Will the real Buddha please stand up!

I thought I would stay away from blogging for a while.  A break.  Perhaps to also re-charge.

Wrong I am.

It is difficult.  Too. Damn. Hard.

I am reminded of a comment made by a former student, who is now a faculty colleague.  She loves dancing, and during the earlier years of her undergraduate years, she even toured with a dancing group.  Now, as a faculty, she works with a local dance theatre--I put her in touch with another former student who, too is dancer.  Anyway, she said, "we dancers have to dance."

It is not about being the best dancer ever.  It is not about becoming a star dancer.  It is about being a dancer. 

And I simply want to write.

So, here I am, hoping that an occasional reader might find something here.

Recall the story of the prince Siddhartha, whose mother had that vision when she was pregnant with him?  And the stark encounter of life provoking an existential crisis in the prince, which then leads the prince to ditch his royal luxuries in search for the meaning of life?  And how finally he became the awakened one--the Buddha?

What if all that story was, well, mere story?

Who was the real Buddha?

I suppose this is an example of how "religious studies" and faith diverge.  In the old tradition, it was often said, "ரிஷி மூலம் நதி மூலம் ஆராய கூடாது" (one should not try to find out the origins of the sage nor of the river.)  But, this is exactly what religious studies scholars do. Even when it pisses off the fanatics, as Wendy Doniger's experience demonstrates.

So, who was the real Buddha?

Bringing the reliable historical fragments together, and discarding mythic elaborations, a humbler picture of the Buddha emerges. Gotama was born into a small tribe, in a remote and unimportant town on the periphery of pre-imperial India. He lived in a world on the cusp of urbanisation, albeit one that still lacked money, writing and long-distance trade.

I think this Gotama becoming such a profoundly influential figure is far more impressive than the story of the princely Siddhartha growing up in a huge palace.

Impressive that from a small and remote place in that area between modern day India and Nepal, Buddha and his teachings have spread far and wide.  Of course, when the teaching spreads, ideas are morphed in a number of different ways.  The modern day mindfulness and meditation in the West too have their origins in the Buddhist teachings.  But, even the Buddha might not recognize and understand the contemporary practices of mindfulness!

The Americans who adapted mindfulness in the late-20th century drew on a 19th-century revival of meditation in Burma. And so rather than transmitting an ancient practice, they instead promoted a new spiritual discipline, formulated when Burmese Theravada was suffering in the shadows of the British Empire.
A feature of the modern mindfulness movement, inherited from fairly recent Burmese innovations, is its appeal to the laity, and hence its essentially therapeutic, rather than salvific, aim. Nothing could be further removed from the Buddha’s radical ideal of sagehood. By insisting on ascetic discipline and a life of homeless wandering, Gotama presented mindfulness as a total life commitment. Practised in this way, attending to the constituents of experience can be transformative: Gotama claimed it is a way of undoing one’s mentally constructed world, along with all its unsatisfactoriness and suffering.

Writing too helps me with the world "along with all its unsatisfactoriness and suffering."  Om!

The mystery that writing is!

Of course, I had no idea about writing until the first term of graduate school.  I am, therefore, sympathetic towards students, in particular, who are yet to figure out how to write, especially in their own voice.  It takes time to learn to write, and then to learn to write in one's own style.

One of the many things that I had to learn right in that first term of that first year was about numbers.  Sometimes they were written out as words. Sometimes as numerals.  Nobody gave me an explanation; I observed the patterns in the publications and then decided on a practice.

Not until today did I learn something deeper about the numerals versus words when it comes to conveying numbers in the written form: "Numerals jump off the page; numbers written as words lie on the page and don’t interrupt the flow." That makes complete sense now that I think about it.  More so now in the world of electronic screen reading where we skim through paragraphs, the numbers do call our attention and essentially interrupt the flow.

But, this is also a stylistic issue; it is intended "for readers who have the leisure to savor what they read."  Ah, yes.

Over the years, I have also come to understand that writing involves a lot of re-writing.  Over and over and over again.  I routinely tell students this, but nobody seems to pay attention.  But then even academic (published) writing often comes across as if the author did not care to re-write.

If we’re speaking of a larger, more overarching mistake that writers make, it’s not taking the time to read their work aloud as they’re refining and editing it. If they did, they might easily find all sorts of errors and infelicities that they could themselves solve

Infelicities. 

I would never have worked that word into that sentence, in conveying that idea, because my vocabulary is limited.  Not that I don't know what infelicities means.  Knowing what a word means is one thing, but to know how and when to use it is different.

Two decades ago, back in California, I had writing instructors assist me in conveying to my classes the importance of writing.  One of them reminded students to be cautious when using the thesaurus in order to use big and fancy words that students often think make their papers more sophisticated.  One of the many examples that she gave was this: Consider the sentence, "their successful marriage was built on a solid foundation of love and understanding."  Basement is a synonym for foundation.  Imagine a marriage built on a basement of love!

It has been almost 32 (or thirty-two) years since that first writing experience in graduate school.  I am continuing to learn to write.

The life of an amateur

I wanted to be an academic who was actively engaging with the public--the old-fashioned public intellectual, even if I could not ever be at the high quality. After all these years, whenever I look at my CV, well, frankly, I am impressed with myself.

I really did not think it would work out this well.  Especially because I am always worried that people might find out that I am an impostor.  I have always felt like I am an amateur who was dangerously close to the edge.  It is, therefore, comforting to know that such a thought of being an amateur is a good thing:

Being an amateur is nothing to be ashamed of. Edward Said embraced the term. For him it was the mode of the intellectual. Amateurism, he said, is "the desire to be moved not by profit or reward, but by love for an unquenchable interest in the larger picture." It is a desire, he continued, that lies "in refusing to be tied down to a specialty, in caring for ideas and values despite the restrictions of a profession."
As an amateur you are naturally anti-instrumental. You’re largely indifferent to extrinsic rewards or status. When doing research, you’re not interested in gaining an elevated position among your immediate academic peers. You’re just interested in keeping your job, making sure not to get fired.

I like that description: "you are naturally anti-instrumental,"  I do what I do not because I am chasing "extrinsic rewards or status."  I care for the ideas that I explore, for the students I serve, and as long as I continue to have the job that I have, all is well.  As simple as that.

As amateurs we need to be open. And we need to experiment with different outlets, and work on how we get our ideas across.

Exactly.  In doing so:

Are we writing about topics worth caring about? Topics that move us? Topics that move other people? All too often we seem to write about topics that move no one and have no resonance to anyone, anywhere.

In my early years of engaging with the public, it was always a struggle trying to figure out how to convince the reader that what I write is important.  Where was the hook for the local reader if I wanted to write about India or Tanzania?  Why is that relevant to them?  The only thing I knew was this: I did not want to come across to a reader that I write because I am an expert and that they ought to read my stuff because I am an expert.  That, to me, was an unequal partnership that would never work.  I detest the tone of "listen to me, because I am an expert who works at a big time place."

I am willing to bet that this meaningful op-ed writing and engaging with the public has also made me a better teacher.  Or at least a less-horrible teacher.  After all, it is the same mentality that I take to the classroom: How do I convince the audience--even if they are captive--that the content is relevant to them and their lives?

When writing for academic journals, you’re lucky to be read by more than a handful of people. With teaching, however, it’s different. Not only can we reach many more, but, as Russell Jacoby wrote in The Last Intellectuals, we "have students who pass through and on to other things." And with students passing through the university each year, you might have an impact after all.
As an unapologetic amateur you should like to experiment with form.

It is a pleasure, and perhaps quite an ego trip, when students do make those connections.

At the end of it all, I find more meaning in what I do.  There is no unbearable burden of calculations towards professional advancements.

Many aspiring intellectuals have put their professional careers at risk in favor of something more meaningful. They’ve cared less about their careers — and more about the world. Which, we think, is laudable.

In the meanwhile, there are students to serve.  After the spring break, which even wannabe intellectuals need ;)

But ... what about Native Americans?

In Jill Lepore's narrative, I am now into the 20th century, more than 400 years after Columbus "discovering" India.

After some of the detailed descriptions early on about the asymmetrical interactions between European settlers and Native Americans, and then later about the Trail of Tears, Lepore's narrative does not say much about the original inhabitants.

Now, Lepore herself writes about readers who would question her on why she had skipped something or the other.  As she writes, no single-volume history of the United States can cover it all.  I think that including it all will be like trying to draw a true-to-scale map of the world.  (Was this in Alice in Wonderland?)  But, still ...

I figured I would not be the first person to think of this.  As a truly curious person would do in this internet age, I googled for it.

Sure enough, this essay from The Los Angeles Review of Books pops up, in which the author writes:

Indigenous absences are not a minor fault with These Truths. They lie at its core and they bear weighty consequences for the story that emerges. In a book that confidently bills itself as “an account of the origins, course, and consequences of the American experiment over more than four centuries,” the marginalization of indigenous people is a fundamental problem.

Any historical account will be contested, yes.  But, still ...

Methodology may have been a problem from the start. Lepore has a reliance on written literacy and record-keeping as powerful determinants of history and memory. The “history of truth is lashed to the history of writing like a mast to a sail,” she asserts, adding, “most words, once spoken, are forgotten, while writing lasts.” She makes this claim partly through a contention about the “literall advantage” supposedly maintained by Euro-American colonizers over peoples of indigenous and African descent, who oftentimes used non-written forms of expression and communication.

I don't understand why academics use "methodology" when they mean the research method.  Anyway, that is beside the main point, which is that when Lepore's method is to let the people speak for themselves, and for which she relies on the written word, well, what happens to the stories, the truths, that were not written down but were passed down through the spoken word or through images?

Lepore is a sharp intellect, and a phenomenal communicator.  I am sure there were reasons about which she is confident.  But, still ...

[Scholars] of early America and Native America have produced marvelously fine-grained reassessments of literacies, communication, and meaning production. You can now browse entire library shelves that illuminate the dynamic, enduring processes through which distinctive Native communities have transmitted information: knotted quipu strings, woven baskets, petroglyphs, standing stones, oral traditions, songs, dances, gestures, cornfields, clothing, sand and bone maps, and so much more.

Understanding the non-written is not an easy task.  And, like in the case of the Indus civilization, not being able to decode their inscriptions is another challenge altogether.

Such complexities ought to make us even more interested in understanding the past--what we may have been taught and told might not be anywhere close to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  What a shame that instead of a collective investment in such pursuit of truth, we are even closing down history departments, as if the truth is the one that Henry Ford declared: History Is Bunk.

I write because ... I don't know!

When I began writing op-eds, it seemed like I was purpose-driven.  I had an agenda.  I then sat down to piece together words and sentences.  They definitely interested me, and grabbed the attention of a few readers too.  The agenda system worked.

Of late, I find that I truly do not know what exactly I would bring to an op-ed.  Yes, I know what the topic is that I want to write about, but beyond that ... I end up surprised to some degree at how I wove together the ideas, and I feel an enormous sense of accomplishment.  I marvel at the process, which seems mysterious.

While I am only a wannabe essayist, I am excited to want to belong to that group.  I always wonder how the accomplished and celebrated essayists do it.  Are their practices vastly different from mine?  Is there something that I can pick up from them?

In this vocation of mine, it is not as if I can hire coaches, unlike how Tiger Woods or Novak Djokovic have their own personal coaches.  Other writers then become my unpaid consultants.

One of those consultants made my day!  Charles D’Ambrosio says:

The essay isn’t a form for know-it-alls, though it’s often used that way, which is probably a leftover expository habit we all pick up in grade school. Mostly I try to write about what I don’t know, which is so vast, so very much the larger part of my existence, and I guess as a result my threshold for surprise is set pretty low. Every one of these pieces surprised the shit out of me. Sometimes I’m just surprised to learn that I think what I think. It’s kind of an article of faith for me that if you aren’t taken by surprise in the process of putting words on paper then you’re only writing about what you already know, you’re trucking in conclusions. I need a crisis, I’m courting failure, the possibility of silence, because it’s only at that moment that I actually need to find words, new words hopefully. This is a writing thing, a method, however harebrained, but it’s also personal, a way of being—and they’re related, I think. A pundit like Anne Coulter’s prose suffers not because she can’t write a decent sentence but because she can’t complicate the speaker. Her ideological certainties are already baked into her sentences, so right or wrong, she’s a tiresome read. There’s no crisis, therefore no surprise. The solution for me is to dramatize the problem of thinking about the problem, presenting that spectacle, and some of the narrative umph, I guess, comes from the cliffhanger: is this going to makes sense or not? The outcome of any given essay is truly uncertain, right up to the deadline –and in some cases even past that.

Indeed!

As I have often noted, quite a few of the posts at this blog are on topics in which I am far from fluent.  I shouldn't even be opining about those, yet that's what excites me, though that might be the very reason that I am in the twilight of a mediocre career.  I increasingly find it to be boring to write only on topics that are too familiar to me.  Now, after reading that unpaid consultant's thoughts, I am all the happier that I am doing alright.

Anything else, oh consultant?

I feel like we live in this fucked up surplus economy where you can get cheap answers just about everywhere but real questions are in desperately short supply. It makes me feel lonely because I’m spending my life over in the other economy, an economy of need, with a ton of questions that, in all likelihood, will never get answered. I’d like to say bad answers isolate and good questions create community but I doubt I could defend that, not this late at night. Like a lot of people, I’m searching, not for answers, but for the questions that make answers necessary; meanwhile, we’ve got such a glut of answers that it’s kind of like, who cares? And why? The streets are fucking paved with answers! Just like the road to hell.
I’m very tired –and stoned on Fanta (orange).
To come down out of the clouds, in these essays my only real answer is in the act, the doing, so in the end I know I’ve said something where before there was only silence and I’ve made something where before there was nothing. That may seem like a pitifully small victory but sometimes it gets me by just to answer that emptiness.

Hey, at least one unpaid coach seems to be green-lighting my thinking and writing.

What a way to end! Well, nobody's perfect!

Relax, this post ain't about death! ;)

The trigger for this post was simply an ending line in an essay that I read.  It was in the Economist.  One of the few magazines that I love to read, for the content and for the writing style as well.  (I even put my money where my mouth is, in this case--I am a subscriber!) Those wonderful writers, who always have that Economist way of writing.  In a magazine that is staunchly pro-individual rights and capitalism, the writers remain anonymous:

Why is it anonymous? Many hands write The Economist, but it speaks with a collective voice. Leaders are discussed, often disputed, each week in meetings that are open to all members of the editorial staff. Journalists often co-operate on articles. And some articles are heavily edited. The main reason for anonymity, however, is a belief that what is written is more important than who writes it. As Geoffrey Crowther, editor from 1938 to 1956, put it, anonymity keeps the editor "not the master but the servant of something far greater than himself. You can call that ancestor-worship if you wish, but it gives to the paper an astonishing momentum of thought and principle."

Kind of ironic, right, that the emphasis is on the whole, the product, with no spotlight on the individual writer?  Almost like one of those leftist collectives ;)

Anyway, the ending sentence that impressed me was in a report on China building a new "silk road" via Kazakhstan. 

There are many ways a train can derail.

How awesome!  You need to read the entire essay in order to understand why it is such a wonderful line.

We might remember many opening sentences, like Tolstoy's "all happy families are alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" in Anna Karenina.  Or, Melville's "call me Ishmael" in Moby Dick. Or, of course, Dickens' "it was the best of times it was the worst of times" in A Tale of Two Cities.   But, the final lines don't always get that applause.

My favorite last line is from a movie. From an old movie.  No, not from Casablanca, though that is phenomenal as well.  The one I love, love, as an ending is from Some Like It Hot.  A marvelous final line! ;)

That awful stink? Academic writing!

I am addicted to reading and thinking.  Which is why even as I was getting ready for a full day of meetings and talks, I had to create a "me time" early in the morning, before the activities began, when I could read.

One of the essays I read was Steven Pinker's "Why academics stink at writing."

And then tweeted about it ;)

Of course I liked that essay, for the question that was being tackled there and because of the author too.  After all, it was only slightly more than a month ago that I had even included a video of a talk by Pinker, and the talk was on the godawful academic writing that I was complaining about.  Well, something that I have been complaining about ever since I realized in the early years of graduate school that I had no clue how to write.

Pinker notes there:

The most popular answer inside the academy is the self-serving one: Difficult writing is unavoidable because of the abstractness and complexity of our subject matter. Every human pastime—music, cooking, sports, art—develops an argot to spare its enthusiasts from having to use a long-winded description every time they refer to a familiar concept in one another’s company. It would be tedious for a biologist to spell out the meaning of the term transcription factor every time she used it, and so we should not expect the tête-à-tête among professionals to be easily understood by amateurs.

But then consider the following example I had presented in that post:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

How can anybody possibly defend that writing, right?

I agree with Pinker that it is easy to be an awful writer, and that it takes a great deal of effort--for most of us--to be even remotely decent writers:

Fog comes easily to writers; it’s the clarity that requires practice.

Here is the craziest thing of all--most academics are not clueless that academic writing stinks.  Yet, they continue with this awful practice because, well, there is no penalty!  Where is the incentive for them to write well?  Thus, they are being "rational":

professionals may not bother with this costly self-­improvement if their profession doesn’t reward it. And by and large, academe does not. Few graduate programs teach writing. Few academic journals stipulate clarity among their criteria for acceptance, and few reviewers and editors enforce it. While no academic would confess to shoddy methodology or slapdash reading, many are blasé about their incompetence at writing.

I read.
I tweeted.
Attended committee meetings.
And then popped into a session where researchers were presenting their papers.

A student asked me how I ended up writing op-eds.  I referred him to the Steven Pinker essay.  "Google for 'academic writing stinks'" I told him.

I try.

On not blogging. As in taking a long break from it.

Calm down.
Don't panic.
I am not going anywhere.
I will continue to blog.
Ok?
Breathing easier now?
Good.

There are people who strum their air guitars and imagine themselves to be rock stars. You know a few of them, right?  I can relate to them--by reading, thinking, blogging, and writing op-eds, I imagine I am a writer.  I know my claim to being a writer is as ridiculous as those lunatics pretending to be Eric Clapton.  But, hey, we do whatever that gets us through life.

If I pretend that I am a writer, then I suppose I can also pretend that I have writer's block?  Or that I should take a break from this imaginary qualification in order to get some fresh and original insights?

But, I suppose the best thing about this Walter Mitty alter ego is that I don't ever run out of material to write about.  I mean, think about what you have read until now.  Isn't all that nothing but a truck load of bovine refuse?

Real writers have serious issues because they have reputations to defend.  I don't have any reputation.  No honor and all oblivion.  No wonder that at some point writers quit. For some it is earlier than for others.  Even a celebrated writer like Philip Roth called it quits:

My work happened also to be undoable. Morning after morning for 50 years, I faced the next page defenseless and unprepared. Writing for me was a feat of self-preservation. If I did not do it, I would die. So I did it. Obstinacy, not talent, saved my life. It was also my good luck that happiness didn’t matter to me and I had no compassion for myself. Though why such a task should have fallen to me I have no idea. Maybe writing protected me against even worse menace.
Now? Now I am a bird sprung from a cage instead of (to reverse Kafka’s famous conundrum) a bird in search of a cage. The horror of being caged has lost its thrill. It is now truly a great relief, something close to a sublime experience, to have nothing more to worry about than death.

At least Roth did that after decades of quality writing, unlike:

After “Joe Gould’s Secret,” Joseph Mitchell published nothing new in his remaining 31 years. E.M. Forster published no more novels between “A Passage to India” and his death 46 years later. And then there were those hall of fame figures: J.D. Salinger, who published nothing for the last half of his life, and Harper Lee, whose post-Mockingbird silence should be enough to canonize her, the patron saint of not-artists of any discipline.

Not a problem for us fakes. We can keep going for a long, long time.

So, my dear reader, take it easy--I am not quitting anytime until, well, you know!

source

Is the fateful day just around the corner?

Even after having authored 169 op-ed essays over the years--yes, I counted them a few minutes ago--there is a worry in the back of my mind: what if there is nothing more in me to write about?

This worry is not anything new.  It has been the case for a long time now, though I am not certain when exactly this emotion kicked in.  It is a terrible nightmare.  A nightmare of my own creation, no doubt.  But, it comes up, especially soon after an op-ed is published.

Dreading about failure is not unique to me by any means.  And to write about such a fear is also a typical approach that writers take, I would think.  It is cathartic. Further, if we lower our bars ourselves, then we come out looking good if we do produce something, right? ;)

failure in writing is more of an intimately crushing day-to-day thing. O.K., minute-to-minute. Measured against your ideal of yourself.

You see how that writer describes the failure as an intimate experience that is triggered by measuring "against your ideal of yourself" and yet she writes about it for the entire world?  I tell ya, such public cleansing avoids what would otherwise be a huge expense of gazillions of dollars that we don't have on shrinks!

When I started going down this path of a lowly-paid faculty who wanted to write op-eds, I used to send copies for my father to read--after all, the op-eds are on topics that would interest him too.  Once he asked me how much I got paid for the op-eds, and was shocked to hear me tell him that there was no money involved.  But, hey, there are things we do in life for money, and then there are things we do in life.  If writing is what we do, then writing is what we do whether we get paid nor not, and whether we succeed or fail.

As you get older, rest assured, you accept failure as part of your writing life. You realize the many forms failure can take: There is sentence-to-sentence failure, in which the words fly from your brain out the window or throw themselves on the page like suicide bombers. There is the failure to get on the page what is in your head. There is a failure of will. There is organizational failure, in which you wind up collapsing.
You develop strategies to deal with it all. You develop a kind of sixth sense, a detective’s intuition about what will fail and what won’t. But above all, no matter how much you fail, you still sit down at your computer every day, and you keep going.

Exactly!  It is every single day at the computer reading, blogging, and then every once in a while piecing together an op-ed.  And then worrying that the well has dried up.

But, hey, at least my writing makes sense--even if only occasionally!

BTW, one more round of editing and I will email #170 to the editor. Phew; apparently not this corner! ;)

Neither you nor I is an academic ... if you understand this post!

For a couple of years, the late Denis Dutton, who founded one of my favorite websites ever and one which I religiously check every single day, ran a bad writing contest.  No, you did not write in order to win this championship--I would think that Dutton and his colleagues would have had one hell of a challenge choosing from the bad writing that was in plenty in the academic world.

Consider the following "winner," for instance:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Whereas Renee Zellweger's character in Jerry Maguire famously said, "you had me at hello," chances are pretty good that you did not even read through the "winning" sentence because it had you, I mean had you, at "The move from a structuralist account."

While that sentence, my dear reader, is an extreme, most academic writing is similarly beyond comprehension.  I have always suspected that academics write after a few glasses of wine, and the reviewers and editors read those essays after consuming a few bottles of wine.  There is no way, otherwise, those kind of sentences will ever, ever, end up in print.  Even worse that some even talk that way in conversations and at meetings!

Imagine the horrors when faculty expect students to learn to write like how they do.  Guess what?  That horror happens term after term, in college after college.  Should not surprise, therefore, that at the end of the undergraduate program graduating students come across as even worse off than how they were as mere high school graduates?

The author of this essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education asks, "how many professionals these days, apart from actual academics, write in an academic style?"  Nobody.  Therefore:

The fact that they’re students, and that they’re operating in an academic environment, does not make them academics. Nor will more than a fraction of them go on to become academics, thank goodness. The overwhelming majority won’t be writing academic prose in their professional lives, so why should we be teaching it to them in college, much less high school?

That indoctrination to academic writing is part and parcel of what appears to be the only goal that most faculty have, which is to replicate themselves.  Thus, they actively sell the subjects they teach and try to convert as many students as possible to their own fields of study--the "majors"--and teach students how to think and write the way they do.  Awful.  Simply awful!

I am sure that my colleagues who read my self-evaluation report would not have been pleased with the following sentences (among many others) that I had there:

My approach to teaching has always been about helping students understand the world, and not by any means to impress them with my fluency with the academic jargon, and not to recruit them into majoring or minoring in Geography either. My goal in teaching is to develop in students a commitment to, and an interest in, learning in ways that I hope will also become a lifelong pursuit.

Thus, if ever a student wrote papers with sentences that even remotely resembled that "winning" sentence, my favorite comment on the margin of the paper is this: "what are you trying to say?"

Is it any wonder then that my colleagues do not consider me to be "academic" enough!

ps: one of my exciting moments was when Denis Dutton commented at my blog.  Yes, he did!  I cannot thank him enough for Arts and Letters Daily.

I am in good company!

When I was a kid, the elders often appreciatively commented about the quality of writing in the newspaper that we subscribed to--The Hindu.  After coming to the US, however, I have always been shocked at the atrocious grammar there and wonder whether it was the case even back then, or whether the quality has really deteriorated over the years.

Here in the US, I have often commented to students about the wonderful writing styles in the New Yorker and The Economist.  But, recently, I have been noticing grammar issues in The Economist.  A few weeks ago, I even wrote a sarcastic letter to the editor:

Dear Editor:
I reckon the distinguished newspaper loves the word reckon so much that it reckoned it would make for an interesting reading by using four reckons in the Saudi America piece--two of those reckons in consecutive sentences in the same paragraph.
Who woulda reckoned that!
Sincerely

Of course, the magazine newspaper did not publish that letter.  If they had, you, dear reader, would have known about it by now!

Why write about some old story today?  Glad you asked.

I picked up the mail and the latest issue was in.  On the cover was the image of India's most powerful bachelor (ok, married but living separately.)  Over dinner, I read that lead article, and then glanced through the pages and ended up reading this piece on digital disruption on the farm.  Not really a new story, but a neat commentary that ties a few pieces together.  Which is when my brain caught a spelling mistake.  Do you see what I saw?

Yes, I checked the online version.  Thankfully, that error does not show up there.

Wait, are you still searching for the error?  Tsk, tsk! And I  thought the readers of this blog were incredibly smart people! ;)  Oh well, there is more to life than grammar, right?

BTW, don't even attempt to poin out the writhing problems that you find alot in this blog.  Their not paying me fur this ;)

We need to admit that the required-course college essay is a failure

Every once in a while, I give students in my classes an option to skip out of the required final paper for the class.  No, it is not that they get a freebie.  Instead of the final paper, the option they get to earn the grade is that good old viva voce--oral exam.  A ten to fifteen minutes with me quizzing them in my office.  That's all.

If you ever wanted a demonstration of "faster than a speeding bullet," well, that is how rapidly students negate that offer.  Not even one student is tempted by that offer, it seems.  Ten to fifteen minutes versus a few hours of work and they turn down that offer before I even fully describe it!

Over the years, I have become convinced that the college term paper is an abject failure. Perhaps it works at the Ivies, but I--and the overwhelming majority of us--ain't at one of 'em.  But, of course, the system would easily chuck me out, and there are plenty of colleagues waiting in line to witness that happening, if I were to abandon the requirement of papers when I make abundantly clear that the alternative is even worse, if that is even possible!

I require a lot of writing in the classes that I teach.  No wonder, therefore, that a student has posted this comment at RateMyProfessors.com:

How this class is not a writing intensive class is beyond me. Expect to write 2 pages a week all term with a midterm and final totaling about 7 pages a piece. I received As in every writing class/ Writing intensive class but some how managed only a C+

Thus, there is nothing for me to disagree with the author, Rebecca Schuman, of this essay--from where I borrowed the line for the subject for this post.  Why the preference for the viva voce?

You cannot bullshit a line-ID. Nor can you get away with only having read one page of the book when your professor is staring you down with a serious question. And best of all, oral exams barely need grading: If you don’t know what you’re talking about, it is immediately and readily manifest (not to mention, it’s profoundly schadenfroh when a student has to look me in the face and admit he’s done no work).

At the viva voce, we stare at the reality.  The reality that either one knows or does not.

While Schuman notes that in the context of the required college writing course, the argument is equally applicable to most courses in which we require papers at the end:

We don’t have to assign papers, and we should stop. We need to admit that the required-course college essay is a failure. The baccalaureate is the new high-school diploma: abjectly necessary for any decent job in the cosmos. As such, students (and their parents) view college as professional training, an unpleasant necessity en route to that all-important “piece of paper.” Today’s vocationally minded students view World Lit 101 as forced labor, an utter waste of their time that deserves neither engagement nor effort. So you know what else is a waste of time? Grading these students’ effing papers. It’s time to declare unconditional defeat.

The entire paper-writing is an effing waste of time and effort.  Especially when faculty do not seem to care about giving feedback.

Meanwhile, there is the lure of automatons reading and grading essays.  Fortunately, for people like me, there are a few experts like "Les Perelman, a former director of undergraduate writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology," who rage against the machine:

Mr. Perelman’s fundamental problem with essay-grading automatons, he explains, is that they "are not measuring any of the real constructs that have to do with writing." They cannot read meaning, and they cannot check facts. More to the point, they cannot tell gibberish from lucid writing.

With every passing day, the higher education system seems to be more of a failure than it was the previous day.  Yet, all we do is continue to spin the same wheels.  Uninterested students, self-serving faculty and staff, apathetic public who only care about dollars and cents, together make for a horrible combination.  Perhaps it was always like this and I lived in my own bubble.

"Everybody does not get excited with whatever excites you, Dr. Khé" remarked a student in class.  That truthful vocal comment gets a full score in the viva voce!

I don't get paid for writing. I should sue somebody. Anybody!

I understood early on that it won't be easy, if even possible, to monetize my professional interests and expertise (if any.)  At dinner table conversations, I freely share my "asset" but will have to pay for the consultation with an attorney or physician at the same table.  That is how the world operates.

Thus, when I started writing op-eds, I knew I was giving it away for nothing.  After spending my time, and a little bit of my money, in formally educating myself, I was then spending 45 to 60 minutes to write an op-ed for which I would not get paid anything.  Yet, that is exactly what I chose to do.  Which is why it was one heck of a pleasant surprise when a few years ago the editor at the Register Guard offered to compensate me with a honorarium that might just about pay for dinner for two.  A huge bonus!

There are plenty of reasons why we engage in such writing that does not pay.  At least, in my case, I have a day job that takes care of my expenses.  What about those who like to engage in interests similar to mine, are even more qualified and able than I am, but do not have a regular job?  The web is simply killing their abilities to sell words, leading to this NY Times op-ed with a catchy lead of "Slaves of the internet, unite!"  While it was never easy to have a lucrative career as a professional writer, the internet has certainly made it even tougher for writers to sell their work when so much is being written for free.

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes recalling his own experiences and notes this about the "exposure" element:

ask yourself how often you've seen writers/thinkers/historians/intellectuals etc. in online "conversation." Ask yourself how often you've seen guest-bloggers at sites like The Daily Dish. Do you believe these people to be paid? Do you believe them to not actually be doing work? Tomorrow I will go on television, a prospect that I try (lately unsuccessfully) to avoid. I try to avoid it because it is work. I have to prepare information that I hope to provide. I have to think about what I'm saying. I have to make sure I know what I'm talking about. I have to tell my nervous self to shut up. No one pays me--or any other guests--for these contributions. We work "for exposure."

One simply cannot buy this "exposure" but has to earn it.  Tongue-in-cheek, a colleague commented that I might just about be the most well known academic up and down the Willamette Valley--because of this "exposure" for which I have worked for free.

In a way, it is also this working for free, for exposure, that is behind the idea of internships.  Students provide their time and work for free, or at best for low compensation, knowing that the exposure would pay off.  When I worked as a planner, our agency routinely hired interns.  Private companies hired interns.  Everybody did that.  Some even paid their interns.

Of course, as with anything, here too there were organizations that abused this system--they sucked the energy out of their interns, by essentially treating them like full-time staff without paying them like full-time staff.  Which then led to a law on internships.

As Charles Dickens expressed via the Mr. Bumble character in Oliver Twist, "the law is a ass, a idiot."  It generates all kinds of unintended consequences.  Internship opportunities quickly evaporated.  At public and private agencies alike.  After all, it is easy to comply with the law by not offering internships at all, than it is to make sure that the internship program conforms to the letter of the law.

The latest in this:

Condé Nast, the globally renowned media publisher that produces magazines like Glamour, The New Yorker, and Wired, announced late last month that it will no longer offer its internship program.

Why?

The decision comes in response to a lawsuit filed by two former interns, Lauren Ballinger and Matthew Leib; in June, the interns sued Condé Nast for months of backpay, alleging that the publisher violated federal and state labor laws.

Reason adds this:

Condé Nast is the first major firm to eliminate its internship program since the flurry of unpaid intern lawsuits sprung up this summer. However, lawyers and employers are predicting that many firms may start to cut their programs - or offer just a few paid positions instead of many unpaid ones. So despite advocates' desire to open doors for struggling students, it seems the "Great Unpaid-Intern Uprising" may result in employers closing off opportunities altogether. 

Again, "the law is a ass, a idiot."

Meanwhile, this essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education argues that academics should not write for free.  Ahem, the author has not read Chekov's Uncle Vanya, which I quoted in my essay on academics and research--more than a decade ago--in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  If they know what they are getting, people will not part with their money in order to buy an academic's writings!

I will continue on with my writing for which I don't get paid.  But, hey, if you want to pay me, I am all for it ;)

I am not waiting for a writer's "shining" moment

"I feel like there are lots of writers here in Eugene" she said, as we began the small talk at the checkout counter at my regular grocery store.  Sometimes, I feel like I could write a book simply based on my conversations with the checkout personnel alone.

I smiled as I placed my reusable bag on top of the groceries.

"I have two friends who say they are working on their books" she added.  And then looking at her colleague who was bagging the groceries, she said "and he writes."

I live in a wonderfully unique town and shop at a very interesting store.  One woman who works there has been to different parts of the world thanks to doing Uncle Sam's work.  Another is a former body-builder. And then there are those students at the university.  Old and young, they are all remarkably well-informed.  And they read the paper, too, which is how she knows that I write.

"Yes, I do" I nodded.

"I too dabble in writing" jumped in the bagger.  "I am an English major, so ..." and she shrugged her shoulders.

If not for the couple of people behind me in the line, I would have converted that into a seminar on our respective writings and readings.

"Hey, when it rains all the time, no wonder we sit inside and write" I joked.  Of course, I had to joke--that is what we men do!

"Maybe the writers move here because of the rain" added the bagger.

"Well, hey, that's what the Jack Nicholson character thought he would do by working in that hotel, so he could write, remember?"

A momentary pause and I could almost see the scene playing in her mind.  She smiled.

"So, watch out.  The next time I'm here, it could be "here's Johnny!""

We laughed.

I needed that laugh.  Those folks at the store have no idea how they make my life so much better.

Man can survive on bread alone, but not on honorarium!

A few weeks ago, I did one of those things that I rarely do--went to a gathering of people at a couple's home.  I knew not the couple.  I knew one person, who was involved with the organizing.  The rest of the 15-20 and I were mutual strangers.

I opened the front door and walked in.  The host introduced herself and I did my part.  The usual blah-blah.

And then it was like in those Saturday morning cartoons when you see the light bulb switching on in the character's head.  "Oh, you are the guy who writes columns in the newspaper" she said.

"Yes."

"How does that work?"

I am used to this question now; it has been six years, I think, of regularly writing columns for this paper.  "I am a regular columnist for them, yes, but I am not one of their staff."

"Oh, so if they pay you, it is probably an honorarium, right? Perhaps just about enough to pay for a dinner for two?"

I smiled and nodded.  An irony that pretty much over those very years, it has not been dinner for two in my life.  Well, hey, the honorarium check goes a lot farther when it is for one!

At least I have a day job that pays.  Though, there are times when that also feels like an honorarium.  Writers rarely ever can sustain themselves by writing alone.

As I noted a while ago, it is humbling when I remind myself that the writers of the past had way worse struggles:

Source

Worse not only in terms of earnings, but also in the nature of their daily work that was so far removed from their literary interests.

 In fact, I am glad I am not a full-time writer; the pressure to monetize the writing will be way too intense, as this writer humorously observes:

My experience at Hay was just one example of how I have effectively enslaved myself. I'm sure many fellow authors will identify with the occasion when I took two days to get to Durham and back, in order to talk to 14 people in a damp Scout Hut, three of whom bought a book. Or how about the major book prize which wanted me to be a judge and read some 35 books over the summer?
'Love to,' I said. 'What will you pay?'
'Pay? Oh. Well, we give an honorarium.'
I had to look it up. It's Latin. Apparently it means, 'You should be honoured to be asked, but if you insist, here's a groat and you won't get asked again.'

So, no complaints about the honorarium that I get from the paper.  I wonder if I will ever get a raise though after these six years--I mean, at least to adjust for inflation! ;)

Why write? I would rather not do anything else!

Over the years, I have come to understand how much I have lucked out in being in the profession in which I am, because there is nothing else that I would like to do, even if I were paid a gazillion dollars.  Being here means that I do not have to literally, nor metaphorically, drive around with a bumper sticker along the variations of "I'd rather be ..."

It also means that I find it difficult anymore, to say the least, whenever students approach me with questions on what they might want to do.  I would like to honestly tell them, "it is your life and you need to figure that out, and I have no idea what truly gets you going." 

I suspect that most people I interact with in academia do not truly want to be here.  When colleagues complain about their work, or how they are looking forward to the end of the term, or how they "survived" another week of class, I imagine that they, too, like most people on the planet, have trapped themselves in a "I'd rather be ..." world.

I, unlike those colleagues who are always dreaming of a great escape, look forward to going to classes. To help students understand and interpret the world. To listen to students getting excited about being constructive. So much so that as the academic year draws to a close, I get a depressing sense of "it is all coming to an end." 

In leading such a life, I blog and write opinion pieces for newspapers. I do it more for myself, and rarely for anybody else.  I do these because, well, I would rather not do anything else.  The feedback I get from friends and strangers is a fantastic bonus and I shall surely miss them if they stopped coming.  But, a lack of feedback will not stop me from writing either.

Perhaps it is an addiction?

Writing has always been a pleasure for me—a way to channel a disorderly world into an orderly form. And yet, as with any palliative, writing has an addictive aspect. I often tell my writing students that this comes with the territory. If you want to make writing a career, it must be a compulsion. It must be something that you cannot not do. 

Nope, it is not an addiction as much as it is simply a reflection of who I am.  Like being right-handed.

So, I write.

There are a lot more like me, even those who aren't losers like me, who write because we don't know anything better to do.

lots of us don’t publish… it doesn’t mean we’re wasting our time.

That was the late writer, David Foster Wallace, in a response to a request on feedback on a manuscript, advising that not getting a work published is no cause for despair.

Like most people who end up measuring themselves with the money they own, sometimes writers end up measuring themselves by their publications.  In doing so, they forget that the writing is primarily for themselves and not for others.

Writing for myself is a wonderfully enriching selfish act.

The mystery that is called English grammar

A few years ago, back in California, I requested the English department folks to loan me a graduate student for 30 minutes every week.  The idea was that this student would remind students in my class about the basics of writing, and then as the term progressed, I would pass along to the graduate student problem-patterns in writing-related issues in the assignments, who would then use those real examples in the 30-minute session.

I went this route because as much as I emphasized the importance of writing, I was almost always at a loss when it came to explaining to students why something didn't quite feel correct.  There was one particular occasion when a student raised her hand in class and asked for the difference between "affect" and "effect" because I had crossed out her usage of "affect" and written there that she should have used "effect" instead.

I had no clue how to answer that question.  I was stumped.  I told the class that I merely had a feel for it after all the years of working with the language, and that they had to take it up with the writing folks.

Which is how I ended up asking my colleague, Kim, for a loan, so to speak.  Through her, I worked with quite a few grad students over the two years or so.  They helped me out with the in-class discussions every term.  One of them, Rebecca, said she loved the language so much that her favorite night time readings were typically books on English grammar!

I am sure students who are experiencing me as an instructor for the first time soon find out that I will bug them, bug the crap out of them, about learning to write.  I remind them that there is a long way to go, for me too.

Grammar issues like this, for instance, when punctuation kills :)

Another common error that we often run into:

That same site has this humorous explanation about "affect" and "effect"

It is not that I am a grammar-Nazi, but, ... :)

Quote of the day, on blogging killing good writing

Occasionally over the years I have attempted to argue that factual accuracy is overrated. I won't bore you with the reasons, but it struck me as a good, solid, counterintuitive belief to lug around and display occasionally. Never did it occur to me, until I read Felix's blog post, that it might be possible, without seeming insane, to argue that all aspects of good writing — accuracy, logic, spelling, graceful turns of phrase, wisdom and insight, puns (only good ones), punctuation, proper grammar and syntax (and what is the difference between those two again?) — are all overrated.

Awesome, right?

That wonderful prose was from Michael Kinsley, who worries about the lack of good quality professional writing.

Why write books? Another form of orgasm?

I remember reading a few years ago (age is catching up--can't recall where I read this!) the author noting that there is a book within every person and most of us need to know how to make sure the book stays there and never comes out.  Yet, people write books and most of them are awful.

The NY Times' Bill Keller writes (ht):

Writers write them for reasons that usually have a little to do with money and not as much to do with masochism as you might think. There is real satisfaction in a story deeply told, a case richly argued, a puzzle meticulously untangled. (Note the tense. When people say they love writing, they usually mean they love having written.) And it is still a credential, a trophy, a pathway to “Charlie Rose” and “Morning Joe,” to conferences and panels that Build Your Brand, to speaking fees and writing assignments.

Writing books for self-satisfaction seems more like a polite way of how I refer to most of the book writing that is done within the ivory towers: onanism of the intellectual and literary types!  May produce satisfaction and alter oxytocin levels in the person, but that is all.

Speaking of books written by academics, it would be lovely if professors who list books in their vitas also identified in their annual reports how many copies of the book were sold to buyers other than university libraries.  Most academic journal articles are rarely ever read, and I would hypothesize that most academic books are bought only by university libraries, and then the books gather dust on the shelves.

Full disclosure: I have never written a book, and have no plans to write one--at least for now :) 
I have pretty much stopped reading books by academics too.  Most books are nothing but fluff, and if there is a nugget of wisdom in them, well, it would have been published as a journal article a few years prior to the publication of the book itself.  A 15-page essay almost always contains everything that we would want to know from that 300-page book, and I way prefer the 15-pager.  But then most academic journal articles are also crap--nothing but intellectual onanism.

Now, a collection of Calvin and Hobbes cartoons is a book you ought to own :)

Writing, in 800 words or less

Paul Krugman writes:

If I had my way, we’d require students to write 800-word essays, just for writing and reasoning practice.

I have been doing this for years now.  It forces students to develop well-focused arguments.  There is also one other huge benefit: it minimizes the possibility of Bullshit.  (Come to think of it, we need to impose such word restrictions whenever faculty speak or write anywhere, anytime!  editor: does that include you? Awshutup!)

Anyway, back to Krugman:

It’s really, really hard to say something meaningful in a limited space. And yet, that constraint has its virtues: it forces you to be concise, to figure out what you really need to say and skip the rest, to find turns of phrase that are shorter and usually plainer. And my experience is that the process of doing all that almost always makes the thing read better.

Yep.  While my columns do not have the importance or reach that Krugman's have, I am always aiming for a length of between 675 and 725 words.  Unless the newspaper restricts me to 500 words or less.