At Long Last/College Prof Insecurity

Dear All,

At long last, it seems that I have properly signed in and can now post to this blog. I hope that more of you will decide to participate in writing and that those who have already posted will post more. I cannot complain, however, as I have been negligent myself in getting this accomplished.

I'll only write a short piece tonight to get things back in gear. I'm at that moment in the semester where I've decided that everything I've done so far is wrong and that the students are suffering from my inability to give the proper assignments or to judge their papers with efficiency. Mostly this is because I'm looking up at 100+ papers with the threat of a new score appearing on Friday and the looming holidays. My students are more anxious than I've ever seen them -- even the good ones -- which is another cause for my fears. I know that both their fears and my own are mostly ridiculous, but their anxiety seems to be rubbing off on me. The more I try to play it cool, the more worried they are, the poorer they do, and the more anxious I get. It's quite a cycle.

This is my fifth year at Dominican College, my sixth teaching post-doctorate, and my fifteenth overall as a teacher. I've been given the opportunity to teach all kinds of crazy things, from Shakespeare to sci-fi to Latin to medieval lit. I must admit that I'm not sure I have any idea what I'm doing or where this all ends up. I hope that I've made them think -- some have told me that I have -- and that I've made them feel something about the literature -- exactly one has, and she is a bullshit artist. I see older professors begging for some kind of positive feedback from the students, and I worry about falling into that trap.

Don't get me wrong -- students have been kind in their reports about me. I've been told that I have "ill skillz" (no lie) and that I've made really boring stuff like Shakespeare momentarily interesting. I taught a once-a-week, three-hour, medieval-lit class on Thursday nights that filled, and it looks like I'll have a dozen students who'll take a chance on a 1-credit Octavia Butler class next semester. All of that feels good, and my superiors all seem pleased about the level of student interest. But I can't help but wondering how much of that is due to the fact that I don't like giving tests and my papers tend to be more on the "fun" side. Many of them clearly don't do the readings, and while they listen intently in class, I've got to wonder how much is sinking in. I did have a student recite a couple of lines of a sonnet she memorized in a class for me once, so maybe things are okay.

I promise you that any attempt to assure me that everything is probably okay will not work -- as a matter of fact, it may make things worse. If past semesters are any guide, I'll probably wallow in self-pity, fearing that I haven't given them enough homework until the final week, realize that I have a shitload of ungraded papers, curse the amount of work that I did assign, and then rush through it all to get it done in time for the grades to be in. And then I'll take a month off and start it all up again in January with the best of intentions. Shakespeare, medieval lit, and writing in the spring (with maybe some short classes of Tolkien and Butler): I promise it'll all be different next semester. (Yeah, right!!)

Rob

Ford to City: Drop Dead

At JZ's gaming session the other night, I mentioned my friend Chuck's take on the dramatic power of cell phones in a visual medium. I mentioned that he had done some writing on the subject spurred by his watching of Stranger Things. Here is that piece. (His blog is interesting on other points, as well, including Wisconsin politics and the future of the UW System, if you are interested.)

I still stand by his main point, which is this: "This handheld technology and endlessly flowing content might make for a lot of great things; it might save lives daily; it might upend power structures and governments; it might reconnect you with your 8th grade besty–but we need to face the dramatic truth: phones, texting, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and left swiping are Xanax for the narrative soul." Chuck is writing about the same kinds of things I did in talking about that cafe in Brooklyn that I wrote about a few weeks back. Big picture, I am not at all sure that this is the right road for humanity to be traveling. Long term, where does it get us, this mediated communication, these anonymous comments sections?

Culturally, what is important, anyway? What does "culture" even mean anymore? If shared experience fades from memory, if the way we define ourselves (gender, ethnicity, politics, nationality e.g.) becomes fluid and then gaseous, who are we as a group of people? Just humanity? Well, whose version of humanity? Apple's?

Mike and I recently talked about the Hoboken train station and how much time we spent there while we traveled together to and from Regis. We've got some great memories of that station, including the greatest Paydirt game ever played on the stairs while a blizzard was underway and no trains were running. Imagine the scene as PATH trains, one after the other, disgorged thousands of commuters into the Hoboken station while no surface trains budged! We had a nice crowd for our umpteenth Pats-Raiders grudge match. Lots of middle-aged guys asking what we were doing, taking sides, and cheering us on.

Anyway, I was there again this summer and marveled at how intact it was, how very little had changed. (Glad I saw it before the train accident. Some good old stuff was destroyed in the accident, sad to report.) There was one big change, however. The newsstands are gone! I am ambivalent about pulping the forests of the world to print the internet each day, but newspapers used to be the powerful attractive force that drew together a community. Reading the daily paper was a shared experience that helped to define a city, and culture, a moment in time. I assert that we toss forces like these aside at our own peril. Here is a study of the effect on civic engagement following the closing of two major metropolitan newspapers (short version) (long version).

 

(It is ironic, given my overall thesis, that the people in this picture are conspicuously not talking to each other as they read their papers. I understand that and am not sure what to say about that.)

All of this reminds me also of the ending of Lester Bangs' famous obituary of Elvis in the Village Voice (8/29/77):

"If love truly is going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each others’ objects of reverence. [...] We will continue to fragment in this manner, because solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis’s. But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won’t bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you."

I know, I know. The internet allowed me to find the Voice article instantly and to share it effortlessly. I get it. But you have to admit: it was fin seeing those original pages in the Voice, all those ads, the endorsement of a mayoral candidate. It came down to Herman Badillo, Mario Cuomo, Ed Koch, and Bella Abzug. Did you read who they picked? Remember a time when everyone would have read that same article? When what was in the Voice (or the Daily News or the Times) was a starting point for a conversation with (almost) anybody in NYC?

Lathe of Asbury Park

Mike bought the Springsteen memoir for me (thanks!!) and I am a hundred pages into it, and I have to say that one of my main illusions about the man has been shoved aside for good. See, I always had it in my mind that this guy was at least 40% literary, that words came early in the process and that they were a central part of the origin story for Bruce. Turns out that the guitar meant 100% to him, that he wasn't even the singer (I knew that) and that he didn’t really yearn to be (I didn't think that one through until now). Moreover, the bands up and down the shore were just about all instrumental bands when he as coming up and it doesn’t seem to have occurred to a young him that words in a song could have a primary place in the kind of music he loved.So different from the generations that followed. Thank you, Bob Dylan!!

I am hoping the focus of the book changes, that his attention to literary detail becomes a bigger part of the story. Bruce is an interesting guitarist, but I would not say that he is in any way some kind of guitar genius. Songwriting, yes. Lyricist, absolutely. Guitarist? He has his moments, but there is also a lot of incoherent soloing in his live repertoire. So that's the surprising thing about the book so far. But I'd have to say that it is extremely well-written. Very funny in places! Reminds me of the Sinatra biography that the King of Rock recommended a few years back. What was the title of that book, Rock? The thing that struck me about that Sinatra book was how closely identified every kid in his Hoboken neighborhood was with their ethnic identity. The first thing you needed to know about a stranger in Sinatra's neighborhood was ethnicity: Italian? Jewish? Irish? Something else? That got you slotted into your world and your niche in it. 

I still do remember growing up, though, and those vestiges remained. I know (or think I do) the ethnic background of everyone on the yak. Why should that be? Kind of like gender these days for Millennials and Generation Z, the old categories have become so fluid as to have almost vanished. I ask my students sometimes—almost always when they have an obvious Italian or Irish name—if their family arrived here recently and if they have family in zee olt country. Many of them seem shocked to be asked and have no good answer. It is almost as if who we are begins these days with our births. For Springsteen (and for us too), I think, who we are started generations before we happened to be born. Here is how he describes meeting one of the many, many girlfriends who populate this memoir: “She was Italian, funny, a beatific tomboy, with just the hint of a lazy eye, and wore a pair of glasses that made me think of the wonders of the library.” That's a funny line! It's also instructive that the first adjective is so totally locked down on ethnicity. It seems inescapable for a kid of Springsteen's age who is trying to make sense of his world.

This idea obviously intersects with the King's posting of two weeks ago. Springsteen grew up in a world where your ethnicity and heritage determined a great deal about how you might live your life. For kids today, I think, that's much less true. We are curing our society of its terrifying ills by, what, erasing important information from our libraries? I used to be a white male of Irish and Italian (like Bruce!) heritage. I really don’t know what I'd be if I were born these days. I think the old categories are fading. How do we define ourselves? Is it what we do? What we believe? Political party? Socioeconomic status? And what will we all be fifty years hence?   

Not sure where this idea is taking me. I guess I need to keep reading to see how Bruce searches for an finds his community. Once he moves to Rumson in 1983--the home of the preppy rah-rahs with whom he had clashed over the years--how will he define himself? This question continues to have real relevance to me, a person who abandoned home for the Midwest and who still has not found his feet under him. 

Anyone else want to read this book along with me and Mike?