On Making Wood Pulp from Billy Collins’s Author-Annotated Copy of “Sonnet” (in Poetry)

On April 18, 2013 I attended former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins’s 7:30 reading at the Kent State University Ballroom. He read for a little over an hour. In preparation for his visit, I altered my syllabus for “U.S. Literature, 1865 to Present” so that we could include a sampling of Collins’s poems before his visit. I’m teaching from second volume of Bedford Anthology of American Literature (1st ed.), in which Collins has not yet been added, but I have no doubt he’ll show up in the revision. So I chose three poems from Sailing Alone Around the Room to read with the class: “Sonnet,” “Shoveling Snow with Buddha”, and Forgetfulness.

After his reading, I waited until the end of his signing (he was very generous and stayed for almost 100 people) and showed him the two versions of his poem “Sonnet,” one in my spouse’s copy of Sailing Alone Around the Room, the second the periodical version from Kent State University’s library stacks, also available on JSTOR (subscription required). I had used the difference between the periodical version and the Sailing Alone Around the Room version in my class so that I could ask my students why the two versions were different—and then ask Collins. The difference between the two versions, in wording, occurs in line 2. In Poetry, the second line is “and after this next one just a dozen” (2). In Sailing Alone Around the Room, the second line differs: “and after this one just a dozen” (2). The word that differs is “next,” and my class came up with these two questions to ask the poet:

• Did you change it because you couldn’t count? (i.e., in Poetry version because the “next” line is the third line and only 11 lines follow the third line). That was a student’s questions. I sorta thought “next” could refer to the line after the first one, the second line, so a “dozen” lines follow the second line (and I didn’t really want to ask a poet laureate whether he wrote a sonnet even though he couldn’t count to fourteen).
• Were you unplaying the “iambic bongos” that the periodical version had? In the Poetry version the second line has five metrical feet: the feet are not predominantly “iambic,” unstressed followed by stressed, in that line. In my scanning trochees predominate. I’d scan periodical version like this (bold for stressed syllables):

  and af | ter this | next one | just a | doz en

  Even if trochees predominate in this line, a reader might detect echoes of pentameter, hence a reason for the poet to revise that version and undo the bongos.

So, armed with my students’ questions, I went to the reading (which was wonderful). And after he sat and signed many posters and copies of his books, I inquired with my class’s question, about like this (reconstructed from my memory).

ME: I have two copies of your poem “Sonnet” here, and there’s a difference between them.
COLLINS: Let’s see, what is that?
ME: A copy of the periodical Poetry.
COLLINS: Why do you have this?
ME: I was teaching the poem in my class, and I asked the students for possible reasons the poem was altered so we could ask you.
COLLINS: That’s a textual variant.
ME: I know. I’m a textual scholar. Some reasons for alteration that we came up with in class included that you did not want to play “iambic bongos” or that you could not count to twelve because “next” is ambiguous and could refer to third line—I thought the last was not a nice question.
COLLINS: I see. Well, that [Poetry version] is the earlier version, and this [Sailing Alone Around the Room version] has been cleaned up.
ME: I was wondering if you could correct it.
COLLINS: Oh, well, sure [He strikes out word "next" and signs below on the page].
ME: Thanks very much [suppressed squeals of delight].

So that’s how Billy Collins, U.S. poet laureate from 2001 to 2003, came to “correct” (though I wouldn’t necessarily say that—and he did say “cleaned up”) in his hand the Kent State University Library’s copy of “Sonnet” in the journal Poetry. The poem has been anthologized in the most recent edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature. It’s officially part of the canon now, I suppose.

Soon, if things go as planned at the library, the copy annotated by Billy Collins should be ground into wood pulp. I need to return the copy to the journal stacks. It’s not my copy—it belongs to Kent State Library. One hopes that libraries preserve scholarship for the future. And this copy is certainly of interest. But I don’t know whether that’s a good idea because the Kent State Library is not really committed to preserving print copies of journals. I am the chair of the library committee for the English department (not a glorious position—I pester people to place book orders), and I recently received a memo from an Assistant Dean for libraries, which informed me that the number of print copies of journals held in library (8000 titles) will be cut in half in May of 2013. The faculty has about 4 weeks to review 8,000 titles, and we in English department have about 260 journal titles to review. Two relevant facts justify removing print volumes of the library, according to the assistant dean:

• “While the vast majority of our journal holdings are now online, most of these 8,000 titles are not online. Nevertheless, very many of these volumes are ceased titles, cancelled titles, and/or have little or no use for many years.” (Klingler)
• “In our world, the word ‘withdraw’ does not necessarily mean ‘throw away.’ ‘Withdraw’ means that we review the items for ownership in the state-wide depositories. If the item is already held in the state-wide depository system, we dispose of the items. If it is not held, we transfer the item permanently to the depository.” (Klingler)

In other words, because print journals have little use, they could be “withdrawn” or placed in remote retrieval service called AssureVault. But you see, nobody really wants to pay to store multiple copies in the depository. And the memo does not really go to any pains to distinguish between “copy” in the sense of “paper copy” or in the sense of “digital copy.” In my simplistic bibliographical world, destroying a paper copy is the same as destroying a paper copy, like in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. In the library world, there’s no such thing as destroying anything unless you’ve destroyed the last copy (print, microfilm, or digital) in the state. And we have other uses for libraries on a university campus. I joke with my likeminded colleagues that we are speeding the transition from library as depository to library as infotainment emporium.

So if not next month, maybe next year, maybe later, this copy of the journal should be pulped. Because, as you know, there are plenty of copies of the journal Poetry available everywhere. And nobody will bother to go to the library to look at paper copies of journals anymore (or so my departmental colleagues and graduate students tell me). Any one periodical is exactly the same as another, and the vast majority of our library holdings are now digital anyhow. So it really makes no sense to keep it and clutter up library space with paper copies of journals that have no value.

So that’s why it should be pulped. To make this point, that libraries and scholars no longer appreciate the value of individual copies of journal articles, which generations of labor wrote, peer reviewed, copy edited, typeset, printed, distributed to libraries, bound into volumes, and saved to benefit those who would follow. But we’re in a new digital world, where scholarship does not exist if it’s not digitally accessible. So if nobody else cares, why should I?

Works Cited

Collins, Billy. “Sonnet.” Poetry 173:4 (February 1999): 274. JSTOR. 26 April 2013. Web. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23045442

Collins, Billy. “Sonnet.” Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol. E. Eds. Nina Baym and Robert S. Levine. New York: W. W. Norton, 2012. 837. Print.

Collins, Billy. “Sonnet.” Sailing Alone Around the Room. New York: Random House, 2001. 146. Print.

Klingler, Tom. “Library Journal Review: Your Input Please by May 10.” Email to Wesley Raabe [and All Chairs, Directors, and Library Representatives]. 2 April 2013.

Sherwood Anderson’s “Hands” in The Masses

This transcription is taken from beginning Sherwood Anderson’s “Hands,” as it appeared in The Masses in March 1916. I have transcribed the text from page images on New York University’s Digital Library site. The text differs, in ways I think interesting, from the original book appearance of story in Winesburg, Ohio.

“OH, YOU Wing Biddlebaum! Comb your hair! It’s falling into your eyes!”
Wing Biddlebaum, a fat, little old man, had been walking nervously up and down the half decayed veranda of a small frame house that stood near the edge of a ravine. He could see, across a long field that had been seeded for clover, but that had produced only a dense crop of yellow mustard weeds, the public highway. Along this road a wagon filled with berry pickers was returning from the fields. The berry pickers, youths and maidens, laughed and shouted boisterously. A boy, clad in a blue shirt, leaped from the wagon and attempted to drag after him one of the girls, who screamed and protested shrilly.
As he watched them, the plump little hands of the old man fiddled unconsciously about his bare, white forehead as though arranging a mass of tangled locks on that bald crown. Then, as the berry pickers saw him, that thin girlish voice came mockingly across the field. Wing Biddlebaum stopped, with a frightened look, and put down his hands helplessly.
When the wagon had passed on, he went across the field through the tall mustard weeds, and climbing a rail fence, peered anxiously along the road to the town. He was hoping that young George Willard would come and spend the evening with him. For a moment he stood on the fence, unconsciously rubbing his hands together and looking up the road; and the, fear overcoming him, he ran back to the house and commenced to walk again on the half decayed veranda.
Among all the people of Winesburg, but one had come close to this man; for Wing Biddlebaum, forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts, did not think of himself as in any way a part of the life of the town in which he had lived for the past twenty years. But with George Willard, son of Tom Willard, the proprietor of the new Willard House, he had formed something like a friendship. George Willard was a reporter on the Winesburg Democrat, and sometimes in the evening walked out along the highway to Wing Biddlebaum’s house.
In George Willard’s presence, Wing Biddlebaum, who for twenty years had been the town mystery …

The remainder of the story seldom differs in wording, except this one line:

He was one of those men in whom sex is diffused, not centralized. (see pg. 7, para. 5).

He was one of those men in whom the force that creates life is diffused, not centralized. (Winesburg, Ohio)

Anderson, Sherwood. “Hands.” The Masses 8:5 (March 1916): 5–7. Web. 28 Mar. 2013.
http://dlib.nyu.edu/themasses/
.

Also see:
Anderson, Sherwood. “Hands.” Winesburg, Ohio. New York: Modern Library, 1918. 7-18.
http://bit.ly/XCThgu
.

If you’ve read in book version, doesn’t this Wing Biddlebaum seem, well, smaller and older? The words are more or less the same, though ordered differently, but my impression is that his smallness is more noticeable in this version. Also, browse the page on The Masses. Notice the image of the female figures, one nude, that interrupts the story. And notice the charcoal drawing of “Youngstown, Ohio” strikers that follows. How might the first image affect your understanding of the presence of sexuality in Anderson’s story? Could the second alter your understanding of the mob that drives Adolph Myers out of the town?

In the “Hands” text of The Masses, Adolph Myers’ (Biddlebaum’s) interaction with the boys is more openly acknowledged as sexual in nature (second quote). If the energy that encourages his interest is “diffused,” doesn’t the half-witted boy detect or intuit Myers’ interest in a way that the more gifted boys do not? I ask in class, when teaching, whether Myers’ incursion into the personal space of the young boys becomes, ultimately, a form of predation or molestation? But I usually ask that question more pointedly to make sure the question is clear, “Is Myers a child molester?” Or does the quality of “diffusion” that characterizes his interaction eliminate the possibility that his is a type of predation?

Against the Photograph: Advertising Artistic Miniatures

Ever wonder how the miniature artists held on after the advent of photographs? With brutal ads, like this one in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (19 September 1872: 3) for Williamson’s Gallery.

Art.–Of a pretty woman a miniature alone can only do her justice. Photography details the ugliness. Art supplies the beauty–at Williamson’s–Galleries newly appointed.

Lost in Brooklyn, A Louisa Van Velsor Whitman Letter

In a letter written in June 1870, Louisa Van Velsor Whitman proposes to walk to a funeral. From her home on Portland Avenue, she walks to Myrtle Avenue. The funeral is being held at the residence of one Richard Hunt, who died in late-May.

Where does Richard Hunt live? Well, the wording is not clear. It could be “slonter st” or “danter st” or “slanter st” or something like that. It may be shortened. Who is Richard Hunt. Well, according to census death records on Ancestry.com, a Richard Hunt died in May 1870, a butcher. And according to the 1860 census, a Richard Hunt in New York (Ward 17, District 1) had five children ranging in age from 7 to 20. Presumably by ten years later all could be married, if it’s the same Richard Hunt. I can find no death notice for Richard Hunt from late May in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. He does not appear to be on grave sites, probably because according to Louisa he was buried at his residence.

My query is, can anyone propose a Brooklyn street name near the corner of Myrtle and Portland (Washington Park) that might be within hopeful walking distance of a rather frail elderly woman? one that it is anywhere close to “slonter” or “danter” or “slanter”

By the way, it may not be a contemporary Brooklyn street name. You can see a zoomable map at the
http://www.geographicus.com/P/AntiqueMap/Brooklyn-bishop-1868
. It’s in the sector numbered 12, near the Navy Yard. You can look up the Richard Hunts (if you like in the Brooklyn City Directories).

Answering My Own Question

Today I noticed that the Brooklyn Directory (1871) has a chart of the changes that have been made in the Street and Avenue Directory (pgs. 467-688 in PDF). One change may provide a clue to our mystery. Duffield Street was renamed Stanton Street in 1871. Deerfield Street is about 7 blocks from Washington Square Park and so at least seems possible as a street to which Louisa Van Velsor Whitman would have considered walking. This seems promising because A) Duffield/Stanton is close enough to Myrtle and Washington Squart Park, B) Stanton is very close to “slonter” or “slanter” if the first “t” is not crossed, which led me to suspect that second letter was an “l” instead of what I now suspect, a “t.” C), C) A June 1870 letter might reflect changes in street names before they were published in the 1871 directory. With these clues to go on, it’s time to see if I can make this into a rock-solid annotation. Perhaps the Duffield-Stanton street name change will be in the Eagle, and perhaps I can find the death notice of Richard Hunt.

A Quick Reply to Marche: On the Digital Humanities

I do the most traditional of humanities work, transcribe texts for the purpose of editing them, and yet I find that digital humanities is less interesting as an idea about algorithmic criticism than about the very matter that Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” has as its root concern, the radical instability of texts even when they are (in the sense Marche would have it) the same text.

But there are many ironies herein. Stephen Marche in his recent shot across the bow of digital humanities (“Literature is not Data: Against Digital Humanities”) appears to take his text of “Pierre Menard…” from Labyrinths, which has the translation by James E. Irby instead of, say, the translation by Robert Bonner in Ficciones. Of course, since Marche is publishing in the L.A. Review of Books rather than in a scholarly journal, he in his context will exclude a bibliographical citation in which he would specify the source of his quotation.

That Marche used Bonner’s translation can be ruled out because Bonner transcribes Borges’s Spanish—presumably Bonner seeks to assure the reader that his identical translations of the two passages (Cervantez’s and Menard’s) mirror Borges’s two identical Spanish versions. These are just details, but then one point of Marche’s post is that context matters when details are the same.

But if Marche is quoting Irby’s translation, as I believe he is, then why did Marche not honor Irby’s choice to print each quotation from Borges as a separate block paragraph? And why did he omit the ellipses? More details, I suppose. But it may be that Marche or his editor do not think the ellipses and block paragraphs in Irby’s translation are important.

Perhaps the choice is related to the appearance of this review article in digital format.

Might it be that block quotes within block quotes do not render well in the digital environment?

Maybe the ellipses were inadvertently omitted, or maybe the the ellipses in the default web font are considered distracting by Marche or the editors. And so some human decided not to honor the block quotes in the source. Would Marche continue to hold that the “text” is still the same—format and ellipses be damned? Or could inaccurate quoting be the first step in the digital fall? I hold out hope that it’s another instance of a delicious Borgesian twist, that Marche or his editor has mindlessly altered Bonner’s translation to more closely match Irby’s—it’s that fascistic demon tradition having its way with Marche’s attempt to transcribe. Or maybe there’s another ineffable digital text that is Marche’s Borgesian source?

It would be too delicious were the latter so, and so I will suppose that it is not. But it’s so not because such details don’t matters or because context is everything. Context is only the first thing missing from Marche’s discussion of digital humanities. The subjects of humanities studies have been born digital works of literary art and games (see the work of MITH), are being archived in digital format (see any research library or scholarly archive), and are being produced in digital format as first-generation material (see almost every present-day author or scholar). Let us even take up Marche’s most frightening example, that a handful of scholars wish to (and are capable of) applying algorithms to collections of digital texts and thus deriving readings. Marche says, in his most laughably ambitious claim, that “algorithms, exactly like fascism, work perfectly, with a sense of seemingly unstoppable inevitability, right up until the point they don’t.”

That’s just ridiculous: no scholar who wishes to remain a scholar believes that algorithms work perfectly. Scholars may be susceptible to fascism, but algorithms are not the reason. Marche then exhibits his own unexamined belief, that texts are just there whereas meaning is handmade. This naive belief is as dangerous a matter as an algorithm. Bruce Manning Metzger in The Text of the New Testament (1964) has as such an example Erasmus’s edition of the Greek New Testament, which excited the ire of a competing editor, Stunica, who participated in the preparation of the Complutensian Polyglot. Stunica’s complaint was that Erasmus’s text lacked the

Trinitarian statement concerning ‘the father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth’ (1 John v. 7-8, King James version). Erasmus replied that he had not found any Greek manuscript containing these words, though he had in the meanwhile examined several others besides those on which he relied when first preparing his text. In an unguarded moment Erasmus promised that he would insert the Comma Johanneum, as it is called, in future editions if a single Greek manuscript could be found that contained the passage. At length such a copy was found—or was made to order!”—apparently by a Franciscan friar who prepared a new-old Greek manuscript on the basis of the Latin Vulgate (101).

Church authority trumped transcription and manuscript provenance, and would seem to suggest that such things may matter, yet Marche continues to espouse that present-day pipe dream, the “complete, instantly accessible, professionally verified and explicated, free global library.” We can only hope that Marche invokes this utterly ridiculous prospect in jest as no less a Borgesian dream, with its ever-present teasing wink, than his “handmade insight.”

That’s all now. I must go back to mulling over a space in a printing of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin or a handwritten letter by Walt Whitman’s mother and try to decide whether I should transcribe the space in a digital representation so as to separate one word from another. And the word count, should it be 1 and then 2 words? or just 1? True, an algorithm may lead someone into faulty interpretation. But it won’t be the first time—or the last.

The Letter of Recommendation: Resisting the Anonymity of MOOCs and Large Seminars

Early October seems to be the time for letters of recommendation. Students begin to apply for spring-semester opportunities like study abroad or internships. Some ambitious seniors begin to contact me about applications to graduate school that will be due in January or February. Recent requests from students have prompted me to think again about the place of this somewhat humble activity in the life of the professor. The activity is humble because a letter of recommendation is addressed to a limited audience on behalf of one person. Unfortunately, the forms of these letters are so familiar that readers are inclined to read very closely for both what is said and what remains unsaid, so they can be difficult to write well. However, my first concern here is to advise students on the threat of large seminars and web-based course work, including MOOCs, a shift that hinders the ability of university professors to provide a service to undergraduate students that they deserve, to attest in a recommendation that they merit strong consideration for a selective study program, an internship, graduate study, or employment. To ensure that a professor can support your application based on familiarity with your work, I conclude with a handful of tips for student who seek such letters. Your effort can make it much easier for me to write a strong letter of support.

Before I explain my concern that greater campus anonymity is transforming this humble activity of writing recommendation letters, which will lead to direct advice on securing letters of recommendation, I do acknowledge that I write from the particular cultural context of U.S. opportunities and U.S. institutions and employment. I have read enough graduate school applications from international students to realize that the praise so common in recommendations from American professors is rare from faculty at international institutions. Some international students have the support of letters written within cultural conventions that are entirely different from U.S. expectations about the genre. I suspect sometimes that merely acknowledging the fact that the student attended the institution and studied with the faculty member counts as extravagant praise—and my colleagues with more experience at international institutions have been helpful in supporting culturally attentive readings of different conventions. The more pressing matter is not whether high praise (U.S.) or mere acknowledgment of presence (international) is merited or formulaic—and one that is near impossible to overcome unless readers have knowledge of wider cultural conventions—but the challenge of recent transformations in education, which are making letters of recommendation more difficult to write without the significant contribution of students who seek such support.

Though the letter is a humble genre, I recognize that it has the potential for an outsized effect on the lives of individual students. In fact, though I have a standard speech in which I offer letters of recommendation at the end of a course (which I’ve reprised at conclusion of this post) the number of requests that I receive is quite small. Now that I have several years on the same campus, I receive four or five requests per semester. Yet I teach some 130 to 160 students per academic year. So the mere act of requesting a letter of recommendation is often a sign that the student’s work is well above average. The rate of requests is somewhat higher when I teach honors students in smaller seminars of 16 to 20 students, but still it is unlikely that the rate of requests ever reaches ten percent of the students in my classroom. I teach at a public university, and its selectivity is not comparable to prestigious universities, but the students who are at the top of their classes here can succeed anywhere. Had they more advantages of educational opportunity afforded by social connections and financial resources, they could compete with the students at more selective universities. And given that many of my students drag their real-life struggles against significant odds behind them like some burdensome tail, one can discern in their struggles signs of future promise, which are at least as promising as stellar list of achievements that their more privileged peers flaunt like a squirrel’s extravagantly twitchy tail of self-affirmation. But it is not an exaggeration to notice that in the significant majority of cases students who request letters of recommendation merit high praise.

Unfortunately, it is disorienting when a student who requests a letter of recommendation has become unfamiliar to me because of the passage of time or because the educational mode that is enforced by recent budget restraints has made me less familiar with individuals. Recent examples of requests include one from last semester, a student who sought a letter in support of her (pronouns in this and all future references are by random coin flip to preserve anonymity) desire to transfer to another university three semesters after attending my literary history class. Though I remembered the student vaguely, the 200 or so students in the interim since I last saw her had obscured my memory. With the assistance of two papers that the student forwarded I was able to recall the student’s work, but I inquired whether she had more recent faculty members who could offer more timely support. Her answer, No. The reason: most of student’s other classes were introductory courses either taught in a large auditorium seminar or as a web-based course with a comparable degree of anonymity. I had chatted with the student briefly two or three times after class, and the reason she sought a recommendation was simply that to acquire the requisite number of support letters the student had to reach back three semesters to ensure that enough professors had known her on a first-name basis. Last semester I taught a web-based senior seminar, and a few weeks ago a student from that seminar requested a letter of support for admission to a graduate program. His work was recognizable (and the course is recent enough) that this letter will be easy to write, but I would not know him if I passed him in the Satterfield Hall, the building that houses the English department at Kent State. Surely we have crossed paths, but his face and voice remain a mystery because I have never connected the name on an electronic roster or grade book to an in-the-flesh human being.

If contact with professors on a personal basis is so rare or if the educational mode of distance learning or, god forbid, the sea of anonymous faces in a MOOC becomes the norm, how can professors serve promising students by providing affirmation to and testimony about their achievements? A MOOC reminds one of De Quincey’s opium eater and the “rocking waters of the ocean” on which “the human face began to appear; the sea appeared paved with innumerable faces.” If the online education trend is inevitably toward this DeQuincean nightmare, students from disadvantaged backgrounds who attend public universities will have even fewer opportunities to draw from professionally connected professors and other mentors. If the advantage of an education is at least in part the opportunity to make connections—and if unpaid internships contribute to a crushing debt burden—one of the seldom-acknowledged costs of web-based education and auditorium seminars is the structural tendency toward anonymity, which makes the human connections that provide concrete support for particular opportunities in letters of recommendation almost impossible for students to acquire.

If universities are evaluated on whether they can help to engage students with employment opportunities, administrators underestimate the cost of the increasing anonymity that is forced on students in a public university. Large seminars and online learning, when they become pervasive, limit opportunities for faculty to get to know students well enough to provide authentic letters of support. If you are a student at an institution in which classroom time is dominated by large seminars and online courses, you must take extra steps to get to know a professor who may in the future write a recommendation. Office hours, though few students take advantage of them, are one of the opportunities to take advantage if you will seek the professor’s recommendation to support any type of application for employment, scholarship, or advanced study. And another unfortunate fact, as I have discovered from students who have made requests, is not all professors take the duty of providing letters of recommendation as an essential part of their professional duties. Therefore, the amount of effort that you need to take to ensure that you build connections that could support future career opportunities is ongoing and substantial. At the first moment that you discover an opportunity which demands a letter of support, you should have multiple possible sources for letters of reference. Business majors are trained on the necessity of building a network, but humanities majors who seek careers must accept the necessity of networking as well.

As I see this need seldom addressed systematically for undergraduates, I offer the following suggestions on making the best impression and securing the most helpful letter.

• Before contacting me, please develop a brief statement to explain clearly to me what you are applying for and your interest in it. If I can communicate your interest and preparation for the scholarship or internship or award or position, the letter will be much more effective. I don’t necessarily expect your application essay three weeks in advance, but I do need some narrative about your past and future plans that make what you are applying for appropriate for your plans.
• When you inquire about letter of support, do the following: 1) contact me early (preferably at least two weeks before due) but not too early lest I forget about deadline for something that is two months away; 2) if a semester or two since you took my class, remind me who you are by sharing copies of papers or projects; 3) after I make clear commitment to writing letter for you, remind me of due date and submission method of material three or so days before due. Print mail is seldom used anymore, so an email letter or link to web submissions can usually be completed a day or two before the deadline. Make sure you have a firm commitment from a reliable person. I have not ever missed a deadline for a student request. If you seek a recommendation from a professor who is unreliable about ordering books or returning assignments, be wary of using said person for a letter. Or if you do, make sure that you send reminders.
• If the opportunity offers you a choice on whether to wave your right to view the letter, you should think carefully. The convention of a letter to which you have waved access is to ensure that the person can speak freely. However, there is a risk that you will place your trust in a writer who is incautious in their approach to criticism. During my career I have been twice warned discretely that a certain person whom I considered for writing a letter of recommendation was either prone to careless errors or given to including helpful doses of pointed criticism despite the conventions of the genre. I decided against asking those persons for letters. However, if you wish to retain your right to read a letter submitted on your behalf, you can expect the pablum of bland approval, which is unlikely to be believed by readers who know you have refused to wave access to the letter.
• If you earned an “A” and wrote exceptional papers, a letter is easy to write. If your work improved over course of semester, another easy job. If you skipped two or three classes and an assignment, I can still do my best. It is difficult to write a glowing letter if you turned in multiple assignments late (or skipped them) and missed class regularly. In latter case, I recommend you find another professor who can speak more glowingly of your performance. Generally I base my evaluations mostly on your submitted assignments, comparative GPA in the course, and less so on your sparkly personality. Perhaps lacking the sparkly personality myself I underestimate its value. So in my particular case if your sparkly personality is a strength and you are applying to a sparkly personality position, make it clear that’s what you prefer to emphasize so that I can stress that in my letter (see first item in list).
• If you want to simply list me as a reference or resume or vita, you are welcome to do so. Email as the contact method is strongly preferred. I almost never check my office phone, and messages left for me in office may be placed in my box so that I receive them 2 or 3 days later. But please send note explaining what you are applying for and notify me if you expect your references to be contacting me. It is simply bad for your opportunity if a person who calls me has to spend a minute or more explaining who you are because I’ve drawn a blank—since it’s been several months since we last spoke. So do not allow old references to age gracefully on your resume. Replace them with more recent references ever year or two—or at least warn old references who remain willing to provide support when you apply to some new position.

If you are at an institution in which relative anonymity of students is becoming the norm—especially if online-only and large seminars now dominate your undergraduate education—you need to make efforts to ensure that your professor knows you. And the professor must know you well enough to provide letters of support for your future career or academic opportunities, because your future opportunities could at least in part depend on it. It is in your best interest to resist the anonymity of MOOCs and auditorium seminars if you wish the professor leading them to also provide letters of reference.

Dostoevsky Notes from Underground Blog Assignment

Write a query to an advice column in the style of the underground man or of one of the characters in the story (for example, as the underground man’s servant Apollon). Answer at least one question by another student in the style of the advice columnist whom the underground man (or another character) addresses. See Wikipedia’s entry on the “Advice column” for a list of popular columnists. For a near sample, see Letters with Character at
http://letterswithcharacter.blogspot.com/
. You may write to what the Wikipedia page describes as as “Agony Blog,” where everything is intended to be recognizably fake. Each student must post a minimum of one question and one answer.

Some basic guidelines for questions, which are New Topic on the Blog Post:

1. You must address a particular advice columnist by name (Dear Prudence, Dear Abby, etc.)
2. The problem must be recognizable as deriving from the underground man (in his style) and must be associated with a particular episode in the story.
3. The styling of the question (length, subject matter, etc.) must be one suited to the style of questions that the particular advice columnist is likely to answer. If you have an edgy question, ask an edgy advice columnist.
4. Must sign off in advice columnist style (i.e., Lonely in St. Petersburg)
5. In brief bibliographical note (writing as yourself the student, not Dostoevsky character), explain which episode and character you are using as the source for your question. Cite source in formal citation style. Explain which advice columnist you query (if not linked on Wikipedia Advice Column).

Some basic guidelines for answers, which are responses to the thread on the Blog Post:

1. You must address the questioner, i.e., “Dear…”
2. You must provide answer in the style of serious (or sarcastic or humorous) advice. And you must answer in a recognizable imitation of the queried columnist. Or, you must explain why you, a different advice columnist, have decided to take this question.
3. You are encouraged to base your answer in part on what you know is the “real reason” the character is writing (i.e., you are permitted to flaunt your inside knowledge of underground man’s story).
4. In brief bibliographical note (writing as yourself the student, not advice columnist–you may enter these bibliographical deatails as comment on your own post if you prefer not to spoil the seeming purity of the question), explain what part of the story you are basing your “inside knowledge” on. Cite Dostoevsky source in formal style: MLA, Chicago, APA, etc. Be sure to specify any particular section of the text to which you refer in clear form like chapter number and page range: this is required if you quote or paraphrase.

Grade based on following:

1. (20 percent) Proper grammar, spelling, and bibliographical citation (MLA or Chicago or APA style, in comment on your own post if you prefer to maintain unbroken surface in your question).
2. (30 percent) Recognizable imitation in question that echoes closely a particular episode in Dostoevsky’s Notes. You may quote without quotation marks so long as your “bibliographical note” explains that you have done so. See my guide for blog post handout in which I explain source from which advice stolen.
3. (30 percent) Answer that both attends to the question asked and responds in recognizable imitation of particular advice columnist.
4. (20 percent) Going above and beyond. Being exceptionally funny. Picking unusual character or unusual episode for which other students have to really work to do well. Answering more than one question.

For samples, see Ask E. Jean at Elle magazine or Dear Prudence at Slate. Here’s a sample. Writing as Liza, compose a letter to E. Jean asking whether you should see the underground man again, maybe just once. Or, again as Liza, ask Prudence whether you should return home since living in the big city is going so badly. Or, as
Apollon, ask Dear Abby what you should do about the 7 rubles that the underground man owes you. Make these characters live through their own words as foils to the word that the underground man uses to control them.