Dimes from the Cinders

Note to self: if you’re eventually fortunate enough to start getting some good stuff published, Mike, and if you’re ever fortunate enough to get yourself to professor-land, please don’t assign your own stuff as required seminar reading material. Cause when you have your students discuss your stuff, it’s so easy to slip into them discussing you, and that sets up some nasty alignments. You’ll have the ones who give you the “Oh it was so good to read” and you’ll have the ones who won’t, and those ones who won’t — if they raise any questions — are gonna look to at least some of the other students like they’re attacking you. And there’s no good way to answer those questions that pleases everybody — you, the believers, the sycophants, the questioners.

Bet y’all can’t guess what happened in seminar tonight.

Better yet, here’s the bonus question: guess who the questioner was?

Yeah. And I should know better, too; I mean, I know I’ve got that super-critical streak, and I also know I’m socially pretty shy — your basic tortured-geek combination — and you put those together in a seminar where you don’t know any of the other students and you’re gonna come across as the guy who only opens his mouth to attack, no two ways about it. I usually try to be pretty good about this stuff, but tonight was a disaster, ’cause the prof went immediately defensive and turned the questions I was raising about the politics of research as manifested in the thing we read into questions about the politics of the prof’s research, and I didn’t realize it until too late.

Which is too bad, because I thought there was some useful stuff that could’ve come out of tonight’s discussion, if it had been a discussion about the politics of research rather than about the prof. Stuff about how poststructuralist research practitioners acknowledge the power of language but seem to often deny the power and privilege of their own discursive positions as researchers. Stuff about how “the tension embedded within the term economy between management (as a practice of intervention) and system (that which manages itself) has periodically loosened and tightened, drastically changing the meaning of the word” (Gibson-Graham, New Keywords 1), and how, now, “As a system the economy has been reduced to the market, and as a style of calculation and management, it has taken hold of all manner of human interactions” (5). But I’m not really feeling like working through that stuff tonight; it’d be like picking dimes from the cinders of the day.

I got home, I cooked dinner — spicy tender curried beef in a cardamom and tomato and yogurt sauce, over brown rice — and put the leftovers in the fridge with the hoppin john and the roast pork with peppers and marjoram and juniper berries, I’ve been cooking like a fiend this week and no one to eat it with, and blasted some Patti Smith and put together teaching materials for tomorrow’s classes (which I’m looking forward to, since actual in-the-classroom teaching time almost inevitably makes me feel good and useful and productive and, quite often, pretty dang happy) and some stuff for the classroom research project, and played kill-the-hand-in-the-sock with the kittens, and blasted some more Patti Smith, and washed the dishes, and now I feel a little better.

Washing dishes is good that way.