I have recently started trying to catch up on reading my academic journals–something I had let lapse late in my attempts to secure full-time work in academe and which I had not been diligent about doing since I lived in New York and had an hour-long commute that had someone else doing the driving. Now, though, while I am largely out of academe, I retain some affiliation with it, particularly as applies to my discipline of medieval studies, so I retain membership in a few organizations, and I take some of the journals they publish. In truth, I have missed grappling with developed ideas; the teaching work that I yet do does not afford me much chance to confer with my colleagues in the field, and I have felt myself stultifying as a result. It is not a pleasant thing, to be sure, and being as far behind in my reading as I am (there’re volumes from 2015 I’ve yet to read!) does not help matters. But I have the opportunity to address that much, at least, and I am please to be taking the chance.

That I would do so is something of an oddity, I know. I really should be working to extricate myself more fully from academe, to let the teaching I do be just a job–and not even so much more than that as a hobby. Erin Bartram, whose influential blog piece remains on my mind (as I’ve noted here and here), is not wrong to note that continuing to participate in the system that has rejected me–as academia largely has–is to contribute to the conditions that force others out and prompt such ideas as the zero-time faculty fracas at a university in southern Illinois. Maintaining society memberships and journal subscriptions, writing and presenting and trying for publication, all feed into a system that has both shat me out and shat on me.

The thing is, though, that it has not been my discipline that has treated me thus; a number of institutions have, to be sure, but I have to think that they are separate from and only loosely connected to the discipline of medieval studies as a body. The discipline itself has been largely hospitable to me–and to many outside traditional academe. I recall Richard Utz’s plenary address at Kalamazoo some years back (I forget which year), one in which he extolled the amateur medievalist and reminded those in attendance to value the non-traditional scholars among us–of whom there were and are many, and their lack of institutional constraint allows them to pursue projects from which we all benefit and which we ought to support. Many of us do; I know the Tales after Tolkien Society does, and it values the independent scholar no less than the affiliated one. And that is to the good.

Also, on a wholly personal level, many of those I call colleagues, I also call friends. And if it has not been the case that institutional realities have helped them to hire me, it has been the case that I have enjoyed their company and their collaboration across many years. Their work, I do not mind supporting–and from experience, I know they have not minded supporting mine. (There has been little enough of it, but still…) Thus, while I am sympathetic to Bartram’s argument, and much of what she writes resonates with me (clearly, else I’d not come back to it again and again), I find I cannot turn away from academe so completely as she looks to do. I cannot leave that part of myself fully behind.

How much of that reluctance comes from lingering camaraderie and how much from pathology and dysfunction are unclear to me–and I am not at all certain I want to figure it out. (I worry about the implications for my stability, and it needs no dissuasion as matters currently stand.) What is clear is that

1. Because I do remain engaged in academe, if only peripherally, and
2. Because I perceive myself as benefiting from doing so,

I will be continuing to read from my years of scholarly journals. I have the time to do it, now, and I feel the need. And even if I do not foresee a return to full-time academe, I see no reason I should not work to improve my understanding of the world, and so improve myself.

Contributions are always welcome!

On 24 April 2018, the online Chronicle of Higher Education published Julian Wyllie’s “Why This Philosopher Wants Her Students to Ask Someone Out, in Person.” In the piece, Wyllie lays out some context for the article’s subject, Boston College’s Professor Kerry Cronin, including the note that her work has generated a documentary, before reporting an edited interview with her. The interview articulates some of the ideas and issues surrounding Cronin’s now-extra-credit assignment for students to ask a person out on a date–with specific parameters given for the date–and to reflect upon it. In all, the article gives an interesting image of Cronin and her assignment as it relates to currently-prevailing social narratives about the early college experience, although there are some problems to be found.

Some of the problems are noted explicitly in the article. Wyllie reports Cronin as acknowledging the fraught nature of entangling students’ work with their romantic lives–although Cronin is correct to note that teaching students means teaching the whole student, and that means their interpersonal relationships become relevant to what occurs in the classroom. (Necessarily, those who view college as job training will disagree; personal and professional lives are “supposed” to be separate insofar as a person has or is allowed to have a life other than the professional.) And there is a decidedly ableist comment in response to one of the questions posed–the one about cheating on the assignment–that gives pause. A person who is mobility-impaired might well find it expedient to use technology to set up a date, and others whose differences are less visible might have other reasons to deploy technologies other than mouth-to-ear speech. (This is in addition to the set of people who legitimately perceive no need for romance in their own lives, at least not during the time they are enrolled in the class.) While the case might be made that the avowed extra-credit nature of the assignment might permit the imposition of additional restrictions on it (but likely not well), it does not excuse the ill-considered speech–particularly from a philosopher, who ought more than most to be attuned to the perils of such speech.

Such being said, there is something of interest in the assignment. Because it is necessarily a repudiation of the idea that college is about job-training, it is worth some attention. (I am generally against the idea that higher education is supposed to be about higher earnings first or only, as should long have been obvious.) Too, the idea voiced by Cronin in the piece that students who do not want to participate in the dating part of the assignment can still contribute usefully to the discussion prompted by reflecting on the experiences of asking a person out and going on a date with that person is a fine one; there is much to be learned from looking into why a student would reject part or all of an assignment–about the student, about the romantic environment in place, and about the assignment itself, among others.

Additionally, there are useful comments in the interview aside from discussion of the assignment. Cronin’s definition of hookup culture–a social system centered around “a physical or sexual interaction with no perceived emotional context and no perceived intention for a follow-up” that seeks to avoid communication about the relational implications of the interaction–seems to be one, as a point of departure if nothing else. And her notion that “People hide behind screens to guard from vulnerability” seems also to have some use to it as a way to understand why “kids these days” do so much through social media (in addition to the simple fact of time-demands precluding physical travel to the places needed to conduct affairs in person); why would a person–of any age–not take measures to guard against hurt that is likely to come? (And before I hear people complain about Millennials and younger needing protection, I wonder how many of those who make such complaints would go to play, say, baseball or softball without wearing protective equipment, or who would think to weld steel without a mask and gloves. I think few, indeed.) So , although neither is without its problems, there is something in the article well worth reading, something in Cronin’s assignment worth considering.

Contributions remain decidedly welcome.

I seem to be writing about my writing a fair bit recently, a wonderfully meta-scriptorial (if that’s the word for it) series of pieces that may or may not serve to help others get through their own writing experiences. I nurture the hope that they do, and I have some reason for that hope; I occasionally get comments from students that they have looked at what I have left here and used it to their own advantage. So that much is to the good–and I hope that I can offer more that will continue to be of aid, if not in my classroom, in the efforts of others in theirs and in their lives outside them.

In the spirit of discussing my own writing with an eye toward helping others with theirs, I offer the following comments, then, and note that I have recently returned to a practice I’d long employed and then too long set aside before taking it up again: journaling. Not long before I completed my student teaching, I started putting my pen to the pages of actual bound journals, doing so partly as a meditative act and partly because, with the looming completion of my undergraduate studies, I felt quite adult and thought that keeping such a record was the kind of thing that an adult ought to do. I kept the practice up, albeit not as regularly or thoroughly as I ought to have done, across the years of my graduate study and past it, finally wearing out in May 2017, when I faltered and failed to keep up with my intent, and I let the intention go as I had so many others.

Or I tried to do so, at least. Really, I had no more success in setting aside my journal-writing and my regrets about it than I have had about leaving academia (about which I’ve also done a fair bit of writing in recent memory); the uncompleted volume of my journal stared at me form my desk, eyeless but still with plaintively blaming gaze, and as often as I looked again at academic job listings, I berated myself for not taking up my pen again. (That is to say “entirely too damned often.”) And so I acquiesced at length to that particular urge, and I picked up a leather-bound journal once again, beginning to put my pen to it–and using pens long given to me as gifts, to boot, rather than the plastic throw-away things I had been using.

It has only been a few days since I have returned to the practice, to be sure, but I already feel better about my writing from doing so. My pen-hand is still quite poor, admittedly, but more than a decade of fairly regular practice in the earlier journals had not improved it, so I am not surprised that it has remained as ugly as it ever was. More importantly, I feel myself better able to put words together in some semblance of legible order–something I attribute to the resumption of more practice writing, and doing so engaging more of myself than typing allows. For when I write with pen, I invoke different muscle memories than those I use when I type, and the added engagement of the kinesthetic–and the olfactory, with the ink, paper, and leather each having their own aroma–brings more to me and so calls more from me. I have to think it helps me, and I need all the help I can get.

If you’d like to be part of that help, click here.

A recent Twitter thread in which I participated sprang from a new parent commenting on having to sing lullabies despite not knowing many. The new parent is a long-time friend with whom I’d discussed impending parenthood (and likely with not entirely welcome advice along the way, as I realize now, for which I apologize), one who’d shared with me excitement at becoming a parent, and the lullabies comment was posted publicly, so I thought I’d chime in on it. Doing so showed me a variety of versions of one particular lullaby that seems fairly consistently used–at least in its earlier verses–and prompted from me the comment that the lullabies my wife and I sing to our daughter go to strange places.

As I think on it more, I am more convinced of it. The original example, singing of a series of acquisitions starting from a mockingbird, finds its way to a Grecian urn that will be discarded if it does not ode; my wife is responsible for most of how the verses get there, although I admit to following up a few verses later with talk of a singing thrust that ought to beard. But my wife and I both hold advanced degrees in English–we fell in love over Beowulf, in fact–so that we would make slanted references to older verse and fairy tales could perhaps be expected. And I think that neither of us necessarily recalls the lullabies we were sung, either; my wife is the younger of two, and while I am the elder of two, it has been decades since my brother was young enough to take lullabies.

Making such a comment, though, reminds me that there were many years I fell asleep with music in my ears, a Walkman or a Discman slid under my pillow and headphones clasped about my head. It is for such reasons that songs like “The Pinnacle” and “Miracles out of Nowhere” remain in my mind as strongly as they do, and that my daughter’s been sung to sleep to the tune of “Lonely Wind” and “All the World” more than once. I imagine something similar informs my wife singing Beatles tunes and Simon and Garfunkel to Ms. 8 to ease her towards sleep. And I have to think that my brother, the musician, who looks forward to the birth of his son, will have even broader a selection for his coming child.

What it says about us that we pass on what we pass on is always worth consideration, of course, and I know that what my wife and I are giving to Ms. 8 shows our backgrounds and training–and, in my case, at least, both the delight in working with what I treat and the lingering bitterness of the times I have been thwarted in pursuing that work. I know that the latter is less than helpful, and I try to hide it from her (although I know she sees more clearly than to allow me to do so), but I worry also that the nerdiness embedded in most of the things I do will not only color or taint her perspectives on the world, but that it will lead her into pitfalls I faced–and I would have her avoid my mistakes, if it could be. And so even something as seemingly benign and commonplace as a lullaby sung to a child who may well never consciously remember hearing it has to be examined a bit more carefully–not only for figuring out how to proceed with the song itself, but also for figuring out how to guide that audience down the years to come.

Contributions are always welcome. Click here.

One of the things I have done with my writing is to collect it. That is, I keep copies of the things that I have written, many of which are gathered into large computer files and arranged by genre and chronology. There are reasons beyond the narcissism I believe endemic to all who will write–or draw, or paint, or perform in any way they seek to have others see and appreciate–for me to do so. Having a perspective on how my writing has changed since the earliest pieces I have in the collection–early in my life as an undergraduate English major–helps. Having a record of ideas I’ve treated and might return to (although that happens but rarely, to be sure) also helps. Less helpful but quietly comforting is the idea that there is more to what I have done than many or most will know, that there are secrets not kept out of shame but to have something special that might somehow, sometime be of value to some others. And the idea that I am leaving a record for Ms. 8 (and perhaps others) has its attractions for me, the more so since my journal-writing seems long since to have lapsed, and I am not at all sure that it will begin again.

As I was updating the file recently, though, and reading over the comments I have left about each of the pieces I’ve put in it, I was reminded that the collection is a collection of failure. Each piece in it is one that I either wrote for a class and never revised and resubmitted, so that I failed to follow up on ideas, or it was one that I sent out for publication and failed to put into print–even print with so low an entry barrier as this webspace. However I might have felt about what I wrote when I wrote it, however wrong I think the selectors were who chose other pieces to take up than mine, the collected writing I have gathered over some years now–and I’ve been working on the project intermittently for quite a while–is a record of failure, yet one more such for me, and one that I have put together myself–even if I did not think that was what I was doing when I was doing it.

As with the other records of my failures, though, that of my failed publications will likely remain with me. Part goes to my bibliophilic tendencies; I keep text. Also, again, I do occasionally pull older ideas and rework them. Too, Ms. 8 may someday be interested in reading what I’ve written, or my wife might, or someone else who decides they give something that resembles a damn might. And I admit to no small degree of automasochism; I tend to flagellate myself with reminders of my failings, not to spur me to later success (clearly), but because…well, I’m actually not sure why. But I know I keep doing it, over and over again.

Contributions are always welcome. Click here.