December 2006 Archives

I don’t have a good visual memory.  I know people who can actually see memories from way back with considerable accuracy.  I can’t.  So I have been hoping to find more pictures of the property back in South Carolina, the one with the block house on it.  Here’s one of the better ones I have found so far.

We are sitting on the property line between our place and Grandma’s place.  If you squint a little into the sun there you can make out the side of Grandma’s house.  So that’s how close we were to her place.  Not all that far across a field of low lying weeds.  I don’t ever remember anything being grown on purpose in that field, just naturally occurring weeds.

As you can see—a little bit—a line of trees ran along the property line, and not that far on to the left and back from the property line a little was the well.  That’s where we got our water. The earth around that that well was always a bit muddy.  I used to walk in that mud barefoot because I liked the feeling of it.  There must have been a leak somewhere.

The one of us to the left is brother, Steve, and the little guy, seated on the block, is brother, Dave.  He looks at least a year old, maybe 18 months.  So the picture must have been taken in 53 or 54.  We are barefoot per usual.  A pair of shoes is a terrible thing to waste.

I am there but completely blocked out.

Looks as if we are doing some pretend thing, maybe we are pretending to camp out.  Though I don’t know why we would be doing that.  But behind there—it looks as if we have constructed a tent and inside the tent appears to be a broken down palette of the kind used to carry brick and block about.  Seems as if where ever we lived one or more of those things could be found lying about or leaning up against a wall.

Somewhere right along there, more to our right, I think was a good sized persimmon tree.  I ate some of those once that were a little on the green side and got a stomach ache out of it.

Here I am again—I was going to say—looking pretty country.  But I don’t see anything here to signify country.  I do know, though, the picture was taken of the porch of the house in South Carolina, the one the old man built out of block and that had four rooms but no bathroom.  Note the brickwork.  That was his doing, but so were those steps to the porch: four blocks just plopped next to each other.  The old man suffered from a slight attention to detail problem.  I remember those block now that I see them.  They used to wobble when you stepped up to the porch.

The lawn clearly is in need of a mowing.  Ha. Ha.  Nobody had lawns back there and certainly nobody bothered to mow them.  Mostly people had dirt yards; sometimes they would sweep the dirt yards to get the dirt off.  Ha. Ha.  Those weeds are just whatever stuff grew in front of the house.

I am wearing shoes so it probably isn’t summer, but I am wearing shorts though so maybe it is.  I am wearing one of my trusty t-shirts, and I didn’t wear much of anything when it was hot summer.  So maybe it wasn’t summer. But maybe they had been dressed up for the photo session.  So I guess I don’t know what time of year it was, except that it probably wasn’t winter.

I don’t know what that thing is off to my right on the porch.  It looks like a fish, but what’s a fish doing on the porch.  We didn’t eat fish; the old man didn’t like to pick out the bones.  He did say, though, they had fish fries when he was a kid.  Folks would gather by some lake, they would pull a truck up next to the lake and use it to power a live cable they would throw into the lake to electrocute the fish. They would just come bobbing up and all you had to do was collect them.

I could be five or six in that picture.  I don’t know, but if you ask me I look pretty boney.  Back then though I was always boney.  But maybe this was during my sickly period when I was sick all the time with strep throat before I had my tonsils out.

I look sort of pensive.  I wonder what I was thinking about.  Maybe my head was completely empty or maybe I was thinking about eating dinner, or what the hell I was doing sitting there.  I have been told I was a thoughtful child and very curious.  So maybe I am thinking, why am I here, what’s going to happen, what’s the point in all of this, why have I been put on this earth and is there a purpose.

The usual stuff.

This here is Aunt Kitty.  I don’t know her last name, but she was the sister of Joan’s, my mother’s, mother.  So her maiden name must have been Barrett, the same as her sister’s.  But she was married at least twice and I have no idea what her last husband’s name was.

She is like a little time machine back to the era of the Late Edwardians, over there in England.  She had her heyday around the time of WWI.  She was the tutor for the children—or so the story goes—of Count Zeppelin, the guy responsible for the Zeppelin, over in Germany.  He told her a war was coming, so she got out of Germany and went back to England.  From there, she immigrated with her sister to Canada.

She ended up with her second husband in San Diego.  He was an alcoholic.  He had a house, but he didn’t work.  He mostly lay around drunk.  She had to make ends meet.  She sold eggs and kept goats and they sold the goat milk.  Also they were on relief.  She took in Joan and Aunt Betty after their mother died of breast cancer, the so-called father, Kaller, being pretty long out of the picture.

Joan went to Grossmont High School, so this picture was probably taken somewhere out in East County, the boondocks as it was called back then, near El Cajon.

That’s about all I know about Aunt Kitty.  I saw another picture of her somewhere and she has a big wart on her nose, and I thought she looked like a witch.  I don’t know when I saw this picture.

She died a few months before I was born.  So in addition to her normal depression, Joan was depressed by Aunt Kitty’s death about the time I came into the world.  I would say I sucked in depression with my mother’s milk, but Joan’s breasts “caked,” so I wasn’t breast fed much.

And, oh, that dog lying over there in the right side of the picture--that was Joan's dog, according to Joan, and it's name was Teddy.  My brothers and I had for years to suffer with another dog named
Teddy.  Joan named it and I don't think we knew it was an incarnation of the Teddy lying in this picture.

This guy is my mother’s father.  His last name was Kaller or at least that’s what he said.  He also said he was an orphan.  One night his brother got angry with him and told him that he wasn’t his brother but was adopted.  And when he found out that was true, he ran away and joined the circus.  I find that hard to believe.  Ran away and joined the circus?  Give me a break.  Everything about this guy reeks of cheap novels.

I never met him.  By the time, we moved back to San Diego he was dead.  Once we went to a tailor’s shop in downtown San Diego back when that little square in the middle of town was where the prostitutes hung out.  The shop was on a little side street and I remember staring at this poster on the wall that depicted that pyramid on the back of the dollar but with a really huge eye on the top.  The tailor saw me looking and said that had belonged to my grandfather who was first degree mason and that the poster depicted some sort of Masonic symbol.  I guess we had gone there so my mother could ask the tailor about her father’s last days.

I don’t know if it was that time or another but we were down town back when the only shopping around—before the malls came in—was at the downtown department stores, and my mother caught sight on this fancy clock, on the top of a fancy pole, outside the Marston’s Department store and she just started bawling and bawled all the way home, and we had to wait a number of days till we heard the story of the Marston clock.

She was 18 years old and had a job in a department store.  And going home she was standing beneath the Marston clock when this man came up to her and asked her what time it was, and she didn’t say anything, but pointed up to the Marston clock, and the man said thank you and moved on.  I thought maybe the guy had been trying to pick up on the old lady, though I couldn’t see why frankly.  But it turned out that the man who asked the time had been her father, and he hadn’t even recognized her. That’s why she started crying every time she saw the Marston clock or any time she told the Marston clock story.

No reason really he should have recognized her.  He had abandoned her and her sister and her mother back when my mother was 10 or so.  The guy was a real reprobate.  He was married six times.  He married one woman, who was pretty loony, for her money, took all her money, had her committed, and then divorced her.  He was a good cook and a real charmer, life of the party sort.  He would start a restaurant, get it up and going, and then blow all the money on the ponies, and then start another restaurant or marry some woman for her money.

 Once I am in New York City before you could get any book in the world off the web and I hit the book stores pretty hard.  One day I am hanging out in the big Barnes and Noble, and I come upon this history of the Klu Klux Klan.  I find myself thumbing through it and then scanning the index for mention of my grandfather since he had been during the early thirties Grand Dragon of the KKK for the Western States.  That was the story in any case. Who knows, though; the guy was a damn liar and a pathological opportunist.

Here I am again, looking pretty country, seated on the steps of the porch of my grandma’s house.  The galoot to my right figures in my earliest memory.  I am down on the floor on my belly and I am looking at my little potty chair and I am pissed because somebody else is using it.  The person using it is was the galoot sitting next to me in that picture.  He was not supposed to be using my potty.  After all it was mine.  Also he upset the height hierarchy.  I was the first born and taller than my little brother who must have been two or three at the time of this picture.  But the galoot, who was less than a year older than yours truly, had a number of inches on me and quite a few pounds.

The big galoot was my Aunt’s son, the son of the sister of my mother.  He was Aunt Betty’s son and for some unknown and ungodly reason she had name him “Skipper.”  That’s how I always knew him and that’s what he was always called.  I don’t think it was a nick name.  I don’t know what my Aunt was thinking about when she named him but I doubt she was thinking too clearly.

She had fallen for this military guy, and just before he headed out during WWII to the South Pacific, they went to Tijuana and got married.  I doubt my Aunt was into premarital sex, so I guess they had the time in between getting married and his heading out to sea to get Aunt Betty pregnant.  Well, she bore the child and decided to go back with him to her husband’s ken in Arkansas, his having not yet returned from the war.  But when she got there, she found they didn’t know who the hell she was because her so-called husband was already married and had not communicated to his family—through he had written otherwise to Aunt Betty—anything about her existence.

Talk about your embarrassing moments.  And they were not welcoming in the least either and sent her packing.

So she went back to California, and when the old man drug me and my mother back South, she stayed there for a number of years.  But I think it was probably pretty hard being a single mother back then or any time for that matter, and she must have gotten lonely—though she and my mother hated each other—so she came back to South Carolina and got a job up in Greensville as a telephone operator.  And while she was looking for work and getting a little money together we took in Skipper.  He was with us a number of months I think, and returned for extended stays on other occasions.

But after a while, Aunt Betty went back to California to San Diego to be with her father who was dying at the time.  I don’t know why she wanted to go back to see that asshole; but maybe she hoped to inherit his trailer, that he was living in at the time, and get her hands on whatever valuables he had stashed away.  After he died, she stayed in San Diego.

After we moved back there ourselves, we were told, after the fact, that one reason we had moved was so that my mother, who hated her sister, could be near her sister in her time of need since Skipper who suffered some sort of hormonal abnormality and grew to over six feet before he was 12 had developed cancer.

Walker Evans took the pictures for James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families.  Note that word “tenant.”  Interestingly in that regard many of the pictures in the Library of Congress of the rural south during the Great Depression are characterized as depictions of “landless whites.”  I don’t recollect having seen pictures captioned “landless blacks.”  I don’t think one had to characterized blacks as landless; that was assumed.  But “landless whites” were a particular social category, particular enough that the phrase could be used as a tool to sort through the thousands of pictures of the rural poor taken by people like Evans, Marion Post Wilcott, and Dorothea Lange.

My Grandfather, William Berner Tingle, was for a considerable while landless. My father, William Berner Tingle, Jr., remembered having moving from house to house at least half a dozen times in his childhood.  By the 20’s the family fortunes had decayed almost completely.  Land can be divided up only so many times between all those sons, and by the time my Grandfather came along there wasn’t any left.

I don’t know for sure that he was a tenant farmer or sharecropper.  I expect he was.  But as far as I can tell, he was also an odd jobber.  So if he rented, I am not sure that he planted crops for much other than his own consumption and to sell to get some cash money for things like sugar, coffee, and clothes. Some of the Tingles seem to have had an entrepreneurial streak, and somewhere along the line Grandpa Tingle acquired a mobile saw mill. 

He would scope out the territory and go up to the landowners who had a good stand of pine and say he would cut them down and sell them for a percentage.  He kept himself and a crew of four to six men busy for years with that saw mill.  That’s how he acquired the money to buy a few acres in Ora, South Carolina.  He was no longer landless, and on that land he built from wood he had cut the house he sits in front of in this picture.

He was a man known in that small community to have a one hell of a temper.  Part of that may be genetic; many members of the line have a tendency to fly off the handle.  But I think too he was in chronic pain.  He had asthma as the result, some believe, of having a tractor buck up on him and crush his chest.  Also he had hemorrhoids of a near Olympian variety.  The story goes that to be able to sit in his car he stretched across the metal frame of the driver’s seat a tractor inner tube with a hole cut in the middle large enough to accommodate the hemorrhoids.

He died pretty young in his early 50’s I think of a heart attack that occurred, according to some reports, in the middle of a raging fit about the price of sugar.  He smoked.  If you look closely at the picture, you can see a cigarette between the fingers of his left hand.  He also drank.  My father reports that he was sent not infrequently to the local store to buy a bottle of Old Crow.  The bottle was then usually secreted in the hollow of tree stump, hidden out of sight but of ready access.

My brothers—mostly my brothers—and I had to clean out our mother’s house so we could sell it.  As the family historian, or the one interested in such things, or with the time to do it, I took charge of a couple of boxes of pictures and documents that our mother kept in a cedar chest, and a few days back I pulled out one of the boxes and started going through it. 

 That was a mistake.  I am never in a good mood and doing that, looking at pictures of a bunch of dead people from long ago, didn’t help my mood any.  But I found this picture and I think at some level I have been thinking around and about it since I first saw it. But I don’t know what I am thinking about exactly and whatever it is seems pretty confused and full of conflict.

That’s a picture of the first house we lived in when the old man took us back to South Carolina after WWII to grow cotton.  I think the house had electricity but it didn’t have running water or in door bathing and toilet facilities.  I appear to be looking at or for something in the grass.  Off to my right is a cat high tailing it out of the area.  A shovel leans up against the wall, and the screen on the door to the porch is a particularly thick and rusty kind of screen that’s hard to describe but you would know it if you have seen it.  Whenever I have seen it I have wanted to touch it.  It has that effect.

I don’t remember the day of course or the house.  I wish I remembered the cat.  But I do recognize the kid.  That’s me, OK.  I know that.  But I have a difficult time making the connection between me, as I sit here at a computer looking out the window at the California mountains about 58 years later, and that kid.  But I do feel a sort of personal, though generic, attachment.

I say generic because in general I like little kids about that age.  Whenever I bump into a little kids about that age I say hello, or sometimes, if I am wearing it, I take off my hat so they can see part of my head come off.  Usually, they don’t mind.  My conversations with these little kids are pretty brief, and I almost always find them satisfying.  I can’t say much passes between us, but enough I expect. What’s there to say but hello and then goodbye?  That’s probably the most basic and fundamental conversation anyway, hello and then goodbye.  That sort of wraps it up, I think.

I am glad the cat is in the picture.  I must have disturbed it—the way it is high tailing it out of there—just moments before the picture was taken.  When I first saw the picture I thought it was a little weird-assed goat with a long tail sticking up, but that didn’t make any sense; then I saw that what appeared one of the ears of the goat was in fact the right front leg of the cat.

I like animals too and I try to communicate with them whenever possible.  While I am very fond of cats, it would have been cool if the cat had been a goat.  I know we kept goats now and then.  Goats are an under-rated animal, pretty interesting, and even a little intelligent, I think.  Not like sheep or your basic fleshy fat cow.  They have a dull and dead look in their eyes.  But a goat will recognize the person who feeds it.  Cows—they don’t give a damn who you are.  They just want to be fed.

Given the possibility of injuries, the ineptitude of general managers, drunken violence, rape charges, and an utter lack of loyalty to anything but the pursuit of the almighty buck, I am probably way premature in heralding the coming-into-being, as I see it, of the New Lakers.  But I have enjoyed watching these guys lately; the fourth quarter comeback led by the bench in the fourth quarter against Minnesota was something to watch, something inspiring and surprising in the way the Lakers have not been in a long time.

The old Lakers, with Magic and Kareem, were the New Lakers, part 1.  They were interesting and surprising because Magic was always interesting and surprising, and those guys had chemistry, with Kareem playing DC to Magic’s AC.  There’s just something thought provoking about a tormented, introverted, 7’6 guy, who played basketball for his very life, for this one chance at being something other than a genetic freak, along side of wonderfully gifted exhibitionist and flaming extrovert who played for the pure and simple fun of it.

I won’t go now into the misery of the Van Excel years, and, while I do like to watch a team that wins, I never did enjoy Kobe and Shaq.  Sure they won, but they were damned predictable.  Either Kobe would end up dribbling endlessly to get a shot or they would throw into the Big Maw and he would dribble back and forth moving around people with that roadhouse butt of his.  Never, in the entire history of basketball, has any body made such devastating use of his butt than Shaq.  He never learned how to shot the basketball but he could open his own summer camp on the use of the butt in the low post.  Of all the Big Things Shaq called himself, he never did pay adequate tribute to his single greatest physical assist, and that was his butt.

They just weren’t any fun.  But more like the Yankees have become of late; just the best basketball team money could buy, especially in that truly pathetic last year of Shaq’s tenure, what with Gary, the Punk, Payton, and Karl, Joint Grinding, Malone.  What the hell were they thinking?  I mean the guys upstairs.  And, as for the guys down on the floor, they just never did click.  I was glad Shaq left and I am glad he was the one that did.

But back to the present.  I don’t remember a Laker team as deep, except maybe for that year or two they could bring in Bob McAdoo to replace King Kareem.  Now that was something.  But I would have to check the roster to be sure of that.  I think these “New Lakers” are deeper all the way down the bench.  And to Jackson’s credit he seems to be yielding a little on his “I hate rookies” attitude. Or at least, he has the sense to play the rookies so he can see what he has got.  If, as the season goes on, he starts playing a short line up, I think he is making a really big mistake, a much bigger one than any of the multiple of small one those rookies might make out on the court because right now he is sitting on a group of guys that have, if played, the potential to become one heck of a team, for a goodly number of years to come.

Take that Mo Evans—is that his name—as a for instance.  I don’t remember the game but he was hanging out right below the basket, facing back into the court, and the ball clanked off the rim, admittedly right into his hands.  But then—wham—I don’t think I have ever seen a guy go back up for the dunk, with so little flair, but such complete efficiency that had you don’t seen the ball coming down through the net, you would have known how it got there.  That’s a little surprise.  But I think these “New Lakers,” as I prematurely crown them, have more surprises in their bag.

The problem with Pinker—as a representative of the evolutionary psychology movement generally—is that there’s something to what he says.  The mind is not a tabula rasa.  That’s as Pinker says, though the British philosopher, Peter Blackburn holds Pinker’s feet to the fire a bit on that one.  He says Locke, for example, did not believe in the kind of utter tabula rasa that Pinker claims he did; instead, according to Blackburn, Locke was  “…perfectly happy with the idea that the nature of the slate or paper may determine what can be written on it.”

I can buy that, but over the last couple of decades, I have felt in my reading around and in my listening to others that in some of the disciplines at least, especially and sadly in the humanities, people have decided that the mind is a “piece of paper” or somewhat more complicatedly now “a computer screen” and the only thing written on either are words.  Language became “fetishized,” it seemed to me, in ways I could not comprehend.  

What is this talk I wondered?  Do these people, though I may interpret them incorrectly, actually believe that, if one can change the way people think about the world, one can change the world.  Too many of my students at one time seemed to me overly familiar with the idea of stereotyping.  Oh, that’s stereotyping they would say or perhaps the more popular word at the graduate level was “essentializing.”  I understood a possible positive motive behind the anti-stereotyping and anti-essentializing movement that made it a bit impolitic to say the whole movement was bogus.

That motive also confused me.  I certainly don’t believe in going around essentializing people or races. Or, in other words, I don’t believe in going around calling people or races bad names or making assumptions about people and races on the basis of their names.  The whole business in my head got screwed up with the political correctness thing.  That’s my problem I guess, but I may be forgiven I hope.  Things do get complicated when an epistemological claim of some sort gets all mixed up with a high falut'en moral imperative of some sort.

I found it hard to say to my anti-essentializing and anti-stereotyping students that they had things all screwed up when the trend seemed to be in part an attempt to be decent people and to treat others decently.  But to get, if I can to the point, I did try to say that they might be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.  One can’t think at all I wanted to claim unless one stereotypes or essentializes. Language necessarily abstracts, but that was hard to convey if one is talking with people who honestly believe that there is Nothing But Language and thus no other Reality from which it might be said to “Abstract.”

So a person was pretty much stuck if he or she, as I wanted to do, wanted to argue against the anti-essentialist movement since to do so would automatically put one in the camp of those who believe in a “reality” beyond the language that shapes it.  I suppose I could have said something like “The painful feeling of gas in my stomach is not the same thing as saying ‘I have gas.’”  But I don’t think my having gas would serve all that much to sway anybody’s thinking. So with mixed feelings, though some of relief, I began to read people like Pinkus as saying to the language fetishists:  Look you delusional morons.  You seem to think you can change people just by changing the way you think about them, when in fact what you can think (or say) about people is circumscribed, hemmed in and dictated, by the very tabula rasa that allows you to think at all.

But I put myself poorly.

Noodling around possible chapter or portal headings for my hypothetical reader—one might be “What am I?”  All the headings will have the single letter word “I” in it.  As in “How Do I Feel?” There’s a bit of a pun in that one.  One asks how do you feel and one says well, I feel fine or whatever.  But I mean “how” does one feel in biochemical sense—what are the emotions/feelings/affects biochemically speaking.  This heading too might point in the direction of those “lower” portions, down on the brain stem, that seem to have something to do with the primal fight/flight response. 

Adrenaline.

Dopamine.

Seritonin.

“What Do I Feel,” however, pretty much says what it means.  What is one feeling?

“Who Am I” points in the direction of identity.

But what am I?—that’s a bit odd I think.  I guess one would first say—man or woman.  But I think I am thinking some lower down and a bit more primal than that: the distinction or the attempt to make it between human beings and the animals.  Aristotle: the rational animal, Hegel the sick animal.  My response though would be more in the direction of: human beings: the social animal.

My readings in and around evolutionary theory suggest that may be really What One Is?  The social animal.  In spite of all the nonsense about the selfish gene, human beings appear not selfish but completely gregarious and mutually supportive.  Selfishness is the epiphenomenon of this deeper phenomenon.  People throw out the baby with the bath water on that one, depending on the fish they want to fry.  But what gets us along in any case is not individual, atomistic selfishness, but group being and group creation. 

Thus human beings: the social animal.  And so, sociology points out at the extreme, coming at times quite close to a tabla rasa notion of mind, that what human beings know is what they have learned from other human beings and from the very social structures (quite real structures like building and roads) that guide them in their responses to each other without really having to know anything.  Human beings have moved or changed rapidly because they leave behind them structures upon which the next generation builds.  Genetic adaptation is not necessary, since we build our own environment.  But this capacity to erect a social environment that might be built upon is no doubt the result of a genetic predisposition.

The downside of this or at least one downside—because there are others—is the business about hyper conformity.  Nietzsche emphasizes this aspect with his quite correct characterization of human beings as the herd animal.  Supposedly—this is the ideology—individuality, individual effort, and most especially individual responsibility are prized qualities or values…But it’s well nigh impossible to buck conformity.  Hell, it is impossible.

Remark re: history of ideas.  The enlightenment set off this whole view with people like Helvictius and Rousseau later.  Nietzsche is made possible by the sociological view—in fact his philosophizing might be an attempt to figure out how individuals might arise from the herd.

As I was saying, thinking about materials for a reader I went online.  Who needs a reader, a hard copy one, I mean.  I didn’t have even to go that far into the mess to be overwhelmed by mass of materials out there on every subject known to humanity.

And Wikipedia is turning into a really useful instrument, especially if you are looking for info on current stuff.  They have decent references on the diverse subjects they treat and unlike your regular encyclopedia, mostly because their space is unlimited, there’s no filtering device, i.e. a certain limited number of pages. 

I wonder if one might construct sort of a knowledge ratio to the effect: limited amounts of documentation, limited space, high or low, produces a greater or less constricted knowledge hierarchy.  In the old encyclopedia Britannica for example one might possibly have found an entry on Andy Capp and his creation, Little Abner, but I don’t think one would have found much more than that Capp drew a comic strip called, Little Abner, that appear in such and such number of newspapers.  Certainly not, as one may find in Wikipedia, a list of every damn character that ever appeared in the strip along with a short “biography” of each.

I wonder if some sort of knowledge flow chart or graph could be constructed: data base plus space plus labor.  The greater the factor under each of these items the more the knowledge curve or knowledge hierarchy would tend to flatten towards infinity, while the less under each category the more the chart would approach a perfect pyramid.  The very peak of the pyramid would consist of the longest of all documents, as the determinative of their importance, with as one went down more and more documents with less and less space devoted to each.

In any case, on the web, there’s plenty enough to go around.  Within minutes, I had located articles, magazine and journal, as well as video on the “topics” I was trying to look into.  This is the “death” of the reader.  Already, one can think of the reader as a portal to web based research, reading and viewing.  Eventually the portal will disappear into the very thing it is opening up.

The web not the book is, without a doubt, the future of reading and writing, barring of course some natural or unnatural disaster that sends this whole electrical thing into the void.  But barring that, the teaching of writing has to become more and more rooted in that digital universe.  The web of course can not teach people how to read and write, but the fact of it will alter individual’s relation to both and the purposes of each.

One of my lit. teachers back in the 60’s let us write extra credit papers on the Death of the Novel.  I forget what I concluded.  But clearly THE NOVEL is dead; or rather the novel has found itself a niche market.  The Book too will die, if it is not already dead, that thing I grew up holding in my hands, the pages of which I turned, slowly or quickly, whatever you did the pages had to be turned—The BOOK will find its niche, but it won’t be where the big bucks are. 

 Information, not contemplation, is the name of the game these days.

Talk about your misleading entry title.  My subject here is not as profound as the reader might assume.  As the author has died so must the reader, I guess.  But actually I am referring here to “readers” as they are called in the world of writing instructors.  These are collections of articles, essays, and other sorts of writing/readings assigned by writing instructors to their students for the purpose largely of giving students something to write about when they write.

I have hardly ever used these collections myself.  I did for a while when I was the person training teaching assistants to work in our Writing Program.  They were required to use Behrens “Reading And Writing Across the Curriculum” or WRAC, as we came informally to call it, and so I used it too.  That seemed only fair.   

One may find quite an enormous variety of such readers.  Back in the day, when publishers were possibly less cost conscious, I was flooded with the things, new ones appearing every other day it seemed in my mail box.  I think there are still quite a few of them, and they can be money makers for their editors.  Larry Behrens, for example, had an office two doors down from me, and I know he made more than chump change off his book.  Also, one door way, and two doors away are the editors of Common Culture, a reader that has made its co-editors some money.

I have toyed for years with the idea of making up a reader and making some money from it.  Why not?  But I never get very far with the idea.  It just seems like too much work, or too much of the kind of work I don’t really want to do, sifting through articles trying to find ones that might work with your average, generic American college student.  And, well, I must say, I am not entirely in favor of such readers.  Not because they are bad, but because in my opinion writing teachers should always make their own readers.  That’s what I have done, so everybody else should do it too.

Aside though from this rampant narcissism, I have a slightly more rational reason for taking this position.  Making up your own reader tends to compel the instructor to think a bit more about the readings, their over all purposes, their levels of difficulty, and how they might be used in writing assignments.  Your pre-packaged commercial reader doesn’t require the instructor to do this and sometimes I think they act a bit too much as a prop for the writing instructor, though I do know your average free way flier instructor simply may not have the luxury of the time that I have to waste putting together a reader, when they are readily available pre-canned as it were.

My reservations, though, re: readers did not keep me recently from putting together a proposal for just one such reader that I sent off to McGraw Hill.  I haven’t heard from them yet, and I don’t expect them to take me up on the project, since my ideas tend towards the eccentric.  Still, for the heck of it, I started in the last few days to put together a trail run reader that I will use in one of my courses this upcoming quarter.  Looking around for readings, of course, led me to forage on the web, and this foraging has led me to conclude that your basic “reader” is dead, but doesn’t know it yet.

To be continued…..

As I established by Exhibit A in my last entry, Tingle Road, as I will always know it, started not very far from the Paron Primitive Baptist Church, ran North then for a number of miles, hung a left, as it approached the county line between Monroe and Butts Counties, crossed Brownlee, and terminated at High Fall Roads.

Since the South end of Tingle Road had no street sign and only local opinion to give it official stature as any thing other than one of hundreds of nameless dirt roads, my wife and I made a point of driving to the Northern End, and there located Tingle Road in its black topped manifestation complete with street signs as documented here .

When I first devoted a web page, now scrapped, to Tingle Territory, I had to look high  and low for maps.  Now maps abound on the web, and so to check my memory, and my facts, and to see if there was more of Tingle Road than I had thought at the time, I googled Tingle Road and much to my displeasure found that it had significantly shrunk.

The green tack—Istoodhere—in the google image marks the intersection of High Falls and Tingle Road where I stood to take the picture above of the street sign marking the corner of High Falls and Tingle Road, but as the viewer will no doubt note directly to the right of the marker is a road called “Teagle” not “Tingle.”  Apparently, I will never again be able, should I wish, to stand at the corner of Tingle and High Falls Roads.  The whole upper end of Tingle Road has been changed to Teagle Road on MSN maps as well as Google. 

I asked you, dear reader, what possibly could have been gained by this change from Tingle to Teagle.  Perhaps the locals didn’t like the sound of Tingle and so changed it to Teagle or perhaps some stupid redneck failed to copy Tingle correctly and had signs made up as Teagle. 

And just as perturbing, if not more so, The Red Dirt Tingle Road near the Paron Church has also disappeared.  I direct the viewer’s attention to the tiny Bit of Tingle Road (microsoft map) that now runs into something called “Gordon” Road.  Why this part of Tingle Road is called Gordon Road I have no idea.  Who is this Gordon person?  All that remains now officially of Tingle Road is that little bit of the triangle, hardly a quarter mile long.  Better to have wiped out the whole road rather than leave that mockery of a vestige of its former robust self.

Exhibit A, so called, is the first piece of evidence in the mystery of the vanishing of Tingle Road.  The Tingle Road, of course, of which I speak, is the one resting at the center of my Particular Tingle Territory, the one located at the upper or northern edge of Monroe County, GA, itself located midway between Atlanta and Macon off inter state 75.  That’s the thing I most wanted to see, when I went in 1994 to visit my people in the South,  not for the beauty of the spot, it being after all just a dirt road pretty much in the middle nowhere and not much to brag on, but to see if it actually existed, as family had suggested it did.  Not that I doubted their word, but it was just one of those very, very few things in my life I have felt the need to see with my own eyes.

So when I was back there and had the chance, my wife and I drove down 75 and then took Route 42, at the center, as you the viewer will see, of Exhibit A, up to little known, because little populated, Blount, Georgia.  There we found, as indicated in the yellow blotch in the middle of Exhibit A, the Paron Primitive Baptist Church, that had among its founders, in 1823, a number of ancestral Tingles, whose bones rested directly adjacent on the one side to the church, and  was directly adjacent, as brought to my attention by elderly bent old woman, on the other side to Gregory road which, if I took that would take me a piece, over a little bridge, and right beyond that the entrance to the southern end of Tingle Road, though I should keep my eye peel it being somewhat overgrowed. 

If the reader or viewer would take a moment to direct his or her attention to Exhibit A, he or she will see that things were just as the elderly lady, living repository of local history, had indicated.  Though, the end of the road was not so overgrown, having only a few branches overlapping it, and once one got through those, the road stretched out pretty much open and straight ahead as pictured two entries ago and worth, I think, repeating here.  I drove this stretched as far as I could in my rented car until my wife freaked out when we crested a little knoll and Tingle Road just ahead became a little boggish, no doubt from recent rains.  I was still not quite deterred, and walk aways ahead to determine the depth of the water.  When though I sunk up to my ankles in the red mud, I decided that we had reached the end of the road figuratively speaking.

I can’t say then that I have seen all of Tingle Road with my own eyes, for I failed to drive it end to end as I had wished, motivated by some strange irrational urge to see the whole damn thing.  I don’t know how long the road is exactly, but as the alert viewer, reader will note in Exhibit A, Tingle Road runs on up to cross Route 42, past the Webb Cemetery, across Brownlee, and then runs on a bit more (not pictured here) to High Falls, acting for a way, as it goes, as marking the line between Monroe and Butts Counties.  It terminates, rather abruptly at High Falls, I say abruptly because while the dirt road continues to run some ways, officially it’s called Country Road.

That’s how things were back in 1988 when the map of Monroe County was map, and when I visited in 94 and again in 98, but that’s not how it is today if current documentation is to be trusted.

To be continued…..

I suppose I could just lie and make up things about Tingle Territory.  I don’t think anybody would notice.  I think writing a blog is like talking to one’s self and for some odd reason, writing down what one is talking, and then putting that in the paper shredder.  I wonder if writing bogs will produce a new aesthetic movement—let us call it the Garbage Dump Movement or GDM.  No museum for this movement, just a dump, with all that implies.  Mostly the temporality of all stuff, junk, writing, and TV sets.

Actually I first had the idea for this aesthetic many moons back in the early 70’s.  I was going out front to bring in the trashcans, and as I did so, noticed some paper there on the ground, folded up, like a letter with ink markings on it.  I thought about just leaving it but it was litter for one thing, and I was a little curious to determine if it was a letter. 

I don’t know what I expected to find.  It was a letter, four pages of a letter, in smallish handwriting, every word of it detailing—and I do mean detailing—its author’s ongoing battle with her weight.  I sat on the fender of my nearby 1959 Plymouth Station Wagon and read the thing through.  I was transported by its purity...  I don’t know what else to call it.  There was no pretension, no pomposity, no philosophical fog, or ideological yammering or, having done with it, no unpleasant, lingering aftertaste of thought.  Just a detailed, down to ounces, individual meals, particular temptations, and specific food items, record of the author’s struggle to master her weight.  One might say it had no depth, and maybe for that reason, it had all the depth in the world.

Having read the thing, and been transported, I had no desire to keep the letter, but put it back where it belonged.  In the trash.  Eventually, the trash would be picked up.  It would be taken to the dump, and once dumped would lie there, unto a tractor pushed it along with many items into a pile and shoved the whole ball of trash into the hole, where eventually it would all be compressed into landfill.  Depending on the wretchedness of the landfill—whether it had trapped gases or stank incredibly—a park might one day be put there or maybe even houses would be built atop it.

I think now of the alien archeologists who come across our moldering globe and with their modern archeological tools begin to unearth the dumps to today to find hard drives, millions, nay billions of hard drives, each to them rather like that letter was to me: something left, passionately produced, but pointless, wayward, and useless accept for what it might tell the curious aliens about how these long gone beings lived—things as they say of historical interest.

Some idiots a while back were talking about the “end of history.”  They were wrong about what they were talking about, but maybe right about what they weren’t.  History may be ending alright—in an outpouring of documentation that might require the entire Grand Canyon and many more such canyons as holes into which to dump it all.  Never before have the lives of individual beings been so documented.  What a prodigious mass of information is now being churned out for some future historian.  That might be the end of history, for I can well imagine this historian, upon unearthing this mass, to throw up his hands, put back into the trash what she had been examining, and say to hell with it.

I found when I would wake up at 530 and it’s pitch dark outside and I am painfully buzzing from effexor withdrawal that I could steady myself a little by compulsively futzing around with the computer.  I supposed in the olden days I would have taken out my knife and whittled all day.  But the computer has its own way to whittle things, and so I launched into a project I have entertained for some time, and that is to construct a web page for what I call Tingle Territory.

But once again I pooped out and the further I went to the project the more futile it felt.  Part of the problem is one’s audience.  Who the hell are these Tingles?  Well, I have found that throughout the USA one can locate a goodly number of Tingles, though obviously, this odd name is infrequently heard. I am trying feebly to say there is potentially at least more than one Tingle Territory because one can find more than one Tingle and they have all been in different territories or parts of this USA.

So I find it a bit pretentious or possibly grandiose to put up a page called Tingle Territory as if my tiny piece of Tingle Territory is the whole story.  Some Tingles on line out there in the Ether might go to my Tingle Territory and not be pleased.  I don’t want to offend any Tingles, for they are a fierce bunch. 

Or they are fierce, if, as I believe to be the case, most Tingles in the USA share common genetically linked Ancestors.  Most of the Browns or Smiths or Bushes in this country are probably genetically unlinked.  But the rarity of the Tingle name alone suggests a likely linkage.  Who would voluntarily take on that name, I ask.  Also the little I have gathered about Tingle genealogy suggests common ancestral and genetic links.

Rumor has it that six Tingle brothers came to the Colonies in the 1680’s.  I can trace my line back to a Solomon Tingle, known to be in the colonies in the early 1720’s and, though I cannot document it, I think it logical to infer he was the son of another Solomon Tingle, one of the original six.  The brothers appeared to have fanned out across the country.  I was driving through the “historic” district of Cincinnati once and stumbled on the Tingle House.  An elegant old structure once owned by a William Tingle who owned and operated a brick making plant.  Also, a Google Search documents a pretty large number of Tingle Roads and even Bridges scattered across the country from Maryland to Washington.

I have to believe these roads and bridges were named after people named Tingles who either lived near by or owned the land through which the roads ran and which, at watery places, were sustained by Tingle bridges.  The “Tingle Road” in my family line is located near Blount, Georgia.  That’s where my particular line, fathered by one of those six Tingle Brothers, headed, down South, by way of North Carolina to arrive in Georgia in the early 1800’s.

I don’t know if this is why things start, after a point, every time I try to write up a Tingle Territory page, to feel futile and a bit overwhelming.  My Tingle Territory is but a tiny bit of Tingle World.  Maybe, I could solve my problem by giving the page a different name, but I refuse to yield that alliteration.

I wonder who this guy is.  I must be fond of him since I have had his picture somewhere in the files on my computer for more than ten years.  More than once I have gone back rummaging through http://www.nicktingle.com/crazy1a.jpgfiles trying to relocate him, and I always do because I called him or his picture rather “crazyface.”  That’s easy to remember.  It speaks to me somehow—that crazyface—and recently I looked him up again and reduced him mightily to 16 by 16 pixels and stuck him up there next to my URL as my favicon.  And, as you will note, I have over stuck him in my last three entries on depression.  He seems right stuck there in ruminations on depression.

In fact, I think whenever I write an entry on depression and related mental illnesses I will stick him there in the entry as a sign to the reader: this is about depression and mental illness, read at your own risk.  Perhaps I will construct another little site with a photo gallery of this guy and the ways I have massacred his face, hack it, chopped it and colored it.

I first came across this fellow in Darwin’s “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” and, as the reader will note, the picture here is labeled by Darwin as being from a photograph by one Dr. Duchanne.  Darwin uses Dr. Duchanne’s photographs constantly throughout his book and also refers to Dr. Duchanne’s work, “The Mechanism of Human Facial Expressions,” (1862).  The man in the picture was called by Duchanne “The Old Man,” though honestly I don’t think he looks that old.

He was Duchanne’s model and his experimental subject.  I say model because Duchanne photographed him and experimental subject because the various expressions on the “Old Man’s” face were not spontaneous but the result of a galvanic or electric discharge.  Duchanne applied electrodes to muscles as a way to isolate the muscles most responsible for facial expressions in general and for particular facial expressions. 

He would then make a photograph of the Old Man under the influence of electodes, show that picture to regular, ordinary people and ask  them what they thought this particular contraction of configuration of contractions “expressed.”  As indicated, people thought the Old Man’s face, as pictured here, expressed Horror and Agony.

I find something troubling in all this. Or should I say: quite modern.  My crazy face is not expressing as from his psyche, Horror and Agony.  He is not even an actor mimicking Horror and Agony.  He is being electrocuted in a very exacting way.  History records that the “Old Man” was

afflicted with almost total facial anesthesia. This circumstance made him an ideal subject for Duchenne's investigations, because the stimulating electrodes he used were certainly somewhat uncomfortable, if not actually painful.

If this is true—and I hope it is—my poor “crazy face” could not even feel his face.  I wonder, if this is the case, if he knew when he was smiling or when he was frowning.  Or did he have to carry a mirror around with him.

I feel a bit like Bill Clinton with his, it all depends on what the meaning of is is.  I was glad Bill was not a Republican, but I never liked Bill.  But better a man who solved his masculine inadequacies with out of the oval office blow jobs, than the massive overcompensator we now have.

But as I said.

I think there’s a difference between saying:

A:  “I am depressed.”

And B: “I am a depressive.”

A.J. Ayer dismisses all of Sartre’s philosophy as a pun having to do with “is-ness.”  Dickhead!  Talk about a tree getting in the way of the forest.

 This came to me in insomnia soaked moment somewhere towards dawn, another product of Effoxor withdrawal.

But what a difference a noun makes or maybe an adjective makes.

Twenty four little hours—and the difference is you.

But as I said.

 In “A” the emphasis is on “am” and followed, as it is, by an adjective, the “am-ness” here constructed is all temporality.  “A” says, I am, not that I was, or that I will be.  Just that I am, at this transparent moment.

In “B” the emphasis is on “depressive,” I think, and the “am-ness” here constructed takes to itself the air of a logical proposition.  Or maybe it’s that little article, “a,” that makes all the difference.

I have known for years that I “am” and “was” depressed, and for years that was different than saying, “I am a depressive.”  I am still reluctant to say the latter perhaps because it means, in its logical finality, that I have given up all hope of things being otherwise.  But lately, I have thought it more applicable; when one hits sixty—I know I generalize—but at least in my case—one has doubts about any important change.

Still I am reluctant because if one says, “I am a depressive,” that means being depressed has become part of one’s self-concept.  Being male is part of my self concept; but if I say I am horney I could be either male or female, horniness not being gender specific.

The problem though—and it is not a small one—is that if one goes around saying I am depressed and not I am a depressive, one is not adequately positioned, I think, to deal with one’s depression qua depression, to accept it as such, and to find accordingly ways of dealing with it or, if not that, living with it. Because it’s hard enough being depressed without being hard on yourself for being depressed.

The epistemological question I have raised a little lately as to whether much is happening in the world to piss a body off or whether this body is at present predisposed to be pissed at anything is the product, over six months or so, of my effort to stop taking the anti-depressant called Effexor.   Why I might not want to stay tanked up for the rest of my natural or unnatural life on anti-depressants is a question itself.  Isn’t it really six of one, half dozen of another?  One is tanked up on something all the time biochemically speaking—caffeine perhaps, or sugar, sugar, sugar, and so on and so forth.  In any case, not taking anti-depressants is no more natural than taking them. Why in God’s name in any case would I want to know what I “really” feel like at age 60?

But that’s another question, as I said, maybe for another time.  For now, I see those moments lately of a pure and clean anger that come on fiercely like a summer squall and then are gone as symptoms of withdrawal.  I thought six months ago maybe these moments would just dissipate like yesterday’s cold leaving no permanent scar on the psychic tissues.  But I was wrong.  I kept cutting back and cutting back on the drug from an original high of 375 milligrams, and for a bit things would flatten out and then wham! Up aside the head again.

Finally, I was down to the smallest dosage they have of this nasty stuff.  37.5 milligrams.  I should have known something was up when my psychiatrist suggested I split this up even for a while.  This required pulling apart the capsule—not easy to do with my eyes going—and dumping its contents of tiny white little orbs of something or other into a bowl.  Then with my fingernail, I would scoot one half of the orbs over to one side of the bowl and like a dog tongue out the other half of orbs, and later in the day tongue what remained.  Then I started throwing out some of the little balls and dividing up whatever remained for the course of the day.

But shit! Say I.  I got the feeling I was just prolonging the misery and decided to flat out just stop.  The act of gradually tapering off as I had over the last six months just didn’t have, as far as I was concerned, the intended effect of lessening one iota the final scream of withdrawal like some malignant ghost that just refuses to go over to the other side.  I was caught so by surprise I went online to see what others might have to say about Effexor withdrawal just to confirm to my enfeebled brain that I was not going nuts, because that’s what it felt like.

What I found confirmed what I felt up to and including reports of the mysterious brain shivers.  I had not thought of it that way exactly; the word shiver implies a shiver, I think, as a reaction to coldness.  Whatever it might be that hits my brain at odd moments is not a reaction to coldness but to darkness, a palpable, right there behind the eyes darkness, that is almost, if one could just completely give into it, a restfulness beyond all restfulness, that seems as if it is lightly sucking at you, like a current or undertow pulling you down and back.  But doesn’t.  As if getting just to the relaease of orgasm one can’t get off. ….  Maybe that’s the shiver part.

I doubt that people who busy themselves with such things think any longer that the mind is a tabla rasa.  And if a person is not convinced that it’s not, I recommend a good strong case of depression.  I have had at least two major episodes of that; and in between, in a more regular and daily way, I have been diagnosed now by three psychiatrists as having dysthymia, a form of depression described as low-grade and chronic.  Some consider it over a lifetime more debilitating even than major depression.  People suffering from those—the great swings for example of bipolarity--probably have killed themselves, but we low grade types just go on and on as our teeth fall out.

One shouldn’t trust psychiatrists.  They are legalized pill pushers is all.  I had pretty much diagnosed myself before I saw one of them in any case.  If out of some perversity, one wishes to acquire an official case of depression, it’s not at all hard to do.  One has only to mention an inability to sleep or too much of it, fatigue that goes to the bone, a general lowering of affect, an unpleasant loss of libido, did I say “fatigue,” and some suicidal “ideation” of course is de rigueur.  But the capper, the sure fire nail in the coffin, is a family history of the stuff.

This gets most directly to the inadequacy of the tabla rasa notion.  One may not wish to believe in genetics, but sadly they appear operative.  My family tree could be called the family tree of depressed monkeys.  The whole lot on my father’s side seems to have suffered it, and I am positive too that it appears on my mother’s—given how she acted—but I can’t trace her line back very far.  Melancholia mixed with rage—a volatile tonic, I should say. 

Man, what tempers.  But when one moves around every minute of every day feeling one is floating just slightly above a steady undertow of bone jarring fatigue, one can, under life’s very minor irritations, such as a window that won’t open, or a dog that barks too much, or any number of equally idle and pointless things, just snap as if that thing were the proverbial last straw.  But oh, one runs into a great number of last straws.  There are a lot of them.  Those straws come to seem more like matches for the always primed and slightly hissing flame thrower of one’s rage.  Just a flick of your Bic in the wrong spot and Kaboom!

I have my own theory of depression that I will not attempt to defend or justify on anything other than my capacity, as it were, of participant observer of depression’s squirmy stuff.  At root, at the fatal bottom, way back in the brain stem, is the fight/flight or fear/anger response.  If the flight/fight response gets stuck, as it were, in an oscillating and conflicting mode, anxiety, or a heightened state of observational awareness is produced.  Evolutionarily speaking people prone to anxiety might have served a purpose, being that kind of person that the rest of the tribe could count on to stay awake all through the night while on guard.

Who knows, it makes sense to me, but perhaps I am trying to believe that at least at one time depression served a purpose.  But probably I am just trying to find a deeper meaning or mythological depth to what is no more than really screwed up biochemistry.  These biochemical processes, I want to call what Freud called the deepest levels of the unconscious, the primary processes. 

Maybe I am just too easily perturbed or maybe things are just very perturbing.  So I am giving The Nation its weekly read and I find a brief essay by Walter Mosley on the class structure of these United States.  And I am perturbed.  He’s not saying anything remotely new or something I don’t think about nearly every day.  But I am perturbed anyway.

Maybe these things need to be said over and over and over until somebody happens to listen.  The USA, for all its wealth, is a class society.  Funny, Roosevelt said that clearly.  Mosley concludes his little essay with this line: “A man can be rich, but only a nation can be wealthy. And if any person of any age suffers from poverty, then our whole country bears the shame.”  That’s FDR revisited from when he said—and I forget the exact words—the health of a nation is to be judge by the health of the least among us.

Over and over again.  I am glad Mosley is saying it again of course, but I doubt we have one Democrat in office that has the guts today to say what Roosevelt said in his.  I have had the painful misfortune of having lived since almost the moment I was born in 1945 through a period—excepting for a brief outburst of something in the 60’s—of monstrous reaction.

 The money lenders and the merchants of greed came to dominate the rhetoric of this country and managed to draw a veil over the yawning chasm between the classes.  That’s the victory of the consumer society.  Everybody had more crap to put in his or her garage.  Everybody could share in this superabundance of crap.  We could all eat shit equally; and people have bought it for the last 60 years.

Oh, but oh my, people will say, we have now a new global world order.  Things are just not the same.  Painful scarifies will be required (usually of other people).  No, things have not changed.  Marx was terrible on communism (though he did say he was not a Marxist) but dead on when it came to capitalism.  The Manifesto lays it out clearly.  Marx knew about global capitalism back then.  That’s why he wrote, Workers of the World Unite.  He knew more than most know today.

Over and over and over again—and I suppose people should and must say these things over and over and over again.  But I am getting tired.  And I have a pessimistic streak; it’s really hard not to have one.  Perhaps people are not able to recognize their own self-interest. It’s beginning to feel like Nietzsche’s Eternal Repetition of the Same, and, well, that is truly the road to nihilism.

I can’t go on; I go on.  Says Beckett over and over again.  That’s not a philosophy designed to promote social change, that nihilism.  But perhaps the road to Heaven goes straight through Hell. 

Yesterday for me was the last day of classes for the Fall Quarter 2006.

I have been teaching since 1976, so I have had a lot of last days of classes.  But I am still no good at “closure.”  Of all the idiot words running around I like “closure.”  But I am no good at it.

Maybe I should bring cookies or bake a cake or barbeque for the last day of class like some of my colleagues do.  I think about it but never do.  So maybe I am no good at closure because I don’t care enough to want to do anything about it.

But I thought I had something that might make the last meeting a little less lame than usual. We sit there usually, and I ask questions about the last paper and ask them if they have questions about the last paper.  The students look all pale and worn out.  I suppose I could give them a quiz to perk them up.

But I had them write their last paper on “Fight Club” because the “theme” for these particular classes had been the consumer society.  I have very mixed feelings about “Fight Club.”  But it’s all I could think to use at the time.  I don’t know if it’s a complex film or with that twist at the end just takes an ironic distance towards itself and so undercuts itself entire.

But that’s another question.  We all had more or less decided on the basis of a few readings that the movie wasn’t just about the consumer society but had something to do also with being masculine or not in the modern world.  I apologized to the young women in the class for a movie so masculine in its emphasis but they didn’t seem to mind.  One even said it was her favorite movie.  She is real bright too but having a very hard time trying to be pre-med—all that biology and chemistry.

But I think, while I am reading the LA Times at breakfast, here’s something that might enliven the last session.  They have a column on another nut form of religion making the rounds.  As the article indicates fewer and fewer men seem to be attending church; the majority of church goers are women.  So the evangelical freaks to get more warm bodies in their pews have decided that modern Christianity is emasculating or de-balling, and are trying to lure more men by preaching a new “rugged” Christianity.

Christ was really a rabble rouseer, a guy who hung out with his homies doing drugs on the street corner and spent lots of time out in the desert living off the land like a real ape man.  Christ as Ripped.  Christ the body builder. And when he was up there on the cross, he really toughed it out.  I asked my students if one of them could photo shop for me an image of Christ on the Cross but really, really buffed up.

But I say this whole thing is about controlling women and quote one of the rules of one of these churches: Rule No. 1: "Learn to work the toilet seat. You're a big girl. If it's up, put it down."  But a couple of the young women say that women should learn to “work the tiolet seat.”

I can’t win for losing.  The class ended, as far as I was concerned, having achieved a total lack of closure.

I would hope that if, dear reader, you happened to take my Crime and Punishishment quiz that you got 100%.  If I did not construct a quiz whose answers were self-evident, I failed in my efforts.  I don’t think that my literature Professor would have liked this quiz much because it makes mock of  the idea of the English Department as the warden of a specific discipline or knowledge base.  I mean if nobody really wants or needs the information of the knowledge base or the knowledge base is somehow made to appear transparent one is not a warden of much.

But I would say the word “knowledge” is thrown around these days a bit too indiscriminately; disciplinary knowledge is not a knowledge base but an information base.  Or more precisely if one can find no point to the information, aside from the fact that one might possible call it “interesting,” then it is not knowledge.  Knowledge--or at least preliminary baby steps towards it--is information with a point or meaning.  My quiz provided transparent information arranged in a way to suggest potentials for possible meanings.

That’s a terrible definition for what I think teaching and/or education to be: information with the potential for meaning.  One has, as a teacher, to somehow stimulate in the student the sense that this information is not dead and just lying there, as in having murdered to dissect, but might for the student possibly come to mean something and that in trying to figure that meaning a student might come to a knowledge (meaning, significance, importance plus information).  Professors, however, who say  their job is to teach the subject and not the students don’t see it that way.

People said that—back in the backlash to the sixties which set in by the late seventies.  I was a college student in the late 60’s and I must say personally that I had no idea which end was up about much of anything.  But students a bit older than I or perhaps just wiser began to question the way higher education was being done.  And many, many Professors, especially those who were authorities in their discipline, did not like the questions students were asking at all. 

I remember sitting in graduate school when a Professor said that--I teach the subject not students--and it stung then, and I still feel the sting of it because—and I know I am being presumptuous—anybody who says that and means it should not be allowed to mount the podium.  But I need to get off this topic rapidly.  It perturbs me.

I am too old to spend what is left of my time on this globe being perturbed.  I am all for the powers of positive repression and forgetting.  Still, I remember a very nice Professor, who was an expert on Conrad, visiting my class one time; she had a bit more to say about the class than the other Professor had.  She said, “You really should talk more.”  I interpreted this negatively of course, and said, yes, I knew the discussion had not gone well.  But again we (the writing teacher and the Professor) were talking at cross purposes.  I thought she meant I should have talked more to stir the pot for discussion, but, no, that was not it.  You have, she said, such smart things to say.  Why deny them what you know so well and express so clearly.

Damn—was I in a pickle.  

I do understand the emotions that might have driven writing teachers to want to lay claim to content.  The professors in the English Department, who rarely if ever taught composition, were nonetheless the bosses of those of us who did.  Before the writing program moved off, at least bureaucratically, on its own, my classes were visited, for the purposes of review and rehiring, for a number of years by English professors.

I remember having been visited by a Renaissance Scholar who made me pretty nervous.  He wasn’t a bad guy but I was pretty sure he was an elitist. He thought poetry was the highest form of literature and, how to say, the highest of all forms of experience.  I was, that quarter, teaching the second course in the sequence, the one that featured, in the closing weeks of the quarter, a novel.  I did Crime and Punishment for old times sake and as a tribute to my misspent youth (misspent reading Russian novels when I should have been out getting more well rounded).  I broke the students into groups to consider directed questions.  They kicked in and I felt the class had gone pretty well.

The professor, as he left, paused for a moment.  He was smiling so I figured I had done OK.  I guess I had, but he didn’t say anything about the class and the students or the quality of discussion.  Instead he expressed mild surprise at my not having called students’ attention in a particular passage to an allusion Dostoevsky had made to Pushkin.  Oh yea Eugene Onegan, I said since I figured he was really trying to see if I had caught the reference.  I had but I didn’t let on that I had never read the damn thing and had no intention of doing so.

And that was it, really, for comment or response to the class.  I had trouble not feeling his lack of response was a cover for a negative one.  But now I don’t think that was it.  I valued the way I had conducted the class, the way I had managed and elicited discussion, and he valued Crime and Punishment and my expert knowledge of it which I did have since I have always been an excellent reader.  He simply saw a different class than the one I thought I was teaching.

I wasn’t trying to impart to students some esoteric knowledge about Crime and Punishment or to use it as a way to teach students about symbolism or the early forms of the naturalistic novel or about C and P as a sociological treatise on the alienating effects of the movement of persons from rural to urban environments.  I didn’t want C and P to be about anything, but more a thing between myself and the students to be kicked this way and that and as offering a communicative scaffolding between the students and myself.  So that as we looked into the book and wrote about it we might also look a bit into each other.

I rather doubt the English Professor would have appreciated the quiz I liked to give on C and P.  We are going to have a quiz today, I would tell the students, and they would look downright shocked since I never quizzed them on anything.  Take out a pencil and a piece of paper, I would say, and then, Oh, forget it, we can do this orally:

Question 1:  what is the sex of Raskolnikov’s mother?

Question 2:  what is the sex of Raskolnikov’s sister?

Question 3: what is the sex of Sonya the prostitute?

Question 4:  what is the sex of the old lady that Raskolnikov kills with an ax?

Question 5:  what is the sex of the mare in the horrible nightmare of the horse beating?

Question 6: what is Raskolnikov’s sex?

Or, as I was trying to say before I got distracted by the Volksburger, the writing course does not have content or a disciplinary knowledge upon which one need be expert to mount the podium, as it were.  At one time, back in the early 80’s, far, far away and many moons ago, the composition sequence in which I worked did have content.  The first course was a writing course—mostly students wrote ---and the second course featured the informal essay, short stories, and a novel of one’s choice, and finally, believe it or not, the last course in the sequence featured poetry, a Shakespeare play, and one by a modern.

As I said, that was many moons ago.  Back then the writing program was under the purview—curricularly and adminstratively—of the English Department.  One has to say I think that these literary texts were a kind of fixed curriculum.  The sequence wasn’t arranged around mastering different sorts of writing skills, but around making sure students got a taste of poetry, the novel, and some short stories.  One administrator, I remember, expressed some dismay when the writing program became the writing program and did away with the literature part.  Now, he said, it will be possible for a student to graduate the university without having read a single play by Shakespeare.

True enough, I guess, though not sufficient reason to teach him in a writing course.  I wasn’t sure however that the reasons my more compositionally inclined colleagues gave for not teaching him were all that good.  They seemed to be saying—and this seemed the only coherent reason they could give for not teaching Shakespeare—that the content of a writing course was most properly writing and not Shakespeare.  I think teaching Shakespeare and poetry made my compositionalist colleagues feel insecure because they felt Shakespeare was a content, or disciplinary knowledge upon which one need be expert to mount the podium and pontificate.

I didn’t understand this at all; for while, yes, I had at one time been an English Major, but I had taken only one—and it was poorly taught—class on Shakespeare in my entire college career, undergraduate and graduate, and did not feel myself an expert at all.  This didn’t bother me one whit because I did not teach Shakespeare as content.  I wasn’t concerned about saying something about his work that was inaccurate because I didn’t try to say anything about him except that which might give students the confidence to read him and then to write something upon him.  I did not, for example, talk about the “nature of tragedy.”  Heaven forbid.  Given the way I approached the teaching of Shakespeare I thought his works were just as good as many and perhaps better than some works as a stimulus and catalyst for student writing.

 I was troubled also by the other side of this equation.  For the argument against teaching Shakespeare appeared to pit one content—in this case—Shakespeare against some other “content” specific to and definitive of the writing classroom.  But as I have argued, the writing classroom has no content per se or qua content.  None.  That some in the “discipline” of writing think otherwise is quite disturbing at least from a theoretical perspective and in the light of sound reasoning.  In the “real” world of course one does what one has to do.  But this idea that the content of the writing class is writing has had and continues to have pernicious effects.  I hold this idea responsible for the many teachers, usually beginning ones and Teaching Assistants, that feel one has not done one’s duty as a writing instructor unless one has managed to reduce students to complete confusion by lecturing on and on about coming up with a “thesis statement.”

I managed though to scotch the argument about burgers by bringing up my Volkswagen theory.  This is a general theory that I have applied on different occasions to express my concern with the proliferation of objects or items that all do the same thing. I used it for example to critique all those different kinds of cameras I had begun to see or all those different kinds of watches.  So I applied it to the burger and said I didn’t understand why we didn’t have just One Burger.  What the hell was the difference?  A burger was a burger was a burger, wasn’t it.  Why not a sort of Volksburger for all the people?

Man, you would have thought I advocated killing the Pope or something.  No, they insisted; a Mac’s burger was not the same as a Jack’s burger, and neither of those were the same as a Carl’s Junior, and nothing matched Burger King burger.  They weren’t just amazed at my apparent stupidity but a little bit angry.  A Volksburger seemed to them down right Un-American.  Inside listening to them, I had one of my too frequent what am I doing here and who are these people moments.  For these young people, I felt, with a sinking heart, freedom was the freedom to pick, buy, and eat the burger of your choice.

This was some time in the early 90’s and looking back I can now see that I was already dealing with the influence of consumerism.  My Volksburger theory ran completely contrary to that proliferation of objects that constitutes choice in the consumer society.  While communism was not the bug-a-boo it had once been, I, as an advocate of the Volksburger, seemed to advocate a drab sort of society where everybody wore the same thing—usually something brown and sack like—and were all really automatons because they ate the same burger.  Unlike us--I mean Americans--who wear all sorts of different things and can choose freely among a vast array of possible burgers.

My concern with the development of the individual didn’t arise directly out of such episodes.  The idea had been with me long before that and is related to my own personal history.  Hell, the title of my dissertation was “Romantic Thought: Education and Alienation” (1980).  At that time, I had thought I would be a teacher of literature, but looking now at the title of my dissertation, I think I was unconsciously, and semi-consciously, concerned with the effects of education and its possible role in the development of the individual.  Maybe Hegel’s Bildugn.

Perhaps I am projecting, as is always possible, but episodes like this (multiply by a 100 or so) led me, rather despairingly, to feel that these young people actually believed that one’s individuality was somehow related to things that one purchased and sometimes ate.  I just didn’t think a person could buy individuality.  It didn’t come along with an enlarged bank account.  I thought and still do, vaguely I admit, that individuality was not a given.  One was not born it; it was not a right of the individual.  One became an individual—if that’s what one wanted to become—and becoming one was a lot of hard work.  The labor of the negative, as Hegel might have said.

One might ask, I suppose, why a writing teacher reflects so much on education.  I think it’s the teacher part. And the writing part.  As a writing teacher, I don’t have content or a specialized knowledge to impart to students—like math or the history of England.  I do, of course, have content in my writing courses, but it’s not fixed or something either about which I am expert.  I keep changing the content or it keeps changing.  Next quarter, I will teach a class linked to Sociology and basic sociology will be the content of the course.

And in the basic freestanding courses I always have content too.  For example I have been teaching something called Writing for the Social Sciences.  I am no expert in the social sciences, but I offer a topic that I hope social science students can write about.  For about four, maybe five years, I used the topic of “Eating in America.”  Then I grew weary of reading about people getting fat, so I changed the topic to the Consumer Society.  Partly, though I changed, not just to get away from obesity, but because for our basic research writing course I had taught something on the American family.  That topic, along with the fat topic, led me to believe that I had fallen asleep somewhere around 1985.

My readings in fat and the family made me aware that some pretty amazing changes had been taking place in the USA since about 1980.  I had noticed them, I suppose, or been vaguely cognizant, but I hadn’t tried to study them directly or to make some sort of systematic sense out of them, so I switched to the consumer society.  That seemed to offer me, at least, a frame by which to digest or make sense of all the disparate info I was getting about markets, niche markets, cows and beef, brands, our experiential distance from what we eat, credit card debt, the growing income gap, health care and the death of the medical profession.

That last topic—the death of the medical profession--arouse out of teaching a writing course for students seeking to enter the medical professions.

I picked these topics for my own reasons and I have always tried to find a “content” that students might know something about and that might at least slightly pique their interest.  Who isn’t interested in food?  Thus Eating in America. I thought students might be interested because I knew that they ate, and once, a number of years before, an In-n-Out Burger franchise had moved into our area, and while, driving by it on the freeway, I noticed, on the day of its opening, a huge line of cars extending from the parking out of sight on down the street.

What’s up, I wondered, and asked my students, the next day, about In-n-Out, and a discussion erupted (is the right word) about burgers and which was the best burger and so on.  And vigorous debate centered on French Fries, some arguing that In-n-Out Fries were the worst, and others argued that they were really French fries and very fresh because you could see them making them on the spot.  One kid defended In-n-Out mightily, and admitted, when I expressed my consternation at anyone waiting that long in a car to get a burger, that he had made a special trip to In-n-Out because he wanted to be there at the opening, as if the opening of an In-n-Out was like the opening of the baseball season.  And when it came out that they had screwed up his order, you could tell he was really upset.  Like going to the first day of baseball season and having the game rained out.  He was really disappointed.

This might appear confusing and I suppose it is.  On one hand, I appear to want to claim that education can assist in the development of the individual.  Certainly, at the heart of this development would be shifts in one’s epistemology.  However, I appear also to want to claim that a person with a highly complex epistemology, like K and K’s graduate student, may not, by virtue of his or her education, have developed as an individual.

I have said this because I do believe that the university as an institution seeks to perpetuate itself and thus culls from the great mass of students those people who might best assist in its perpetuation.  Who are these people more exactly?  I would suggest they are people, a particular group of people, whose intellect, as a part of their particular psychological configuration, is more detached from the emotional realm than is the case with most people.

This does not make such people “smarter.”  Rather it means only that they are able to shift to the complex epistemology of the university more easily than might be the case with persons whose intellect remains relatively rooted in the emotional realm. Education, as I think of it, may not require of the former, given their detached intellects, development at deeper psychological levels.  Education, as I think of it, may require, however, of the latter, a developmental move, with its attendant destabilization and affective discharge, not because they are not as smart as the former, but because their intellect is not detached from but rooted in their emotional universe.

Educational institutions, such as the university, may feel they are doing their jobs, that indeed they are educating, because they appear to educate some relatively few persons into become “graduate students” and perhaps later themselves professors.  I am arguing however that the university, as currently constituted, does not “educate” these individuals but culls from the great group of students those whose relation to the intellect and its activities permits them, with relatively little psychological turmoil, to assume towards knowledge that position favored by the university.

I express this roughly.  But the psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott, has argued that some individuals at the earliest stages of development and in relation to a particular set of circumstances may develop a relation to the mind as an object.  The mind as object becomes detached from emotional or subjective realm, but at the same time serves those individuals for him it has become detached as a stabilizing and anchoring object.  Such people find the activity of the mind particularly satisfying and may turn to it not as a way of understanding or coming to grips with the conflicts of the emotional universe but as a way of stepping, however momentarily out of it.

Such people experience endlessly chewing over a particular intellectual puzzle not as an exercise as futility, but as enlivening and stabilizing. Such people may, in fact, find consolation in philosophy.  I have wondered about my own inclination, over the years, when enveloped in a certain kind of depression, to actually WANT to read Hegel, and to find, as I struggled with his tortured meanings, if not release, at least distraction, however fleeting and momentary, from the weight of my depression. Other people, under such circumstances, might bake a cake.

K and K wish to link stages of epistemological development (or attitudes towards how one knows or doesn’t) to moral development.  In this light, the moral position of B might be superior to A.  I am, however, unwilling to accept a link between epistemological development and moral development.  Or to put this a little more clearly, I am unwilling or unable to say that because a person has been to graduate school that his or her moral judgment is superior to someone who hasn’t.

The conception of education that I am trying to elucidate, in any case, does not aim at the creation and/or production of graduate students but at the cultivation or development of individuals.  Going to graduate school does not of course not make one an individual; but surely going to graduate school does not guarantee either that one is an individual.  That academics might, of course, tend to privilege or to take as moral development epistemological development makes sense of course.  Universities seek, as do most institutions, to perpetuate themselves.

 Universities, like the Marines, are always looking for a few good mostly men and some women.  Professors, or epistemological workers, are consistently on the look out for people who show the potential for thinking like themselves.  Curried and favored these few individuals are encouraged to sign on with the university and once they have they are thrown into the boot camp of graduate school.  This is no more than to say that birds of a feather flock together.

The desire of educational institutions to perpetuate themselves has more to do with the creation of tribes (or flocks) than it has to do with the cultivation or development of the individual.  I have felt and continue to feel that the members of the university may at times be entirely too comfortable with “uncertainty.”  This may be a very valuable thing in the realm of “science” and knowledge production, but not a valuable thing in the realm of action.  Or more precisely, uncertainty in the realm of action tends to take one out of one’s comfort zone rather than put one in it in the realm of knowledge pursuit.

In the realm of action, as William James said, skepticism is not operational.  Beliefs sustain and guide persons in their actions, and they are “beliefs” and not knowledge because it is impossible to know if one’s actions will have the effects or the consequences that one intends.  For example, should I join the Army now, or live at home, work, and seek a degree at the local community college.  Or should I marry X who clearly loves me and whom I love or risk losing X while I pursue a career that may take me to another part of the country.  

Uncertainty in the realm of action can very easily produce the very unpleasant discomfort—far, far more uncomfortable than the uncertainty of skepticism—of intense anxiety.  As Sartre suggests, we may in such situations employ all sorts of rationalizations, excuses, and psychological maneuvers to conceal the anxiety that arises from choice.