expressions and attitudes

Laine and I went up to stay in the gold country, up in a vacation cabin by the Stanislaus National Forest. We didn't go alone. We went with a couple that we've known for a couple of years, Teri Mae and Katie. I guess we met them as friends of friends, mutual friends, something like that. Katie is an adoptee, as is Laine, and they used to walk around Lake Merritt and talk before Laine and I moved over to this part of town. We've mainly seen them at parties at their house and at games nights. They're both considerably younger than we are. They're planning to get married next year.

I mean MARRIED. They've planned this whole thing with their folks coming out from Boston and Ohio. They're going to have a reception of more than one hundred people. This is getting married like straight people. Maybe this is a generational thing, but I don't have any great brief for getting married, though I definitely think that queers should be able to get married and spend a fortune on it if they want to do it. But it still seems odd to know lesbians who are doing it. Like I said, it could be generational. I've know couples, lesbian couples who have been together for ages, who would laugh at the idea of spending all this cash and time for a wedding. There would probably be some muttering about heteronormarative behavior from the ex-separatists. But the marriage isn't the issue. It was the weekend.

Oh, there were lots of problems. Katie is a person who's not easily satisfied. She's also highly competitive. Now I'm not unfamiliar with the urge to compete. I'll be the first to admit it. But games are just that, games. They're nothing to get bent out of shape about. It's great to win. It's a drag to lose. But the point of a game is the play and the company. For Katie, it's more than that. She won't play a game after she's lost at it. She needs to play games she knows she can win.

That was bad enough. I won't go into all the small ways that she let us know she was not having a good time. The thing that really got me thinking was how she treats her girlfriend, Teri Mae. If you asked them, I think they'd say that they have a butch-femme relationship. That's not all that unusual, really. Laine and I have a b-f relationship, though it's not particularly marked, meaning I'm not a hard butch and she's decidely on the tomboy side of femme. Still the category is a useful one. It sets out certain ideas about gender identity and display. But I suspect that Katie identifies as butch because she thinks of masculinity as the winning team. Certainly the active, aggressive team. She slaps her partner on the ass, grabs her, runs her hands over her tits in the quasi-public space of the four of us. I gotta say I didn't much care for it and I don't think it's being butch. I think it's being a brute.

My idea of being a butch has developed over the years. If one concedes that gender is societally determined and that certain styles and gestures are assigned to different genders, then (in some ideal world) we can choose what gendered behaviors best fit our internal pictures of ourselves. The reality, of course, is that this is not a perfect world and that the choice of gendered behaviors brings some funky socio-political baggage and a whole set of unsavory assumptions about what it means to be a woman and what it means to be a man. Choosing b-f identities in this landscape means that the best you can do is to be thoughtful and avoid the tar pits of gendered behaviors as we perform these roles to greater and lesser extents.

I have always wanted to be a gentleman. Also, truth be told, I like the way that masculine desire can be modeled as active and direct. [I guess that's agency, but I also suspect this model is an artifact of when I grew up. I don't think it's "natural" or particularly inevitable, but we make our selves up out of the available material.] The whys of this? Who knows. Maybe I shouldn't have read "The Highwayman" at a early age. There's no telling why anyone ends up with the sexuality s/he has, why certain things are erotic, why certain roles seem to fit, why some people are attractive and others aren't. I am a butch because I don't completely feel "like a girl", whatever and however that means.

But as I watched Katie this last week, I also realized that in my head being butch is connected to some default behaviors and attitudes. At one point the lights in the cabin and all the houses around there went out. There was a note about this possibility in the long post the owner had sent out, so it must happen with some frequency up there. Katie was freaked out. It turns out that she's afraid of the dark out there in the country. She started wittering about the flashlights -- there were supposed to be two , but we only found one -- about the Coleman lights -- turned out to be a bad idea, no ventilation to speak of inside -- about what PG&E had to say about when the lights would come back on. All I could think was, "What a baby!" Butches are supposed to be brave, you see. This is not to say that non-butches aren't. That's laughable. But I had this (previously) unexamined belief that once you claimed the role, there are things that you should and shouldn't do and freaking out about the dark in a well-populated part of California is one of the shouldn'ts.

Wuss.

We had a nice time in the dark, watching the fire and talking. Once the lights came back on after a couple of hours, Katie wanted to play another game. I said no thanks and went up to bed.

The picture is of the approach to Bridalveil Falls in Yosemite.

getting the car towed away and other endings

I wrote a couple of months ago about my car not running. It sat in the driveway from December until two days ago, long enough for mold to accumulate under the wheels. I finally got it together to have someone come and tow it away. I had a brief hope, not really, that someone would be willing to pay something for the non-running carcass of a 1991 Chevy Corsica. But in the end, I called junker service I found online and on Thursday, sometime after noon, a guy came by, took the title and took the car.

It was my dad's car. My father died back in 1998. In January. He died of a heart attack, but it would probably be more accurate to say that he died of years of drinking too much. He died in his favorite chair, the last of a series of recliners that sat in the living room of the apartment I grew up in. The location never changed, The chair was well positioned in front of the tv set and a nice distance from the speakers. My dad probably had two great pleasures as he aged, music and movies. I have his reel-to-reel tapes of 78s and his videos of movies that he caught on cable. He liked things like Shogun, the complete Smiley series on PBS, Forrest Gump (though he bought that), My Fair Lady (mainly because he was a big fan of Henry Higgins, uh, Rex Harrison), practically anything with Cary Grant in it, and movie musicals. My dad loved movies. He told me years ago about how he'd gone to some matinee as a kid and that he liked the movie so much he stayed and saw it three times. My grandmother was wild, worrying about what might have happened to him. I see him, a small boy happy, sitting in the dark, watching the fantasy unroll in front of him.

I understand that in him because I love movies too. There's a lot I don't understand about my father and that I never will. I think, when I look over the movies he collected, by buying or copying, when I see his Calvin and Hobbes collection, the Pogos, and the other odds and ends that I've kept after he died, that he had a hard time figuring out how to be a man. He wanted the authority of maleness, but he wasn't attracted to being a brute. We watched The Wizard of Oz every year when I was a little kid. My sister and I loved it, but he did too. I think he was essentially gentle and liked being silly, but felt that wasn't ok for a man, especially a black man of his time. He was a geek before there was a name or a place for it. I think he'd have been happier growing up now. I miss him.

He died not long after I got my PhD. He was so proud of me. When the tow guy took the car away, I was trying to remember different drives in it. Although I was reaching for times after my dad's death, I remembered one time before he died when I was finishing up on my doctorate. I had to drive to Princeton to get a signature. He offered me his car, although I hadn't asked for it. I drove down to Princeton and back to Ithaca on a rainy day, listening to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. It was a kind thing for my dad to have done. It was his constant and unobstrusive support that I remember now. A support that I didn't appreciate enough at the time and that I wish I'd thanked him for back when he could have heard it.

At the end, the car had more than a hundred sixty-three thousand miles on it and oil was leaking into the engine. I got it the semester after I started the job at XXXX university and now that the job is at an end, it's only right that the car is going, going gone too.

some things never change

That's a repeated line in the last two Matrix movies. It sounds dumb in the movies (in the midst of some outstanding dumbness), but it occured to me today as I was listening to The Incredible String Band, preparing for a class (long story). I still like this stuff. I especially still like 'Ducks on a Pond", which was one of my favorite songs back in the day when I thought I couldn't be friends with anyone unless they also thought the ISB was the best band ever in the world. "Ducks" is long, over nine minutes. It's full of loopy British associations. It sounds completely home-made. It's such a hippie piece of work and I just love it. Here are the lyrics:

Ducks on a pond, ducks on a pond
Very pretty swimming round
The lion and the unicorn journey very far
The answers are the question, sir
The lady soothes the lion's fur
Meek as a lamb he follows her
Wherever angels are

Sing me something
I asked the ice it would not say
But only cracked or moved away
I thought I knew me yesterday
Whoever sings this song

Greetings on you kings in the sky
Who'll buy me a mynah bird
Play me a magic word
Speak of hopes with thoughts absurd
Thoughts floating by
Little ducks, pretty birds
Clouds across the sky

Moving pieces on the plains of Troy
Carving faces on the rocks of joy
Pretty lady washing the tiles
Soapy pictures like crocodiles

Chilly winds blowing
Lovely spring coming soon

I wear my body like a caravan
Gipsy rover in a magic land
Misty mountains where the eagles fly
Lonely valleys where the lost ones cry

I had a little letter full of paper

Inky scratches everywhere
Always looking, looking for a paradise island
Help me find it everywhere

Peacocks talking of the colour grey
Awaking soundly in darkest day
A howling tempest on a silent sea
Lovely Jesus nailed to a tree

Mad as the moon when Merlin falls
Silver castles and silver halls
Taking lessons from the piper's son
Learn to play while the world is young

Boys and girls come out to play
The moon doth shine as bright as day
Leave your sorrows and leave your sleep
And join your playfellows in the street
Come with a whoop or come with a call
Come with a goodwill or not at all
Up the ladder and down the wall
A ha'penny loaf will serve for all

Following my fortune now the Holy Grail is found
And the Holy Bread of Heaven it is given all around
Farewell sorrow, praise God the open door
I ain't got no home in this world any more

Poor as the birds but to give their song away
Gathering possessions round to make a bright array
Dark was the night, praise God the open door
I ain't got no home in this world anymore.

Now I completely understand why the young me liked this - such visual images, weird British references, and some odd, just odd Christian thing going on. Even though I'd stopped being a Christian when I was sixteen, I could still parse the imagery.

The things that never change are hard to see when I look in the mirror and see someone very much other than my 17 (or so) year old self. But responding to something that touches you, even when you can't completely identify why, that thoughtless, immediate reaction - whether it's love or hate - that's something that never changes

principle

I carpooled down to work as usual this Monday. We spent the first half of the ride talking about the driver’s history course. She’s working on getting students to think about how history is presented in different contexts. She’s working with museums right now. She has a reading—I forget the name of the author—about how museums present information. The main case study was the uproar about the Enola Gay exhibit that the Smithsonian wanted to do a number of years ago. The curators wanted to show the consequences of dropping the bombs on foreign policy and the civilian population. On one side, you’ve got the historians who used primary sources from the time period that suggest that maybe, maybe, we didn’t have to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the war. On the other side, there are veterans' organizations and miscellaneous folks who believe that the bombs ended the war months earlier than it would have and that we shouldn’t ever feel anything resembling remorse for killing all those non-combatant folks. I’m exaggerating, but still. . . .


So the lines are pretty clear on this one, right? Historical evidence versus popular sentiment, evidence wins. But then she tells me about some other exhibit that got closed down. It was called “Back of the Big House” and it was about slavery in the USA. In this case, it was the largely African American staff that worked in the Library of Congress who objected. As far as I can tell from the ride down, (now backed up by some judicious Googling) the employees did not like the exhibit, though it had been shown without comment at five different locations before it got to the LoC. The link suggests that the complaint may have originated in a labor dispute, but I couldn’t find any more detail online. At any rate, this show was also cancelled and eventually moved to a different venue.

Now you’d think that the same rules would apply here. Historical evidence and expertise trump popular sentiment, yes? No. In this case, my colleague thought that the feelings of working people should be taken into account.

Once she said this, I lost all interest in the conversation. This is something about talking about race with some people that makes me just nuts. It doesn't matter how friggin' crazy an African American's idea is, it gets cut slack by some well-meaning white liberal, who would be all too ready to jump down the throat of some old white dude. Now why are the feelings of African American workers more important than that of WWII vets? Got me, but my suspicions are that the feelings of black folks are considered more legitimate than those (presumably) old white soldiers). Legitimate? Why legitimate? Legitimate because we are no threat, because we have no perceived power, whereas the old white dude is emblematic of patriarchy, of the government, of their father for all I know. At any rate, he's someone to be struggled with and we are a people to coddle and condescend to. We are treated like children.


More about my soon to be ex-employer. As I was looking for information about the LoC exhibit problem, I came across this on an academic history blog:

Please. It is just plain pitiful that a graduate of XXXXX will never have had an opportunity to take a course in European history or much of any other history for that matter. God knows what other opportunities they will have missed while being filled with "Global Studies" mindsuck.

Oh dear. You know my colleagues have been telling me that our model is admired in other institutions, but maybe that's just not true. It turns out that the professor that wrote this is a political conservative. Nevertheless, he's not completly wrong about the role of ideology in instruction here.

carless

My car stopped running about two months ago, during winter break. I'm guessing that's when it stopped. I didn't try to drive it until the end of January, when I needed to go to campus. It turned over, but it wouldn't catch. This sounds like something trivial, probably is, but it's the last straw. Things have been going wrong with the car slowly over the last couple of years. That's not surprising. It's 15 years old. Has has over 165 thousand miles on it. It's been slowly dying for some time. There was the new water pump, then the cracked manifold, then the head gaskets. There have been a series of tires. It's been broken into and the CD player stolen. Then the heater dropped dead. The engineering geniuses at Chevy have designed the car so that it will cost $500 to fix the heater, but about 3/4^ths of the cost is labor, just getting at the heater. Then finally there's been a mystery leak, not a problem much of the year here in California. Unfortunately, however, it's the wet season here and the car has become a mold factory.

So I've been riding to campus with other commuters. I can walk to my classes and any meetings on campus. I usually bring food down from home, but one day I had to get to the local Safeway and Blockbuster. A trip that would take about forty minutes took three and a half hours. There's waiting for transfers; there's walking to where I really needed to go from the bus stop. There's the long loopy out of the way routes that buses have to take. The people who ride the bus are teen-agers, a couple of elderly people. Maybe they look a little poorer than the people than people in cars, but not so's you'd really notice. But clearly, like me today, they've got more time than cash or have to make time because they don't have money or can't get a car for some other reason.

Cars are a plague for all sorts of reasons: the endless appetite for petroleum, the isolating influence of these mobile private rooms, the island lives of the suburbs, but life in lots of the US, especially California is impossible without them. Or if not impossible, difficult and taking tons of time, time that most of us don't feel we have.

Because there's an upside to being on the bus, once I gave up the notion of getting done quickly. I took a look around. There are these amazingly individual plantings on the nearly identical houses in Seaside. There's the ocean breaking away in the distance, there's Monterey looking like a small pretty coastal town. There's the fog and the small shops, Mexican, Vietnamese, and Chinese, sprinkled among the big boxes that dominate Sand City and Seaside. I like the bus. I only wish that it were a less neglected way of getting around.

The default assumption is that we all have cars or if we don't, we should.

soup

Last weekend I made French onion soup*. This is my way of creeping back into cooking after basically retreating into heating up and taking out since mid September. This soup was one of the first from scratch things I learned how to cook. I bought Julia Child's French Cook cookbook. This isn't the two volume version with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholt. No, this was the little paperback based on the tv show. As I remember, the recipe is different in the paperback. I think that it calls for thyme or bay leaf or something. In the Mastering the Art version (the one I use now, I've got both volumes), the soup is basically onions, beef broth, a little salt, a little sugar, a little flour, and some vermouth. The trick is waiting the carmelization process out. When I first made the soup, I'd stand over it, worrying the onions along. Sometimes I'd just not be able to stand it another minute and dump the broth on the not-quite-golden onion slices. The soup always came out ok, but never as good as it can be when the onions get good and browned. So now, I find other stuff to do while they're in the pan. I read. I fold clothes. I wash dishes. I swing back and check out the pan and give it a stir every five or ten minutes. After a while, it's ready to go.

I know things about cooking now that I simply couldn't have at 20 or whenever I bought that little paperback. Some of the things I know, I know because of that book (soon covered in grease and gravy and egg and who knows what). But many of the things I know, I know simply because I've been cooking for a long time now. It's sheer practice, making mistakes, learning to think my way around fuckups or missing ingredients. My skills are the result of both theory (any new recipe) and practice (every dish executed).

I'm thinking about soup because I have to develop next semester's class on writing and writing is a lot like cooking. It's theory (the nuts and bolts and widgets of written English) and it's practice (every written communication). But since I'm trying to teach students how to write sort of formal prose, I have to figure out how to write the recipes . . .

Oh, forget this metaphor. I'm having the worst time trying to think about this class. The soup was great. Also great is Harold Pinter's Nobel speech. This man can write. My students, well, some are sort of interested in writing. But I'm having this incredibly hard time getting the writerlyness about writing across to them. For one thing, there's this whole problem of patience. Some find it difficult to understand why someone would write something that's fifty pages long, when you could say the same thing in a paragraph. The point that fifty pages make possible something that a single paragraph doesn't is probably the root of my failure to communicate.

* I made gingerbread too.

epiphany

When I was an Episcopalian, from 13 to 16 years old, I had this great pastor who invited members of a youth group out to his house in Upper Montclair and talked about theology and chess. I am a bad chess player. I learned when I was in 5^th grade and have never gotten any better. I'm not a great theologian either, but I remember still this one thing I learned from those discussions - epiphany.

Now according to the dictionary, once you've gotten past the feast of the Magi, epiphany is "the revelatory manifestation of a divine being". But my pastor called it "the outward sign of an inward grace". I think that epiphany applies to many things, not just grace and I've been having a number of them this week. First, the continued devolution that is this university. The Academic Senate voted not to do anything in response to the Chancellor's mandates. This is not so good as the Chancellor is not a forgiving sort of guy and is likely to do something about this refusal. To make matters worse, according to the Provost, the school is going to have to pay back something like one and a half million dollars through failing to meet enrollment targets. To make things even worser, 49% of the students who come here leave without a degree. And, the worstest part, the ones who stay here are harassed by instructors. This last is from my buddy the ombudswoman, who further went on to say that the many complaints that come to her are caused by the same five or six faculty members, time and time again.

Great.

But the epiphany came when I was walking across campus to get some lunch. It must be hunger awareness week or something right now. On the middle of the lawn at the center of campus was a cardboard and duct tape shantytown. I didn't know it was a shantytown until I saw the sign. It didn't look all that much like anything. So anyhow, as far as I understand it, students who want to bring attention to thee important issues live in these shantytowns for the week, but these were empty by sundown, with only a couple of posters and the boxes were gone by midday the next day. That is this place. Full of borrowed good intentions, but with never the heart or head to follow through.

The other epiphany was about golf, but that will have to wait.

extremes

Today was too long by about three hours. Part of the problem was an academic senate meeting. I've been the senator for my college for going on three years now and the nasty bits of the sausage-making that is getting people to discuss issues and make decisions has become tiresome.

Today's meeting there were presentations from two of the academic vice presidents. These women aren't directly connected to the faculty-teaching side of things, but they were giving information about the dire state of the campus and what we should be thinking of doing about it. I may have mentioned that the place is falling apart?

Their presentations were the sort of bracing talks we needed, but of course someone managed to turn it around to their political perspective in less than 30 seconds. So what that we're the worst school in our system for students transferring out? It's not our fault. The problem is that the tuition is too high! Yeah, that's it.

Uh huh, sure it is.

So I drag myself out of the meeting and off to class. This is my rambunctious section and we're slogging through a book that I know less than half of them are reading with anything like attention. One of my better students starts off with this wild-assed theory about why African-Americans are better athletes than whites. Something about different rates of evolution in humans.

Oh dear.

Well, I was tired and I was cranky and I called his theory wacky in front of the entire class. After about ten minutes he left and I have never felt so bad in a classroom all the time that I've been teaching. I got through the rest of the class and went straight to my office to write him an apology. At the end of my next class, he walks in, waits for the students who have been hanging around to leave and then we have a good talk.

He's having a hard time these days. His parents are splitting up. He's been helping his dad move to Salinas. (His mother doesn't know.) He just broke up with his girlfriend. And he's pretty sure that he doesn't want to be a business major. He really just loves music, but doesn't see how he's going to make a living at it.

We talked for quite a while. Although I'm the last person on earth to tell someone to stay in college, I think that college is the perfect place for a guy like him. He's curious. He likes struggling with new ideas. He's not particularly shy about putting his opinions out there. He's thoughtful. He works hard. Not to mention that he's thinking about dropping out to join the Navy and this is a bad time to be in the Armed Forces. He should be having a good time in school now and not worrying about what he's going to major in to pay off the debt he's accruing as he goes to school.

Our system sucks.

This is one of the things I like about teaching. Just as sitting through the meeting before class is one of the things I hate. The latter makes me tired. The former makes me feel useful and it's nearly as good as doing the classroom work.

shuffle - I

One big problem with having my mp3 player on endless shuffle is that I rarely listen straight through a CD or album.  I hear things in bits and snatches, one great song and then onto something completely unconnected.  Of course this is also like having God’s very own radio, spinning between genres and time periods as though they were all the one.


Things catching my attention this week:

• The Staples Singers – New Home


• Billie Holliday with the Mel Waldron All Stars (including Lester Young) - Fine and Mellow


• Joao Do Vale – Estrela Miuda


• Gil-Scott Heron - Winter in America


• Richard and Linda Thompson - Calvary Cross


• June Tabor - Lay This Body Down


• Sonny Rollins - Tenor Madness


• Hilary Hahn - Bach Violin Partitas


• James Brown - The Big Payback

the cabal

An amazing talk from the former State Department's chief of staff who details and condemns the mess the GWB administration has made of foreign policy.

being contrary

I don't know what it is about me or about me in conversation with some people, but there are folks that just make me perversely contradictory. Today I was in a faculty meeting. Well, it's more complicated than that. I am the director of the program. All of these people are my employees, sort of. That is, I hire them, but given that we all teach the same topic, we're more like colleagues, but the fact that I chose them is always lurking in the background.

At any rate, there's a lot of tension around as I've written before and faculty in my program are particularly worried that the program itself is going to be eliminated. One of the proposals making the rounds is that all the university learning requirements (general education in the rest of the world) should be cut from four to three units. All the university learning requirements, except English Communication and Mathematical Communication. The people who wrote the proposal think, with some reason, that reading and writing are good things to be able to do, that it's good to be able to do some arithmetic, so these classes should have an extra hour to teach these useful skills.

No one has ever shown that the students here actually do learn better with four rather than three units in a class. Actually, there have been complaints since the very beginning that students get to their senior thesis without begin able to write. (It's true. I've read some of them.) But there's a sort of fetishism going on here.

At any rate, one of the faculty starts in on this rant about how cutting the arts and emphasizing English and Math is just another one of those Republican attacks on civilization. Now I hate the Republicans as much as any progressive, African-American lesbian living in the Bay Area could, but wait a minute. I started back at her with some rant about how it shouldn't be an either or sort of thing, how schools just needed more support to do all the good educational things they did when I was a kid (cheap instrument rentals, free lessons, art programs) blah, blah, blah.

But the thing that really bugged me? She actually does think that art is more important than mathematics and that's just wrong. In a perfect world, people wouldn't fear mathematics; every one would love reading; they'd be able to play an instrument; they'd be able to write what's in their hearts and heads with clarity and eloquence; they'd be able to make visual arts; they'd be able to fix a car, and cook, and sew, and who knows what all? But in this imperfect world, what should someone coming out of a four year university be able to do?

At the very, very , very rock bottom least, they should be able to read critically, write clearly (passion is a plus), and understand something of the abstraction that mathematics embody. To do these things, they should know some content too, but I'm willing to leave the content wide open.

The contrary part? I actually do think that knowing how friggin' hard it is to make art should be part of undergraduate study. But I know that this woman has remarkably low standards for art from her students. All expression all the time. Anything she says about art, holding herself as an exemplar of course, just turns me into a Philistine or forces me to point out to her that I started out as a painting major, ended up with a doctorate in ecology, and basically see art and science as co-equal in the realms of human achievement.

In short, being a jerk

not thinking

That's the theme for today. I'm clearly not thinking because I've locked my keys in my car and I'm sitting here waiting for the AAA people to show up.

My colleagues are not thinking because with a deadline looming (I'm talking about three weeks or so away, which is like half an hour in academic time), they're dithering over whether these are long-term or short-term changes. And they're wanting someone, from somewhere to pay them some extra cash for thinking about curricula, which is, you know, our job.

And the on-going non-thinking of our government is manifest in

• the mad spinning on the Plame leak, even as it looks like someone is going to jail


• The increasingly feeble Potemkin village pretense that this administration has any interest in governing
  


• the laughable recommendation that that shill Armstrong Williams give back some of the money or that he be indicted, while the brains in the Deprtment of Education who came up with the plan go unnamed and unscathed

When I started this blog, it wasn't to whine about my job, though that's certainly proved to be the easiest thing to write about.

No. The name came to me after watching the Katrina debacle unfold day after day. It made me aware of politics in a way I haven't been in years, convincing me that even as far off and abstract as elections seem, the effects are right here and right now. I wanted to write about politics, but I've only been able to write about the very close up and personal politics of this campus I'm leaving. But it might be an as above-so below sort of thing. The non-thinking that's driven this campus into panic, the dismissal of inconvenient facts or unpleasant information is not all that different from the non-thinking that's gotten the country were it is now. Except that I don't think that there's anyone on staff here who's actually the AntiChrist, and I'm not all that sure about Karl Rove.

implosion II

I fucked up and published the first part of this before I was finished.

The university where I teach is coming unraveled. It started as a experiment, not all that long ago, but it is an experiment within a not-too-experimental system. The campus has dealt with this situation basically by closing its eyes and hoping it would go away.

It hasn't. In fact things are worse now because the central adminsitration is making some very specific demands and (if things were'nt bad enough) the deadline for making some substantial changes is looming. Faculty are either running around like chickens with their heads cut off (metaphorically speaking) or they're hunkering down to resist any change whatsoever. The other sign of the place falling apart is that many of the curricular experiments that made the place different look to be the first things tossed overboard right now. That's telling I think.

For all our rhetoric, it seems as though the glue that held the place together wasn't very strong after all. What seemed like a comprehensive commitment to a particular mission seems to have been individual commitments to individual ambitions. The qualities that make a community happen never came together and now the rifts are growing more and more visible. The people who wanted a traditional education in the first place look at this vindication. Those who wanted something more innovative are building up ramparts of denial and bargaining. Those who just wanted a job are waiting to see what happens next. Sadly, not many want to think about this very deeply or do anything. But there simply isn't time for the usual dithering.

I am torn. Part of me just wants to wait out the time I have left, but another part feels the call to do something. To try to salvage something from what seemed like such a wonderful dream.

implosion

When I started this ten days ago, I was trying to fgiure out what I'm going to do next. No pressure here. I've got months before the resignation is effective. I was trying to separate my mind from this place where I've spent so much time and energy for the last eight years.

But since then, the place itself, never all that stable, is beginning to fall in on itself.

I quit my job

I was thinking about it for months, for years. I complained about it to all my friends for the same months and years and now I've finally done it.

Since this is academia, it's not that easy.

I had to talk it over with my dean. Then I sent in a letter. Then I sent in another letter. Then he sends me a letter. And then it's done. I don't actually leave until next year, the end of the spring semester when all the grades are in, all the faculty hired for next year, all the graduates gone. Then I'll be gone too.

So in the next, what, nine months I disentagle myself from this life and get started on a new one. I hardly know where to start.