Long Distance

I just found out that one of my uncles died today. He was my father's sister's husband, and he and my aunt had been married for fifty-four years.

I was extremely fond of him, and I love my aunt very much, so the news was of course shocking. Having said that, he was old and in poor health, and as such his death isn't a tragedy, just a "loss."

The reason that I'm so distressed by his death, really, is that I can't participate in its aftermath. One of the many things I hate about living so far away from my extended family is the inability to participate in so many of the family epochs-- births, deaths, and weddings that I only grasp fragments of through photos and stories. Deaths are the worst, because there are no pictures, no happy couple or child to actually ever see; just an abrupt hole in the tapestry.

I felt this most poignantly when one of my beloved grandfathers died. Despite having always lived on separate sides of the world we were extremely close, and his unexpected death ripped me apart. The worst was not being able to participate in anything: not the twelve days of mourning rituals, not the communal family grief. It was my first year in graduate school and while my relatives in India went through the elaborate process of sending my grandfather's soul on its way and gave away cows (really), I sat in my apartment weeping, and feeling terribly impotent and alone.

No one really likes funerary rituals, and with good reason. I imagine it's very strange
to conduct elaborate whatevers around a corpse (or the suggestion of one). But I remember when I visited India after my grandfather's death, I kept waiting for him to come into certain rooms, or find him sitting in his favorite chair. I never really got to say goodbye, so his perpetual absence was inexplicable and painful. Even worse, my raw grief was very unnerving to my relatives, especially my poor grandmother. They had all gone through the mourning process months before, but I had stalled somewhere in the middle.

Now my uncle is died, and once again I'm left feeling like while life itself is acknowledged and happening elsewhere, I am unable to do anything other than sift through memories and wait.

I try my hand at academic schmoozing

All stories of academia in the days of yore seem to revolve around two themes: there is the "good old days" narrative, in which the young professor finds a college/University she likes, has an amiable chat with the president or dean or whoever, and then is informed at the end of lunch that she's been hired. That's the kind of story told during departmental teas that makes me wish for a seal club (to use on either myself or the story-teller). There is also the "bad old days" narrative, which inevitably involves references to academia's old-boy network and lecherous old profs with beds in their offices.

While I have never had the misfortune to come across a bed in an office--only some suspiciously squishy sofas--I've spent quite a bit of time in the last several years feeling frustrated about the inner circles that continue to dominate academic life. At every conference I've ever been to there always seems to be a "cool group," usually comprised of the plenary speakers, the conference hosts, and a few assorted friends who eat, drink, and sit with each other and generally shun everyone else. Even at post-talk receptions in graduate school there were unofficial groupings; all the graduate students scrambled to talk to either the speaker or the hippest professors in attendance in the hopes of establishing some kind of credibility. I mostly used to sulk in a corner and nurse grapes before quietly slinking off.

While I am a very friendly and sociable person, I'm pretty wretched at schmoozing. I can never think of an intelligent comment or witty question on the spot, I'm afraid of annoying the person or seeming stupid, and I simply lack the necessary verve to approach total strangers. At the first major conference I attended I was intent on speaking to one of the plenary speakers whose book I loved and used in my conference paper. I stalked the man for two days in desperation before I figured out a way to meet him. Ten minutes before my paper started I saw him looking a book display, so I wandered over, pretended to browse, and dropped a book at his feet. I felt like an 18th-century Frenchwoman with a handkerchief, but it worked. Unfortunately, after that first meeting (and he kindly came to my paper), he didn't seem particularly interested in talking to me, and I was so afraid of being a pest that I didn't approach him again after that.

Once I actually got a job, I figured professorship would automatically propel me out of the ranks of the desperate and mute. Alas, I've now discovered new obstacles to academic hipster status: my lack of a book and a network of academics who know and love me. I was recently at a colloquium where I was the junior-most faculty member, and as I watched everyone else reminisce about conferences ten years ago, first books, and life pre-tenure, I felt utterly alone. No one knew who I was, and with only one small publication to my name I can't exactly spear-rattle. So, as the sun set over the first-night party, while all the other professors sat together on lawn chairs and caught up I grabbed several stems of grapes and found the little contingent of grad students huddled together in a corner. They were glad to see me.

Evaluating evaluations

In my last job, student were asked to evaluate instructors in two ways: first, by choosing a number that ranked the instructor based on questions provided ("On a scale of one to five, how would you rank the intellectual challenge of this class?") and second, by developing on those numbers in written comments. The questions were at the top of the page, giving students ample space to reflect, criticize, and judge. Some students merely write down numbers, but most of them actually wrote several sentences about the course and the instructor (me).

As nerve-racking as it always was to get copies of those evaluations and pull them out for a read, it paled in comparison to the experience at my new job. When I got ready to pass these evals out to my students, I noticed that they looked like a scan-tron test-- lots of bubbles and almost no place to actually write. And when I got a chance to look at the results, I got several pages of bar graphs and statistics that told me how my averages related to departmental averages, averages for similar courses, and a whole lot of other confusing crap. What I did not feel I got was a sense of how my students felt about my courses.

I have very conflicting feelings about course evaluations and their usefulness. I absolutely think that reflecting on a course and its usefulness is a valuable exercise for all students. I also think that any input an instructor can get about the course and her methodology is equally invaluable. Unfortunately I don't see course evaluations in their current form as helpful to either students or faculty. My older evals are rife with conflicting opinions ("She's very organized and gave great comments," "She's disorganized and doesn't really comment on papers"), nonsensical comments about other class members, and the all-too obvious diatribe written by the kid who clearly felt entitled to an 'A' from the beginning. While those evals were actually pretty good at pointing out my strengths as a teacher, they were less successful at helping me identify and correct the flaws in my pedagogy.

Unsurprisingly, these new evals are even more useless and frightening than the old ones. If I felt that I could once assess the value of each evaluation based on the comments, these new evals simply present a sea of numbers. Almost none of the students wrote down comments, so I can no longer distinguish between the student with a genuine problem with my pedagogy and a student who simply disliked me, the subject, or his classmates. As confusing as the older evals could be, at least I got a sense of what issues students had. Now, I have no idea. Clearly this kind of evaluation isn't about helping the students or the instructor, and I really resent the fact that my teaching ultimately boils down to nothing but a couple of averages.


Postscript: The obvious solution to this issue is, of course, to not read those damn evals. But I can never help myself. I just wish I could go back to the pre-scantron days.

Writing in the dark

At the end of each semester, weary graduate students in universities all over the country stumble to administrative offices clutching stacks of expensive-looking paper. The work of three or four or five or more years comes down to a weary looking official thumbing through the pages to make sure all the margins are properly aligned. Then, at least in my experience, if you pass the cursory inspection, said weary official disappears with your bound dissertation and returns with an embossed certificate and, in a very weird token gesture, candy. Congratulations! you just graduated and you're now a Ph.D.

Last May I found this whole last ritual--the delivery of the dissertation and the acceptance of the candy--abrupt but inexplicably comforting. Having finished the dissertation turned out not to be as grand a finale for me as I had once imagined; I was lucky enough to find a job right out of graduate school, and so the dissertation came to signify not the apotheosis of my graduate career, but the very rough draft for an even longer and more exhausting project. I was so done with graduate school that I didn't even bother to participate in the "real" graduation-- the ceremony in the Graduate Office was enough for me, and I moved out of my apartment the day of the hooding ceremony.

In what seems like the twilight of the academic publishing era I think I book is a fairly ridiculous requirement for tenure. But I'm grateful to be in a university that only has one book, not two, as the standard for tenure. I didn't touch my dissertation at all last semester, but after attending several meetings with various deans who kept referring to the ticking of the tenure clock I pulled up all the files on my computer a couple of months ago and thought, "Now is the time to turn this thing into a book."

But I just sat there in front of the computer for about an hour, staring blankly at the screen. This was no longer a "dissertation," it was a "book project," and I felt lost in the interstices between the two. I didn't have a clue where to begin. I consulted my sublime former advisor, who encouraged me to "conceptualize the larger framework of the project," so I spent a week fixing all the little typos and awkward sentences in the first two chapters. I spoke to a charming older colleague who advised me to "think about what distinguishes a dissertation from a book and then apply that to the project." I gave the whole thing to him to read so I wouldn't have to.

After several weeks of fruitless agonizing, nitpicky editing, and watching snippets of the original "He-Man" on YouTube (clearly I, like Adam, want to transform from a cringing first-year professor into an Academic of the Universe), I have slowly resumed my research, trying to contextualize and deepen the thoughts already on the page. I still don't really feel like I have any idea how to proceed; I just got tired of sitting and started to grope about in the dark. Graduate school taught me taught me how to do research, but it didn't teach me how to be an academic, much less a professor, and while I sift through an ever-growing array of books, I'm waiting for the light to turn on.

Title?

"Rice and Keats" is not the most graceful title. I typed it in without really thinking it through, and then say back and asked myself "Why?"

The two things I seem to spend most of time on these days are food and literature. I'm no gourmand, but I do cook a lot, and as a South Indian, rice is at the core of it all. The Tamil word annam means both 'food' and 'rice'. No matter how far into the cooking stratosphere I stray, I always come back to the many rice-based dishes that are the core of my food psyche.

I don't necessarily have the same elemental connection with John Keats that I do with rice; my research interests lie in a different direction. But I have found teaching Keats to be one of the highlights of my career. He's a pleasure to teach: the meters are tight, the rhymes fascinating and controversial, and the language is simply yummy. That's not a particularly academic description, but I can think of no other word for his lush, almost tactile wordplay. Best of all, even my poetry-shy students embraced it. After a semester of freaking them out with Shelley, Wordsworth, and De Quincey, reading Keats felt like a love-fest. Teaching Keats always reminds me why I entered this ridiculous profession in the first place.

But the connections between Keats and rice extend beyond the madness of my personal universe. After I started thinking about it, I remembered that one of Keats's best friends was a James Rice, with whom he was living when he wrote a lot of his best stuff, including Lamia, one of the poems that so gripped my students this past semester.

So, rice and Keats. Keats and Rice.

The Reluctant Blogger (and Dosas)

Like some seven-year old in a crisp tutu tiptoeing onto a stage, I am finally stepping with some hesitation into the blogging world.

I disliked the idea of blogs when I first heard of them. For eight years I kept a private journal, writing copiously, vehemently, and poorly in a series of chunky spiral-bound notebooks. Then, suddenly, I stopped. The stories and poems that were supposed to materialize from these outpourings never did, and pouring my life's minutiae onto paper seemed unproductive, and arrogant. Most of all, I couldn't decide whether I was writing for just me or for some unknown posterity, and it affected the content of my journals considerably. These weren't the outpourings of an unbridled soul, they were constructed with some ghostly audience in mind.

Thinking about it this way everything I initially feared about blogging-- the seemingly endless audience, the potential spectacle, the anonymous gawking-- seemed only a realization of the potential future I had mapped out for the words I was supposedly writing just for me.

I'm still not completely comfortable with the idea of a blog, but I think I need a useful experiment in my life right now.

The other thing I've been experiment with lately is food. I finally made good dosas for the first time in my life, thanks to my tremendous Vita-Mix, and a cast-iron griddle lovingly handed down to me by my wonderful mother. You don't need a Vita-Mix, of course, any good blender will do. Here it is:

Dosas (makes roughly 30, depending on size)

1 and 1/4 cups urad dal
3 cups rice
fistful of fenugreek
salt
water

soak the dal with the fenugreek, and the rice separately in bowls with plenty of water for four hours. Rinse the dal well, then blend the rice and dal (plus fenugreek) separately until very fine (the Vita-Mix is amazing; it reduced the hard grains into a silky batter in mere minutes). Combine the rice and dal in a large pot, add enough water to make a batter of dropping consistency, and add a generous amount of salt.* Cover, and place in a warm spot for several hours or overnight. When you take the cover off in the morning, the batter should have risen considerably, and have lots of bubbles.** Taste a little of the raw batter for salt and adjust accordingly.

* If there is too little salt or water, the batter won't ferment properly
** If the batter doesn't rise, don't worry. Just portion out some of the batter for immediate use and stir some plain yogurt into that. It will add the tang to the batter that you need.

To Make Dosas

After greasing a griddle with some vegetable oil, heat until it radiates heat; then lower the temp. to medium. Drop a ladleful of batter onto the griddle and push it outward in concentric circles. At this point, you can drizzle the edges of the dosa with oil to help it unstick. Once the dosa has formed several tiny bubbles and looks dry at the edges, use a metal spatula to unstick it from the griddle and flip it over. It will cook very quickly on the second side. Slide it off the griddle and serve. The first couple may stick, rip, and otherwise bother you, but once you practice a few times you'll improve. Dosas can be thin and crispy or tender and pillowy, but either way they are fantastic.