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It occurred to me that Carl Sandburg had to have more going for him than just that "Chicago" poem with the hog butchers in it, and lo and behold, he does. He likes to blurt out exactly the things that most poets would wrap up in layers of ambiguity, sometimes with pleasing results. The anvil keeps catching my attention, so now it gets to catch yours, too.
Wow, I've been away from lj a long time.
I'm finally free of the tutoring mill. There were good things about working there, and the proprietor has some fine qualities, but people who habitually negotiate in bad faith piss me off, and listening through the cubicle walls while my colleagues used humiliation as a core teaching technique made me heartsick. Humiliation doesn't teach children grammar or felicity of expression. Humiliation teaches humiliation, and not a damn thing else.
Fortunately, my new freelance clients have ransomed me from that place. I'll praise them here some other time. There's too much to praise all at once.
The Rutgers School of Continuing Education wants me to teach a poetry workshop this summer. I guess I have to stop describing myself as an escaped academic now. I would have been able to resist a part-time lecturer's line from the English Department, but Continuing Ed courses are ungraded, non-credit courses for a constituency that consists mostly of non-matriculated adults. No students attempting to haggle over grades! No students taking creative writing out of a delusional belief that such courses are easy A's! No students selecting my course solely on the basis of its time slot because they have to carry a full-time courseload to dodge their student loan payments! I hear from reliable sources that teaching in Continuing Ed affords all the joys of classroom teaching, and none of the bullshit that goes with working in a credentialing system. Well, we'll see.
The woman who runs Continuing Ed's creative writing program is interested in offering genre fiction workshops. She'd insist on teaching experience, a record of relevant publication, and New Jersey residency. Academic degrees would be a non-issue. The money's not great, but not bad for part-time university work. By my calculations, even with realistic assumptions about prep time, the lump-sum stipend would break down to a better hourly rate than most copyeditors make. Anybody out there know anybody who might be interested?
Meanwhile, the manuscript progresses. When my main job was to make it longer, it was easy to measure my progress. Revision is so much harder to assess. Roughing out ten new pages is a day's work by any reasonable standard, but somehow ripping out ten pages doesn't feel like a day's work. I fixed a broken sequence of scenes by adding three transitional paragraphs today--and thank goodness it didn't take more than three paragraphs, since the word count's still too high. And yet, and yet. Had I produced twenty new pages the current market does not want, I'd feel more virtuous now. Embattled, unpublishable, and virtuous. At least the new paragraphs are yummy. A canal ought to have flower petals drifting on its wavelets. A drawloom's heddle frames ought to click when they fall into place.
Wow, I've been away from lj a long time.
I'm finally free of the tutoring mill. There were good things about working there, and the proprietor has some fine qualities, but people who habitually negotiate in bad faith piss me off, and listening through the cubicle walls while my colleagues used humiliation as a core teaching technique made me heartsick. Humiliation doesn't teach children grammar or felicity of expression. Humiliation teaches humiliation, and not a damn thing else.
Fortunately, my new freelance clients have ransomed me from that place. I'll praise them here some other time. There's too much to praise all at once.
The Rutgers School of Continuing Education wants me to teach a poetry workshop this summer. I guess I have to stop describing myself as an escaped academic now. I would have been able to resist a part-time lecturer's line from the English Department, but Continuing Ed courses are ungraded, non-credit courses for a constituency that consists mostly of non-matriculated adults. No students attempting to haggle over grades! No students taking creative writing out of a delusional belief that such courses are easy A's! No students selecting my course solely on the basis of its time slot because they have to carry a full-time courseload to dodge their student loan payments! I hear from reliable sources that teaching in Continuing Ed affords all the joys of classroom teaching, and none of the bullshit that goes with working in a credentialing system. Well, we'll see.
The woman who runs Continuing Ed's creative writing program is interested in offering genre fiction workshops. She'd insist on teaching experience, a record of relevant publication, and New Jersey residency. Academic degrees would be a non-issue. The money's not great, but not bad for part-time university work. By my calculations, even with realistic assumptions about prep time, the lump-sum stipend would break down to a better hourly rate than most copyeditors make. Anybody out there know anybody who might be interested?
Meanwhile, the manuscript progresses. When my main job was to make it longer, it was easy to measure my progress. Revision is so much harder to assess. Roughing out ten new pages is a day's work by any reasonable standard, but somehow ripping out ten pages doesn't feel like a day's work. I fixed a broken sequence of scenes by adding three transitional paragraphs today--and thank goodness it didn't take more than three paragraphs, since the word count's still too high. And yet, and yet. Had I produced twenty new pages the current market does not want, I'd feel more virtuous now. Embattled, unpublishable, and virtuous. At least the new paragraphs are yummy. A canal ought to have flower petals drifting on its wavelets. A drawloom's heddle frames ought to click when they fall into place.
