Dangling Conversations

I spent ninety minutes yesterday talking to three people who helped shape my world in Boardman.

I paid a call on Mr. and Mrs. Lariccia across the street, the two sweetest philanthropists I have ever known, happily married for thirty-five years and giving away an unexaggerated fortune to every worthy cause in Mahoning County. And God bless a world with men like him in it...in Mr. Lariccia's eyes, I can do no wrong, I am "juicy," "more delicious than a Charlie Staples sparerib" (as is his elder daughter Natalie's writing for the Vindicator) and a man to be praised for knwoing so much about the music and films of his generation...the mere mention of my employment on the Universal lot prompted half our talk to be his hearty reminiscence of Douglas Sirk's classic Imitation of Life, from which he could extensively quote dialogue.
God bless this world.

Then came 45 minutes on the phone with Carlee Tressel, who has traveled and will travel from Ohio to Minnesota to New Mexico on a journey through writers' workshops and penning two books of her own, while moving to a new apartment and continuing her graduate program. I had rung her up a few days ago in a moment of crisis regarding my studies in Chicago, and, as only she can, she reaffirmed for me the beauty of my taking a risk and that nothing in life is ever worth it unless we lay something on the line, that God smiles on people like us who follow our hearts and passions. Every time I write or speak with her, my heart turns to soy milk...lighter and sweeter than ever before. She's the sort who deserves reams of posts, only I would never be able to find precisely the right words.

Mark Bauerlin in the Chronicle of Higher Education comments on a different kind of conversation...the grand sharing of knowledge academics and scholars take part in through the publishing. The paradox is that as publishing becomes more of a factor in the tenure decisions I and so many of my new colleagues may face someday...the actual quantity of things WORTH publishing is dropping. The statistics daunt my questing heart and mind: 3,000 books and papers in the last two decades on Milton, Faulkner, and Woolf...APIECE. Almost 19,000 on Shakespeare alone! And almost 2,000 of those on Hamlet! As Bauerlin says, "At what point does common sense step in and cry, 'Whoa! Slow down! Hamlet can't give you anything more.'?" The reason for this was a shift in criticism in the 1980s--the same time Eagleton published his definitive "Introduction"--from asking "What does the text mean?" to "How can I read the text in a way no one else can?" Bauerlin suggests two remedies: limit the number of pages in a review of employment candidacy, and shift the focus onto actual quality of teaching.

I may be a newcomer to this field with less of a voice at the moment, but Professor Bauerlin's ideas make a lot of sense to me. Writing is hard enough...it took eighteen months and fourteen drafts to work the 115 pages or so of my graphic novel into a publication-ready form, and from what I've seen thus far, academic writing is especially hard due to both voluminous standards and a need to say something no one has ever said before. Putting limits on how much the academic can publish for recognition forces careful revision and production of only the cream of our milky flow of ideas...the best and most unique, and therefore most representative, of our thoughts will by necessity be the ones which emerge, thereby ensuring a contribution to the conversation which means something and is not just, to quote Nabokov, "eloquence masking as ignorance." I know I personally never like to contribute to conversations unless I have something worthwhile to say.

Second, as someone who believes in literature as rhetoric and the power of the meaning and insight people acquire from a text, one-on-one interaction and how a teacher motivates and inspires students should be perhaps THE major criteria for collegiate employment. In fact, just as the first point should move back to "What does this mean?," this second point should be centered in "How can I read this?" Everyone will bring their own skills and knowledge to a text, and the exchanging of opinions, convictions, and interpretations will only result in new, deeper meanings...but only if an encouraging, competent teacher is stimulating the discussions. Only if they put in the time and effort to work with their charges. This is how we keep the conversation going.

And academic publishing will go on like Celine Dion's shrieking heart. Indeed, the conversation may expand to become more democractic and accessible thanks to the Internet. And we're all going to find the time to write books...we didn't get into the scholarly world to keep our mouths shut, after all :)

http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:http://chronicle.com/article/Diminishing-Returns-in/47107/

The story of John Sexton, the president of NYU, is an inspiring chronicle of higher education in itself. An underprivileged youth, he got into FOrdham on a scholarship, flunked out when his father died, single-handedly set up a debate team at a Catholic girls' school with NO academic reputation and led them to two national titles, and on that earned his way back into college, getting a Ph. D. in religion from Fordham AND a law degree from Harvard. "Because this oblivious, immature, overly confident young man set unreasonable expectations," he says, "the students met them. There was strength in my obliviousness." How many of us might do more than we dreamed simply by ignoring what people say we are able to accomplish? http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090717/REVIEW/707169966


P.S. Marc grilled a heck of a good flank steak yesterday. Some men were born to grill, some were born to use ovens and stoves and crock pots. I'm the latter.