The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer

Because it jived with me...

From Farming: A Handbook by Wendell Berry.

I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my inheritance and destiny, so be it. If it is my mission to go in at exits and come out at entrances, so be it. I have planted by the stars in defiance of the experts, and tilled somewhat by incantation and by singing, and reaped, as I knew, by luck and Heaven's favor, in spite of the best advice.
If I have been caught so often laughing at funerals, that was because I knew the dead were already slipping away, preparing for a comeback, and can I help it?
And if at weddings I have gritted and gnashed my teeth, it was because I knew where the bridegroom had sunk his manhood, and knew it would not be resurrected by a piece of cake. "Dance" they told me and I stood still, and while they stood quiet in line at the gate of the Kingdom, I danced.
"Pray" they said, and I laughed, covering myself in the earth's brightness, and then stole off gray into the midst of a revel, and prayed like an orphan.
When they said "I know that my Redeemer liveth," I told them "He's dead." And when they told me "God is dead," I answered "He goes fishing every day in the Kentucky River. I see Him often." When they asked me would I like to contribute I said no, and when they had collected more than they needed, I gave them as much as I had.
When they asked met to join them I wouldn't and then went off by myself and did more than they would have asked. "Well, then" they said "go and organize the International Brotherhood of Contraries," I said 'Did you finish killing everybody who was against peace?" So be it. Going against men, I have heard at time a deep harmony thrumming in the mixture, and when they ask me what I say I don't know. It is not the only or the easiest way to come to the truth. It is one way.

meta-for-me

[Note: this is somewhat long and quite angsty. To be read in the style of slam poetry.]


There are many metaphors for it.
Look down your nose at them.
On your high horse.
Up on a pedestal.

I’m metaphorically tall.
In reality short.
And quiet.

But in metaphors I scream and turn my nose up at people.
In metaphors
I do abhor
Metaphorical me

And I can point to it
“That!”
The thing to change.
The edges to soften.
The judgments to allow to give way to the gratefulness.

Metaphorical me.
Ivory tower but about to jump.
Looking down on your foldgers coffee and “conventionally” grown broccoli
All the while starving.
All the while being eaten away inside
Stopped by
Pride?

Disengaged. Fully enraged.
Discourse, high horse.
Just say it the way you want, even if it lacks specificity.
At least you’ll share their reality.

Asking, “but how do you define…?”
Keeping this conversation in a bind
While I try to convey the meaning of “truth”
While it gets away.
Off the bus.
And we fuss over the meaning of progress.
I digress.
We regress.
We shoot the shit.
We play with it.
This is fun this back and forth.

Meanwhile the world remains.
Crashing waves of shallow ideas with more power than your highly refined multi-variate, multi-leveled statistical analysis published in the ASR.

What’s your argument?
Where’s your evidence?
How big was your sample size?

My argument is this vent.
My evidence is irreverence.
My sample size is infinite, reprise.

And I’ll have a PhD
A doctorate in knowledge monopoly
A ticket to a lifelong game
Growing egos through departmental fame
Masking this with modesty
And holding fast to the goal that they shant ever see
What’s really going on

This is your brain on grad school.
Year one like pasta salad
Year two like poached eggs
Year three like oatmeal
Come and look at your brain.
Insane.
Refrain.
Fain.

But the hardest part is the response.
Calling it quitting instead of liberation.
Calling it a mistake, ignoring thoughtful deliberation
Making judgments instead of my congratulations cake
Quickly destroying the supports you built up around me
When I was doing things the way you saw fit
The way in which society sanctions it
And now I’m freefalling
Metaphorically
But when I land it will still hurt, and not just rhetorically

NOLA

I have some serious peeling going on on my upper back and shoulders after getting sunburn in NOLA while working on an extension ladder scraping paint off the eves of a house. It's a reminder of my time spent in New Orleans, 4 days of work 5 nights of play. I learned that I don't know how to pronounce French words, that Bourbon street is not somewhere I'd like to spend much time in, that you can be white and be a minority, that eating fast food more than once a year is too much, that is quite likely easier to travel with friends than family, that I am old, that I am young, that I can carry an extension ladder by myself, that I love beignets, that zydeco music is super fun to dance to, that I can dance with a partner (in this case a 40 something sweaty native who was super sweet and fun to dance with), that I can do without but only for so long, that I am spoiled in a number of ways, that I am making the right decision to leave graduate school, that being in a car for more than 15 hours at a time is too much but it's made more bearable by good conversation, good music, and Dr. Pepper from Race Trac with crushed ice. The most interesting thing I'll come away with is that New Orleans is an incredibly unique place with bizarre happenings. At random, I saw black men dressed as Indians as part of a tribute/celebration, men in skirts smoking out of plastic tubes, the most awkward young, white guys attempting to dance in seriously awesome ways, a parade! where old guys kiss young girls and give them trinkets, and much much more. NOLA's a great city. I hope I get to spend more time in it soon.

I learned even more than that but those things are the first that come to mind. I'll post pictures soon and I'll try to snag the ones I don't have from other folks.

John Holt on Education

"Education, with its supporting system of compulsory and competitive schooling, all its carrots and sticks, its grades, diplomas, and credentials, now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern and worldwide slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and 'fans,' driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear."

Instead of Education, 1976

too

too many things to carry
too many worries to worries
too many times I've told you

too much love!
too much love!

too many ideas I never wrote down
too many stones turned over in curiosity
too many stories on the bus ride home

too much for who?
too much for who?

too many storms in the summer
too much artificial light in the room
too many two letter words to memorize

is this too much for you?
is this too much for you?

etiquette

Is there some kind of blog etiquette regarding length?

If so, I probably violated it last night. Sorry about that.

Off to the gym even though I'm feeling exhausted. Maybe it'll wake me up so I barrel though those last 200 pages of Field Methods articles I have to read. Unlikely. The good news is, my IRB is complete (but not yet approved) so I'm well on my way to another scrabble monday of participant observation. Ooooohhh....

Have a good hump day.

Scrabble, teaching and other thoughts

I should forewarn my reader(s) that I'm in a bit of a mood. Not necessarily a bad one but neither an especially positive one.

A few thoughts about recent happenings in my life.

First, I am taking a field methods course which requires that I do four hours a week of participant observation. I decided to make my fieldsite the Northampton Scrabble Club (affiliated with the National Scrabble Association). Monday night was my first night there and it was I.N.T.E.N.S.E. The first women I played against asked me if I was good and I had not idea how to answer since I wasn't sure who I was comparing myself to.
The answer I learned after playing four games? No. Not. At. All.
There is, I think, some interesting stuff going on at NSC sociologically so it should be a fruitful project for my course. It is, however, a new source of completely unexpected stress and developing obsession. I have played (only) two games online today and I am studying a cheat sheet in an effort to memorize two and three letter words.

And this is what's so fascinating about this game. There's all kinds of memorization involved. It's not like playing scrabble with the Koppes family where you pretty much have to be able to define the word to play it. Know what zoea means? Me either! But I sure as heck better have it in my brain...and soon. It oddly makes it feel less like a game to me. It is less fun (probably because I don't have these words in my memory stores and if I did, I bet it might just bring me great pleasure to play obsure words I can't define but garner me 50 points).
The biggest issue is that I sincerely want to get better. And not so much for personal gain as for the sake of my research. I think I'll be privy to more information and understanding if I can play against a larger variety of people (we're match by skill level) instead of just the one or two newbies (who still kicked my butt).
Bottom line: sociology is amazing because it's everywhere. Even at scrabble club. And it's pretty nifty that my 'work' is playing scrabble for four hours a week (though it's infinetly more complex than that. More to come...)

Second. I am sad to report that my passion for teaching is being squelched. I think I've misspoken actually. It's not the teaching itself but rather teaching within the system in which I'm employed and a great many people filter through each year, year after year, for the sake of two letters (B.A. or B.S.). I've started reading The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get A Real Life and Education (by Grace Llewellyn). I found it through my interest in an alternative school in Hadley. It was the inspiration for the school and the directors suggested it and when I checked it out online I thought it sounded fascinating. It's directed at teenagers, of course, but it's useful for me both academically and personally. The author tells her personal story in the beginning and she sounds similiar to me in many ways. That was really comforting. But what is less comforting, what is in fact jarring, is that her final conclusion was that she simply couldn't teach within traditional school systems (or even untraditional ones...she didn't want to teach in an institution that had compulsory education). And I'm starting to feel really with her on this one.

Part of it is that I'm TAing for a wonderful, wonderful professor. I wish I could say enough nice things abotu this person because she really deserves showers of praise. She's a great lecturer and has the ability to engage students in a large lecture (225 students) and generate discussion to some extent (two great feats). The issues I'm having spring up around the rules of the class and also around grading (which is just a part of the system). The larger the class, the more rules you need to create simply to maintain order (or more accurately, avoid chaos) and get things done (not even to be efficient, just to get it done however you can). Without the rules people get confused and since there are so many of them and so few of us and they aren't inclined to ask questions to clairfy, thing get messy. All that to say, I get why the rules are in place. I see the practicality of them.

Nonetheless, this structures much (all?) of my interactin with my students outside of class and discussion time. I get upset e-mails about how restrictive the guidelines are for writing papers. Irritation at being required to print off articles (there's no book) rather than being able to read them from the computer screen in discussion. The list goes on and on. One student cried to me last Friday no over, but triggered by, getting a zero on a paper (which amounts to less than one percent of her final grade). And I have relatively well thought out ideas about pedagogy and such. The Teaching Sociology course I took last semester was so helpful to me in thinking out ideas but I am so constrained in a so many ways that my level of frustration has risen.
My temporary solution is to spend some time on Friday talking about my ideas about pedagogy and education. I am an advocate for honesty with my student and I'd like them to know how frustrating it is for me to have most or all of my interactions centered around clarification of the rules and contestation of very minor grades. I want to say this in such a way that both fosters understanding (their understanding of my position on these things but also a recognition that I understand or am trying to or at least want to understand where they are coming from) AND indicates that these problems are born from the structure of the system (which means I'm doing sociology too!). It also allows me to address the swath of e-mails I've gotten as well as those not sent but rattling aroud in people's heads.

Most people will probably stare at me blankly as I give my spiel. And this too is part of the problem. But what am I to do? [This is a real question!] Someone who cares about teaching and education and fostering critical thinking trying to swim against a strong current. And I can't swim. Not in this metaphor any way. And I'm invested and I care so telling myself to just view this as a job or just get through it isn't ok (not just because I care but also because I believe in living, going through the process, not closing my eyes to awake after the moment has passed).

What are my other thoughts? Well. I've been incorporating activities into myself to try to have one (a life) outside of school. I'm cylcing 1-3 times a week, taking voice lessons, and now scrabbling. I'm also trying to bring back craft night and draw more (I started in January but it trailed off since the semster started). Doing these things feel great...the activities themselves and the ways it shapes my life as a result of just having them in my schedule. I've been more productive and focused lately and that feels so nice. Sometimes I think about this "jack of all trades, master of none" thing though and wonder if I should commit to one thing and do it more often. I don't think it's in my nature though. Even with scrabble I was thinking, who would want to spend that much time learning wording and playing to improve their game and strategy? It seems wasteful to me since time is such a precious resource. The same with singing. I love it but I don't forsee myself spending oodles and oodles of time on it given that I'm not going (or trying to go) anywhere with it as a profession or anything else. But I do with I had more time to work on the things I am involved in already that require practice and skill building.

Which is why I think someone should sponsor my life. So money is no object! Now accepting applications.

Thanks for reading if you made it this far. I might just be back in the blogosphere (and came back with a bang!).