There are many ways to encourage senior faculty to retire. After all, you can’t just go around kicking their weakening shins until they fall down; they’ll simply lecture while sitting.

One way NOT to entice them into retirement is by making them laugh. If you make them laugh, they will simply grow stronger by the hour and then you’ll never be able to put those tenure track faculty lines to their BEST use: which is, naturally, not in the hiring of bright and clever new faculty, but in the hiring of new administrators, associate administrators, deans, deanlings, and deanlettes (or “dean lites” as they are sometimes known).

Not that I’m bitter.

So, although I am reluctant to make sport of my own university, I must call attention to the fact that UConn might well be facing a dearth of retirements because of the outright and prolonged laughter initiated by a recent memo directed —...

Can we recover from our past?

Or does it seep through to the present as the garish color of underlying old wallpaper left unstripped will usually show through to the pale expensive layer on top and spoil everything?

You know the answer.

The past is never safely in the past.

It punctures the present: a needle pricking a balloon. It sneaks into right-now life, sly as a pickpocket, invisible and unnoticed until a witness cries out.

The unhealed past will seep through layers of time as a deep enough wound will bleed through layers of gauze bandages, however neatly applied.

It’s not like hanging wash on a line, where everything is clean and pinned into place, waiting for you to gather and fold it neatly into bundles.

The past is not done, or washed through, or finished. Don’t fool yourself, please.

Don’t look around; don’t look down. Don’t bother. It’s there. ...

Our academic culture turns scholars into grant writers.

Institutions increasingly place emphasis on securing “external funding” for work in the humanities, where there is no equivalent of Pfizer to fund research and development.

And, as a result, many faculty members have learned to become as persistent (but not as amicable or useful) as ordinary panhandlers. They spend their time with a hand out, but with their fingers on the keyboard; they use their writing talents attempting to secure their institutions more money in order that they might be permitted to get a small percentage for themselves.

In retail, as I remember, we called this “working on commission.”

At a national conference not too long ago, I was seated next to a distinguished administrator — once an Americanist — who spent the entire dinner explaining why those working in the humanities should be judged by the...

Am I the only one to find the following truths to be self-evident?

— Movies divide into two categories: helmets and guns vs. candlelight and talking. — Goo Gone is one of the great achievements of our civilization. — Writing with a fountain pen makes you feel as if what you are writing matters, even when you are writing yourself a note concerning when gin goes on sale. — Some people are entirely self-contained yet vulnerable, like an egg. Be wary if you find yourself in a basket among them. — Interrupting somebody’s yawn by putting your finger in his mouth is funny only to the person doing the interrupting. Rarely does it delight the yawner. — Nobody is enthralled by Magic Eye pictures anymore. — There comes a point in every relationship when you either break up or get married. — You alone understand what your pet is trying to say. Everyone else is just guessing. — There’s a big...

War invades the most domestic tasks. It stays with us, clinging to us in small ways long after history books have set up graphs, with tidy timelines provided, with official stories all neatly laid out.

Personal memory, however, offers the unofficial history.

I remember watching, throughout my high-school evening meals, the battles in Vietnam being broadcast over the small black and white TV in the kitchen. We listened to body counts as we spooned sauce from the pot; we listened to political rhetoric as we dug into dessert. The war spread in our small house, moving from room to room as we listened over the clicking of our knives and forks.

Everybody had a response to war. The first time I ever saw my name in print was when I wrote to a columnist at Newsday to assert my unwillingness to support the country’s military strategies in Vietnam. I was 11 years old.

The columnist,...

5. He treats everyone with what he sees as a sense of detached and razor-sharp irony, but the GWDLTWW himself becomes very sensitive when criticized or even observed closely (which amounts to the same thing). When he perceives a piece of criticism coming close to being sniffed out in public, the GWDLTWW becomes terribly earnest and looks at the perpetrator of the atrocity — otherwise known as the person disagreeing with him — like the mother who left him at day care before he was ready.

6. The GWDLTWW will paint a portrait of any woman who says anything aside from “What a brilliant idea,” and “Wow! I never would have thought of that” as man-hating, disenfranchised, lonely, probably alcoholic, bitter, spinster (or dominatrix, or ex-wife) with a second-rate mind. If you ask this man to discuss whether he has any issues with your work or management style, he will simply make light of it...

Part One: Who They Are And Why We Need To Cut Them From The Herd

1. When they have not prepared sufficiently, GWDLTWW are more overbearing and talkative than usual in order to compensate for what they know to be their inadequacy.

If he keeps asking questions about one particular paragraph and raising complex philosophical issues about it, you can bet that he’s only read the paragraph and wants to hide behind that tiny piece of information like a 600-pound wrestler trying to hide behind a washrag.

What to remember is this: If there’s a guy on your committee who won’t shut up about the report, you can bet he hasn’t read the report.

2. They will stand in front of your desk and ask if you have gum, candy, soda, muffins, a stapler, a Band-Aid, extra paper, Post-it notes, Advil, or Kleenex.

They think of every woman as, basically, a Bodega.

They think that every woman not...

OK, so I’m not going to post a desperately intellectual, academic, original piece today, despite the fact that Fossil and other members of The Algebraically Confident group did indeed explain to me why and how the stupid Chocolate Age Calculator works. The fact that they did it while smacking me on the head for my own mathematical inadequacy is not even the reason for my reluctance to venture into Brainstorm’s erudite arena.

I just don’t feel like it.

(I’m tempted to make that the end of the post. I’m sitting here with Karen and Sarah in my basement office, while the cold rain comes down in nasty, vicious sheets, making it look like a summer day in England. Sarah and Karen are both graduate students. They’re not happy today either. We’re not sure why. Maybe it’s because it’s almost the end of the semester and we all have a lot of grading to do; maybe it’s because of the various...

(I swear I’ll post a desperately intellectual, academic, original piece once somebody can explain to me how and why this stupid chocolate-age calculator works.)

Chocolate Calculator: Don’t tell me your age; you probably would tell a falsehood anyway — but the Hershey Man will know! YOUR AGE BY CHOCOLATE MATH This is pretty neat.

DON’T CHEAT BY SCROLLING DOWN FIRST! It takes less than a minute. Work this out as you read … Be sure you don’t read the bottom until you’ve worked it out! This is not one of those waste of time things, it’s fun. 1. First of all, pick the number of times a week that you would like to have chocolate (more than once but less than 10) 2. Multiply this number by 2 (just to be bold) 3. Add 5 4. Multiply it by 50 — I’ll wait while you get the calculator 5. If you have already had your birthday this year add 1759 … If you haven’t, add 1758. 6. Now...

Right before delivering a big fancy lecture at my old college I stood in front of the mirror at my hotel and decided that the best way to prepare for this occasion was by cutting my bangs. Lucky for me, I had an old pair of manicure scissors right there in my ancient cracked plastic kit bag. I carried this horror show of an accessory with me because the nice toiletry bag from Liberty of London was far too nice to use.

After I turned on all the bathroom lights and narrowed my eyes in preparation for the first irrevocable snip at my bangs, I saw, like a weird special effect, my own face as a girl.

My own face was no longer my face. It was once again the one with steadier contours, with wider eyes and a less-practiced smile. It was the face I used to try to catch unawares, looking out from the side of my eyes into the darkened windows of buses and subways to glimpse myself as...