Thursday, November 14, 2013

20131114.0837

I seem to have fallen behind in my journal-reading again.   That I have is in part a result of the move to Sherwood Cottage, which disrupted my activities substantially.  The move was months ago, though, and had it been the only thing interfering, I would have caught up with myself by now.  Similarly the trouble journals have taken getting to me, which somehow seems to have abated; I get my journals in a more timely fashion in Stillwater, Oklahoma, than in New York City, which strikes me as an oddity, given how resistant many of the people here are to governmental programs and their funding.  (Note that I discuss people and not politicians.  And I am aware that the construction of the previous sentence tends to argue against the humanity of politicians.)

Another reason for the slowness in my journal-reading has already been discussed, and not too long ago; I will not go over it again.  But perhaps chief of them is that I am lazy.  The assertion will come as a stunning revelation, I know, to those who believe that the life of an intellectual is one of indolence and ease.  Having summers off and holidays throughout the fall and spring terms attracts to the work of the mind those who are not equipped or are unwilling to do real work and who therefore deserve to find themselves impoverished and disdained; did we deserve respect, we would have already earned it.  And the professoriate, which inflates its own ego through onanism and the profligate deployment of words that are too damned big and of which I, at least in name, am part, is worst among them, trying only to perpetuate itself and lead promising youths into deconstructionist bullshit and lifetimes of poverty so that its own members can pass off what little teaching they would otherwise do onto unequipped graduate students in favor of sitting in offices, intoxicated, with their thumbs up their asses--if anything so useful.

I really want a sarcasm font.

The truth is, though, that I do often feel as if I am being lazy, despite spending hours not only in the classroom and more hours in reading over and offering comments on student work, but more hours yet in developing and refining the knowledge base from which I teach and grade so that I can do both more effectively and with a greater understanding of how things actually are and what they can be.  (The hope I clutch to my chest is that the students will realize what they can do to help the world get from how it is to how it can be better.)  I come from people who have given themselves over to the work of the hands, and they excel at that work, but I see the price they have paid and are paying to have such mastery.  Complain as I might of what I am obliged to tolerate in what I do--and those who read what I write here have seen many such complaints--I know that I suffer far less from doing what I do than do the hard-working members of my family for what they do.  I spend time away from my work because I must; I have to sleep, though I begrudge the need, and I have to tend to family and home, though I do not begrudge those needs at all.  But something in me nags at me in every moment that I am away from grading and lesson planning and teaching in the classroom and meetings with students.  It nags at me as I exchange ideas with other scholars in passing in the halls or in email or in conference presentations or in printed work.  It nags at me as I am away from my desk, doing something that is not the two-fold scholarly mission of developing knowledge and disseminating it.

It tells me that I am lazy however hard I might work, and I do not know how to get it to shut up.

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