New Mexico Chapter...again

Have decided to break up the New Mexico chapter into two or more chapters, and to do something similar with the other sections of the book (not one chapter on New York but two, etc.)

Now all I have to do is rewrite the proposal and the outline to reflect that. And sell the agent on the idea.

Argh. Argh. Argh.

New Mexico Chapter...

Still fighting the New Mexico Chapter. It is now 35 pages long and not half finished. I have to figure out some way of shortening it without losing it in the process. Again, wish me luck.

Professors and Hell: III

A confession….

I am a rationalist. But, there is a deep, dark, infantile part of me that can't quite help believing in magic, and particularly curses. That part of me feels, wholly irrationally, that some people can, somehow, reach through the ether or whatever and harm others…their malevolence projecting across space-time like some toxic radiation.

And I must further confess that the same, childish part of me feels their malice. It feels, or pretends to feel, their hatred, projecting across a higher dimension.

To reassure that childish part of me, I envision a wall constructed there…in that higher dimension…made of some weightless but impenetrable material, not constraining or immobilizing me but psychically opaque to them …existing between them and me and shielding me from their enmity, or even reflecting it back in their direction.

It is, as I say, childish and irrational. But…the child … or the Id…is powerful. If its conception of the universe is not proved by evidence or logic, then at least it can be comforted in moments of distress. Better the Wall than drinking.



*

I wonder, now that you have read about my Wall, and perhaps envisioned it, will your energies add to its strength?

Whether it does or not, if you now wish to also envision my three professors having public diarrhea or otherwise being humiliated and discomforted while in full view of large numbers of people…

Well, feel free. And with my blessing.

Professors and Hell: II

Just re-read the entry from a while back about hell and professors. Should I have followed my own advice in dealing with the committee of that program from which I was forced to leave? Which, I suppose, is another way of asking to what degree did their personal animosity and not their professional concern direct their actions?

At first, I wasn't certain that it had at all. I thought that it had been entirely my fault. (And I am, admittedly, a difficult person at times.)

But then I remembered an interesting incident. The head of the program was a large and billowing man who was a noted authority in a particular field. I'll not identify him, just as I will not name the other two members of my committee, but suffice to say that he was well known and something of a star in the academic world.

I had admired him, at first. I thought he was quite remarkable…though I found his comments on my papers less than useful. He had a great dislike of anything smacking of informality, or indeed of popular culture. Once, when I compared a certain nineteenth century figure to a video game developer he just about took my head off.

But I thought we were on good terms…or at least, functioning professional terms, until my two other committee members sent me a letter telling me that they refused from hence forward to work with me on my Ph.D. Dissertation. On the advice of my mentor at another university, I then sent this man an email saying that I seemed to have inadvertently alienated these two committee members and asking him what was now possible.

He wrote back an angry note in which he said he could not believe that anyone on my committee was refusing to work with me for any personal reason. Rather, he said, I had failed to understand the nature of "genuine scholarship."

Much later, when I had left the program, I began to be a bit suspect of his disinterest. I remembered that in my email to him I had said that I had alienated my other committee members, but I hadn't accused them of any personal animosity. You can be alienated from someone, particularly in a professional setting, yet not hate them as an individual.

Why, then, had he been so quick to assume that was what I meant? Why had he been so eager to defend himself, and the other committee members, from an accusation which I had not actually made?

Maybe… maybe because…because it was true? Because personal animosity WAS part of the equation? Because their treatment of me WAS unfair and unjust, and very personal? And he knew it? And he attacked me before I could raise the possibility? Did he, in other words, protest too much?

The more I've thought about it over these past few years, the more I've wondered if that wasn't exactly the case. Of course I cannot say for certain, much less prove it, but I've begun to suspect my exit from that particular university was as much a product of their personal dislike as it ever was of my failure to practice "true scholarship."

And the source of that dislike? Why they hated me? Well, who can say? But, I'm guessing it was precisely the thing that I found offensive in my own students: that I was not sufficiently deferential. As I admitted before, I can be a difficult person, and I have the habit of saying openly (and with force) what it would be wiser not to say at all—that such-and-such a book is badly written, that so-and-so is a pompous and vapid idiot, that this-or-that idea is politically correct but utterly foolish.

In other words, I suspect I did not properly pucker before the proffered asses. And this, alas, spelled my demise.

Which means I'm confronted with a disturbing question. How do I tell my own students not to do what I do, but rather tell their professors what they want to hear?

Or, to put it another way, how do I explain that Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf, with all its pettiness and cruelty, is actually terrifyingly understated?

accomplishments

Still working on the book. A while back, I even told my parents about it. I even sent them a couple of chapters to read. They liked them. Or at least said they did.

It was not easy for me to reveal my work to my mom and dad. It is very unlike me. I never show anyone my material, or talk about it, until after it is finished.

But, this time, I didn't do that. This time, I emailed it to them. I suppose it was because they are getting on in years, and a part of me desperately wants them to know that I'm not just fooling around…that I'm really writing something that might be important…that I might, finally, get published. And not just by technical magazines. But published by real publishers that someone other than a few engineers and public relations people might read.

I want to make them proud of me, at last, while they're still here.

There's something sick in that. They already ARE proud of me. Or, so they've told me, anyway.

But, I simply cannot believe them. I cannot believe I deserve their pride. Or anyone's. Least of all my own. My accomplishments seem too few. My failures too many.

As I say, it is sick. Neurotic. But, come, confess, you have felt the same way now and then. We all have.

It is what we feel the moment we realize that aspiration remains as boundless as ever, but life…our own or that of others…is finite.

Copyright © 2010 Michael Jay Tucker

starting work on New Mexico

Tomorrow I plan to start work on my chapter about New Mexico. I'm intimidated. Difficult subject for me in general and, in some ways, I'm still finding my way into this project. Worse, I find myself unmotivated after just finishing long weeks of teaching.

Wish me luck…or at least energy.

professors and hell

8:00 am -- Getting ready for work. A little worried. I have to confront two students on the quality of their work. It is a difficult problem because on one level there is work is just fine. On the other, it is impossible.

Let me explain. Most of my students this term are Chinese. They came to the US for a special three term program which, if they pass it, gets them into a certain American University as a freshman, no questions asked.

These two young women are good students, in their way. But, they come into class and zone out. They do homework for other classes, flirt with the boys, talk to each other…

When they turn in their work, it is usually pretty good. They do halfway decent essays on American history. But, there's the rub. The essays are based entirely on what they learned in high school in China. Everything they write is from a strictly Chinese perspective. In fact, even their exams sound as though they were carefully copied, word for word, from a very Marxist Chinese textbook. Thus, the U.S. Civil War was a clash between progressive elements from the American bourgeoisie and reactionary Southern feudalists. The Cold War was a conflict between Russia and America, in which China was simply a bystander, except when forced to protect itself from U.S. imperialism in the Korean War.

And there's nothing particularly wrong with writing in this way. But, there is nothing of me in it, either. There is no sign that they have heard my lectures, read my notes, or even looked at the assigned readings. It is as though they have somehow been wholly absent from my class.

So, I face the interesting problem of explaining to them that their work is good…but it is also good evidence that they have spent four months ignoring me.

1:00 pm—now back. The students were humble, even contrite, when I talked to them about the problem. I encouraged them to, in future, actually include material from their classes in their homework.

I wonder if they will follow my advice. Alas, they seem to me the sort of person more likely to smile and say yes, while continuing to do exactly what they had done before.

For their sake, I hope I'm wrong. They are about to begin their freshmen year, and, once in "real" college, they will encounter many professors who are far less tolerant than I am.

Simply put, academics are a lot like lovers. They can forgive an honest error. But, ignore them…?

Hell hath no fury.

grading

Summer term is coming to an end. I've graded all the book blue books for one class and about half of them for another. I still have just under 40 research papers to read, and 18 short reports from yet another class.

Students, of course, dread finals and papers and other assignments. But you have no idea how much we, your instructors, share your terror.

he has never heard of the Algonquin Round Table

My editor continues to intrigue me. I discovered that he has never heard of the Algonquin Round Table.

If you haven't heard of it, don't worry. There is no reason why you should. It was a group of writers, wits, critics, and editors who regularly met around a "round table" at the Algonquin hotel in New York in the 1920s. Their number included Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Franklin Pierce Adams, Heywood Broun, and so on. In their time, they were very famous. Though, today, they tend to be little known. Alas, they wrote and talked about their own times, and…like all those who address their present…sometimes fail to reach their future.

But that HE hadn't heard of them is astonishing. It means that he made it through English classes at several prestigious prep schools, as well as an important American college, and never once had his instructors refer to them. That's unnerving, because they were important. They helped establish the modernist style, and any time you read creative non-fiction today, you read something that was directly affected by the Round Tablers.

Yet, under the direction of his professors, my friend was ignorant of them. Moreover, he was clearly irritated when I mentioned them in my chapter on New York City, as though he suspected me of inventing them, or of wasting the reader's time with someone impossibly obscure.

Concerns me. I wonder who else has been, or will be deleted from the public memory by the academic elite? By Those Who Know Best? Will my children's children be permitted to read Shakespeare, Jane Austin, George Sand, Charles Dickens, Edger Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton, George Orwell, William Faulkner, Truman Capote…?

All these were, of course, writers of genius. But they did not address the concerns of full professors (with tenure). Ergo, they are not worthy of study, and shall be cast into the outer darkness, unlamented, and unremembered for all eternity.

just the two of us...

More on the young editor with whom I work…

As a person, I like him very much, and I think he is a talented writer in his own right.
But, in some ways he is the wrong man to work with me. For one thing, he is very young, and like a lot of young people who have recently graduated from the best of American schools, he has been taught to believe that the author has no right to appear in his own works. In other words, the letter "I," is forbidden. To write "I thought," or "I believe," or "I felt," or even "I experienced" is considered most offensive.

Yet, I am at my best when I am most self-referential. At heart, I am a diarist, a journalist (in the original meaning of the word, in the sense of one who keeps a personal journal), and, yes, a blogger.

Thus I am troubled. I fear that if the book gets published, it will actually be inferior to what I write about it…that what follows the title page will be less than what appears here, in Xcargo…to be know only to a few. By, in other words, I who write this, and you …you few and dear …who read it.


*

Actually, on looking at that last sentence, I feel an odd comfort. There are not many people who have read Xcargo from its beginnings as an ezine to its present status as an odd entry in the blogsphere.

There is something pleasant in that. In your presence, my readers, I feel that I am in a very select group…among friends… even something akin to family.

How rare a thing that is. I am grateful.