Head and Hands

Lately I've been enjoying the time at my cutting board more than my time at the keyboard, or with a book in hand.  And I'm not even cutting up freshly caught brook trout in some wilderness camp. Just things like greens, chicken, onions.   I've been enjoying my time picking and restaking tomatoes, stir frying fresh kale, experimenting with mixtures for a new favorite consumable, the protein shake.  And the simple pleasures I've been savoring extend past food.  Started lifting weights two weeks ago, and have liked feeling the simple  operation of muscle, though mine are still mostly where they started.  So much of our bodies we take for granted. Mowing the lawn, fixing a corroded drain fixture last weekend were quite satisfying, as was sorting out duck decoys and stacking them in new storage bins.  After I finished these I  felt satisfied--affirmed, even--as I rarely do with my job.  Which didn't go well last week. 

Some of the most tiresome parts of my job take place at the keyboard, so my recent preference for these simple acts may be no wonder.   But the more interesting ones do as well--writing (not always pleasant but a top shelf pleasure when it works), taking notes on reading, even simply reading articles or e-books.  Chatting with students (honestly, I think I my one-on-one conferences go better online than face to face).   These things are expected of me not just because of my job description but because the kind of person I am.  Intellectual, verbal, analytical.  That's how people saw me for long before I started assembling letters after my name and that mark me now among people who know  me (though "outdoorsy" usually comes to their minds too).  So really, smart guy stuff ought to be a passion, and even before that a reflex.  Menial labors (and gardening and cooking qualify as such, though they are often labors of love as well) should be necessary chores to be quickly dispatched before getting back to the real work, or at least to cerebral pleasures.

Now, I think that handwork gets short shrift in a culture that ranks white collar occupations above blue, and digital products over material ones.  I have great respect for craftspeople, farmers, mechanics, everyone who can do things with things.  That goes for people whose avocations result in fine things--trout flies, quilts, charcuterie, furniture, for example.  The results of the manual tasks I've immersed myself in lately aren't that admirable.  My cooking is rather slapdash, as is my lawncare.  There are actually some important home maintainence tasks I've been letting go, and need to take care of before the frost comes. All the same, those I do work at are what makes me happiest at the moment.

I suppose my greatest pleasures--the outdoor sports, or simply spending time outdoors--are handworks, or at least pleasures of the senses, no matter how much reflection and strategizing they include.  There was a time though when these things entered into the life of my mind.  I taught courses on environmental literature. I devised writing courses where students explored watersheds, food, neighborhoods (which provide another avenue for my attraction to terrain).   At the moment I don't have the option to teach those, which doesn't bother me so much as that the teaching I am doing seems uninspired and rote.

It has seemed less so, regardless of what I was teaching, when I held close and lived daily with ideas and evocations of those hand--and eye, ear, nose,  and footfall--pleasures that give so much of my life its shape.  Reading Thoreau or Rick Bass and their rest of their literary crew.  Reading what others have said and disputed about them.  Writing about nature literature and philosophy, or writing about my own outdoor excursions.  Writing in Find the River.  In doing those thing, hand and head join, and the rest of my work receives a charge from it.

Through busyness or laziness, I've let them slip apart, and it shows in disparate parts of my life.  My question now is, how can I join head and hands again?

Maybe I've already answered that.  Maybe I'm starting to do it.  At least the question has formed, and even that is giving me a lift.

Busy Work Ahead

With summer coming nigh, fishing is on my brain. How much of it I get to do is in doubt.

Lots of projects on my plate--teaching two courses, revising courses for next fall, helping design a curriculum for a new minor in sustainability studies, and a new writing project whose nature remains vague. I want to write about literature of Ohio's Maumee valley (wherein I happen to teach). There is precious little of it, but I think it deserves some notice. That there is any would come as a shock to many people.

There is much work on the house to be done too. We're considering a move to the Toledo area next year, so we need to get this ready to sale. Given the market, we need to make this dwell nothing short of swoon-worthy.

All the same I will be scrounging out some water time. I plan a few days the week after next somewhere or other. I'll let the spirit move me in a suitable direction when the time comes. I plan to head north at least a couple times a month. And with a relatively dry spring (until now) the Huron should be fishable early this summer.

What this means is blog fodder. Daily writing is unlikely, but I will be on at least once a week. This is not of great consequence to many people but I'm feeling the need more now--this site has become a nagging itch. I hope I am inspired to continue writing, if only because writing inspires me in whatever I write about.

Lifting the Veil of Ivy...

Another good idea from The Atlantic: Shine a light into the dark recesses of the Ivory Tower.

The conventional wisdom is that you get what you pay for—that the larger the price tag, the better the product. But that’s not true in higher education. Tuition has been skyrocketing for years, with little evidence that education has improved. Universities typically favor research and publishing over teaching. And influential college rankings like the one published by U.S. News & World Report measure mostly wealth and status (alumni giving rates, school reputation, incoming students’ SAT scores); they reveal next to nothing about what students learn....

The Obama administration could be a catalyst for change. The stimulus package includes $30 billion in tuition aid, at a time when colleges are starving for money. That gives the government leverage—it should push for systematic public information on the quality of undergraduate learning, school by school. This would not only serve students; over time, it would improve the quality of our workforce and the prospects for our entire economy.


That stimulus bill certainly stimulated some thought at the Atlantic. We can hope it has the same impact elsewhere.

Miscellany: Pedagogy, Revolution, and McMansion Removal

I had tentatively planned to head north tonight to fish the hex hatch, which I understand has started now. But exactly one week from today I begin teaching a class on American nature writing, and I am far behind where I had hoped to be in preparing for it. I'm ready for day one (actually, for weeks 1-4 of 6), but I wanted to have everything in the can by now. Besides developing plans to teach each book, I still have a lot of tweaks to make to the website. It's an online class, actually.

We are reading:

* Selections from William Bradford (Pilgrim leader), William Bartram (18th C. naturalist whose narrative of his journeys across the American south became the first international bestseller by an American writer), and Thoreau

*Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac

*Gary Snyder's Turtle Island

*Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge

*Jim Harrison's novella "The Beige Dolorosa"

I'm looking forward to this. I love to teach this kind of stuff, but get few opportunities.



Over the last week I've been following the developments in Iran closely. If the protesters succeed in forcing new elections or even, dare one hope, toppling the theocracy, it could have a major impact on the political future of people across the Muslim world. Besides, it's hard not to cheer people organizing, acting, and literally putting their lives on the line to throw off tyranny. The level of courage and determination shown by the people in the streets of Tehran, Isfahan, and elsewhere in the country is truly humbling.

The uprising has been a media event in more than one sense. It has dominated news coverage over the last week (though it did take the cable networks a few days to register more than a dim awareness of the events), but it has also highlighted the significance of social media and personal communications technologies. Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and YouTube have allowed people on the street to report events as they unfold, and to share their passions, triumphs, and terrors directly with readers and viewers around the world. These technologies have also helped the activists to communicate and organize.

Of course, this new media reporting also makes the event a time suck for me, and probably others. With new tweets, blog posts, and youtubes being posted continuously, it's tempting to check in every couple of minutes to see the latest developments. (I'm mainly following this through Andrew Sullivan's always excellent blog as well as the Iranian-American Council blog.) I probably would be further along with my class planning if those rabble-rousers had just sucked up the dodgy election results...



Finally, The Atlantic's Idea of the Day from Saturday was this:

How’s about a stimulus-started plan to buy up the nation’s foreclosed and empty McMansions and hire out-of-work construction workers to deconstruct them? It’s an idea that could keep giving and giving. Aside from the obvious benefits of employment as the deconstruction took place, de-developers could offset costs by selling used housing materials (recycle!) or donating usable building materials to low-income- housing renovation projects (help the poor!).

Read the rest. It sounds freakin' brilliant to me.

De-funding the Future

This morning, Michigan Radio reported that as part of efforts to balance the state budget, the brain trust that is our state legislature is proposing to cut $210 million in financial aid currently available to college students in Michigan. The merit-based Michigan Promise award, which offers students as much as $4,000, faces total elimination. 96,000 students are expecting this award for the coming academic year.

God knows our budget problems are dire, but this cut is particularly short sighted. What incentive does this give future tech savvy, "creative class" knowledge workers to stay in Michigan after they graduate? Scientists, programmers, engineers, entepreneurs, green architects and builders, educators, and new media professionals (for starters) will be essential to transforming the state's economy, but this proposal tells them they're a liability. The message it sends is "Go share your gifts somewhere else."

They will. Keep it up people--we may yet become Haiti-of-the-lakes.

The governor opposes this, so hopefully she and some like-minded legislators may be able to prevent it. Governor Granholm has been a disappointment in many ways, but I will say that during the current budget crisis, she's been right more often than wrong.

If you're in Michigan...send an email to your state senator telling them this is bull#@*^.

Their Cheating Hearts

Somewhere between two thirds and three quarters of college undergraduates cheat, according to studies on academic dishonesty. So statistically, it's all but certain I teach some of these chiselers. Until recently though, I didn't think dishonesty--which, since as I teach writing courses would take the form of plagiarism--was a chronic problem in my classes. Maybe it wasn't but this semester I've encountered more plagiarism than I have in the past three or four years. Never mind that on day one of class I define what plagiarism is and outline the consequences it can bring--they do it anyway, and in shameless fashion.

These days, at least as far as I can tell, plagiarism usually takes the form of cutting and pasting information from websites. Sometimes students act surprised to find that this constitutes dishonesty, and in a few of these cases I think they genuinely don't know it does. In other cases, students know damn well what they're doing, but can't believe it when I catch them. It apparently doesn't occur to them that if they know how do use Google, I probably do too. The internet may have made cheating easier, but it also makes catching it easier.

I'm not sure how to explain this. The abundance of information free for the taking on the web, with the attendant blurring of intellectual property lines, likely is part of the problem. Maybe students take their cue from the seemingly endless parade of stories about cheating in the worlds of finance, government, sports, or journalism (or, for that matter, the high reaches of academia), reasoning that if the big shots do it, why shouldn't they?

I write my plagiarism policy in my syllabi, and refer student's to the university's statement on academic dishonesty. Maybe I could give the message more impact with a few lines from The Smiths:

If you must write prose and poems
the words you use should be your own,
don't plagiarize or take "on loan."
'Cause there's always someone, somewhere
with big nose who knows,
and he'll trip you up and laugh when you fall,
he'll trip you up and laugh when you fall.

Or, for this multimediated generation of undergrads, forget the syllabus. I'll just show the clip (giving due credit, of course).

Table Talk

Went to a holiday reception put on by the dean of my college this afternoon. I knew no one there and was sitting at a table by myself when a couple of guys walked past discussing a gun purchase.

"I've got to get a gun before I go back down," said the older one. "I don't need something big, just something rapid fire. Is anyone sitting here?"

"No," I said, itching to hear more of the conversation.

"Get a Ruger 10/22," said the younger man, going on to describe it further.

"Luger?"

"No, Ruger. 10/22."

"Is it rapid fire?"

"It's semi-automatic. It'll shoot as fast as you can pull the trigger. You can even get a 50 round clip if you want."

It turned out the older man wanted it to shoot snakes around his vacation place in Florida, where copperheads, diamondback rattlers, and water moccasins covered most of the ground, I gathered. He didn't know much about guns, he admitted, not having held one since he went partridge hunting in northern Michigan as a kid.

"Partridge hunting," said his companion, "the sport of kings."

He turned to me and gave a quick smile. It was obvious I was listening in.

"My sport too," I said.

His eyebrows arched. "Really?"

I nodded. The older guy, who it seems was a music professor, started in on the difficulty of shooting partridge. I couldn't but agree. We ended up talking about hunting and fishing for a while. Turns out the younger one, a professor of communications, owned 120 acres up near Glennie where he spent most of the summer and as much of deer season as his teaching schedule allowed. I mentioned that I fish the Au Sable fairly often. He rarely fished anymore, he said, aside from catching eater brookies from the creeks up there. Yet when he was younger, he told me, he had speared steelhead in some of the Au Sable's tributaries. "I don't do it anymore," he said quickly. "It's not sport fishing. It's more 'satisfying a primal instinct' fishing."

I think I felt my eyes boggling but I managed a wry laugh. I snagged salmon when I was a kid (though it actually was legal at the time). Spearing seems a more brazen kind of violation, though it may be a more honest one: at least it doesn't present an illusion of legal angling.

It's a shame some of the people who proudly denounce "effete intellectuals" weren't around for this.

Beginning Again

As of yesterday, another school year began. Barely noticed it creeping up on me, despite having spent much of the summer preparing new classes. It really doesn't feel as if I've crossed some kind of hard boundary. Days blend into one another. But soon life will become very different from what it was for the last three months; the first stack of papers to grade will drive the point home.

One of my new classes--the environmentally themed freshman writing course out at the Lake Erie Research Center--has only two students enrolled. It's going to proceed, but with writing classes overbooked at the main campus, future iterations of it are in doubt.

I did get fishing last week. Wednesday and Thursday I headed up to the Au Sable below Mio. Got there in time for the ephoron hatch Wednesday but it fizzled. Floated to Comins Flats on Thursday and landed five rainbows, 10-13". The biggest came when I was just rowing along dragging my fly in the water. Heard a thump and looked around to see my rod bent. Maybe I shouldn't bother casting. I did hook a number of other trout that stayed on for a bit, but worked off before I could net them. Maybe it's time to sharpen hooks.

Got to run upstairs and badger the department secretary for giving students my cell number. I get two or three calls a day from people wanting to add a class. None of them want to drive out to the lake for one, though.

The Summer I Didn't

Warning--whining of a merely personal nature ahead.

This seems to be going down as the summer I didn't do some-thing-or-other-I-meant-to.

For starters, I haven't fished this little during a summer in years. This summer's rains have something to do with that. I cancelled a hex outing a couple weeks back due to forecasts of heavy rain, and locally, the Huron has been too high for comfortable wading for much of the summer. It is now, actually, and I'd figured to get out a few nights this week. Kristine and I are taking a weekend trip to Grayling in a couple weeks, and I should squeeze in a couple mornings on the water then. Otherwise...I might not chase trout again until September. That puts a bit of a crimp on a fishing-oriented blog.

When I do get out, I often forget my camera, or don't bother to take pictures if I do. Also not good for the blog.

I meant to write a killer application letter for a renewed job search later this year. I've done some background research, but no real sketching of the letter.

I have rarely even gone outside except to work in the yard.

What have I done? Mostly, I've sat behind the computer, or in libraries, plotting out some courses I'm developing for fall. And progressing slower than I'd ever have imagined. So much for getting "summer off." Last spring, my chair proffered these teaching opportunities with some gravity and circumspection--maybe she had a better idea than I did of the effort I'd need to invest getting those together. All I'd thought of was the chance to do more work with my environmental interests , but as the poet says, In dreams begin responsibilities.

I'm going to Kalamazoo this weekend for a niece's wedding, and that's starting to sound like a dream trip.

I'll close with something from a time this summer when I DID--did go fishing and did take my camera along. This shot of the Tippy Dam backwaters is probably one of the better photos I've snapped this year. I took it from my campsite during my June trip to Manistee.



Disappointing as that trip was, at the moment I'd take another like it in a heartbeat.

History at Work; Two Days From Trout!

Until recently, I never paid much attention to the desk in the office I moved to last fall. With a solid, if heavily scratched wood top and attractively grained if peeling wood laminate on the front of the drawers, it was an improvement, aesthetically, over the steel and Formica job in the office I'd left, but it was still an overused, neglected piece of university furniture that would have been junked decades ago in any for-profit operation.

But a few days ago I happened to glance at the nameplate sunk into the upper drawer:



I remembered that Aldo Leopold, conservation legend and author of A Sand County Almanac, had been born in Burlington, IA, and that his family ran a furniture factory. I did a little searching and found that this was indeed the Leopold company founded by his father. (Not that I had much doubt...how many candidates could there be in Burlington?) I've read Leopold's works for years ( FTR readers quite likely will find Sand County Almanac indispensable) written about him, tacked a poster recounting his career on my office wall (and that before I knew about the desk). So my desk now offers not space for my work, but brings a new, albeit very small, measure of coherence to it.

My department is supposed to move to a new building next year, which will be equipped with new furniture, and I'm going to try to take the Leopold desk home. I don't think the university will miss it. I asked our department secretary how I could arrange to take it. She suggested pulling a van up to the building and trundling the desk out at midnight. That could happen.



If my schedule holds, I may take my first trout excursion of the year this Friday. Every April, the state stocks trout in a stretch of the Huron River upstream from me and opens a fly-only, catch and release season through the opening of the regular trout season at the end of this month. I've wanted to try it for years, despite the reports of crowds and of fish that become maddeningly selective after the first few trips through anglers' nets and hands. Not the kind of fishing I dream of over the winter ( my report of opening weekend--to be posted in just 27 days!--will explain that), but for now, it will provide excitement enough.

Hunter's Ed

A piece in today's New York Times reports that legislators in West Virginia passed a bill permitting public schools to offer hunter education classes when at least twenty students in a school express interest. This is one of a number of initiatives in states to boost declining hunter numbers, and probably the most ambitious I've heard of.

As the article details, not everyone is happy about such developments--some wonder whether, in an era of school shootings, schools ought to endorse the use of guns in any way. More generally, one might ask whether such classes have a place in modern schools that need to teach students to thrive in the global economy.

I think that question points to the best argument in favor of these classes.

Hunter's ed classes make as much sense---and the same kind of sense---as classes in art, music, and drama (all offerings I strongly support). As supporters of the hunter ed classes note, hunting was a traditionally a part of life in many communities, one that is being lost to developments in technology, land use, and new interests for kids. It's part of the culture that once defined rural (or formerly rural) places, and that long influenced daily life in, as well as the art and literature of, North America. It offers ways of learning about and reflecting on the world that academic inquiry doesn't, though it can support and enrich that inquiry. Hunting, or any traditional outdoor pursuit, may contribute to a well-rounded education as much as athletics or forensics.

Aldo Leopold once wrote that hunting had become a pursuit very comparable to opera, recreating aesthetically "a drama once inherent in daily life." Much like the art of the past, the outdoor sports help to tell us who we are and where we came from--we being the human race.

But pedagogical questions aside...would hunter's ed classes lead to any change in offerings at the school cafeteria?

A Leap Day Update

Can't believe it's been over a month since I updated. I knew I was letting the blog slide, but the guilt stings a little more after seeing the numbers. At least I didn't let an entire month lapse (thanks to a quadrennial calendar quirk).

As I said in a Twitter note, I've been super busy, mostly because I'm launching a couple of new courses and needing to make a lot of midstream adjustments. But I'm having fun with them, most of the time. The best experience has been a writing class pairing my students with some kids from an inner city high school to survey some residents of their neighborhood and prepare a report of their findings to a community service agency. Here is one team (some of my students on the left side of the desk, the high schoolers on the right), banging out a draft:


Most of my students came away from the experience feeling it had left some mark on them. One said he hadn't realized his studies could make a difference in the real world; several got their first exposure to the inner city, and felt anywhere between suprised to dumfounded by the differences between "how we live and how they live down there," as one put it. Many were also impressed by the determination by people in that community to improve conditions there. As am I. I hope to make this project (a collaboration with a community foundation) a long term venture.

Other than that...we've been riding wild swings of weather here, with stretches of frigid weather broken by irruptions of April. After one sudden thaw, I went to take some pictures of swollen rivers to show my students next fall exactly how a floodplain works. Here's the Ottawa River outside Toledo, OH where it meanders through a local metropark. The river is ordinarily forty feed wide here:



Kristine and I went cross country skiing near Grayling a couple of weeks ago and got smacked by both ends of a weather shift. Saturday morning the temperature was near O (F); we had a fine, cold sunny afternoon of skiing with temps peaking near 20. An overnight warmup was expected with freezing rain by late the next morning. We planned to rise early for a last ski, but opened the motel door to see our car already covered with half an inch of ice. We got breakfast, then hit I-75 to inch home with a train of disappointed snowmobilers.

We're going north again this weekend to ski near Tawas City. The forecast looks similar, but the ice shouldn't hit until at least 11am Sunday. If weatherunderground.com was wrong about that, I'm suing.

Wined and Dined, Sort Of

Maybe I really should say I was "beaned." At any rate, I'm being plied with gifts from those wishing to sway my vote for a new department-wide textbook this spring.

I'm on the committee charged with deciding on a new book for my university's freshman writing program, which means about 2,000 sales for some lucky publisher. We'll make our choice soon, so we're receiving lots of calls, emails, and handwritten notes from hungry publisher's reps. And yesterday, when I went to my mailbox, I found a Starbuck's gift card, courtesy of McGraw Hill.

Before I went to graduate school, I was a publisher's rep myself, and a few times I took committees out for dinner, events that tapped my employer for over $200, sometimes. No one has offered us anything like that, but I'm holding out hope.

Actually, I should let on to the reps that I fly fish...maybe I could get a new sinking line or at least a dozen flies out of this business.

And students wonder why their textbooks cost so much...

The Ability to See

All isn't doom and gloom. We've enjoyed beautiful weather here this week perfect for taking two of my classes to Wildwood Metropark near Toledo, OH on Tuesday. My students usually paid close attention to our naturalist guides, and the occasional muttered "cool" or "huh!" or "that's crazy" told me at least a few were learning something new. Their interest, plus some time in quiet, shady woodlands were an unexpected spirit tonic.

The guides showed us an assortment of striking or ecologically significant plants, pointed out different habitat types, and explained the role of floodplains and how the one we walked along had been impacted by last week's rains. They identified whatever animals and birds crossed our path. One guide, Kim, did a stunningly accurate imitation of a barred owl. A woodchuck ambled by, indifferent to us, which delighted several my students who had never seen a woodchuck before. I suppose they are kind of cute, if they're not undermining your house. One young lady said she wished she could have one as a pet. I'd gladly give her the one burrowed under my porch, if I could ever lure it into my trap.

What stood out to me Tuesday was how the tour differed with the style and personality of the guide. Over the last two years I've taken that tour with four different guides. Last year, we had a gentleman who seemed to have a story for nearly everything he showed us--how pioneers used the plants, superstitions about certain trees or creatures, some colorful characters associated with the park, and so forth, all related with unflagging enthusiasm. His stories were usually entertaining, and they helped fix their objects more deeply in mind. Kim, a grad school classmate of mine in long-gone days, is authoritative, enthusiastic, and radiates a love of the land she works on and and shares with others. Today, with my morning class I walked with a guide named Tammy who was not much older than most of my students and less formal in her presentation than some of the older guides. I think her style helped my students to relax and enjoy their walk. In the afternoon, we walked with Linda, whose presentation proved to be the most instructive, albeit not in the way it was intended to be.

Linda was heavyset, and walked with great effort and the aid of a cane. Her comments on the sights along the trail were by contrast breezy (if a bit wheezy) and assured--and nearly constant. Within the first hundred feet of the trail she had pointed out four different plants, offering a couple minutes' commentary on each. Moving on, she promised she wouldn't be stopping so often on the rest of the trip, but she did. Nearly every step brought us to some item whose features required a meticulous explication. While my students didn't appear to get impatient, I did. Looking at my watch around the halfway point on the trail, I saw that we were scheduled to leave the park in five minutes. I mentioned this, and she apologized and took us back to the visitor center--actually, pointed us back, since she couldn't have kept up with us if we walked quickly enough to catch our bus.

We missed some notable sights--a remnant prairie, a pond, and a marsh where you can glimpse at least two or three different kinds of woodpeckers. But musing about this on the way back to campus, I recognized that we hadn't come up short in experiences of the preserve. Linda had abundantly compensated us for what we missed. While we might have covered more ground with another guide, we would have walked unawares past a number of plants and insects I hadn't known of before: knotweed, leafy spurge, oak caterpillars, witch hazel, twigrush, among others.

In the last twenty or so years, the phrase "differently abled" has worked its way into the American lexicon as a euphemism for "disabled," but in Linda's case I think it is quite apt. Moving more slowly, angled toward the ground, she of necessity focuses on short stretches of terrain for longer periods of time than someone looking straight ahead and walking briskly would. Some might call her condition an impediment, but it is also an opportunity to pay more attention to the particulars that crowd nearly any seemingly inconsequential piece of ground. Her disablity supports an ability to see what most of us will only notice with expert guidance or long observation.

I don't know if Linda looks at her infirmities this way--she may well wish she had sturdier legs. But I certainly don't wish she had given us the standard field-tripper's view of Wildwood. Our relation to the outdoors is always largely a physical one, so that relation will be influenced by how our bodies are built, whether we are tall or short, weak or strong, male or female, near or far sighted. Being physically situated in a particular way to one's surroundings means a particular perspective on them. Can we say that any perspective arising from this fact is without value? Or that only one or a few are worth heeding?


That depends. How much of the world do you wish to know?

A Superior Subject

We were at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC last week for the biennial meeting of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, the professional organization I'm most involved with. I attend a fair number of academic conferences, but this is by far my favorite. It connects with my primary research interests, obviously, but the atmosphere is far more casual, and collegial, than at most conferences. A few people will wear suits, conservative dresses or "business casual" garb, but many will wear shorts, hiking clothes, t-shirts, or jeans. The panel sessions are almost always well attended. I've gone to (or worse, given papers at) sessions at other conferences where the presenters almost outnumbered the audience members. Rooms that held the sessions I sat in on or presented for at the ASLE conference were usually full or even standing room only. Discussions after the presentations are usually lively, but rarely antagonistic. Conferences almost invariably give me an intellectual and vocational jump start, but I feel like this one offers a glimpse of how academic life at its best might appear.

One of the most memorable papers I heard at the conference touched on subjects near and dear to this blogger, and, I suspect, to some of his readers. At a panel titled "Landscape and Identity" or something like that, the final presenter gave a paper on representation of the Upper Peninsula in the fiction of Jim Harrison. Out of the four papers delivered, this was the only one that drew any reaction from the audience--questions and comments poured in for the presenter, a professor from a small Ohio school who happened to be a native Yooper. Yet few if any of these were directed at his scholarly insights, interesting as they were.

What excited the audience's interest was the place. At the outset of the presentation, the native son explained the geographical isolation that contriubted to the region's unique Finn-dominated culture, and evoked its daunting, wild landscape, acknowledging in the process the degrations visited upon it by extractive industries. He shared stories about his own Finnish family and their participation in the UPs epochs of boom, bust, and diaspora. He offered careful readings of several Harrison novels, too, but when his time was up, instead of scrutinizing these, members of the audience volunteered their own memories of visiting the UP, asked about how some of their favorite spots there were faring, and commiserated with the presenter about tranformations in the UP resulting from development and climate change. Although the audience was basically ignoring his literary analysis, the presenter didn't seem to mind, and expanded cheerfully on observations about his home ground.

In short, what happened is that the subject of the talk--or rather, the element giving rise to the subject of the talk--overshadowed what the presenter had to say about it. Some might say that this was simply because the presenter didn't do his job well, that he had nothing particularly captivating to say, but I disagree. One of the central points he offered about Harrison's work was that characters learn to look beyond idealized images of nature or guilt over environmental harms to appreciate what is present in the land. To members of the audience, the talk conjured memories of what had been present to them there--of the actualities of the place. I think the reminisciences they shared grew organically from what they had heard. I think too that this speaks to the potency of the UP's landscape, and how strongly it can grasp the imaginations of those who encounter it even briefly.

Literary scholars are prone to asserting that our experience of reality, places included, is bound by language and the representations of it culture offers. While I don't entirely dispute that, this episode argues that we still encounter things in this world whose influences on us extend beyond anything that can be reduced to words. That there are voices in this world drowning out the ones that attract notice from professors of English.