How to Teach Yourself to Swim

A Matter of Degrees

2009-09-14T14:27:00.002-04:00

It's clear that not all degrees from all colleges and universities are equivalent. We know that a 4 year degree from Niagara County Community College doesn't carry as much weight as a 4 year degree from an ivy league school. There are countless reasons why this dichotomy exists, but the easiest way to sum it up is: inequivalent resources. The schools, the faculty, the regions, and the students themselves all bring to the table different levels of economic, intellectual, and social resources. But what about within the same school?

It's also evident that schools specialize, and that an MFA in creative writing from Brown or the University of Iowa carries more weight than say, a Sociology degree from the same school. Because of faculty, resources, location, or arrangement, those schools have been able to cultivate particularly supportive and innovative communities. But still, these things are obvious. Everyone knows if you want to pull down the heaviest degree in Economics, you will go to the University of Chicago. And that that degree is "worth more" than a degree in Landscape Architecture from the same school. But what about the same degree? What about the same degree at the same school?

I've been thinking about this constantly since I reentered the academic fray, and it's become a difficult thing to overlook: one person's 4 year degree is NOT another person's 4 year degree. Same faculty, same school, same resources, completely different outcome. And to many of you, this too will be obvious. You will say, "Of course, everyone knows that students get more out if they put more in, or benefit more if they make connections with faculty, etc." And I wholeheartedly agree. But I'm thinking less in terms of what students get out of their education, and more in terms of what they actually know how to do. I can say, after witnessing it first hand, that the skill levels of Senior Art History majors vary so widely that it's almost unimaginable that they've gone through the same coursework. They simply do not have the same skills. You can talk to me all you want about individual capability, heterogeneity, the benefits of multiple perspectives, but lately I've come to believe that earning a degree should indicate a certain level of proficiency or skill in a particular area of focus. In other words, no matter what your background or perspective, there are things EVERYONE in a major should know how to do, related to their field.

Think of how important this becomes in majors that more closely resemble vocational training: web design, film editing, graphic design, almost all of the hard and soft sciences - there are simply things that every single one of those students should know how to do. The idea that some graphic design graduates are proficient in Illustrator and Photoshop and others are "okay" at them doesn't sit right with me. A degree, as I've understood it, indicates a level of competency and mastery of a subject, not just a familiarity.

I'm sure many of you are thinking, this doesn't matter in the long run, the wheat will always be separated from the chaff, someone whose skills prove insufficient in the real world will be superseded, but I'm not so sure that's enough for me. The idea that graduates with "equivalent" degrees with ostensibly "equivalent" skill sets are being provided the same opportunities for employment is frustrating. I'm also not sure exactly what I'm suggesting - but it might be some sort of uniform skills proficiency test or guild-type apprenticeship program. I hate standardized testing too, but the idea that two people with the "exact same" degrees from the exact same school could be so divergent in ability is unacceptable to me.

Stretching Light

2009-09-03T01:14:00.004-04:00

The light that reaches us from the farthest points in the universe is redshifted by the expansion of the universe, the Doppler effect, or gravitational interference. Redshifting, in the simplest sense, can be thought of as stretching. Light that travels towards us across the universe for billions of years is "stretched" by the expansion of the universe in the opposite direction. This stretching results in an increase in wavelength that corresponds to a drop in frequency - called a red-shift, because in the spectrum of visible light, the shift would be towards the red. However, any increase in wavelength is termed a redshift, whether it's part of the visible spectrum or not.

Correspondingly, the oldest light (light that has traveled the greatest distance) is the most redshifted. Now, if light were a thing, which I'm not sure it is, I would say that the oldest light is most affected by its journey, possibly the most wearied. After moving tirelessly for 13.8 billion years, it must be a blessing to find a spot to rest, to make your way into the sterile glass eye of a space telescope kept at almost absolute zero or into the welcoming arms of a massive curved radio telescope here on earth.

I know that my body emits tiny (almost undetectable) amounts of light. I like to imagine this light traveling towards other people when they sit next to me, finding a place to rest possibly in their eyes, or on the back of their hands. I wonder if this light, traveling this tiny distance, could ever be redshifted, even slightly. What I mean to say is, I wonder if the light that comes out of me gets stretched before reaching you. And if it does, I wonder if it is, technically, the same light. I wonder if light has to travel all the way across the universe before it gets weary and needs a place to rest, or if it can wear itself out in a microsecond moving across the room.

The oldest things in the universe fall into our prosthetic eyes every moment of every day, and we absorb them, however slightly or indirectly, bundle them up, and let them out again in little packages, so dimly shiny but not new. At any moment, I could be giving you a gift 13.8 billion years old.

This has very little to do with learning, less to do with academia, and almost nothing to do with my infinitesimal trajectory, but it does comfort me. When I despair about the direction that trajectory takes me in, or where I've steered, I like to locate myself within the largest, oldest trajectory conceivable, but not locate myself in a way that contextualizes me, rather, decontextualizes. If I implicate myself in something as old as the trajectory of the earliest light, I feel all the sharpness of my failures redshifting away, and know my light may also find a place to rest. Even if it takes 13.8 billion years.

Learning is a Form of Violence

2009-09-01T23:24:00.005-04:00

I'm back. Had a little hitch in my giddyup.

I've been learning a lot lately, both inside and outside of school, and both about myself and others. All this learning has given me a fair opportunity to consider precisely what learning is, or may be - what exactly we mean when we say I've learned something.

I don't mean this in a purely conceptual, epistemological sense, in fact, I'm more interested in what may be going on physiologically when we learn something. Cognitive neuroscience has revealed that individual neurons and their correspondent electrochemical impulses contribute to thought and memory, and, a la phrenology, that certain groups of neurons and regions of the brain are more involved in particular mental processes than others. But none of this is news, it simply reiterates what has long been known: in the mind, physical events manifest metaphysical phenomena. Again, the interplay here between the tangible and the intangible is nothing new, but this does set the scene for what I've been thinking about: learning is a very particular form of violence.

I've been reading Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop; in the book he considers the physiological processes involved in sentience and consciousness. Ultimately, it is impossible at this time to assert that a group of neurons is responsible for the establishment, maintenance, and storage of particular ideas, but what can be said is that certain patterns of physiological activity directly facilitate cognition and metacognition. It's these patterns that interest me.

Imagine that a tiny region of your brain is composed of 100 neurons, and it takes 10 of those neurons working together to generate a thought or a memory. That thought or memory isn't reliant on those 10 neurons, but rather the pattern that they exhibit. If those 10 neurons are employed in some other mental function, 10 other neurons of the hundred are capable of establishing the same pattern, and thus, the same thought or memory. The neurons themselves could be considered a stiff architecture, and the patterns themselves a fluid architecture. I hesitate to even draw this analogy because it calls up antiquated notions of hardware/software comparisons, but I hope it serves to elucidate the cellular (no pun intended) and component nature of cognition. The stiff architecture of neurons doesn't mean to imply that they are immovable or unchangeable, only that their functionality is often reliant on their placement or position, whereas the fluid architecture of electrical impulses isn't as reliant on physiognomy; it relies on chronology or synchronization. They are a pattern in time but possibly not a pattern in space; in this way, their ability to manifest themselves is fluid.

If the patterns of our thoughts and memories are to be amended, addended, or erased, then some force must act upon those patterns. Some new pattern must be established, and it is this force, this shift, this change that reveals a subtle violence. Restructuring old patterns and establishing new ones requires an override, a suppression, or a neural syncopation. The greatest difficulty in "learning" arises when certain neural pathways have been strengthened by heavy use or overuse; these "strengthened" pathways are actually neural connections that have become accustomed to running the same patterns again and again. It is, in effect, physically "easier" to think the way you've always thought. Again, we see the potential for violence, or at least, in this case, the establishment of a heavily endothermic system - one that requires more energy to work. A new pattern, a new thought, a new idea, is not only mentally harder to think, it is actually physically harder to make happen.

As I sat through Organic Chemistry this summer, establishing thousands of new neural patterns in the space of a few short weeks, I considered the coarse reality of specialization: my decade of absence from the sciences and saturation in the arts made learning the material very difficult. I considered not only the outside stimuli that helped establish new patterns, but the internal stimuli that resisted them and reluctantly obliged after a little cajoling. The irony here, but the bald truth that we've all experienced is that learning something well often generates resistance to learning anything else.

That being said, it's difficult to determine what to strive for - expertise and a less-viscous fluid architecture, or encyclopedic knowledge and greater viscosity.

Either way, I will continue to consider the forcible evictions, coerced choreographies, and etched avenues active just behind my eyes.

The Prodigal Son

2009-01-13T22:41:00.003-05:00

I've had some time to think about my return to academia while meandering across the windswept arctic tundra that is the SUNY at Buffalo campus, and I've come to a few conclusions (cursory, of course):

I am a chronological anthropologist: Much like the narc that returns to high school at 30 years old to root out the juvenile drug ring, I am equipped with the wisdom that a decade or more of insight affords. Not only can I marvel at the awkwardness of the average college student (their inability to comport themselves, speak clearly, dress themselves, etc.), but also I can marvel at the fact that I was once as awkward, unintelligible, and sartorially challenged. My re-situation within the exact same cultural milieu at a later date has provided me with a more objective look at what those years must have been like for me. In my first two days back at my alma mater (or pater, if we're to keep to the parable analogy) I feel as though I've been granted a wish to travel back in time and watch myself (or students like myself) go through the painfully embarrassing post-adolescent shapeshifting. It's fascinating, horrifying, and impossible to stop watching.

Things have changed: You will say, of course they have. Or you will say, no they haven't, you've changed. Well, I'm here to tell you that I may have changed, but some things have actually changed as well. I have the syllabi to prove it. The prerequisite courses for my move ahead into Art Conservation are pretty elementary, so I didn't expect much waxing philosophical, etc. But when I went to AHI 102 on Monday, I was shocked at how facile it was. 3 three page papers. Compare and contrast. The works of art will be discussed in class and compared and contrasted before the papers are due. Vocabulary quizzes will be multiple choice. No cumulative final exam. No dates are required for artwork recognition. The professor literally apologized for the work that was to be done, then to curry favor reminded the students that there would be no research paper. OK. I'll risk sounding like a jaded old man, but I took AHI 101 at UB, and I have the syllabus. Cumulative final, dates for recognition, compare and contrast essay quizzes to be done in class, research paper, full definition of terms on exams. So, ten years later, the second half of basic art history is fundamentally different, and fundamentally easier. Score one for the tyranny of the student majority.

Copresence is ubiquitous: I have no prejudice against technology. I love my phone. I'm on it constantly. I text like a Japanese teenager. But on Monday I couldn't see a single student in the entire 400 person lecture hall who didn't have his phone on the table or in his hand. I have nothing more to say except it must be almost impossible to teach in those fractious circumstances. The situation was better in smaller classes, but not by much.

This may have been my only option: I decided to pursue this course of study in early November. Since then I've continued my job hunt, but the employment and economic situation here (and throughout the US) has just gotten worse. I've been turned down for two jobs I was qualified for, and none of the other positions available even pay a living wage. I may have picked one of the worst times in history to quit my job, and I'm actually happy that my life path led to me to the safe haven, the grand maw that accepts all comers with a check in their hand, the forgiving mother/father, the insitution of the University.

I guess that's where the analogy ends. The prodigal son squandered his inheritance and then returned to the father penniless, only to be forgiven and celebrated. I've squandered nothing, am returning penniless, only to be treated with welcome indifference.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. I'm actually thankful for this opportunity and I know not everyone has it.

Transitional Note for a Transitional Time

2009-01-01T21:09:00.006-05:00

A few days ago I was lucky enough to stumble upon Adam Gopnik's review in the New Yorker of two new Samuel Johnson biographies. My point here isn't to elaborate on Gopnik's review, nor to relate anything specifically to Samuel Johnson - it's to examine something Gopnik mentions as he briefly recounts Johnson's move to London in 1737:

...Johnson had no luck in his dream, of becoming a London writer and wit, for a very long time. He had the misfortune to have arrived in London at a time not unlike this one, with the old-media dispensation in crisis and the new media barely paying. The practice of aristocratic patronage, in which big shots paid to be flattered by their favorite writers, was ebbing, and the new, middle-class arrangement, where plays and novels could command real money from publishers was not yet in place. The only way to make a living was to publish, for starvation wages, in the few magazines that had come into existence...(The new order had also produced a permanently bitter and underemployed class of writers, who had meant to be Popes but were left to be merely beggars in the square outside, and they made their living working for penny-a-line pamphlets and cheap gossip tabloids, creating a constant mouse scream of malice that runs in counterpoint to Johnson's grave sonorities) (90).

A time not unlike this one. As I've mentioned in the past, the plight of overeducated underpaid liberal arts scholars is neither unique nor new. But, after reading this, it was the first time that I entertained the notion that this might be a particularly difficult moment in history due to media transition. Johnson (along with every writer and artist whose career spanned the 17th and 18th centuries) was facing a time when the infrastructure of patronage was being dismantled (not to mention the infrastructure of "royalty") and the foundation of public, for-profit publishing was just being built. I (along with every writer and artist whose career spans the 20th and 21st centuries) am facing a time when the infrastructure of for-profit publishing is being dismantled and the foundation of internet publication is in its nascent stages.

Publishing houses, like patronage, lasted centuries and they are still alive and well. Patronage didn't die overnight, and it never became completely extinct. Neither will publishing houses. My argument isn't that publishing is dead, books will no longer exist, libraries will evaporate, blah blah blah. My argument is that as the traditional model of writing and disseminating work has changed, so has the mode whereby authors and artists get paid. We've gone from a patron's steady allowance or commission of work to a model where we write/make something, get agent, submit manuscript/work, get published/shown, collect royalties/payment to a model where we write/make something, bypass all middle men, find a computer and blog or post pictures of our work, then try to figure out how the hell to make money. With the new model, there seems (so far) to be very few viable options: place advertisements adjacent to your work and receive tangential revenue, charge for digital manifestations (pdf's, etc) of your work, or ask for donations. Of course there are still writers who get paid in the traditional way for work posted to the internet - there are salaried bloggers, journalists, etc. But that's just a residual financial holdover from the previous cultural production paradigm. When patronage was phased out, an entirely new fiscal model was introduced - one based on the free market, supply and demand, widespread literacy, and cheap production methods. As traditional publishing is phased out, we're scrambling, as they are in the music and film industry, to figure out what the tenets of the new fiscal system for art and literture will be. But none of this is news. I'm merely highlighting that we're still walking onto the apron of a very substantial new system, one which is hardly even framed up yet.

As Johnson discovered when he moved to London, given the tools and opportunity, there is no dearth of creative people willing to distribute their work. The glut of young writers was filtered by the sieve of editors and publishers, and eventually, by the public's demand for certain work. One can only hope that this new glut of artists and writers, fueled by the ease and accessibility of the internet, will find a similar filter and a feasible economic model.

Until then, I'll simply add this to the list of difficulties facing artists and writers in our time. As we piece together the shrapnel of a defunct system, the resulting pastiche can be predicted and advocated, but never truly discovered until it has fallen into place.

Not Much Has Changed

2008-12-26T01:21:00.002-05:00

The Well Run Dry

2008-12-09T23:07:00.004-05:00

Sooner than I thought, and more difficult than I imagined.

My money is, for all intents and purposes, gone. It's lasted about half the time I approximated, and although I was frugal, I didn't see the income I estimated from artistic endeavors (thanks in part to the economy, I imagine, and also because of my change in plans). This has left me looking for a job as I wait for the spring semester to begin. It's also left me thinking about the various trajectories my life (and this process of catloging it) has taken. Alternately optimistic and pessimistic, idealistic and practical, sane and insane, constantly paradoxical, but always, I hope, honest.

Facet candle holders, 2008. Idea stolen from Kindling Shop, Chicago, IL.

I now feel I have to address the possibility that my attempt to become a professional artist is a failure. Or a much, much longer adventure than I imagined. On the surface, it would be easy to say I failed, or my heart wasn't in it, or I didn't give it the time and effort it deserved, but when you look closer, it's a lot more complicated.

As my focus shifted towards returning to school, it shifted away from commodifying my art to the degree that it might provide a viable income. I don't mean that I stopped making art, I mean that it became difficult to sustain both endeavors simultaneously, and the aspects of becoming an artist that I found distasteful began to look markedly worse (eg: self-promotion, branding, incorporation, marketing, strategic alliances, etc). I know on a certain level the negative aspects of becoming an artist are present in everyday life as well; we all must, on some level, market, brand, and promote ourselves. But for most of us, it isn't our primary concern unless we're walking into a job interview or trying to pick up a new mate. I felt hesitant right from the start about making it my primary concern and having it overshadow the actual production of my artwork. And I know, I remember writing about schmoozing and navigating this side of the art world as a facet of the true meritocracy that exists, but that didn't mean I had reconciled all my misgivings. I was, and am still, highly uncomfortable with being a businessmen-artist hybrid. Part of me isn't so sure that I want to rely on my business savvy, networking skills, and ability to sell myself for health care, food, and shelter. In simpler terms, I might just be, deep inside, a consistent paycheck kinda guy.

And, as I took a long, hard, honest look at myself and my skill set, I began to realize I was capable of most anything, but an expert in very few fields, if any. Sure, I can screenprint, letterpress, woodwork, etch, bookbind, and hundreds of other things. But am I highly skilled at any of those things? Not really, to be honest. I'm just good at them. I am the consummate jack of all trades, master of none. And the people in those fields who are highly skilled, who are experts, still often find it difficult to make ends meet solely by making non-commercial art. The people who succeed that aren't experts usually do so via their business savvy or sheer dumb luck. We've already covered the business savvy part, so I'll just say I've never been a lucky guy, and this is hardly the time to be waiting for the luck wagon to come around the corner. The idea of becoming an expert in a particular field or a master of a certain skill has always appealed to me, but I've always understood that it isn't something you achieve on your own, but under the guidance of others. This might be one of the only real chances I have to make that happen. I also understand that some of you may be thinking 'a person can be an expert in their own artistic process, in the field of themselves, and no one else can teach them that.' Very true. But I must also admit here that one of the things I admire most in art, of any medium, is craft. Handicraft. Technical skill. Even if it isn't immediately recognizable or the artist has exploded the index of his skill and replaced it with something ostensibly random, I still enjoy teasing out the craft and admiring the skill. This is something I strive for in my own work, and this may also be an opportunity to hone my weaker skills.

Am I selling out my dream to become an artist by returning to the safety of the Institution? I don't think so, because I'm trying to think of it as a necessary step I didn't previously envision. It isn't that I had to go back to school, but when I looked closely at what I wanted, school became something I needed. More clearly: I've envisaged my future, the skills I want to have, the life I want to lead, and returning to school fulfilled that vision more clearly than pursuing professional art full time.

It's my hope that the prerequisite classes I must take, as well as the classes to come in the advanced degree program, will provide me with a far more extensive skill set and knowledge of art history and art media that I can enfold into my own work. It may be pure rationalization, but I'm thinking of this as a prerequisite, another step on my journey towards becoming the artist and the person I want to be.

One Long Year

2008-11-27T00:02:00.007-05:00

Today is the one year anniversary of my sobriety. I celebrated by digging in my heels and moving forward with my new life plan. As of today, I am a student again. I registered for classes at SUNY at Buffalo that I will need to apply for Art Conservation advanced degree programs. If all goes well, I'll be able to start those applications in spring of 2010 and begin a program in the fall of 2010. Most programs are three years long, so I'll make my exit sometime in 2013. I will be 36 years old. To be honest, I never thought I would make it to 30.

I lived hard when I was young. I spent all day, every day, skating - throwing myself down flights of stairs, onto handrails, off launch ramps. Again and again I slammed my body into the ground, over and over I suffered the crippling effects of serious injury. To date I've broken: all of my fingers, all of my toes, my right tibia and fibula, my right ankle, my right heel bone, my left radius and ulna, my left wrist, 3 ribs, my right front tooth, and my coccyx. I've torn: my left ACL, my right ACL, my left MCL , my right patellar ligament, and a series of soft tissues between my ribs. I've sprained: my left ankle, my left knee, my right ankle, my right knee, both my wrists, all of my fingers, disclocated my left shoulder and hyperextended my left arm at the elbow. My injuries were sometimes spectacular, sometimes subtle, but always a reminder of my fragility and mortality. I wasn't one of the kids that thought he was immortal - far from it - the vulnerability of my body to injury reminded me every day that life was temporary.

When I thought of growing older, I could never imagine myself after 30. Not because it was old, and I was never going to get old (which I think it the common cause of this inconceivability), but because I couldn't figure out what I was going to do after 30. I knew I would be too old to skate. I knew what I was interested in, but even then I had no idea how it would translate into a job, a career, or a lifestyle. I simply thought that meaningful existence (as I understood it) after 30 seemed entirely improbable (for me), and as I maintained that improbability, it began to morph into an impossibility. I began to tell myself that I was never going to make it to 30. The way I lived my life was such that I would meet my end in a fiery car crash or a spectacular fall; I'd become the youthful martyr that all of my friends reminisced about. I didn't have a death wish. I liked living. But I had a feeling, a really strong feeling, I was just never going to make it to 30. Now that I think about it, this feeling may have made a distinct contribution to my inability to pull the disparate parts of my life together into a legitimate whole right around the age of 30. I'd told myself that day was never going to come, and when it came, all I could think was "Where's my spectacular fall?"

Needless to say, the fall never came. Neither did the fiery car crash. No sensational decapitation, nothing. 30 passed with a quiet murmur and left me looking over both my shoulders, thinking destiny was late.

Fueled by the conviction that three decades was all I had, in my 20's I lived a lifestyle full of the conventional excesses of the aimless: drugs, alcohol, sex. It was never glamorous, in fact it was often the opposite, but it was definitely propagated by an absence of consequence, or a perceived absence of consequence. I couldn't be blamed, I needed to fit it all in, I was only going to be here half the time everyone else was - or worse, maybe part of me felt like "it won't matter when I'm gone because people will forgive me, and if they don't, I'll never know." An ill-conceived plan at best, if I conceived it at all.

And, as many of you know, it caught up with me. And it caught up quick.

I feel lucky that my breakdown a little over a year ago became an impetus for change; as brutal as an emotional rock bottom is, I still recognize that it doesn't compare to the vicious character of an addict's rock bottom. I'm glad that I never had to experience that, and glad to have the opportunity to move my life away from the possibility. I've learned to live without drinking and understand clearly now that I'll probably never be able to come back to it in a casual way. It doesn't bother me as much as it did at first, because lately I've been trying to figure out what drinking did for me. What it ever helped me achieve.

Let's see: It got me laid. It helped me relax and avoid the sources of my anxiety. It loosened me up so I could actually have fun with my friends. It helped me sleep. It gave me a social crutch, a commonality to rely on. Other than those things, I was hard pressed to find anything. And when I look at those things, I think to myself: I can do all those things on my own. Getting laid is easy. Relaxing and avoiding anxiety are easy if you work hard to structure your life in a healthy way. I don't need loosening up, if I get get going, I'm just as crazy now as I was when I was drunk. Sleeping is easy if you deal with your anxiety and its sources. And finally, if I need a social crutch, I either need new friends or a social crutch that isn't going to give me a hangover. Like volunteering at the Red Cross. You get the point.

After coming to terms with all of the above, it's difficult not to feel regret. Time wasted, money spent, decisions made, physical damage done. But I know I can't dwell on it. I could've never made this decision earlier. No one could've convinced me at 28 to make the changes I've made. Because I believed I wasn't going to make it to 30. It took undeniable chronological evidence and emotional upheaval. Even then it was hard for me to believe it.

This last year has been the longest and the shortest of my life. I've been absorbed in introspection, analysis, evaluation - the days feel agonizingly long as I plod through the mental muck, but those same days shoot by on the calendar, the sun seems to rise and set in minutes. I've had to admit to myself what I'm good at, what I'm not, who I've hurt, how I've hurt them, what it's possible to do, what it isn't. I've had to say hard things to myself and make harder decisions. But I believe it's been worth it, because now it all seems a little more possible, and I don't feel like a ghost. I don't feel like someone that somehow slid past 30, escaped the eye of the grim reaper, and continues to amble along unsure of how to proceed. I'm convinced I'm actually here, convinced I should make something of it, and convinced that I can.

I want to extend thanks to every single person that has helped me make this transition; I love all of you and value your support.

Coming soon: my thoughts of re-entering academia, the first-hand accounts I'll be able to give of the current situation, and determining whether or not I'm a sell-out.

The Dimensions of Certainty

2008-11-16T23:21:00.008-05:00

The past ten days I've been re-reading Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. For those of you who aren't familiar, the "novel" is a fictional scholarly examination of a fictional documentary of a fictional event, replete with real and imagined footnotes, as well as a subplot/subnarrative focused on the unfortunate chap who first found the treatise. The book is unorthodox in its format, page layout, and chronology, but for all its gimmicky greatness, there's still a story there and that story is about a house that manifests interior spaces larger than the exterior reveals. It begins with a tiny discrepancy and finally grows to massive proportions that demand a team of explorers and documentarians. The point here isn't to retell the story or review the book, it's simply to present the idea of dimensional complicity. Yes, I know what complicity means.

Consider a dimension as a limit. Say a point wants to become a line, but the one dimension it belongs to stifles its expansion. Say a line wants to become a wall, but the two dimensions it belongs to keep it flat. Think of dimensions and the limits they enforce as the only thing that stands between us and absolute dimensional entropy.

Now consider a dimension as an opportunity. A point is free to become a line, but must find a way to unfold into the second dimension. A line wants to become a wall, but must acquire depth. Think of dimensions and the opportunities they offer as the only thing that makes expansion possible.

This is clearly a pessimist/optimist argument, but I've been thinking a lot lately about how to view the dimensions around me. House of Leaves deals primarily with the possibility of structures altered by perception (what you see is what you get, literally - if the stairs seem endless, they become endless). Is there really any reason that we can't think of our 3 dimensional journey, participating as it does, in the 4th dimension as well, as a structure? Is it possible then, that this structure is altered by our perception of it? Heisenberg was really the first to delineate this in a scientific sense (uncertainty principle and observer effect), and his concern was primarily the effect of observation on technical data, but the upshot is the same. Perceiving the course of my life, as I must, necessarily affects its structure (and consequently, the sensory data I receive and assess). My evaluation, then, is as flawed as any scientific evaluation - but is it flawed in a consistent way? Do you ever become so familiar with your own margin of error that it no longer has any effect?

More importantly, can the way I see things actually make them bigger or smaller? This might be an argument for absolute relativity, so Einstein might be on my side, but according to a footnote in House of Leaves, so is Gunter Nitschke. Danielewski recounts his description of "experienced or concrete space":

It has a centre which is a perceiving man, and it therefore has an excellent system of directions which changes with the movements of the human body; it is limited and in no sense neutral, in other words it is finite, heterogeneous, subjectively defined and perceived; distances and directions are fixed relative to man...

That final line should probably read "fixed relative to a man." Because if the early lines are to be believed, every space is going to be different to every man. Some think this goes without saying, that our notions of near and far, large and small, bright and dark, etc are necessarily different. These, however, are qualitative assessments of space (and for that matter, time), not quantitative. Most of these people would concede that objects in space have an objective quantitative set of properties (extension, mass, etc) that are measurable, re-measurable, and verifiable by peer-review. Except of course, David Hume.

I, like Hume, am beginning to wonder. As I consider the possibility of returning to school for Art Conservation, I feel my interior spaces unfolding, opening outward at a pace my exterior can't match. I hear the clatter of floorboards being layed down in a thousand different hallways, I feel the new neural pathways firing that allow me the luxury of daydreaming or worrying, I see the silent elastic fibers of time extending and contracting before me. Going back to school would require an investment of close to five years and over 12,000 dollars for prerequisite classes. Can I shorten this time just by looking at it differently? Literally? Can I make this room bigger by looking at it differently? Can I conjure the space and time I need by force of will? By application of sense? If I could, would I?

Maybe. Maybe I'd make it all look a little shorter and more possible. If only to take that first step.

Vocation vs. Avocation

2008-11-06T21:47:00.004-05:00

I've been advised by more than one person to think of a vocation as something that provides fiscal solvency and facilitates an avocation (hobby, pastime, minor occupation). The idea is simple, and it's proven its feasibility for many artists and writers throughout the years: find something to pay the bills and spend the rest of your time doing whatever you'd like. Until now, I've been fervently opposed to this approach, convinced that I'll be able to turn what is an avocation for most (art-making) into a vocation. I haven't, until recently, considered pursuing occupations that combine the two in a way that doesn't discount the value of either. Sound convoluted? It isn't. Imagine a space where you participate in a creative activity all day long, some sort of art-making that is your vocation, but doesn't involve making your own work. I know there are obvious choices here: art teacher, commercial screenprinter, set designer, costume designer, journalist, copy writer, etc. But none of those appeal to me, and I've been put off by the warnings of friends who have those jobs and feel it actually saps their energy and desire to produce their own work.

QEW Toronto, 2008

Lately, however, I've been considering the Art Conservation program at Buffalo State College. It has a reputation for being one of the best in the world, and amazingly, students receive full tuition remission for three years (ie: it's free). Graduating art conservators enjoy an exceedingly high rate of job placement, not to mention compensation commensurate with the hyper-specialized and unusual nature of the work. Art conservators work in many different fields, from sculpture and painting restoration to paper and wood restoration. Part forensic scientist, part detective, part artist - so far it sounds like a dream job where all of my vices (obssessive compulsive tendencies, perfectionism, meticulousness) would become virtues. So what's the down side? There's plenty.

QEW Toronto, 2008

The artcon program has a massive list of prerequisites - one that wouldn't be so daunting to a fine arts major, but to someone coming from a philosophy/english background it's fairly significant. The requirements? 9 hours of studio work, 21 hours of art history, chemistry 101/102, organic chemistry 201/202, and outside employment/internship with a professional conservator. Those alone would require 4 semesters of undergraduate work, 3 if I was really pushing it, and after all that, there'd be no way to guarantee myself a spot in the advanced degree program. That's a huge investment of time and money without the assurance of a payoff.

Nevertheless, I'm not giving up yet. Coincidentally, there's an open house at the artcon department this Friday, so I'm going to go to feel it out and ask questions specific to my unique situation. I love the idea of being able to use my creative skills, critical skills, and fine handiwork in a job that seems useful, multifarious, and interesting to me. And I also love the fact that the work I'd do would probably be so far from my own work that I wouldn't feel tapped out at the end of the day - perhaps I'd even feel like the vocation had primed the pump for my avocation.

QEW Toronto, 2008

This really strikes at the heart of what I discussed during my examination of liberal arts: the difference between general education and vocational training. Art conservation would definitely be vocational training, and maybe that's what I've needed all along (or at least, recently).

Taking Stock

2008-11-03T23:58:00.003-05:00

It's my birthday, so I'm currently taking stock. More on the stock I've taken tomorrow. Until then, enjoy these:

The Artist As Consumer

2008-10-29T19:49:00.003-04:00

I spent this past weekend in Toronto at the indie art gathering CANZINE, which focuses primarily on zines, small press, comics, and crafty DIY doo-dads. I recently finished a book, and while purveying my new wares, I had the chance to survey the field and conjure up a few generalizations and blanket statements.

Firstly, artists are a poor, unreliable lot of consumers. Maybe it's a cultivated disinclination towards consumption, maybe it's actual financial hardship, or maybe it's a tacit disdain for similar modes of cultural production (as in "I can do that, and I can do that better"). Either way, the result is the same: ambling crowds of artists and writers shuffling by tables simultaneously admiring and loathing (because they actually loathe, or loathing because they actually admire), and visually mining work for usable materials and concepts, but rarely ever buying.

I'm guilty of the same behavior, especially the overly critical eye. I walk by tables thinking "crap; crap; crap; OK but not my bag; crap; hey that's not bad - how did they do that?" Then I sit back down behind my table (having bought nothing) thinking "these sons of bitches better start buying something." And they do. But it's not the artists who buy - it's the non-artists. Old ladies particularly love the look and feel of my work. Flattering, but as an audience demographic I'm not sure it's exactly what I was looking for. This brings up an interesting set of questions that my friend Ben touched on in a comment: who buys art? who do I think should be buying my art? why? can we really control things like that? do we even want to?

If I suddenly became the poet laureate of elderly women, would I complain? Should I? I can't say I would complain, but I can say it would make me reconsider the content of my writing and the overall aesthetic of my books. I'm sorry, but it's true. And if that's true, I must have some blurry idea of what my demographic is - but at the moment it's only negatively defined as (I hope) not solely women over 65.

Secondly, artists are a loyal network of reliable consumers that can help make selling your art an economically viable pursuit. Say what? Isn't that exactly the opposite of the first point? Yes. Take Etsy for example. Tens of thousands of artist-entrepreneurs have descended on the site in the past few years, selling hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of items. The Etsy community is a virtual marketplace that reflects the positive energy and reciprocal support that is the mainstay of the DIY/craft underground. What does that mean? It means the people who make the things provide positive feedback and constructive criticism to each other - but it also means they buy each other's things. So why can a virtual community like Etsy manifest an economical reciprocity while an event like CANZINE has a hard time? Is it sheer volume of artist/consumers (as in there were 2000 people at CANZINE, but there are 100,000 poking around on Etsy)? Is it sheer volume of art objects (as in with that much stuff, everyone can find something they like that they can't make themselves)? Is it because cheap art is an impulse buy, and it's easier to impulse buy online than face-to-face? Who knows, but chances are it's a combination of all those and more.

As for me, I'm considering including a questionaire with all of my books and art so that I can begin to refine and market to my key demographic.

Guts, Gumption, Gold, and Glory

2008-10-19T22:21:00.004-04:00

The UGLY WINNERS one night art show in the upstairs apartment came off without a hitch. It was a great success, well-attended, and positively received. There was only one problem: we didn't sell a single thing. That wasn't the sole objective of the show - I was more concerned with giving unrepresented artists a chance to share their work and meet one another - but it still would've been nice. See - art shows, book fairs, and the like act as catalysts for artistic production - or more accurately, they provide the threat of a deadline, which is always a powerful motivator. But what if all that motivation turned action turned product has nowhere to go? A visual artist can only produce so much without having a market for his work (unless he's lucky enough to have a massive studio or a warehouse - or he makes really tiny work). A glut of work also threatens to devalue individual pieces (it's just supply and demand). And not even just the exchange value - I'm thinking more of artists, bands, and writers that have no "filter" and produce album after album, novel after novel, poem after poem, painting after painting, etc. It skews overall value, or what I might term reception value. I don't know about you, but this wide-net approach to cultural production has always left a bad taste in my mouth. Like if you throw enough at the wall, something's bound to stick, but it doesn't matter what it is. Anyway, the show was a great idea. And I want to have more. But it left me wondering, how many can I have before all the artists' homes are just full of unsold work? How long could we all go on making things, filling our closets, dragging things out and dusting them off, even contemplating throwing them out in order to make room for new things?

Polaroids by Jay Stankiewicz

It also left me wondering about the turbulent economy (which I know has already become a cliche) and the effect it will have on luxury spending, because I do consider the purchase of art a luxury. Or more accurately, I understand that the purchase of art is regarded by a large percentage of the population as superfluous to human needs. People in the Rust Belt/Great Lakes Region have been the victims of a vicious economic vortex for over 5 decades now - so it's not as though there's been a time in recent memory when luxury spending was the norm - but is this recent collapse going to make things even worse? In short, did I pick the worst possible time to try to become a working artist and help promote my friends' work?

The upstairs living room during UGLY WINNERS.

Maybe. But maybe not. I've been buoyed by a recent article that touts Buffalo as one of the top places in the nation to "ride out the recession."

Buffalo's terrible economy shelters it from the benefits of economic booms, but it also makes us almost impervious to the negative effects of economic downturns. Things have always been bad here, we're not really going to notice if things "get worse." In fact, our economic turmoil has cultivated an insularity that's allowing us to move independent of the global crisis. Slowly but surely, even now, our home prices are rising. Employment is on the upswing. Consumer spending is level. Home foreclosures are a fraction of what they are elsewhere. Things out there in the world might be ugly, but here on the economic island that is Buffalo, they're the same, or even improving.

Kit Bowman's "Most Colorful Primate."

Maybe, just maybe, people in Buffalo have already worked luxury spending into their very limited budgets. So I probably have nothing to worry about. At least from a consumer standpoint. From a production perspective, however, things are looking less healthy.

Chris Fritton's "Basic Standing Dive."

Don't get me wrong, I'm not sinking yet. But tightening my purse strings in order to ride out this transition has made progress on the studio space in the garage slow. In fact, it's stopped almost completely because I'm at a point where I need an electrician to come and connect the building to the grid, install a breaker box, and get everything up and running. Luckily the building is wired already, but it's still going to cost a significant amount to get the work done. A significant amount I don't have right now. This was a terrible disappointment (the first major one since I started this project) because I envisioned using the space and time over the winter to produce a number of larger pieces and begin marketing them. Luckily I will have a heated space to work; a close friend is going to Europe from January to April, so I'm going to sublet her huge studio while she's gone.

Untitled painting by BREZO

In the meantime, I'm going to have to focus on writing (I'm putting the finishing touches on a new book entitled "Occupation: Housewife" right now) and teaching (I've landed an intermittent gig with the local non-profit Just Buffalo to teach afterschool and in-school programs in poetry and writing) because I've run out of room for other work.

Astronaut or Astro-not

2008-10-06T21:46:00.003-04:00

I've been MIA for the last ten days because I've been reading up and working hard on my NYFA Fellowship Applications. I've discovered a number of resources for emerging artists in the last few months, but NYFA provides the most diverse and substantial help; from fellowships to SOS grants, the money is there - but you have to fight for it. Not only is there competition from other artists, but there's also an aspect of competition with yourself. Maybe competition isn't the right word, but there's definitely a struggle of sorts - a struggle with new forms and formats, with paperwork, with strict guidelines, with articulating your artistic principles (in less than 1000 characters please!), and with designating the self (and products thereof) as your primary economic engine.

The conversion of the self into a brand and the conversion of your art into a series of products/commodities is an emotionally, politically, economically, and ethically tumultuous process, to say the least. I don't think I'm qualified to speak to the issue in the economic terms it deserves (value, use value, exchange value), but I do think I can speak to the emotional labyrinth it calls forth. Unfortunately they're inextricably linked, so forgive me if I cross the line incoherently.

I've been doing all I can to learn about how to create opportunities for myself as an emerging artist, including signing up for NYFA's MARK program , a "new statewide six-month program for visual artists who want a unique opportunity for individualized focus on the professional side of their creative practice." Sadly, so far this has meant nothing but a lot of meetings, seminars, homework, sifting, and filtering. I'm reminded of an old episode of This American Life where they conducted interviews with people who had "dream jobs" that didn't turn out so fantastic. The most memorable? Astronaut. They spoke with a few different astronauts - all of which had dreamed of being astronauts from the time they were very young - and the truth was shocking. It took them years and years to become astronauts. Countless hours in simulators, in flight, in testing and training, undergoing rigorous psychological counseling, etc. But once they achieved the honor of becoming an astronaut, what was their daily routine? Boredom. Paperwork. Meetings. Most of them were never even slated to test experimental aircraft, let alone go into space. The joke was, they were astro-nots, not astronauts. And it wasn't through any fault of their own; they weren't unqualified, they just weren't needed at the time. Sound familiar? Rings of the common line in a rejection letter from a publisher: "We regret to inform you that your submission does not meet our needs at this time." What's the tacit implication? But keep trying. So the astronauts are astronauts in name only, probably won't ever make it into space, but they're supposed to keep hoping and trying. Just like people who are artists and authors in name only (who haven't had the good fortune of being published or sponsored) are supposed to keep hoping and trying. So who's the real astronaut? Who's the real author? The real artist? They both are. One just goes to space, and the other doesn't. The notion here is that being an astronaut involves a lot more than the occasional space mission. It involves a lot of bullshit. But, the astronauts are getting paid, whether they're headed into the final frontier or not. Here's where the analogy ends. Because unpublished authors and underground artists aren't usually getting paid. So when we do bullshit, it's doubly insulting because we usually have to do it for free.

I'm not getting paid to do all this paperwork and go to all these meetings and seminars. I'm not getting paid to spend hours in my basement trying to figure out how to build frames for my etchings. And it's hard. It's hard to look at the clock and think that the time I'm spending isn't generating a little capital that I can exchange for food. And it's really hard to look at pieces that took 20 hours to create, but if/when they sell, they'll only bring the equivalent of 10 dollars an hour. That would be fine if it were constant - but right now, my artistic income is intermittent. I guess that's at the heart of everything I'm doing to learn the business side of art - I just want to see if there's any way I can generate consistent (if modest) income from my labor. I'm not afraid of work. I like it. I don't have pie-in-the-sky dreams of becoming an art superstar, I just want to be a working artist. But not one who's working another job.

First order of business: create a venue where people can see and purchase your work. Check.
Check out the UGLY WINNERS one night art show at my house, 61 Elmwood Ave, Buffalo, October 11, 2008, 8p-11p.

The Guilt of Production, The Production of Guilt

2008-09-25T00:35:00.003-04:00

Previously, in conversation with Ric Royer, I touched on the shame associated with cultural production, but recently I've been wrestling with something a little different: the guilt I feel about producing my own work or doing things entirely for myself. The shame Ric and I discussed was a particular sort of discomfort the artist feels when discussing what it is he "does." It's wrapped up in anticipation of any number of complex negative reactions - condescension, befuddlement, bewilderment, feigned interest, etc - but no matter what the response, the result is the same: quiet humiliation. Ric and I never discussed the complex positive reactions someone might have, but no doubt they would lead to quite the opposite reaction, possibly boastful pride. Shame is an externally motivated emotion - people make other people feel ashamed. You split your pants alone, you go home and change your pants. You split your pants in front of a crowd, you feel ashamed, then go home and change your pants. Okay, it's not exactly that simple, shame is a complicated emotion, but you get the point - people are rarely ashamed without some sort of external motivation. Guilt, however, is a little more nuanced.

Guilt is internally motivated - you make yourself feel guilty. It's the result of an internalization of a standard social code of conduct (your "conscience") and the subsequent transgression of that code. If I've internalized the notion that it is wrong to steal, when I steal, I will feel guilty about it. I don't need someone to tell me stealing is wrong to feel guilty, although I might need someone to confront me in order to feel ashamed. The code we've internalized is dynamic; it is always changing, and sometimes aspects of it can even be overridden or rationalized away, but there are often components that remain unchanged (murder is wrong, etc.). I'm currently confronting one of those unchanged components in my code, and having a hard time overcoming it. I think it's wrong to do something for myself, so when I do, I feel guilty about it.

West end of the upstairs office, before.

The origin of this problem is fairly simple - I'm a product of a Western tradition steeped in Judeo-Christian culture that extols altruism and a clinically co-dependent child of divorced alcoholic parents. I was imbued with the idea that doing for others, not the self, is the greatest virtue, and I learned at an early age how to caretake; eventually this developed into the system by which I generated feelings of self-worth. I did for others like I was supposed to, and I was praised; I did for my parents, and I was loved in return. Don't misunderstand me. I'm not knocking philanthropy, generosity, charity, or any of the other countless benefits of altruism. What I'm saying is, as an individual, complete and utter selflessness is a prescription for a barren identity - too much time spent creating other people (in a sense), and not enough time creating the self.

I'm not saying I am or ever have been completely and utterly selfless, that would be a ridiculous lie. I'm saying that I've internalized feelings that equate doing for others as good and doing for myself as bad. In the past, this has caused me intense hardship. In intimate relationships, I tend to overextend myself, I maintain a pattern of giving until it becomes the norm, but it's unsustainable. When I finally do amass the will (or desperation) to do something for myself, others see it as a disintegration of the pattern - in effect, a betrayal. Or the guilt I feel about doing things for myself causes me to hide them instead of addressing them and voicing my intention openly - an actual betrayal. My life, until recently, has been a roller coaster of increasing desire, compulsion, and violation (with periodic catastrophic releases) followed by the abstinence, penance, and atonement of rebuilding the relationships I harmed and self-worth I abandoned. Maybe I should've abandoned it - it wasn't built with the right material anyway.

East end of the upstairs office, before.

The problem isn't that I have no self-control or I'm a bad person - the problem is that I always returned to doing for others as a way to reconstitute my self-worth. If I could've asserted myself and my will forthrightly, secret transgressions and betrayals would've never been required. I could've stated what I wanted, attempted to attain it, dealt with the consequences, and used those experiences to build my self-worth.

I'm sure many people in my life have thought of me as selfish even though I spend most of my time giving to/doing for others. That's because those people focus on the times when my inability to assert my will has caused me to lie or act irrationally: having an affair, picking up and moving with very little warning, etc. But those times comprise a tiny fraction of all my actions - I'm neither selfish nor selfless, I just don't know how to be selfly or self-ful.

This blog is an attempt to do something self-ful (and I'm sure some of you think I'm overachieving), a daily introspective exercise, a research project smattered with some creative philosophical input. But lately, I've found myself turning away from it. Sure it's hard to sustain a full-blown essay every single day - but what really wears me out is when I look at the big picture and see that things haven't changed that much. I've been neglecting the blog to do things for other people. I've been neglecting my art to do things for other people. I've been neglecting the studio project that was supposed to be all for me. The list goes on.

East end of the upstairs office, after.

I've always had quirks about the way I produce art: I produce quickly, efficiently, late at night, normally alone. I always thought that this was the way that I worked best, the way that suited me (I'm impatient). Recently, however, I've realized that during the time I'm producing, I feel an intense amount of guilt. I feel terrible about "wasting my time" on my art when I could be doing something for someone else, or doing something more "constructive." I make things at night when no one is around so I don't have to feel bad about ignoring someone. I make things quickly so that I don't use up precious time that I could spend on/with someone else. As badly as I want to be an artist, making and thinking about art are still things that I "sneak in" between the things I've always done. I still have no concept of how to generate self-worth from the work that I produce (sure, some self-worth walls go up if people see my work and like it, but again, I'm still relying on someone else to provide those bricks).

There's a question about utility here that I'm not fully ready to address - but I'm sure of it because I've had two books in the works for about 6 months now. Instead of getting the books together and putting them out, I've been working on the house. Painting, building, cleaning, caulking, plumbing, whatever I can find. I'm doing those things for myself only insofaras I live here. Really, I'm doing them for the tenant, my partner, the cats, etc. Because I'm fixing the things they use. I'm still not really sure how people use my books or art. I know that they read them. I know that they perceive it. But for some reason I'm really resistant to the idea that they're using them (even though that's clearly what they're doing) - maybe it's because if they were using them, I'd just be making more things for people to use, gaining my self-worth from their response to my work. I told you I wasn't ready to address this. Now the logical conclusion is that I should be making entirely self-serving, totally useless art.

West End of the upstairs office, after.

Either way, what I do know is that I've found no way to garner sustainable self-worth from my artistic output, and I still feel guilty when I produce. I feel guilty because I'm coming a little too close to doing something entirely for myself - so I sneak it in during the wee hours when no one's around. No one makes me feel guilty, no one tells me I can't or shouldn't be making art, no one tells me it's a waste of my time; in fact, everyone close to me is quite supportive. Except for me.

I know this is about utility, I'm going to have to think about it some more. I'm also doing these things around the house because I'm still unemployed and it makes me feel useful, that I can still do things for other people even if I'm not being paid for it. Like pretending I have a job. You see, it's not only about the utility of what I make, but my utility. My usefulness. And sadly, making money fits into that equation somewhere.

The Ethicality of Art

2008-09-14T20:31:00.005-04:00

Why instigate the whole cloud of dust (make art)? The whole conversation, in all its myriad and nuanced forms? I said at the end of my last post that I think it's the Right thing to do. But why? Because I'm an advocate of dialogue - but not for the reason you may think. Not because it leads to resolution. I'm not so naive as to think that dialogue is a precursor to resolution, in fact, I advocate dialogue for precisely the opposite reason - because of the inherent conflict involved. Cultural production is a means whereby we propagate an incessant argument, a nebulous linguistic glow, hotter in some spots than others.

Urban highlighting project, 2008. Aquarium gravel.

Cultural production (and cultural criticism, which I generously lump under the heading of cultural production) also serves as a way to push ourselves out into the world. Think of the art you make as a prosthetic limb, one of your own shape and design, manifesting itself in the world. You shape these limbs, these extensions of yourself; you put them out in the world; you increase your size; you're continuously pushing yourself out into the world. Taking up more and more space, enlarging your aesthetic footprint. This isn't as menacing as it all sounds, but there is a particular type of violence in motion, in creation, in the conjuring of ideas, the calling up of that which wasn't before and placing it outside the self. In a crowded space where everyone is pushing themselves out into the world, obstruction, overlap, and obfuscation are bound to occur. These conflicts (and concurrences) are the heart of the conversation - in the end, one must recognize that they aren't conflicts between ideas, or between theories, but between people. The ghost of a hundred thousand dead artists and critics live on through their now disembodied prostheses, reattached to a willing host body. This is the most appropriate metaphor for the arts in academia: academics cutting off their own limbs to wear the flashiest or most powerful prostheses, sacrificing their own hands and feet to continue the conversation, all the while haunted by the tingling in their phantom limbs, all the while thinking about what their own hands and feet would've done, what their own mouth would've said.

Fill the cracks we forget about with something brighter, make them remember they're there.

I'm well aware that this is a vicious criticism of academia that doesn't always hold true, but I feel it clearly illustrates the difficulty discerning the difference between pushing oneself out in the world and continuing to push others out in the world. One can argue that the self, when one looks close enough, is no more than an amalgamation of others in indistinguishable proportion, so we are all merely pushing parts of others out into the world, a bucket brigade carrying the whole history of art/culture forward. To me, this is possibly the most interesting facet of the incessant argument that takes place - the struggle to determine how much of your self is in your prostheses, how much of your self is in your reservations and assertions. Because, as I said before, this isn't a conflict between ideas and theories, but between people, between others and the self, between the self and the self.

Let the wind sweep them away or let people put them in their pockets.

To that end, I think the ethicality in art is integrally tied to questions of identity, to an investigation of the self and others that should be the right of all humans. We should all be allowed to look as deeply as we can into the faces of the past, the eyes of the body that used to own the limbs we're using now. Making art (and everything that goes along with it) is the Right thing to do because it allows us to look closer at ourselves and others, it lets us see the water in the buckets we're carrying, it's let us spit in them or cut our hand off and send it on it's way.

Art and photos, C. Fritton, 2008.

One may think that by advocating the incessant conversation, I am endorsing the academic "house of cards" I've previously vilified, but I'm not. The academic aspect of cultural production is only a small part of the global incessant conversation (luckily for us) - and it's crippled by corruption, misguidance, conservatism, elitism, and capitalism, just like many other aspects of the conversation are: the Art world, museum culture, popular criticism, etc. The conversation is so much bigger and multifaceted than we can imagine; each of those parts are going to have their strengths and weaknesses.

Installation art in Toronto in conversation with mine, taking high-lighting literally.

Soon, I'd like to start turning my attention toward other parts of the conversation, parts that escape some of these handicaps, parts that are setting their own more democratic rules, parts that aren't embroiled in the pandemic problems listed above.

What's My Motivation?

2008-09-10T18:43:00.003-04:00

Last night I was typing up pages for a new book, and I started thinking about why I was making it. I mean beyond the reason that I had an idea, and I like making books. I was thinking about why I like making books, why I like making art, and as you can imagine, it led me to think about why I do anything at all. Yeah, I know, how existential. But seriously. Do I make books because it makes me feel good? Because I want people to read them and respond positively, and that makes me feel good? Because I want to change people's minds? Because I want to change the world? Because I think beautiful things improve the world? What exactly is my motivation? Is it purely aesthetic? Is it ethical?

I've read and seen plenty of interviews with artists, and common responses to questions about why they make art are "I can't help it; I'm just compelled to; I have to; I must;" etc, or something similar. They answer the question without answering the question, and rarely follow up with an explanation. Why can't they help it? Why do they feel compelled? Why must they? Just because an artist can't recognize a deeper motivation (or doesn't care to reveal it) doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. I, for one, am not content feeling obliged to do something without understanding why.

Letterpress business card template for my 8 year long project, Ferrum Wheel

I'm a firm believer that all cultural/artistic production involves an expectation of audience even if that audience is the artist himself (see: Henry Darger, even Andy Goldsworthy) or convenes posthumously (see: too many artists/authors to name, but famously, Emily Dickinson). Simply by virtue of being perceiveable/conceivable in the universe, an artistic object/event (or concept thereof) not only expects an audience but requires it. Artist thinks artistic concept: he is necessarily there thinking it, he is his own audience. Artist makes index of concept: again, at least, he is his own audience (now conceptually and perceptually), but more than likely, the audience will extend beyond himself. From this we can assume it is inevitable that conceiving art, creating art, conceiving art that is perceived, perceiving art that is conceived, or perceiving art that is created must make the artist feel a certain way. And if audience is unavoidable, then it must play an integral role in how the artist feels.

Let's take each of those in turn. How does conceiving art make me feel? When I had the idea for this book, I felt excited, challenged, hopeful, nervous, anxious. How many of these feelings are dependent on audience? All of them. I was excited to produce something (an art object) that others (and myself) would see. I felt challenged because the creation of the object always involves some level of compromise between the imagined object and the actual thing, and I try reconcile the two as best I can. I felt hopeful because reconciling the imagined and the actual seemed relatively possible. I also felt hopeful for a positive response (from myself and others). I felt nervous and anxious about an inability to reconcile the imagined and the actual, and a possible negative reaction (from myself and others). All that before I even make a single thing. The only thing clear at this point is that even conceiving art makes me feel a lot of conflicting things. Now since it's impossible for me to conceive of something that I cannot perceive, it's safe to say that I've already perceived the conception of the art object I've conceived. This perception (thinking about my thoughts) doesn't necessarily add much in the way of what I feel, except maybe make me a little more critical of my idea. Creating the art object itself does, however, generate a new batch of feelings, including, but not limited to: frustration, determination, celebration, etc. Many of these feelings are wrapped up in the struggle to apply my physical skills in such a way as to produce precisely the object I envision. When I'm applying my hands and tools in this focused way I feel determined, when it doesn't turn out I feel frustrated, when it does I feel celebratory. Finally, when I perceive art that has been created (by my hand or otherwise), I feel intrigued, contemplative, joyous, disappointed, confused, etc. This, by far, is the most complicated and controversial aspect of artistic production because (unless the artist is the sole audience) it involves any number of people and any number of various reactions. I hardly have time to go into the whole history of aesthetics and criticism, but suffice it to say it's a contentious issue. I'm just trying to figure out why I make art.

I think this cycle of emotions is a key to why I make things. The emotions above are exclusive to me and are by no means representative of how other artists feel when they produce art, but the cycle is not. I think every artist goes through a similar process although the emotions may be different. It's this dynamism, this artificially generated interplay between risk and reward that draws me in - that maybe draws us all in. The velocity (and intensity) with which we experience these emotions is dependent on the length (and intensity) of the project (from a doodle on a notebook to a ten-year outdoor construction piece). It's an autogenous storm, one we stand at the center of, drift in and out of, and sometimes lose our way in.

Maybe if I had to answer the question about why I made art, I would say: Because I'm not just making art, I'm making all the things that go along with it. I'm instigating all those ideas, emotions, and criticisms, in myself and others, the whole cloud of dust.

I know this is a cursory examination, and I'm sure I'll be coming back to it over time. And I know my final statement is just as vulnerable to my earlier criticism of other artist's answers: one could easily ask me why I like instigiating all those ideas, emotions, etc. I think the answer might be a combination of something ethical and aesthetic - like maybe I think it's the Right thing to do...maybe more on that tomorrow.

Check out Ferrum Wheel at www.ferrumwheel.blogspot.com

A Brief History of Liberal Arts, Part II

2008-09-09T00:42:00.002-04:00

Renaissance ideals spread throughout Western Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries, and did much to expand education beyond rote memorization into the realm of critical thinking. Italy led the charge, with England, Spain, Germany, and France lagging behind under the weight of a common obstacle: religious strife.

The Reformation instigated educational debates throughout the region, most notably Philip Melanchthon's push for universal literacy in Germany (helped along by the invention of movable type and the printing press), Puritan individualism in England (which served to disassemble not only papal infallibility, but also the authority of clergy and educators), and Samuel Hartlib's radical suggestion of education for all (built on the notions of John Amos Comenius). While these innovators were by no means entirely successful, their ideas served to prod the stubborn, slow-moving heifer of education forward.

The Counter-Reformation wasn't without its contributions as well, especially those of the Jesuits. In 1534, Ignatius Loyola founded the Society of Jesus. Spurred on by the Council of Trent (which encouraged educational activities in order that clergy might "react convincingly against the doctrinal innovations from the Lutherans, Calvinists, and others"), Loyola and the Jesuits established their first college in Sicily in 1548 (79). By 1615 there were 372 Jesuit colleges throughout Europe; by the mid 18th century there were over 700. The Jesuit schools were revered for their efficiency, effectiveness, and academic rigor. The Jesuit program was 13 years long, separated into 3 stages, but the final stage was really reserved for aspiring clergymen. The 1st stage concentrated on grammar, rhetoric, and religious studies, the 2nd stage on philosophy, and the final stage was a 4 year submersion in theology. While the Jesuit's curriculum may not have much in common with modern education, their teaching methods are certainly familiar. They were the first to widely use examinations and grading, urging students to compete, and "marks, badges, and prizes" were often awarded to successful students (81). In addition to being a forerunner of the competition/reward system of modern Western education, the Jesuits were also the first to achieve a level of standardization throughout their schools based on the principles of the Ratio Studiorum (an instruction/guidance manual for teachers and institutions).

As individualism, scientific advances, and new political philosophies percolated throughout the West, they culminated in what is commonly referred to as the illumination, or the Age of Enlightenment. The Enlightenment covers a lot of ground, but Lawton and Gordon try to summarize the general features as such: "belief in the power of scientific reasoning; faith in progress; human rights; freedom of thought and enquiry; and finally, the desire to promote education as a means of furthering the 'Enlightenment project'" (89). Now we're not to believe these tenets were ever penned by someone who participated in the Enlightenment; we're to understand that they're a retrospective assessment of historical data. Scientific, philosophical, and technical developments during this period made schools and universities hotbeds of intellectual debate, theoretical arguments, and controversial ideas. In addition, the sheer volume of new information coupled with the waning power of the Church caused a disintegration of common teaching methods and practices, virtually ensuring that each new school/university would have a new curriculum and a new way of teaching it. "Above all, the Enlightenment...destroyed forever the idea that education was primarily concerned with memorising sacred texts, or indeed any other books. The Age of Reason demanded that education should be concerned with developing the powers of the mind to criticise the status quo and think rationally" (99-100).

Until this time advanced education was still a private affair; it still cost a great sum of money and/or was reserved for aspiring clergy. However, the oncoming industrial revolution would see the rise of a middle class and lower middle class that could sometimes amass enough wealth to buy their way into the system.

During the early 19th century, many theories about education arose out of the nascent field of sociology (or the social sciences), pioneered by Auguste Comte. The later 19th century, however, saw logistical changes as well as theoretical shifts. Labor reformers in England, America, and elsewhere were calling for the mitigation or elimination of child labor. The industrial explosion had created an insatiable employment market, unfortunately to the detriment of more than one generation of young children. When these reformers succeeded, young children could no longer work, so public schooling was devised to fill their idle time. There is more than a hint here of the nationalism that was the impetus for Roman public schools: if the children cannot work in the service of capitalism, they will spend that time learning why it is right to work in the service of capitalism, and this will unify the country. This is not to say that there was some conspiracy in the development of modern public education; I'm sure important figures in education reform/implementation had the children's best interest in mind, but we should keep in mind that their "best interest" did include becoming a dutiful, productive citizen.

Regardless of the loss of child labor, the 19th and 20th centuries were times of great prosperity for Western European nations and America. Families continued to amass wealth, and when children finished their public or private schooling, some families had enough money to send them to colleges and universities. A degree was a status symbol, and ironically, those who could afford a degree rarely needed to worry about whether or not it would benefit them financially. You see, if you look closely back through the history of "liberal education," you'll find that employability was never a concern. The classical Greek economy was based primarily on slavery, and where slaves were trained to do manual labor, citizens were free to pursue philosophy and the arts. In Rome, private education was an exclusive (and expensive) privilege used to sustain wealth and power, and when it was made public, it was only a propagandistic tool to unify the empire. For some time after that, the Church used exclusive education to maintain its stranglehold on Europe - but clergymen were always going to be fed - they weren't earning their degrees "in order to get a job." All throughout the Renaissance, Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and Enlightenment, higher education remained the province of the well-to-do: courtiers, noblemen, aristocrats, and as always, clergy. Even in the 19th century in the public schools in England, a liberal education was for sons of "gentlemen" "who would become leaders of society at home or administrators of the Empire" (195). For over 2000 years, there has been a deep dichotomy between liberal education and vocational training/technical instruction. Only in the last 100 years has the problem arisen of putting a liberal education to work - of somehow reconciling encyclopedic, broad based knowledge with specific vocational requirements. In terms of the history of education, it's a relatively new problem, brought on by the expansion of the middle and lower middle class, the availability of student loans, the decline of high-paying low skill jobs, the overabundance of degrees, and the inability to recognize the difference between liberal education and vocational training/technical instruction. Often in a university, these two sit side by side. Learning how to become an electrical engineer, technically, would be vocational training/technical instruction. Learning how to interpret poetry, on the other hand, would be a liberal education. But we can get both "degrees" at the same place. Both result in very different outcomes. You can see how some confusion might arise - how the myth of the college degree as golden goose might begin: students equate all degrees received from an institution, although some are part of a liberal education and others are vocational training. At one time, it may have even been possible to make the mistake of equating a college degree with economic advantage because all those who received a degree already had an economic advantage.

For more on the American history of education after World War II, see my previous entries Shame on You, Shame on Me and We Are Not the First.

Either way, it's been an enlightening trip through the history of Western education and liberal arts and it's encouraging to see that we're wrestling with a relatively new problem (even if it is still embedded in a terribly old system).

A Brief History of Liberal Arts

2008-09-07T22:26:00.002-04:00

Bear with me; the history of liberal arts (and Western education in general) is long, multifarious, and dare I say, convoluted. For our purposes here, I'll keep it brief - but try to remember that the purpose of this investigation is to give us some notion of the depth of the tradition we're participating in and the legacy we've inherited.

The framework of "liberal arts" crystallized during classical antiquity, first in the schools of the Greek city-states, then in the Rome, where sometime around the 5th century it took on the form we recognize as the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and the Quadrivium (astronomy, music, geometry, and arithmetic). In truth, the Athenian educational curriculum from the 6th and 5th century BCE included many of the same subjects: music, poetry, reading, writing, oratory, and rhetoric. Greek education was in service of citizenship, as "all adult Athenians were liable to be drawn, by lot, for public office, or they might need to plead a legal case in front of their fellow citizens" (Lawton and Gordon 13). However, Athenian "schools" were often private tutorships for older boys, "with wealthy parents paying large sums of money for good training under expert teachers" (13). Extraordinary education, even at that time, was the province of the rich, and a method of ensuring success in business, government, and the courts. The popularity of this type of private education (and no doubt the avarice of some would-be teachers) led to the development of private schooling for the 7-14 year old age bracket, but only 1 in 10 of those students went on to more advanced education because of financial reasons. Apparently even ancient Greeks were no strangers to the propagation and maintenance of State control via exclusionary practices of the wealthy. Now it would be unfair to say that these students were taught the premises of asymmetrical social scheming, in fact, quite the opposite. Greek students were inculcated with an ethical approach to rhetoric; teachers advocated honesty and respect for the beauty of a logically sound argument - until the Sophists appeared.

The vibrant intellectual climate in Athens attracted orators and philosophers from overseas who set up small schools or taught in the open air for a small fee - this group of foreign teachers were collectively known as the "Sophists." The Sophists were criticized for their lack of method, their unethical practices, and their moral relativism, but it cannot be denied that their imported ideas had some influence on traditional Greek ideas, even if it served to strengthen them. And it also cannot be denied that when these Sophists returned home, they brought Greek culture and ideas with them. We can see the nascent stages of international intellectual exchange in the Greek model, but the changes it instigated in Athens and elsewhere were subtle; the curriculum and the aim of education remained unchanged for almost 2 centuries, until the arrival of Aristotle.

Shortly after Aristotle's massive contributions to philosophy, logic, ethics, aesthetics, and natural science in ancient Greece, the former city-state of Rome saw its territory slowly expanding. Most people living within the boundaries of Roman territory at this time were farmers. It was primarily an agrarian society, so early Roman education took place at home, and was what we would consider "vocational" training. Manual labor was not regarded as "low" by the Romans as it was by the Athenians, and conversely, intellectual prowess was not cultivated and revered by the Romans as it was by the Athenians. Young Roman boys were taught to farm, read, write, basic arithmetic, and they were introduced the market economy. The earliest schools in Rome surfaced around 200 BCE, and they were private as well, modeled on the schools of the Greek city-states. Students began at 7 years old were taught the same things most would be taught at home: reading, writing, arithmetic, as well as pietas and gravitas. At 12, the student would move on to "grammar" school, where the focus was Greek and Latin grammar, as well as the literature of Homer, Aesop, Horace, Virgil, and Livy. At 16, the major subject became rhetoric, and the focus became oratory, as it was in Athens. Some students even travelled to other famous schools to study rhetoric. We can assume that the same economic forces were at work in Roman education as in Athens; Lawton and Gordon assure us that "such education, at home or abroad, was very much an experience reserved for the wealthy" (25).

By the 1st century some State-sponsored grammar schools (and the schools that preceded them) had been established in Rome and abroad, so "Rome must take some of the credit - or the blame - for the spreading of the notion of the school...it is very probable that by then it was general policy to introduce schooling into conquered regions in order to Romanise the population" (29). It's very likely that the solidification of the Trivium and Quadrivium was an inevitable symptom of the standardization of Roman State schooling. By the end of the Roman empire, "all education was supervised by the State and teachers were only permitted to teach if licensed" (29). While this type of schooling may have been moderately successful at unifying the empire and Romanising conquered populations, it was an absolute failure in terms of personal education. Students were unruly, teachers were unqualified, and often insurmountable language barriers existed. Sound familiar?

The Roman grammar schools didn't survive the barbarian invasions, well at least the "Roman" part of them didn't. Sometimes the schools were taken over by the invaders, but these resurrected insitutions were few and far between, with no consistent curricula. As the Mediterranean and European regions were entering the Dark Ages, schooling was perpetuated by the Catholic church. Monasteries carried on the tradition of education in languages, oratory, rhetoric, while "cathedral schools" were the new grammar schools for younger prospective clergy. The monastic schools and cathedral schools were clearly vocational in nature, they were not educating for the sake of education, rather, "the first priority was to ensure that future priests and monks would be educated to a suitably high standard" (45). Unfortunately the Church ran into the same problem with its public schooling as the Romans: standards declined or were never implemented, and inadequate education resulted. Enter Charlemagne.

Charlemagne is often credited with conquering and Christianizing most of Western Europe and revitalizing education at the end of the 8th century. He built on the schools that the monasteries and cathedrals maintained, insisting that the clergy "be instructed more vigorously and standards be strictly enforced" (47). Under Charlemagne's guidance, what we would regard as a post-scondary school was set up at Aachen, a place where advanced studies of scripture and language could go on. For the next 400 years, the general population remained illiterate and subjugated to the educated clergy, except for select noblemen (and women) who paid for their education. At this point in time, what we understand as the traditional liberal arts curriculum was all but lost; mathematics, poetry, and music suffered the most, washed over by the concerns of the Church.

During the 12th century, some European countries saw the Church consolidate its power by restricting access to the monastic schools to future monks (excluding even noblemen and the wealthiest landowners). As these schools became more exclusive, laymen and even some priests had to be educated elsewhere. In cities, schools sprang up to educate them, but the Church wanted to retain its control over all schooling, so it declared that only teachers licensed by bishops could teach. The Lateran Council made this a requirement in 1179 for all Christendom, and its possible these restrictions benefitted the new institutions by giving some air of legitimacy to them and ensuring the quality of instruction. At this time, the Trivium and Quadrivium were resuscitated and implemented as the standrad curricula for these new "universities." Welcome back, liberal arts.

These early schools weren't called universities, normally they were referred to as "studium generale." They surfaced in Salerno, Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge, but "the first use of the term universitas magistrum et scholarum (university of teachers and scholars) was at the beginning of the 13th century , in Paris" (52). The universities quickly became cynosures of philosophical debate where new ideas and theories flourished, but these rapid changes met with some resistance from the Church, which resulted in the development of the idea of "academic freedom," essentially exempting students and their teachers from ordinary restrictions on speech and thought. Don't get me wrong. They weren't free to say anything they wanted to say. They were simply freer than others to propose questions and answers about the nature of mankind and the universe. All of this "freedom" stewed about for a couple hundred years before boiling over in 14th and 15th century Italy.

As Italy experienced a rise in prosperity and increased demand for educated and highly qualified men, the old-fashioned universities there, Church run or otherwise, couldn't keep up with the demand. New schools were formed outside of the institutions, "often in the homes of scholars, where there was direct communication between teacher and student, and new material was taught" (59). This abandoned the stifling lecture model that was prevalent prior to the shift. The Trivium and Quadrivium remained, but now they were complemented by the study of literature, philosophy, and even recreation and physical education. By the end of the 15th century, these "Renaissance humanists" had even won the struggle to include (and teach) the visual arts (painting, sculpture, architecture, etc) under the rubric of liberal arts. Massive changes took place, and education was becoming more available to those outside the Church and nobility, but it was still far from approaching egalitarian.

Next up: from 1500-2008, how we made it from the Renaissance to here.

This entry is obviously indebted to wikipedia, but also to:

Lawton, Dennis, and Peter Gordon. A History of Western Educational Ideas. Portland, Woburn Press, 2002.

Photo recap 1978-1986

2008-09-05T23:12:00.003-04:00

Me at 2 years old, with maternal grandfather and grandmother. Traditional nose-picking pose.

Me with headless mother, 3 years old.

Me doing jigsaw puzzle with mother, 8 years old, shortly before my parents divorce.

Me with my Uncle Scott, 10 years old. He was a child from my grandfather's later marriage.

Naked Singularity, Part IX - Final Installment

2008-09-03T22:25:00.004-04:00

The hunt for a graduate school was short and sweet. I wasn't prepared to commit to a PhD anywhere, and quickly found out that terminal MA programs were cash cows for Universities. If you want a PhD, schools might be able to scrounge up funding for you, but if you just want to get your MA and get out, pay up. So the list got shortened to a few strange schools that had funded MA programs in English/Poetics. The University of Maine appealed to me because Orono had a long history with Buffalo (sharing the late great poet and teacher Robert Creeley, among others) and with the exportation of Ben Friedlander from UB to UMaine, it seemed that the traditional dialogue would continue. I knew Ben from times he would sit in for Charles Bernstein; I liked him as a person and a professor, so I thought that working with him would be beneficial to me.

I took a trip in November of 2002 to check out the University and meet with professors. Orono is an 11 hour drive from Buffalo, almost 3 hours North of the border between Maine and New Hampshire. In other words, it's up there. Way up there. I remember thinking to myself as I drove farther and farther North, what am I getting myself into? I arrived at the University in the middle of the afternoon; things were grey, cold, and dreary. The architecture was unimpressive, the campus was active, but not bustling. Quiet for a school of 13,000. I would come to find out it had little to do with the school and everything to do with the students. After a meeting with a few professors and the chair of the department, I sat in on an evening class Friedlander was teaching on Sentimental Poetry. I was myself: brash, confrontational, insightful - but everyone else was so quiet. I hadn't even read the entire book they were discussing, and I had more to say than most of the students. I thought this place could use a kick in the ass. I left the campus ambivalent, arrived in Bangor where I was staying with an enrolled grad student, and turned in early.

The next day I explored the little city of Bangor (the only thing I really knew about Bangor was it had a statue of Paul Bunyan and Stephen King lived there). In the afternoon I met with Pat Burnes, the teaching assistant coordinator, attended a reading by Mark McMorris (part of UMaine's New Writing Series), and ended the evening by having dinner with McMorris, Steve Evans, Jennifer Moxley, and a few others. Discussion at dinner was lively, and I was entertained by the depth and breadth of Evans' knowledge. I found myself thinking there might be life in Maine yet.

I left early the next morning and drove to Maine's coast in search of the ocean. For some reason I thought if I could just see the ocean, it would tell me the answer. Let me know whether or not I should be there. But I couldn't find it. I know that sounds ridiculous, but anyone who's ever been to Maine can concur - the coastline is a jagged series of rocky inlets, small harbors, and uninspiring wetlands. I wanted waves. Great big crashing waves, something bigger than me, something sublime that would draw me in completely or send me home screaming. I drove out of my way for almost 3 hours, and never saw breaking waves. I turned inland towards route 95 and headed home, feeling ashamed. Why would the ocean have the answer? Was I insane? Shouldn't I have the answer?

Flying into Bangor, ME, 2004.

I was doing good work in Buffalo - why did I really want to move? Was it because all my friends had gone/were going to grad school? Was it because I couldn't handle the complexities of my social situation? Was it because I really wanted to learn more about the subject I had come to love and value? Was it because I wanted to escape into the woods of Maine and discover things about myself? I think it was all of those things, but I also think it was to buy time. I had entertained the notion that I might never find a job directly related to my education, but I remained in denial, pushing it to the fringes, telling myself that all I needed was more education and everything would be alright. Then someone would see the value in me, want to put my knowledge to work, and capitalize on my unique skill set. Part of me was still holding on tenaciously to the golden myth of higher education, part of me was probably just drunk.

I decided shortly after arriving home that I needed a kick in the ass, someone in Maine might be able to give it to me, but more importantly, Maine needed a kick in the ass, and I was just the man to give it. I packed up my car, my big fish attitude, and moved to the great white Northeast in August of 2003.

While at UMaine, I taught composition to incoming freshmen and sophomores. I was an atypical teacher; I taught about cryptozoology and the loch ness monster, engaged my students in discussions about DADA and Situationism, assigned activities instead of papers. I was good at teaching, but I didn't necessarily like it. I always imagined when I went away to places that it would be to "work on me," but teaching made me feel like I kept emptying my bowl before I had the chance to fill it. I can tell you one thing for certain (especially those of you who like to think of your students as "teachers"), I learned nothing from my students in Maine except patience and the advantage of having multiple approaches to a problem.

Maine was an exercise in patience. Stores and restaurants closed at 9p, bars closed at 1a, people were reticent and uncommunicative, and the climate was oppressive. I keep late hours, so rarely had the chance to grocery shop or eat out; I'd arrive at bars a half an hour before last call; I'd find myself leading every single conversation I was in; and sometimes in the winter, the temperature didn't clear 0 degrees Faranheit for weeks at a time. I never realized how truly impatient I was until I experienced the interminably slow pace of Maine. I mean, seriously, the speed limit in the city is 25mph. And people obey it. But I learned patience. Not only with the place, but with myself.

Nadja Sayej installation at 107 Neville. Mural, Chris Fritton, framed work, Nadja Sayej, 2005.

This new patience made me a better reader and a better writer, as did guidance by Friedlander, Evans, and Tony Brinkley. I admired and envied their reading skills, vocabulary and wit, and wisdom, respectively. Maine allowed me the freedom to cultivate and integrate a number of varied interests, including, but not limited to: pataphysics, utopia/dystopia, visual poetry, poetics, perceptual science, hermeneutics, Situationism, and Marcel Duchamp. But this meandering appreciation didn't help me in an environment that prizes unilateral specialization - I didn't have a particular focus that was my "project," my "specialty." Evans once remarked to me that the nature of my papers and outside activities led him to believe I "may have been better off going to art school for an MFA." It probably didn't help that I had converted my office at school into an international art gallery that focused on visual poetry from around the world. The space was called 107 Neville; I would have artists mail their work, then I would hang and curate a show for them in the space; the work would change on a bi-monthly basis. I saw it as a way to draw together students and faculty from the art, english, new media, and philosophy departments. All told, 107 Neville hosted 9 shows and featured artists like Nico Vassilakis, David Baptiste-Chirot, Wendy Collin Sorin, Nadja Sayej, Mike Basinski, and many others. It never turned into the multi-disciplinary haven I envisioned because I didn't really understand the insular nature of the departments (and people) in Maine. But it was, as Jennifer Moxley called it when I first described it, "an idea beautifully doomed to fail." And it was a beautiful, fun, and entertaining failure, which in my opinion, is as good as any success.

Nico Vassilakis visual poetry projection, 107 Neville, 2004.

Did I give Maine the kick in the ass it needed? I think so, at least while I was there. I made people drink a little too much, think a little too much, see and do things they would've never done had I not been there to encourage them. I was wild, erratic, cocky, and chronically argumentative, but I brought a lot of positives to the table too. I was decisive, creative, inspiring, and engaging. Apparently students and professors there honor my memory by describing things too hyperbolic, over-the-top, or unusual as "Frittonesque".

Me in Orono, ME 2005, complete with furry earflap cap.

Maine taught me to read, to write, to have patience, to make my own fun, and to honor myself and my personal vision. But it also taught me about the sordid, ugly side of departmental politics, the incessant jockeying and feuding, that the Ivory Tower is as muddy as any place where human beings interact. There is nothing sacred or exempt about it. The most important thing I learned in Maine was on my final day. I had stopped by my mentor Tony Brinkley's office for a goodbye chat. After some small talk and a comfortable silence, he sat up and looked me right in the eye, and said "You know it's all a house of cards, right?" I thought I knew what he meant but I wasn't sure. I said "yeah," but it must not of been believable, because he kept staring at me, and said "Are you sure you know it?" I knew it. And I still know it. He was talking about all of academia. He was talking about building a career writing papers about other papers that people wrote while building their careers writing papers about other papers other people wrote. He was saying, we don't need anymore papers, you don't need to write those papers, go out and Do Something.

I've been trying to do something ever since. After graduating, I co-curated the Soundvision/Visionsound III visual poetry show in Somerville, MA, then moved back to Buffalo. I started the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair. I wrote three books, learned how to letterpress, screenprint, and etch glass, quit drinking, found a stable relationship, and quit my job. I'm doing. I'm doing as much as I know how, but not as much as I imagined.

As hard as I work, sometimes I still feel like I'm in Maine, taking a walk through Bangor at 1a, next to the pitch black Penobscot River, full of ice. I could be the last man if it weren't for the chimney smoke that signals others are out there somewhere, or in there, in the spaces we make so we can keep on making, keep on doing.

Next up: Now that we're done with the history of Me, we'll take my friend Tawrin's advice and do a brief history of this thing we call liberal arts.

Naked Singularity, Part VIII

2008-08-31T23:39:00.007-04:00

My new love was one of those all-consuming loves, the ones that make you blind to all of the other person's faults, the kind that swallows you up in warm foam, soothing you while it obscures your vision.

We spent every moment together, and just when I had gotten on the horse at UB, I started skipping class so that we could spend more time together. My grades suffered, and at one point, about 1/3 of the way into my 4th semester, I gave up. Entirely. More completely and finally than I had ever given up on anything. I didn't even gesture towards participation in school; I stayed enrolled in my classes, and when my grades came, I'd received a 0.0.

I'd never failed at anything. Ever. I felt a sense of relief and release, like I'd finally done something I'd been waiting to do my whole life. I'd flouted the silent expectations that my parents and friends had for me. I'd abandoned responsibility; I'd been burned by the fire of failure and survived. But had I? Look closely. This was an engineered catastrophe, a calculated decision. I had decided that I needed to fail, I decided on the terms and conditions, I executed the actions. In every way, this was an artificial failure. And from conception to staging to implementation, it was an absolute success. I'd done exactly what I'd set out to do. Christ Almighty! I was so terrified of failure that I'd engineered one for myself just to see if I could survive it, and was oblivious to the fact that my failure was a perfect success. The real failure was yet to come, and it was an integral part of cleaning up the mess this faux-failure left in its wake.

At the time of this "failure," my mother was caring for my grandfather who was terminally ill with cancer. He'd lived a hard life: working in the coal mines in West Virginia, working on the railroad, chewing tobacco and drinking his whole life, most of it in abject poverty. When he was first diagnosed, the cancer was small and treatable. He ignored treatment suggestions and the cancer spread. At one point he was given 6 months to live. He lived another 9 years. My mother moved in when he was in the final stages, the cancer was in his lungs, his skin, his bones, his organs. She'd just ended a long term relationship under very poor circumstances, and she was still working to support herself while caring for my grandfather, who, at best, was ungrateful. At worst, he was abusive. My mother and I, at this time, had a quietly strained relationship - we'd always been emotional buoys for one another, but she hadn't been able to help me with my break-up or academic woes, and I hadn't been able to help her with her break up or stress that came from dealing with her father. For a short time, I lived with her and my grandfather in the cramped apartment, but it was clear we were of no use to each other.

Here's where the story gets ugly.

While I'd had enough of "failure," and I was again doing well in school, I still had a 0.0 on my record. I found out that I could have these grades dismissed if I could provide evidence of some extenuating family or personal circumstance. Really? A crisis you say? I just happen to have one...

I spent the next couple months rounding up evidence of my grandfather's illness, writing letters to the Dean about how my involvement and responsibility, as well as my mother's, contributed to my academic nil. Abhorrent. Inexcusable. Obscene. Did he just say that he used his grandfather's cancer as an excuse to get poor grades removed from the record? Yes, I did. Did I feel bad about it? Not for a second. You see, my grandfather was a strong man, a hard worker, but he was a bastard. He had led a sordid life that wreaked havoc on those closest to him; he had abused my mom in her childhood, and in his final days, continued to abuse her and behave like an ingrate. The way I saw it, with all the negative things that came out of his life, he owed the world something positive. He owed me something positive. And dead as he was, that man could still do the work of wiping my slate clean. But I was wrong.

This is where I really failed: he didn't owe me (or the world) shit. He owed my mom. The world is full of plenty of terrible people, but it isn't really (or shouldn't be) the privilege of the living to figure out how to exploit their death for individual or societal gain. As small as they were, I was unprepared to carry the consequences of my actions; I had devised a plan, pulled it off, and as soon as I saw that failure wasn't so bad, I wanted out. I wanted to burn something down, but didn't want to stick around to sweep up the ashes. I succeeded at my failure, but I failed when this ruse was a success.

LEAVE - glass etching vispoem, 2008.

Back to academia. My philosophy classes moved along nicely, but I'd hit a glass ceiling when it came to math and science. I'd excelled at the two subjects throughout high school, but when it came to calculus and college level chemistry and physics, I was afloat. The only other subject I seemed to retain a propensity for was English. I would pack my schedule full of philosophy, but if there was an opening, I'd take an English elective. I was still on my quest to figure out what it was to be human; philosophy was taking care of the architecture for me, but when it came to color and emotion, it still left me feeling flat. The English electives I took helped expand the depth and breadth of my knowledge when it came to fiction and poetry, but they also gave me my fix of the illogical, irrational side of humanity. People were full of fire and ice, grand schemes and lowly deceits (believe me, I knew about this one), weird, strange, and unforgettable combinations of characteristics. Very little traditional philosophy I encountered allowed for this kind of exceptionality, but I saw it every day around me, especially in myself. I needed to know more about it, so I dove in.

I completed my BA in Philosopy at UB in 1998, but delayed graduation. I was 4 semesters away from a BA in English, and I had no other plans, so I stuck around. Well, really, there were two big reasons I stuck around: Fred See and Charles Bernstein. See looked like a football coach, big guy, big moustache, but he taught Shakespeare and theories of America. He forced answers out of students, was brutally honest, sometimes short-tempered, but always, always involved. Often our essay responses were limited to 1 page, front and back, sometimes 2. And he meant it. If you wrote more, he refused to read it, or tore it off the staple and threw it out. You'd get your paper back without the second page. His love of the subject matter, ability to humanize everyone involved (inculding the students), and nostalgic recollections of his life and family made him a powerful influence on me. Bernstein, if you don't know already, is a former L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet, essayist, and pope of poetics. He's a brilliant polymath that you can't help but be drawn to - he has a strange sort of easy charisma - especially if you have any interest in language. I'd taken a seminar class with him prior to 1998, but arranged my schedule so that I could take every class he offered and attend graduate seminars I wasn't even enrolled in. He teaches via submersion, an absolute deluge of material is dropped on students (3000-4000 pages) knowing full well that most won't be able to make it through all the material, and they will have to choose what they find most meaningful and important. The freeform classes encouraged experimentation, incorporation of other media, non-traditional writing methods; in short, it was chaotic and unmeasured, and would've been fruitless were it not for Berstein's ability to rein it all in and orchestrate some sort of trajectory.

UB was a cynosure for liberal, radical, and experimental poetry and poetics. I had no idea when I transferred there that I was walking into such a profound legacy, one that was propagated by people like Susan Howe, Samuel Delaney, Robert Creeley, Dennis Tedlock, Ben Friedlander, Bernstein, and so many others. In the space of a few short years, we had visits from the greatest and strangest poets in the world, we were free to ask anything we liked and respond in any way we saw fit. It was freedom I'd never experienced in academia, and my passion for the material and the mode of learning gave way to an exponential increase in knowledge, not only of poetry and poetics, but of people and politics.

I started to see how it all fit together for me, how I could marry philosophy and literature and see the best and worst that humans had to offer. Then I graduated.

By this time, the love of my life had begun to disintegrate; there was infidelity, emotional unavailability, and immature posturing. I was again giving in order to be loved, doing more and more and more and seeing no return - often this is a trademark of my relationships with others because they don't see me as "needing anything." I was confused, desperate, and had no idea how to apply all that I'd learned to my life in the real world. The one thing that I wasn't was unemployed. I was working 9a-5p and one job and 9p-5a and a second job. I hid in my work. I hid from the people I loved, I hid from those who loved me, and I drank too much (I worked as a bartender). At one point I was drinking close to a bottle of vodka a day and juggling intimate relationships with at least 7 different people. It all got to be too much. So instead of facing it, I ran away.

In October of 2000, I sold everything I owned except what fit in my car (again) and moved to Southern California. I don't know what I was doing, except running. I thought distance from my situation would help, give me time to work on myself, and what better place to do it than in sunny Southern California? I'd visited once, and it felt like home. Skateboarders everywhere, perfect climate, fast pace. But visiting somewhere and living somewhere are two completely different things. I still had no plan, retained all of my ties to home, so I was managing relationships from a distance (very poorly), and developing new relationships to strain myself with. I skated, worked as a bartender, got drunk every night, and did absolutely nothing to work on myself. After a year, I was floundering. Sure I had a job, lived a 100 feet from the beach, skated every day in a place where it never rained, but I'd only found two friends. And I'd stopped writing and all other modes of cultural production. SoCal felt like a cultural vacuum - poetry readings were at Borders, little art galleries were almost non-existent (what a change - look at LA now!), and I was suffering. I decided to move back to Buffalo, and the minute I did, something changed. I produced three new books (even before I left SoCal) and started Ferrum Wheel with Ric Royer. It was like my motivation was geographically dependent. But now that I think about it, maybe it was just socially dependent.

After returning to Buffalo, I got an apartment on the third floor of a quiet house on a quiet street. It felt like a nest. I had no doorbell, so if I unplugged the phone, no one could get to me, except via the fire escape, which only a few people dared. I began isolating myself for longer and longer stretches of time. I spent the summers at the same job, the winters off, living on unemployment. I'd drink too much, not eat right, but it was a productive time for me. I wrote a few books, many performance pieces, made 4 issues of Ferrum Wheel, had readings on a monthly basis. Something about being untouchable up there, in my bird's nest, made me feel like I could get things done. I think I'd always ignored my own work when there was someone close to me - I'd either make the decision to spend my time with them instead of make art, or I'd give in to their tacit, palpable jealousy. I worked best when there was no one to compete with my work, so I just began shutting everyone out so I didn't have to feel guilty about working.

Surprise, surprise, my love life wasn't improving. I can't imagine that it had anything to do with me unplugging the phone and disappearing for days on end. I felt stifled by my private life, but also stagnant intellectually. Sure, I was producing, but I wasn't learning anything. And I definitely didn't have a job "in my field", nor any prospects. A combination of private and public pressures made me think grad school might be the answer. Somewhere far away.

Next up: Sorry, it's going to take one more to wrap up the series! Grad school and my move back to Buffalo.

Naked Singularity, Part VII

2008-08-30T00:09:00.004-04:00

I forgot to mention one important aesthetic development from high school: headphones. I can hardly overstate the importance of their insulation, invocation, and penetration. Long before I ever understood anything about close reading, I was practicing close listening intensely. Walking the railroad tracks to the bus stop, on the bus, in the hallway, in lunch, in study hall, laying in bed at night. Sometimes I would keep the same cassettes in my player for months at a time (literally). I would familiarize myself with every note, every word I could make out, every convergence and severance, every anomaly. I would listen until it didn't even feel like I was listening anymore, then listen right through and out the other side, like I was hearing it all again for the first time, I'd interpret it anew, then I'd start all over again.

Reading, however, was a different story. By the end of high school, I had read Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Leibniz, Rand, and too many other philosophers to mention - but with no guidance and no clear knowledge of basic philosophical quandaries. I was reading people's answers without knowing what the questions were, and likely, searching for my own answers when I didn't even know exactly what my own questions were. Why am I here? What is the universe? Where did it come from? What is infinity? Is there a god? What is love? Sure, sure, sure. All those and a thousand more. But I no idea how truly massive these questions were and how nuanced the answers had become. Often the philosophy I read made little sense to me, but occasionally I would connect with something; occasionally there'd be a small and partial revelation and I would wrestle with its placement in my intellectual garden. But I pressed on, reassured by the power and solace in these little aphorisms, these little talismans. Soon though, trauma would test the foundation of what I was building, the things I was coming to learn, especially "what is love?"

The day finally came when the summer after my senior year ended, and my girlfriend and I were to head off to college together. We packed up the car, took the 35 minute drive, and unloaded the unsold remains of our lives into the cinderblock hovels even the nicest schools call dorms. It was a humbling time for me; I always had very little in the way of material things, but now what I had could literally fit in the trunk of my car (except for my waterbed, which I couldn't bring to school anyway).

I registered for classes, determined to pursue the course I was already on - philosophy - and become a philosopher (for more on that delusion, see my entry Fireman Syndrome). I enrolled in Philosophy 101, Aristotelian Logic, Latin, Creative Writing, Ethics, and Theology. My girlfriend, though she knew more than I did about college and why we were there, didn't know what she wanted to go to school for, so she picked up a number of disjointed 101 classes. The semester progressed well, but the tumultuous situation with her family continued and the pressure became too much. A week after my birthday in November, and 3 weeks after paying her final tuition bill, she dumped me.

I was broken. I mean broken. I thought I had found love, I thought I knew what love was, I had given everything for this person, given everything I knew how to this person even though I had so little, and it wasn't enough. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, I would cry for hours on end, I became the crazy psychotic jealous ex-boyfriend that followed her places and always, always, "just needed to talk." 3 weeks before the semester ended, it was too much for me, I took my stuff and moved home with my mom. The plan was to commute to school, but I was in no condition. I skipped the remaining classes and my final exams. To give you an idea of the rigorous intellectual standards at the prestigious private institution - I did all that, and still got a 3.6 that semester.

Spun and alone, I was inconsolable. My family had rarely filled the role of emotional consolators, and most of their efforts fell flat. My father tried to fill me with positive thoughts and make me look ahead, said it could be for the better; my mother soothed me, sided with me, and turned against my girlfriend (like all good mothers do to the people who hurt their babies) - but it isn't what I wanted or needed. I had put myself out there, I was trying to build that emotional bridge to someone else, I was desperately flailing, trying to find a person to love me in a way that I had never been loved before - in an unconditional way, for who I was, not what I did. This requires a little elaboration: my parents, I've come to understand, did, and always have, loved me unconditionally. But I didn't know that. After the divorce, when my role changed from son to emotional and psychological consort, I saw my task as supporting my parents. When I did this task right and well, they loved me. Their love was conditional. In my child's mind, I was sustaining them so that they would sustain and love me. In effect, I took on the weight of my own subsistence far earlier than I had to. After years of it, I think that part of me resented my parents and went looking for someone who would love me unconditionally. Instead, I rambled out into the world and gave the first person I could my whole self, and more, in the hope that they would love me. I did the same thing that I'd been doing my whole life, repeated the same pattern - I was giving to be given to, doing things for someone in order to be loved.

Needless to say, I survived. Slowly I started eating again. By the end of December 1994, I had made the decision to transfer to SUNY at Buffalo (UB), away from my ex-girlfriend and to a school that I could afford. A move for survival at the time, I had no idea it would be one of the best decisions of my young life.

Many of my friends from high school had gone to UB, so I immediately fell into a social suport system that was non-existent at the previous school. The anonymity of a large school appealed to me - I could go days without seeing the same people, I could melt away in a lecture with 250 other students. It was what I needed - I no longer felt strong, but I didn't want to be coddled or nursed. I wanted to heal, slowly and completely. I would sit in empty lecture halls at night and write for hours. I would consider myself, my feelings, my thoughts, incessantly; I was cultivating a skill for introspection that I had always possessed, but now it seemed more important than ever that I succeed, that I come to some conclusions about myself and what I wanted to learn. And it came to me one night, in that lecture hall. It's going to sound grandiose, but I wanted to learn what it was to be human. I don't need to point out that this was a poorly disguised way of saying I wanted all of the answers, I wanted to know everything about everything, which is impossible - but somehow, when I worded it that way, it seemed possible.

If I could learn what it was to be human, then I'd have something to say. Something to teach other people. But first I had to pass chemistry. UB was considerably more of a challenge than my first school; my first semester saw me head home with a 2.7. And I was trying. At least I thought I was. I never really had to try before. And hey, I always had an excuse: I was still recovering.

Luckily, with guidance, I became a very good close reader. As my maturity level and openness to external input increased (I'd always been the smartest kid in the room), so did my understanding of philosophical principles and texts. After a number of readings and re-readings of Spinoza, something clicked. I knew that I should be reading just like I used to listen to my headphones. Over and over and over. Until I came out the other side.

I had brutal philosophy professors - some that would hand back papers half a dozen times before accepting them as a final draft. Some that had so much to say that they would rarely stop to answer questions. I was completely overwhelmed by the deluge of material, ideas, and potential answers. I forgot about my girl troubles; I spent my days spelunking into the caves of ontology, existentialism, and logical positivism.

Hardcore and skating were still huge parts of my life as well, so my days and nights were full; I was reining myself back in. Then I fell in love.

Next up: The final installment in the Naked Singularity series, failure, poetry explosion, grad school, and homecoming.

Naked Singularity, Part VI

2008-08-26T02:31:00.003-04:00

Near the end of 10th grade, I was walking home after school, down the railroad tracks towards my house. When I arrived, my mom was sitting alone in the backyard. Just sitting. She never did anything like that - I knew immediately that something had to be seriously wrong. I went and sat next to her, asked her what was wrong, and she didn't answer me for a long time. I was afraid I already knew, and when she finally answered, my suspicions were confirmed. She'd found my weed. Found the little tape case with the little bag and the little handmade pipe ingeniously made from kitchen implements and pieces of pens. I'd become so forgetful that I left it sitting in the middle of my bedroom floor; she came in to grab some dirty clothes, and it was right there.

I'd thought from about the age of 10 that I was operating autonomously, that I was on my own. But it wasn't until that very moment, the moment that I sat down next to my mother, that I realized it was really true. She didn't yell, she didn't tell me I was wrong, she didn't even really say that I had to stop. She just told me that she was disappointed in me, that she thought I would've been smarter and made better choices, but she couldn't control those things, all she could do was tell me how she felt. That was it. I was my own human, out in the world, making my own human choices, for better or worse. I never knew that really being on my own would make me feel so alone.

Things were different after that around the house; I had always been an over-achiever scholastically, always excelled at things I loved, and for the most part "done the right thing" with no parental provocation; it was unspoken, but my parents expected it of me. But not after this. After this betrayal, it was as though my mom held no expectations of me. It humanized me in her eyes in any number of ways, I'm sure; prior to this, she regarded me in an almost super-human way, like I was capable of anything with little effort, but this failure revealed my fallibility, my weakness.

Me in my senior picture. Borrowed shirt, borrowed tie, 17 years old.

Primarily due to this event, partly due to my declining memory, I stopped smoking pot. Almost immediately, the world came rushing back in all its jagged, incessant glory. Unlike most teens, my opinions and interests didn't vacillate wildly, but here I did a complete 180. I had always been familiar with a subgenre of hardcore music associated with the straight-edge lifestyle, a way of living free of drugs and alcohol often paired with radical vegetarianism and actively opposed to escapism in all its forms. It advocated fully embracing the rage, sadness, frustration, and other volatile emotions that accompanied making your way in the world without chemical crutches. SO like any good teen, a living irony, I escaped into the anti-escapism of straight-edge. And it was easy, because it was a brotherhood, a tight-knit social circle centered around the music, a support system of other people like me, a place where it was okay to be fucked up, okay to be angry, okay to show your emotions, but most of all because it drew a line in the sand. It made it clear what was right and wrong. Drinking and doing drugs was wrong. It poisoned your body and mind, it harmed the people around you. It was black and white. It was a mode of ascetic self-discipline and self-discovery that posed a unique challenge to me, but also promised a reward: clarity. And I thought clarity might lead me to the answers I'd been searching for.

Ad for a show by my band Contempt. I have plenty of flyers, but this from the local paper was too good, framed in by TEEZ'IN and STEALIN.

At this point in my life, I'd been going to hardcore shows (I even had my own band, Contempt) - all ages shows, often matinees, steeped in the DIY ethic - for about 4 years, but when I started to go to more straight edge shows, I noticed the abundance of zines (handmade photocopied underground short run magazines). Zine culture was huge in the straight edge movement, a way of spreading the word, getting to know new bands, see pics of bands from other cities, etc. I'd already been writing poetry and introspective prose, so it was only natural that I start my own zine. It just seemed like the perfect creative outlet, and one with little risk - essentially, I'd be preaching to the converted, so the odds of coming up short were pretty slim.

My first zine, Unity (1991), and a later zine, Spindrift (1993).

My first zine was called Unity, and it focused on skating, straight edge, the intolerable atmosphere of high school. During my senior year I made Spindrift, a zine ostensibly dedicated to hardcore music and straight-edge, but the content bordered on the philosophical. I mused on topics like mutual respect, self-delusion, the educational system, civil disobedience, abortion, and community building. I had found a new form, I'm certain, spurred on by the philosophy I voraciously read: the essay. I was also attracted to the aphorism. I liked (and still do) the force, efficiency, and depth of a good one-liner.

Various skate and hardcore zines from my collection, dating 1988-1992.

My zines were well-received by friend and strangers alike; they even caught the attention of some of my teachers. I was close with many of my teachers (my continual absence gave them reason to continually pull me aside) - but a few had a serious impact on me. My 11th grade english teacher was obsessed with Shakespeare and really made me see the beauty in craft and the refinement of language. She was the kind of lady that would jump up on a table and start rattling off a soliloquy. My 12th grade english teacher encouraged me to continue writing, even brought me in during off periods to tutor other kids - and we did this amazing exercise that improved my writing a thousand-fold. We'd read a 5 page article (at least) from the New Yorker, then we would have to adequately summarize the article on a 3" x 5" index card without using any form of the verb "to be". No is, are, was, were, be, being, or been. It was an exercise in active construction and concision that I've never forgotten. Finally, I had a world history teacher that taught me if you worked hard enough, and in a really focused way, you'd have more free time to do the things you love. In AP world history, we'd often work two days out of the week intensely, then spend the remaining three discussing issues that interested us, of simply listening to music and doing other work. This mode of operation has never left me - I still compress days of work into hours so that I can have those days off.

I'd love to say there was some art teacher that inspired me, but it wouldn't be true. The art program at my school was an atrocity and I really never had a positive experience with it.

As I neared the end of high school, I began to hear talk about college. This is hard to explain, I've hinted at it before, and many people won't believe me, but I didn't really know what college was. Even as late as early in my senior year, I didn't understand if it was school like high school, vocational school; I simply had no idea. I was a smart kid, but neither I nor my family really had any experience with it, so I was completely ignorant about what it entailed. Eventually, a meeting with my guidance counselor clued me in, but I also found out that the deadline to apply to most schools had already passed.

Luckily for me, I had gotten myself entangled in one of those brutally messy, co-dependent, Capulet and Montague style high school relationships. My girlfriend was a smart girl too, athletic, pretty, but her parents hated me. I was a little too lawless, and apparently a bad influence. The domestic intranquility quickly devolved into an ultimatum: it was them or me. Her parents told her that if she stayed with me, she was no longer welcome in their home and they wouuldn't pay for her college. Bristling at the challenge, and emboldened by my assertion that we could make it on our own, she chose me. She moved out of her house and into the apartment that I shared with my mother. By this point, my mom and I really were roommates, I was using money from my job as a stockboy to help pay bills and buy food. But that's not the point; the point is, my girlfriend knew about college, knew where she was going to college, and I was unsophisticated enough to think going together was the perfect plan. I quickly began working more hours and selling everything I owned to help pay her tuition (it was an expensive private school - I was lucky enough to get grants because I was so poor, but she had to pay almost everything), hitting up my family for money, and borrowing against credit cards.

Looking back at this makes me want to laugh until I cry. I bet you can't wait to see how it turns out.

Me, my mom, and my dad on graduation day, 1994.

This is how I left high school and entered college: still skateboarding, live-in girlfriend, roommate mom, working as a stock clerk for 4.15 an hour, making zines, writing poetry, reading philosophy, absent 45 days my senior year, graduated with honors.

Next up, and the penultimate installment in the series: close-listening, wide writing, my Undergrad experience.

Angstoriffic High School Poetry

2008-08-21T23:10:00.003-04:00

As the Naked Singularity series nears its end, I feel the need to embarrass and expose myself once more - not with pictures this time, but with really awful, angst and ennui-ridden poetry.

Laugh all you want. I know I am.

I do feel compelled to say, however, that this no longer reflects the style or content of my writing.

fit in

people spend their lives hiding feelings
original thoughts society's stealing
caring thoughts it seems they have none
hurting others gets nothing done
laugh, scoff, and ridicule
psychological warfare is their tool
deep down inside they wish to escape
the common ideas start to take shape
conforming is the disease of our society
leader of the clique the Deity
fuzzy-eyed followers walk behind
truthful thoughts they'll never find
inebriated with orthodoxy
loss of their souls is the fee
this is the corrosion of conformity

storm at sea

the purple petals of a peaceful plant
weave and bob in nature's chant
the wind blows strong, though not cold
nothing but nature is so old
babbling brooks stretch to the south
trickles and drips exit their mouth
shiny splinters of reflecting sun
glint on the horizon where water seems done
crests of fallen waves, white with foam
the water is free, ungaurded to roam
darkness rols in, the sky cries
above this blanket, brightness lies
roaring and churning, the maelstrom above
fish live under, with the peace of the dove,
hardly they notice, the maelstrom above.

staircase

my heart sinks. my mind drops.
the greatest emotion ever suddenly stops.
the staircase upon which i stood
splinters and falls away
a terrible cold rejection destroys
the immovable foundation of yesterday.
stolen away, never given the chance i deserve
all my rage for another day, i conserve.
torn apart like never before
a presence, a person, neither, nor
the once stable partnership between conscious
and subconscious
threatens to disintegrate from the inside out
and eliminate us.
I, a participant in this parody of feelings
know more than those outside the score
apinful as they are I withstand the peeling
I know no longer what I am, once more
I return to my staircase
I am no longer at the pinnacle
of my creation
I hide in the shadows beneath it
this is my station.

Some wits and aphorisms from a teenage me:

>day is an illusion, it simply divides the night.

>words are like animals, when they are cornered, they become violent.

>if you never try to understand, then don't bother to criticize.

>personality and honesty are the true soul

passable phrases I dug out of the mire:

...break this silk...altar of variety...transparency of body...I am 15 years old and fail to see how my own minds works, let alone others'.

Okay, that's more than enough. I can say though, that looking back through old notebooks reveals a consistency in theme that's shocking. Many of my poems (not necessarily those above), however awkwardly, dealt with identity, memory, degrees of transparency, and bodies at rest and in motion. I'm still captivated with those things today, and the stories I tell just attempt to work out some nuanced understanding of them. Even the story I'm telling you right now.

Naked Singularity, Part V

2008-08-20T23:42:00.003-04:00

The summer between middle school and senior high, I had the requisite adolescent run-ins with drinking and smoking pot. Drinking didn't take because it tasted terrible and made me feel sick, but pot stuck. It softened the edges of everything, slowed my mind, and made me abandon my incessant cataloging of sensory data. The cataloging was a mechanism that dulled the intensity of all the information coming in, or at least shortened its duration - but when I smoked, the things coming in didn't matter so much, or maybe it wasn't that they didn't matter, but they mattered in a less painful way. Smoking pot didn't lead me directly down other aesthetic paths like it does most people - musically, artistically, hygenically - because I wasn't doing it with anyone (no one "showed me how", if anything, I was the guy that led all my friends to smoke). There was no one there to tell me to listen to the Grateful Dead and wear a tie-dyed shirt. I just did the things I usually did, skated, listened to music, and read. But it made them different. It's still particularly difficult to describe, but it made them beautiful in a new way, like previously I had been seeing things through a lens, then the lens was removed, and I was seeing them again for the first time. It was like everything around me was given a fresh start, untainted by my previous experience with it.

At the time I definitely needed it; it wasn't as though I could go on internalizing and exaggerating the impact of everything I encountered. The problem with wiping the slate clean though is that it feels good - maybe too good. So I started wiping the slate clean all the time. And that's how I entered high school.

My town had a single high school, and it was fairly large (over 2300 students when I came in); it was possible to retain some degree of anonymity in the crowd. I didn't mind it a bit; I had enough notoriety in elementary school to last me a lifetime (always the new kid at school, always the brain, always the spaz). So there I was, a pot-smoking, skateboarding, punker 13 year old that was too smart for his own good. What was I to do? Look into Buddhism, of course.

Hold on. Give me a chance to explain.

Not everything that colored my aesthetic cloth took place inside the walls of the school or outside on the parking lot with my skateboard. I was also in boy scouts, and I went to Roman Catholic church school. I liked boy scouts - it gave me the opportunity to travel, camp, participate in activites and see things I would've never otherwise. But let's not forget, it is a faith-based organization, and it compels you to follow and explore the tenets of your particular faith. I inherented a Roman Catholic legacy from my father's side, so from the time I was a cub scout on, I attended church and church school regularly. The purpose of church school is to prepare you for Confirmation in the faith, a time when you take a vow against Satan and align yourself with the Church, ostensibly for good. I was an inquisitive youngster, and suffice it to say that my interest in science and logic made some of the more spectacular supernatural aspects of religion hard to swallow. Even at 11 and 12, I was asking hard questions and getting no acceptable answers. So I had the long, convoluted, and I imagine, exhausting conversation with my dad, and quit church school. Really quit church altogether, and all at once. And I quit boy scouts a year later. What's a boy to do but look elsewhere for answers? I wanted to know why the world was the way it was; I wanted to know why it was so ferocious and sublime, so delicate and effervescent, and I wanted to know why it hurt me to be there.

So, back to the main storyline. Early high school was a time I began exploring other religions. School provided me with absolutely no stimulation, I was chronically absent, and it never even affected my grades. I would stay home and go skating, or lay in bed and read. I went to the library and took out books on Buddhism and Hinduism, those in turn led me to books on Zen and Taoism. That's when things really got cooking. I remember finding the Tao Te Ching at a local bookstore, and opening to the first page: "The tao that can be told/is not the eternal Tao./The name that can be named/is not the eternal Name./The unnameable is the eternally real." Now here was a fucking mystery that matched the mystery I witnessed every day. Here was an honest assessment of the absolutely unknowable world.

Now, beyond this milestone epiphany, I've been having a hard time thinking of how to categorize, analyze, and recount the decisions and discoveries I made during this period in time. That's not to say there weren't any - in fact, the opposite is true; there were hundreds, maybe thousands of meaningful moments, some leaving a more lasting impression than others, some reversed and re-reversed, some forgotten or maybe incorporated into others. The sheer volume and velocity of them is dizzying, so I thought it might be easier to define them in terms of concept. The three that seem the most important to me are: adjacency, introduction, and opposition.

Adjacency has the most to do directly with aesthetics. I couldn't understand, for the longest time, what led me to read the things I read in high school, and when I finally figured it out, it was so accidental that I didn't want to admit it. How does a 14 year old kid start reading Neitzsche when no one suggests it? At first I thought maybe I was subconsciously logging things away, things I read in skate magazines or heard teachers talk about. But then I realized that had nothing to do with it. It had everything to do with the fact that in my local bookstore, the philsophy shelves were adjacent to the religion shelves. Where the books on Taoism, Buddhism, and Zen were. I found those books simply because they were next to the books that I was reading. For some reason, their proximity convinced me that they would be worth reading too. So I really started to think about it. Not only literal adjacency (books in a section in the bookstore, the library, etc.), but figurative adjacency also played a role. I read books by the same author, published by the same company, on the same subject, etc. I listened to music in this figuratively adjacent way long before I read this way as well; I listened to music that I knew was in the same genre, on the same record label, by the same band, had members of another band I liked, etc. Seems simple right? It's association, pure and simple. These things related to one another, it only makes sense that I would discover them. Well, it's not so simple, and trying to figure it out was problematic for me. It took me three days to figure out that I found philosophy books because they were a shelf over from World Religion books. And it fascinates me that pure propinquity (coupled with curiousity) was my only motivation. Seriously, it's almost dumb luck. It may have taken me years to discover the same books.

Introduction stands almost in contrast to adjacency. It refers to the times I can recall being introduced to something having no prior knowledge of it and with no adjacental ligaments. Example: Driving in my friend Joe's car and hearing Joy Division for the first time. Me: What the hell is this? Joe: Joy Division. Me: This is creepy. But it's cool. Where are they from? Joe: I have no idea, they were in that skate video. Now, if you want to get technical, there are some principals of adjacency at work here, e.g., Joe is my friend, and Joe got it from a skate video (and I skate). But what it comes down to is, I didn't begin listening to Joy Division because Joe did, or because they were in the skate video. I began listening to them because of the utter force of that first aesthetic encounter. Another example: Kid with locker next to me drops book on floor, it's Voltaire. I think, who the hell is Voltaire? Why haven't I heard of him? Next thing you know, I'm in the bookstore trying to figure out who this Voltaire chracter is. Low and behold, I find some of his work in the Poetry section. And guess what? Literal adjacency takes over again. And I find poetry. But there's a million ways to think of it: introduction to new people, new places, etc.

Finally, opposition. Opposition is really as clear as it sounds; whereas I feel like adjacency and introduction were building my identity and my character in a positive, constructive way, opposition was responsible for building identity in a negative, reductive way. As in, I am not that. I am not someone who listens to adult contemporary music. I am not someone who wears preppy dress clothes. I am not someone who plays team sports. My perpetual observation of others, how they behaved and conducted their lives, often left me wallowing in a miasma of oppositional affirmations. One benefit of this quagmire was an early dismissal of this principle as an entirely valid way to create identity. Whereas many of my friends became bogged down in defining themselves as what they were not, I saw the pitfalls and became more selective in my reductive analyses. I knew almost immediately that I would be shutting the door on various experiences and people, and that was the last thing I wanted to do - even though experience was still very overwhelming to me, I couldn't help but want more, want to take it all in and make sense of it.

That's what I meant when I said yesterday that I took a path that was different from many of my friends. I didn't hole up in a world composed only of punk rock and hardcore, I didn't stop at skateboarding magazines and art, I went on to other reading and different kinds of art. I started listening to bands that my friends would never listen to, reading things they didn't even know about, and, inspired by the aphoristic power of the Tao Te Ching and other poetry, I began to write.

To be continued: Next up, a humiliating exhibition of high school poetry, then I wrap up high school and start college.

Naked Singularity, Part IV

2008-08-19T23:59:00.003-04:00

My middle school years were awkward and transient, as they are for most people, but the periodic class schedule and larger pool of students suited me well. I had gone to 5 different elementary schools, acquiring a few good friends at each, so when I reached middle school, people that I knew from all over the city were collected under one roof. In other words, I was in better social shape than many of the kids who had the "advantage" of a stable home life. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't popular, because my primary interests were skateboarding and punk rock, and my friends and I were still misfits and outcasts.

In the morning when my friends were walking to school, they'd drop by my house and pick me up. We'd watch cartoons or skate videos and talk about skating and screw around until we were almost late, then finally make our way out the door. My house was only two blocks from the school, so we were always pressing our luck - leaving with 2 minutes to spare, then 1 minute, then 5 minutes late, etc. My house became the flophouse for all of my friends, not just because of its location, but because of its lack of rules, generous endowment of pornography, and adult atmosphere. Just as she treated me like an adult from a very young age, my mother treated my friends the same way. It was a sanctuary from the restrictions of their world; they enjoyed the premature promotion in years and the freedom. Many of my friends envied me, but they never knew that I envied them and their "normal" lives.

Middle school was especially brief for me because I was caught in a transition between junior high and middle school in our district. Middle school was 6th, 7th, and 8th grade. Junior high was 7th, 8th, and 9th. The year I entered junior high in 7th grade, they converted it to the middle school, and 9th grade was bumped up the high school. The result? I was only there for 7th and 8th grade, then went straight to high school.

I can only remember a few things from middle school that had any profound effect on me:

We had amazing shop classes: print shop, metal shop, and wood shop. I loved making things with my hands, working with tools, producing useful items. I was familiar with most of the tools and modes of fabrication because my dad is a great craftsman in his own right, and always took care to teach me those skills. I still have a hard time feeling like I'm making something unless I'm actually physically making something.

I had a fantastic gym teacher that ran an extracurricular class about the Vietnam War. I would spend free periods hanging out with him and a few others in the auxiliary gym, talking about the war, life, and death. In the class we would watch movies, read first hand accounts of the war, discuss the political, social, and economic ramifications of conflict, and he would even bring in former POW's to speak. I was moved by their stories. Although my teacher was careful to remain objective when presenting information, I remember being struck by the atrocities of war, personal and public. It was all very real. Real human beings killed other real human beings in real places. The empathy I'd been nurturing since childhood was ratcheted up a notch; if the pain I felt going through my minor tragedies hurt so bad - how could people in the midst of war even survive? Needless to say, I became vehemently anti-war (much of the political punk I was listening to was leading me that direction anyway), and remain so to this day. As if the panic attacks I had in bed at night about Mutual Assured Destruction during the Cold War weren't enough.

My heightened empathy began to bleed out into every aspect of my life. I began looking closely at everyone around me, watching their every move, listening to their every word. I became hypersensitive to their pain and joy, their beauty and ugliness, their shame and pride. I felt it all, and it all felt so real to me, I would relive someone's smile or someone's embarrassment over and over, all day long, I would bring it into me, carry it with me, recycle it in some compulsory feedback loop until I managed to work it into me somehow. Everything became about placing events, feelings, ideas, and words in particular places. I could feel the structure growing up inside me, and I spent all my time learning where things fit the best. Simply put: the glut of information I was taking in required me to organize it somehow, or else it would overwhelm me. I began to compartmentalize, separating people from other people in my head, parsing thoughts and emotions, stacking up the data of experience.

I couldn't help it. I felt like everything cut me. The quicker I could put it in place, the less it would cut. The problem was, I became too efficient at organizing the information coming in - and I actually think I began to take in more. Maybe I'm not explaining this well. I could actually see something so beautiful it would hurt me. I could wander around replaying someone's tears and begin crying. Everything, good or bad, was too much. It all cut.

I continued to find solace and commiseration in punk and hardcore music, skateboarding, and reading (at this time mostly Stephen King and young adult classics), but this new feeling was about to lead me some place different than many of my friends were going.

Quick Photo Timeline

2008-08-18T18:18:00.005-04:00

As far as I can tell, I have no photos of me at age 3 (except the New Year's Photo), 7, or 9. I'll see if I can scare some up from relatives.

2 years old with Mom and Dad

4 years old 5 years old

6 years old

Naked Singularity, Part III

2008-08-17T23:53:00.003-04:00

I neglected to mention that in 3rd grade, it was suggested to my parents that I attend a school for gifted children; the only down side was that I would live at the school and come home on weekends. My parents thought it might be a good idea, but I'm not sure they were ready to let me go - I'm an only child and losing me at 8 years old would've left a premature hole in their lives, I'm sure. In the end, they left the decision entirely to me (foreshadowing my soon-to-come-too-soon independence and autonomy). I opted out, citing the reason that I didn't want to leave my friends behind. It was a lie. I was the kid that answered all the questions and never shut up, was always right, and the other kids hated me for it. I had one real friend, and he wasn't even in my class. The real reason? I didn't want to leave my parents behind. Maybe I had a sense that I was a binding force between them and wasn't sure what would happen if I left.

Luckily, in 4th grade I had a second opportunity to participate in a gifted chlidren's program called CLASS. I forget now what the acronym stands for (boy were they wrong about me being gifted, if I really were, I'd be able to remember), but I'll never forget the intellectual stimulation it provided. We memorized lists of hundreds of items, worked on SAT level analogies, spent weeks working up slide shows and presentations on subjects that interested us, read college level fiction, some of the students were even doing college level mathematics. CLASS met once a week for an entire day, so I'd miss a day of 'normal' school every Friday. Spending almost all my time on CLASSwork really gave me the opportunity to focus my attention on particular subjects for extended periods. I believe that aspects of my work today continue to reflect interests that I developed in CLASS - often we were given the task of researching a person in-depth, taking on their character for a day, and making a presentation. I always chose scientists and magicians, even if they were frauds or charlatans. One glance at my written work now reveals my continuing fascination with the jargon of science, the symbiosis between magic and fraud, and the humans that perpetrate them.

CLASS continued through 6th grade, and frankly, was the only thing that made my elementary education tolerable. I finally had a place to go where everyone was a know-it-all dork like me.

The CLASS program in 1987, 6th grade.

Back to the timeline: My parents got divorced when I was in 3rd grade, so I switched schools in 4th grade, again in 5th, and again in 6th. A new school every year made making friends almost impossible, so many of my friends came from the CLASS program. Unfortunately, I only saw them once a week (and only during the school year). Summers were lonely, I spent my time wandering, making up games that only children do, getting in trouble (throwing rocks at cars and breaking into abandoned buildings when I was in the city at my Mom's apartment, trespassing and tromping though the woods, shooting things with my beebe gun when I was in the country at my Dad's house on weekends). It was clear I needed some sort of outlet for my "creativity." And then, like a bolt from the heavens, skateboarding found me.

I'd had a cheap skateboard for a year or so and used it occasionally, but for some reason in between 5th and 6th grade, I started using it more. I started trying to do tricks, ride down bigger hills. Then the neighbor who lived in the house next to my Dad's got a "real" skateboard. As soon as I saw his and the tricks he and the older kids were doing, it was a lock. Within a week I had my own "real" skateboard and quickly submersed myself in the associated music and culture.

For those of you who don't know, skating has an integral and absolutely unique cultural component. Skating isn't a sport, it's a way of living that focuses on (and sustains) music, art, fashion, writing, and creative expression in all its forms. It's an individual activity done with others, but the absence of any "team" leaves skaters free to do pretty much anything they want. Not only can you skate any way you want to skate, but you can listen to anything you want to, write and say anything you want to, dress any way you want - it's looks like I'm about to say something cheesy like "the only rule is that there are no rules." But that's bullshit. The only rule in skateboarding is: have integrity. Know why you like the things you like, why you make the choices you make, why you skate the way you do, and above all, own yourself and your opinions, and respect others that do that same. Skating wasn't just a way for me to expend extra physical energy, it was a touchstone that fractured into a thousand little cultural avenues that I could explore.

Xmas, 1990. Pictured: me, my Mom, friend Chris.

The first avenues I explored were musical; I was introduced to metal, punk rock, and hardcore. At 11 years old, I didn't always understand the political or psychological import of the words, but again, there was something about the way the message was delivered - the fury, the angst, the rage, the desperation - that touched a chord with me. This wasn't just entertainment, this was a frenetic explosion of personal and cultural introspection that confirmed what I had suspected: all was not right in the world, and I was not alone in thinking so. Don't get me wrong, it didn't take me long to figure out the content as well, and I'm thankful for the critical precocity and tolerance it instilled in me.

Every waking moment of my life was spent diving deeper and deeper into the world of skateboarding; I discovered new music, artists, writers, photographers, and DIY ethics on a daily basis. It, unlike any other sport, insists on a sort of micro-cosmopolitanism. It is so diverse yet close-knit that even if you don't like everything you encounter, you have to acknowledge and respect it. But more importantly than my knowledge of these external influences, skateboarding changed the way I saw the world. Everything became potential - I could skate anywhere on anything; I began to see the world in terms of skateability; the entire world became source material, something I could use. It is, without a doubt, the reason why I see the world now in terms of potentiality for art.

Skateboarding revised the function of everything. Nosegrind, 1991.

When I was in 6th grade, two bullies at my school stomped on my bike until both the rims were bent and the tires went flat. When I unchained it from the bike rack and began dragging it home, I realized that they were waiting half way home for me, with all of their friends, and most of the kids that lived in our neighborhood. They waited just to laugh at me, just to see me drag my bike by and make fun of me. That was a defining moment. I didn't get another bike for 6 years. I didn't need one. I had my skateboard.

To be continued: Next up, fast forward a few years into high school, then early college.

An Aside

2008-08-17T12:45:00.002-04:00

My mom has been reading my blog and digging up old pictures to help substantiate my stories - and she's been reminiscing along the way. Here's what she had to say about "pickle" being my second word, and it's funny as hell:

...the pickle story was so cute, such a wonderful remembrance for me to read. I remember that day as if it was yesterday, the first time you did it, I said "No Chris, you can't have a pickle right now." The second time you said "pickle," I said "No honey, maybe later you can have one." And the third time you asked, I said "Christopher James, no, I'm sorry we don't have any pickles." And you looked straight at me and said "olive?"

Naked Singularity, Part III on the way tonight.

Naked Singularity, Part II

2008-08-15T23:11:00.006-04:00

At the end of 3rd grade/early 4th grade I discovered Choose Your Own Adventure books; if you're not familiar, they're science fiction adventure novels that require you to choose one of two options every few pages, your choice leads you to another page where the narrative resumes, etc. As you move throughout the novel, you skip back and forth, determining the protagonist's fate. An almost infinite number of permutations is possible in each storyline (for the adult version, see Julio Cortazar's novel without genre Hopscotch). CYOA quickly dissolved my notion that fiction was a record of events because even as a child, I understood that one person couldn't be in two places simultaneously doing two different things (attack and retreat), and even if they didn't do them at the same time, no one could've ever done all the things that a single CYOA hero did (fight the dragon, save the princess, fight the robots, save the town, etc). I understood that my volition, my choice was contributing to the narrative. Building it. Steering it. I was a passive reader, but I became an active reader. Rampant generalization, I suppose, led me to the conclusion that things in books didn't really happen, but they made things happen (made me imagine). I don't know if it was clear to me yet that everyone didn't imagine exactly the same thing when they read (a sort of one-to-one equation between words and ideas), but I do know that I was intrigued by my new skill (active reading).

3rd grade class photo. I wasn't abused, I got hit by an iceball.

At the same time I was getting a handle on the concept of recorded music, thanks to my purchase of a few records (most notably, STYX's Mr. Roboto, and Kenny Rogers' The Gambler) and, eventually, acquiring my own radio/cassette player. I could also record on blank tapes, and set to finding music I liked on the radio, recording it, and interjecting my own stories in between. I loved the words people sang, the images they called to mind, but more than ever I was beginning to obsess over how the sang them. Sure, the stylistic differences between STYX and Kenny Rogers are hard to miss, but what do you want, I was 8 years old. The point is: the way people sang made me feel different even if the words were the same. I began to see a distinction between form and content, and this carried over into my reading.

Preschool, 1980. Man, I loved Garanimals.

I developed opinions about what I was reading and could recognize stylistic variance from author to author. I could tell you what I liked and what I didn't, even if I couldn't articulate why. The rough hewn taste I had in music (based on the way it sounded) gave way to a nascent taste in "literature". Possibly the origin of an inner ear - the early stages of cognizance concerning the sound of a word, and the aural appeal of a phrase? Who knows. Probably not yet - it's far more likely that I was still primarily content driven, some authors told stories that I liked, some didn't. But I knew they told stories differently, the same way no two people could sing alike.

Kindergarten, 1981. Can you spot me?

I realized that people made music and people wrote books, and the words in music and books affected me. If people made words and words could affect people, then maybe I could too. I'm sure I'd learned this long before, perhaps as early as when I said "pickle" and got a pickle. But a pickle transfer isn't very emotional - more accurately, I realized because music and books affected me emotionally, they could affect other people emotionally too. And because of this, my sense of empathy increased. But so did my sense of design. I began consciously modifying the delivery of messages to see what the result would be - like many children, my first acts of creativity (besides coloring and doodling) were probably lying, exaggerating, and falsely emoting.

I continued wrestling with form, function, style, and content (whether I knew it or not) throughout 4th and 5th grade. The summer between 5th and 6th grade, I discovered skateboarding and punk rock, and all hell broke loose.

To be continued: Next up - connectivity, eloquence, and identity - the mercurial avenues of angst.

Naked Singularity, Part I

2008-08-14T21:19:00.007-04:00

A naked singularity in general relativity is a gravitational singularity without an event horizon. Black holes contain singularities with an event horizon, an insuperable barrier which light can't even transgress - meaning that they can't be observed; a naked singularity, however, can (theoretically) be observed. Okay, it's a long way to go to tease out this extended metaphor - but I think it's appropriate:

I've been seeking a point of origin for my interest in literature and philosophy, and I'm hoping that it's a naked singularity, not a black hole. I mean, I have no delusion about discovering a moment in time when my fascination began; I think I would settle for a sympathetic reconstruction based on a series of educated guesses/vague memories. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that I'm hoping to uncover a series of naked singularities, dots that I can connect, the index of my aesthetic itinerary.

A pre-lingual me, asleep in the punchbowl, snowed in during the Blizzard of '77.

My first word was "mom". My second word was "pickle". I don't know if this is important, and get as Freudian as you'd like in you assessment. I'm told that I used to tug on the refrigerator door in our apartment and say "pickle, pickle, pickle." Sure, I showed some propensity for the language (moving as I did, directly from a one syllable word to a two syllable word) but I think that had more to do with my little taste buds than my love of words.

After that, I remember my mother reading to me every chance she had; she'd read me to sleep, read as an activity, give me books for presents. By the time I entered pre-school (on the eve of turning 4), I could read, write, and form reasonably complex sentences. I was good at it, but I don't know if that's because I liked it. It's far more likely that I liked it because I was good at it; my success elicited praise, and that praise gave way to a sort of jejune pride. At this point though, my performance was little more than mimicry by rote.

Around this time, however, I remember waking up on New Year's Eve, wandering down the hardwood hall in my footie pajamas, and discovering that my parents were having a New Year's party. People were dancing everywhere, the apartment was very warm and smelled like cigarette smoke and beer; I was so short that I could only see people's knees and thighs, but I remember moving through everyone dancing, them picking me up and hugging me, dancing with me; the music was so loud. Everyone's roles had vanished - my babysitter wasn't my babysitter, my aunt wasn't my aunt, my parents weren't even my parents. They were just people at a party, people who had somehow abandoned themselves and become something else. And I thought it was because of the music. I was too young to understand the part alcohol played, so I presumed that the magical transformation was caused by music. Eventually I was tucked back in, but I remember lying there thinking about all the women telling me to listen to the beat and shake my little hips, the smiles on their faces; I determined that music was a thing with power, a thing to be paid attention to. The radio took the stage in my life, and I began (as I was told) to listen to the beat and shake my little hips, but I also began to listen to the words, and more importantly, the delivery of the words.

Me and my grandmother, Arley, on that fateful New Year's Eve night, 1979.

My progress continued at a phenomenal rate throughout elementary school. By 3rd grade I had completed all of the reading material at a 6th grade level and I no longer participated with most of my classmates in normal classroom work. Teachers hand-picked novels for me to read and asked me questions about them. This is the earliest that I can remember reading for fun. I was profoundly affected by the absurdity and improbability of Ronald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach. I read it 3 or 4 times in a row, and it may have been the first time that I connected the imaginative narrative space with actual physical space, trying to envision/solve the problems of scale (exactly how big would this peach have to be?). This changed something in me, caused some shift. The fantastic space of the children's novels I read (Tolkein, Lewis, Blume) was supposed to be real space...the people were real people. However, I was too young to make any distinction between the verisimilitude the novels offered and an actual series of events. In other words, I may have thought that everything I read had happened, at some point in time, and what I was reading was just a recording of events.

My mom reading to me while camping, Keewayden State Park, NY, 1981.

As an aside, a similar conflation had taken place in the world of music - I didn't really understand that music could be recorded and played back, so I believed that when I heard songs on the radio that the band was there, at the radio station, in a studio, playing the song. And when they were done, another band would get up and play another song. Don't ask me why I didn't figure it out when my parents played records. Selective observation, I guess.

To be continued: Next up, how Choose Your Own Adventure stories cured me...

The Unrepentant Humanist

2008-08-12T21:10:00.001-04:00

I've spent the last couple days considering the trajectory of my blog thanks to a recent recap by Richard Owens of Louis Proyect's review of Marc Bousquet's book How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (NYU Press 2008).

Confused? So was I. Proyect runs a blog called The Unrepentant Marxist; he reviews Bousquet's book, then Owens reviews the review. If you have a moment, it's worth taking the time to read Proyect; he deftly summarizes both How the University Works and Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education (Monthly Review Press 2005) by Joe Berry - a marxist call to action/organization for part-time faculty.

Give me a couple weeks, and I'll be back with my own take on both. For now, if you're really interested, Bousquet has conducted interviews with Cary Nelson, the president of the American Association of University Professors and other scholars that are up on youtube.

All this cogitation on Marxism, socialism, activism, organization, labor, and class has induced me to think of the liberal arts crisis as a systemic defect, one that could be understood by "taking a look at the long history of academia" as my friend Tawrin has suggested. He insists that "the system isn't designed, nor can it be. It fell into place, and the better question is not 'in what way is it bad' but rather 'why is the state that the Academy is in a stable one.'" Although I disagree with him on the point that the system isn't designed, I do agree with his assessment that we need to investigate why the current state of the academy has become unimaginably durable.

Few systems as vast and multifaceted as the academy are designed by an individual (or small group of individuals), rather they evolve over centuries from the top and the bottom. What does this mean? It means that policy makers and policy followers contribute to both the form and the function of a system, that lords and serfs are complicit in the creation of the fiefdom. Although palimpsestic and difficult to discern, individual dicta and acts of resistance have cumulatively shaped (and continue to shape) academia. But for all its slow dynamism, whence its stability? Is it the adoption and adaptation of the most effective business models in history? The economic adversity students and adjuncts face? The tenacious grasp of tenured faculty? It is all these, and a thousand more. But what's the common thread? Greed? Fear? Ambition? Misdirected good intentions? It would hardly be fair (or sensible) to claim one as the singular motivation for the millions of covert and overt contributions to academic stability, except: humans acting humanly.

I know that's a cop-out and covers a lot of ground, but it's supposed to; our motivations are myriad and rarely clear. That's the beauty and the ugliness of being human. I support and admire the call to organization, I advocate a democratic socialist approach, I want to see changes in the system, and I want to see people treated fairly and equally. But that's not my calling - to organize. I'm interested in the emotional and psychological impetuses/incentives for our choices. I'm also interested in the emotional and psychological rewards/consequences after those choices have been made. Some might accuse me of a symptomatic approach to the problem - the system is what causes distress, the operation of the system has to be changed to relieve the distress - but I disagree. If we can discover why students choose to pursue liberal arts, why professors choose to become professors, why adjuncts haven't organized, why administrators politic and mandate the way they do, then we'll be one step closer to figuring out how to modifiy the system. Of course it isn't the sole solution (or a solution at all - it's just a part); organization, politics, revolution, recognition, introspection, all of these things will play a role in any attempt to exact change. I'm trying to do my part, the part I'm the best at.

That's why my entry Youthful Movements may have seemed out of place (or the whining of a crybaby), but it was so important to me. I'm trying to discover why I made the choices I made; why art and literature has meant so much to me; why the academy has meant so little, etc. And that's what I'm looking for in my interviews too: the human side of my friends and colleagues, the one willing to talk about their failures and fears, not the one that wants to posture about revolution.

Let me know why you made the choices you made, why you feel the way you do now, and I'll continue to look for my answers as well.

Kevin Thurston Interview, Part I

2008-08-09T00:18:00.009-04:00

Kevin Thurston is an artist from Buffalo, NY. He received a B.A. in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2001, moved to Baltimore, MD and subsequently received a Master’s Certification from Johns Hopkins in Graphic Design. In 2005, he returned to Buffalo and took a job designing catalogs for a local company; he turned the micro-managed hell of his workplace into a number of pieces, written and recorded, including KEVIN IS RUNNING LATE TODAY BUT WILL BE IN and The Randy Files. Kevin's work, like Kevin, is often simultaneously self-deprecating and elitist. It is raw, honest, painful, and strangely tends to incite more laughter than it does empathy.

In the last year and a half, he’s seen some massive changes in his life: getting divorced, quitting his job, moving to Washington, D.C., and now, moving to Seoul, Korea to teach English.

Kevin has always openly held the academy in disdain although he maintained tangential ties with it via a reading series he organized through the non-profit literary organization, Just Buffalo.

I caught up with Kevin to have a conversation before he moved to Seoul.

Chris: What made you quit?

Kevin: Quit what exactly?

C: Your life. Your job. Your direction.

K: Well, I kinda met it half way. I had a decent job in Baltimore in public relations opening up and doing design for predominantly high-end restaurants, then I moved to Buffalo so that my (then) wife could pursue an MBA. I took a job that I hated (which became an artwork) to support us. Eventually we separated/divorced and that opened up an entirely new set of possibilities for me (after the pre-requisite months of drinking too much).

Having this new sense of freedom (we were together from my being 20-28) come after the usual decade of 'discovery' for the recently graduated liberal arts major, I took stock. The good thing about it is that there is more stock to look at at 30 (that doesn't quite make sense) - but what I mean is numerous friends at 30 are in wildly different life positions whereas most of my liberal arts friends and acquaintances at 22-26 are in very similar positions.

I should mention part of the reason for my marriage's dissolution--in my opinion, of course--is that I was getting disgusted at the fact that employer's are no longer comfortable with their workers simply doing their job and going home, they always want more. This may have always been the case, but since I was “in it” it was/is more apparent to me.)

Then I moved to D.C. and found that looking for a job is hard when you don't want one. [by job I mean a white-collar career]. So, running out of money for what has become my residency at the Buck Downs Summer Retreat, I started looking for opportunities that would take me to places I'd like to be (most of them are in the world's top 10 cities in terms of population) and that I wouldn't find too disgusting to do. Having always wanted to teach, I took/am taking a great opportunity in Seoul.

That said, I'm not really certain I'm "changing direction" or "my life". Its more fluid than that.

Kevin Thurston, 2008.

C: What makes the larger cities attractive to you? Heightened interaction? The cachet?

K: I like the interesting. I find cities more interesting. All the friction of bodies and information.

I mean, critically suburbs and rural areas and smaller cities all offer the interesting, but less that I find surprising. This feels like a really pretentious answer.

Maybe a different approach is necessary. While in Baltimore I made lots of collages from what I found while walking. These constant little surprises from the excess that you can find while walking. Walking is very important to me. Before I left Buffalo I was walking a ton, but the garbage just isn't that interesting. Not enough intersections amongst the variables.

Also, I prefer public transportation (very much prefer it) and that is something smaller places do not usually place a premium on.

C: So a flaneur in the suburbs is just a walker? That is kind of pretentious.

K: I recognized it!

No, it’s not the walker, it’s the environment (for me) that's important. That helps propel action.

To use the above example, in Buffalo I made a work out of text, and the text of my job. In Baltimore I made work that was equally an interaction with my daily environment, I just found/find the larger environment more interesting. That said, I can easily imagine myself living in a very rural area. Nature is interesting too, but it lacks that constant reminder that THIS IS INFLUENCED BY HUMANS the way cities do. Suburbs for example, are just as marked by this, but you don't get the beautiful and the desperate quite as much, unless you go the Hank Bukowski route and sit in the dive-bars.

(i may want to edit this)

C: Joking aside, I do understand what you're saying. It's the level of compression and the sheer numbers creating potential for palimpsest. Everyone writing over everyone else. Where in the suburbs everyone writes next to everyone else?

K: I don't think it is next to; I believe it's just as much of the palimpsest, just less acknowledged.

There is a lot more of the palimpsest getting passed around in the suburbs as opposed to staying still for everyone to add to.

C: Hot-potato palimpsest? Interesting. But more interesting to me is the ambivalent relationship you've had with the academy. Don't you think it provides the same level of compression and interaction you admire in cities?

K: No. More specialized than the average city, suburban or rural setting. I mean, I currently reside in a specialist city. I was just talking with Divya Victor about this, you can be sitting next to the head lobbyist for Nigerian oil taxation. Just absurd shit. I suppose it needs to be done, but just not by me. That said, I do read a lot of "academic texts" that relate to things I am interested in.

I was hostile to the academy, but now I am ambivalent.

C: Where did that hostility come from? What was its focus?

K: In part my experience. It seemed to me that I was constantly being told that the next step would be the one I’d really like. Example, in middle school, high school is so much better. In high school having teachers I admired and found inspirational telling me that I’d love college. Then I got to college.
and
and
and

C: They told you it was the one you'd really like, or the one you'd really need?

K: No, they said I would like it. Only my mom (beyond school administrators like guidance counselors) said that college would be beneficial in terms of needing it.

Of course, no one mentions that that depends on what you go for and the state of the economy when you get out. And where you live. Which is the reason I went to Baltimore in the first place.

C: You've always worn you're non-participation in the academy as a badge of honor. Do you really believe that you can learn the same things outside the academy as within?

K: Have I? As I said, I think that marked hostility is in the past. Not that the academy is suddenly beyond reproach.

Of course you can't learn the exact same things out as you can in. But the inverse holds true also.

Too Comfortable to Revolt; Kevin Thurston

C: Was it hard to come to terms with the fact that all the work might be for naught, and that you may never get a job "in your field"?

K: No.

C: Was it harder to come to terms with the fact that you might not want a job at all?

K: That is the much harder one to face, which I think you have written eloquently about on your blog. As I mentioned, I think some of those initial thoughts, before I processed them, call it a gut reaction, helped end my marriage. So, yes, it is harder as there is a lot more social pressure. Fortunately, some of those pressure sources are beginning to recognize that I just “need to find my way” as old-school dramas may put it.

I mean, in the last 2 years I have marked myself. I got divorced (which felt much more like a demographic marker than getting married), quit a steady job with a nice title, and basically quit that path. I even owned a house!

C: Someone once said to me, while I was bemoaning my inability to land a job that would turn into a career "Maybe you don't want a career. Have you thought of that?" And it hit me like a ton of bricks.

K: This isn't to set myself up in some romantic myth; there is a certain degree of comfort I want out of life.

Yes, Rod Smith said to me, “seems clear to me that you didn't really want a job.”
And I thought, “oh(?)”

C: It's a Zen moment, isn't it? Like when the master hits you in the face with a stick. And you're like, "that's the meaning of life." Or at least, my life.

K: Thanks for being relative! I think that's very important. But I’m not sure I agree with "my life". It’s more like, my life, right now, is not interested or going to pursue that. Whatever that that happens to be. I’m constantly amazed at how where I think I’ll be in 6 months is always different than where I expected.

C: Are you ever terrified about where your next meal will come from?

K: To a certain degree, yes. But I also realize growing up, even on the lighter side of, middle-class gives you a great freedom and frees you to some extent from those hardcore worries. I mean, I have plenty of middle-class friends and they won't let me starve.

Basically, choosing to walk out on that trajectory is not the same as a single-mom quitting her job she hates, or like an ex-middle-class junkie who has burned through all his support. I’m not on something as real as “my next meal”. This may be the focus, for me, of what is called the white male privilege.

C: Right, I was being hyperbolic. I wanted to see what you'd say. The white male privilege is not being allowed to starve?

K: With a college degree too, most likely. This society--again, as long as you aren't on drugs or a criminal--won't let you die. Not that I can see (which isn't to say it isn't possible).

"What about all those poor people dead of an under-dose?"

C: Talk about going to Seoul. They may let you starve there.
K: They might!

Maybe that's part of it. Leaving as much of the societal obligations (inscriptions) behind. Even then, though, I have the 'privilege' of being an American citizen in a country that has a gigantic us military presence.

C: Is it important to you to feel useful? I’ve written about how many liberal arts majors feel "retiree syndrome" before they even get a job - like they're useless. The emotional impact of this is hard to overstate. Are you going to Korea to feel useful?

K: No. Not in that existential sense you are alluding to. I want(ed) my next job to be more useful though (as opposed to helping rich people realize their dream of opening up a nice restaurant, or organizing catalogs for an antique auto parts manufacturer & distributor).

In terms of feeling useful in the sense I think you mean it, organizing readings, creating environments for people to interact in like the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair, etc, cure that problem before I even get symptoms.

I think the retiree thing is why I started to do the kind of work mentioned in the paragraph above. That is, when I met with Mike Kelleher of Just Buffalo about starting the reading series, one of my reasons was I didn't want to be part of the group that complains that there is a lack of options without trying to create a few first. Blame my parents for that.

C: What's Kevin Thurston's perfect life look like? What's your perfect workspace?

K: No idea. I don't (currently) want to stop feeling a sense of surprise, which kind of precludes the idea of me envisioning my utopia.

As far as workspace, I honestly don't know. I’m still trying to figure out what my work is. Performance, visual objects, text generation? All of these things can exist in myriad places. One thing that draws me to language based work is that the requirements are so slim. When I graduated high school I got into USC for film, then I learned how much film is to process. I quickly got scared off. Same with going to NYU for a BFA, that is, too expensive for the money that I think I would make back to pay for it. At those points, and into the present, economics is always a (dis)motivating factor.

For example, currently I’m working on a piece called "weight gain" and all I need is access to the internet to work in Google documents.

Gentrification; Kevin Thurston

C: Would you/do you ever want to go back to the academy?

K: Sometimes. I mean there are a few approaches, one that I found the most attractive at 20 is now, I think, long gone. You may or may not have a degree, you produce a body of work that reaches a certain amount of acclaim, the academy invites you to teach. This worked, especially in the 1970’s when the university (at least in NY state) seemed wide open. That window is pretty closed now.

If I went I think I would want to learn a tangible skill: print-making, or some such. But, who knows, maybe i will end up writing a dissertation on Deleuze someday.

C: Do you think your work is important?

K: It can be. I mean, I try to make work that can handle abstract concepts but present them in an accessible way. In fact, I think that's one of my strengths. That said, I suppose that's up to 'a grad student yet to be born.'

C: Nice. Final words?

K: Like something inspirational ? No.

Youthful Movements

2008-08-07T00:25:00.007-04:00

In his essay Activist Impulses: Campus Radicalism in the 1930's, Robert Cohen examines the background of 125 student activists via interviews, biographies, and autobiographies. He demonstrates that class and familial influence were far more important contributors to student activism than rogue instructors, left-wing rabblerousers, or campus socialist groups. He insists that "of the student activists in our sampled group, 41.6 percent credited some family member or home influence with facilitating their politicization" (Cohen 1). This is monumental in comparison to the negligible percentage that credited professors or other students with fostering their radical views. Cohen goes on to illustrate that even students whose parents didn't directly draw them leftward did so indirectly or unintentionally by exhibiting liberally sympathetic behaviors and values. The point? Parents matter, whether they're trying to or not.

Now my concern isn't exactly the same as Cohen's; I'm not specifically interested in how parents influence their children's radical politics, but I am interested in how they influence their perspective, personality, emotional and psychological stability, aspirations, and fears. I think it's a safe bet to assume that more than 41.6 percent of all people would credit their parents with seriously influencing these characteristics.

I've written previously about how my parents' economic situation and inexperience affected my access to information and skewed my ideas accordingly, but I haven't yet considered how their psychological and emotional states could've affected my own, and possibly negatively impacted my development.

I'm a child of divorce. My parents separated when I was 9 years old and got divorced shortly afterward. Their relationship was like many other young relationships: alternately volatile and sanguine, financially tenuous, and moderately alcoholic (a regional mainstay). My mother and I moved to a small apartment owned by my uncle; my father was granted weekend custody. I slept in the very small bedroom with my pet guinea pig Stripe, and my mother slept on the couch. I switched elementary schools, left my friends behind, tried to get accustomed to the smell of diapers requisite to large apartment buildings, and almost immediately had my bicycle stolen out of the hallway.

My dad and I in 2000.

My parents relationship improved soon after the divorce, and they became friends. What was no longer clear was my relationship to either of them. Divorce places a child in a strange space, one prone to the excesses of indifferent negligence and guilt-ridden spoiling, but I was never victim to either. My parents cared for me well, loved me, and supported me. But I became their peer. At 9 years old, I found myself with a weekday roommate and a weekend roommate. Their financial concerns became mine, their emotional concerns became mine, their social concerns, etc. I was asked for advice, consulted about which bills to pay, cried on when things went awry or they were feeling sad. I began to see myself as responsible for my parents feelings and well-being, and to a degree, still feel that way today.

As you can imagine, I developed a level of independence and self-sufficiency well beyond my years, cooking for myself, becoming a latch-key kid, going without a babysitter at 10 while my mom worked nights as a waitress. We moved endlessly, for financial reasons (when I returned to Buffalo in 2005, it was the 32nd time I'd moved in my life - I'm 31 years old). I hung in there because I knew they needed me to - they told me I was going to have to be strong and things would turn out okay - I hung in there because I knew if I did, they would. And I knew how to cook for myself, but I sure as hell couldn't get a job yet to pay for my own food. I had a lot of responsibility, and I carried it well. The problem was, I began to think that was why my parents loved me. They loved me because I was strong, because I was there for them, because I was independent, because because because. It may not have been true, but it was what I believed. The role that I played after my parents divorce demolished any notion I had of unconditional love.

By 13, when I got my first paper route, I really didn't need my parents for anything but the roof over my head. I was gone most days from morning until after the sun went down, going to school, doing papers, skateboarding until all my friends had to go home (I really had no curfew). But I wanted them around. I liked them as people, and we tried to include each other in the things we were interested in; my mom and I would play cards and scrabble, my dad and I would go fishing and camping. I pulled down straight A's at school, never brought home homework, and never asked for help. I'm not even sure I knew how.

My mom and I in 2001.

By the time I graduated from high school (with honors even though I was absent more than 75 days a year), I had made some bad choices, was overly involved in a heavily codependent relationship, and was wrestling with both the bureaucratic and emotional sides of going to college. My parents rarely tried to give me advice or help because they made the mistake of thinking I knew what I was doing. Guess what? I didn't.

I didn't know that having my high school girlfriend move into the house I shared with my mother was a bad idea. I didn't know that sacrificing all of my money and selling everything I owned to pay for her college tuition was a bad idea. I didn't know that going to college together at all was a bad idea. I didn't know how to fill out financial aid forms, what school to go to, and that I shouldn't fill out credit card applications and run up the bills. You know what I knew how to do? Look like I knew what I was doing.

So, I'm not "blaming" my parents. I'm blaming myself for not asking for help, but I also have to acknowledge their divorce set up a dynamic that required me to be so self-sufficient they believed I never needed help. And when I needed it most, maybe because they were out of practice, they didn't recognize it. Even if they did recognize it, I'm not sure they could have because of their inexperience. But if I could've let them know, they could've tried.

Me at 5 years old.

Did my parents influence my politics? Sure. But they influenced a lot more important things too.

Maybe what we need, in addition to a Real Life/Employment 101 seminar for liberal arts majors is a Parents of Dysfunctional Families College Orientation. I know many colleges have parent orientation as an option for families of incoming freshmen, but I'm thinking more of a federally funded/mandated program that would walk parents through the academic process, procedures, and potential pitfalls. I think it would help parents give the help they don't know how to give and that some kids don't know how to ask for.

Shortened Stories

2008-08-05T19:03:00.004-04:00

While tarring the roof on the studio today, I haphazardly considered the importance of storytelling in our society, and liberal arts majors' connection/contribution to the stories we tell ourselves. The rough hypothesis: The way we tell ourselves stories changes (the structure and the content), and these changes dictate the value of certain creative skills.

Compare print advertising from the 1940's to contemporary print ads. Ads from the 1940's, like the one below, were heavy on narrative (often with 5-10 paragraphs of copy), hand illustrated, explicit, and unambiguous. They very literally told a story. No doubt the creation of such an ad required the collaboration of a copy writer, an illustrator, a marketer, and any number of advertising consultants, not to mention input from the company contracting the ad agency.

DUZ ad from 1947 describing uses, answering letters, making jokes with accompanying illustrations.

Contemporary ads revel in ambiguity; they're short on copy, loosely narrative (if at all), implicit, and rarely hand illustrated (if ever). They insinuate a story, but the possibilities for interpretation are myriad and vague enough to implicate the interests of a thousand consumers. They tell a different kind of story than the ads from the 1940's, and accordingly, require different skills to produce. The construction of a modern ad probably employs one or more graphic designers, creative consultants, brand consultants, and teams of ad men who specialize in message making and demographic distribution.

409 ad from 2008, heavy on image, light on text, joke is a tie-in to television advertisements that wouldn't be understood by an unfamiliar reader.

Simplistic? Of course it is. But the point is, as the way we told ourselves stories in advertising changed, the need for a creative writer and illustrator (in this process) all but disappeared. Single words coupled with photographic or computer enhanced images are used now, not paragraphs of text with cartoon accompaniment. We create (and we respond to) paradigmatic explosions as opposed to syntagmatic extrapolations.

Can I explain the shift? Language undergoing a compression and condensation, photographic imagery undergoing an eruption in popularity while sustaining a refinement of subject, a series of stylistic turns that became the semiotic iconagraphy we know today. I can surmise it had everything to do with efficiency and equivocation. Why not relay information faster and more ambiguously? I can hardly imagine a more efficacious way to facilitate auto-narration and insure its quality - in short, like a horoscope, why not let the reader read their own story to themselves? Just give them a little shove. Nudge them.

Drano ad from 1947 with step-by-step comic illustrations for indications and uses.

But again, that's not the point here. The point is that this development affected the job market for illustrators and advertising writers negatively. What can writers and illustrators do about it? Very little, unless they plan on taking up the gauntlet, resurrecting the outmoded ad, and upending current trends in advertising (which might not be a bad idea - but who has the resources to do it?). But they can be aware. Simply looking closely at the world around us and how we produce and convey information can open thousands of avenues for employment.

Liquid Plumr ad from 2008 - "Destroy the Clog" is the only text - the rest is imagery of a sink drain with descending ninjas.

Is this solely the responsibility of the individual/student? Some would argue yes. I'm not one of them - I'd love to see more institutions doing what the Savannah College of Art and Design does: provides incoming students with an overview of their major, including areas of specialization, job prospects, expected salaries, working conditions, and professional organizations. This one is just for Fiber Arts, but the print catalog they distribute contains the same information for every major. I think my life would've been very different if someone would've provided me with a rundown like that when I entered the Philosophy or English Literature Department, but maybe it was just the tar fumes.

Shame On You, Shame On Me

2008-07-30T14:44:00.003-04:00

In case you didn't do your homework:

Karen Kitchel's article is a response to an article written by Professor Steven Mannheimer called "Guilty by Association." In his article, Mannheimer describes what Kitchel calls a "conspiracy of silence" that characterizes the academic job hunt:

Everyone understands that 199 of every 200 hopefuls will return to Des Moines or Missoula or Toledo empty-handed. But the interviewers' good manners and the candidates fear of appearing unattractively pessimistic render this statistic almost unmentionable (Mannheimer 15).

Kitchel believes that it isn't only "good manners" that propagates this behavior, it's "a matter of institutional self-preservation" (Kitchel 1). She insists that "if more artists paid attention to such details there might be a few (thousand) less enrolling in grad schools" (1). I'm sure that this is true, but as I've said previously, I don't think it's just a matter of paying attention, it's a matter of being presented with the information in a clear, honest manner. It's very possible that the hopeful demeanor of the MFA job candidate has less to do with fear and more to do with ignorance. Sure, they know it's tough to get a job; sure, they know the chances are slim. But has anyone ever told them exactly how slim? I doubt it. Is there an introductory course in MFA or liberal arts programs that demonstrates the ratio of graduates to job openings? No. Maybe it isn't fear or ignorance, but both, as I described previously; the student is afraid to ask, afraid to face the truth about the probability of failure, and so becomes complicit in maintaining their own ignorance.

However, it's clear as you move through Kitchel's argument comparing the MFA program to a pyramid scheme that the "artists" she holds accountable aren't just the students, but the professors and administrators as well. A pyramid scheme is a financial scam wherein "there is often no real product and no actual market for the supposed product, but instead, a system requiring that you continuously sign up other recruits in order to realize a profit" (1). Pyramid schemes prey on the financially vulnerable (read: lower class), and

rely on investors recruiting others to serve as the income-producing layer underneath. No new blood, no pay-out. If you fail to recruit, you remain on the bottom of the heap, because technically, there's no place to go except up and on top of the backs of your recruits. By definition, the only ones who can benefit from a pyramid scheme are the ones who got there first (Kitchel 2).

The "investors" in this case (or the invested), the "ones who got there first" are the artists and professors in the academy. This is where I feel the analogy falls short. Academic artists don't recruit undergraduate or MFA students directly - they rely on the framework of the Institution to lure them in and keep them there. They indirectly profit from the system; they're guilty insofaras they do nothing to dismantle or expose the inequities, but they are not guilty of malice or extortion (as many participants in a real pyramid scheme are).

So how did they get there first? This has been a question of great interest to me; I find myself constantly seeking the origin of the downward slope - the moment when the value of the liberal arts/MFA degree began to decline, the moment when the jobs dried up, the moment when the silent conspiracy began. Kitchel suggests the 1940's as a place to begin:

Regardless of it's diminished value today, the MFA did start out as a job ticket. The creation of the degree was a direct response to the sudden need for teachers created by the G.I. Bill in 1944 in all disciplines, art included. Thanks to the flood of government scholarship money, student enrollments doubled and kept climbing. For a while, the newly formed departments supplied teachers as planned, but that vacancy was adequately met back in the mid-to-late '70's. It's been surplus ever since (Kitchel 3).

Why didn't this come to light then? How could the production of more and more graduates continue when it was evident that there were less and less jobs? Again, a hopeful quietude was to blame. A greying of the faculty was predicted, and the early 1990's promised large-scale retirement across the academic landscape. Quite simply, those with degrees were lying in wait, biding their time until these jobs opened up. Unfortunately, it never happened. At least not on the scale that everyone predicted. Universities used this time to restructure and cut costs; the part-time and adjunct faculty pandemic began, departments shrank, and resources were reallocated to technology and research. Though the numbers are old, they reveal the asymmetry clearly: Kitchel discovered that the 1990 census shows just over 1.6 million self-proclaimed artists, a 127% increase since 1970, while during the same period, those reporting full or part-time jobs in academia shrunk by 50%. Twice as many artists, half as many jobs. The numbers are likely severely underestimated as well (Kitchel 3).

Now, to be fair, art school isn't just about preparing academic artists and art teachers. Many of those with MFA's might be seeking employment outside academia. But are they faring any better? Kitchel cites a small study done by Julie Ardery at the University of Kentucky in Lexington that suggests not. Ardery originally expected to

find gender differences in the satisfaction and employment rates of studio MFA's once they left school, [but] she quickly discovered instead that nearly all of the 55 alumni interviewed were in the same sinking boat, regardless of gender, media, or any other differences. Most were still shellshocked several years after leaving the department, cobbling together disappointing jobs and wondering what went wrong (Kitchel 3).

These unsuccesful graduates often abandon art for more profitable occupations (though by no means prestigious) as they suffocate under the weight of student loan debt. Imagine the outcry if 90% of all engineering students were unemployed in their field 5 years after graduation. Or medical students. Or business majors. There's a direct correlation here between the value of art in our society and the care and attention that we give this problem. Artists are not only seen as less important, but our education is often regarded as a "personal journey" as opposed to vocational training. And if we don't make it, we obviously didn't have what it takes. What it takes might be some support in finding a job so that we can continue making art.

Why? This beffudles me. Why isn't artist regarded as a job? Why isn't employment the goal of an MFA program? I have a few theories, more on those soon.

I do have one final suggestion though. It's evident that remodeling is necessary on a widespread scale in MFA and liberal arts programs across America. The silent conspiracy needs to be dismantled, the facts and figures need to come to light and be made available for everyone to consider before they make decisions. But what we need most is an abandonment of shame. The shame that we feel from being taken by the system, the shame of being part of the system, the shame of not being able to find employment, the shame that surrounds calling yourself an artist. When no one told me the truth about job prospects and assumed that I knew the score, I never got the sense that the silence was the result of fear or malice; I think now it may have been shame. My professors were ashamed at how poorly the system was designed, how it took advantage, how they were powerless to change it, afraid to change it because it's where their paycheck came from, and ashamed that they felt lucky to be there. Maybe for those foolish enough to be taken in by a pyramid scheme, shame is an incentive as powerful as greed.

Karen Kitchel and the MFA Article

2008-07-27T00:31:00.005-04:00

Got the file up - check out Karen Kitchel's essay "The MFA, Academia's Pyramid Scheme." You'll be taken a a separate page with a link to download the PDF of the essay - it's all safe, just in a Google Group I created for the sole purpose of hosting files for the blog.

Curiously, this works for Firefox, but the file doesn't come up with Safari. Sorry - don't think it's my glitch.

Back with my thoughts on this and Robert Cohen on Monday.

We Are Not The First

2008-07-25T15:57:00.005-04:00

When did this happen? The devaluation of the degree, the evaporation of job prospects? I've been thinking about this a lot lately but quickly realized all of my notions would be pure speculation. Luckily, Adam Trowbridge contacted me recently with a political cartoon from c. 1930 and a great website on student activism from the same era (run by NYU Professor Robert Cohen). The cartoon is below - over 70 years old and exposing the same issues we're dealing with today. Adam also sent a PDF of an article by Karen Kitchell entitled "The MFA, Academia's Pyramid Scheme." I'll be posting that as soon as I figure out how to get a PDF file up on Blogger - I'll probably have to find a spot to host it first. In the meantime, check out all the great political and educational cartoons on the site, the history of the American Student Union and the National Student League, as well as the poignant essays by Cohen.

George Price and Louis Lapchek. Cartoon from undated publication of the National Student League.

Fireman Syndrome

2008-07-24T02:22:00.003-04:00

I've been considering other factors that contributed to my disillusionment, both before and after graduation, and I'm certain that "fireman syndrome" had a lot to do with it. When you're a child, you aspire to heroic and glamorous vocations; you want to be a fireman, a policeman, a rock star, an actor, a professional athlete, maybe president. As the weather of adolescence moves in, its shifting winds quickly dismantle those childhood dreams and replace them with other romanticized notions: I want to be an author, a journalist, a lawyer, a doctor, or any number of other, more specialized things. Or sometimes our adolescent experiences reinforce our childhood dreams. Sinking our tentacles deeper into the world, we root out new interests and hold on to old ones, and varied as they may be, they all have one thing in common:

No one tells us exactly what it will take to get there.

OK, if you're lucky, maybe someone does, or hints at it, as in "Doctor, huh? Takes a lot of school to get there." But for more obscure occupations, like philosopher, many mentors, teachers, parents, and professors don't (or can't) tell you what it would take to get there. They may be able to tell you that you have to go to college, but beyond that, it gets a little fuzzy. That was part of my problem.

When I was very young, I wanted to become a jet pilot. Not a commercial jet pilot, a fighter jet pilot. I held on to that aspiration until I was in my early teens. At that time I got involved in skateboarding, progressed rapidly, and found an outlet for my energy and creativity. My dream of becoming a pilot morphed into a dream of becoming a professional skateboarder (this was later solidified by my discovery of the role the Armed Forces played, and the integral part they'd play in me becoming a fighter jet pilot). In my late teens, my love of reading inevitably led me to popular philosophers. I was immediately overcome by the beauty, elegance, logical order, and audacity of their worldviews. I thought to myself - "This is the most amazing thing you could do with your life, spend it constructing a system that details how you see the world." It was evident to me that this was the most creative and rewarding enterprise possible. This, however, didn't supplant my dream of skating for a living.

Yes, you read that right. I simultaneously wanted to be a professional skateboarder and a philosopher. From the time I was 16 until the time I was 26. And you read that right too: 26. Years. Old.

Roof gap ollie, School 7, San Pedro, CA - 24 years old.

I submersed myself in philosophy, received a BA in Philosophy in 1998 from the SUNY at Buffalo (UB), and 2 1/2 years later received a BA in English/Poetics (the philosophy of poetry) from UB. At the time, UB was at the tail end of being the Harvard of Poetics (due to its historically progressive program developed in the 1960's). I couldn't have lucked into a better school to marry my love of philosophy and literature. And all the time I believed I was preparing myself to become a philosopher - that majoring in Philosophy meant that the academy understood I wanted to be a philosopher, and they were going to show me how. Did they? No. Did I ever tell anyone that's what I wanted? No, not to my recollection. Naive? Ridiculous? Of course. But that's exactly my point. My expectations/understanding about what college was going to provide for me, what it provided for everyone, was way, way out of line with reality.

Slowly I began to piece together what it was going to take to become a philosopher: a PhD, a tenure track position at a prestigious University, decades of work on other philosophers, ten of thousands of hours of research under fluorescent lights, and finally, if I was lucky, some time at the end of my life to map out and illustrate my own worldview. Cynical? Pessimistic? Hyperbolic? You bet, but I'm trying to prove a point. I just didn't know what it would take to make it in the world of academic philosophy. I had fireman syndrome. And no one at school bothered to cure me of it, but that's probably my fault as well, because I never told anyone what I wanted to do.

So what did I do? I moved to California and became an amateur skateboarder in 2000. I found some small sponsors, made some friends, but quickly realized the place wasn't for me and my 24 year old body was very close to being past its prime. I saw firsthand what it took to become a professional skateboarder. The physical toll it took on your body, the posturing, the politics, the talent, the networking. And guess what? I didn't have it in me. I cured myself of my own fireman syndrome by going there and finding out what it took to make it.

Frontside 180 lien ollie down 5 stairs, Lockport, NY - 15 years old.

I wonder why in 6 1/2 years of college I never discovered what it would take to become a philosopher - the politics, the work, the subjugation - it was all hidden. I didn't truly discover it until I went to graduate school, when my status and age made me privy to the more personal side of academia, the gory truth. How did I discover the truth about skateboarding (and my place in it) in 6 months in California, but I couldn't do it in 6 1/2 years at school?

I know I should have asked. This leads me to my next realization. Maybe I didn't ask because I was scared. Maybe I didn't want to hear the answer about how the chances were slim and the workload almost insurmountable. Maybe I didn't want to consider the possibility of failure after I'd come so far. I was the first person in my family to go to school. I have three degrees obtained over 11 years. The idea that I would/could fail may have been hovering at the fringes, but I couldn't bear to let it in.

Ric Royer Interview, Part I

2008-07-23T01:01:00.005-04:00

Ric Royer is a performance artist who resides in Baltimore, MD. He holds a BA in Theatre with a minor in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo, an MA in Theatre Arts from Towson University, and has MA "credentials" from Dartington College of Arts. His work is difficult yet accessible, fast-paced yet thoughtful, vulnerable yet guarded, and a thousand other contradictory things. He is a master storyteller, and the stories he tells are about life and death, and what we do to fill the time from the moment we're born until the moment we die. He is currently an adjunct Professor in Theater, Film, and Video Department at Stevenson University. His work can be found at www.ricroyer.com

I conducted this interview about all things academic and non-academic via email over the last two weeks.

Chris: Describe your current relationship with the academy.

Ric: By “describe your current relationship" are you looking for more than just
status/position within academia?

Right. I feel I can go on forever, so I will limit it to this for now: Liberal Arts: School that teaches how to go to school (until you can teach in it).

I seem to undergo a psychological shift about academia depending on my status within/without it. Yes, the idea of the liberal arts castaways can be tragedy, as exhibited by my own limited employability in the face of serious debt, but it's hard to overlook that academic institutions are also places where many formative transitions can occur, places where the focus is on learning and exploring with intersecting of communities of peers. That doesn't always succeed, but it provides the resources. As I tell my students, if you don't use your institution, you will leave feeling used.

Lately I've been considering going back just so I have time to think. I've also been toying with the idea of starting an event in Baltimore called "School" wherein the focus is not merely on performing a piece or delivering a lecture, but on the discussion afterwards. Each "class" also comes with a suggested reading emailed or printed on theposter for the audience/class to familiarize themselves with the piece/subject prior to presentation.

Ric waves goodbye to Kevin Thurston's soul in the piece "Carry On, Carrion".

Alternative educational institutions are becoming extinct. Two more are scheduled to close or drastically change in the next next year: Dartington and Antioch, so maybe small networks/communities of idea exchange forums need to start developing.

It's great that you are focusing a blog on this subject. Maybe you can apply for a grant to set up liberal arts support groups or rehabilitation programs. Turn this into the profit that has been
promised!

I would like to see some practical discussions too instead of purely theoretical ones. I'm less interested in words like "post-modern" in discussing this subject than I am in words like "legislation". I wonder how much the devaluation of the degree (product of the "Ace Race") has to do with the castaway condition. The world-wide push to use quantitative educational measurements to reflect quality of national education has seemingly reduced each degree by a notch. My MFA is not that terminal anymore. I'm even more obsolete!

My question for you, if it is a question: isn’t the "artist", or more generally anyone who participates in a non-financial economy of cultural commodity/community, categorically a castaway, whether or not he/she went to school to be one? Those of us that paid tuition to be
outcasts feel more of a sense of entitlement and therefore betrayed. If you didn't go to school for philosophy, would you be in a better position in the field of philosophy?

Is that all there is my friend, is that all there is? You know the rest.

Ric Royer (seated) and collaborator G. Lucas Crane in Ric's Attic.

C: The devaluation of the degree has been a long time coming, and relates directly to revaluation of education as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. If we're told that getting a degree is a guarantee of a better life, then more people will try to get a degree. But, accordingly, there is also more of a financial incentive for institutions to provide more degrees to more people - and the quickest way to do that is to lower educational standards and matriculation requirements. Your "School" event seems to subvert the traditional economic promise of the academy, promoting education for the sake of education. Do you think this will also quell the sense of betrayal? If you want to see the discussion move more from theory to practice, as I do, where should an event like this lead?

R: Sure. I'm unsure where it is headed, I mean, what/when is the critical mass? How long can University education continue to usher the populace through the system before most people recognize the uselessness of it? Is it reversible or will it just take time for student behavior to adapt to it and begin changing how they use their environment or choose not to go to University at all. As I just said to Justin Katko when he was in Baltimore last month: not going to school is the new going school. Many people practicing one of the questionable liberal arts degrees like art or creative writing are benefiting from staying away from the academy walls. Personally, one of my mantras as a teacher is to tell my students not to let school get in the way of their education.

As to where the "School" event should lead, I don't know, away from accreditation and finances I suppose. Quite frankly, I dont think there is anything wrong with treating learning as a hobby (operating outside of a financial economy). That’s all most of our major "skill sets" are anyways.

Ric's avant-garde coffe mug that reads "the lip of the elite is ajar".

C: Do you think hobby is the right word? How does that exempt it from a financial economy? By avoiding commodification? If you're talking about an artist doing what he does because he loves it, alright. But if you're talking about the guy who does what he loves but sells it at the craft fair, that has intermittent participation in the true fiscal economy.

R: I like the word hobby. I first started using it in the Pop Experimentalist paper/lecture (which, though dated, still has some snippets you might find interesting). I think hobby is a term worth appropriating. It's always listed below occupation (Dating Game), as if to say the things we like to do cannot be the things we like doing. Hobbies and pastimes can end up being ones career (like professional baseball players and pool sharks), but it rarely works that way. And come on, the guy selling crafts has about as much participation in the "true fiscal economy" as your cat sitting does. Sublimating hobby as something worth feeling good about, something more than an insignificant way to spend your time when you are not making money and making your country work better is a good idea, no? WIthout this sublimation, personal or otherwise, what's left is the shame of being someone that spends all our time practicing our hobbies. Just because it's poetry or music or some experimental form doesn't mean it's too far from making model airplanes. Which reminds me, I did a whole project based on this idea: "Building the Jolly Roger Without Instructions ". I have my artist statement for it somewhere if you want it.

C: Talk more about the shame you experience practicing your "hobbies."

R: Well, you know what I'm talking about. It's not like I am ashamed of being a weird writer or performer, it's more about how it can creep in when you are in, say, an airport or highway rest area. or when somebody normal asks you what you do. Nothing, can I just say I do nothing? It would be easier. I just performed at a huge music/performance festival here called Whartscape and there were hundreds of people that are social outsiders, misfits, weirdos, etc but they were all in one room, cheering among the same sensibilities, completely comfortable surrounded by like-minds and like-outfits. That's alright with me. I felt old, but they had a good time, and they, like me, don't always have good times in large groups of random Americans.

Ric eats beans hobo style.

C: Do you think you understood what you were getting into when you went to college? Or when you pursued particular degrees? Do you think you'd have any advice for liberal arts majors?

R: Hmm, that's a hard question because I'm not sure if I really remember why I went to college other than because my friends were going (social pressure). But I do remember switching from the Theatre Department to the English Department in my junior year. I remember it because I feel like it was the first decision I made strictly based on my own experience. I didn't find the Theatre Department rigorous enough, it felt like a continuation of high school. With the poetics community, I found people to argue with. Arguing is the best way to learn in a hurry.

Graduate school was something different. I DID want to become a scholar, I wanted to teach performance studies, write essays, books, crap. And you know what, I don't think I was that bad at it. I think I wrote a strong thesis on a niche-yet-rich topic (instruction art), I could articulate myself under pressure (thanks acting class!), and I had a significant body of practical work to back me up. But almost three years out of grad school, I'm realizing that I'm better at creating/writing/performing performance work, and I like participating in the art community more than I would in the academic community. So although I'm teaching (adjunct), I could be fully committing myself to more reasonable career, but what would I be like if I did that?

Thus, my predicament within this whole "castaway" condition: apply what I got out of college that was practically useful, or apply what I got out of college that gave me a sense of identity.

This is where Ric does his laundry.

C: Tell me about your MA fiasco.

R: First, the MA in writing is a tricky one. Dartington is/was very loose, I went there as a research resident to write my thesis, and ended up completing all requirements for a full MA. But I was never enrolled, so all I have is a piece of paper that says I completed the "equivalent" to an MA in writing. I could have dropped a years worth of international student tuition (20k or so) to have the paperwork, but haven’t bothered. It's too late now as Dartington is slated to be devoured by a larger institution (University of Plymouth) next year to bail them out of financial crisis.

C: When I was considering Graduate School, I went to Charles Bernstein and got a letter of recommendation. We talked for a long time, and he advised me against it. His situation was very different, coming up in the 60's, 70's, and 80's. Opportunities were present in the institution (or became available) that are no longer available. I thought for a long time about taking his advice, and decided against it for personal reasons, because I feel I learn poorly in an unstructured environment. But now that I look back at it, I also believe that technology (or absence thereof) unduly influenced my decision. If the internet had existed in the same capacity then as it does now, with it's myriad venues for distribution, social networking, etc., the viability of a sustained educational foray and accompanying soapbox (outside academia) would have seemed more realistic. Do you think it's become more possible (or only become possible, or become possible again, as it was in the decades when Bernstein and Robert Creeley came up) in the last ten years for not going to school to become the new going to school?

R: I dont know if it's a philosophical change, a technological change, or just plain numbers (more people are going to school, so the ones that don't have a "rare" knowledge). But much of it might be the envy and fascination of academia over those who managed to somehow avoid it. I've talked with Eric Gelsinger about this before, a good conversation about the exoticness of the "non-student".

C: What about your workspace?

R: I dont really have a workspace. My whole house really, just here and there.

C: What do you really want to be doing and where do you want to be doing it?

R: I dont know. Not baltimore. Maybe not U.S. Maybe Canada, that would be nice.

The Price of Being Poor

2008-07-21T22:34:00.008-04:00

After some rumination, a walk, and a conversation, I realize my post from yesterday requires amendment. Thinking that I'm one of the last generation duped into believing that even a liberal arts degree can help establish a career and increase earning power is not only inaccurate, but smacks of victimization.

The truth is, I specifically was naive - but I believe there were reasons for my naivety. And I believe many of my naive friends who are in the same position share those reasons.

I believe the delusion of the college degree as golden goose is an affliction of the lower class, or lower middle class. Neither of my parents graduated from high school, let alone college. They did receive their GED's shortly after I was born; my father was particularly proud to go back and follow through. But neither of them understood anything about how the college admissions, tuition, or enrollment processes worked. I was the first person in my family (even my extended family, including aunts, uncles, cousins, and in-laws) that went to college. I believed that college was a golden goose because they believed, and they never went, so how could they have known? My blue collar background, the same one that made college the promise of a better life, was instrumental in my ignorance.

Parents who went to college, especially those who graduated with degrees in liberal arts, are far more capable of (and likely to) impress upon their children the truth about a college education. I didn't have this advantage. Once again, without even trying to, I land in a puddle of class politics and economics. Why didn't I understand more about college? Because I was poor, and my parents were poor.

Me at 4 years old.

But after my arrival at college, how could I have kept believing? Especially when I had friends in Business, Computer Science, Chemistry? Here's where it gets interesting: because it was never mentioned. The idea of preparing for job prospects within my field was never introduced in class, and outside of class it was no more than a passing joke. I assumed it would all come together upon graduation. I assumed there would be a place for me out there in the world, a college graduate. Why the hell was it never mentioned that I might have trouble finding work with a BA in English? Because there's an implicit understanding in the academy that students in certain fields are going to do one of two things: pursue a higher degree and become an academic or pursue a degree in education and teach. No one at the academy bothered to tell me, because the academics that taught me believed I was there to become an academic too, believed I was part of a silent contract I knew nothing about. The fields that immediately come to mind are English, Comparative Literature, Sociology and Philosophy. Those students are rarely reminded of the hopeless futility of banking on a four-year degree, nor are they given vocational guidance to help palliate the inevitable symptoms of their estrangement from the workforce.

Unfortunately I didn't figure it out until my second year of graduate school, when everyone stopped talking about theory and literature and started talking about who got a job where.

The Price of Being Useless

2008-07-20T23:07:00.001-04:00

I am one of the last generation of students who actually believed that getting a college degree (no matter what the major) was a guarantee of greater earning power and a secure future. Now many agree that that isn't the case at all, whether you're a liberal arts major or not. Don't get me wrong, enrollment for liberal arts is on the decline and career-based education programs are on the rise, but check out this brief article from the Wall Street Journal highlighting the woes of all college graduates.

But that isn't exactly the point today. The point is how it makes you feel. I feel betrayed, I feel angry, I feel confused, and worst of all, I feel useless. Neither institution of higher learning that I attended felt obligated to tell me that my educational trajectory could actually be detrimental to my future. Why? Marc Scheer knows why. Because they're businesses first, learning institutions second.

Every morning I wake up wondering why profit can't be made without taking advantage of someone. Every morning I wake up full of knowledge that I love to have, but also has very few, if any, practical applications in the world that might garner income. Every day I'm made to feel useless by that simple fact.

True, the real value of my knowledge and skills shouldn't be equated with the exchange value they draw in dollars and cents. And half of me believes this. But the other half of me wants to learn how to cut hair, just so I can feel useful again.

The kicker isn't just going to school for something and finding out it's useless - it's when you find out that (unless you want to give up entirely) you have to figure out a way to make it useful. How many other students attend school, graduate, and are then expected to figure out what to do with the skills they learned? But you say to me, "That's part of the creative process, part of the freedom enjoyed by artists and authors, the liberty to go whatever direction you like and take whatever path you choose to get there. Artist would be just like every other occupation if it were all mapped out for you." Bullshit. Someone could've taught classes in how to get published, how to get an agent, how to hold your martini at a cocktail party. Someone could've demystified the hermetic aspects of artistic success.

Or maybe they couldn't, because no one knows. Or they couldn't because then everyone would be an artist, and what would happen to the scarcity that sustains the market?

LIberal Arts Retiree Syndrome

2008-07-19T23:43:00.006-04:00

Ah, retirement - that long awaited release from the obligatory grind - the arrival of time for yourself - waking up late to the sweet sound of the cock crowing the sun up on your golden years. Too bad the reality that many people unprepared for or forced into retirement face is a deluge of unfamiliar feelings: idleness, depression, aimlessness, social awkwardness, and a presentiment of uselessness.

Sound familiar? Welcome to the world of obsolescence. Liberal arts majors often experience the symptoms of "retiree syndrome" before they even get the chance to have a career. The difficulty of securing employment with adequate compensation (let alone benefits) is well-documented, but there's more to it. This is a trans-systemic issue: the Universities continue to educate liberal arts majors in a traditional way, producing students capable of little more than being professional students or academics; employers continue to tout the necessity of all the skills liberal arts majors possess (strong written/oral communication skills, creative thinking, logical perspective, unique insight), but are unwilling to pay for it; and society at large paradoxically reveres and stigmatizes the scholar/artist.

There's a fantastic analogy here between what's going on in academia and the plan ned obsolescence in the manufacturing world. Objects are made with materials that fulfill product lifetime projections correspondent with the date of their planned obsolescence. It's simple. Is your computer going to be obsolete in three years? Then the manufacturer will produce it with components/materials which have a lifespan of three years. Unfortunately, the date of a student's planned obsolescence often correlates with his date of graduation. A student is technically obsolete to a University the moment he graduates (more cynically, the moment he pays his tuition), so why provide him with skills that would outlive that lifespan? A liberal arts student is comprised of a series of skills that need not last longer than his academic career - they don't need to be useful afterward - they need only be useful long enough to garner his degree. How the hell do you figure out how long something will last? In manufacturing, it's easy - they use value engineering and reliability engineering. How do you determine how long a skill will last? You can't. And that's the wild card here.

Just because the University doesn't care if your skills last longer than your academic career or translate well into the job market doesn't mean that those skills disappear, and it doesn't mean they're worthless. One of the largest hedge funds in the World, DE Shaw, refuses to hire MBA's, and hires people with strong liberal arts backgrounds. How do I know? Because I applied to work there. Sure they can get them for cheaper, but that isn't the point. The point is: they do the job better because they're more creative, adaptive, and insightful, and if they didn't, they would've stopped hiring them long ago. Not ready to be a slave to capitalism? Neither was I. But the opportunities are there.

The scholar/artist is revered when she serves capitalism, but stigmatized when she treats her knowledge/skill as an end in itself, not a means to an end. Even academic scholars produce essays, books, articles, blogs, and reports in service of capitalism when the content of their work is definitively anti-capitalist, because even as a naysayer, they become a marketable commodity or brand that draws students and faculty to a University. Scholars outside the academic system rarely become marketable to the same degree, and it's no coincidence that they are publicly valued less.

This is so common that it's cocktail party and holiday dinner fodder for friends and family alike; tell me you haven't heard: English/Philosophy/Fine Arts, huh? What are you going to do with that? Teach? Sometimes you don't even get the courtesy of the standard question, you just get to hear the snickers as they sweep around the room, and solidify your role as pariah. But everyone knows this.

We're saddled with the feeling of uselessness before we get the chance to prove that we're useful. Why? The obsolescence analogy works again - not just within the University, but outside of it: we're the Old Model, and the New Model does things we can't do (computer programming, bioinformatics, quantum physics, spend 4 more years there, pay tuition), things that are considered more useful (but I should say "worth more" because invariably, they are capable of generating more capital both for themselves and for the institutions that employ them).

Maybe I should give you some pep talk here about how the Old Models are more reliable, capable of handling tasks the New Models can't, etc. but the truth is, those scenarios don't often exist. I can write one hell of a letter, but who needs that anymore? I can research the hell out of something, but Wikipedia still kicks my ass. And anyone can use it. Who writes copy at the office? Who cares. Give the job to the smartest guy in the room regardless of his specialty, because no one is going to read it anyway. Our skills, though lauded by employers everywhere, are perceived as increasingly more useless. Some schools have even tacitly admitted it, like NYU, when they tacked vocational training onto liberal arts degrees.

But I did find a pep talk, a far more lengthy and eloquent one than I could ever give, at Journeyman's blog Relevant History. Sure it's four years old, but his essay is so thorough and well-written it could serve as a permanent reference for most of what will come up at this blog.
Check out more of his work apropos the topic of postacademics here.

Plan for Change

2008-07-18T00:59:00.003-04:00

Let's be clear - I wasn't advocating quitting for the sake of quitting yesterday, I was advocating quitting as a way to recover and redirect your mental and economic resources. I don't think quitting should be done without a plan, because if you quit without a plan, you're right back where you started, with all your options open.

Not only do you have to narrow your options in life, but you have to narrow them within your specialty as well. PhD's and MFA's know this, but it can be hard to continue once you're outside the academic setting. My specialties when I was at grad school were William Blake and Marcel Duchamp. 3 years out, I rarely read (or write) about either.

True, this could be because I'm an artist, not a scholar, and I've come to terms with it. But in order to come to terms with it, I had to choose, and I had to close the door on becoming a scholar. The notion of being well-rounded simply doesn't apply when you're trying to excel at something, because in order to excel, you must do something to the exclusion of everything else; you must practice. In academia, canonical trends, self-determined aesthetic boundaries, and the pressure to do something unique (but not too unique, so that it's still a part of the "conversation") all serve to keep you focused. Those of us outside academia don't share those inducements, so we're more likely to stray, and that can be inimical to our focus, and consequently, our success.

I've promised myself that I'm going to continue refining my focus as an artist, and I know that I'll have to suffer more losses and eliminate more opportunities; but this is where I envy those within the academic structure, because I sure could use some fences and some guidance.

Paring to the Core

2008-07-17T01:03:00.004-04:00

It may be a blessing that opportunities are limited in my fair city, because it will force me to focus on fewer goals. I've spent my entire life keeping my options open. So when a job came up on craigslist in Buffalo for a copy editor/proofreader, I thought to myself "I could do that." And a moment later I thought "I could do that, but why?" I do not want to be, nor have I ever wanted to be, a copy editor. And for 23k a year, I thought "Who on earth would?"

Narrowing your options is one of the most crucial (and painful) steps towards reaching your goal. I quit my job to become an artist. I didn't quit it to dabble in another career or achieve a mediocre level of success somewhere else. I had to endure the pain of quitting a job I had for 13 years, and the requisite (albeit unwarranted) shame and guilt that accompanied my decision. But I had to. That dead-end job was an albatross, and my fantasy escape was keeping my options open.

The psychology behind this is fascinating: we experience the elimination of an opportunity as a loss, and we're willing to pay a price to avoid the emotional impact of that loss - often, to our own detriment. Sometimes we're willing to sustain extended physical and psychological hardship to avoid the acute emotional vacuum that loss effectuates. I know I did. A short article in the New York Times by John Tierney called "The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors" recounts how consistently people behave this way.

Too often I think liberal arts majors amble on in tedious jobs because they're the only ones available "in their field" (read: I sit at the desk in the gallery instead of making art to go in it). Of course it's a different story if you like your tedious job. But if you don't, and you want to be a playwright or a fashion designer, then I suggest you quit. Because nothing lights a fire under you like desperation, and nothing saps your strength quicker than a soul-crushing job. Afraid to quit? Good, that's how you should feel. Any sane person would. Does that mean you shouldn't quit? No. And if you can't bring yourself to quit, then you might want to really think hard about how bad you want what you say you want. You want to be the next great pulp mystery novelist with your books in every airport? Then quit your job and get writing. If you don't, then you don't really want it. You want your job, and you want to write as a hobby. I don't use that word condescendingly, I use it to emphasize a hierarchy and the roles things play in your life.

For more on the benefits of quitting and being the best in the world, check out Seth Godin's The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit and When to Stick.

My job was the first door I closed. And many more followed. But as you can see from yesterday's post, I'm still keeping a number of money-making options open. I know it's a mistake, and I'm continuing to whittle away at the list, but old habits die hard. What feels like a safety net is really a booby trap, and I have to pare away all the superfluous alternatives to get to the core.

Sturm und Drang

2008-07-16T00:11:00.003-04:00

Since I'm currently unemployed, I have to start thinking about what I'm going to do, in addition to what I want my work to do. Unfortunately, in a city like Buffalo, opportunities are limited for writers and artists. Very few copy editing and grant writing jobs exist and they don't pay much, there's no entertainment industry to speak of, illustration work is almost unheard of, and even though our literary/art scene is diverse, well-organized, and dedicated, it's hardly sizable enough to generate a livable wage. Where these jobs do exist, the compensation is meager and the benefits are non-existent (No benefits and living in NY state? Consider the Healthy NY Program that I'm a part of; it provides health care coverage to low income individuals and families, and comes with affordable prescription coverage as well). Writers and artists here have to make their own opportunities (as they do in many places), and often have to create venues for their work as well, as I've done with the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair.

While I pull the bones of my studio together, I thought it best to consider some supplemental employment, so I spent last night analyzing my skill set and possible options for fomenting income.

I thought of things I do or that I'm capable of doing, thought about their potential for generating revenue, and thought about how much I like to do them. Then they received thumbs up and thumbs down, accordingly.

I could tutor, but would only want to do it at a college level, because I'm not good with children. I also learned that I'm not good with ESL students after two years of teaching composition at the University of Maine, and unfortunately, many college students that would need English tutoring would be ESL students. Thumbs down. I'm a fantastic carpenter, painter, and builder, so I thought maybe I could do odd jobs for people. Sadly, I lack many of the major tools necessary for this kind of work, as well as the requisite pick up truck. Thumbs down. I bartended for over ten years, from golf courses to night clubs. I can make drinks and make them fast. But I can't stand the stress of being around drunk people that much anymore. Thumbs down. The thumbs uppers? Letterpress. I already do letterpress work, so I'm considering doing postcards, stationery, or art prints. Screenprinting ties. I already do this as well, check out my work here. But I could probably do more and find more avenues to distribute and sell them. A store? Sure. I've had the idea to do a DIY/craft art store here in Buffalo for a long time, one chock full of handmade books, clothing, affordable art, you name it. A website? Yes. I have a doozy of an idea that will be coming to fruition over the next 6 months, so watch out for it. But the idea that I really love? The one that got an immediate thumbs up? Kitty sitting. I love cats. I'll come to your house, and feed your cat while your away. 15 bucks a day. Two visits, fresh food and water, and 30 minutes of play time.

So there it is. I'm an aspiring artist and writer, but cats shall pave that road with gold.

The Withness of My Space

2008-07-15T01:19:00.003-04:00

Yesterday's post got me thinking about the studio space that I'm creating, its role in my life, and its place in the larger system. I wrote previously that a larger space was necessary for me to create larger scale work, but I've thought very little about how that space will intersect with the world. Or what new opportunities it will provide for me to intersect with the world. Do I just want more room to work? Am I interested in how the extra space will affect the content of my work? Do I want to produce larger work to sell that work? Is my work just an extension of my space - a prosthesis? Do I see a change in the scale of my work as directly related to its viability in the marketplace? If I make bigger things, are people more likely to take notice? What do I want my work to do?

1940 International Pickup Truck, 1 of 3 FARM series of etchings.

What degree of autonomy does my studio need to have in order for me to produce the work that I want to unhindered? Very little. Does my work contain any overtly political elements? No. Am I in any danger of my space being co-opted by the authorities? Not unless glass etching becomes illegal or I refuse to pay the rent. Ah, there's an intersection. The autonomy of my studio space is dependent on meeting mortgage obligations.

Does it even matter if I consider my space within, without, or beside? Can I will its orientation, or will it happen organically? Even if I could determine its orientation, is there really any practicable way to measure the impact of a space?

I'm still formulating answers to all the questions above, and still have many more to ask.

Bottom Up Spatial Revolution

2008-07-13T23:34:00.012-04:00

I know the homework assignment was long, but it's a fascinating conversation. Only some of it was pertinent to our purpose here, so I did the hard work for you.

A space neither within or without, but with. How useful is the notion of a creative space that stands beside the established order, beside the academy or the predominant financial economic system? It depends on what you want to do with it.

Opium Den, Shanghai Tunnels, Portland, OR 2007.

If you're seeking solace from the myriad restrictions, requirements, associations, and expectations that comprise and sustain your resident socio-economic system, then you may be taking the correct tack. P. Inman tells us "...as a means of cultural intervention, Foucauldian models of resistance might make a little more sense...i.e. the creation of an alternative cultural space outside - or maybe 'beside' is better - of the dominant hegemonic institutional one" (6). He's talking here about small pockets of imaginative production while also implying that the activities taking place in them (resistance is a broad term) are well-served by the cellular, clandestine nature of their organization (or lack thereof).

But, if you want to effect change in the larger system via a series of small-scale, cumulative acts of resistance, then you may want to reconsider. To this, Inman muses about organization as a whole:

As opposed to some sort of Foucauldian model of localized points of micro- resistance, it seems like any counter-hegemonic strategy needs, ultimately, to be macro-logical; that is to say, among other things, organized (6).

The danger here is not only failure, but recuperation by the structure of the system itself. Organized anarchism is not only an oxymoron, it's the replacement of one hegemonic structure with another. Inman explains:

The move wouldn’t be for writers, for example, to infiltrate the academy & change the lit canon from within. It would instead be to work outside that whole institutional framework & reject questions of canonicity altogether. Not a place at the table, but at a different table altogether (7).

Imagine that a series of sleeper cells in Universities all over America (with similar plans to upend and revise the canon) succeed; no systemic change has been made at all; the only thing different is the content. The new content serves its new masters the same way it served the old, and the inequalities propagated by the design of the system proceed unaffected.

Inman's endorsement of a paratactical space (not a hypotactical one) parallels Situationist suggestions (popularized by Guy Debord and others) from the 1960's and 1970's, but also calls to mind the Temporary Autonomous Zone proposed by Hakim Bey. Bey desribes the TAZ as a tactic: the activity of creating ephemeral, furtive spaces that evade hierarchical control (both from within and from without). The lawless TAZ's are real spaces in the real world full of real people - the purest examples cover the spectrum from underground sex clubs to knitting circles - and that unmediated connection between humans is key for Bey because the immediatism stands in direct opposition to the ultra-mediated and anti-social consequences of consumer capitalism.

Abandoned Central Terminal, Buffalo, NY 2008

So what the hell does this have to do with liberal arts? Quite a bit, actually. To be fair, it has even more to do with class politics and economic imbalances, but that war is being fought on many different fronts by many different soldiers, and I'm not one of them. The decision to make a space of your (singular or plural) own, whether it be a reading series, a Marxist/Socialist action group, or an opium den, requires that you face questions about how that space will operate, and how that space will interact (or not interact) with the larger socio-economic system that it's lodged in. People are making, and have always made spaces like this; this isn't a new idea. Bey admits it himself in Millennium:

My idea was to define a space which I feel exists (anyway), that's a private, even a secret space, if you like...clandestine...in which the whole problem of commodification, the buying and selling of art, the turning of art into a commodity and the use of art to sell commodities, which is sort of a curse for the modern artist, is avoided, just plain avoided; just a withdrawal from that world and a reaffirmation of a creative power in everyday life, outside the life of the commodity, the life of the market. After all, this is why all artists are artists, this is why one becomes an artist - not to sell your soul to the company store, but to create (7-8).

The problem isn't the making of the spaces. The problem is negotiating the interstices between the space you've made and the spaces that surround it. Bey's avoidance strategy is fine for true TAZ's, effervescent bubbles that rise, burst, and disappear before they have to engage with another space. It's also fine for people whose reward for participation in the TAZ is some sort of cultural, emotional, or psychological currency that enriches them. But it does nothing for artists who want to dedicate their lives to creating and in order to do so, must arbitrate an agreement that facilitates existence. If I want to make art for a living, I have to figure out a way that it can help me eat food, a way it can provide me with shelter, etc. Unless your TAZ has a barter system that provides everything you need to live (and some might), then it's inevitable that you engage with the market.

This is why I described the space above as paratactical (standing beside), as opposed to hypotactical (subordinated to). If you can create a space that intermittently engages with the market but isn't dominated or manipulated by it, that space gains integrity and influence, and can use the market to its advantage. This isn't selling out, it's understanding how to invert the inherent subjagation that the market insists upon.

Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA, 2008.

True, this is a self-serving anarchy, individualist anarchy (some call it lifestyle anarchy), anarchy that seems like it will never bring down the State - Bey confirms it by noting in T.A.Z. "Absolutely nothing but a futile martyrdom could possibly result now from a head-on collision with the terminal State, the megacorporate information State, the empire of Spectacle and Simulation" (98). Even Inman agrees:

As an overall political strategy anarchism seems pretty problematic. Given the Western capital's entrenchment & the immense resources which the various state apparatuses, financial institutions, etc. have at their disposal, it's hard to see how anarchism as a strategy directed toward effecting and sustaining structural change in any developed nation could work (6).

I don't disagree with Bey or Inman about the result of a head-on battle with the State/Academy/Institution. But I don't believe that our hard won spaces should or must remain invisible in order to remain autonomous, and I don't believe that these individual spaces carry no power to effect change on a larger scale. Anyone who does may want to read Stephen Johnson's elucidation of emergence and "bottom up" systems in his book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. Or pick up a copy of Robert Kocik's Overcoming Fitness and learn about epigenetics.

Wallowa Lake, OR, 2008.

Bey never envisioned the internet becoming millions of TAZ's as it has, and Inman doesn't reflect on it much, but we now have clear examples of niche spaces gathering momentum and effecting changes with viral velocity that reverberate through whole cultures. What's to say that your space won't be the next space to exact that kind of change? But again, it all depends on what you want to do with your space. Change the world? Change yourself? Both? Neither?

A Space With

2008-07-12T01:16:00.004-04:00

My friend Kevin suggested that there may be some possibility of a space that is neither within nor without, but somewhere other. He directed me to this article of P. Inman in Conversation with Roger Farr and Aaron Vidaver. I have a strong feeling the notion will parallel the liminal Temporary Autonomous Zone advocated by Hakim Bey. But since Kevin isn't a lifestyle anarchist like me (or maybe he is and I'm not, I get them confused) I'm going to take a day off, digest this, and come back on Sunday. Do the same in the meantime.

Paper Peers

2008-07-11T00:35:00.003-04:00

Achieving the accelerated condensation and intense interaction that the academy provides outside of the academy can be nearly impossible. In short: making friends is hard, and keeping them is harder.

Those in graduate school (and even undergraduate) luxuriate in being bound by the ligatures of common interests, common questions, and common investigations. Students are obligated to discuss them, ruminate at length about them, and often generate work in line with them. But as many PhD candidates and students who have completed advanced degrees can tell you - then something happens. Some sort of aesthetic and artistic diaspora. Or demarcation.

Me and Brendan Casey, December 2007. Met outside the academy in 2000.

PhD and MFA candidates have the excuse of literary/artistic submersion. Intense research, unilateral thought, and looming deadlines would be enough to test the most steadfast friendships - but there's something else going on too. Some sort of personal delineation, an alignment of self and method, self and product. This is how I make and this is what I make. And it's unlike anyone else's m.o. or output. This is a necessary step in cultivating your own style and insuring the novelty of your work, but it's also often the first step in distancing yourself from those you were close to. Sure you can engage in spirited debate over the merits of your work with someone, sure you can commiserate about the hell that is the PhD track, but it doesn't feel the same as before. That's because it isn't the same as when you were both 20 and had to read Emily Dickinson or take figure drawing together. You're doing very different things. Things of the same type, but not the same things.

Me and Barrett Gordon, December 2007. Met outside the academy in 2005.

For those of us outside the academy, it's even harder. We've often already embarked on our own aesthetic and artistic pilgrimages, taking us farther and farther from our friends, solidifying and refining our m.o. (for better or worse). We no longer have the artificial community that the academy provided, and have to rely on other artificial (and less structured) sodalities, usually centered around readings, galleries, and collectives. In these loose knit and transient spaces, it can be harder to forge lasting friendships.

Me and Ric Royer, June 2008. Met at SUNY at Buffalo in 1998.

Some might argue that this dissolution of artificial ties is a good thing; it allows us to pursue our own paths as artists and writers untainted by the visions of proximate peers, allows us to orbit distally and crystallize our own visions. Or maybe that it allows friendships to form more organically. But I'm skeptical. I would counter-argue that the absence of constant interaction with peers can result in aesthetic and artitistic petrification. This kind of petrification can make it even more difficult to find and maintain new friendships. And as for organic friendships, the older I get and the more set in my ways I become the less tolerance I have for "new" people. I don't want to be that way, and I'm trying hard to change it.

Of course, whether any of this comes to pass or you even notice it happen is a matter of motivation and awareness.

Negotiating Bedlam

2008-07-10T01:27:00.004-04:00

The question of the day, inside or outside of the academy: How does one promote oneself without compromising integrity or pandering? This, needless to say, is complex.

This is clearly a question of alignment. Aligning your ethics and actions, aligning your unique skills with a prospective skill set, and for many of us with higher degrees in liberal arts, aligning ourselves with the academy.

Let's take them one at a time. Your ethics and actions. Are you comfortable becoming a full-time marketing firm for yourself? Are you comfortable lying in response to an inquiry in order to land a job? Will you have to abandon the pursuit of what you love in your new career? Of course the answers to these questions are different for everyone. And there are a thousand more questions like this. At the end of the day, the most important question will be: Can I reconcile the actions that it took to get this job with my own ethical infrastructure?

Lest this sound too formal, let me remind you that I'm here. So far I've always been able to reconcile my ethics and my actions when it comes to employment. I've never lied about what I could do, and never done something that I didn't want to to get a job. But now I'm not so sure. I wonder what the next job interview will be like (if there is one). I wonder what I would say to get the job, and how I would feel about it afterward. No one likes to subjugate themselves, but the job interview is, by nature, a very asymmetrical affair.

Soap carving, 2007. Let's talk about my skill set: perfect for...prisoner?

Next, your skills and a prospective skill set. Do they ever match up? Is anyone ever the perfect candidate for the job? Possibly. But it does seem unlikely. So what's the best course of action here? Do you push on, hoping that someday you'll run across the job that requires your exact skills? Or do you consider learning things that you don't know because the jobs you want always seem to call for them? My graphic designer friends run into this stumbling block constantly: Graphic Designer wanted, must have web skills. Guess what? Most don't, and if they do, they're minimal. Graphic designers don't want to do web work, that's why they're graphic designers. Now this wouldn't necessarily occur in a larger city, where my graphic designer friends are far more desirable and appreciated, but here in a blue collar town like Buffalo, graphic design and web work might as well be the same thing. Should these hungry designers wander the parched sands of Buffalo employment until the day that graphic designers are understood and appreciated? Or should they suck it up and learn Dreamweaver? I'm always up for learning new things, whether they pertain specifically to my art or my job. But when learning that new thing might ensure that you get a job, a job doing something that you never wanted to do (like making web banners all day long), then you might want to reconsider.

Finally, aligning yourself with the academy. There are a thousand flaming hoops to jump through should you choose this path. But some people are comfortable with it. My friend Matt is well suited to academy life, and seems to revel in the politics and bureaucracy. He actually seems to enjoy it. The academy for many in philosophy, comparative literature, sociology, and other related fields is a lifeline. If this is your choice, you know what's ahead of you, and you can negotiate bedlam, godspeed.

I don't claim to have the answer. I'm still brokering my own deal.

For the rest of you, take solace, you are not actually obsolete, you are only perceived to be. This Twilight Zone Episode "The Obsolete Man" proves it.

Folks

2008-07-09T00:36:00.003-04:00

I recently applied for an art preparator job at the SUNY at Buffalo Galleries; it's something that I've always been interested in, felt I would like, and thought I was qualified for, but unfortunately UB didn't agree.

This, and my previous posts about institutions being made up of people have got me thinking about the importance of getting to know people. I say to myself "If someone at the UB galleries
knew me, they'd know that I was qualified for the job. They'd know how good I'd be at it." We all know the drill: people who know people get the jobs, people who don't know people disdain those who do. Here's the kicker: look at what I typed above. "If someone at the UB galleries knew me..." Not: "If I knew someone at the UB galleries." Why would anyone at the UB galleries know me if I hadn't previously given them reason/occasion to?

For most of my life, I've taken what could be considered an ideological approach to employment, one that maintains the fragile notion of a meritocracy. Do good work, get noticed. Work hard, get ahead. And of course this is true. The results of hard work are evident. But what that work consists of is far from what I envisioned.I always imagined work and reward specific to the task at hand (and occuring organically) e.g.: paint walls well, get job as wall painter, paint walls even better and show others how, get promoted to head wall painter, etc. But this estimation ignores what I consider to be the most important element in any equation: human beings. Humans are emotional, erratic, volatile, capricious, fickle, political, ignorant, and a thousand other things, as the situation warrants (or doesn't). The problem with my idea of the meritocracy is that it's too hygenic and too conceptual; it refuses to account for people's interactions. A more honest interpretation of the wall painter's path might be: learn to paint walls well from someone else, tell people and show people you paint walls well, tell more people and show more people, get job as wall painter, learn from other wall painters, prove to other wall painters you're a good wall painter, negotiate the likelihood of your becoming head wall painter, if unlikely (and if this is your goal), repeat and try harder.

My problem wasn't believing in a meritocracy, it was misunderstanding what qualities the meritocracy valued. And skillful navigation of the human component is a highly valued art. I thought about doing anything in a very narrow fashion, whether it was being an artist or making pizzas. I failed to take into account all the things it takes to get there, things it takes to stay there, and people that help you and hinder you along the way. It was meritocracy in a vacuum.

I'm not advocating anything but recognition. I'm not advocating schmoozing over hard work. I'm not advocating concentrating more on your people skills and less on your technical capabilities. I'm saying that there's a lot more to being an artist or a writer than making art or writing. And if you shun the human aspects of the meritocracy as it stands, the one that values skills you resent or deride, you might be missing the opportunity to become a more complete artist.

It's a more active approach to art - not the passive, "I'll just keep making art and someday someone will discover me (and my great art)." This is a myth anyway, the same one propagated by stories of supermodels discovered on the streets. That's hardly something to rely on. Sorry for the cliche, but you have to enter the lottery to win it.

So, I knew it as soon as I wrote it above. It shouldn't have been "If someone at UB knew me." It should've been "If I knew someone at UB." Because it's my fault for not putting myself out there, my fault for refusing to work on the human side of my art.

Space and Tools

2008-07-07T21:54:00.003-04:00

Since space has been the subject of the week, and I wondered publicly about where artists worked, I thought it proper to show you a bevy of artist's studios at the Canadian design blog, poppytalk.

They've spent the last few months putting together an amazing collection of short interviews and pics of artist's workspaces. Check out the studio spaces here. The voyeur in you will instantly be hooked on peeking into the places where artists make spaces to make.

I previously forgot to mention that in addition to the cramped art room that I use, I also use my basement. It's where I keep the real tools. Check out the pics below.

The Institutional Promise

2008-07-06T01:05:00.003-04:00

Since I considered the implicit promise of space yesterday, I should also consider the implicit promise of the institution/academy. I mentioned previously the aspects of security and freedom inherent in a tenure track job, but failed to examine them further.

An institution is no different from any other space; it cannot promise anything. Just like a city, you can imagine what it promises for you. And the institution itself can provide you with nothing - it is the people that comprise the institution that provide you with things. Provide you with the opportunity for tenure, provide you with your paycheck, provide you with the possibility of fruitful interaction, etc. People provide you with the security and freedom that you imagine in a tenure track job, not the institution, because the institution wouldn't exist without the people. It would just be buildings.

Harvard University, January 2005

But people are unpredictable.

So where does the security in the institution really come from? Its organization. Its ability to absorb unpredictability. Its myriad fail safes in case the human element founders. But these fail safes contain a human element as well, hence the redundancy of hierarchy. If not him, then her, if not her, then someone, if not someone, then you.

I know that when I went back to graduate school for Poetics, I thought the academy existed, and I believed it promised me things (structure, insight, vision, etc.). But these were just the things that I imagined that the academy promised. It took time to learn that it was just people, and I was just a person, and I had to re-imagine what it could actually provide for me.

This could be at the heart of why I haven't gone back. I haven't yet been able to imagine what it could actually provide for me this time around.

The Implicit Promise of Geography

2008-07-05T00:38:00.003-04:00

Since the amount of space one can wrangle can't be separated from the circumstances of the larger environment, when choosing 'where to be', one must consider the implicit promise of populated geography. New terrain assures new stimuli, but in an increasingly homogenized nationscape it also tacitly guarantees sameness, ostensibly for the sake of manageability (read: convenience, comfort). A new place is full of new cities, new cities are full of new places, and new places are full of new people. But there's still something reliable, far beyond the ubiquity of familiar corporations, restaurants, and banks; there's something more primal. It's our humanness, our common crises. A new place may have all new things, but they will be of a familiar kind. There will be sustenance, shelter, social dynamics. I know this sounds like a ham-handed reworking of the basic human needs, food, shelter, clothing, social interaction, etc, but it's not. Because I'm talking about what a space promises, not what we need as human beings.

Chicago, December 2006

A new space promises newness, but it's really a new oldness. Unfamiliar familiars. So, follow me here: the newness is really just a quality of the oldness. This is an important distinction to make, I believe, because it clarifies that a move to a new space will require an assessment of what new qualities you want your oldness to have, not the misunderstanding that a new space will bring actual newness, because when you consider the essence of newness, it's alien. Few of us want to (or could) live in a space that's totally alien.

New York City, July 2006

Further clarification: space itself doesn't promise; we imagine what it promises for us. Sometimes we are helped along by friends. Or advertising. Or rumors. Or reputation. But once you've imagined, it seems as though the place itself is promising. Think Klondike Gold Rush. Miners thought the Klondike itself promised gold, when it was really them imagining that it promised gold. The new oldness there contained the essence of the promise. The promise was a quality of the newness, which was a quality of the oldness. The promise is just an essence in the quality of a quality of a series of things.

Portland, OR, October 2007

So my advice is: imagine that a space can provide you with things it can actually provide you with, not the things it can possibly provide you with. This can take some reconciliation. The great reconciler? For most, I imagine, finances. Why am I in Buffalo? Because it can actually provide me with all of the things I imagine, and I can afford them. I can afford a beautiful home here. I can afford to renovate my garage. I can afford healthy food. I can afford to have transportation. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying don't follow your dreams. I'm not saying don't imagine that New York City can't possibly provide you with these things. What I am saying is look at what you want to do right now. I looked at what I wanted to do right now, and realized that it was all actually feasible here in Buffalo. No delay. But if New York City can actually provide you with the things you want within a reasonable time frame, then the answer is the same. Portland, Chicago, wherever. Do it. Go. Or stay.

The Economy of Scale

2008-07-04T00:05:00.008-04:00

I often imagine a gift to the masses: Space. Pure, usable, unregulated space, a munificent socialist gesture, free of charge. I see airplane hangar sized buildings full of the bustle and hum of hundreds of people using their space. The millions of shrines to utility (in the common sense of usefulness, but more so in the economic sense: a measure of that which is sought to be maximized in any situation involving a choice). How would people use their spaces? Would they become little empires of specialization? Would people live in them? Build on them? Store things? Accumulate more and more space until it became unmanageable? Would they spread and sprawl, grow and wilt? Of course, all of these, because they already do. But now they pay for the privilege.

What if we didn't have to pay? I wonder how many artists would have produced work on a larger scale. I wonder how many would've realized visions that ambled onward and outward, encompassing acres. I wonder how many would do something BIG if they could. Scale is awe-inspiring, and frequently, a shortcut to the sublime. But there are other ways to go big. Big chronologically, e.g. Cindy Sherman's lifelong project of self-portraits. Big in number, small in size, e.g. Raymond Queneau's 100,000,000,000,000 sonnets. Big in concept, e.g. Duchamp says anything is art.

Sketches for etched glass cube and glass panel visual poems on anatomy photocopy, c. 1998

But when it comes to sheer size, scale is a privilege enjoyed by a few, appropriated by some, and suffered for by many. I admit I'm suffering for it right now by putting my studio together. I've had ideas kicking around for over ten years that I haven't been able to manifest because I simply didn't have room (see photos). I'll also admit that I have neither the clout nor the savvy to pull off something like Matthew Barney's Grandstand in the Cremaster 2 (go to sculpture, then grandstand). I can't say, I want to build a rodeo out of salt in the flats. I can't say, like Robert Smithson, I want to build a spiral jetty. Not yet anyways.

For now, I'm increasing incrementally. Why do I want to increase the size/scale of my work anyway? I've already called it a shortcut to sublimity. I don't know if that's pejorative, but I know it's true. Because big things move me. And that's important to me - moving people. Maybe once I become familiar with the easier mechanisms for moving people, I'll be able to focus on the harder ones.

Outer Space

2008-07-02T20:04:00.010-04:00

You would think that an attempt to synergize your life and work would require a merging of those (normally) separate spaces. I often imagined an amorphous, multifarious, endlessly dynamic and inspirited space where I couldn't tell where the art ended and the living space began, and vice versa. As romantic as it sounds, I've discovered that such a space is among the least functional and most oppresive of all possible spaces to work in. For me, it goes from carefree to careless to miasma in the space of a few hours.

Admittedly, the praxis of art production is as diverse as the number of artists producing; in fact, my friend Pat works well in an environment like this - his house is full of handmade, homemade instruments and costumes, and while he keeps a neat living space, the edges of a thousand projects can be seen peeking from beneath the strata of abandoned works and works in progress. Pat himself is very much like this, a conductor of energy and ideas capable of maintaining any number of projects on parallel tracks. But I'm the artist that can't make anything until the dishes are done.

So we come to the crux of the topic: the intersection of the artist and the artist's space.

Although it is absolutely crucial, space is an oft ignored aspect of a nascent artist's approach and output. I'm talking about actual physical space. How big your room is and how it is layed out. How big your studio is and what floor it's on. I'm not talking here about contextual or environmental concerns (as in, I live in New York City, or I'm still in art school). Physical space and an artist's larger environment are obviously undeniably entangled. The leverage of geography is no small thing, but for the moment, let's just talk square footage and shelving.

This is currently my studio space - a single room in my house.

A focal point of my expansion as an artist has become the expansion of my workspace. For too long I've limited the scope and size of my work because I can't accommodate the work I can envision. Even though Buffalo provides me with amazing resources that I can use outside my home, I've still always longed for a self-sufficient studio space of my own.

Luckily, I have a three car garage with a second floor that was, at one time, an apartment or servant's quarters. It has a hardwood floor, running water, electric, and needs mostly superficial cosmetic improvements. My project for the next two months will be finishing the studio - so be on the lookout for updates as the project proceeds.

This is the North end of my studio as it is now, after preliminary cleaning.

This is the South end, as it is now.

I know that this increase in space will allow me to do things I've never done before, things I've dreamt of doing for so long. It reminds me lines from the Tao Te Ching:

We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.

We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.

We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.

And I don't know about you, but I could stand to have a whole lot more non-being to work with.

For me it's about distractions - visual, psychological, and emotional clutter - but physical distractions as well, actual clutter; in my opinion, the less the better. A clean space is a fast space. Somehow this seems important, the connection between the velocity of thought and the velocity of process and the velocity of production. Interested? See Paul Virilio's Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology. New York: Semiotext(e), 1977 [1986]

I want to hear about other people's workspaces, see pictures, discuss the importance of space and scale, order and organization, so I'm going to be dedicating some time in the coming days to an elaboration of space: physical, emotional, and contextual.

Tell me about your space and how it affects your work and how you work.

The Set Up

2008-07-02T00:18:00.005-04:00

On October 26, 2007, I had a nervous breakdown in Portland, Oregon. I was 2500 miles from home, alone, and had been having heart palpitations for almost a week. The night before I was scheduled to leave, the palpitations increased until they were happening between 5-10 times per minute. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't think straight, I couldn't breathe, I couldn't find a way home, and I was convinced I was going to die alone in an unfamiliar city. In my small room in a chic boutique hotel, I curled up and shook and counted my breaths to distract myself from my malfunctioning heart. My body finally gave out, and I passed out. I spent the next day in a Portland hospital watching the asymmetrical lines on the cardiograph, still absolutely certain that I wouldn't get cleared to fly and that I would never make it home. They worked me up for five hours, told me there was no discernable physical cause for the arrhythmia , cleared me to fly, and gave me Xanax to absorb the stress.

I made it home. I did not die. But things would never be the same.

This is me in the Japanese Garden in Washington park the day of my breakdown.

After three months of prolonged disrhythmia and the mental anguish that accompanies it, I finally quit my job of 13 years, which was the major source of my stress. It wasn't so much the job itself, as it was the discrepancy between my daily routine and my imagined daily routine. The incident with my heart made me realize that the time to reconcile these two routines had come. I had to do what I always imagined I would do with my life: become an artist, for better or worse.

I am one of many liberal arts castaways - students who have spent their time pursuing degrees in philosophy, english, comparative literature, art, communications, and too many other fields to name that are making their way outside of academia, by choice or by necessity. A student's journey in one of these fields is often a path of self-discovery, not a career path. Many know from the outset that the limited opportunities available to them will lie within the walls of the academy - they are often inculcated by peers and mentors with the notion that you learn a subject in order to teach it to others. These are the only "good" jobs they're told, and besides being untrue, this attitude serves to exacerbate the vitriolic competition and frenzied posturing characteristic of the academic job search. These are not the words of a jaded, spurned academic hopeful whose hopes were dashed by the demonic "institution." I am one of the castaways that is where he is by choice. I have never sought an academic position.

The mythology of the institution for those in liberal arts is that it provides security, and paradoxically, freedom. It's often also argued that it fosters creativity, which it does, but its impetus for creativity is often competition, not inspiration. The questions for academic hopefuls, then, it seems, should be: "What do I hope to do with my security and my freedom?" and "Am I motivated by competition in a way that makes my work better?" I had no answer for question number one - or I had no idea how I would profit from my security or my freedom within the institution. And the answer to question number two was ostensibly "No." I am competitive, I do increase output or minimize production time when faced with a challenge, but I'm not sure that it makes my work better. I say ostensibly because I understand the real answer is far more complicated than that.

Let me be clear: my purpose here is neither to advocate operating outside of academia or within it. My purpose here is to investigate the choices that the people in my position have made, the motivations for those choices, and the consequences of those decisions. I have many friends in academia. I'm even considering returning in the future, in a healthy, cautious way. But I have far more friends who have recently made the decision to turn away from the "good" jobs, ones who are following their dreams and making ends meet. This is also not specifically a forum for those having a hard time finding a job in the academy, although I would like to hear from you too.

I'm going to let you watch the dynamic process of my dream unfolding, but along the way I'll introduce you to my friends and colleagues so we can examine their choices as well. You'll see my life and my friends' lives come together and fall apart, through interviews and stories watch us orbit close or drift even farther from the gravitous institution.

There is no schematic, no blueprint of how to do this correctly. There is a blueprint of how to work within the academy, but not without. Three years ago I found a pocket-sized book from 1902 entitled "How to Teach Yourself to Swim". My first thought was: That sounds dangerous. My second thought was: But that's what we're all doing, all the time. I don't intend to beleaguer the metaphor because that would be tiresome, but it is helpful to think of all this as dangerous, useful, and inevitable, because without an institution to float on, we're all at sea.

Watch Carefully:

2008-06-28T01:32:00.003-04:00

This is me, in free fall, in perfect form. I won't let myself hit the water until I know how to swim.