A Bit of History
With reference to the title "The Labyrinth and the Garden": when my wife was first demonstrating how to set up a blog a year or so ago, she said, "You have to have a title." I said, "What kind of title?" She didn't say, "A titular title," as she might have, but patiently said, "Just a title." So off the top of my head, I blurted out, "How about 'The Labyrinth and the Garden,'" hoping she would know how to spell either or both of those words.
This proves the validity of the folk wisdom that your first thought may be your deepest and most honest thought, before you filter it through all the filters that filter things about to become a matter of public record. Before you "spin" them.
Here's my interpretation of my own title: sometimes the things you think are going to be gardens, i.e, places of growth, beauty, rest, and peace of mind (never mind the weeds and mosquitos), turn out to be labyrinths--i.e., places of pain, confusion, anger, loss of direction, where neither is the end ever in sight, nor the way to get to the place you can't see. Sometimes the two places (the garden and the labyrinth) change their nature with time. That is, looking back on a labyrinth, you realize it might have been a garden, and visa-versa. Sometimes you yourself are one, sometimes the other. But that is certainly a tale for many more blogs than I intend to write at this sitting, especially since the IRS in its wisdom has decided that I, a teacher, ought to have to spend a lot of valuable time in the labyrinth of last year's tax return preparing for an audit.
And besides, those two terms seem like a reasonable summation of the literature I've taught in the last thirty-seven years. For those of you who may be professionally obligated to think that such a terminological dichotomy certainly must oversimplify things: welcome to my world.
And now, finally, the "bit of history" which was my original intention.
I finished grad school at UC Berkeley, typed out (one by one, since this is 1969 BC--"before computers" were widely available) approximately 125 letters of application to institutions almost entirely outside California, and waited. At that year's Modern Language Assocation meeting, I had fourteen interviews. Out of those, I got one job offer. I tried to negotiate a salary higher than $9500 (even $9750 would have been an improvement), but no dice. I went from California to Detroit, where I spent the next fourteen years. I had thought, if Detroit proved unpalatable, that I would be able to find other jobs in other places, but within two years, all the job listings seemed to dry up. All those positions, at all those institutions of higher education, vanished. Very few ivory towers seemed to love specialists in Milton and the Seventeenth Century anymore. To make matters worse, Detroit proved unpalatable. That will be either a long or short blog, depending on my tolerance for the topic.
Since then, I have taught at one semi-major state university, three colleges of art and design, and several community colleges. I will retire from my current position--at a community college--after some twenty years there.
For the record: the most interesting place to teach was my first art college. Politics were minimal, the academic department (this was truly a garden) had a free hand to create courses of interest pretty much at will, and (along with my own experience as a graduate student in photography at Cranbrook Art Institute some time after getting a PhD in English at Berkeley) I was in daily contact with people who were not only interested in music and the arts, but did them. Like all gardens, though, this one has fallen: new administrations have regularized the curriculum-development process, fulfill many bureaucratic requirements in the name of normalcy and accountability, etc.
At the risk of over-generalizing, there can be a big difference between people who study the arts and people who create them. Almost always, the people I've known who were creators of art have been energetic, eccentric but wide-ranging in their interests, and pretty agreeable. (Obviously, this can't always be true, since there are many instances of artists who are really abominable people, and many fine people who are not artistic at all.) What I remember most sharply about my colleagues at the university is a snide and often contemptuous attitude toward writers: one colleague, thinking of her colleagues on the creative writing faculty, I suppose, as "second-rate egomaniacs." More about this labyrinthine time in my life as we go along, but the university atmosphere seemed, to me, poisonous. I managed to learn a lot because I was always interested in learning, but I would have done that in any case, and the politics that accompanied this uneasy sojourn were borderline hideous. As one colleague put it, "The less there is at stake, the nastier people are about it."
The art colleges have had interesting students, but they're not there to take academic classes, and their studio professors remind them of that, indirectly encouraging them to put in minimal effort there while they applied themselves to their studio classes. This is, I have to say, as it should be--but it can be frustrating for an academic faculty member. The students may or may not be gratifying, and the studio faculty regard you as a second-class citizen, with few exceptions.
There were always studio faculty I regarded highly, one of whom, Joseph Bernard, who has recently retired, introduced me to non-narrative film, and we had frequent chats in the copier room about art and literature.
I had a student from one of his classes in a literature class. When I found out the student was in Joseph's twentieth-century art class, I asked how he liked it. He replied that it was terrible: the first meeting, Mr. Bernard had played them a tape of some woman talking in bed. I immediately recognized Molly Bloom's soliloquy, the many-paged last chapter of Ulysses, a perfect introduction to a class in modern art. I passed that along to Joe, and we had a good laugh about it.
My only description of the university is that it was a 50th-ranked place trying hard to be 49th and vying, in its own mind, with University of Michigan for the self-applied title "Harvard of the Midwest." A day in the life of an untenured assistant professor: at one point, the English department scheduled a group meeting with the Dean of Liberal Arts for some tips on successfully negotiating the tenure process. The standard criteria for tenure were said to be publication, excellent teaching, and public service. The Dean said the criteria were "publication, publication, publication." Most people of merit and potential who began their careers at this university moved on to other places. At least one is a well-known novelist who went to University of Michigan and is now somewhere in New York, perhaps Columbia University. The best things about this place: I read a lot of Faulkner, all of Jane Austen, and taught Shakespeare regularly.
This is the early seventies, and the subject of government surveillance came up one in class. One student pointed out that the government "plant" is always the one who looks most like a hippie. At that time, I had a beard and long hair. Suspicion immediately fell on me.
But I was the victim, not the agent. When the state of Michigan decided that its secret surveillance files had to be made public, I received a notice that there was a file on me. I applied to see it and discovered that the file had been started because my car was parked on a street where a "communist meeting" was taking place.
This reminds me, too, of looking for an apartment that first year. I interviewed with one building owner/manager. He looked at me with my beard and long hair, heard that I had come from Berkeley and that I was teaching at a place notorious for its so-called communists and warned me first of all that I could not have a still in my apartment. I thought stills had gone out with the end of prohibition and speakeasies. Then it was drugs. He would know, he said, whether I was using drugs or not. When I asked how he could possibly know that, he just looked sharply at me and said he would know. The interview concluded with his determination that I "was not right" for his building. I recalled that just before my interview, I had seen him congratulating a very well-dressed, clean-cut prospect. This was my first introduction to the mind of a conservative. The interviewer, a lawyer, had a messy, weedy, toady, infested labyrinth mind that would never be a garden. He would always need someone to hate.
This proves the validity of the folk wisdom that your first thought may be your deepest and most honest thought, before you filter it through all the filters that filter things about to become a matter of public record. Before you "spin" them.
Here's my interpretation of my own title: sometimes the things you think are going to be gardens, i.e, places of growth, beauty, rest, and peace of mind (never mind the weeds and mosquitos), turn out to be labyrinths--i.e., places of pain, confusion, anger, loss of direction, where neither is the end ever in sight, nor the way to get to the place you can't see. Sometimes the two places (the garden and the labyrinth) change their nature with time. That is, looking back on a labyrinth, you realize it might have been a garden, and visa-versa. Sometimes you yourself are one, sometimes the other. But that is certainly a tale for many more blogs than I intend to write at this sitting, especially since the IRS in its wisdom has decided that I, a teacher, ought to have to spend a lot of valuable time in the labyrinth of last year's tax return preparing for an audit.
And besides, those two terms seem like a reasonable summation of the literature I've taught in the last thirty-seven years. For those of you who may be professionally obligated to think that such a terminological dichotomy certainly must oversimplify things: welcome to my world.
And now, finally, the "bit of history" which was my original intention.
I finished grad school at UC Berkeley, typed out (one by one, since this is 1969 BC--"before computers" were widely available) approximately 125 letters of application to institutions almost entirely outside California, and waited. At that year's Modern Language Assocation meeting, I had fourteen interviews. Out of those, I got one job offer. I tried to negotiate a salary higher than $9500 (even $9750 would have been an improvement), but no dice. I went from California to Detroit, where I spent the next fourteen years. I had thought, if Detroit proved unpalatable, that I would be able to find other jobs in other places, but within two years, all the job listings seemed to dry up. All those positions, at all those institutions of higher education, vanished. Very few ivory towers seemed to love specialists in Milton and the Seventeenth Century anymore. To make matters worse, Detroit proved unpalatable. That will be either a long or short blog, depending on my tolerance for the topic.
Since then, I have taught at one semi-major state university, three colleges of art and design, and several community colleges. I will retire from my current position--at a community college--after some twenty years there.
For the record: the most interesting place to teach was my first art college. Politics were minimal, the academic department (this was truly a garden) had a free hand to create courses of interest pretty much at will, and (along with my own experience as a graduate student in photography at Cranbrook Art Institute some time after getting a PhD in English at Berkeley) I was in daily contact with people who were not only interested in music and the arts, but did them. Like all gardens, though, this one has fallen: new administrations have regularized the curriculum-development process, fulfill many bureaucratic requirements in the name of normalcy and accountability, etc.
At the risk of over-generalizing, there can be a big difference between people who study the arts and people who create them. Almost always, the people I've known who were creators of art have been energetic, eccentric but wide-ranging in their interests, and pretty agreeable. (Obviously, this can't always be true, since there are many instances of artists who are really abominable people, and many fine people who are not artistic at all.) What I remember most sharply about my colleagues at the university is a snide and often contemptuous attitude toward writers: one colleague, thinking of her colleagues on the creative writing faculty, I suppose, as "second-rate egomaniacs." More about this labyrinthine time in my life as we go along, but the university atmosphere seemed, to me, poisonous. I managed to learn a lot because I was always interested in learning, but I would have done that in any case, and the politics that accompanied this uneasy sojourn were borderline hideous. As one colleague put it, "The less there is at stake, the nastier people are about it."
The art colleges have had interesting students, but they're not there to take academic classes, and their studio professors remind them of that, indirectly encouraging them to put in minimal effort there while they applied themselves to their studio classes. This is, I have to say, as it should be--but it can be frustrating for an academic faculty member. The students may or may not be gratifying, and the studio faculty regard you as a second-class citizen, with few exceptions.
There were always studio faculty I regarded highly, one of whom, Joseph Bernard, who has recently retired, introduced me to non-narrative film, and we had frequent chats in the copier room about art and literature.
I had a student from one of his classes in a literature class. When I found out the student was in Joseph's twentieth-century art class, I asked how he liked it. He replied that it was terrible: the first meeting, Mr. Bernard had played them a tape of some woman talking in bed. I immediately recognized Molly Bloom's soliloquy, the many-paged last chapter of Ulysses, a perfect introduction to a class in modern art. I passed that along to Joe, and we had a good laugh about it.
My only description of the university is that it was a 50th-ranked place trying hard to be 49th and vying, in its own mind, with University of Michigan for the self-applied title "Harvard of the Midwest." A day in the life of an untenured assistant professor: at one point, the English department scheduled a group meeting with the Dean of Liberal Arts for some tips on successfully negotiating the tenure process. The standard criteria for tenure were said to be publication, excellent teaching, and public service. The Dean said the criteria were "publication, publication, publication." Most people of merit and potential who began their careers at this university moved on to other places. At least one is a well-known novelist who went to University of Michigan and is now somewhere in New York, perhaps Columbia University. The best things about this place: I read a lot of Faulkner, all of Jane Austen, and taught Shakespeare regularly.
This is the early seventies, and the subject of government surveillance came up one in class. One student pointed out that the government "plant" is always the one who looks most like a hippie. At that time, I had a beard and long hair. Suspicion immediately fell on me.
But I was the victim, not the agent. When the state of Michigan decided that its secret surveillance files had to be made public, I received a notice that there was a file on me. I applied to see it and discovered that the file had been started because my car was parked on a street where a "communist meeting" was taking place.
This reminds me, too, of looking for an apartment that first year. I interviewed with one building owner/manager. He looked at me with my beard and long hair, heard that I had come from Berkeley and that I was teaching at a place notorious for its so-called communists and warned me first of all that I could not have a still in my apartment. I thought stills had gone out with the end of prohibition and speakeasies. Then it was drugs. He would know, he said, whether I was using drugs or not. When I asked how he could possibly know that, he just looked sharply at me and said he would know. The interview concluded with his determination that I "was not right" for his building. I recalled that just before my interview, I had seen him congratulating a very well-dressed, clean-cut prospect. This was my first introduction to the mind of a conservative. The interviewer, a lawyer, had a messy, weedy, toady, infested labyrinth mind that would never be a garden. He would always need someone to hate.
posted by Vibistry at 8:55 AM
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