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I’m struck by how many of my cohort thought they were headed for junior faculty, who’ve become data managers or advocates for women in science or some non-teaching role. There were a few of my colleagues who wound up running academic programs, like a travel study program. An associated thing that wasn’t what they’d set out to do

“Paul,” ten year adjunct faculty quoted in The Adjunct Underclass

Sixty-eight years ago, the renowned sociologist Erving Goffman wrote an ingenious essay called “On Cooling the Mark Out,” a study of how con men kept their “marks” from losing confidence and calling the cops. I’ve written before about how precisely Goffman’s language mirrors that of Damon Runyon and Guys and Dolls:

A mark’s participation in a play, and his investment in it, clearly commit him in his own eyes to the proposition that he is a smart man. The process by which he comes to believe that he cannot lose is also the process by which he drops the defenses and compensations that previously protected him from defeats. When the blowoff comes, the mark finds that he has no defense for not being a shrewd man. He has defined himself as a shrewd man and must face the fact that he is only another easy mark. He has defined himself as possessing a certain set of qualities and then proven to himself that he is miserably lacking in them… It is no wonder that the mark needs to be cooled out and that it is good business policy for one of the operators to stay with the mark in order to talk him into a point of view from which it is possible to accept a loss. In essence, then, the cooler has the job of handling persons who have been caught out on a limb—persons whose expectations and self‐conceptions have been built up and then shattered. The mark is a person who has compromised himself, in his own eyes if not in the eyes of others.

Goffman notes, in fact, that it’s more important for institutional cons to cool the mark than it is for street-corner hustlers: “One may note that a service organization does not operate in an anonymous world, as does a con mob, and is therefore strongly obliged to make some effort to cool the mark out. An institution, after all, cannot take it on the lam; it must pacify its marks.” That unproductive PhD program can’t just beat it and catch a bus to Poughkeepsie; it has to stay put and drag more people into the net, and so must calm its losers.

In Goffman’s analysis, there are two primary modes of cooling the mark. The first is to “offer him a status which differs from the one he has lost or failed to gain but which provides at least a something or a somebody for him to become.”

How many hundreds of thousands of former mid-level athletes now coach in pee-wees and high school and community college and independent leagues? How many lapsed high-school jocks are now in college, majoring in sports administration or athletic training?

How many artists run galleries, or write grant proposals for nonprofits, or teach life drawing and intro to watercolor at the local community college? How many poets teach freshman comp?

How many fully qualified scholars teach as adjuncts for three or four grand per course? How many become academic advisors, run the tutoring center, direct the women’s center?

How many novelists park their work on the hard drive in order to write news copy, or edit the work of others? Become a corporate media director, a book reviewer, a pop-culture writer?

The Washington Post reported a few years ago that the Washington Nationals baseball team employed about 200 players at all levels of major and minor leagues, and over 1,100 other employees, from business operations to travel management to chefs and trainers. Rob McDonald, the Vice President of Clubhouse Operations and Team Travel, was a perfect example of a former athlete who used a quasi-athletic job to stay close to the action:

McDonald grew up outside St. Louis, went to Northern Illinois to play quarterback, moved to wide receiver, then suffered a back injury that ended his football career. He transferred to the University of Arizona, studied pre-law, and decided he preferred the pursuit of a career in pro sports over law school. So he worked in Tucson rec leagues, then for a sports radio station in Phoenix, then for the Arizona Diamondbacks in spring training before landing in the Arizona Fall League, where baseball’s best prospects go each year.

Barry Svrluga, “The Glue,” Washington Post, September 22, 2014

Colleges especially are full of ways to cool the academic mark. Student services, IT, co-curricular offices, assessment and institutional research, grants offices, financial aid, registrar, admissions—so many functions that welcome those who are fluent in the language and practices of higher education, but who will not themselves get to participate in the life of teaching and scholarship. I used to describe being a college administrator as like living next door to your old girlfriend—you got to see her every day, but you’d always be reminded of the life you’d never, ever have. It’s a way of life that’s similar, but not congruent, to the work you’d dreamed of doing. You get paid, sometimes pretty well, to endure a very specific form of cruelty.

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The second strategy Goffman lays out for cooling the mark is to “offer him another chance to qualify for the role at which he has failed.” The arts are terrific at this: there’s always another fellowship to write for, another residency, another group show. Every Starbucks needs something on the walls. The writers’ magazines are laden with short story competitions, the prize for which almost always includes having your work actually read by someone important. Maybe only televangelists exceed the arts in their demands to be sucked up to without giving anything back except promises. Con men always promise. Twenty dollar entry fee, please; tithing as our shared act of contrition and fealty.

We publish in the little magazines, paid in two contributor’s copies, read by an audience in the high dozens. But it’s printed, after all, with our names on it and everything. Unless it isn’t, unless it’s an online journal, in which case we just put the URL into our CV and hope they keep paying the registration fees for that domain name.

Parafaculty life is the same. Every year brings its new job market, new possibilities to which we rise like trout to the fly. And mostly, we find that the colleges practice catch-and-release; we’re taken up for a semester and returned to the hungry stream. But because we aren’t as smart as trout, we hang around, hoping to be caught again. We hear the murmurs of affection, from our students and our department chair, and believe that we’re accomplishing… something. Something unnamed but clearly positive, clearly productive, demonstrating our qualifications and our goodwill and our capability of being a good permanent partner if only, if only.

To return to Hans Abbing’s book that we discussed yesterday, he makes several comparisons between life in the arts and life in religious vocations. “According to an early US census report, only employees of the church faced larger income penalties than artists; it again suggests that there is a parallel between art and religion. Both invite employees to make sacrifices.” We imagine ourselves participating in something sacred, and are willing to forego earthly comforts to attain a larger reward.

The salespeople know it’s a business. Salespeople always do. But what they sell is a prosperity gospel in which our poverty is merely evidence of our insufficient faith. They tell us that our dedication and talent are similar, but not congruent, to those more righteous who have attained their promised seat in heaven. But they hold out hope, so that we persist.

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Guess what, friends? This is the 199th little essay in the fourteen-month run of this website. Tomorrow will be posting #200. I’ll throw us a party.

Given that today is May 1, I thought it would be a good day to talk about work and money. Happy Workers’ Day, and thank you to all who work in hidden backstage ways to make our lives better.

It’s interesting that the two professions I write most about, writers and college faculty members, are both winner-takes-all markets, in which a handful of practitioners are handsomely rewarded and economically secure, and most scuffle together what they can on the freelance market. My friend Aimee pointed me to a wonderful book by Hans Abbing, called Why Are Artists Poor? The Exceptional Economy of the Arts (Amsterdam University Press, 2002). Abbing wrote this book from a nearly unique standpoint: he’s an academically trained economist who is also a recognized painter and photographer. The book is an attempt for Abbing to reconcile the cognitive dissonance created by living simultaneously within those two logic systems. Lots of sections of the book contain a construction that shows him actively comparing his two mutually exclusive beliefs, such as this one:

Although I actually earn a substantial portion of my income through the market, as an artist I am convinced that aesthetic value is independent of market value. But as an economist, I disagree with this. As an economist I believe that quality in general corresponds with success in the market. (54)

Must be exhausting to live inside that head. To his great credit, rather than trying to gloss or elide these contradictions, Abbing has spent much of his academic career trying to understand exactly why they diverge and how they might cohere. His conclusion frames the subtitle of this book: the arts represents an exceptional economy, which behaves in specific and knowable ways that are dissimilar to the economies of manufacture or service.

The book is full of takeaway quotes, and is totally worth your time. (You can read and download the entire book at oapen.org, the European academic open-access consortium.) But given that it’s May Day, I want to focus on one particular aspect, the notion of the winner-take-all market.

There exists a number of markets where a large and often increasing part of consumer spending ends up in the pockets of a small number of producers, while the majority of the producers earn little or nothing. Those near the top secure a disproportionate share of the particular market’s income. . . For instance, professional tennis players operate in a ‘winner-takes-all’ market. There are thousands of tennis players all over the world offering high quality performances, but only a select few earns the big incomes, while the vast majority cannot even earn a basic living from playing tennis. (54)

I’ve long been interested in people who are nearly but not quite at the pinnacle of their chosen fields, and who because of that can’t practice them at all. As an example, pick any college baseball player at random: that person would be the best baseball player you’ve ever met, an elite athlete with rarified skills, truly praiseworthy. Maybe one percent of those will go on to make a living (for a brief while) playing baseball, if even for the Lowell Spinners or the El Paso Chihuahuas or the Richmond Flying Squirrels. A tiny percentage of those minor league players will make a major league roster somewhere. So much remarkable talent goes unrecognized and unutilized.

But I think Abbing leads us down a side road by using athletes as his example. Tennis players are engaged in a knowable, objective competition in which one will empirically be better than the other. A career of those empirical outcomes leads some players to be Serena Williams, and others to be Haley Giavara, the world’s #732 ranked women’s player who has made $12,724 in her career. Haley is a starter on the UC Berkeley tennis team, a brilliant player. But the current world #1, Ashleigh Barty of Australia, has already made $17,594,569 at the age of 24. It would be like if the 700th-best carpenter in the US made about thirty cents an hour.

Most professions don’t have an empirical mechanism for determining relative quality, or perhaps for defining quality at all. Those markets are externally influenced: by credentialling systems (passing the bar exam, for instance, or getting a barber’s license), or by a community of gatekeepers. Both of those serve to maximize income for those deemed to be “inside the professions,” and to eliminate the possibility of meaningful competition by those outside.

I absolutely don’t mean to suggest that those restrictions are a bad idea. In law and cosmetology, we want some certification that our practitioner knows what she’s doing, isn’t just making an unwarranted claim to competency. In the arts, in writing… well, we’ve all been to the local craft show, and the world of electronic self-publishing will tell you an awful lot about the gradients of storytelling capability. Nobody has time to winnow through all of that.

And frankly, the gatekeepers don’t, either. There are too many of us who are trying to enter the market, and we can’t all be judged on the merits of our work. So proxies and personalities come into play:

Gatekeepers have an information advantage that allows them to monopolize the discourse, which in turn enables them to easily exclude both artists and experts who do not understand the discourse well enough. (269) Gatekeepers decide on who to let in (to attain a certain reputation) and those who are to be kept out. In fact, participants in the discourse occasionally let artists in by granting them a favorable reputation, while others are rejected or are stripped of their favorable reputations. This way the favorable reputation of the insider artists can be protected. (272)

That “reputation” is generated by facts that lie outside any specific piece of work. Aspiring artists and academics alike are notorious CV polishers. Every award, every show, every mention in the media—all part of our permanent record. We present it to the gatekeepers, to edge our new work to the front of the line; we gaze at it in the mirror, to convince ourselves that our work has mattered.

And every one of those gatekeepers relies on gatekeepers before them. An MFA from Columbia weighs more than an MFA from across the river at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. A distance far greater than the nominal hundred miles separates the MFAs from the University of Michigan and Western Michigan University; the two equivalent degrees are tickets to entirely different kinds of conversations. Literary editors are loathe to read unagented work, and the agentry community itself uses the word “slush” to designate the writing (and by extension, the writers) who must be cleared from the porch before the real workday can actually start. Each of those offers a simple binary of consideration: do you have the reputation that makes you worthy of scarce attention, or are you safely ignored?

The value of reputation is what economists would refer to as a market distortion, in which some external factors prevent product A for price $A from being set directly against product B offered at price $B. Most products, from prospective faculty and prospective artists and prospective writers, have no access to a meaningful marketplace at all.

More tomorrow.

As you might have seen with the most recent two posts, I’ve had a fraught couple of days. So Nora and I had a long talk last night, a lot of which had to do with the functions that writing accomplishes in the world. It was pretty wonderful, and made me realize all over again just how lucky I am.

She’s described a lot of my work in the wake of The Adjunct Underclass as “academic chaplaincy,” talking with people by phone or by email to help them know that they’re not alone. Even the book itself did that work, letting readers of all stripes know that the emotional dislocation and disrespect they experienced was normal, should be expected, wasn’t shameful, wasn’t a weakness. I said to Nora that my fiction was intended to have that same effect. All of my stories, no matter when or where they’re set, are about someone who has done all the right things, looks successful enough from the outside, and feels as though they haven’t reached what they’d hoped for. Or had quit hoping altogether. And my stories are there to say to readers, It’s normal to feel stuck. It’s normal to feel like your success doesn’t look like it showed in the catalog. But you have the capabilities already within you to reinvent yourself. You don’t have to accept who and where you are. There’s more possible. It’s an attempt to offer a different mode of chaplaincy, through fiction.

And Nora said something really interesting, which I’ll paraphrase since I wasn’t taking notes and it was eleven o’clock at night. She said, “I’ve never looked to fictional characters for role models or life lessons. I’ve never looked at a character, no matter how much I’ve identified with them, and thought that I could take lessons for my own progress.” And I think that’s not surprising; she’s an ethnographer down to the bone, learning about others, constantly focused on the experiences and the welfare of those around her. She reads with empathy, learning what it must be like to inhabit those circumstances, that time and place, that culture, that body. She focuses outward.

I guess I’m more selfish. I read lots of things both to imagine those lives and to re-imagine my own. We can go through all kinds of dollar-store psychology about what our reading says about our personalities, our ego stability or fragility. Whatever. I do think, though, that neither Nora’s nor my style of reading are idiosyncratic. Both modes exist in the world.

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I’ve written extensively about my desire to write hopeful books, to act as a countervailing force against a literary landscape that seems daily to become more lurid, more hopeless. That would, in the classic distinction, make me a writer of comedy (books with an upward arc) rather than tragedy (books with a downward arc). Comedy isn’t necessarily funny; it’s just about ascent rather than decline.

And just today, Katy Waldman in The New Yorker wrote about the work that comic novels do. I’ll leave aside her extended discussion of P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster books, and Richard Russo’s novel Straight Man, as well as her recommendations for comic novels worth reading during the quarantine. Instead, I’d like to highlight an important distinction between two different functions of comedy, a distinction that pretty closely mirrors Nora’s and my conversation of last night.

Waldman differentiates between stories intended to lighten our load and those intended to help us adjust and reshoulder our load:

Russo, whose protagonist often wavers between sorrow and hilarity, wants to emphasize that applying a comic framework to life is a choice. Hank refuses to play the straight man in his routine with the universe. Seriousness poses danger; better to make the cracks than to endure them. In this sense, Hank’s clowning illuminates his character, even invests it with tragedy, and Russo offers an alternative to the Wodehouse novels. Bertie is an innocent portrayed ironically; Hank is an ironist portrayed sincerely. One path leads to escapist distraction, whereas the other leads to a set of implied instructions: This is how humor might help—or fail to help—a person cope…. What is our disposition toward a fickle universe? Do we claim agency through humor? Or strive for a jolly and wide-eyed surrender?

Katy Waldman, “Two Paths for the Comic Novel (and the Funniest Books to Read in Quarantine), New Yorker, April 27, 2020

This is absolutely my experience. Some novels are about agency, about recognizing our absurdity and taking action nonetheless. And others are just fun, page-turners that help us get through a hard day. As Waldman says:

From an aesthetic perspective, one vision—pessimistic or optimistic, active or passive—isn’t better, or funnier, than another. But there’s a larger truth here. Before the shelter-in-place orders, I was not seeking out the books that made me laugh as a kid. Now I am. This fact somehow seems to get at the essence of comedy—an art that becomes more real, more fully itself, within a shared, tragic frame.

And that’s the work of comedy as chaplaincy, the recognition that things really ARE fucked up and that we have a responsibility to be honorable anyway.

A couple of years ago, I was at a writers’ conference held at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. One of the staples of those events is some venue where each participant, no matter how far along they might be in their career, is given the opportunity to do a brief public reading. At Bread Loaf, there’s the Blue Parlor; at VCFA, there were pre-dinner readings in which the members of each cohort got their time at the lectern. You get three minutes, or five minutes, to show what you can do.

As a college teacher, I’d done public speaking for a long time, and I know something about how to honor a circumstance like this. So at VCFA, I read an excerpt of my very first novel, a roughly three-minute piece that I knew would hang together without backstory, a piece that had some degree of sonic music to it.

Afterward, I interacted with several of the faculty at the event who said how much they’d appreciated my piece. But one in particular stuck with me, a poet who said, “When you started, I thought, ‘this isn’t going to be a subject I’m interested in.’ But you made it interesting, you made it matter to me.” She paused for the briefest moment, and said, “Where can I read more of your work? Are you published?”

“Not in fiction, no. I’ve sent it out quite a lot, but it hasn’t gotten any traction.”

“Well, people are just stupid.”

Well, yes. Yes, they are. And that’s the Chautauqua for today.

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In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig lays out a number of what he calls “gumption traps,” circumstances that can dispel one’s attempts toward Quality. He divides them into two kinds:

The first type are those in which you’re thrown off the Quality track by conditions that arise from external circumstances, and I call these “set-backs.” The second type are traps in which you’re thrown off the Quality track by conditions that are primarily within yourself. These I don’t have any generic name for—”hang-ups,” I suppose. (299)

Pirsig lays out several set-backs. There’s the out-of-sequence assembly, in which you’ve got the thing almost back together before you discover some step you should have done long before, an oversight that requires disassembling all the work you’ve done. There’s the intermittent failure, the thing that works fine when you go to examine it on the bench, so you put it to use again and discover the same problem. There’s the parts set-back, in which the part you need either isn’t available, or you forgot to get it when you went to the shop, or it wasn’t manufactured right and doesn’t actually fit where it’s supposed to go.

The hang-ups (or “traps”) also come in a three-pack, and Pirsig claims that the traps are far more damaging, and common, than the set-backs. First, there are value traps, in which your preconceived diagnosis of a problem prevents you from actually looking at what’s in front of you. Your preconceived diagnosis of the problem may also be about yourself as a problem-solver. About your ego, or your anxiety, or your impatience, or your boredom. The problem itself doesn’t change because of your anxiety or impatience, but your ability to understand it and address it absolutely does.

There are truth traps, in which we presume that we’ve framed a question in which all of the possible answers can be named, but by its very framing, leads us toward unhelpful answers. Pirsig uses the Japanese Zen teaching of mu as a useful response to that framing. The answer may be neither yes nor no, but mu, which can best be translated as “unask the question.” The best way I can explain truth traps is through the conversation we had a couple of days ago about metaphor. It may be that the very metaphor we hold for what a phenomenon is, is exactly what prevents us from asking better questions about it.

Finally, there are muscle traps. Bad tools, uncomfortable working conditions, and insufficient feel or tactile memory. The things that cause us to make physical mistakes, break parts, burn ourselves or rack our knuckles.

Pirsig drew both the setbacks and the hangups from his own long experience of mechanical work, the “motorcycle maintenance” part of his title. But I think they all apply to writers as well. The external setbacks certainly exist. We put things together in the wrong order, and have to go back and disassemble. Every writer in a workshop knows the experience of having ten radically different reactions to a story, and ten different diagnoses about the location of the flaw and the prescribed remedy.

And, as with mechanical life, the hangups are even more serious. We stop ourselves by our anxiety, we press forward with a bad idea out of ego, we truncate a scene through impatience. We use the wrong metaphor to contain our ideas, and imagine we’re writing a book about some theme instead of letting the characters tell us what themes they’re living. We write in awkward places, at bad times. (Joyce Carol Oates says that the nemesis of the writer isn’t lack of talent, it’s interruption.)

But although writers face the same array of gumption traps as motorcycle mechanics, we have our own special array to add on. As the poet Philip Larkin has it, They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you.

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So there’s a literary agent who has a blog. It was recommended in an article I once read, and as someone always on the search for the key to the castle, I went there and read it for a while, even participated in the discussions for a few months.

It was miserable. The agent herself, with decades of experience, used the blog mostly to complain about writers’ misguided aspirations, or about whatever injustices she felt burdened by that day. It was a cynical stew. And several of her regular comment participants were abrasive, confrontational, mean-spirited. (That blog, in fact, is why I decided not to enable the comments on this one. There’s always someone who wants nothing more than to pee in the pool.) So after about four months, I let it go, stopped visiting.

But here we are in Covidland, all sitting at home without even random errands to run or a restaurant to visit. We need some things to do. So I made the mistake of going back to see what this agent had been up to recently. Her most recent post began:

Lately, lots of off-the-wall submissions. Definitely feels like end of days. And as always they evoke a spectrum of feelings and reactions in me. First, self-pity. Why me? Why do I get these letters and why do I feel I have to answer. Next, annoyance. Can you not be bothered to do a a simple Google search and discover that I’m not interested in self-help, how-to, sci-fi, fantasy, new age and books on spirituality? Books on spirituality in particular enrage me. Then there’s the writing thing. Most people who get published work at their writing for YEARS. These query letters generally come from people who just turned on an Apple for the first time and believe that whatever comes out deserves to be published. 

I had my own “spectrum of feelings and emotions” about this, which I’ll spare you. But all that reactive fizz settled quickly, of no more consequence than the bitters that foamed it up in the first place. And the residue that separated out was a third form of gumption trap, perhaps unique to the creative fields, which we might call the misdirection trap. In creative fields, we’re told to work on our craft, to seek out opportunities for growth, to demonstrate our individual capability. Talent and effort, talent and effort, we om to ourselves, like dwarves off to the mines.

And then we find that the seats we’d earned through our craft and labor are already filled by the Harvard kids and the NYU kids who had enough parental money to run their own magazines for a few years without getting paid, who got into the right parties and had the right people mention their names in conversations. We discovered that our PhD or MFA from the wrong school was a counterfeit currency that couldn’t be spent, no matter how much the salespeople had touted it, no matter how much we’d learned and been published.

That’s what literary agents get paid for. To insert your name into the right conversations, to sell you a card or two from their Rolodex, to overcome your social shortcomings with outboard connections that they’ll lease to you if they feel like it. But the world of agentry is opaque. We send our materials, after hours of research, to an agent who never responds. Or who responds with a form letter about how “it’s not right for my list,” but that writing is a subjective business and someone else might LOVE your deformed offering. We have no feedback from which to learn, merely silence.

So then to discover occasionally that those people don’t merely ignore us but actively demean us—well, that just a hard fact of the world to encounter. In Pirsig’s words, it knocks you off the Quality track, it makes it difficult to find the gumption to face the story again. All of us gullible, naive children who learned the word meritocracy early on and then discovered that its definition was entirely wrong… that sad shantytown of the poorly born, discovering that we are not merely blocked from the mansion but mocked by those inside… it makes you believe bad things about yourself. Beliefs that aren’t warranted, but that have to stand in the absence of other evidence. Beliefs that make trying again just seem wrong-headed and feeble.

I’ll write again, soon, because the writing is always worth it. In the novel I’ve been working on for the past three months, Cassie is just now starting to trust me enough to show me who she is, and the growth of her story will be its own reward. But the thought of putting that story and all the others on the table for sale again is gruesome. I can’t even think about it, or it wipes all of my good will away for hours. For me, it is the biggest gumption trap of them all.

I’ll close where I began, with my colleague the poet and her elegant refrain, “Well, people are just stupid.” The question is: who among us does that best describe?

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I’ve mentioned before that I get updates every couple of days from Random House, with new entries in some category or another. Yesterday, I was asked to Fall In Love with This April’s Romances.

It doesn’t take a decade of architecture school to notice that there’s some kind of graphic-design collusion going on here. (And not all of these are from Random House; I browsed in Goodreads and found these and dozens of others just like them.) Whether the romance in question is straight or gay, whether the couple are white or multiracial, romance books this season are cartoons. Solid, saturated colors edge to edge. Big, blocky text with no borders or shading. The couple in question portrayed by drawn figures, barely more than silhouettes, their clothing and hair also only blocks of solid saturated colors.

Publishing, which we wish were more about individual stories, is really about product, as is true of most industries. (Certainly it’s true of colleges, which have to make their own products uniform enough to be transferred across schools and adhere to disciplinary-society standards.) These books are being sold as just nine different flavors of Doritos, the same chip with different powder, the same bag with different colors, the same general experience with a little twist.

So the literary agent community—just salespeople in the end, like Realtors who have to make each unique home into a commodity—start to ask for these categories, with all of the expectations that they entail. Fads abound, rocketing and exploding and fading into the night. Here’s a bet; romance covers won’t look like this in three years. Some other flavor profile will have taken the fore.

And in closing, let me say this. If one of my fiction books is ever published, they can do whatever they want with the graphic design of the cover; that’s product design, not storytelling. But I promise you that I will fight every last step to ensure that the words “A Novel” do not appear anywhere. What the hell is that even about? I mean, they’re not cookbooks. They don’t look like SAT prep guides, or nonfiction history, or religious tracts. We’d find them in the fiction section of the bookstore. Of course they’re novels! Are we so afraid of collections of short stories that we have to have some kind of safety seal on the book cover? Bah.

I’ll write more tomorrow about why I’ve been so crabby the past couple of days. It’ll help me get over it.

So yesterday we talked a little about the ontological work of the metaphor, that a metaphor represents a base-level claim about what a thing is. So what is a college?

We know what a college does, but that’s different. A college brings people together to take and to deliver courses, and sometimes to conduct research. That’s its role, not its essence. It’s remarkable how many different definitions people bring to the core nature of a college.

A college can be thought of fundamentally as a business. It’s a specific kind of business, to be sure, but so is Starbucks or Sony or your neighborhood tattoo salon. What a business sells is irrelevant to its nature as a business, with its financial responsibilities and outcomes. This kind of examination of a college leads to sentences like this, in today’s Chronicle of Higher Ed email briefing: “If you don’t know the cost of your college’s programs and departments, and their return on investment, this information is essential.” ROI has become its own metaphysical master term, a thing people say when they want to sound sophisticated.

A college can be thought of fundamentally as a member of its community. Community colleges, by name and definition, are built to be one organ within the urban body. But that same role is played by innumerable lesser state colleges, who pay local people to educate the local kids for local lives. The Chancellor of the Vermont State Colleges, who can read a spreadsheet as well as the rest of us, last week proposed the closing of the two campuses of Northern Vermont University and one campus of the Vermont Technical College. This led State Senator Richard Westman to say “It will have devastating effects to all of the Northeast Kingdom, all of Lamoille County, and all of the region across the northern part of the state.” Those devastating effects had nothing to do with education; they were about state subsidies and the jobs they create, the peripheral jobs they sustain.

A college can be thought of fundamentally as a branch of government. As such, its role might be to provide opportunity to those who have less social and economic capital, just as other branches of government take responsibility for children and the elderly and those who are ill and homeless. Government, in the great configuration of Jane Jacobs, is by necessity a countervailing force to business; it keeps rapaciousness in check, and provides opportunities that businesses don’t find profitable but that citizens deserve.

The diametrically opposed definition of a college is to be the training arm for industry. Its fundamental role is to serve businesses with young people ready to go onto the assembly line, whatever form that might take. It’s an apprenticeship program with specific, nameable client employers awaiting newcomers.

There are colleges that configure themselves as empires, based only on acquisition and dominance. Harvard and NYU and Duke are basically the Dutch West India Corporation of the 20th and 21st centuries. There are colleges that are fiefdoms, in which all endeavors are conducted for the benefit and vanity of its president-overlord. And there are colleges that are God’s instrument, doing the earthly work of some deity or another. Sometimes these three are hard to tell apart.

This would all be merely interesting, an ethnographic study of varied language habits, except that these fundamental definitions determine the internal and external relations of the institution. The responsibility that a business bears to its employees (none) creates one form of faculty life; the responsibility that a community member bears to its employees and the larger local economy (significant) creates a different form of faculty life. An endowment based on empire would be evaluated only through growth; an endowment of a branch of government is a running balance spent for service and support. An overpaid president of a business is a common symptom of our CEO culture and thoughts about the worth of scarce talents; an overpaid president of a fiefdom is simply receiving the tribute that they are natively due from their subjects.

We might imagine that different lineages of ethical thought are interesting ideas that we deliberate and choose. But I think they’re just the set of relationship rules that are inherent within the underlying definition of an institution. An ethic of justice posits us as discrete individuals with competing interests that must be reconciled; an ethic of care posits us as existing within webs of relationships that have their own reality; a utilitarian ethic posits us as entries within a larger social balance sheet, “the greater good” devised as a simple mathematical function.

So listen closely to what colleges say, even in their most trivial (and thus least guarded) messages. What kind of relationships and responsibilities and actions are they proposing as native to their identity? If their messages seem to rely on a unified underlying metaphor, believe it. If not, question its coherence as an enterprise, and where the fault lines lie.

The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in the dissimilar.

Aristotle

Well, thanks, dude!

When Nora and I started Teleidoscope Group seven years ago, we gave ourselves the job titles we wanted, instead of the normal CEO or President or such nonsense. I became the Director of Metaphor, and Nora, who has an innate capability of luring anybody into a rich conversation, became the Director of Dialogue.

Aristotle’s attribution of genius aside, I don’t know why I’ve always been drawn to see things in terms of other things. We all do this, of course, but we don’t always know that we’re doing it, and so we don’t think about alternatives. And metaphors always have alternatives.

A simile or other comparison is a simple affair. X is like Y, because they share some common feature. It’s a tool for noticing. A metaphor, on the other hand, is an ontological claim about what a thing is. When we wrestle or grapple with ideas, we mean that those ideas are dangerous opponents that we need to master. When we come to terms with ideas, we mean that truth is a bargain that we need to negotiate. When we interrogate an idea, we mean that it’s concealing its truth from us and we need to get past its superficial alibi. The way we define and approach any problem is based on what we think the problem is.

Twenty years ago, I spent some time in all four of California’s state mental hospitals. (As a consultant, not an inhabitant, thank you very much.) Those hospitals had become mostly populated by people who had arrived due to some form of court sentence: not competent to stand trial, not guilty by reason of insanity, and a special population that the Legislature had invented in 1995, the sexually violent predator who had served his prison term but was deemed unsafe for general release.

Those hospitals were governed simultaneously by two opposing metaphors. The security perimeter, the entry protocols, the restrictions against contraband, all of that came from seeing those institutions as prisons. And they were. They were guarded and set apart from the civilian world by the California Department of Corrections. But once you got through the sallyport and into the units, you were in a hospital, governed by the California Department of Mental Health. And those two communities despised each other, because they each saw everything about the place through their own governing metaphor. The prison guards saw the mental health staff as naive coddlers, and the residents as inmates; the mental health staff saw the prison guards as punitive and draconian, and the residents as patients. One institution was being simultaneously overseen by two communities with two fundamentally different definitions of what the institution was. You can guess how well that worked.

I think it’s far easier to change someone’s mind than to change their metaphor. Once someone has decided that social life is a Darwinian competition over scarce resources, no argument based on collaboration stands a chance. Once someone brings out the word “liberty,” it’s difficult to ask that they temper their behavior in favor of responsibility. If metaphors are fluid, then reality itself becomes fluid, and that’s just scary. It places lots more responsibility on us if we have to choose the metaphor we want to employ; safer to pretend that it just is what it is.

We think of language as a post hoc means of describing reality: the thing is there, sitting immaculate and innocent, and we decide how to talk about it. But I think it makes just as much sense to say that we create reality through language, that what we see and hear can only be known through the metaphors we’ve created to hold it. Your plans to pass a pleasant evening listening to Killswitch Engage can easily be disrupted by your dad hollering down the stairs, “Turn off that noise!” Same song, two definitions.

More tomorrow.

The school was what could euphemistically be called a “teaching college.” At a teaching college you teach and you teach and you teach with no time for research, no time for contemplation, no time for participation in outside affairs. Just teach and teach and teach until your mind grows dull and your creativity vanishes and you become an automaton saying the same dull things over and over to endless waves of innocent students who cannot understand why you are so dull, lose respect and fan this disrespect out into the community, The reason you teach and you teach and you teach is that this is a very clever way of running a college on the cheap while giving a false appearance of genuine education. (140)

When you’ve got a Chautauqua in your head, it’s extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people. (161)

[on teaching writing…] A student would always ask how the rule would apply in a certain special circumstance. Phaedrus would then have the choice of trying to fake through a made-up explanation of how it worked, or follow the selfless route and say what he really thought. And what he really thought was that the rule was pasted on to the writing after the writing was all done. It was post hoc, after the fact, instead of prior to the fact. And he became convinced that all the writers the students were supposed to mimic wrote without rules, putting down whatever sounded right, then going back to see if it still sounded right and changing it if it didn’t. There were some who apparently wrote with calculating premeditation because that’s the way their product looked. But that seemed to him to be a very poor way to look. It had a certain syrup, as Gertude Stein once said, but it didn’t pour. But how’re you to teach something that isn’t premeditated? (170)

Quality… you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is. But that’s self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from, the things that have it, it all goes poof! There’s nothing to talk about. But if you can’t say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn’t exist at all. But for all practical purposes it really does exist. What else are the grades based on? Why else would people pay fortunes for some things and throw others in the trash pile? Obviously some things are better than others… but what’s the “betterness”? (178)

It’s nice to start journeys pleasantly, even when you know they won’t end that way. (184)

I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it.
(240)

…it’s the student’s choice of Quality that defines him. People differ about Quality, not because Quality is different, but because people are different in terms of experiences. (244)

…getting stuck is the commonest trouble of all… your mind gets stuck when you’re trying to do too many things at once. What you have to do is try not to force words to come. That just gets you more stuck. (271)

Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20-20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. it’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past. Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination—”unstuckness,” in other words—are completely outside its domain. (273)

The solutions all are simple—after you have arrived at them. But they’re simple only when you know already what they are. (281)

So since I can’t concentrate, why not subject all of you to low attention span as well? Here are a few things I’ve discovered in the past few days as I’ve tried to not make myself crazy.

1. I went from my newspaper website to the King Features syndicated page to do a crossword puzzle. Along with puzzles, King Features also owns the rights to a bunch of daily comics: Beetle Bailey, Zits, Baby Blues… that kind of stuff. But the thing I hadn’t expected is that each of those comics has a comments section, with sometimes dozens of comments! I mean, in what universe do people have an urgent need to make comments about Beetle Bailey?
2. I was contacted this morning by the person who’ll be doing the translation of my book into Chinese. That person has a difficult task ahead, since the book’s written in a pretty colloquial voice, and they asked if they could reach out for guidance. The example they used was my reference to the fictional Wassupwich U. I spent a long paragraph to try to explain working-class constructions and Bullwinkle and the fact that lots of kids go to colleges that just aren’t very good, and I’m 100% sure that I wasn’t helpful. I feel really awful for this person as she or he takes on an impossible task.
3. The underground yellowjacket nest in my front yard is now vacated, leaving a basketball-sized hole. My friend Derrick thinks that mice may have burrowed into it over the winter and eaten all the larvae. Thanks, mice! Good job.
4. Nora and I have engaged in lengthy discussions about whether a piece of fiber has been twisted clockwise or counterclockwise; whether it matters which end of the yarn you look at when you say that; and whether the correct jargon for clockwise is “Z-twist” and counterclockwise is “S-twist,” or whether we’ve got it backward. It’s simultaneously testing my spatial-orientation skills, my language skills, my memory skills, and my patience.
5. No matter what you try to do, other people will interpret it differently than you meant it. I’ve been asked this morning by one person to limit the number of people I send my daily emergency-management updates to, and asked by another person to be on them. And they’re both right. It’s a question without a correct answer, even though several people imagine that they’re correct.
6. The world is awash in conspiracy theories, mostly generated from fear and anger in the midst of confusion. They give us power when we feel powerless. Everyone’s looking for some kind of master narrative that helps disparate phenomena make sense; the fact that a lot of those constructions are pretty rickety doesn’t matter as much as the comfort they provide.
7. I was watching a YouTube video of a former literary agent talking about the seven reasons why the first page of your manuscript will get it rejected. And one of them was that the core conflict of the book isn’t contained on page 1. She said that back in the ’90s, books could take fifty or sixty pages to lay out the back story, but nowadays, readers want immediate action. And I thought four things, almost simultaneously. A) Nonsense. B) We’ve Twittered ourselves into intellectual submission. C) I love that “back in the ’90s” is unimaginably distant. and D) many of today’s readers were also readers in the 1990s, and the 1970s. It’s not like software, there aren’t reverse-compatibility issues that limit the use of legacy systems.

That, times about eighty-three, is the state of my head today. And I know, from talking with friends, that I’m not alone in that. So give yourself permission to be scattered and disjointed and not at your intellectual best today. It’s not reasonable to expect ourselves to be normal when nothing else is. Be gentle with yourselves and others.

I had a conversation with a friend yesterday in which I said that I was half considering just taking all my novels, converting them to pdf or mobi or epub formats and just giving them away. And she said that she hated to read on screen, never owned an e-reader.

Well, that was a smack in the head. Duh! Neither do I!

I got a Kindle as a gift seven or eight years ago, downloaded one or two books, and hated every bit of it. It’s just an unappealing way of reading. I love holding a paper book. I like the clutter of having paper books around me, of seeing my reading history in a bookcase.

One of the obvious things that gets in the way of creating real paper books is the cost of production. I’ve had the experience of working with an Espresso print-on-demand publisher; after the original set-up costs, the unit cost per book was about eight dollars. Those books cost way more than they needed to. And part of the cost is due to our contemporary expectations about how words sit on pages.

Here’s an image of the innards of two paperback books on my kitchen table, both just over 400 pages. The upper one was printed in 2018, the lower one in 1976. Let’s do a comparison:

• Size 1976: 7 x 4.12 x 0.9. Size 2018: 7 x 5 x 0.9.
• Layout 1976: Single spaced, 10pt type, paragraphs marked only with indentation. Layout 2018: 1.5 spaced, 11pt type, paragraphs marked with extra line break.
• Words per page 1976: about 400, or about 14 words per square inch. The book totals about 150,000 total words. Words per page 2018: about 270, or about 8 words per square inch. That book totals about 110,000 total words.
• List price 1976: $2.50. List price 2018: $19.95

Writer friends, we’ve been sold a lie! White space! Leave the readers some white space! Giant blocks of text are just so… intimidating! Well, bullshit. We LIKE words. We make words and organize words and sell words. Words are what we make people out of. Why are we trying to sell blank paper on behalf of somebody else?

Look at that brick of a book from 1976, the yellowing chintzy paper disappearing under the ideas. That book—Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 19th reprinting of the Bantam paperback—wasn’t influential because of the elegance of its page layout. It was influential because of the elegance of its thought.

The book itself, the object… it’s a hooptie, a beater, a third-hand ride with its warranty long behind it. The body panels aren’t aligned, it doesn’t close right, there’s a lot of paint missing and a 75-cent sticker crooked on the hood. And it doesn’t matter. The ideas haven’t deteriorated. It’s still a reliable mode of transportation to another world.

As Kazuo Ishiguro (author of Remains of the Day, among others, and the 2017 Nobel laureate in literature) said, “I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they’d once belonged to the sea.” Nobody’s ever going to say that about their Kindle…

The only file format that matters to the writer is FTP. Fill. The. Page. It’s time to reclaim the power of the crappy print job. To reclaim the unbleached paper, still true to its piney origins, covered with words. It’s time to reject the upscaling of our books, to return to line after line after line of beauty.