seasons of in-between

There's something about fall that puts me in the mind for writing. Something about the sly slice of cold in the air; something about the breezes that blow through still-uncovered hair; something about the low sky, the dark clouds that make me want to go inside and dream up new worlds.

But wait, you say: it's August?

Oh well, summer 2010 - I've let you go. I'll let the cold bbq's and the green tomatoes and only-3-days-of-swimming go because, let's be honest, I've always loved autumn more. There's something about change, that must be it: ever a student, I feel the advent of sharpened pencils and wool skirts and lunches packed the night before coming, and I can't wait.

Seasons of in-between, seasons of change: I dedicate this post to you.

The last time this blog was updated R and I were not engaged. Since March, we have ... gotten engaged; had fights; made up; driven to DC (flew back, thanks-to-goodness); talked about The Future; decided that The Present is a better place to be; failed at that; laughed anyway. I've come to the conclusion that I am a very serious person, and made an earnest resolution to be more fun. I didn't realize the irony at the time.

And so when these winds blow up - when these seasons of change are upon us - how do we make our lives into neat little narratives? How do we live in our beginnings, middles, and ends, without sounding either too pat or too serious? Let's write one million stories, I'll say, let's write until our fingers are numb and the winter is really upon us. At which point I will say: hello spring, who I have loved all along.

To Live Outside the Law, You Must Be Honest

So I've been doing a fair amount of songwriting lately. Most of the results have not yet made it to the recording phase (though as soon as they do, you can be sure you'll see them here, not to mention here and here.) Self-promotion aside, the reason I bring it up is that I've been struggling a bit with the concept of originality. Every song, at a certain level, seems to have been written before. No chord progression is quite unfamiliar, and every rhyme seems to have been around the block once or twice at least. There are, of course, notable exceptions (a recent favorite of mine, from the Magnetic Fields: "I want you crawling back to me / down on your knees yeah / like an appendectomy / sans anesthesia"). But on the whole, this sort of tricky wordplay only serves to illustrate the tremendous difficulty of coming up with something new.

That said, there is also an art to ripping something off. You can't just copy wholesale, but many a great song takes a few liberties with its influences. A borrowed lyric here, a scrap of an old favorite melody there, throw in the bridge from a jazz standard with a ii chord in the place of a IV, and you've got a brand new song. Of course there's not necessarily anything wrong with this. Dylan did it. Shakespeare did it. As Jonathan Lethem writes, "Art is sourced. Apprentices graze in the field of culture." (for much more on this topic, take a look at The Ecstasy of Influence). Nonetheless, a certain anxiety rises in me every time I borrow a lyric, and inspires the urge to write this long disclaimer.

So here's one of my songs, along with a list of the various influences I cribbed from. Consider it a piece of a cultural map, or a bibliography, perhaps. I was going to post mp3s of the whole batch, but ironically enough it seems that copyright violation could be grounds for the whole blog to get deleted. So for now - find them on your own - and then write an angry letter to Blogger about the importance of the cultural commons. But don't tell them I suggested it...

Day Laborers and Petty Intellectuals - Sixpence
Sing a Song of Sixpence, Pocketful of Rye (nursery rhyme)
Ella Fitzgerald (among many versions) - It's Only a Paper Moon
Led Zeppelin - Stairway to Heaven
Daniel Johnston - Devil Town
The Hold Steady - Massive Nights
The National - Fake Empires
Johnny Cash - I Walk the Line
and many more...

The Inanity of Humanity

(or, President’s Day Laborers)

Today A and I are both day laborers – we have done all the dishes, loaded up the wash, scrubbed the bathroom, cleared the living room of furniture, and now I sit trapped in the kitchen while she mops the living room floor. And it is not yet 1 pm. I am not sure why I would write a blog post about this – it is after all quite boring – but then again, this is life and these are the things we must do some times. I find myself tempted to search for some great meaning, some moral to draw from our morning of productivity, but most likely it’s just what we did this particular Monday. And there are many, many such writings out there in the blogosphere, or at least I imagine so. Nobody said musing on everyday life was particularly interesting.

We went up to the Crest last night and saw the Coen brothers’ “A Serious Man,” a movie which could be read as questioning the human urge to moralize about everything. I don’t think I will ruin the ending for anyone if I say that there is no ending. It is a movie about a man whose life goes wrong in so many ways, and though the last few scenes offer a glimpse of the clouds clearing and life improving again, there is also, well, a tornado on the horizon. Nothing is particularly resolved, and there is no lesson to be learned. We still don’t know whether God exists, and if so, why he would make things the way they are. We don’t know whether our actions are right or wrong, nor whether we will be rewarded or punished accordingly. Presumably, though, we go on living.

With that in mind, perhaps I should help A finish the cleaning rather than type all day long.

A poem seems appropriate – one of A’s old favorites, and now mine too:

Dream Song 14

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) "Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no

Inner Resources." I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

-John Berryman

disciplinarity; or, what I learned from the Poli Sci department

Whoa. So that happened.

I’m giving a paper at the ACLA in April – on a panel with my dear undergrad professor! – on the topic of human rights and artistic representation. I’m a part of a human rights grad student colloquium at UW, and as the only member from the humanities, I often feel an untoward amount of pressure to defend the likes of things such as the importance of discourse, the meanings of language, etc, ad nauseum. Mostly, it’s fun. But last night – last night! – I presented my paper for practice. The group was sympathetic, supportive; they understand what I’m talking about as much as I understand their arbitrations of international law and policy, but we do fine.

There was one Poli Sci professor there. He waited till everyone had said her piece, and then opened the tirade – the dressing down – the umbrage that you never really expect is coming your way.

I won’t bore you with details, but 3 things came out of this for me:

1. I can actually hold my own. No: more than that: I got upset. Reader, for all of my wafflings about the political import of academia and my seeming inability to ever commit to anything (I like to call it a poststructuralist malaise), I suddenly realized that I do have something at stake in this conversation. I felt this amazing surge of energy and desire to be able to explain that words do mean something – nay, words actually make something - and the ability to represent/ be represented is, actually, just as keenly important as “actual” human rights.

2. I can raise ire.

3. The disciplines talk really, really differently. We hold profoundly different things important. We think we know what each other are talking about, but we don’t. When we come to an impasse, we tend to dismiss the other as stupidly concerned with the wrong thing.

So after the presentation R and I went and drank Mexican beers and I talked myself into a real flurry, convincing myself again and again why it is as important to discuss the discursive practices of human rights as “actual” human rights. Today the point seems bigger. What happened, at that table? What happens when English and Political Science sit down together? What is lost when we’re so narrowly in our own little worlds – or, alternatively, what stands to be lost by listening to outside voices?

notes from the front

I went tonight to a panel discussion at the University on the subject of teaching environmental issues in an interdisciplinary manner. It was aimed at graduate students and I don’t teach at that level, but I do find myself often teaching environmental skills to people with university-level educations, so I guess the leap is not so far. I thought the panel might help to inspire some sense of direction in my own consideration of graduate school – no luck there – but it did inspire a few other thoughts. The most thought-provoking comment of the evening, interestingly enough, came from a grad student in the philosophy department, who noted that unlike other academic disciplines, the field of conservation biology comes with an inherent agenda, a theory or philosophy (my words, not hers) that is shared if not widely discussed by its adherents. Where other academic disciplines would seem to approach education for its own sake, conservation carries with it some idea of “saving the world.” This is a difficult concept to pin down, and I’m not sure if any two environmentalists would agree on exactly how, or why, or from what, the world needs saving, but there’s no doubt that the tone of this panel was based on the idea that environmental teachers have a big job to do: they – we – are charged with training the generation of students that will, if we’re lucky, save the planet. Does any other academic discourse have this grand of a raison d’être? It is not enough merely to pass on knowledge, or to train students in critical thinking or the scientific method. Something much larger, it would seem, hangs in this balance.

Her observation was phrased as a criticism, pointing out a flaw in the philosophy of the discipline – and I certainly won’t argue against a deeper examination of the goals of the environmental movement, or the presumption that we all share the same ones. But that’s another discussion. What got me going tonight was the counter-argument; that is, the idea that any academic pursuit doesn’t have an agenda of its own. I started thinking about A’s class, and the discussion we’ve had about how to avoid putting a political slant onto a class discussion. Can you talk about politics, or race, or class, or gender, without revealing your own views on those issues? If, as a teacher and authority figure, you do reveal your political views, does that oppress or silence those who disagree with you in the classroom, and discourage open discussion? On the other hand, how can censoring yourself do your students justice? For that matter, how can you even know which of your own ideas are (so-called) political, when the very language in which they’re expressed carries power of its own?

I think we have Foucault, and perhaps Derrida, to thank for that kind of thinking. (I would cite specifics if I knew them, but then I’m only a petty intellectual). Following this line of reasoning a bit more, I can’t help thinking that every teacher has an agenda, except perhaps a very bad teacher. If you don’t want your students to come away with something, to leave having grasped your message, then why teach? Even the most open-minded of teachers, the one who has no intent of indoctrination, who wants to open her students’ minds and encourage independent thinking, doesn’t she still hope – in her heart of hearts, if you will – that that independent thinking will lead to conclusions somewhat in line with, and perhaps even more inspired than, her own? If she has any conclusions, that is, any strong opinions or ideas of her own. Perhaps you will say, “but the best teachers value independent or critical thinking over any particular dogma.” Yes, but isn’t this value of independent or critical thinking a dogma of its own?

I have occasionally said (to myself), “All education is propaganda,” and vice versa. Or, when I’m feeling more elaborative: “The only difference between education and propaganda is whether you agree with it or not.”

A nice little sound bite, but this philosophy presents some challenges when you find yourself taking the role of a teacher. For that reason, I find it fairly refreshing to be openly propagandist and make the agenda clear right up front. After all, every discipline and every teacher has one, even if it’s unstated and perhaps even unrealized. In secret, behind the heavy closed doors of the academy, knowingly or unknowingly, the economists refurbish the girders of global capitalism --the physicists seek out the underlying building blocks of existence -- the cultural critics propagate theories of Marxism and deconstruction -- the engineers propel forward the grumbling engines of industrial society. As for me, I’ll be right out here in front of the place , just saving the world.

intellectuals, part 1

There are a lot of ways to be an intellectual. Gramsci seems to care more about the day laborers; and let me tell you, from personal experience, he’s mostly got it right. R comes home – usually late, because salaried non-profit employees work till the job is done – always dirty, always caked in dirt. It’s not that interesting. So I am here to hold it down for the intellectuals. Petty or not, at least we’re clean at the end of the day.

There are the intellectuals in movies who sleep with all of their students. There are the intellectuals who never finish their PhDs and live desperate lives of red wine and oft-quoted poetry. There are the intellectuals who never went to school, and the intellectuals who go to school for way to long. Intellectuals are not always academics. Academics are not always intellectuals. We are petty in love, petty in cash, petty in our knowledge of the “real world.” We quote Marx like we know him intimately. Most of us do.

But let me respond to those who claim that academia is an “ivory tower,” is elite, is the engine of elitism. They’re wrong. As a graduate student TA, I earn less than someone on unemployment. When I go on the job market in a few years, I will face a nation-wide hiring freeze in general, and a growing disdain for and down-sizing of the humanities in particular. Indeed, I think this the whole “ivory tower” trope is part of this trend away from the humanities … why, in a nation fueled by technological development and bio-research, would we need departments whose job is to research and think about the human condition? The consensus, more or less, is that we don't (see a great article by Mike Slouka on this … you might need to pay for it. Elite!). But I think we do. To have space to think – to really get into things, to crack them open, to bring to light, to put pressure on – is necessary work. With or without that glass of red wine.

So cheers to R, who gets-things-done every day, while I am stuck in the blackberry brambles of deconstructive theory. There is tangible and there is intangible. Too often these sides do not get to conversation. Welcome to our blog.

“…they are drunkards, incapable of sustained labor; spendthrifts, and hence biologically deficient, either because of chronic malnutrition or because of mental retardation and stupidity.”

- Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks