Yesterday I was teaching my favorite chapter of Rousseau's Of the Social Contract, Book 3, Chapter 15, where he rails against reliance on "deputies or representatives" to serve the state. In Rousseau's ideal state, the citizens would be eager to serve:
The better the constitution of a State is, the more do public affairs encroach on private in the minds of the citizens. Private affairs are even of much less importance, because the aggregate of the common happiness furnishes a greater proportion of that of each individual, so that there is less for him to seek in particular cares. In a well-ordered city every man flies to the assemblies.
We were talking together about whether this is an appealing or chilling picture of political community: do we really want private affairs to be swallowed up in the public good? But then, as we were arguing about this, it occurred to me that Rousseau's idealization is pretty much the life I'm living right now at DePauw.
Every night I fly to some assembly. Yesterday I flew to three: to a philosophy department talk on Nietzsche's metaethics, dinner with the speaker and with the rest of my philosophy department colleagues, then an event presentation: "YoYo Ma: A Life in Music." Earlier in the week I flew to a meeting of the Prindle reading group on James Stewart's book Tangled Webs, with the author present. I've been flying to ethics bowl practices, to Fulbright application meetings, to all-faculty meetings, to the class on The Tempest. What private business do I need to have, what private cares, when this is the public business of my little liberal arts community here?
So maybe Rousseau was on to something, after all.
Friday, September 30, 2011
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Things Due Now, Things Due Later
Do any of you find that while things that are due now are impossible to face, things that are due later draw you with irresistible allure?
I have so many things that I need to do NOW: read for my Rousseau class, read Fulbright applications from my mentees, review books for Children's Literature, review a book for the Children's Literature Association Quarterly, organize some huge and wonderful event on life writing for the Prindle Institute (who could possibly face a task presented under that description!), revise a novel, write an overdue paper, and decide what paper I want to submit to the annual meeting of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics.
Am I doing any of those things? No. Instead, my brain is seething with ideas for a paper on Eleanor Estes's Pinky Pye, for next year's Children's Literature Association conference in June in Boston. That paper abstract isn't due until January. All these other things I listed above need to be done by mid-October, or should have been done last month.
All I can think about is Pinky Pye. I'm rereading it, as well as Ginger Pye, to see if my paper idea is going to pan out. Guess what: it is! I'm making notes, I'm drawing connections, I'm searching for relevant articles, printing them out.
This is very bad, of course. But I really couldn't help myself. And all those other things: they will get done - if only because they have to. But right now, Pinky Pye is polishing up her little white paw, and speaking her one little meow word to me: "Woe."
Oh, Pinky!
I have so many things that I need to do NOW: read for my Rousseau class, read Fulbright applications from my mentees, review books for Children's Literature, review a book for the Children's Literature Association Quarterly, organize some huge and wonderful event on life writing for the Prindle Institute (who could possibly face a task presented under that description!), revise a novel, write an overdue paper, and decide what paper I want to submit to the annual meeting of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics.
Am I doing any of those things? No. Instead, my brain is seething with ideas for a paper on Eleanor Estes's Pinky Pye, for next year's Children's Literature Association conference in June in Boston. That paper abstract isn't due until January. All these other things I listed above need to be done by mid-October, or should have been done last month.
All I can think about is Pinky Pye. I'm rereading it, as well as Ginger Pye, to see if my paper idea is going to pan out. Guess what: it is! I'm making notes, I'm drawing connections, I'm searching for relevant articles, printing them out.
This is very bad, of course. But I really couldn't help myself. And all those other things: they will get done - if only because they have to. But right now, Pinky Pye is polishing up her little white paw, and speaking her one little meow word to me: "Woe."
Oh, Pinky!
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
"Don't Direct Each Other"
Yesterday was the fifth meeting of the interdisciplinary team-taught class on The Tempest that I'm sitting in on in preparation for the performance next month on campus by Actors from the London Stage. We worked on acting techniques and did one exercise where we walked around the room in male/female pairings (taking turns being male or female) in courtly fashion as Renaissance music played. The climax of the exercise came when we presented ourselves to the queen, played by Prof. Andrea Sununu, who did a wonderful job of receiving us graciously, with a dignified nod or distant smile, except for the one or two occasions when she saw fit to extend her hand so that some favored one could kneel and kiss her ring.
Toward the end of the class, we received the following acting advice which doubles as extremely useful life advice:
"Acting is trying to change your partner" - but don't try to change your partner by giving explicit instructions for how the other person should act: "Don't direct each other." (With a blush I remembered the previous week where I had been full of helpful advice for how the Ferdinand and Miranda in my scene - I was Prospero - could deliver their lines more effectively!) Instead, "React to what they're actually giving you."
Here was the best part: Instead of saying "This isn't working, you're not coming to me," GET THEM TO COME TO YOU.
Oh. All those doomed relationships, a lifetime full of them, where I expended so much effort directing the other person to do what I what I wanted him to do, now exposed for the failure of my inappropriate directorial stance.
Oh, well. Now I know!
Toward the end of the class, we received the following acting advice which doubles as extremely useful life advice:
"Acting is trying to change your partner" - but don't try to change your partner by giving explicit instructions for how the other person should act: "Don't direct each other." (With a blush I remembered the previous week where I had been full of helpful advice for how the Ferdinand and Miranda in my scene - I was Prospero - could deliver their lines more effectively!) Instead, "React to what they're actually giving you."
Here was the best part: Instead of saying "This isn't working, you're not coming to me," GET THEM TO COME TO YOU.
Oh. All those doomed relationships, a lifetime full of them, where I expended so much effort directing the other person to do what I what I wanted him to do, now exposed for the failure of my inappropriate directorial stance.
Oh, well. Now I know!
Monday, September 26, 2011
A FEAST Indeed
I'm home from the Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (FEAST) conference. It was wonderful, despite the conference center "resort" itself proving a disappointment: closed pool, closed trails, meeting rooms with paper-thin walls, late-night revelry from the endless weddings going on simultaneously with our conference. But the conference itself was a banquet for the mind and spirit.
Often when I attend conferences, I deliver my own paper, go to a few sessions where friends of mine are giving papers, and then spend the rest of the time reading, writing, and sipping pomegranate martinis in the hotel bar. This time, because I wasn't giving a paper but was just going to to the conference in order to go to the conference, I actually WENT to the conference. I attended almost every single session, scribbling notes frantically in my DePauw University notebook - seventeen pages of them. In addition I scribbled down names of books I want to read, books I want to teach, ideas for future articles.
In the evenings I did curl up in my room and read a riveting biography of Emily Dickinson, Lives Like Loaded Guns, by Lyndall Gordon. The title is from a poem by Emily: "My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun. . . ." I started reading the book simply because I've long wanted to read a biography of Emily Dickinson; I had no idea how much the book would bear on my current interest in the ethics of life writing. It turns out that everything written about Emily Dickinson for decades - including much that is still written about her - has been shaped by an intense family feud, triggered by the torrid adultery of Emily's brother, Austin Dickinson, that split the family into two warring camps, each with their own interest in "owning" Emily's poetry - and shaping the mythology that came to surround her.
So by day I feasted on papers with titles like "Queering Reproductive Ethics," "Gender and the Politics of Invisible Disability," "The Epistemic Function of Narrative and the Globalization of Mental Disorders," "Muslim Women and the Many Faces of Patriarchy," "The Weird Adventures of Western Aid," and "On Having a Bottomless Source of Moral Failure." By night I feasted on Emily's poems and the life that inspired them.
And I even lost a pound in the process!
Often when I attend conferences, I deliver my own paper, go to a few sessions where friends of mine are giving papers, and then spend the rest of the time reading, writing, and sipping pomegranate martinis in the hotel bar. This time, because I wasn't giving a paper but was just going to to the conference in order to go to the conference, I actually WENT to the conference. I attended almost every single session, scribbling notes frantically in my DePauw University notebook - seventeen pages of them. In addition I scribbled down names of books I want to read, books I want to teach, ideas for future articles.
In the evenings I did curl up in my room and read a riveting biography of Emily Dickinson, Lives Like Loaded Guns, by Lyndall Gordon. The title is from a poem by Emily: "My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun. . . ." I started reading the book simply because I've long wanted to read a biography of Emily Dickinson; I had no idea how much the book would bear on my current interest in the ethics of life writing. It turns out that everything written about Emily Dickinson for decades - including much that is still written about her - has been shaped by an intense family feud, triggered by the torrid adultery of Emily's brother, Austin Dickinson, that split the family into two warring camps, each with their own interest in "owning" Emily's poetry - and shaping the mythology that came to surround her.
So by day I feasted on papers with titles like "Queering Reproductive Ethics," "Gender and the Politics of Invisible Disability," "The Epistemic Function of Narrative and the Globalization of Mental Disorders," "Muslim Women and the Many Faces of Patriarchy," "The Weird Adventures of Western Aid," and "On Having a Bottomless Source of Moral Failure." By night I feasted on Emily's poems and the life that inspired them.
And I even lost a pound in the process!
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Off to FEAST
I'm leaving in an hour for the first of many fun weekend getaways this fall. This time I'm driving up to a resort on Lake Michigan north of Chicago to attend the every-other-year-conference of the association for Feminist Ethics And Social Theory: FEAST.
This is the first time I've ever gone to a conference where I wasn't presenting on the program. It had never even occurred to me to go to a conference if I wasn't giving a paper there. But part of the faculty culture at DePauw seems to be that it's perfectly okay to go to a conference just to - gasp - learn something new, something to bring back to the university in order to enrich our teaching, or to contribute to the quality of our shared intellectual life. The point of going to a conference doesn't have to be another line on our c.v.
Now, this isn't to say that I'm not wishing that I had thought of submitting a paper months ago when the call for papers went forth. I love giving talks and papers and value the critical feedback I receive. I wouldn't have a career at all if it weren't for forcing myself to give talks and papers at this kind of conference, gather the comments from the audience, head home to expand and revise, and then publish the paper somewhere. But this time I didn't get around to it. I was busy getting around to lots of other things instead, which were more urgent and important at the time.
So I'm going anyway. Just to learn. I'm taking my yellow DePauw University notebook that I bought at the college bookstore upon arriving to campus. I'll go to talks, take good notes in my notebook, see lots of University of Colorado friends, and return home with some new ideas bouncing around in my brain. Maybe an idea for a presentation at some future conference or a published paper. Maybe ideas to help me do a better job teaching my Feminism and the Family course here in the spring. Maybe just ideas to make me more intellectually alive right in this moment. Not all ideas have to be stored up for some future purpose, right? Sometimes we're permitted to learn, and think, and grow simply for its own sake, for the sake of the feast - FEAST - itself.
This is the first time I've ever gone to a conference where I wasn't presenting on the program. It had never even occurred to me to go to a conference if I wasn't giving a paper there. But part of the faculty culture at DePauw seems to be that it's perfectly okay to go to a conference just to - gasp - learn something new, something to bring back to the university in order to enrich our teaching, or to contribute to the quality of our shared intellectual life. The point of going to a conference doesn't have to be another line on our c.v.
Now, this isn't to say that I'm not wishing that I had thought of submitting a paper months ago when the call for papers went forth. I love giving talks and papers and value the critical feedback I receive. I wouldn't have a career at all if it weren't for forcing myself to give talks and papers at this kind of conference, gather the comments from the audience, head home to expand and revise, and then publish the paper somewhere. But this time I didn't get around to it. I was busy getting around to lots of other things instead, which were more urgent and important at the time.
So I'm going anyway. Just to learn. I'm taking my yellow DePauw University notebook that I bought at the college bookstore upon arriving to campus. I'll go to talks, take good notes in my notebook, see lots of University of Colorado friends, and return home with some new ideas bouncing around in my brain. Maybe an idea for a presentation at some future conference or a published paper. Maybe ideas to help me do a better job teaching my Feminism and the Family course here in the spring. Maybe just ideas to make me more intellectually alive right in this moment. Not all ideas have to be stored up for some future purpose, right? Sometimes we're permitted to learn, and think, and grow simply for its own sake, for the sake of the feast - FEAST - itself.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Dupery through Hope
Today I'm giving a dinner talk at five o'clock at the campus Center for Spiritual Life in their "Food for Thought" series. Each speaker is asked to take as his or her topic: "What Matters Most to Me and Why." I heard that past speakers have given answers ranging from "human dignity" to "shoes."
I'm going to talk about hope. I'm going to begin by talking about the life-opening semester I had my sophomore year in college when I was simultaneously taking a religion course at Wellesley with Mr. Denbeaux and a philosophy of religion course at MIT with Mr. Brody. The MIT class reviewed the various arguments for the existence of God (the cosmological argument, the teleological argument, the ontological argument - all bad) and the various definitional attributes of God (omniscience, omnipotence, omni-benevolence - all subject to crippling paradox). At Wellesley, on the other hand, Mr. Denbeaux told us that the characteristics of God were just "patience, long-suffering, and love." At Wellesley, Mr. Denbeaux told us that people who complained about inconsistencies in the Gospel record were like people who refused to listen to a warped record played on a fourth-rate stereo - despite the technical flaws, you could still "hear the music."
It was that semester that I read for the first time the most beautiful philosophy essay ever written, "The Will to Believe" by William James. James is arguing against another philosopher, William Clifford, who has a hatred of credulity; Clifford claims that it is always wrong to believe anything without sufficient evidence. James counters that someone like Clifford may succeed in avoiding any errors, but he will also miss out on believing crucial and beautiful truths. This, too, is a form of dupery, and "Dupery for dupery, what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear?"
So I decided then and there always to let myself err on the side of being duped by hope. I read "The Will to Believe" to the man I eventually married, to make the case for taking a chance on love. I became a children's book author, because the distinguishing mark of children's books is not that they have happy endings - many do not - but that they have hopeful endings: or should! I hate the ones that dupe children through fear. And if anything requires hope, it's the enterprise of writing, word after word, line after line, page after page, with no guarantee whatever that it's any good, or that anyone will ever read it, or care about it in any way.
Dupery for dupery, what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear ?
I'm going to talk about hope. I'm going to begin by talking about the life-opening semester I had my sophomore year in college when I was simultaneously taking a religion course at Wellesley with Mr. Denbeaux and a philosophy of religion course at MIT with Mr. Brody. The MIT class reviewed the various arguments for the existence of God (the cosmological argument, the teleological argument, the ontological argument - all bad) and the various definitional attributes of God (omniscience, omnipotence, omni-benevolence - all subject to crippling paradox). At Wellesley, on the other hand, Mr. Denbeaux told us that the characteristics of God were just "patience, long-suffering, and love." At Wellesley, Mr. Denbeaux told us that people who complained about inconsistencies in the Gospel record were like people who refused to listen to a warped record played on a fourth-rate stereo - despite the technical flaws, you could still "hear the music."
It was that semester that I read for the first time the most beautiful philosophy essay ever written, "The Will to Believe" by William James. James is arguing against another philosopher, William Clifford, who has a hatred of credulity; Clifford claims that it is always wrong to believe anything without sufficient evidence. James counters that someone like Clifford may succeed in avoiding any errors, but he will also miss out on believing crucial and beautiful truths. This, too, is a form of dupery, and "Dupery for dupery, what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear?"
So I decided then and there always to let myself err on the side of being duped by hope. I read "The Will to Believe" to the man I eventually married, to make the case for taking a chance on love. I became a children's book author, because the distinguishing mark of children's books is not that they have happy endings - many do not - but that they have hopeful endings: or should! I hate the ones that dupe children through fear. And if anything requires hope, it's the enterprise of writing, word after word, line after line, page after page, with no guarantee whatever that it's any good, or that anyone will ever read it, or care about it in any way.
Dupery for dupery, what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear ?
Monday, September 19, 2011
Golden Perfection
I've written before about how I generally send off half-baked scholarly articles, get back deservedly scathing reviewers' comments, and then set about to make the articles into real publishable pieces by adding in all the scholarship that should have been there before but wasn't. I'm good at going from half-baked to baked. I actually think my method is a pretty good one. It definitely produces more publications than the method of holding on to something forever trying to perfect it on my own. Baking is a collaborative enterprise.
I'm now working on a project where I'm taking an already baked article to the state of golden baked perfection. I have comments from one brilliant reviewer on my essay, "Redemption through the Rural: The Teen Novels of Rosamond Du Jardin." In the essay I show how Du Jardin uses the rural as a site of virtue, essentially "sentencing" selfish, shallow Pam, who is used to dating "smooth" guys with country club memberships, to marry a FARMER as part of her moral rehabilitation. This paper was not half-baked. I had already cited tons of books on American culture in the 1950s, on Midwestern literature, on pastoralism, on teen fiction. But this reviewer wanted even more.
So now I've found a 1960 master's thesis on Rosamond Du Jardin from Florida State University that quotes extensively from contemporary reviews of her novels as well as giving statistics as to her sales figures, and snippets from interviews and correspondence. The thesis itself is something to behold: typed on an actual typewriter! on that bond paper we were supposed to use for fancy projects! I showed it to some students here, and they were stunned by this blast from the past: "But what would you do if you were typing along and made a mistake?" Well might they ask!
I also ordered from E-Bay a copy of the December 1958 issue of the Reader's Digest that contains an article "The Danger of Being Too Well Adjusted," which appears thinly disguised in Double Wedding as Mike Bradley's school-paper editorial, "The Well Adjusted Generation."
I am digging. I am delving. This is going to be the best-baked paper ever.
I'm now working on a project where I'm taking an already baked article to the state of golden baked perfection. I have comments from one brilliant reviewer on my essay, "Redemption through the Rural: The Teen Novels of Rosamond Du Jardin." In the essay I show how Du Jardin uses the rural as a site of virtue, essentially "sentencing" selfish, shallow Pam, who is used to dating "smooth" guys with country club memberships, to marry a FARMER as part of her moral rehabilitation. This paper was not half-baked. I had already cited tons of books on American culture in the 1950s, on Midwestern literature, on pastoralism, on teen fiction. But this reviewer wanted even more.
So now I've found a 1960 master's thesis on Rosamond Du Jardin from Florida State University that quotes extensively from contemporary reviews of her novels as well as giving statistics as to her sales figures, and snippets from interviews and correspondence. The thesis itself is something to behold: typed on an actual typewriter! on that bond paper we were supposed to use for fancy projects! I showed it to some students here, and they were stunned by this blast from the past: "But what would you do if you were typing along and made a mistake?" Well might they ask!
I also ordered from E-Bay a copy of the December 1958 issue of the Reader's Digest that contains an article "The Danger of Being Too Well Adjusted," which appears thinly disguised in Double Wedding as Mike Bradley's school-paper editorial, "The Well Adjusted Generation."
I am digging. I am delving. This is going to be the best-baked paper ever.
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