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Saw a flyer yesterday on a bulletin board in the English Building:

CHECK US OUT THIS THURSDAY!!!
FREE FOOD!
BAGS!
M16 SIMULATOR!
AND MORE!!!

I needed to know what more Army ROTC could possibly provide, so I force-marched over to take a look. In the small grassy space west of the Armory, about 50 students in blue-and orange ROTC t-shirts and shorts were chatting, playing bean-bag toss, and trying to get a grill going. Rock music played loudly from an unseen stereo in an Armory window.

Just before four o’clock, the music went down and someone yelled for them to tuck their shirts into their pants and fall in. The cadets formed up in two platoons in front of a tan Humvee in the grass, and the student platoon sergeants reported that all were accounted for.

“Guidons?” the cadet First Sergeant asked.

“No guidons,” a cadet Platoon Sergeant said.

“Guidons?”

Other students walked past on the sidewalk, coming from or going to their dorm rooms, the gym, and the Greek houses, and a busy road behind the formation made it hard to hear.

“Don’t worry about guidons,” the battalion commander said from the side.

There was a short awards ceremony for those who got scholarships or had excelled in summer programs. A quarter of the cadets got awards. When it was nearly over, a young woman with long straight hair ran up. She wore a ROTC shirt and madras shorts, and had an ankle tattoo and heavy earrings. She dropped her bag next to me, said something apologetic, and ran to join the others. When the formation was over and she came back to get her bag, I asked her kiddingly if she’d get an Article 15 for being late.

“I didn’t want to be late.” She laughed. “I had a class and ran over afterward.”

We talked about the barbecue, held to welcome back cadets and give others on campus a chance to meet them. There were fun things to do, she said, like the grenade toss, and the M-16 simulator, which everybody who tried it seemed to love. “I was never much into that shooting thing,” she said. “But then I tried it and it was awesome! Especially shooting those helicopters!” She pointed an imaginary gun to the sky and made a pshoo-pshoo noise. The music came back on loudly, and she invited me to stay for a burger. Air Force and Marine cadets in dress uniforms filed in and out of the Armory.

I went over and introduced myself to Sergeant First Class South, who was shooting the breeze next to the battalion sergeant major. SFC South was a new arrival, just up with his family from duty in Orlando. His pressed BDUs had a Combat Infantry badge with a star over it and an Air Assault Badge pinned on the breast. He’d retired but worked as a defense contractor to help train the cadets. He thought it a good job and a welcome transition to civilian life, a chance to learn “how to deal with doctors, lawyers” and the like far from any military post after 20 years in the service. He got to take classes himself, and his young children loved playing with neighborhood kids in a nearby small town where he lived.

He said cadets were welcome to bring friends to this event—in case they were interested in ROTC, since you could take military science classes without obligation—and that the cadets with “surveys” on clipboards for passersby were a recruiting tactic too. The clipboard cadets were engaged with the grill, and passersby rarely looked in the direction of the gathering, though one pretty young woman smiled at them, and a couple of wiseacres snickered.

South said there was a rock-climbing wall inside the Armory, and the shooting simulator, which could portray different scenarios all over the world, and different weapons, from 9mm pistols to grenade launchers. “The kids like it,” he said, “and it’s certainly easier and cheaper than getting them to a range.” He said ROTC also sends some cadets to training programs, such as a military map-reading course in Indiana. I mentioned the old joke in the enlisted ranks that there’s nothing more dangerous than a freshly-minted Second Lieutenant with a map and a compass.

South laughed hard, briefly, then put his instructor’s face back on. “We learn all kinds of things out there,” he said. “Funny how many are afraid of the dark. But you get a bunch of city kids in the woods for the first time…. I tell them that a lot of what they’ll need to know about military life they’ll need to learn as they go. It’ll almost be like college all over again. They need to pick up some books, do some reading to find this stuff out. They won’t always have an NCO right there to tell them how things work. They’re going to have soldiers who get DUIs, soldiers with marital problems, all the stuff they’ll need to deal with that they haven’t even imagined yet. They ask me, ‘What do I say when I meet my new platoon sergeant?’ I tell them, well, don’t act like you know everything.”

Nearby half-a-dozen cadets and one friend were being shown how to throw grenades from an improvised pit. The target was a shapeless enemy soldier behind folding chairs draped in ponchos. The kill zone was marked out with white tape and little orange construction cones in the grass. Someone overthrew it and the inert grenade clattered to a stop near my feet. The cadet running the activity looked sheepish. “At least it’s a dud,” he said to the others.

There were many opportunities for students to join something this muggy August day. Across the street a giant banner hung on a wrought fence:

Sigma Phi Epsilon
RECRUITMENT EVENT
TODAY at 5

The Ice Arena was across from the Armory too, groups of skaters entering together, and a gang of mopeds was parked at the curb of the Academic Services Center. A Jimmy John’s car with a megaphone on its roof rolled past slowly, announcing, “We’re looking for drivers at three campus locations….”

At the barbecue, a couple of cadets sat on the tailgate of the Humvee turning M-16s over curiously in their laps. The hardest-looking assistant professor I’ve ever seen, a full-bird Colonel assigned to the ROTC battalion, watched his cadets play bean-bag toss with a tiny smile of pleasure as flames leapt from the grill and smoke poured across the sidewalk.

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Crazy Larry, always hungry for acting roles, sent me an ad he found on Craig’s List:

People meet me (an author) at book signings and events and are always surprised; they imagine me differently somehow. It occurred to me that perhaps there is someone out there better suited to be me, to be the me I seem to be in readers’ minds. You would accompany me at my next book event, and who knows what else; the idea is evolving and I’m letting it unfold as organically as possible. If this sounds intriguing—and this is totally for real—email me a bit about yourself and then I will in turn share my name and book titles. You do not need to be a professional actor at all. You don’t even necessarily need to be female, though I will tell you that I am. Thanks for your time. Compensation: No pay.

Who knows what else, indeed? Here’s an idea to let unfold organically: Get actors to play us, college teachers. After all, students I meet at the start of every new semester are always surprised; they imagined I would look different somehow.

Since Larry’s looking for a gig, I’ll have him be the me I seem to be in students’ minds when they register. On the first day of class he’ll arrive to my room costumed in tweed and glasses, adept at thoughtful looks he’s practiced in the mirror. He’ll call the roll delightfully, projecting students’ names, his voice rich and modulated.

After that it gets a little dicey. He’s just an actor, after all, not a teacher, and after waving a piece of chalk around dramatically, he begins to sweat. After a couple of minutes, students openly challenge him, and he looks around shiftily. Suddenly he bows, waits for applause that never comes, and runs out of the room. Scene.

Meanwhile, the middle-aged student in the back of the room who’s been trying to give him surreptitious hand gestures is faced with a choice. Should he reveal that he’s actually the teacher? Run out after Larry? Or join the forming mob and plan to slip away when it chases Larry out of the building?

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Surely our astrophysicist friends have a term for the chaos that exists when individual bodies in mutually influential orbits haven’t settled into a cohesive whole. I call it move-in week.

It’s not a problem everywhere. In Miami, where the city is a giant gateway for transience anyway and the university relatively small, the arrival of students in the fall is unnoticeable. But here I’m guessing we lose about a sixth of the town’s population each May, get used to having those people gone, then see those thousands wash back up at the end of August. With every cycle of departure and arrival the town is inundated with trash, traffic gets heavy and disorganized, and new pedestrians mill around confusedly, looking at each other. What’s more, my favorite pens and notebooks are sold out all over town. And don’t even think about trying to get into Red Lobster.

This year it seemed authorities had spent more time getting ready for the wave. Signs have been up for two weeks reminding drivers which roads would be clogged. A new highway exit is open on the opposite side of town to relieve congestion. And earlier this week cars in certain lots had notes on their windshields reminding owners to park elsewhere during move-in. It felt possible to escape the worst of the crush.

But yesterday was Freshman Move-In Day, and you could hear them coming, like barbarian hordes from the north, before they ever left Chicagoland. Dads everywhere were seething with rage that despite all good intentions the tribe was getting a later start than planned. Moms were still vacuum-bagging the comforters at mid-morning, all the kids had gone to Target for last-minute DVDs, and all those dads sat in their SUVs in their driveways, racing their engines to red line to make their point.

I walked over to the nearest of the dorms to take a look. Main roads were busy but not gridlocked as I’d expected, despite the weather starting to go bad. Signs stuck in the ground outside the dorm read, “20 Minutes to Unload and Go,” and “Unattended Cars May be Relocated.” A young woman named Karen in a shirt that read “Hall Chair” had command of an army of orange-shirted I-Guides, whose task it was to drag in arrivals’ belongings on flat dollies. She gave one of them a thumbs-up then talked to someone on her walkie-talkie. I asked her how things were going, and she said there hadn’t been much of a rush yet. “Looks like the rain is letting up now, though,” she said cautiously.

The university had let some people into the dorms earlier in the week, since move-in wasn’t on a weekend this year. But they were prepared for anything, it seemed, since traffic for this dorm was routed around several city blocks, with monitors, police, and students who would hand out free stuff placed strategically along the route. In the hour I stood watching, none of that was necessary. A dozen minivans, official car of the American middle class, were parked at the curb in front of the main entrance at any given time, but there was no line of traffic waiting, and families got checked in, dropped off, and moved along quickly.

“If you ladies are in Group One, you can go on downstairs after this load,” Karen told a few of her troops. “Travis, do you need help?”

Families dragged in all the stuff needed to survive a semester at a big state university. It was packed in Sterilite bins, Texaco anti-freeze boxes, laundry baskets, laundry bags, garbage bags, Dell computer boxes, plastic filing cabinets, Office Depot sacks, Container Store containers with more containers inside them. A dad ran through the drizzle with a flatscreen TV held protectively in his arms like a baby. Nearby a member of the campus workers union stood under a large tree, watching, not bothering to hold up his protest sign that read “Justice for All.” He looked at his watch then left.

As I was leaving, it began to rain hard. A mom stood at the back of a minivan, yelling, “La maleta” at her husband’s rump as he dug around in the dry interior. “Eh? he said. “La maleta! La maleta!” she cried over the hiss of water. Next to her stood case upon case of bottled water, canned energy drinks, and Shin cup noodles. Karen was instantly on the scene, her hair plastered to her head now.

“Karen, you have done magnificently,” I said when they were done and Karen had taken shelter under the overhang at the entrance. “How many you expecting today?”

“A hundred-and-thirty families,” she said.

“How many are still left?” one of her soaked orange-shirts asked ruefully. It rained harder, a real downpour, and another orange-shirt down the dripping line called loudly and cheerily, “Welcome to the university!”

I walked home thinking about those 130 little tribes. They made me blue, not because they’d invaded our town, but because everything about the university, from its landscaping and architecture, to the education it provided, to its organizational efficiency, would have the effect of distancing, for a time if not permanently, the members of those tribes. I’m one of those who make it happen, and I felt a little sorry about our power.

Mrs. Churm called just then to say that she driving back into town from a meeting, and it was a nightmare: Dozens, hundreds, tens of thousands of cars lined up to the horizon, coming in on the new highway exit on the opposite side of town.

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Our friend Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin says there are three kinds of exhaustion: “Exhaustion caused by muscular fatigue, exhaustion caused by overtaxing the brain, and exhaustion caused by amorous excess.”

As for the middle category, he recommends for “the sage who has allowed himself to be carried away by the charms of his subject, exercise in the open air to refresh his brains, baths to loosen his aching fibres, fowl, green vegetables, and rest….”

There’s a footnote that says to see a few chapters further on, where he gets more specific:

Take a knuckle of veal not less than two pounds’ weight, split in four lengthwise, flesh and bone, and fry together with four sliced onions and a handful of water-cress; when it is nearly done, pour on three bottles of water and boil for two hours, not forgetting to replenish what is lost by evaporation, when you will have ready an excellent veal broth; add a sufficient quantity of pepper and salt.

So far, so good. Now then:

Pound up [with mortar and pestle], separately, three old pigeons and 25 live crayfish; mix and fry…and when you see that the heat has thoroughly penetrated the mixture, and that it is ready to burn, pour on the veal broth and stoke the fire well for one hour. Then strain the broth so enriched, when it may be taken by the patient morning and evening, or preferably in the morning only, two hours before luncheon. It also makes a delicious soup for ordinary purposes.

Brillat-Savarin says he reserves this cure for “weak constitutions, less decided characters—for those, in a word, who break down easily,” by which he means, of course, tenured scholars. Those of us who are adjuncts, writers, and other brutish types might need “Prescription A” instead, “for robust constitutions, strong characters, and for those, in general, whose breakdown is due to excess of action”:

…pluck and clean an old cock, and pound it up in a mortar, flesh and bone, with an iron pestle; mince up two pounds of the best beef….

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I have a new dispatch up at McSweeney’s today, in which I prove myself to be the monster that so many have always thought I was. Pop over and take a look. It’s mostly on the Beatles festival that my acquaintance Crazy Larry and I attended a while back. (McS had a bit of backlog, so it’s just now appearing.) But the piece is called “On Wildness” and also takes up the idea of art as positive transformation, the opportunity for something Thoreau deemed no less important than the “preservation of the world.”

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My family and I are back from our trip, and I’m ready to get back to work. While we were in West Virginia, if we wanted to check e-mail we had to drive up to Snowshoe Ski Resort and use the wireless at the Starbucks. There had been a mountain bike tournament on the slopes, and there were still lots of kids around. I pay more attention to young people now, being the parent of very young boys and a college teacher, than I did a few years ago. And when the kids are of a certain age, I tend to see them as representative of some cohort I’ll see in my classroom in a few years, taking note of what they know how to do and how they think.

As I stood waiting for a latte one morning, I noticed that a young guy and two girls, all maybe 12 or 13 years old, were looking at us. They sat three abreast, a laptop in front of them, but they were staring at me as I stood waiting, even more than people usually do when they’re staring at my oddly-shaped skull. I smiled and said hello, and they were polite in return.

But it continued. I finally got my coffee and sat down. Mrs. Churm and I both had our own laptops and were trying to get some mail answered, but their gazes were unnerving. First I wondered if they knew me as the famous blogger Oronte Churm but realized they probably didn’t read Inside Higher Ed. Then I began to be suspicious that they were broadcasting pictures of me or my children. After a long while, when I looked over and they were still looking, I cursed softly and said loudly, “What are you staring at?” They looked back with innocent wide eyes and said hello again, and not even in that ingratiating way that wealthy kids do to stick it to their adjunct elders.

Then they stared some more. By now Mrs. Churm, who’s been a victim of identity theft, was wondering if they were hacking into our university mail as we sat reading it. (Neither of us had any idea if this sort of thing is possible, and the thought that we might be paranoid old people only made me madder.)

Finally I used the excuse of picking up Wolfie and carrying him off to see something so I could circle around the wall behind them and see what they were working on. As I emerged next to them and looked down, I saw they had something open called “Porn Star Tournament,” and the video was…well, of an amorous nature. The three looked up stricken, aghast, and I burst out laughing. I took my seat a few feet away and said loudly, “Yeah, see, I kept wondering what you were staring at, and now I see you were just worried about getting caught.” They chuckled nervously, and it made my righteousness spike in reaction to having been worried. “Why don’t you guys go ride your bikes up and down the mountain a few times?” I said.

The boy cleared his throat professorially—ahem—and mumbled that in fact he had a skateboard, and he thought maybe they would just leave now. They slowly packed their bags, put on their coats and filed out with nods to us. Their composure was admirable and much beyond anything I might have managed at their age. But then, at their age I was learning to play mumbledy-peg, which isn’t a metaphor for anything. Sneak-peeks at soft-core mags are nothing like instructional videos in every possible deviancy, and I wonder how children educated by new media since, say, 2000 will think and act in college. Will their early knowledge be liberating or crippling?

Having taken charge of a situation I felt out of my control, I was in a good mood again until my wife pointed out that we also had to deal with two boys and the Internet. The thought put me off my latte again, so I snarled at a couple of retirees and went off to hike up and down the mountain until I had worked out all my energy.

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As far as I know, summers off from school have their roots in agriculture. Students needed the time to tend the crops, cut wood, make repairs, put up food, and after harvest they could come back to the classroom. This cycle matched to the natural world also provided scholars the time to do field research and to write, so summer vacation became to academe what the stirrup was to warfare.

Some say our wired lives no longer require three months off each summer, since we’re plugged in 24/7, year-round, and besides now we have gas-powered log splitters. To them, I say, go make hay while the sun shines, and if you don’t want to do that, hit the indoor track and then the tanning beds. A break will do you good. No head-sick handworkers, no heartsick headworkers, as Mother Jones used to say. Is that what she used to say?

After a summer of hard work that wasn’t teaching, my family and I are on a short vacation up a long mountain. Yesterday we drove around to the next valley to see the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. The presentation and tour were decidedly low-tech, considering NRAO looks into deep space to discover the secrets of the universe.

But this was for two reasons: First, the facility’s budget, provided by the National Science Foundation, is only $10 million per year, and among other things, they have to maintain the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope, and 17 million pounds of chipping and scraping. Second, stray radio waves of any kind interfere with the incredibly weak signals they’re capturing from space and trying to analyze. Even the handheld battery-powered fans they used to sell as novelties in the gift shop had to be discontinued to keep from generating RF signals that might ruin years of research. A short DVD in a shielded visitors’ center, a brief talk by an interpreter, and a bus ride around the grounds in a Navy-surplus diesel bus was about it.

Still, it was a great daytrip, and it was mind-boggling to see what they’re accomplishing there, both in the lattice-work dish rising above the trees and in the photos it produces of, say, the black hole at the center of our galaxy.

As an added bonus, NRAO is in what’s called the National Radio Quiet Zone, a bowl in the mountains that blocks stray signals from the rest of America, which means that most of the modern communications devices we’ve become attached to are defunct. (“Cell phone free fun,” the Science Center’s brochure says.)

Here in our comfortable but Spartan condo almost a mile up, I can look out with Starbuck’s binoculars over the receding ridges and see a single cell tower in the carpet of red cedar, rhododendrons, maples, and oak, but it’s so low wattage that service is spotty at best. There’s no Internet and only fuzzy cable. Even my electric peppermill has quit, and I needed that for the flank steak. What will I do now?

Starbuck and Wolfie have seen three black bear cubs, innumerable white-tailed deer, a vulture eating a snake, a hawk, and a groundhog (running from a hawk); they ate wild blackberries, learned to make a popgun from a weed, and pedaled boats around a lake. How odd that both the highest-tech and the lowest are here on Cheat Mountain, both providing opportunities to look for the essence of life.

And how did I post to my blog? I’ll tell you how: I dodged logging trucks, a mountain lion, a wolverine, and 42 skunks to get to the one place for miles around where I could get some business done. Sort of like walking across campus to the Admin building. Ha ha ha ha, just kidding. No, really.

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Never let it be said that Oronte Churm isn’t hip to what’s goin’ down in the scene. You think I don’t see things? Everybody walking around with their websites and their fancy hairdryers and their catalytic converters. Alright, I can play that game.

The design firm Poccuo, whose clients include Chicago’s Newberry Library, the literary journal Ninth Letter, and Madrid’s Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, has been working with me the last couple of months to create my own website. Let me tell you something: If you’ve got a thing you want to do and you need somebody who knows about stuff, these are your people.

Today, friends, I’d like to invite you over to my new digital house.

The paint is still wet, and I haven’t put down carpet, but it’ll make a nice vacation home when I want to get away from the rigors of blogging and sit by the lake. If you get there before me, tell Rory to get out of my liquor cabinet. And I hope you’ll stop by now and again. I have some interesting ideas for the site, which I might take up after my book edits.

By the way, thank you. You’re awesome.

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Ever wonder how graphic designers think about book covers? This site by design firm Fwis might be illuminating. They post images of new covers, do a short critique of each, and give other designers the chance to weigh in with comments. (They also write a column in Publisher’s Weekly, with extended select critiques.)

No doubt about it, design is a vital element in sales, and to my untrained mind a most difficult thing. Let’s say you wrote a novel based on some historical violence but which really is a love story of four couples, told by a communal voice that may be transmigrating souls. Which way would you go with the cover? Period photograph? Or art from some journal of the time, some of it beautiful and thematic, the rest humorless socialist realism? What about a garish painting depicting the actual event? Or something more abstract or from the natural world, spooky and lovely?

In the past, academic book covers were less than sexy, as our friends in advertising use the term. But as Inside Higher Ed has been reporting for some time, university presses often pin their hopes on crossover success, and that means catching the eyes of the public. (Here’s a forum on covers in academe, with members worrying about design elements for their books.)

But let’s face it: It’s still a sliding scale, with general interest titles getting the most care and attention, such as this good-looking volume of translations that’s very sexy indeed.

Textbooks are lower down the scale—because no one buys by choice?—but publishers seem to have been trying a little harder recently, with four-color covers instead of two, making possible sexy, gauzy nanocrystals.

Still at the bottom, I’m afraid—no doubt due to projected sales—are works of more specialized scholarship. This is an attractive cover, but would it have killed the designers to find a woodcut of its subjects fist-fighting outside a brothel?

I have another manuscript at a big uni press, and I’m hoping that if they take it, I’ll get to offer some input on the cover. I’m thinking…Speedo. On a monkey. Fist-fighting Immanuel Kant.

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Advice for novelists, essayists, and poets everywhere from Plato, by way of our mutual writer friend Marcus Aurelius:

…he who is discoursing about men should look also at earthly things as if he viewed them from some higher place; should look at them in their assemblies, armies, agricultural labours, marriages, treaties, births, deaths, noise of the courts of justice, desert places, various nations of barbarians, feasts, lamentations, markets, a mixture of all things and an orderly combination of contraries.

I run a mental check on my novel: Assemblies (check), armies (check), agricultural labors (check), and so on. Viewed from some higher place (check). An orderly combo of contraries (double-check). Squared away! Maybe I’ll add another feast. You can never have enough feasts….