20140120.0719

The obvious focus of today for those in the United States is on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day.  Today, the nation ostensibly pauses to honor the legacy of one of the many important civil rights leaders of the mid-twentieth century, reflecting upon the struggles of which, for a time, he was the perceived center.  ("Ostensibly" because, as is to be expected, they day is being spent otherwise; I have work to do even though my classes are not meeting today, and I am aware that many retailers are running sales to exploit the down-time that many others have as well as many workers who otherwise might have been able to benefit from the reforms King and his colleagues espoused.  It is not surprising.)

Today, it should be obvious that the work begun long before King is yet to be done.  There is not parity among races in governmental and judicial processes in the US, and even the term "race" is so problematic as to prompt many to shy away from the discussion thereof (I am, again, aware of my privilege and the limits on it).  That there are systemic inequities is recognized by few in power, and those few are typically unable or unwilling to effect the change that the recognition thereof suggests.  And I, at least, see little hope that it will be otherwise for some time,* for matters will not improve without the kind of coordinated effort that centralizing figures--such as King is romanticized to be--can facilitate.  The fracturing of the middle and working classes in the days since King, understandable as both expected consequences of world events and as products of systematic manipulation by a few assholes in power, works against that coordination.

Little hope is not the same as no hope, however.  While I cannot expect that all people will reflect upon their beliefs and attitudes and adjust them in accordance with observable data and sound ethics (a term which I well know to be fraught), I do expect that there are some who will and some who do.  Many of us are in positions of influence over the minds of the young--it is not for naught that teachers at all levels are accused of indoctrination rather than education (as though the two can fundamentally be disentangled, since education always assumes a given body of information to be transmitted and developed, and the determination thereof is a political concern necessarily incorporating elements of indoctrination).  Those of us who do teach have the capacity to encourage critical reflection, even as experience teaches us that at no point will we be able to get all of our students to do so.  Still, we can work, and (maugre Fish) ought to work to motivate such reflection, such critical investigation and analysis of the self and the preexisting beliefs imposed upon each of us by the prevailing cultural narratives in which we are enmeshed.

If there is to be any improvement, it will be because of such things and through no other agency.

*It might be wondered at that a person who enjoys white male privilege would be concerned for such things, given that he evidently benefits from the inequities in the system.  He does recognize, perhaps as arrogantly as his use of the reflexive third person implies, that he is diminished by the diminishment of his fellow human beings, and, more directly, he is married to a wonderful woman who is of a different background--and his forthcoming child shares in that heritage.  Fault him if you must for reacting because of his personal involvement with the matter.

20140119.0719

This afternoon, my wife's coworkers are hosting a baby shower for her.  Several members of the family have made the trek from their natural state or hard by the meanest of greens or in the lands that gave rise to Cimmeria to this place where the wind comes sweeping down the plain to celebrate the upcoming birth of our child (due at the end of March, thank you) and the burden my wife carries in nurturing the child within her body.  It is good to see that so many others are excited about the child; my beloved wife is working hard to support the baby within her and is enduring much on the child's behalf, and she deserves praise for doing so.

(I do not mean to say by this that those who choose not to have children are deserving of censure by dint of that choice.  They may well deserve censure for other reasons; many people do.  But the informed and deliberate decision not to have a child despite the biological and societal pressures to do that very thing is also praiseworthy.  I do not think I need to seek forgiveness, though, for lauding my wife.  I think I would very much need to seek forgiveness for not lauding her--and not just for her motherhood.)

I am aware of the shower as a distinctly feminine space, however.  The event it celebrates, although yet to occur, is one with which women are most intimately concerned, and understandably.  It is the woman's body that suffers in the process and the woman's body that is put to the nurturing of the life hopefully released into the world thereby; that women are the ones to celebrate the thing in which they are the principal actors is sensible and appropriate.  And in this place, the separation of gender roles along "traditional"* lines is far more in force than in The City or in other places I have known or known of; showers is fer wimmin, or some such thing, and several of the comments that I have overheard bandied about have indicated that the men who have come and are coming along with the celebrants are not expected to attend themselves.  "Burping and farting" seem to be the expected activities, and they are to take place somewhere else entirely.

That this is so forces me to pose some questions, and their nature demands that I attempt to do so delicately, for I really do wish to know, and I truly am curious, but I realize that I can easily come off as the ass in this, and I do not intend to do so.  (I know the sentence is ridiculously complex.  So is what it tries to express.  See Barnard, "The Ruse of Clarity.")  Have I, accustomed to enjoying privilege without necessarily explicitly exerting it, found myself in a position to have had my privilege checked?  Or, rather, am I experiencing in my reaction to the event (which reaction I admit to be childish and petty, particularly since I benefit from the event in several ways) some vanishingly small semblance of the systematic and too-much institutionalized discrimination those in unadvisedly marginalized groups experience on a regular if not continual basis?  (Please do read the question in full before castigating me for it; the qualifiers are in place for a reason.)  And that leaves aside what it says of me that I can and do frame my experience in such terms, something with which I still struggle...

*I use the term advisedly because I know full well that it is problematic--and I know that some who read this know enough to call my on my error if I do not tread carefully with it.  I am aware enough of the problem to be chastised if I do not act with at least the awareness of it, even if I lack a good solution to it.

20140118.0827

Some years ago, I picked up and read a copy of Donna Dunbar-Odom's Defying the Odds, a book with expresses and investigates the difficulties attendant upon coming from a working-class background and going into academia.  I confess that as I read the book, I read affectively, finding myself identifying with Dunbar-Odom's narrative voice because I found many parts of myself in the text.  (I am supposed to know better than to lose myself in a text in such a way, supposed to be more disciplined than to allow it to happen, but I remain human after all.  Whether that means I am a bad scholar or a good one, I am still not sure.)

I might have discussed the issue in this webspace before, that I come from a solidly working-class background and have as a result faced some...difficulty in negotiating the culture of the academy, particularly that of the academic humanities.  I have in the course of my studies been obliged to question and reconsider most of what my upbringing leads me to call virtues.  Common practices--the "way things are done" and "the way things are"--have faced similar investigation and analysis.  And in doing so, I feel that I have been made distant from the family of my birth even as I have found and grown close to my family of choice.  (I do not mean by this to say that I do not love the people from whom I sprang, but I feel no shame in saying that my wife and child receive more of my love and affection than do my parents and brother.  It is as it should be.)

As I have worked in the academy, I have felt very much as though I am obliged to do through raw power what others, whose backgrounds are more suited to work in the collegiate environment, are able to do through finesse and panache.  I feel that I have to stake my claim by force, that I still have to prove through my efforts that I deserve the place and position I occupy, and that I have to prove it to myself as much as I do to other people.  I am the intellectual version of the nouveau riche, spending conspicuously and gratuitously to assert that I have the stuff to spend, marking myself as a newcomer (and probably making myself unwelcome) as I do so, knowing it and being unable to stop.  For I have the fear that, although I may be making an ass of myself through what I am doing, as an ass I at least have a place, and that if I stop, that place will be taken from me and no other will be forthcoming.

There is some comfort in knowing that I am not the only one who has such feelings of unfittedness and being outside even among the outside (for the intellectual is very much on the outside, as McWhorter notes in Doing Our Own Thing).  For that knowledge, I thank Dunbar-Odom.  But the knowledge of how to get away from such feelings would be far more welcome.

20140117.0628

As I was writing in my journal last night (yes, I keep a journal), I caught myself as I was about to make a comment about giving my "best effort."  It occurred to me that I rarely if ever feel as though I have given my "best" effort.  I know that I could work much harder and with more focus on any one of the many things I ought to be doing in my personal and professional lives, thereby achieving greater effect.  I can do better almost always, so at no point that I recall can I claim with any accuracy to have done my best.

Thinking on the matter further, I came to the notion that few people do.  People can rarely look back at their words and deeds and say that they did not have it in them to speak better or do better.  Most or all have gone away from a thing and later thought "Oh, I should have said" or "I should have done" something different, something other than what was said or done, something that would have been better.  It happens often, and since it is a matter of definition that nothing can be better than the best, in each of those instances, we have not done our best.

More thought on the matter, however, leads me to a good reason for our collective failure to do our best, one that may well actually excuse the error.  Better work tends to require more focus; the best work requires most focus.  Focus shuts other things out.  Shutting things out creates problems that ought not to arise.  It cuts us off from parts of ourselves we need.  For example, I could work more diligently as a scholar, shutting myself away in my office or the library with books and scholarly journals, leaving Sherwood Cottage well before dawn and returning well after dark and staying there only to sleep the few hours that my body demands and that I begrudge.  I know this because a fair number of my days as a graduate student were spent thusly, and my undergraduate career was not too much different in that regard.  But for me to act in such a way would diminish me now.  It would cut me off from my beloved wife and our child whom she carries (who is kicking with some force, as I felt last night).  It would cut me off from the markedly enjoyable talks I have with colleagues, talks which may not be strictly of work but are illuminating even so.  It would cut me off from that which makes me human.

More than simple biology, the connectedness to others humanizes, and for a scholar of the humanities, loss of it would be...unfortunate.  The same is true for others; doing our "best" work, what it is that doing out "best" work requires, robs us of something vital, or threatens to do so (and even the threat, by imposing fear, works to the end of actually stealing from us).  We cannot be blamed for seeking not to be burgled.

20140116.0725

There are days I sit in front of my computer to write in this webspace (or in other webspaces or in documents that are far from being webspaces) and words flow freely.  I will not say that the stream is always clear and pure (the metaphor of text as fluid again), and I know well that it is not always wholesome, but it flows.  But there are days when I sit down to write, and it is as though the pipes are clogged.  They permit no outflow, or perhaps only a trickle, a rivulet strained and made dirty by seeping through congealed grease and matted hair and decaying proteins best left unexamined (and I seem not to be able to avoid the scatological).

In such circumstances, I am tempted not to write.  I am tempted to fall back on the old conceit that the Muse comes when she will, and until she comes, there is no sense in my trying to write.  "I have to be inspired to write," whines the annoying little jerk voice within me that wants me to not, a voice a much more popular netizen than I calls The Blerch.  (I do not always agree with The Oatmeal, but it is good reading even so.  And The Blerch is a good concept, little bastard that he is.)  "Things have to be right or it won't work."  It is a refrain I have heard from students any number of times; "I just couldn't get it going.  It didn't feel right."

You should know where this is going.

It is true that the Muse comes when she will.  It is also true that getting any given woman to come often takes dedicated effort on the part of those who want her to come.  Sometimes it does not work, admittedly; the mood does have to be right and the circumstances sufficiently relaxed or otherwise suited to her, and even then, other things can intervene.  But that does not mean that the effort ought not to be expended, that hands and tongue ought not to be bent toward the goal of making the Muse come.  And when the effort does induce the Muse to come, there is a joyous outpouring that is itself quite stimulating, one that in my case often promotes something cylindrical to send out streams of fluid of its own.

I am a more skillful lover of my Muse than to simply quit when the response I seek is not immediately given.  Instead, I work at it until I can work no longer, until hands cramp and tongue will flap no longer--or until my Muse comes and I can enjoy her having come from my efforts, as I have noted before.  So it is that even in such circumstances as those with which I began to write today, I do not turn away but labor on.  Really, even if the Muse does not come in response to my efforts, she appreciates them, and I still have some reward.

20140115.0615

One of the things I am doing with my students this semester is online discussions.  I have tended to do this when I have taught literature classes, largely because it provides a valuable extension of the classroom (when students avail themselves of it, which has not always been as extensively as I would like it to be).  Admittedly, some students do the minimum work to earn their assigned points--but this is true of every assignment.  Sometimes, students do come up with some really interesting ideas, and one such happened yesterday.

The idea that struck me among the student comments I read yesterday is contained in one remark that a student wanted to find a class "dripping with literature."  I replied to the student that it suggests a metaphor of literature as fluid.  (Which fluid it is most like is a question well worth pursuing.  The obvious answer is "ink," but obvious does not mean right.)  And, if literature is a fluid and a class is a thing that can drip with it, does that mean a class can be damp with it?  Moist?  Flooded?  What does it mean to drip or flood or be moistened with literature?  How does one dry out from it?  Can one?  Should one?

I pose such questions to my students.  (I have yet to read any answers.)  It is, actually, fairly common for me to do so.  I am a student of language and literature guiding students of language and literature more junior than I am (and, whatever their majors, those in my class are students of language and literature while they are in my class), and I can only do so by prompting them to ask and answer questions, with the answers leading to yet more questions to be answered.  Some will be frustrated, no doubt; through years of conditioning and the legitimate demands of other disciplines, they want to see single, definitive answers to things, and the humanities offer no such things.  Not if they are done sincerely and with passion (and I have no desire to reward the insincere and apathetic).  Others will simply quietly hunker down and try to get through the "fluff" class their school and majors require of them so that they can move on to the "real" work they need to do, the kind that is supposed to lead them to a job doing something that makes money (although money more for others than for themselves).

Still others, though, will begin to be able to ask the questions for themselves, to look at things and wonder articulately and with subtlety and nuance.  They will see the pieces of creation and question them, working to answer those questions and expanding the field of human knowledge by their efforts even as they and I realize that there will never be an answer to all of the questions until the end; indeed, finding The Answer is the culmination of things, as the Good Doctor has noted at least twice to my recollection ("The Last Question" and "The Last Answer," oddly enough).  Those students will begin to move into The Work in at least some small way, and we will all be better for it.

20140114.0739

I am in trouble.

It is only the second day of the new term, and I am already fighting running battles with my snooze button.  I am already going back and forth with the little beeping machine over whether I will get out of bed when I want to get out of bed or I will get out of bed when I want to get out of bed.  And I feel like I am losing.

Perhaps I am doing the teaching thing wrongly.  Perhaps my techniques are inefficient.  Whether they are or not, though, I found that I was emotionally and mentally drained at the end of my day yesterday, and that those drains sapped what physical resources were available to me (which are not as extensive as they have been because I have not nurtured them as I ought to have done).  Even now, I am somewhat dazed by the experience--and the first day of classes is one of the easiest teaching days.  If it left me as I am, then I very much am in trouble.

Amid the comments disparaging those in the professoriate is one used to disparage all teachers, that we get to have a lot of time off.  I have spoken to this before, and other pieces (such as this one referred to me by a former coworker) also hit upon the issue.  What they fail to acknowledge is that working with learners is exhausting (as is conducting research in any field, but that is a different matter altogether).  Guiding students through their individual learning processes takes a lot of work--and it is necessarily the case that students, rather than classes, are guided.  Each learns in his or her own way and at his or her own pace, and what students learn is not always (or even often, probably) the material being explicitly taught.

My composition classes this term have nineteen students each.  My literature class had thirty when I last looked.  Guiding sixty-eight individuals from where they currently are in their understanding to where they need to be to meet the institution-mandated course objectives and where they really need to be to have a chance at fully realizing their humanity and their connectedness to the world around them is no small task.  Many do not realize that there is such guidance to be had, or that such goals exist, let alone are achievable.  Some seek to resist learning as a thing unneeded and undesirable, and a few others unfortunately are not content with their own ruin, but seek to inflict it upon others.  My colleagues and I have to help those who want it--and they all need different help--while minimizing the impact of those who do not or who do not want them to have that help--and they all use different tactics to work their will.  It is, frankly, a lot of work to do.  And if it is the case that I do not do that work with the sweat of my brow or the strength of my back, I can nonetheless attest that it is no less tiring to move people with mind and mouth than to dig ditches in the dirt and stone.  I have done both, and more than once.

I take comfort, though, in the sure knowledge that the first day on the job is exhausting for most people, regardless of the work.  Some matters, at least, should improve soon.

20140113.0602

Today begins the Spring 2014 term at my current institution, and I will be teaching nine hours consisting of three sections across two classes: two sections of first-year composition and one of early British literature.  It is the easiest teaching load I have had since my assistantship--I was teaching seventeen hours in four sections as an adjunct--and the first time since then that I have gotten to teach in my area of specialty.  (I am qualified to teach composition through years of doing it, and I am qualified to teach American literature through years of study, but my focus was on early British literature, and such classes are not common at my previous institution.)  For both the relatively light load and the distribution of it, I am grateful.

Even so, as always, I am a bit apprehensive about going back into the classroom.  Every time I am faced with new sets of students, I am a bit nervous as I try to look ahead.  How will the students react to me?  Will I face what I faced last semester?  Will I respond to it the same way if I do?  Will I be able to reach more than a hare handful of them?  (The old calls of "If you reach only one, you have done enough" ring in my ears, and they are wrong; it is not enough until all are called.  But I have said that my teaching is my ministry, I think, even if I cannot find where.)  Will this be the set of classes that goes too far and finds me out of work or worse?  Will this be the semester I get shot in the face for handing back a paper that bears a failing grade?

At the same time, I wonder if this will be the term that goes well, the one in which students impress me with their work across the board and scholars, as yet untrained but with clear potential and desire to learn, and we can move together beyond the basic content into beginning to grapple with deeper issues.  I wonder if this will be the term that sees many students see the relevance of what they are doing in my classes, not only for their curricular requirements, but for their own enrichment and the betterment of the world in which they live.  I wonder if this will be the term in which my teaching work and my work on The Work will finally coincide.  (It might be; I have some projects to do that seem similar to those I am asking of my students.  The model will likely be helpful, even if I am not going to put it in the usual place for reasons that will make sense later on.)

I wonder about many things.  I have many questions.  I hope to be able to instill the same things in my students and to not lose them in myself.  And I know that this semester potentially offers opportunity to do so.

20140112.0800

As I have noted in one of my social media feeds (and actually "feeds" this time), I am grateful to be in contact with a number of interesting people who read deeply and broadly and comment upon what they find.  I am also in contact with a number of people who are much more adept than I am at coming up with ideas and making them interesting; I feel that I am often able to come up with ideas, but that those ideas ring much of being forced, of my trying too hard to make them happen and make them good.  I find myself thus in awe and envy of many of the people with whom I have the good fortune to associate and who are sufficiently tolerant as to let me hang around them online and off.

As I write what I write--which is still probably not enough--I do so with the awareness that much of what I write is autobiographical and personal, offering testimonies of my experiences and comments about them.  In doing so, I hope that I can offer one of a number of things: additional accounts of and perspectives on phenomena observed by others, commentaries to let those who may be in some similar circumstances know that they are not alone in those circumstances, pieces of public intellectualism to possibly elevate the net median level of discourse in the world, or present what may actually be interesting reading.  Whether I am successful in the endeavor at all, I rarely know, but I hope even so that I am.  I supposed it is a matter of faith (and probably no small degree of narcissism) that I continue to act as though my small actions matter at all in the world.

I am fortunate to have been told that what I have done has mattered to some people, actually.  Not long ago, some friends of mine in The City made me aware that I was brought up as the subject of a brief narrative--not really an anecdote, but similar to one--by which Huffington Post commentator Rev. Vicki Flippin introduced one of her sermons at the United Methodist Church of the Village.  (It concerns something about which I have commented before.)  It meant much to me to know that I am remembered at all; that I am remembered fondly is, frankly, amazing.  (For someone who has been getting written death threats since age 10 and who is routinely the subject of many, many complaints, it is an unusual thing to be remembered kindly.)  It is relatively rare that people are shown that they have been and are appreciated, so I am once again grateful to have been among such people as will say to others that they value them.  I am once again grateful to have been one of those whose presence and actions have been valued, and I continue to be hopeful that I will someday become worthy of such valuation.

20140111.0900

I have been doing more writing of late, which pleases me greatly; I actually begin to feel productive.  Even if I am not necessarily getting the great, grand publications and advancing my scholarly career as I ought to do, I am pushing more of my text out into the world--and I am even managing somehow to get paid for pieces of it.  Perhaps one with it is my consideration or reconsideration of how I work as a writer, of my preferred writing situation, and as I know well that among the readers of what I post here are writers of much greater skill and aplomb than am I, I offer my report thereof.  Maybe, as with other notes I have made in this webspace, it will open a discussion that I and others can use to improve upon ourselves and upon the world.

Perhaps owing to my family's storied and extensive background in music--my brother holds a degree in music, and he is only the most recent in the family to earn one; too, many of my family across generations have been performing musicians at varying levels of artistic and commercial success--I find that I work best when I am able to have music playing.  I know that there are some who need silence into which to summon their Muses, and I hold no rancor for them, but I know also that my experience calls for Euterpe or Polyhymnia to accompany her sisters, whether Thalia, Calliope, Cleo, Erato, or Melpomene be the one to grace my presence with hers.  (Neither Terpsichore nor Urania often come to visit me.)  This may be somewhat odd given my several past expressions of appreciation for the quiet of the morning and my demonstrated tendency to write in the morning (I think I say it best here).  I will plead only that I do not do all of my writing in the morning.  Not by any means.

Tied almost certainly to my writing in the morning, as well as to my own background and what I must admit as a weakness in my makeup, is my overwhelming preference for cups of coffee while I write.  (I am over the earlier problem, thanks, although I still drink a fair bit of wonderfully astringent Darjeeling.)  People have commented on the near-inevitability of seeing a cup of coffee in my hand or within easy reach when they see me, and they are not far wrong.  I have extolled the virtues of the black brew before; I need not do so again.  It does, however, undergird much of my writing even now.

Something that I have increasingly found I need to have when I write is a means of escape; I have to be able to get up and move about.  For one thing, it reduces the effects of the sciatica with which I have recently been formally diagnosed (as if I need another reason to feel like an old man).  For another, it eases the eye strain to which I feel I have been increasingly prone; I used to be able to stare at a screen for hours on end, but no longer.  For still another, I find that walking around the house a bit helps me to refocus my attention on the writing task that faces me.  Something about the physical motion, the going away and returning, works to my advantage.  Perhaps it is simply that doing so, working the large muscles of my legs, stimulates blood flow from which the brain benefits.  Perhaps it is the eureka phenomenon the Good Doctor identifies at work in a small way.  But whatever it is, it helps.