In which Piers Thinks about Making Good Choices

Every day, no matter the season, there are the usual things to attend:  the slow decay of the house, arrested by fitful and makeshift degrees; the creeping and exponential entropy in the garage; the swarming clouds of little boy passions; the lockstep march of the school year on its way to semester grades; the minor insurrections among the various small, furry, and stinky creatures in the house; the drifts of papers with crayon, pencil, ink, marker, glue, and toner; the electronic alerts blurting in the background of every almost-quiet moment; the foggy outside, where there is time enough for decisions and revisions; the mostly inaudible sigh of the days as they fall one by one on our shoulders.

In which Piers Ponders Institutional Collapse

Looking around, and I think especially in the wake of some deeply disappointing revelations about things that have happened at Carolina over the past two decades, I begin to wonder what institution, if any, can be trusted.  I know, I know . . . as I write that, I shake my head.  Of course no institution can be trusted completely.  When in human history have we been able to rely on the edifices we construct?  It seems to me, though, that the more "advanced" we get in terms of interconnectedness and dependence on large systems, the more vulnerable we are when those systems break.  From where I'm sitting, I cannot help but notice the following:


1.  My department has a crisis of leadership.
2.  My university has a crisis of leadership and direction.
3.  The state university system that employs me doesn't even pretend to treat its member institutions with equity.
4.  My alma mater, where I spent those eight wonderful years in graduate school, has taken a mortal blow that shows a hollow core.  It breaks my heart.
5.  My academic discipline is intellectually and institutionally adrift, and though the grandees at the top of the heap may blame state legislatures, etc., etc., the damage is almost entirely self-inflicted.
6.  The national and state governments have proven inept in almost every way possible (this last is the least surprising).
7.  Church leadership, both at local and denominational levels, has Macbethitis:  full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing.
8.  Knowledge industries like publishing and news:  hollowed out and collapsing.
9.  The education schools that turn out the teachers who are teaching my children:  F

For starters.  These are merely my observations, and I recognize that large-scale trends are always mitigated by individual examples of excellence.  I could name plenty in my discipline, and even in my academic department, who are doing brilliant and rigorous work.  They are generally, however, not the ones in charge.  I have always been a skeptic, though perhaps not a vociferous one.  I look around and see that I have been mistaken to abandon that posture, at least when it comes to trusting the big bureaucratic systems that appear to control more and more of my life.

You know what they say about Knoxville

I remember how about five, maybe six years ago there was a major branding initiative that brought all UT system campuses under the same general graphical representation, complete with logos that were similar across the three major campuses and other institutes:  Knoxville, Chattanooga, Martin.

Now I learn that UTK has decided to set all that aside in favor of its own branding:

If they want to tie the identity of their university to their football program, more power to them.  I trust the boosters will love it.

I guess that means this branch of the university system is also free to choose its own independent logo too, huh?

Among the things I am deciding

1.  Teaching five classes in one term isn't happening again for me. They can't pay me enough to compensate for the extra work, and I am far less effective in the things I'm trying to do.

2.  I'm going to have to do something different--completely different--for my composition classes, because I've had enough of the way I've been doing it.  I am so very tired of the grind of that heavy lifting every week.  I never used to understand the griping about teaching comp . . . I do now.

3.  Withdrawal from some of the other facets of campus life is a necessity for me if I'm going to get the writing done that I need and want to get done.

4.  There are some sacrifices I'm not willing to make for the sake of my work.

41

Getting into middle age has its disadvantages, I will not lie.  I don't have as much energy as I used to, and I'm more impatient with stupid people and stupid things. I have more lines in my face, more gray in my hair, more quirks in my behavior.

On the other hand, being an older man means I don't have much left to prove. I don't get nervous about much any more in public settings. I don't feel the need to explain myself. I have perspective on things that I didn't even five years ago.  A lot of knowledge about myself, hard-won and precious. Also naps.

I was sitting at the bar the other night and some young guys were in there all peacocking for the cute little bartender. She didn't care, wasn't impressed, had a job to do . . . but they couldn't help themselves. I was glad to let them do their best . . . and fail. I just talked to my buddy and minded my own business.

Yup, glad to still be around.

Adventures in Parenting, Vol. 45

or, the closest I've ever been to fisticuffs.

I watched the kids badgering and taunting Number One son as he walked over to the sideline where I had been standing, watching the third of three soccer games for the day, this time of Little Red who isn't all that little anymore but the name has stuck at least for now--that red hair making him instantly recognizable not only to his father but to anyone who has been around this family for more than two or three minutes.

Number one was not doing well, I could see. He was hunched up and had the knit he gets in his brow when he is worked up about something.  So, I talked to him about it. Those kids had thrown a football at his head and had generally been jerks to him.  I wanted to intervene for his sake, but there wasn't anything I could do about it, and what's more, he does need to defend himself sometimes. That all changed a few minutes later when he had to go to the bathroom and had to walk past where those same kids were playing.  I told him it would be fine and I would be watching.  And sure enough, as he tried to walk past them, just as his back was to them, they pegged him with the football. I took off after him and told him to grab the ball.  He did, whereupon they jumped him and kicked him.

At that point I may have shed the usual self-control.  I grabbed the ball, and shouted at the kids to take me to their parents.  Well, they didn't need to, because he had heard the commotion, and as I approached the person it was clear that he was not prone to see things my way.  All he saw was a stranger shouting at his children.  I was hot and righteously angry, though, having watched them size up my son and deliberately target him, so though he leaned heavily on me and tried the whole intimidation-by-implicit-ass-kicking tactic (my thought, which I vocalized, was, "are you kidding me?"), I did not back down.  At that point, the heated voices had gotten the attention of others, and a casual friend of ours, JM, had to step between us and physically usher me away.

It took me a long time to calm down, though on the outside I regained my composure. In retrospect, I should of course have refrained from shouting at the other children--could have easily dealt with the situation without anger. But I saw red when I saw what they did.  I'm not yet so old that I don't have an ornery streak on occasion.  That said, I'm glad a much bigger man intervened between me and the other fellow . . . I would have lost that fight.

A gnawing hypothesis

Shorpy Historical Photo Archive.

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others, as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders, serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it. A wise man will only be useful as a man, and will not submit to be "clay," and "stop a hole to keep the wind away," but leave that office to his dust at least:

--Thoreau, Civil Disobedience. 

Monday Update, tempo edition

In distance training, whether on a bike or in running shoes, there's a thing called a "tempo" workout, wherein you choose a moderately challenging pace and keep it up over a fairly considerable distance.  That's opposed to something like a sprint or interval workout where you vary the speed from quite slow to very fast.  I think a teaching term is much like a tempo workout, and for me, it usually takes me the first 45 minutes of a ride to get comfortable with what I'm doing--just like it took me all of last week to feel comfortable with what I am doing back in the full job.

The Triathlete and I had triumphs of our respective sorts this past weekend; she of course ran a superb race in her triathlon, winning first in her age division and 7th overall of all the women.  And she had so much fun that she has actually had a difficult time returning to normal life with the rest of us regular people.  I, on the other hand, received word that I've had an essay accepted at the 2014 Southeastern Renaissance Conference in Greensboro NC...which means that in early October we will be traveling back to our old stomping grounds for the first time since we moved to NTWN in 2005.  It also means another publication for me, and the start of the productive phase of the sabbatical study I've been doing.

So, although the sabbatical is over, and I've got a tighter schedule than I had just a couple of weeks ago, It seems that things will be okay as I adjust. Though I'm a slow starter, once I get going I do alright.

Plus/Minus

Plus:  Glad to be teaching this summer term--having the opportunity to make a little money to help out the bottom line of the family. Those opportunities are about to dry up completely.
Minus: Summer teaching is exhausting; there's no way around it. And I'm out of shape when it comes to the energies involved.

Plus:  I used the time well this past semester, learned a lot, did a lot of writing and editing work.
Minus:  Didn't do nearly enough.

Plus:  A couple of months ago I turned a corner personally and have been able to move forward in my life with a far more positive, constructive outlook.
Minus:  I mourn the five years during which I stagnated personally and professionally.  It is going to take a long time to get back to where I should be.

Adventures With Students, Vol. 51

Students on the first day of class when I'm making jokes:



GIFSoup

Monday Update, Back to Work Edition

Maya Desk--Dare Studio. Definitely not my office.

Sabbatical is over. I start teaching summer classes tomorrow. I don't know how it is at other institutions, but the summer teaching opportunities have just about completely dried up here. As in many other respects, the pace of change is leaving us grasping at straws, more or less unprepared for the transformations staring us in the face.

I am quite thankful for the time I got this past semester . . . I did an enormous amount of work, and I really do think it may have saved my willingness to be doing this career for the foreseeable future. Still planning to make our way to a new location, but for now I'm able to take the next step.

The Triathlete has impressed this summer with the intensity and variety of her workouts. It is pretty intimidating for a bookish sort like myself, but I'm also proud of how strong she is, i.e., ridiculously strong.  She says she looks forward to riding with me in a couple of weeks while the kids are in Atlanta; I think she will find me . . . slower.

Readjusting to a new kind of schedule, and trying not to let up the research and editing intensity.

Deus est Machina

"Cannot you see, cannot all your lecturers see, that it is we who are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralyzed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops--but not on our lines. The Machine proceeds--but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die. Oh, I have no remedy--or, at least, only one--to tell men again and again that I have seen the hills of Wessex as Ælfrid saw them when he overthrew the Danes."

--E. M. Forster, "The Machine Stops"

A return

"How often it is the case, that, when impossibilities have come to pass and dreams have condensed their misty substance into tangible realities, we find ourselves calm, and even coldly self-possessed, amid circumstances which it would have been a delirium of joy or agony to anticipate! Fate delights to thwart us thus. Passion will choose his own time to rush upon the scene, and lingers sluggishly behind when an appropriate adjustment of events would seem to summon his appearance."

--Hawthorne, "Rappacini's Daughter"

In which Piers Makes Progress

Word has it that a certain amount of stress is a good thing, and I'm inclined to agree. . . I've long since accepted that in order to really produce any meaningful work, I need to have a certain level of anxiety working to spur on the activity.  And so, this past week I really put my foot down and tried to make some headway.  So far so good.  The listed documents are of all different types and lengths, down to the actual typefaces involved.  There is a mixture of dialect and Latin along with what might be called straightforward 16th-century English.  I am able to say that I know a lot more than I once did, and I am also able to say that there are some details about 16th century orthography and terminology that I need more information on.  Progress, though, is a good thing, and whereas I still experience some nervousness at the scope of what I've taken on, I do anticipate having something substantial to reveal at the end of the sabbatical period.

Alas, even now there are tiny hints of the real world reasserting itself:  book orders and course descriptions for the summer and the fall semesters.  I imagine that I'll be ready to get back to it when the time comes, but I have really enjoyed the chance to immerse myself in work on something.  Good work takes hours of uninterrupted time, and a full teaching load doesn't allow for that . . . not if you plan on having relationships with colleagues or with your own family.

In which the road goes ever longer

At some point, this was bound to happen.  After what I considered to be a pretty hot start, and after possessing a considerable amount of confidence, I have now come across more information that indicates to me the actual magnitude of the task I have taken on . . .

 . . .and it's massive. 

I have not historically been the most apt to take on huge projects, nor have I been apt to give up once I'm in the midst of something that I think is important.  Still, it's a frightening prospect, and it's hard to be satisfied with the tiny bits of progress that make up a single day's work (or even a week's work, in many cases).  I need about 5x the number of resources I've got at my fingertips, and a much bigger brain.  Still, I'll have to work with what I can get.

Adventures in Parenting, Vol. 44

Around 10:00 this morning, The Triathlete got a phone call from Number One Son from his school. He was complaining about blurred vision and headache . . . Even that he was having trouble reading words at the board because the letters were swimming around. We thought it might have been some kind of ploy, since he has been acting funny this week...but she decided to go lay her eyes on him just in case. When she arrived at the school office, he walked in and his eyes were both unfocused and crossing. She decided to take him to our pediatrician. Meanwhile, I began to think of the worst possible scenarios involving blood clots on the brain, aneurism, cancer . . . Thinking about how we would make it work at St. Jude in Memphis, wondering about how we would manage the other two while he was in the hospital . . . Worried until it got to the point where I was sure I was going to vomit. I sat and tried to work for about an hour when in walk the two of them, smiling.

As it turns out, he was crossing his eyes while clowning around for laughs at school, and overdid it. Our pediatrician knew it almost immediately. So after lunch, we took him back to school, and all agreed that the eye-crossing routine hadn't worked out very well.

Neither of us told him what we both experienced in that hour or so: the worst fear--the coldest knot of ice in the stomach, the hottest knife in the skull--that either of us has ever felt.

Adventures in Parenting, vol. 43

Number One: has learned that he isn't the biggest (in fact he's about the smallest) or the most aggressive or athletic. The boys his age are already quite aware of who is good at which sport, and they compete (as they should). Number One is not competitive. He doesn't spend all day shooting baskets or throwing a ball. He flits from thing to thing and mostly makes up stories. Kids don't get a lot of street cred for being like he is, and even the academics have been on ya moderate success. The other night he asked me what advice I could give him to make him feel better about himself...I gave him the advice you'd expect, about patience and being the right kind of polite and hardworking person, but at nine, how can a kid understand? Hopefully it'll take if we are consistent.

Black Letter

One of the most daunting features of sixteenth century pamphlets is their tendency to use "black letter," a type font associated with early German printers.  Most of the letter forms are relatively easy to recognize, though it takes some practice.  I remember the first time I ran into this stuff when doing course work in graduate school, and how I did my best to avoid it. I'm finding that, predictably,  experience pays off in research as in other things.

Narrenschiff

Every day that passes I am more and more glad that I have this break--this distance--from the usual. It's already doing me a world of good.

Day Seven

I think I've figured out a schedule that will work for me, which is an enormous deal seeing as I need to find a way to spend my time wisely.  If I can spend the morning hours on campus, working at transcription, library oriented work, and so on, I can spend the afternoon hours at home with the dog, and whichever children I need to be watching at the time, while I read whatever book/article/pamphlet I need to cover.  I don't imagine I'll get away without changing my approach at least once, but for now it's good enough.

I was pleased to talk to my student intern today (unpaid; she's getting class credit for it) and she was remarkably quick and enthusiastic to join me in the work. I threw her in the deep end, giving her a black letter pamphlet to work on . . . and she is on it like a terrier.  A rare gem, she is.

Eventually I'll get back to posting on other stuff . . . it's just that I'm super preoccupied with this work at the time.

Day Five

After a weekend full of mundane family matters, I returned to the researches with a burst of energy today, reading (as I need to do a great deal of) primary sources from the 1570s-90s. I also started giving my "intern" (I have a very bright young woman who will be helping me out with some of the work) some assignments. I'm excited to be getting to the material itself, though every day I deal with it I'm reminded of the missed opportunities I had to seriously study this stuff when I lived in Chapel Hill.  It seems like too much to do from where I stand right now . . . but if I plug away at it, I may find that by the end of the month I've made some significant headway. A little momentum will go a long way.

Day One

My dear machine been idle so long 
Now it's time for another drive
Please can you take me where I wanna go
Though I let you rust
My dear machine--

Among the pitfalls I foresee in a semester away from teaching (the first, I might add, since 1999?):

1. The Errand:  I'm not teaching, and not required to be at the office, so it should be no problem to stop in here . . . stop in there . . . be out for two or three hours . . .

2. The Endurance:  How long has it been since I sat myself down and did serious study for 5-6 hours over the course of a day?  I have grown accustomed to entirely different work rhythms, and need to recover my ability to focus for long periods.

3. Where and When: This is a small town and it is difficult to disappear. There are Time Vampires lurking around who will consume all I have.

4. Confidence Crater:  Am I still capable of doing serious sustained work?