Rose City

I didn't know that Portland is known as the Rose City before I got here, but within minutes of walking around, I could tell. The houses are all cozy-cottagey and covered in rose bushes, with more roses taking up their entire yards. People even plant rose bushes on the little strip of grass between the sidewalk and the curb. Everywhere you look, you're dazzled by more roses--many-colored, fragrant, enormous. I think some of them are the size of my head. And people here do this interesting thing with rhododendron, which grow very tall: they cut back the bottoms so that they look like flowering trees instead of bushes. Ah, the strange customs of other places.

City-girl Katie says that a few weeks ago, when the flowers were at their peak, she thought at first that a factory was pumping floral fragrance into the air (she has a magnificently imaginative inner world). She's going to be on TV tomorrow, getting interviewed about an article she has published on the religion of Oprah, which includes a leader, a distinctive theology, spiritual disciplines, and social commitments. I am excited about being present for Katie's debut as a celebrity.

J&T Take San Francisco

Julie and I spent Memorial Day weekend in San Francisco, where I attended the American Literature Association Conference. The conference itself was great--I got to hear some fantastic papers, connect with old friends and colleagues, and get excited about research before picking back up with it after a year of concentrating almost solely on teaching. A professor of mine from grad school gave a paper, and it was inspiring just to hear her "teach" again. She's one of the people whose teaching manner I most would like to emulate--brilliant, funny, relevant, fascinating, warm, critically sharp. She and I and one of my friends from grad school (and the friend's husband, a young music professor now) went to coffee and sat in the coffee shop for so long that I missed another panel I'd have liked to have seen, but it seemed like sitting there talking about teaching was an education in itself.

Apart from the conference, Julie and I bopped around San Francisco, seeing all the touristy spots (Fisherman's Wharf, Ghirardelli Square, Coit Tower, Lombard St., Chinatown, the Embacardero open-air market), activities which as Julie pointed out, we should not be ashamed of because after all, we are tourists. The weather was breezy, brilliantly sunny, dazzlingly gorgeous--as it also is here in Portland, where I am for a few more days to visit my much beloved friend Katie. I will post photos when I get back to Washington this weekend. Till then, peace out everybody! (See, I've been in San Francisco!)

Tough Love

I just read an article on the New York Times page about how a bunch of people, mostly interns, have gotten themselves fired by blogging about their jobs--telling company secrets, etc. I've never mentioned the name of the place where I teach . . . not only because I'm not totally stupid, but also because I also don't particularly want this blog turning up when somebody (like the College president?) Googles the name of the school to see what kind of press we're getting. Yikes!

I've been thinking about writing a real commencement address since we graduated our students the other day. Some of them deserved all the glowingly optimistic praise showered upon their heads--and more. Others I wonder about; I wonder what we're doing with them, and whether we're doing well enough by them the whole year through to justify what we say about them upon their departure.

I think an honest commencement address would say something like this:

Some of you are really smart, and some of you work really hard, and some of you are generous, funny, responsible, caring people. Some of you are all of those things. Some of you have made so much of your raw promise that as your teachers, we're filled with wonder and pride. You may not be A students, but you may have made at some point a movement from a C to a B that we will remember for years to come. You are what's on our mind when we say we love our jobs, and we feel lucky to have known you. And yes, we are talking about you when you see us huddled around the table at the coffee shop. We are talking about how wonderful you are, and how you have already begun to change the world.

Others of you seem to have been just getting by, and we've wondered about you. Whether you're more alive in other classes, or whether you're only really interested in the drinking that seems to consume so much of your time and energy. We know that drinking is an anaesthetic, and we wish that you'd try work and learning and joy instead, but sometimes it's hard to know what to do with you. Anyway, we hope that you've learned something, and we wish you well.

Others of you puzzle us entirely. We understand that college has become requisite for virtually all white-collar employment, and we can't see you working as hard as would be demanded by blue-collar labor. But you've made our jobs infinitely harder by your disrespect for the learning that your classmates are seeking. Though you are routinely unprepared for class, you feel entitled to the same rewards your fellow students are seeking when they choose to stay in and study instead of going out and partying, night after night. We are both happy and sad to see you go--while it's nice to think you won't be rolling your eyes at our hardworking students in class next year, it's sad that we haven't been able to do more with you.

Good luck everybody!

Games for Geeks

I've never liked fantasy novels or role-playing games; I never enjoyed all the work of learning the rules to someone else's imaginary universe. But in the past couple of days, I've been participating in a workshop on these historical role-playing games developed by Barnard College. Each game takes place in a historical crisis, and each student is assigned the role of a historical figure in the crisis. For example, in the French Revolution game, the game involves writing a new constitution for France. Students play the roles of the king, the revolutionaries, the clergy, the crowd, and various other real people. Students get role-sheets that outline their characters' objectives, motives, and secrets. Each student aims to complete his or her own objectives and has to make alliances and strategize to do so. The crowd has a riot card it can throw a couple of times to stop the assembly, but then the die might be rolled, and some of them might be executed.

Anyway, we've been playing a game on a succession crisis in Ming China, and I was assigned the role of a Confucian extremist (yes, I know it sounds like an oxymoron). My role was to be as strident and critical of the emporer as possible, and ultimately to pursue martyrdom. It was pretty fun. I would never have made a public speech calling one of my colleagues (and friends) obsequious outside of a game-playing situation.

I read a while back that when psychologists analyze boys' and girls' play, they find that in boys' aggressive play, they compete against each other and learn that competitive behavior does not mean their relationships are on the line even if they're insulted, defeated, etc. The scholarship suggests that girls' more empathetic natures lead them to play games through which personal relationships are negotiated, and they're less likely to leave the games behind. Thus, women become less comfortable with competitive behaviors throughout their lives.

I know it's a bunch of chickens and eggs, and I'm not sure if I buy all of it since I know some men (and women) whose confidence is tied to winning and losing. But I wonder if role-playing games give people the opportunity to experiment with different personality strategies. Of course, in actuality, I felt that my game playing was strongest when I was pretty much acting like myself, just keeping my character's objectives in mind. So, who knows? Anyway, whatever the gender theories I may develop as a result, Julie says that my clear relishing of the game was irretrievably geeky.

Paris, PA

Courtesy of Erin, I found out today that I belong in Paris. That must be why I live where I do: Paris on the Monongahela, as we may start to call it.

You Belong in Paris

You enjoy all that life has to offer, and you can appreciate the fine tastes and sites of Paris. You're the perfect person to wander the streets of Paris aimlessly, enjoying architecture and a crepe.

What European City Do You Belong In?

Bedfellows

While I was in North Carolina, my friend Kim looked after my cat, Holly Golightly. Kim reminds me of my mom in her kindness to animals. My mom has this gift of patience and insight with animals, plants, and food--she knows exactly what they need, pays careful attention to signs I wouldn't even notice, and wait for things to come around to where they need to be. (She also doesn't ever think anything takes too much time or is too much work.) I'd just asked Kim to check in once or twice, but she came over every day for almost an hour, fed the kitty, played with her, watched TV with her, napped with her, etc. , and left a little "what we did today" journal for me.

Since I've been back, Holly has spent a lot of time mewling for attention, and one night she actually slept the whole night with her chest and front paws on my stomach (to keep me there?). Last night, she somehow got under the covers to sleep alongside me, and when I woke up, there she was, with her little stuffed mouse tucked between her paws as well.

Caps, Gowns, and Grins

Jennifer, Lindsey, and me--erstwhile denizens of Greenlaw 320, the tiny office we painted lavendar under the cover of a humid summer night.















With the lovely and charming Clare.



















And with my advisor. Doesn't he look the part?

Getting Hooded

Sounds dangerous, doesn't it? It's what they call the doctoral graduation. If you've been to a college graduation where the professors wore their rather outlandish "regalia"--heavy woolen robes utterly inappropriate for warm weather and long satin hoods that hang down to the back of the knees--then you know what I mean. My advisor will put the hood on me to signal the conferring of the degree. Which actually happened last summer, so I wasn't going to go for the ceremony, but I wanted to visit NC this month, and this was the only weeked that worked . . . so there you have it.

All this is a long way of saying bye for now--I won't be able to post until next week, when I come back to give an exam. An exam that incidentally will probably not save X's grade (remember him?), especially after he brought to class what (barely) looked like a 10-page paper, but was actually 2 pages of the paper, along with 8 pages cut and pasted from another document to make the paper look longer. He thought I wouldn't notice.

It's funny though; X and his henchmen drive me batty, but it's been a great year overall. I wish I were a better teacher; I wish I ate more vegetables; I wish I didn't entertain silly crushes; I wish I had the inner peace to just cancel the TV altogether. But I at least have a job, and a house that is becoming more and more like home, and new friends, and a real church, a congregation of people called by God. And wonderful old friends to visit this weekend (like it or not, guys, I'm coming!). With all those things to think about, the hood seems just incidental.

Good Deed Averted

An update: I set up an appointment to look at the apartment in Pittsburgh, but L's friend changed her mind and said she was looking for something else. But in the meantime, in response to my post, a friend sent me this passage, from Marilynne Robinson's Gilead:

This is an important thing, which I have told many people, and which my father told me, and which his father told him. When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation? If you confront insult or antagonism, your first impulse will be to respond in kind. But if you think, as it were, This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than as circumstances would seem to dictate. You are free to act by your own lights. You are freed at the same time of the impulse to hate or resent that person. He would probably laugh at the thought that the Lord sent him to you for your benefit (and his), but that is the perfection of disguise, his own ignorance of it.

"I am reminded of this precious instruction by my own great failure to live up to it recently. Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense. How well do we understand our role? With how much assurance do we perform it? I suppose Calvin's God was a Frenchman, just as mine is a Middle Westerner of New England extraction. Well, we all bring such light to bear on these great matters as we can. I do like Calvin's image, though, because it suggests how God might actually enjoy us. I believe we think about that far too little."

Food, Clothing, Shelter 2

"All y'all's" comments are often better than my posts, I think--perhaps what I should do is just start posting questions! Wouldn't that be Socratic of me? I've been thinking a lot about Lee's comments under "Food, Clothing, Shelter." He is certainly right that Americans aren't in danger of over-valuing poverty.

What I've noticed, though, is a different problem--that sometimes we tend to define first the most radical position our faith would lead us to take, and then to reject that proposition as too impractical or impossible. I notice this in people younger than I am (there are more and more of them all the time!): when they are young, they want to be missionaries, they want to work for the Peace Corps, they want to do Teach for America. But then when they have college loans to pay back, they have to get jobs, and while many still want to serve God, they aren't able to translate their radical commitment into a way of living that is equally committed to God, but in less apparently radical ways.

Our faith should always be radical, but sometimes the expression of it will not mean moving to Africa or selling all that we have--yet. Whether because that's not our calling, or because we aren't yet ready to "be perfect" (as the rich young man wishes to be). I guess what I'm working through in my mind is how we translate a radical faith in God into a practical handling of our wealth as American Christians. And I mean wealth relative to a global and historic scale--I don't feel especially wealthy, but by virtue of living in the United States in the twentieth century, I have comfort unimaginable to many others around the world, throughout history. Where I've ended up is trying to give as much as I can, budgeting giving before anything else, but still feeling conflicted about what I'm doing. And I think God wants us to live according to well-thought out principles that we've defined conscientiously, not in a muddle of hapless efforts, occasionally good intentions, selfish motives, and guilt. I'm curious as to whether any of you have a financial theology that you feel satisfied with, and if so, how it works. Any thoughts?