Newsworthy

I know it's been a year and a day since I have last written anything, and this is going to be brief because I have *lots* of schoolwork to do.

For anyone who questions the value and relevance of a degree in English literature--especially with a specialty in medieval and early modern studies--in our *modern* society, just take a look at two front page headlines on nytimes.com: Maureen Dowd's op-ed "The Nun's Story" (ahem, Chaucer) and "Historians Reassess Battle of Agincourt" (hello Shakespeare!).

What we do in our special little club is make sure these references aren't lost on anyone and teach future journalists, politicians, lawyers, even scientists, that literature is not all flight and fancy but ingrained in our blood as humans. It is the humanities after all. And who can argue with studying what it means to be human?

The Decline of the English Department

The Decline of the English Department

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Mind and Memory

I used to think that I was on top of things. I used to remember appointments, homework, my keys.

Those days are gone.

I need a planner, an alarm clock, post-it notes.

I am a graduate student with far too much on my mind. I think about everything, every day, all day. It's tiring.

But I love it.

A Rare Find

Turner and I are rarely in the same frame since he is usually taking the pictures and making me pose. This lovely shot was taken by Brenna Knowles at the wedding of our friends Dave and Emily in Vermont a few weekends ago. Predictably, Turner is making a face.

translational poetry

with universal love for showing our mind,
with science and technology for withstanding diseases,
and with connotation for predicting future
we sedulously interpret the charm of life science
and annotate the life origin of "people-oriented"
be in the same of life, and pray for the world

Ode to a Moleskine

From where I sit I can see

Some five or six relaxing books.

With sleak, black skins they wait for me.

I reach for one and take a look

At notes, scribbles, and jots.

Page smooth and thick, pen dark and deep.

Unbind the tie, begin a line,

A swirling language marks the spot

Where once some words were wont to seep.

A book is just a book unless it's Moleskine.

A Pizz-a Heaven

I made a sausage and onion pizza on Monday. It resembled the real deal, which is not always the case with my pizzas. I used the dough recipe from Mark Bittman's NYTimes blog Bitten, but instead of making 2-3 medium pizzas, I made one large pizza. I also cooked the pizza on a pizza pan sitting on a pizza stone in a 410 degree oven for about 26 minutes. It seems like 350 degrees would not be hot enough to cook a pizza of that size.

The dough was a little tough to form on the pan because I did not knead it quite enough before letting it rise. That said, the crust was just the way I like it. For those thin-crusters out there, this is not the recipe for you. It was thick, and chewy, and puffy in places. The toppings were simply sauce, mozzarella, onion, and italian sausage.

I wish I had a camera to have recorded my triumph. Next time.

Fish on the Frontlines

Stanley Fish weighs in on his NYTimes blog about the dirth of writing courses that actually teach writing:

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/what-should-colleges-teach/

He observes instructors teaching ostensibly writing courses in social justice, popular fiction, etc. I agree that it's all too easy to not teach writing, because how do you teach something that is best learned through repeated practice.

While current composition theory promotes ways to teach writing through the process theory, modes of rhetoric, and the like, many instructors use this as the invisibile backbone of the course letting students think and talk and read about ideas. Then write. Writing should be both the primary activity and the final goal, the first and the last, alpha and omega.

Many of the freshmen coming out of high school or the non-traditional students lack the knowledge of writing as a technical, practical skill because fewer teachers seem to teach the art of grammar, style, and ultimately rhetoric. I realize that rules-based instruction may fail to reach many students, but there are other ways of teaching the nuts and bolts. The important fact is that they need to be taught. I am not sure if students are aware that there is a correct way to structure sentences. (Correct according to whom? But that's another matter entirely.)

I do think Fish sounds slightly prescriptivist; "these kids can't write like I can. No one is teaching them like I was." Teaching writing can take many forms. However, a syllabus loaded with papers, free writes, and the like does not garuntee that students will recognize that they are in fact being taught to write.

Back in 2006, Fish wrote in his blog titled "The Writing Lesson," "We’ve now had decades of composition courses in which students exchange banal opinions about the hot-button issues of the day, and student writing has only gotten worse. Doesn’t it make sense to think that if you are trying to teach them how to use linguistic forms, linguistic forms are what you should be teaching?" If a student does not know the function of a verb, have we failed as writing teachers? Should this be our first concern of the day?

Isn't it possible to do both? Oh, it's complicated.

books

my books are secluded in an attic
unread, unloved
smothered pages wither in the summer heat
yellowing, curling
growing old waiting for the shelf
will they remember me?

Poaching 101

Poaching is one of those techniques I had never tried before, until last night. I came across a recipe for Poached Salmon with Corn and White Wine Butter Sauce in Food and Wine the other day and it looked light and refreshing, good for the depressingly humid weather that has descended on Buffalo.

The fish was tender and tasty. (My apologies for the lack of photos; I am without camera for the time being.) And the corn and zucchini complimented the fish well with their sweetness. Both are in season now so it's a great recipe to use up those zucchinis from the garden that evade your eyes until they are gargantuan since they will be shredded before cooking.

My one complaint is that the recipe calls for too much white wine leaving little left in the bottle for stoveside tippling.

The Waning of Summer

I have to go to school tomorrow. Summer is over.

Orientation begins tomorrow morning at 9:30. Since kindergarten, I have spent only 17 months away from school. For the rest of my youth and early adulthood, I have either been a student or a teacher, sometimes both simultaneously.

I feel eager and stressed, excited and nervous. Like an adrenaline junkie, this is what I crave out of life. Starting school again make me feel alive even though it scares the bejeezus out of me, especially at this level. It's PhD or bust at this point. I do feel unbelievably lucky, privileged even, to get this opportunity. Sometimes I can't believe it's really happening. Tomorrow.

And in less than two weeks, I will face my own class of similarly nervous yet enthusiastic freshmen. I feel lucky to be able to share in their awakening to life beyond what they've known because it's happening to me too. I get excited thinking that, while not everyone, many will arrive at class brimming with hope.

Maybe it's something in the air. The beginning of the school year has a certain smell, even if now it's just a smell in memory. Shiny textbooks, squeaky erasers, pointed crayons. These forlorn objects have faded into the recesses of my academic mind, replaced by computers and ballpoints, but I remember their dearness. Even as a child I couldn't wait to put on my new school clothes and fill my backpack with pencils and scissors and journals. I remember pictures of my sister and I dressed in our "first-day-of-school outfits," lunchbox in hand, even though the first day of school was a week away.

This is an occasion that I think children are experiencing less and less, which makes me sad. School seems a chore to many, and it continues into college. I wish I could inject in each detached, bored face an iota of the thrill I still get on the first day of school.

Success

After wrestling for days with FTP programs, I was finally able to upload my personal homepage to the UB Unix server. Find it at http://www.buffalo.edu/~smcenter.

I reused the format from a web design course that I took years ago and updated the content. I think it looks pretty good, what do you think? Comments, anyone?

FYI, if you click on the personal link from the homepage you will be directed back to this blog.

Welcome

The name of this blog, PHeeD, embodies perhaps the two things that will occupy most of my life for the next five years: graduate school (Ph.D) and food ("pheed" pronounced as the verb "feed").

I have been away from blogging for about 6 months and have finally rejoined the fold. Having left China and all its wonders behind, my husband and I are embarking a new stage of life. Soon I will begin my studies as a PhD student in English literature; soon we will move into our new house in Buffalo, NY; soon I will be settled again. The best part is that I will have my complete library and kitchen again, after two years or more of life as a literary and culinary ascetic. In China, there are few books and even fewer ovens.

This blog will continue more frequently come September when I am finally settled with a stable Internet connection. For now, I still follow the path of the wanderer, heading to Vermont in one week then back to Buffalo, staying as a guest with friends for a few weeks before closing on the house September 18th. (Keep your fingers crossed that all goes well!)