This Little Light of Mine

It's a gorgeous day: bright blue cloudless sky, red gold leaves in the trees and underfoot, and warmth under the dappled sun. As I tramped through the leaves in the backyard, half listening to my neighbor summon her cat "Cowgirl! Here kit-kit-kit-kit-kit-kit-kit-TEE!" which makes me feel like I'm in the country, I noticed that the familiar call was mixed with a strain of bright music. There is a church on my cross-street, a tiny white box of a building that I never paid much attention to. But today I could hear a small gospel choir inside singing

This little light of mine
I'm gonna let it shine
I'm gonna let it shine
I'm gonna let it shine
This little light of mine
I'm gonna let it shine
Let it shine, let it shine, let it shi-ine

My mother used to sing this to me when I was very small. Hearing it today was kind of transcendental.

Underneath

Being under review again is challenging, since I've started to make progress on my manuscript revision. The review can take up a lot of psychological and emotional acreage, leaving little room for focus on my current projects, if I'm not careful. And it gets scarier and scarier in the years leading up to the tenure decision. I'm only 3 years in and already I'm worried.

Reading one's colleagues' critical reports is a bracing experience, but I'm trying my best to take them to heart constructively by thinking about how I can use this as an opportunity to change as a teacher and as a scholar. I'm trying to read them as assessments rather than evaluations. And I'm hoping they'll keep me on.

I have also realized I am not a fan of certain words and phrases that tend to crop up in such reports. It's probably because right now my mind's landscape is being overtaken by thoughts about the review and its uncertain outcome. But for some reason the verb "evinces", even used in a positive way, freaks me out. It has nothing to do with what the word means. I think it has something to do with the way it sounds- kind of like a sharp knife slicing away at paper.

Haiku Dissertations

I recently came across these beautiful haikus (via an email from an adorable beau) based on doctoral dissertations.

Somehow I'm more impressed by these scholars' abilities to write haikus based on their projects than by the years of research and argumentation that went in to the original projects. It's so much more difficult to reduce one's argument to seventeen syllables.

I think perhaps I ought to try to write a few of these about my book project, and maybe they will help me clarify my proposal.

HAIKU DISSERTATION

Yellow Leaves

I'm back in the South for the time being. Montreal and New York were wonderful, but I've had to come back here for a while, to work, until I can find a subletter and a sublet elsewhere.

I've just turned in my 3rd/4th year review dossier (sigh of relief, followed by sigh of apprehension) and am settling in to writing, or fixing up my manuscript.

The weather's been cool, and the leaves are starting to turn. I'm switching from sandals to boots, tights, jeans and cardigans. It's not cold enough to turn on the heat just yet, but it's cool enough to smell woodsmoke and cold wet grass in the air, go for a short walk in the park and return to brew a pot of tea for the afternoon's work.

I love autumn. I think maybe I say this every year around this time of year, but I believe I think better, write better, work better when it's just starting to get chilly out. The air is thinner, crisper, my mind is sharper. Or maybe it's all the mugs of tea I'm consuming. At any rate, I am grateful for the arrival of autumn and for my leave- there are few things I would rather do than sit down with a pile of books and a pot of tea, wrap myself in a wool cardigan, and settle down to read or revise, with a nearly comatose cat nestled in my lap.

retourner à Montréal

Tomorrow morning- eye blinkingly early - I'm going to take the 11 hour train from New York to Montréal. It will be my first time back in the city in two years, which is almost unbelievable to me, given that I still dream of Montréal and still think about myself as having come to the south from there, kind of as if I lived there longer than I actually did. Of course it helped cement that feeling of being "from Montréal" in my head, when I kept going back to Montréal for a year and a half after I moved south (I was dating someone who lived there).

But anyway, it's been two years. My French is rusty. My vocabulaire Québecois even rustier. I can't seem to remember the proper order of the streets that ran between my own street, Rue Drolet, and the main street Boul. St. Laurent, even though I walked past them several times a day for a year, and for some reason I find this vaguely disturbing. Henri-Julien, Laval, Hôtel-de-Ville, Coloniale, St. Dominique. There, I think that's right. (I just checked google maps and had forgotten de Bullion- how could I have forgotten de Bullion?!). Every day I would walk along Avenue des Pins from Drolet to St. Laurent and pass these same streets. I'd pass the Theatre des Quat'Sous, housed in an old synagogue, and the fancy restaurant Laloux where my parents once took me and where we ate coqilles st. jacques cooked with creme, orange rind and pernod and they served mousse de fois gras instead of butter with the bread. It sat across the street from a humble little potato place, Patate au Four, which I never tried but liked the idea that it was open late next door to a Buanderie- so you could get a piping hot potato if you were stuck out in the cold, dark winter doing your laundry.

This time, I'm not going alone. There is a fellow traveler (an adorable beau), who speaks better French than me but has never been to Montréal. I can't wait to show it to him. But it will also be good just to walk those streets again, speak that weird mixture of Canadian French and English, see my old friends, and wander through the used bookstores of the Plateau, stocked with beautiful francophone books and huge collections of discounted classical music CDs. I think I still have my 10% off discount card for the Bouquineries St. Denis and du Plateau, which I remember had this great window on Rue St. Denis full of curious book specimens, all of which I coveted. And of course we'll see some French cinema and visit Mile End, with its mixture of Portuguese cafes, Greek delis, and Orthodox Jews, and the Spanish and Portuguese places in the Plateau, and the lovely Café Côté Soleil on St. Denis to have a Montréal brunch, and then go for a walk up the "mountain" maybe with a picnic lunch from Marché Jean Talon and I'll see my friends and colleagues too- three days is starting to seem a little too short to fit everything in.

First Paycheck On Leave

30% of my half-pay has been withheld in taxes. I now make less per year than I did as a postdoc in Canada.

Ouch.

Back to grant applications for the spring.

Home again, home again, jiggety jig

. . . And it's pretty much the same. Except that the cat is trying to make up for 18 days without me by sticking her face in front of me every two seconds, and about 50% of the tomatoes were destroyed by caterpillars or blight or not enough water or all three. The first day of classes was yesterday but I'm on leave so I roll out of bed at 8 and spend the morning writing and listening to Bach in my pajamas. I feel kind of ill- like I'm playing hooky or I've got one long extended sick-day.

I've got to get out of here! And so I've devised a marvelous plan: who says I should spend my leave here just because I didn't get a fancy long-term fellowship? Here, where my house is full of distractions and I feel all wrong going to campus and hanging out around my colleagues who are not on leave, and thus envious of me? I have decided to try to sublet my place and move somewhere (avec chat) with bigger libraries, more rare books, more influential and important early modern scholars, and writing-friendly cafes, preferably late this fall, but I'll do January if I must. Can I afford it? Barely. But right now I think it might make a huge difference in my productivity and general happiness. Yes?