Let me begin by saying that this is a sincere inquiry.

Blogs by academics often contain expressed wishes that they didn't have to go to so many meetings. I didn't know what to expect when I started my job, but I wasn't worried about it; meetings generally don't bother me unless they go way off topic and deteriorate into unproductive chatting and joking around. [Note: This is especially the case when there's a specific project that the attendees are collaborating on; a few years ago I experienced such meetings.] At the close of my first semester as an assistant professor, I believe I've only been expected to attend about five or six meetings over the course of the semester: not bad at all. There are faculty meetings, and then there's a grant initiative program I'm participating in, for which I've had to attend one meeting. I'm in a writing group which meets once a week, but I don't really count that.

Granted, I'm not on any committees yet. But for years now when hearing professors talk about all the meetings they have to attend, I've wondered -- just how many meetings are we talking about, really? What's the big deal? I would say that something around four meetings per day for a period of a couple of weeks would be tiresome, especially if they're being held all over campus and you're having to be on the go constantly. Are most professors having to attend meetings on the order of ~15-20 per week? Or mostly just those with administrative posts?

I'm wondering, then, if you want to divulge: How many meetings have you attended this week? (Or last week, what have you. Break it down Monday through Friday.) Also, what counts as a meeting? Do class meetings count as meetings? Do meetings with students in your office count as meetings?

UPDATE: KulturFluff responds -- good stuff.

A response from Profgrrrrl as well.

I'm reading The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath right now, and it's striking how much I feel like I'm reading her blog. Silly, I know. I think I might post a few of her journal entries here from time to time. Here are a couple I like:

--Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy, and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems titled RAIN pour in from across the nation.

and

--I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time...

These are from July 1950-July 1953, toward the beginning, when Plath was in her late teens.

Today Jonathan and I are going to have a modest meal; this weekend we'll be doing a proper Thanksgiving with his family. We're probably going to go with what's in the house. Here's the tentative plan.

1. Roasted chicken -- don't know what we'll use for marinade yet; it's still thawing.

2. Roasted sweet potatoes and parsnips -- this is a dish I got from Martha Stewart's TV show. You cut up sweet potatoes and parsnips, drizzle them in olive oil, bake, then coat them with a dressing made of maple syrup and dijon mustard.

3. Peas

4. Maybe corn

5. Possibly biscuits, just the milk-and-self-rising-flour kind. I might grate up some cheddar to put in them, too.

We might venture out to the grocery store, in which case cranberry sauce, Pepperidge Farm stuffing, and a store-bought pie of some kind will surely be added.

This phrase was somewhat of a refrain in my dream last night. Do your dreams ever have phrases repeated at intervals? In one dream I had "There is no finding the lost souls or the lost great." ("The lost great," in this case, consisted of the Shakespeare's sisters of history).

Anyway, in last night's dream, I heard the expression "Trick up a tree." I remembered hearing old men in my family say it, and I got excited and thought, no one uses that old southern expression anymore! I'll have to reinsert it into circulation.

"Trick up a tree" was used in reference to a particularly cruel joke or sad irony. "Trick up a tree," the old man would say ruefully, clucking his tongue and shaking his head. In the actual dream, I told myself that I'd have to Google "trick up a tree" when I woke up. So I did, and it actually is not an old southern metaphorical reference to a cruel joke or sad irony, but merely a skateboarding trick. Though, I suppose, the phrase could also be used to describe Christmas tree decoration.

In another dream, one I had a couple of weeks ago, I got a batch of papers from one of my first-year composition classes, and they had given their papers titles that were intended to upset me, but they only ended up slightly amusing me. A couple of examples included "Stupid Vomit Paper" and "Dumb Snot Boogers Paper."

A while back, Mark Bauerlein at The Valve made a comment that has stuck with me ever since, or part of the comment, anyway:

We’ve done such a poor job of training young people to appreciate the value of literature that most of them see no point, and nothing at stake, in their engagement with it.

Today, Avedon Carol pointed me to Ursula LeGuin's acceptance speech for the Maxine Cushing Gray Award. This excerpt illustrates especially well those stakes:

There have been governments that celebrated literature, but most governments dislike it, justly suspecting that all their power and glory will soon be forgotten unless some wretched, powerless liberal in the basement is writing it down. Of course they do their best to police the basement, but it's hard, because Government and Literature, even when they share a palace, exist on different moral planes. Each is the ghost in the other's bedroom. A government can silence writers easily, yet Literature always escapes its control. Literature cannot control a government; poets, as poets, do not legislate. What they can do is set minds free of the control of any tyrant or demagogue and his lies and disinformation.

The Greek Socrates wrote: "The misuse of language induces evil in the soul." Evil government relies on deliberate misuse of language. Because literary skill is the rigorous use of language in the pursuit of truth, the habit of literature, of serious reading, is the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.

The poet Shelley wrote: "The imagination is the great instrument of moral good." Believing that, I see a public library as the toolshed, the warehouse, concert hall, temple, Capitol of imagination — of moral good. So here — right here where we are, right now — is where America stands or falls. Can we still imagine ourselves as free? If not, we have lost our freedom.

is the title of an article that's worth a read. I don't lecture myself, but I'll admit, I loved lecture courses when I was a student. Speaking of... we finally got one. (the backstory)

I'd like to riff off what Collin says in a recent post about conference presentations. He suggests that conference presentations are not taken very seriously by some who do them, and that one way to think of them would be to prepare our presentations as though the people in the audience paid their own money (no reimbursement by their institutions) to be there. Conference travel is expensive, and it's terrible to offer up a lousy presentation in exchange for that.

That, to me, is a good motivator to prepare well for presentations (well, that and the fact that I have done two presentations in the past that didn't go well at all, and I don't want to have to suffer that embarrassment again). But I can think of other motivators:

1. Do your presentation as if there's someone in the audience who has been wanting to meet you for a long time now (months or even years).

2. Do your presentation as though recruitment scouts (for publishing opportunities, jobs, PhD programs, etc.) are in the audience.

3. Assume that there's at least one blogger in the audience and that if you don't do a well-researched, thoughtful, and eloquent presentation, that person is going to write a bad review of your presentation. Assume the person's blog has a high enough Google page rank that the review could show up on the first page of results in a search for your name.

Hadn't seen this one before:

If you search YouTube, you can find lots of good Folgers commercials. (I confess that I wanted to watch that "Happy Morning" one again.)