Another Reason I'm Glad the Academic Year is Over

Campus shootings (and shooting sprees generally) have become so commonplace that I don’t usually bother to comment on them.

But yesterday’s incident at UCLA, in which a former graduate student killed an engineering professor and one other person before killing himself, caught my attention.  You see, one of the shooter’s reasons for killing the prof was over a grade he had received from the victim.

According to news reports, the professor was well respected and actually popular with students and staff alike.

There but before the grace of God go I…

Mondo Cane

As if we needed any more insight into our national character, this item from Reuters provides us with still another clue.

A 7 year old boy returning from a vacation with his terminally ill father suffered an attack from an allergy to dogs soon after boarding a flight with the cut-rate airline Allegiant Air.  As father and son were removed from the plane the other passengers broke into applause.

Give me convenience or give me death, I guess.  And the smirking, unsympathetic remark from the flight attendant who escorted them out that dogs were on every flight just underscores the odd relationship Americans have with their pets that puts them above the welfare of other human beings.

It’s one more sign that we are gradually losing our humanity…

Quiet before the Storm...

Brace yourselves.  The 600 lb. gorilla has entered the room.  The Iowa caucuses are tomorrow.

After all the fuss of the candidates' debates over the past few months, it's hard to remember that we are at the threshold of the parts of the presidential race which count.

I'm already weary of it.  It's a long way to November 8th.

Loops & Boomerangs, Jedi & Trogs: Thoughts of a Freeway Flyer

Inservice training week is over.  Convocation came and went.  And I can breathe somewhat easier now that all my scheduled classes are a go for Spring semester.  Now all there is is the nervous anticipation of what to expect when I return to work on Monday.

The latter part of the semester break found me in a kind of groove.  (A groove for me is like a rut, just not as dismal.)  We’ve had a let-up from the constant snow we experienced since before Thanksgiving, and the sunlight through the windows has been a most welcome sight.   I’ve spent my days cooking soups and stews for sustenance and catching up on my writing. 

The past weeks have had a pleasantly monotonous quality, the house quiet as I sit at my desk tapping away at the keyboard.  When I needed company, I would play “Feel It All Around” by Washed Out on an endless loop.  When that no longer appealed to my ears, I’d play The Beta Band’s “It’s Not Too Beautiful” instead. Or perhaps Eric Reed’s instrumental version of “An Englishman in New York,” interspersed with “Poinciana” by Ahmed Jamal.

I’m going to miss this peaceful interlude.  This week’s trainings included a department meeting, where I was pleased to learn that Snowflake College was going to tackle the problem of declining enrollment by borrowing a page from the for-profit vocational “colleges.”  The counseling staff would plan a student’s curriculum from start to finish with a goal of finishing up within two to four years.  (We are, after all, a two-year college.) 

At first, this was good news.  A plan!  Administrators actually providing leadership!  Why, the president had gone to the length of appointing a task force to tackle the challenge! 

Then came the details.  In order to place students on predictable schedules, the times of day courses are to be offered will be “rationalized.”   In other words, general ed courses will be offered mainly in the morning and early afternoon while major or career training-specific classes will be offered primarily in the late afternoon and evening.  That didn’t faze me, until the other shoe dropped.

Paradoxically, it wasn’t the move toward making students ready for the local workforce that was the bad news.  Rather, it was the plan’s effect on the four-year transfer students which got everyone’s attention.  Permit me to set up the background: My discipline is in the social and behavioral sciences.  The “service course” my department provides for gen ed fulfills the same transfer requirements of the state unis in our region as a similar course in one of the humanities departments.  Students may choose a two-course sequence in the humanities or mix-and-match one course each from both departments.

The cannibalization of enrollment this overlap already causes is a problem for my department.  And for me.  Treetop, my “home” campus, which programs its own schedule, often places my section(s) on the same day and time block as the other department’s sections.  The campus administration is quite open about its preference for the instructor of the competing course, so I get shafted by them pretty regularly.  What I didn’t know before attending the department meeting is this is a reflection of attitudes in Snowflake’s administration as a whole.

Matt, our chair for this academic year, a bespectacled fellow about my own age with a dry sense of humor, explained that our department’s offerings weren’t included in the gen ed course package planned for the initiative.  Almost in passing, he added a colleague had mentioned that an unnamed administrator had suggested that our department, even its gen ed course, were unnecessary and that the humanities folks could do the job we’ve been doing.

Matt’s words were met first with disbelief, than with a clamor to identify the administrator.  Anita, our department’s only other tenured professor, a lady with a strong personality and a well-earned reputation for getting things done, promised she’d get to the bottom of this and raise some Cain in the process.  We part-timers murmured among ourselves as to what the implications would actually be.

We needn’t have asked.  Each of us knew the score.  The existential threat for us adjuncts is now two-fold.   If the rumor is true, we won’t jockey about to get class assignments anymore because the assignments will be nonexistent.

This isn’t what I bargained for ten years ago when I got an out-of-the-blue email from my graduate advisor telling me Snowflake College needed a last minute hire to teach a class.  I’ve covered the good, the bad, and the ugly of the adjunct’s life in this blog.  But it just seems the stakes for survival in this trade have gotten dicier as time goes on.

I have my own private narrative for what I do.  As a “freeway flyer,” a part-timer who divides his time among several campuses and institutions, I’m struck by the variations in students and institutional cultures.  I’ve even come up with a taxonomy not only for my classes but my commutes.  Days where I start from home in Treetop, teach at one campus (or two if the evening brings me back to home campus) are “loops.”  Days where I drive to Verdant Fields Community College, forty miles to the east of home then double back on my tracks to teach at Snowflake’s Quartz City campus, which is fifty miles west of home, are “boomerangs.” 

Boomerangs can be particularly stressful.  Last spring I taught six sections.  Three out of four of my instructional days were boomerangs.  That semester I drove 550 miles per week.

This semester, all my days will be loops.  But that still leaves the question of the kind of students I’ll have.  All my sections are day sections, which means even at VFCC many of them will be traditional four-year transfer students.  Even then, I know the personality of each section will vary.  The section whose students show the best attitude and aptitude will be my “Jedi class.”  (I’m not a Star Wars fan; I just made the label up on the spot one day and the kids were really pleased when I called them that.)  The section I find most trying is my “Trog class.”  (As in “troglodyte.”  I don’t share this appellation with them.)  I’ve had very few semesters where I haven’t had one of each.  

The colleges themselves have their strong and weak points.  Snowflake pays better than VFCC.  On the whole, Snowflake students are better prepared for college work.  Despite its large size, VFCC has a sterling support staff for adjuncts who do their utmost every day to make sure we instructors have what we need.   The administration at VFCC is fairly supportive of teaching staff, whereas at Snowflake, as you may have gathered already, the higher ups tend to be autocratic.  (There are exceptions—the folks at the Quartz City campus are wonderful.)   If only I could combine the best elements of both and eliminate the long drives, I’d be content.

In the meantime, I hope for the best even when this is getting ever more elusive.  Now, if only that flutter in my stomach would just go away…

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar 

Unread Books

In August 1974, a middle aged woman named Connie Converse packed some belongings into her Volkswagen Beetle and drove away from her Michigan home.  She has not been seen or heard from since.

The event never made the news at the time.  Her family, which had been out of town on vacation when Connie left, did not report her missing.  She had left them letters explaining her absence.  Connie had shown signs of discontent for a while and had hinted she might go away.  There wasn’t much to hold her down anyhow.  She was single, and her position as managing editor for a prestigious academic journal had just been eliminated after it moved its base from the University of Michigan to Yale.

Connie would have remained unknown to the world outside her family and friends but for the discovery of a remarkable set of artifacts.  During the 1950s Connie had tried to make a go of it in New York City as a singer-songwriter.  She met with limited success.  She had difficulty finding acceptance for her music.  It didn’t fit into the formulaic pop genre of the era.  The nascent Greenwich Village folk scene favored traditional ballads and protest songs.  A friend secured an appearance for Connie on Walter Cronkite’s CBS morning show in 1954, but nothing came of it.

The friend, Gene Deitch, was an animator by trade but his hobby was making sound recordings.  And so, at Deitch’s home in Westchester County, Connie performed her songs for posterity.  They were not heard again until 2004 when Deitch was invited to share his recordings on the public radio program Spinning on Air.  Connie’s witty and personal songs touched a nerve with the listening public.  Beginning in 2009, several editions of her compilation album How Sad, How Lovely have been released.  (There are a number of postings of the album on YouTube.  Here’s one.)

Connie eventually gave up on being a professional musician, settling into an obscure existence.  (The best known member of the Converse family was her younger brother Philip, who coauthored a seminal text in my field of academic endeavor.)  But the restlessness seems to have remained.  By any measure, Connie (née Elizabeth) was a remarkable individual.  The daughter of a strict Baptist minister, Connie chafed at her small town New England upbringing.  Graduating high school with top honors, she followed her mother and her grandmother before her to Mount Holyoke College where she excelled.  After two years, she quit.

It just happened to be music where Connie wanted to make her mark.  However, she was also a gifted painter, sculptor, and prose writer.  Her lyrics give voice to the frustrations brought on by the straitjacket of social convention inhibiting middle class women in midcentury America.   “Roving Woman” is a particular favorite of mine.  Connie sings of going to bars alone and playing poker with men at a time when respectable dining establishments with saloons would only seat accompanied ladies at dinnertime.  Ladies by themselves in standalone watering holes?  Scandalous.

Connie’s private life was a mystery even to those closest to her.  Her brother Phil recalls never meeting a boyfriend.  (He conceded in an interview before his own death that she may have been a lesbian.)  Photos of Connie in her thirties portray a slightly enigmatic figure.  Bespectacled, fair haired, she was a pretty but ordinary woman.  Her expression reveals little and inspires idle wonder rather than answers.

Aside from the accounts of the people in her life, and the letters she sent to them when she vanished, Connie herself didn’t say much about the mounting frustration her unmet potential caused her.  In an attempt to alleviate her discontent, family and friends pooled their money and sent Connie on a six-month sabbatical in Britain the year before she fell out of sight.  Her mother took her along on a vacation to Alaska to help Connie snap out of her funk.   

To no avail.  Connie had already lost her academic publishing career.  Her doctor then delivered the news she would have to have a hysterectomy.  Brother Philip suggested that this may have deepened her depression since it precluded having children, though at age fifty this would have been a remote prospect. 

So wither Connie Converse?  Philip believed that she was a suicide, driving off a bridge to her death since her car was never found.  (So much for the vaunted buoyancy of the original VWs.)  It does appear to be the most satisfying explanation.  Her Social Security number has not been used since 1974 nor her death reported.  No claimed sightings of her have ever been verified.  If alive, she would be ninety years old.  It’s possible, though unlikely given that Connie was a heavy smoker and drinker. 

The only parallel I can find with Connie’s disappearance was the presumed 1955 suicide of a contemporaneous artist, the poet, novelist, songwriter, filmmaker, and painter Weldon Kees.  Kees left his San Francisco apartment on a summer afternoon never to be seen again.  His car was found on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County, keys in the ignition.  Kees, too, had been depressed in the weeks before going missing and had spoken of wanting to kill himself.  Then again, he had also mentioned decamping to Mexico so who knows?  No body was ever discovered, which gives us license to speculate.

My thoughts on Connie Converse?  I think in her lifetime she suffered the pains of the gifted and sensitive who go unappreciated.  She was an unread book on the shelf, gathering dust.   It’s strange and poignant, though, that a true polymath such as she should have waited forty years after her departure (real or metaphorical) to finally be noticed by critics and a mass audience alike.  We can chalk some of this up to the limits on women her generation experienced.  Perhaps her art was simply out of synch with her times.

I find the lack of reaction to her leaving a bit disconcerting but perhaps reasonable given she had voluntarily absented herself.  We are all at risk of falling through the cracks despite the panopticon nature of our monitored public spaces and the migration online of personal relationships.  I’m reminded particularly of the bizarre demise of Joyce Vincent, the woman who died suddenly in her London flat in 2003 while wrapping Christmas presents and watching TV not to be discovered for another three years.  No one seemed to have noticed her absence.  She was estranged from her family but was an attractive, vivacious woman popular with her co-workers.  Surely she had friends who might have checked up on her.  But it was only when her rent was sufficiently in arrears that the authorities entered the apartment only to find Joyce’s skeletonized remains. 

Joyce Vincent was yet another unread book.  It's a pity there are so many, many more resting on the shelves.

  

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar

Away from It All

The World’s Greatest Blog may just have stumbled over its own mordant humor.

A colleague who rhetorically asked to be killed because s/he didn’t have the strength left to end it all was met with a flurry of concern that s/he might be a potential suicide.

That said, an email this morning from my department chair announcing additional section cuts for the upcoming semester could very well push this proffie over the edge…

Xmas Flix

I have spent the past two weeks holed up at home.  When you live in a resort town whose principal industry is catering to well-heeled skiers and snowboarders, Christmas is the season for some of us to hunker down.

It hasn’t helped that it has snowed pretty steadily; no sooner would one storm pass through then another followed.  Out of curiosity I’ve been monitoring road conditions on the state highway department’s website.  (I say “out of curiosity” because ordinarily I do so for my own safety since I drive over mountain passes to get to work.)  Despite the heavy snow and whiteout conditions, the flatlanders were undaunted.  Over the past few days the highway patrol has been metering traffic coming up from the foothills due to congestion.

I have ventured out exactly once since the college winter hiatus began.  I was out of liquor.  True to form the supermarket was packed with families in bulky ski outfits.  After waiting fifteen minutes in the checkout line, I was finally able to set my items down on the conveyer.  The lady in front of me made note of my purchases—a liter of bourbon, a liter of scotch, and two bottles of a sleep aid.  Smiling, she gave me a knowing look and said, “Family, huh?”

“Yeah, family.”

Actually, no.  In fact I’ve been dodging voicemails all week from my relatives, whom I make a point of keeping at arm’s length.  If they were your relatives you would, too.

Needless to say, I’m not much for Christmas.  I am not a guy who decks the halls.  You won’t find a tree or a single holiday decoration in my house.  I despise the crass commercialism of the season.  My only concession this year was to send checks to my two sons.  Let ‘em do their own shopping.

There is one exception to my antipathy.  There are certain films which are must-see viewing for me this time of year.  My absolute favorite is Scrooge, the adaptation of A Christmas Carol starring Alastair Sim.  Somehow I missed that one this year.  Not to worry, there are two more titles which hold a similarly warm place in my heart.

The first is the venerable It’s a Wonderful Life.  It’s kind of strange that I would have an affinity for this kind of movie.  Fantasy stories don’t really appeal to me.  The dialogue is unbelievably corny, even for a Frank Capra film.  And even as a kid I found the idea of angels, let alone guardian angels, absurd.   

No matter, I was sure to catch NBC’s customary Christmas Eve airing.  (It’s a Wonderful Life is in the public domain which means it’s freely available online.  But somehow it just feels right to watch it on TV every December 24^th.)  As I watched, I tried to figure out just what it was I liked about the movie.  I still don’t have one definitive answer but I think I can pin down a few things.

Capra excelled at encapsulating classic Americana.  Bedford Falls was nothing like the small town I grew up in.  The neighbors were much friendlier and considerate than mine.  People in the movie behaved as if they lived in a community and looked out for each other.  And what small town boy wouldn’t have wanted to marry a girl like Mary Hatch?  (Or Donna Reed, for that matter?)  Notwithstanding the idyllic nature of the town, however, I could certainly identify with protagonist George Bailey and his yearning to escape and see the world.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of It’s a Wonderful Life is the David and Goliath story of George and the Bailey family’s tiny building and loan consistently thwarting the designs of wealthy banker Mr. Henry Potter.  George was the epitome of the stammering, sincere Everyman character James Stewart perfected.  Likewise, Potter was typical of the crabby old men Lionel Barrymore played toward the end of his career.  (The wheelchair Potter occupied was a necessity for Barrymore, who suffered from crippling arthritis.) 

The symbolism of the contest of wills between the two men is subversive in the contemporary cultural context.  Potter is just the kind of individual held up as an exemplar for today’s economic elites.  A “job creator” who treats his employees as disposable vassals, Potter is devoid of sentimentality.  His resort to common theft to bring down his rival would nowadays be seen as a minor peccadillo.  On the other hand, George would be held up as a poor businessman because he puts people ahead of profit.  To portray Potter as the bad guy sets American cultural values—our actual values, not the ones we purport to hold—on their ear.

Stripped of the spiritual mumbo-jumbo and its over-idealized take on small town America, It’s a Wonderful Life is an anachronism with the right message for our age.  That’s why I like it so much.

My second must-see classic is a movie I’m actually old enough to have seen in a theater during its first run.  I was dragged unwillingly to see A Christmas Story as a high schooler during a custodial visitation weekend with my father and stepmother.  I was expecting a stinker, given my dad’s taste in cinema.  (He particularly loved Burt Reynolds' movies from the ‘70s and ‘80s, each of which was essentially a protracted car chase scene.)  Any movie we saw also had to have a plot and character development simple enough for my stepmother to follow.  (After seeing Sophie’s Choice, she complained of not understanding what it was about.  I don’t know why dad married her, but it certainly wasn’t for her smarts.)

Having set my expectations low, I ended up being bowled over by A Christmas Story.  It definitely helped that it was adapted from several of Jean Shepherd’s short stories about his Indiana childhood.  I’d just discovered Shep, having been recommended to me by my English teacher, and I was already familiar with the adaptations of the Ralph Parker stories aired on PBS’s American Playhouse back when the network still offered a respectable volume of quality programming.  (Note: Endless rebroadcasts of Downton Abbey are not an acceptable substitute.)

More time would pass before I learned of Shepherd’s career as a proto-hipster with a late night radio show in 1950s New York City.  Jean Shepherd’s Night People was a freeform program which garnered a cult following among college students.  Shep would speak to his listeners as if they were discerning cultural coconspirators against what he called “creeping Meatballism;” that is, the pervasiveness of the prosaic tastes of the square “day people.”  

Shepherd’s audience was a loyal one.  John Cassavetes’ first feature, Shadows (1959), was financed in part by contributions from the “Night People”—an early example of crowdfunding.  Shepherd also liked to tweak his audience’s noses now and then.  After discussing a racy, albeit nonexistent novel titled I, Libertine, on his show there were so many inquiries about where the book could be bought that Shepherd upped the ante by hastily writing an actual novel under the nom de plume Frederick R. Ewing.  Shep’s photo, captioned as author Ewing, adorned the dustjacket.

It is most unlikely that a program like Night People would be commercially viable today.  Even Shepherd made the migration to public broadcasting in the 1970s.  However, much of the entertainment content on public radio, such as This American Life, The Radio Reader, or The Moth Radio Hour, tend to speak to the interests and concerns of liberal suburbanites.  It’s all good programming, but it doesn’t take many chances.  Meatballism triumphant. 

But, back to A Christmas Story.  Shep is at his best here, playing it straight.  Directed by Bob Clark, whose best known other movie was Porky’s, A Christmas Story is a paean to childhood wonder and anticipation.  Set circa 1940 in northern Indiana, nine year old Ralphie Parker (Peter Billingsley) lives with his father, The Old Man (Darren McGavin), his mom (Melinda Dillon), and his whiny younger brother Randy (Ian Petrella).  The voiceover narration is provided by Ralphie as an Adult (Shep Himself).

The plot is episodic.  The A-plot chronicles Ralphie’s dogged quest to receive a Red Ryder BB gun as a present.  At every turn, Ralphie is discouraged with the warning, “You’ll shoot your eye out!” by everyone from Mom to his teacher to the department store Santa.  But family comedies must have happy endings, and we learn at the end that The Old Man came through for Ralphie with a surprise extra gift Christmas morning.

A Christmas Story works because it’s relatable, showcasing Shepherd’s talent for wringing humor from the most ordinary childhood and family experiences.  (Paradoxically, Shep wasn’t much of a family man.  He was married four times that we know of, and he never bothered with his children again after he left them and their mother.)  Everything from Ralphie’s friendship with Flick and Schwartz (recurring characters in the Ralph stories) to dealing with bullies Scut Farkus and Grover Dill to the discovery your favorite programs are just vehicles to sell stuff are all familiar notwithstanding the retro setting of the film.

The B-plots are gems in themselves.  The Old Man wins a “major award” for solving crossword puzzles, which turns out to be a lamp in the shape of a woman’s leg clad in a fishnet stocking with a lampshade as a skirt.  Mom disapproves and the major award is shattered when it “accidentally” falls to the floor.  Ralphie sends off for a Little Orphan Annie decoder ring which turns out to decode nothing but radio ads for Ovaltine.  Ralphie rats out his pal Schwartz when he utters the F-word after a mishap helping The Old Man change a flat tire.  Christmas dinner is ruined when the neighboring Bumpus hounds enter the Parker kitchen and tear apart the unattended turkey.

I don’t think I really expected A Christmas Story to become a holiday perennial, but it’s easy to understand why it’s stood the test of time.  It’s certainly the best known of Jean Shepherd’s works among the general public.   And it’s a damned shame his other writings and broadcast work have kind of fallen into obscurity since Shep died in 1999.  But then, Shepherd never held himself out as an artist for the masses.  The definition of hipness is fluid and ever changing.  So there is the probability that Shepherd’s humor doesn’t translate well anymore.

I have my fingers crossed for a revival notwithstanding.  And in the meantime, we’ll always have A Christmas Story.  Particularly when TBS airs it repeatedly every Christmas Day.

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar