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.

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 read three wonderful essays/commentaries in two newspapers

Two from the Wall Street Journal, and one from the New York Times.

Two were about sports, and one was about life, liberty, and literature.

The only thing missing--hot coffee as I read them.  If it were at home, or even in my office, I would certainly have been on caffeine as I read them.  But, there I was in the university library, reading the paper the old-fashioned way, occasionally even folding the paper down.

The best of them all was about the reporter watching with Yogi Berra the baseball movie, Moneyball. Who doesn't like Yogi Berra, right?  Jason Gay has written a wonderful piece. In that, Gay notes:

Berra didn't earn a ton of money playing baseball. The game was different then. When Yogi was a 17-year-old prospect from St. Louis, he signed with the New York Yankees for $90 a month. When he returned from World War II, his first major league contract paid him $5,000 a year. Berra worked at Sears, Roebuck & Co. in the winter. He never made more than $65,000 in a season. He never had more than a one-year deal.
But no one squeezed more out of baseball—and gave more back —than Yogi. He played 18 seasons with the Yankees, appearing in 14 World Series, winning ten of them. A catcher, he was a 15-time All-Star, a three-time MVP.
"I was very lucky," Berra says softly.

If only we had more Yogi Berras and his charm and intelligence not only in sports, but in all aspects of life!

The other engaging sports story is as depressing as the Berra essay was uplifting.  It is about the exploding child abuse news out of Penn State.  What an unfortunate irony that the place is Happy Valley!

In contrast to Gay's final comment about Yogi Berra, "Look at the numbers. Look at the life. Yogi Berra is priceless" the equally old and accomplished Joe Paterno seems to be fading fast towards an ugly exit from Penn State:

Paterno has been at Penn State, as an assistant and the head coach, for 62 years, a record. Graham B. Spanier, the university president, was a faculty member and an administrator there from 1973 to 1982 and returned to lead the university in 1995; Curley graduated from Penn State in 1976 and has been the athletic director since 1993; and Schultz graduated from Penn State in 1971 and has worked there ever since. Ultimately, they all serve the monster that rises on 12 Saturdays a year.
The question is, if Paterno heard some ugly stuff about Sandusky in 2002, it is now 2011, and he seems to have not done anything about it since. Maybe he didn’t invite the guy to his house anymore. That I don’t know. But as far as alerting people to the possible predator tendencies of his former assistant, Paterno seems to have been silent. He had a game to coach. He had players to recruit.
...
This seems to be a common malady for big-time coaches. They get so puffed up with trying to go undefeated that they lose sight of reality. Just to run this kind of program demands moral blinkers.

Yes, serving "the monster that rises on 12 Saturdays a year" necessitates moral blinders of various sorts.  How awful!

At Penn State, it was even worse than prostituting education for the sake of a football powerhouse. The entire old-boy system in that university managed to overlook the possibility that children’s lives were being ruined, within the dangerous cocoon of King Football. We need to look beyond the alleged abuses. We need to look at the system that encouraged people to look the other way.
Really, we need to do something about big-time college sports. 

As I often remark in the introductory class that I teach, the market worries not about morals.  Given that we the people are the market, all of us serving this monster that rises up twelve Saturdays are also at fault for having encouraged college sports to become this godawful.

In a wonderful essay about liberty and literature, Mario Vargas Llosa talks up free market and liberty, even while noting that:

There are those who in the name of the free market have supported Latin American dictatorships whose iron hand of repression was said to be necessary to allow business to function, betraying the very principles of human rights that free economies rest upon. Then there are those who have coldly reduced all questions of humanity to a matter of economics and see the market as a panacea. In doing so they ignore the role of ideas and culture, the true foundation of civilization. Without customs and shared beliefs to breathe life into democracy and the market, we are reduced to the Darwinian struggle of atomistic and selfish actors that many on the left rightfully see as inhuman.

Llosa concludes:

The search for liberty is simply part of the greater search for a world where respect for the rule of law and human rights is universal—a world free of dictators, terrorists, warmongers and fanatics, where men and women of all nationalities, races, traditions and creeds can coexist in the culture of freedom, where borders give way to bridges that people cross to reach their goals limited only by free will and respect for one another's rights. It is a search to which I've dedicated my writing, and so many have taken notice. But is it not a search to which we should all devote our very lives? The answer is clear when we see what is at stake.

Indeed.  This is no different from my position as a Libertarian Democrat. More than me, my parents remember all too well my teenage years as a Communist sympathizer before I, and as Llosa writes "abandoned the Marxist myths that took in so many of my generation."

So, there, three wonderful essays.  Read them. Share them.