20190610.0430

I've posted seven times previously on 10 June, in 2010, 2011, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. The most recent three are poems, and short ones, though the 2017 piece is a sonnet with a rhyme scheme I tend to deploy. (I do not follow the typical models of Shakespearean quatrains or the more intricately braided Spenserian rhymes, but instead offer four triplets and a couplet.) It might be of interest therefore, if not necessarily much. The 2015 piece is a bit of a rant against the circumstances of my job search; it informs why I do not want to go back on the job market if I can avoid it. The 2011 piece is a short rumination on academic regalia; I still do not have answers to the questions I had then.
The 2010 and 2014 pieces remain, and I note that they both make much of my father working as an HVAC/R technician. The latter is something of an angry rant about the state of funding and care at the US Department of Veterans Affairs; so far as I know, little or nothing has been done, and things continue now as they did five years ago. My father still works for the agency, still maintains the systems that keep the staff and patients warm enough or cool enough to do what they need to do. He has not told me that things have much changed for him, and those I know who use the VA's services have been similarly uncommunicative regarding things getting better there. But I did not expect that any words of mine would carry to the eyes or ears of the mighty then, and I expect it even less now.
The 2010 piece is strangely interesting as I look back at it. The second part, wherein I discuss some things that happened in the classes I was teaching as I worked on my dissertation, is particularly interesting. It still flatters me that my students asked after copies of Malory, even these years later; it's not been something that's happened for me many times since, not even when I've had the luxury of teaching literature classes (and that has not been often, to be sure, nor is it likely to be the case again). The bit about jokes in Malory has come up for me in my work since; I tried to get a short paper on one published, but that didn't work well. (I may or may not try it again. I'm not sure.)
My rumination on the value of the academic humanities...I am not sure how to feel about it at this point. It seems entirely too myopic to be of any use; it needs corrective lenses, even as I do, but I am the wrong kind of doctor to determine that prescription. Or perhaps I am more jaded and cynical now than I was nine years ago, while I was still a graduate student with the hope--expectation, really, even more foolishly--that I would land a tenure-line position. I knew better than to think I could change the world, of course, but I thought that I would have a particular portion of that world to call my own and that what I did to push back against human ignorance might actually matter.
Now, though...I am not convinced.