End of the year post:
1. I've migrated my teaching thoughts to a different, semi-anonymous blog. Check out facebook for that info if you're interested.
2. I'm going to keep this blog going, as a personal, living with my parents in Oklahoma in one of my childhood bedrooms, and hey-I-watch-a-lot-of-TV type blog. I have a lot of thoughts about things I'd like to write about, and not a lot of ideas about what's really worth putting out there. It seems like personal blogs often end up being more of a diary, which might not be the worst thing in the world, but also seems a bit navel-gazing. Still. I'd like a place where I can write about TV and life without feeling like it should be super researched (which tends to be my go-to with writing).
Towards the end of the semester, I caught up on Parenthood and Supernatural. Few things are as satisfying as getting caught up on that last one - it's just so daunting, with all the episodes, and the drama, and the occasional foray into talking dogs. But, it's ride or die at this point with those boys - I need to track down this season's eps and then I am totally living in the present.
I am, in fact, up to the present on The Vampire Diaries and, from where I'm sitting, it's still solid. I'm an easy mark for the Damon/Elena love drama and you can't beat Bonnie in the other dimension alone, decorating that Christmas tree in an empty parking lot, with the flashbacks to happier, pre-vampire times, and the newest, twin-merging villain is, for a reason I can't figure out, more disturbing than anything I've seen on this show. Maybe because he's a legit sociopath, without a redeeming love, or injury, or redemption arc. So far, he's an honest-to-goodness asshole, but without feeling flat or one-dimensional.
Also - the main point of this post - I watched the first season of The 100 and I dig it. The first few episodes feel kind of cheesy and derivative - part of that is the by-now very familiar Vancouver outdoorsy locations, part is the rotating Vancouver actors, and part is the obvious influence/homage/ripoff of Battlestar Galactica and, to an extent, Lost. But. At about episode 4, the show starts to hit its stride.
Bear with me for a moment on this one: I was watching The 100 right as the report on the CIA's use of torture came out and the show was surprisingly resonant with that cultural moment. A lot of TV shows deal with torture - as Eric Deggans points out here, TV has primed us for thinking that torture works, especially when Kiefer Sutherland is trying to save the world from a ticking time bomb. The 100, however, foregrounds the fact that torture actually doesn't necessarily work, because people either get pissed or just will say anything to make the pain stop. The show is not super sophisticated in its delivery of that message - one of the grounders is being tortured into giving up info on his people, but that info is only forthcoming when the torture stops and the Ark-survivors show some kindness and mercy. But what made it stand out to me is that our sympathies are not necessarily with the survivors, despite the fact that the whole premise of the show is based on following their return to Earth. Yes, we go along with them as they leave the Ark, return to Earth, and try to make a go of it, 100 years post-apocalypse. But whereas BSG put us right with the survivors as they were attacked by an invading force (and thus walks us slowly through the questions of us and them that tend to structure moments of violence), The 100 shows us people who were destroyed by their own hands. We don't know why the war or the nuclear attacks happened, or who was to blame; the survivors don't even seem to be carrying any internal divisions based on that blame. So, they aren't a ragged group of "innocent victims" who attack the Grounders out of feelings of revenge. Rather, they are a multi-national group of English-speaking people who, because of imminent threats to basic biological survival, have to return to the place they themselves destroyed. Thus, when these Ark-people do return, they are the invading force; contrary to their assumptions, there are humans (the Grounders) who have survived and continue to survive on Earth, humans who, quite understandably, react to these people from space with anger, suspicious, and violence, which the Ark-people instigate as much as the Grounders do. In fact, the band of survivors from space justify their own violence, not through an ethical imperative or righteous revenge, but with a much more base appeal: kill or be killed. To them, it's a question of basic, bare-bones survival, despite the fact that there is evidence to suggest a more peaceful route is possible.
So by the time we get to the torture scene midway through the first season, our sympathies are already divided between the protagonists of the story (Finn and all the other teen hotties from the Ark) and the Grounders (in their more mature, physically-perfect glory) and these divided sympathies make those torture scenes seem gratuitous and more about ego and power than truth and justice. What made this stand out even more to me was the fact that, as I finished the torture episode, BBC America just happened to be playing the BSG episode in which Kara torture Leoben. While BSG does an excellent job of twisting up the definitions of friend and enemy to such an extent that no strict delineation holds, at this Kara/Leoben point in the narrative, our sympathies are still fully with the humans as they struggle to find the skin-job cylons hiding in their midst. Here, it seems like a perfect example of the ticking time bomb against which torture so often achieves its justification and even later, after so much of the clear right and wrong disappears, these humans are still the ostensible heroes of the narrative, and the narrative structure still conditions us to go along with their actions, even when they seem ill-advised. With The 100, however, the "heroes" of the story - even the sainted leader Finn - jump straight to torture without doing much work to make us believe they are in the right. So, yes, The 100 is another post-apocalyptic teen drama, but with a critical spin on questions of war, survival, and otherness that took me by surprise; I respect the fact that it didn't try to make torture palatable by encouraging me to sympathize with the perpetrators, nor did it suggest that only the truly evil would use torture. Instead, torture is used by these kind of messed up people, with whom I can kind of identify and thus critically engage, but without so much identification that I emotionally cave to their unethical action. Maybe these thoughts will change with Season 2 (which I haven't seem), but for now, it has me.
I also started American Horror Story: Coven. I'll talk about that later - only one episode in, but I can't mainline it the way I do some many shows. It has to come in small doses.
Friday, December 19, 2014
Wednesday, November 5, 2014
And so it goes
2 things.
1 is that there were elections yesterday, something that feels far removed from my life here. Part of that sense of displacement comes, I think, from the fact that I spent the last ten years living in Madison, which is more politically active than here. No, that's not quite what I want to say. Even as I wrote that sentence, the claim that Madison is more political doesn't feel right to me, because Oklahoma is every bit as political as anywhere else. It just masks its politics under claims of common sense, family values, small government, and old-fashioned values, or under the misguided belief that it is somehow separate from national politics.
In fact, more times than not, I tend to feel overwhelmed with just how political Oklahoma is. But being here, rather than Madison, does feel different on the day after an election. An awareness of the political stage, both local and national, and, more importantly, an awareness of how deeply politics is embedded in our everyday lives, was more present in a place like Madison, and I am definitely feeling that lack right now. My inadvertent (on my part) disenfranchisement has probably also contributed to these feelings of distance - I hadn't planned for Oklahoma's 24 day cut off period for registering to vote, so by the time I sent in my info, that deadline has sailed right by. No voting for me!
But, as I said to a number of people, it's not like my vote would have mattered here anyway, which I think is more at the core of my feelings about election day. On the one hand, I have often felt that my vote in this overwhelmingly right-leaning state has little to no chance of being cast in favor of a candidate who will win. Much as I would have liked to see Fallin go, it never seemed a likely proposition. In fact, voting in Wisconsin always gave me an extra thrill, because it was the first place where it felt like my vote really contributed to a result.
But, on the other hand, I am a bit disgusted with the sense of pointlessness and apathy that I brought to this election, try as I did to register. Does voting only matter when you have a good chance of winning? It seems like there is something in the process that should matter, that there is something that *matters* by just showing up, even if (or perhaps even more so when) you know the candidates you support are not going to win.
But that sense of importance gets dampened when, in the course of my day, the people I often encounter don't seem interested in or motivated by the issues that seem so desperately important in another places. Of course, all of those issues trickle down and circulate around Oklahoma, but the shield is pretty thick. And, to be honest, I imagine I don't seem particularly motivated either, outside the bickering I do with family members over things we will probably never agree on.
2nd thing. This first semester is almost over, so much so that I am trying to plan, and replan, by calendar for next semester. I'll be teaching 5 Comp II course and 1 American Lit course, so there's a lot of book-ordering and schedule-revising to be done. The biggest challenge right now is figuring out the role of research and the research paper in my Comp II class. I don't really like how the research paper has gone. I feel like my students benefited from early exercises in exploring research in the world, and research with the OED, and even the annotated bibliography and oral presentations on the information they found. I am less convinced, however, of the benefits of the traditional research paper itself, though whether that's a failure of teaching or of learning, I don't know. I imagine it's both. But I am increasingly aware that this particular brand of paper writing is not the best use of time and energy in a one semester class, even if there are some arguably transferable skills. So, the question is, what do I do instead? A research paper is a required component of Comp II here at TCC, though what exactly "paper" means is not specified. I am thinking I might go back to the journalistic mode I used the last time I taught composition at UW, but that needs to be tweaked.
Other than that, the classes are going generally well. The retention difficulties and lack of completion is new to me, but it is generally understandable. It's a challenge, but, given all the factors affecting community college students, withdrawing from a class is not the worst thing to do.
1 is that there were elections yesterday, something that feels far removed from my life here. Part of that sense of displacement comes, I think, from the fact that I spent the last ten years living in Madison, which is more politically active than here. No, that's not quite what I want to say. Even as I wrote that sentence, the claim that Madison is more political doesn't feel right to me, because Oklahoma is every bit as political as anywhere else. It just masks its politics under claims of common sense, family values, small government, and old-fashioned values, or under the misguided belief that it is somehow separate from national politics.
In fact, more times than not, I tend to feel overwhelmed with just how political Oklahoma is. But being here, rather than Madison, does feel different on the day after an election. An awareness of the political stage, both local and national, and, more importantly, an awareness of how deeply politics is embedded in our everyday lives, was more present in a place like Madison, and I am definitely feeling that lack right now. My inadvertent (on my part) disenfranchisement has probably also contributed to these feelings of distance - I hadn't planned for Oklahoma's 24 day cut off period for registering to vote, so by the time I sent in my info, that deadline has sailed right by. No voting for me!
But, as I said to a number of people, it's not like my vote would have mattered here anyway, which I think is more at the core of my feelings about election day. On the one hand, I have often felt that my vote in this overwhelmingly right-leaning state has little to no chance of being cast in favor of a candidate who will win. Much as I would have liked to see Fallin go, it never seemed a likely proposition. In fact, voting in Wisconsin always gave me an extra thrill, because it was the first place where it felt like my vote really contributed to a result.
But, on the other hand, I am a bit disgusted with the sense of pointlessness and apathy that I brought to this election, try as I did to register. Does voting only matter when you have a good chance of winning? It seems like there is something in the process that should matter, that there is something that *matters* by just showing up, even if (or perhaps even more so when) you know the candidates you support are not going to win.
But that sense of importance gets dampened when, in the course of my day, the people I often encounter don't seem interested in or motivated by the issues that seem so desperately important in another places. Of course, all of those issues trickle down and circulate around Oklahoma, but the shield is pretty thick. And, to be honest, I imagine I don't seem particularly motivated either, outside the bickering I do with family members over things we will probably never agree on.
2nd thing. This first semester is almost over, so much so that I am trying to plan, and replan, by calendar for next semester. I'll be teaching 5 Comp II course and 1 American Lit course, so there's a lot of book-ordering and schedule-revising to be done. The biggest challenge right now is figuring out the role of research and the research paper in my Comp II class. I don't really like how the research paper has gone. I feel like my students benefited from early exercises in exploring research in the world, and research with the OED, and even the annotated bibliography and oral presentations on the information they found. I am less convinced, however, of the benefits of the traditional research paper itself, though whether that's a failure of teaching or of learning, I don't know. I imagine it's both. But I am increasingly aware that this particular brand of paper writing is not the best use of time and energy in a one semester class, even if there are some arguably transferable skills. So, the question is, what do I do instead? A research paper is a required component of Comp II here at TCC, though what exactly "paper" means is not specified. I am thinking I might go back to the journalistic mode I used the last time I taught composition at UW, but that needs to be tweaked.
Other than that, the classes are going generally well. The retention difficulties and lack of completion is new to me, but it is generally understandable. It's a challenge, but, given all the factors affecting community college students, withdrawing from a class is not the worst thing to do.
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Why I Am Blog-Blocked and What I am Watching
Oh blog, I haven't forgotten you. I just don't know quite what to do with you. These are my hangups:
1. What do I even talk about? Do I talk about work? Family? Students? Daily life in Broken Arrow? I'm don't know what to focus on and, when I do think of something, I end up being conflicted about whether it is appropriate to write about it all, whether that is due to privacy issues (students/teaching), professional concerns (community college, never-ending admin stuff), or kindness worries (how does anyone ever publish a memoir without pissing off everyone they know?). So, I think about things, and then I let them slide out of my brain as I rush off to watch my nieces at gymnastics practice.
2. I don't know how to write about things without a text in front of me. I need a text in front of me in order to feel qualified about making any claims. I wonder about things I see, situations that seem particular to the community college experience, or to the Oklahoma-life experience, but I can't help but feel...uncomfortable about making any broader claims based on those first hand experiences, or even knowing exactly how to articulate them as experiences, without attempting to put them into a context, or get some background info, or compare them to a greater statistical sample. I guess that's just my training.
3. I'm trying to figure out a way to bring these two issues together, or at least use the second issue to address the first. I mostly keep thinking about "coming home" texts I could analyze. There could be an entire Bruce Springsteen Day! And weeks upon weeks about Dr Who! More on that later, I hope.
As for now, I figure I might as well jump into the TV pool. I made it, what? 4 posts. Longer than I thought I might. So, here's what I'm watching/preparing to watch:
1. The Good Wife - strong opener, fast-paced (maybe a little too much?), still one of the strongest examples of how to construct a good narrative on conventional TV (or any TV, really)
2. Castle - I love it. I don't care if its groundbreaking TV (though there is a paper to be written there). A little concerned about the new showrunner, but I gotta believe.
3. Forever - watched an ep tonight. Liked it. Will watch again.
4. Dr Who - I am out of control into it. Why did I wait so long? I am so in love with River that everything else kind of takes a backseat. Tbh, I am still working my way through the seasons. Despite everything I believe in and hold dear, I haven't watched the episodes in order. I watched the first season, then jumped into the middle of the Matt Smith years, and I am now watching the Tennant and Capaldi eps alongside each other. It'll eventually all join up in the middle, much like the relationship between 11 and River, but hopefully without the epic heartbreak. There's something about the relationship that both River and 11 have to death and to finitude that I just can't shake. I'll do a whole post on it this weekend, I think.
I like Tennant a lot, increasingly so, and I think Capaldi is terrific (Listen was a great episode), but 11 is my doctor. And those Ponds! They got me with that group.
5. Started Season 3 of Damages to watch on the treadmill. Still interesting, can't-turn-away TV.
1. What do I even talk about? Do I talk about work? Family? Students? Daily life in Broken Arrow? I'm don't know what to focus on and, when I do think of something, I end up being conflicted about whether it is appropriate to write about it all, whether that is due to privacy issues (students/teaching), professional concerns (community college, never-ending admin stuff), or kindness worries (how does anyone ever publish a memoir without pissing off everyone they know?). So, I think about things, and then I let them slide out of my brain as I rush off to watch my nieces at gymnastics practice.
2. I don't know how to write about things without a text in front of me. I need a text in front of me in order to feel qualified about making any claims. I wonder about things I see, situations that seem particular to the community college experience, or to the Oklahoma-life experience, but I can't help but feel...uncomfortable about making any broader claims based on those first hand experiences, or even knowing exactly how to articulate them as experiences, without attempting to put them into a context, or get some background info, or compare them to a greater statistical sample. I guess that's just my training.
3. I'm trying to figure out a way to bring these two issues together, or at least use the second issue to address the first. I mostly keep thinking about "coming home" texts I could analyze. There could be an entire Bruce Springsteen Day! And weeks upon weeks about Dr Who! More on that later, I hope.
As for now, I figure I might as well jump into the TV pool. I made it, what? 4 posts. Longer than I thought I might. So, here's what I'm watching/preparing to watch:
1. The Good Wife - strong opener, fast-paced (maybe a little too much?), still one of the strongest examples of how to construct a good narrative on conventional TV (or any TV, really)
2. Castle - I love it. I don't care if its groundbreaking TV (though there is a paper to be written there). A little concerned about the new showrunner, but I gotta believe.
3. Forever - watched an ep tonight. Liked it. Will watch again.
4. Dr Who - I am out of control into it. Why did I wait so long? I am so in love with River that everything else kind of takes a backseat. Tbh, I am still working my way through the seasons. Despite everything I believe in and hold dear, I haven't watched the episodes in order. I watched the first season, then jumped into the middle of the Matt Smith years, and I am now watching the Tennant and Capaldi eps alongside each other. It'll eventually all join up in the middle, much like the relationship between 11 and River, but hopefully without the epic heartbreak. There's something about the relationship that both River and 11 have to death and to finitude that I just can't shake. I'll do a whole post on it this weekend, I think.
I like Tennant a lot, increasingly so, and I think Capaldi is terrific (Listen was a great episode), but 11 is my doctor. And those Ponds! They got me with that group.
5. Started Season 3 of Damages to watch on the treadmill. Still interesting, can't-turn-away TV.
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
The Basics
There are a lot of blogs about education and, within that circle, a lot about community colleges. I've been perusing some lately and now know that I lack a considerable amount of knowledge about the blogosphere; my lack of knowledge about community colleges has simply been confirmed.
So, one dilemma facing me is: what to blog? another is: how much to blog under my own name? There are plenty of places to find more, and better, insider info from vastly more-experienced people than me. For exhaustive coverage of pedagogy and resources, look over Community College English. Check out Confessions of an Associate Dean for an anonymous take on a CC in the NE.
But, as I tell my students, I guess part of it depends on audience. For those of you reading this blog just because you know me - surely that's most of you? - and those of you associated with research institutions - surely that's a lot of you? - here are a few basics about my life so far.
Tulsa Community College opened in downtown Tulsa in 1970.
It has four campuses spread around the Tulsa metro area. I work at the newest campus, West, which was founded around 20 years ago.
TCC serves over 35,000 students annually, according to statistics I read on their homepage. I've read different numbers in different places, which I think points to the difficulty in defining and assessing the number of students who attend community college - is that based on enrollment? graduation? completion of a course? These questions in turn point to issues concerning retention and graduation that were not part of daily discussions in my R1 training.
As English fulltime faculty, my course load is a 5/5. I have one course reassigned this semester for professionalization workshops, putting me at only 4 courses this semester. I am teaching 2 Comp I courses and 2 Comp II courses, both of which meet twice a week. Here's the hourly breakdown:
Teaching: 15 hours
Office Hours: 10 hours
Availability for committee work: 10-ish hours
(Eventual) Reading and Writing Lab Work: 3 hours
For those of you keeping track, there is no time allotted for prep or grading. While much of that, for now, occurs during office hours, this way of doing things is also new. As time goes on, there are opportunities to have some of those teaching hours transfer to other responsibilities (like the faculty training sessions).
The pay is good, and has the opportunity for more (depending on how many extra courses I teach each semester and in the summer. You can teach up to 7 or 8 courses in the semester, though I am curious as to how many people in comp do that).
I have a good office, smart co-workers who aren't afraid to speak openly about how things work, the freedom to plan my course according to my own choosing, and the relief of a regular income with good benefits.
TCC employs around 275 fulltime faculty and 850 adjuncts, if we believe wikipedia. The experience of adjuncts is much more visible to my own experience as a fulltime faculty member than perhaps it was in the past, though I was also working from a graduate student position, which had some benefits and many limitations. The adjunct/fulltime difference here is visible through things like course guarantees, office space, and weighted preferences in class times/subjects, in addition to the obvious increased pay and full benefits that go along with the position.
My students are similar in many ways to the students I had at UW, at least in the personalities and anxieties they exhibit in the first few days. Still, a higher number of my students here have jobs outside of school and work more hours than their counterparts at UW did. A higher number are returning students; a higher number have children.
According to TCC's Director of Institutional Research, over 36% of students here come from historically-underrepresented groups. From what I can tell looking at UW's enrollment 2013-2014, around 14% of its students come from these under-represented groups. If these numbers are wrong, someone please tell me.
The emphasis on community integration, and the sense that I am living and working in the community I am ostensibly here to serve, is stronger here than it was for me at Madison, though I don't fully subscribe to the town and gown perspective that people often take in relation to research institutions. I value and think there is communal value in academic research of all sorts, from the practical to the more esoteric, and what I'd like to think about more in these coming months is how that belief in research, and in particular humanities research, and in even more particular esoteric humanities research, might play out in the community college classroom. For now, the same emphasis on form - that formal considerations are useful and relevant across academic and popular culture - that guided my research continues to guide my teaching; the same commitment to the public humanities pushes me to orient my classroom as an introduction to the community as much as to academic writing. But that's all just at the level of motivation and intention right now - I don't know how it will play out in the coming months, but I hope to figure out a way to think about it and to write as things move along.
But I also hope that I am able to think more precisely about how the relationship between the humanities and the community college campus goes both ways, that while the humanities have a place in the education and administration of community colleges, community college education has something to teach research institutions about community integration rather than outreach, and what it means to approach your daily work as if it is always already part of a broadly public conversation. And yeah, I did throw "always already" in there. I think it fits.
So, one dilemma facing me is: what to blog? another is: how much to blog under my own name? There are plenty of places to find more, and better, insider info from vastly more-experienced people than me. For exhaustive coverage of pedagogy and resources, look over Community College English. Check out Confessions of an Associate Dean for an anonymous take on a CC in the NE.
But, as I tell my students, I guess part of it depends on audience. For those of you reading this blog just because you know me - surely that's most of you? - and those of you associated with research institutions - surely that's a lot of you? - here are a few basics about my life so far.
Tulsa Community College opened in downtown Tulsa in 1970.
It has four campuses spread around the Tulsa metro area. I work at the newest campus, West, which was founded around 20 years ago.
TCC serves over 35,000 students annually, according to statistics I read on their homepage. I've read different numbers in different places, which I think points to the difficulty in defining and assessing the number of students who attend community college - is that based on enrollment? graduation? completion of a course? These questions in turn point to issues concerning retention and graduation that were not part of daily discussions in my R1 training.
As English fulltime faculty, my course load is a 5/5. I have one course reassigned this semester for professionalization workshops, putting me at only 4 courses this semester. I am teaching 2 Comp I courses and 2 Comp II courses, both of which meet twice a week. Here's the hourly breakdown:
Teaching: 15 hours
Office Hours: 10 hours
Availability for committee work: 10-ish hours
(Eventual) Reading and Writing Lab Work: 3 hours
For those of you keeping track, there is no time allotted for prep or grading. While much of that, for now, occurs during office hours, this way of doing things is also new. As time goes on, there are opportunities to have some of those teaching hours transfer to other responsibilities (like the faculty training sessions).
The pay is good, and has the opportunity for more (depending on how many extra courses I teach each semester and in the summer. You can teach up to 7 or 8 courses in the semester, though I am curious as to how many people in comp do that).
I have a good office, smart co-workers who aren't afraid to speak openly about how things work, the freedom to plan my course according to my own choosing, and the relief of a regular income with good benefits.
TCC employs around 275 fulltime faculty and 850 adjuncts, if we believe wikipedia. The experience of adjuncts is much more visible to my own experience as a fulltime faculty member than perhaps it was in the past, though I was also working from a graduate student position, which had some benefits and many limitations. The adjunct/fulltime difference here is visible through things like course guarantees, office space, and weighted preferences in class times/subjects, in addition to the obvious increased pay and full benefits that go along with the position.
My students are similar in many ways to the students I had at UW, at least in the personalities and anxieties they exhibit in the first few days. Still, a higher number of my students here have jobs outside of school and work more hours than their counterparts at UW did. A higher number are returning students; a higher number have children.
According to TCC's Director of Institutional Research, over 36% of students here come from historically-underrepresented groups. From what I can tell looking at UW's enrollment 2013-2014, around 14% of its students come from these under-represented groups. If these numbers are wrong, someone please tell me.
The emphasis on community integration, and the sense that I am living and working in the community I am ostensibly here to serve, is stronger here than it was for me at Madison, though I don't fully subscribe to the town and gown perspective that people often take in relation to research institutions. I value and think there is communal value in academic research of all sorts, from the practical to the more esoteric, and what I'd like to think about more in these coming months is how that belief in research, and in particular humanities research, and in even more particular esoteric humanities research, might play out in the community college classroom. For now, the same emphasis on form - that formal considerations are useful and relevant across academic and popular culture - that guided my research continues to guide my teaching; the same commitment to the public humanities pushes me to orient my classroom as an introduction to the community as much as to academic writing. But that's all just at the level of motivation and intention right now - I don't know how it will play out in the coming months, but I hope to figure out a way to think about it and to write as things move along.
But I also hope that I am able to think more precisely about how the relationship between the humanities and the community college campus goes both ways, that while the humanities have a place in the education and administration of community colleges, community college education has something to teach research institutions about community integration rather than outreach, and what it means to approach your daily work as if it is always already part of a broadly public conversation. And yeah, I did throw "always already" in there. I think it fits.
Sunday, August 10, 2014
A Strange Land
Over the last few years, on my trips home over the Christmas holidays, my nephew and I have started taking trips to Oklahoma state parks. The main point is to travel with the nephew, because, well, it's fun, but the secondary goal is to experience the area in ways I haven't. Growing up, it was easy to think of this area as a land without history and without interest. The first assumption is obviously false, fraught with political and racist underpinnings; the second is just lazy. So, I've slowly started moving around, looking for things that are interesting, different, or unusual.
Last week (at my aunt's behest), I attended Marian Days in Carthage, MO, a city of around 14,000 that lies 130 miles NE from Tulsa. Marian Days is, according to my mostly Wikipedia-type sources, either the largest religious pilgrimage and festival in North America or simply the largest Roman Catholic festival in the United States. Either way, it's big. Over the first weekend in August, it brings over 50,000 Vietnamese American Roman Catholics to Carthage to honor the Virgin Mary and to reunite people from around the country, many of whom have been making the pilgrimage since 1978.
The festivities, which began as a one day retreat, take place on the 28-acre campus of the Congregation of the Mother Co-Redemptrix, land that used to house Our Lady of the Ozarks College but which was purchased in 1975 by an order of Vietnamese priests and nuns "who came to this country after fleeing Vietnam in fishing boats at the insistence of their founder, a day before South Vietnam fell to the Communists in 1975."
Following the fall of Saigon, thousands of Vietnamese refugees ended up at Fort Chaffee in Western Arkansas, including the 170 priests and brothers of the Congregation of the Mother Co-Redemptrix who were split between Fort Chaffee and Camp Pendleton in California. Over the next few years, people ended up all across the region, including tens of thousands of people who were relocated to Oklahoma City; Cardinal Bernard Law, then Bishop of Springfield – Cape Girardeau, sponsored all 170 members of the Congregation, allowing them use of a college in his diocese that had been closed for years. That group evolved into the congregation that still worships there today.
And, for these few days every year, this small area becomes an orderly tent city, housing people in individual tents, large group tents with rows of cots, camper-trailers, and all the city's hotels.
I have to admit, I'm not sure about attending a religious celebration for a faith that I don't follow. I did feel weird at first, wandering through the temporary lanes that wound around the campus. But, while the festival is centered around liturgy, there are also a number of other events that are more open to the general public, such as the county-fair-like atmosphere of the adjacent food/drink/cotton candy area.
And so, I ate.
A lot.
And I walked around.
And I marveled at how much has gone on around me without me paying much attention. And it's not for lack of mention - my grandfather used to tell me about the thousands of people flooding into small-town Missouri, but I dismissed his stories as exaggeration tinged with xenophobia. It just sounded like paranoia and, besides, how big could something in Carthage be? Well, I was wrong, about Carthage, and my grandfather, and my own sense of worldliness that convinced me that nothing that interesting could be happening nearby without my travel-experienced mind paying heed.
Last week (at my aunt's behest), I attended Marian Days in Carthage, MO, a city of around 14,000 that lies 130 miles NE from Tulsa. Marian Days is, according to my mostly Wikipedia-type sources, either the largest religious pilgrimage and festival in North America or simply the largest Roman Catholic festival in the United States. Either way, it's big. Over the first weekend in August, it brings over 50,000 Vietnamese American Roman Catholics to Carthage to honor the Virgin Mary and to reunite people from around the country, many of whom have been making the pilgrimage since 1978.
The festivities, which began as a one day retreat, take place on the 28-acre campus of the Congregation of the Mother Co-Redemptrix, land that used to house Our Lady of the Ozarks College but which was purchased in 1975 by an order of Vietnamese priests and nuns "who came to this country after fleeing Vietnam in fishing boats at the insistence of their founder, a day before South Vietnam fell to the Communists in 1975."
Following the fall of Saigon, thousands of Vietnamese refugees ended up at Fort Chaffee in Western Arkansas, including the 170 priests and brothers of the Congregation of the Mother Co-Redemptrix who were split between Fort Chaffee and Camp Pendleton in California. Over the next few years, people ended up all across the region, including tens of thousands of people who were relocated to Oklahoma City; Cardinal Bernard Law, then Bishop of Springfield – Cape Girardeau, sponsored all 170 members of the Congregation, allowing them use of a college in his diocese that had been closed for years. That group evolved into the congregation that still worships there today.
And, for these few days every year, this small area becomes an orderly tent city, housing people in individual tents, large group tents with rows of cots, camper-trailers, and all the city's hotels.
I have to admit, I'm not sure about attending a religious celebration for a faith that I don't follow. I did feel weird at first, wandering through the temporary lanes that wound around the campus. But, while the festival is centered around liturgy, there are also a number of other events that are more open to the general public, such as the county-fair-like atmosphere of the adjacent food/drink/cotton candy area.
And so, I ate.
And I marveled at how much has gone on around me without me paying much attention. And it's not for lack of mention - my grandfather used to tell me about the thousands of people flooding into small-town Missouri, but I dismissed his stories as exaggeration tinged with xenophobia. It just sounded like paranoia and, besides, how big could something in Carthage be? Well, I was wrong, about Carthage, and my grandfather, and my own sense of worldliness that convinced me that nothing that interesting could be happening nearby without my travel-experienced mind paying heed.
Monday, August 4, 2014
The Long Way Around
Sooner or later, we all go home. That's the message pop
culture often throws our way. The Salvatore brothers return to Mystic
Falls. Ed heads back to Stuckeyville. Raylan Givens is exiled to Harlan Country. Odysseus finally lands in Ithaca. Lebron eventually goes back to Cleveland.
And then there's me. After finishing my undergrad degrees at the University of Oklahoma in 2001, I left the state to attend graduate school, first in England and then in Wisconsin. I left for many reasons, but it mostly boiled down to the fact that I wanted something different. I didn't know exactly what that difference was or should be; I just knew it was something different than what I had.
And so, I left.
But I also returned, time and again, for equally complicated and simple reasons: my family was there, many friends were there, and, in many ways, I was still there. I loved the land and the wind, I bristled at the politics, and, regardless of where I was, I still thought of myself as Oklahoman.
Still, 13 years went by. I finished my Master's in Women's Studies and English literature in England. I traveled and waitressed and worked at Star Trek conventions. I was on the academic job market for three years. I kept waitressing. I finished the PhD in Literary Studies at Wisconsin.
And, after three years of applying for jobs across the academic spectrum (visiting and tenure, research and teaching, state universities and liberal arts colleges), I've now accepted a position as Assistant Professor of English at Tulsa Community College, where I'll be teaching composition. I grew up outside of Tulsa, in a place called Broken Arrow. I went to high school here, I went to church here, my parents and siblings still live here. In fact, I'll be living, first, at my parents' house (in my same middle-school room) and then, presumably, on my own. I'll shift from teaching one course per semester at a 4-year research institution, writing a dissertation in contemporary American literature, working as a public radio producer, and waitressing at a chain American Chinese restaurant to teaching five courses a semester at a community college, attending soccer and baseball games, and doing research as my schedule allows. It's going to be different.
And so, I decided to start this blog, to track my experience of returning to Oklahoma and to consider how humanities research plays out in the community college composition classroom.
In his essay explaining his decision to return to Cleveland, Lebron James gives an account of a reckoning, a departure whose purpose was to teach him the value of home:
"Before anyone ever cared where I would play basketball, I was a kid from Northeast Ohio. It’s where I walked. It’s where I ran. It’s where I cried. It’s where I bled. It holds a special place in my heart. People there have seen me grow up...I want to give them hope when I can. I want to inspire them when I can. My relationship with Northeast Ohio is bigger than basketball. I didn’t realize that four years ago. I do now."
Odysseus puts it more dramatically: "I long - I pine, all my days - to travel home and see the dawn of my return."
Dorothy puts it more simply: "There's no place like home."
All of these folks make a compelling case for returning home. They leave, swept up in a whirlwind of circumstances, returning only when fate allows, after they achieve greater self-knowledge. For all of them, experiencing the global is a necessary but transient step in appreciating the value of the local.
But as for myself, I have always been less certain about narratives that tell us that its better to go home, that our reasons for leaving are understandable but short-lived, that, upon exploring the world, we should want to bring those experiences back to the place we left. I don't know if the goal of leaving is always to return.
My skepticism about stories of return, however, is at also at least partially rooted in the fact that I am drawn instead to narratives that tell us it's good to break free, that setting out on your own is a desirable choice, that, as the Dixie Chicks explain, taking the long way around is, in fact, the way to go.
In other words, I've always thought that education was my way out, an opportunity I embraced, but now education has brought me back. And so, this blog is also an attempt to wrestle with the stories we tell ourselves, of who we are and what we want, of what makes for a valuable life.
Well, that's the goal. I'll probably also talk a lot about TV. We'll see how things shake out.
And then there's me. After finishing my undergrad degrees at the University of Oklahoma in 2001, I left the state to attend graduate school, first in England and then in Wisconsin. I left for many reasons, but it mostly boiled down to the fact that I wanted something different. I didn't know exactly what that difference was or should be; I just knew it was something different than what I had.
And so, I left.
But I also returned, time and again, for equally complicated and simple reasons: my family was there, many friends were there, and, in many ways, I was still there. I loved the land and the wind, I bristled at the politics, and, regardless of where I was, I still thought of myself as Oklahoman.
Still, 13 years went by. I finished my Master's in Women's Studies and English literature in England. I traveled and waitressed and worked at Star Trek conventions. I was on the academic job market for three years. I kept waitressing. I finished the PhD in Literary Studies at Wisconsin.
And, after three years of applying for jobs across the academic spectrum (visiting and tenure, research and teaching, state universities and liberal arts colleges), I've now accepted a position as Assistant Professor of English at Tulsa Community College, where I'll be teaching composition. I grew up outside of Tulsa, in a place called Broken Arrow. I went to high school here, I went to church here, my parents and siblings still live here. In fact, I'll be living, first, at my parents' house (in my same middle-school room) and then, presumably, on my own. I'll shift from teaching one course per semester at a 4-year research institution, writing a dissertation in contemporary American literature, working as a public radio producer, and waitressing at a chain American Chinese restaurant to teaching five courses a semester at a community college, attending soccer and baseball games, and doing research as my schedule allows. It's going to be different.
And so, I decided to start this blog, to track my experience of returning to Oklahoma and to consider how humanities research plays out in the community college composition classroom.
In his essay explaining his decision to return to Cleveland, Lebron James gives an account of a reckoning, a departure whose purpose was to teach him the value of home:
"Before anyone ever cared where I would play basketball, I was a kid from Northeast Ohio. It’s where I walked. It’s where I ran. It’s where I cried. It’s where I bled. It holds a special place in my heart. People there have seen me grow up...I want to give them hope when I can. I want to inspire them when I can. My relationship with Northeast Ohio is bigger than basketball. I didn’t realize that four years ago. I do now."
Odysseus puts it more dramatically: "I long - I pine, all my days - to travel home and see the dawn of my return."
Dorothy puts it more simply: "There's no place like home."
All of these folks make a compelling case for returning home. They leave, swept up in a whirlwind of circumstances, returning only when fate allows, after they achieve greater self-knowledge. For all of them, experiencing the global is a necessary but transient step in appreciating the value of the local.
But as for myself, I have always been less certain about narratives that tell us that its better to go home, that our reasons for leaving are understandable but short-lived, that, upon exploring the world, we should want to bring those experiences back to the place we left. I don't know if the goal of leaving is always to return.
My skepticism about stories of return, however, is at also at least partially rooted in the fact that I am drawn instead to narratives that tell us it's good to break free, that setting out on your own is a desirable choice, that, as the Dixie Chicks explain, taking the long way around is, in fact, the way to go.
In other words, I've always thought that education was my way out, an opportunity I embraced, but now education has brought me back. And so, this blog is also an attempt to wrestle with the stories we tell ourselves, of who we are and what we want, of what makes for a valuable life.
Well, that's the goal. I'll probably also talk a lot about TV. We'll see how things shake out.
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