Let me give you a little weekend recap.

I was doing two things all weekend long (really three, but the third is connected to the first, so we'll let it go at that): baking and grading.

The third thing was volunteering, but I was volunteering to sell the baked goods that I was baking. That's the connection I was talking about.

I graded three sets of papers, one set of annotated bibliographies, and about seven sets of discussions over the weekend, beginning on Thursday. I was in that situation because I am something of a procrastinator when it comes to grading, so although I was giving feedback on projects throughout, I hadn't exactly sat down to assign formal grades to things.

And yes, I know I posted on both the grading and the baking earlier on. I'm now providing the post mortem.

The grading was miserable. I hate it. However, I dutifully plugged along and took the punishment for those weeknights during the semester that I decided sleeping was more important than grading a bit here and there (it also didn't help that I went to Seattle toward the end of the first summer session to attend a wedding...traveling is not good for my grading motivation).

The baking on the other hand, while exhausting, was a joy. It was so enjoyable in fact that following Friday night, when my pies and cookies sold at a brisk clip, I went home and baked two more pies and a few more dozen cookies. This time I rose to the challenge of a friend and produced a vegan apple pie, which essentially meant I didn't use any butter or margarine, as that's the only animal product in a fruit pie. Instead of butter/margarine (margarine contains whey, which is made of milk, so it's not vegan...something I learned this weekend), I used Crisco baking sticks with "buttery" taste.

Mm-Hmm. If they say so.

Although I didn't like it nearly so much as the butter-laden regular dough, the all vegetable shortening dough was not bad (may I never say that loud enough for Julia Child to overhear me in the Hall of the Kitchen Gods). The filling is absolutely the same: apples, flour, sugar, salt, lemon juice, and cinnamon.

I feel a great sense of accomplishment today, having both turned in my grades and sold off the baked goods, and look forward to turning my eye to more important matters such as John Boehner's tan and Michele Bachmann's pledge to oligarchy.

Baking.

One of the things I did in grad school to procrastinate was bake. If I had a paper due in a few days, the best thing I could do was back a pie or two. I've got grades due in four days, so I decided last night to bake three pies and six dozen cookies.

OK, I'm not being terribly honest.

I knew for a few weeks that I was going to be baking last night. I volunteered to supply a few baked goods to a charity sale for the local library, and so my baking wasn't this time a reaction to the impending doom of turning in my grades.

Sorry I don't have pictures.

However, I baked three apple pies. Two are double crust and one is crumb-top. The apples are braeburn and I dice them up pretty well, although I always leave a few larger chunks. I was planning on one double crust and two crumb-tops, but I had so much dough that I went with the two double-crusts. Good dough. I use the Julia Child recipe from The Way to Cook. I highly recommend it.

There's something nice and simple about flour, butter, vegetable shortening, sugar, salt, and water.

Between making the pie dough and actually filling and baking the pies, I made cookies. Three dozen are chocolate chip and three dozen are chocolate chip with walnuts. My cookies come out flat and crispy. They come out exactly like my grandmother's in fact, a point that mystifies my mother and aunt. I don't do anything special; I use The Joy of Cooking recipe.

The kids are a bit upset right now because they're not allowed to have any of the cookies.

Confessions, perhaps.

I despise grading papers.

I understand that's probably not a novel confession. I think it's universally reviled as the most annoying thing about teaching. It must, however, get done.

I have a whole slew of grades due on July 11, as the first summer session has ended, and I am not really interested in getting through the grades. I'm five days out (sort of), so you think it's no big deal. Yeah, I hear that voice, too. It drowns out the more reasonable voice that knows my schedule and what happens to time on weekends and realizes that today and tomorrow are probably the best chances I have to get these grades done.

The main problem I have with grading is coming up with concise comments. I tend to overwrite my comments, and that kills my efficiency. According to research, comments are not as helpful as teachers intend them to be (at least on my typical assignments, which don't allow revision). The typical student apparently glances through the comments and gets to the grade and that's that. I wasn't a typical student, I suppose, because I loved to read the comments if they were good and I felt a significant sense of discomfort if they were bad.

And when possible, I took them to heart and strove to fix problems the next time around.

Comments are to an extent important, even if they don't improve the student in the way we intend; comments indicate to the student that you actually did reflect on their work and in the case of the few who do see their academic work -- even in core classes a world away from their majors -- as important to their future as "college educated adults," then it makes a difference for their next paper. The research jury, as with so many things in social sciences, is still out.

You know, it's a lot more fun to write about grading than to grade.

Uninspiring.

The US Women's Soccer team looked completely uninspired today in their 1-2 loss to Sweden. Flat flat flat. And when it got down to the last ten minutes plus stoppage time, they looked like a team content to allow the game to go down as a loss; there was no sense of urgency in turning to the attack, and they were out of position so that when they got the ball deep in Sweden's end, no one covered the top corners to prevent Sweden from clearing.

If we don't see better in the quarters, it's going to be one and done.

Our freedom means we can shop whenever we want to!

Yesterday was Independence Day, and to celebrate I pretty much sat around for half the day, spent a little time catching up on an online class I'm teaching, and then went shopping so we could have some fireworks (the type that are legal in Pennsylvania, that is) and dinner.

When I was a kid if you tried to go anywhere on the 4th of July and buy stuff, you would be, as they say in Virginia, SOL. We had respect for holidays. However, we've managed to turn most of our holidays into excuses to consume, so it makes sense that the day off (for office workers and government employees) is pretty much nothing more than an extra day to shop.

The summer is marked by the three major holidays devoted to grilling: Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Labor Day. The gods of charred meat are honored on these days.

We didn't char any meat yesterday, mainly because on the 2nd I'd charred about 50 burgers (beef and turkey) and a dozen chicken legs and that I think was enough of an offering. Yesterday we grilled veggie burgers and corn.

But I digress.

Just about everything is open on the 4th these days. True, many mom and pop joints close down, but even one of the local guitar shops was open like it was any other day. There's a sad feel in these big box stores (for instance Target) on holidays, because the aisles are full of holiday related material that didn't sell and will soon be on clearance, and the workers are already setting up the next big shopping event.

In Target's case, that event is back to school. The backpacks, notebooks, pens, pencils, and glue are all positioned for maximum visibility at the end of the long wide aisle (a bit like a major Parisian boulevard) that divides the housewares from the groceries/junk food. We turned the corner from the toothpaste and laxatives and our son looked down that long gleaming aisle and let out a very audible "ugh" as he spied the huge "back to school" banner and the backpacks hung high over the aforementioned orderly rows of school supplies.

Talk about killing the holiday spirit.

Let's talk literature.

So part of my professional duties is to teach literature. I recently completed a course in American literature in which I asked the students to read Herman Melville's The Confidence Man. It's an amazingly simple story in that it takes place aboard a Mississippi steam boat and involves nothing more than conversations between characters. However, it's also an amazingly intricate story in that it involves shifting roles with one character constantly reappearing in the guise of someone else: in other words, a confidence man.

The story is based on trust, or confidence, and the necessity as well as danger of confidence.

It is, I have decided, not a text to be served up to freshmen in an introductory literature course.

Introductory lit students seem to think the text is plotless, and to an extent it is, and they view that as a great fault, which it can be but isn't always, and I would say that by and large they are not fans of the book.

One of my students, however, did me the great honor of giving me her copy of the book after class: it was the Norton Critical Edition, whereas the official book was the Penguin edition. Now for those of you who aren't in the know, the NCE is a series that includes not only the text of the book with explanatory notes, but also several essays about the author and/or the text. They're very nice scholarly editions, so I appreciated that gift, even though it also told me that the student didn't see much value in keeping the book.

I have a few books that I've decided need to be reserved for more advanced students. Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! are among those books. I also don't think I would surprise them with anything of Toni Morrison's beyond Beloved (although I might think about Jazz). Sula, on the other hand, is a great introduction to Morrison.

I will continue to teach Melville in the introduction to American lit, but it will most likely be my favorite, "Benito Cereno," or "Billy Budd." Maybe Typee.

Endgame?

Here's an outcome I actually didn't expect. The Guardian (among others) reports that the criminal case against former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn is about to go belly up. The surprising thing isn't that he's going to beat the charges; after all, he's a global power broker and she's an immigrant maid. The main surprise is how spectacularly colossal the collapse appears to be.

Strauss-Kahn, if you recall, never denied having sex with the maid. He never said "I did not have sex with that woman" as some other famous leaders have been known to say. However, he alleged the sex was consensual. The maid alleged rape.

It looked pretty dark for the DSK, and the story had all the makings of a TV or movie crime drama: wealthy privileged man takes advantage of lowly support staff on the margins of society. Surely in most crime dramas, the man would be convicted after having used his wealth and power to try to escape, only to find justice prevail in the end...cue courtroom steps scene of victorious lawyers wearily asking each other if they'd like a drink.

Our dear recently departed Peter Falk could have made mincemeat of the DSK stand-in during another installment of the best detective show ever, Columbo.

And of course, even in the cop shows where the good guys don't always win, such as Law and Order, the audience would still be left with the impression that the bad guy got away with something, that he's still guilty as sin but that money and power can sometimes buy the verdict, a message hammered home in so many Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett tales.

Alas, we don't even have the luxury of moral if not judicial superiority, as the case appears to be so completely done for that DSK's story may in fact be the true one. Certainly the report that she consulted a jailed drug dealer friend on the financial windfall that could occur should she press charges makes her look, um, a bit unreliable.

So we still have the story of the power broker and the maid, but that's about it.