MOSTLY MUSIC
Now it is the weekend, so we will sing. This is Julio Jaramillo on Interrogación and it is a beautiful performance. I would like to see the movie from which it comes. Here Jaramillo’s band wins dinner on the house in Cali, Colombia for their singing – a dinner they really need, too.
MOSTLY PROFESSORS
Speaking of dinner and metonymically related matters, I have socialized with a certain type of colleague today and I think I prefer the students. Do people forty and over normally stop eating and begin to think of retirement? I had already felt alienated at thirty, when it turned out that many professors my age were interested primarily in acquiring suburban houses and watching sports on wide screen televisions. When at forty they began to discuss retirement, I felt newly foreign.
At forty-five, people began to lose their appetites. This to me was the most irritating experience yet. There are so many ways in which we are asked to limit our lives, so many sacrifices one must make to be a professor. It is my feeling that we can and should at least eat. When I was younger I watched my weight, but when I became a professor – the job being far more demanding physically than graduate school – it burned so much energy that I began to eat rather like a working man. White beans, stuffed turkey wings, peas, potato salad, green salad, rolls, I needed it all for my strength and so as not to slide out of my clothes.
MOSTLY MEN
I still did not eat as much as an actual man, because men were still thirty years old and packing it away like teenagers. Fifteen years later, however, they became senior citizens in several ways and started ordering half portions, or wanting to share things in restaurants. I hate this because it makes me feel invaded – I cannot have what I want, but must negotiate what I might share – and because it leaves me starving and lightheaded. If I do not know them well and they start to suggest this plan with the waiter already there I have sometimes handed over my own credit card and said “I will have the X.”
Sometimes I speculate that men who do this are keeping several households. People assure me this is not the case, and say that these new habits are a natural result of “aging.” They say I need to get used to the idea of being old. But I am bored walking slowly, discussing “limits,” and eating “meals” the size of first courses. I have been known to call my parents, who are well over eighty, for the sole purpose of having a conversation with people more youthful than some I know of my own age.
MOSTLY FLESH
Does the modern body really spoil so quickly? Or is it merely professordom which takes its toll? I think it is a local phenomenon, as even doctors exclaim: beyond forty with no cancer or heart disease, how remarkable! But if it is a national one, I will either move abroad or become a systematic cradle-robber. To lighten my mood, I have taken the quiz “Which of the Greek gods are you?” chez Unsane. I am Apollo.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
i have missed your words which i can find here at anytime, but those directed to me and most encouraging, i have missed. even when caught in your personal maelstrom, all documented here, you manage to soar…how blessed your students are to have you…peace
At 42, I haven’t lost my appetite yet, and I never intend to. At fancy ladies potlucks at work, I’m the one that signs up to bring cold frosty pints. I hate to cook, and if someone can get away with bringing wine, dammit, I can bring beer! I’ve also come across older people (people my age that is) who have so resigned themselves to being old that they’ve stopped thinking about anything new. They’ve stopped looking around and noticing the world or change or re-awakening to what’s beautiful and hideous. It’s frustrating. And most difficult is their frustration with me. Why can’t I just conform already. Luckily I have a bunch of younger friends and artistic friends who don’t age the same way as academics.
However, I just recently wrote about retiring, which does make me feel old. I just hit the middle of my teaching career, and it really does affect how I look at things, thing about things, like whether or not I should go part time at this late stage (yes) or whether I should hoard my favourite courses or start helping others learn the content (not yet).
Oh yes, I also always bring the drinks! The ladies who actually bake cakes for such events truly amaze me. Interesting, so academics *do* age more quickly! They *certainly* limit themselves more than other people do … that is, the ones without great jobs limit themselves. And truth be told, I also think about retirement, but not in the way they do – not to just sit or go on vacation – but because it would be a way to have income while starting a second, less passive and less geriatrically oriented career.
I am at the stage of life (not numerically that different from either of yours) when life is just beginning for me. Finally I have untangled many of the threads that bound me. So, I’m making use of whatever of youth still remains in me to become as good a kickboxer as my body will allow me to be. I will press forward with this for a while to come. When I come home after my sparring rounds, I attend to my thesis in a cool and reasonable manner. I do not expect to have a very long academic career, but to retire to Africa, to write. In that final stage of my life — in those final rounds — I require of myself only that I pull out all stops to prove what I am capable of. (In boxing training, the final round always has to be the hardest and the fastest.)
I am pretty happy with this formulation that I have set out for my life.
This is the thing – I also feel as though life is just beginning.
And that is a good idea, to plan ahead to only stay in academia a short time (one can always change one’s mind and stay longer, but in academia, where one is constantly waiting for the job offer which will finally make one happy, it is a good idea to have an exit strategy one has control over). Retiring to Africa to write, it sounds great.
Prof Zero I have taught in the US, South Africa, India, and Malaysia, in the last 3 years and I feel relatively sure that the right job is not a place.
In each place I tried to reinvent my passion for academia only to find myself disgusted still the same.
Not the students. Never the students. They are the reason for my calling, what is left of it.
But the politics. Academics. Not intellectuals. You find few intellectuals in universities.
What you do find are tiresome and bloated people who are in the business of academia. They talk of tenure, post-tenure, and spend an awful amount of time footnoting the nothingness of writing for other academics.
In between the lament of a life wasted, even lost, is usual.
And as times ticks on, the distant time-away, and the new tenure, retirement, beckons.
For when we get to retirement, well then we will read and travel and eat.
I feel a lot better about leaving that behind. I am 43 and not tenured anywhere. And don’t care if I ever reach … but I do care that I gave so much of myself to a system/profession that hardly feels engaging anymore.
If even I knew this from jump.
Peace,
Ridwan
ps. beyond eating … what else is there for a middle age man to do? 😉
Beyond eating – ride motorcycles, of course! 😉
I wish I had known this from jump, too! It’s true:
– a system/profession that hardly feels engaging
– trying to reinvent passion as a doomed task: I am sure that is true, I hereby revise my goals and I am now only trying to reinvent calm
– many academics, few intellectuals, oh yeah! – a serious, serious problem
– being committed to the business of academia *and* lamenting a life wasted/lost, very astute
– retirement as the new tenure, LOL! that’s brilliant
– “and when we retire we will travel, read, and eat” … yes that is the fantasy…how hilarious…
How did people get convinced it was normal to endure boredom now in exchange for moneyed leisure later … what about an engaged life now and also later, when did that dream drop out of the picture?
They talk of tenure, post-tenure, and spend an awful amount of time footnoting the nothingness of writing for other academics.
There does seem to be a tendency to opt for safety in academia — even though not many academics drive volvos.
Ah yes, safety.
My father was terrified to be anything but a professor because only professors have absolute job security (or had, in his day). My mother believed that the choice for women was to be one, or to be incarcerated as a housewife. The concept seems to be, live in fear and then limit your life as much as possible so as not to have to feel that feeling too much … or something like that.
[Side note: this actually is a point for a bell hooks style post somewhere in the future: advice as limitation … and at the same time, as an imperfect, but still real expression of concern and love. These ideas are far from original with me but a good short story could be made.]
And, back to the topic of academia: academia and business.
I’d almost rather be in academic administration than a professor because then the fact that it is about academic business would not have to be hidden. Interestingly, professors in order to shore up their reputation as (pseudo) intellectuals have to insist that they could not be administrators – they could not be that crass – administrators handle money, they are in trade, oh dear!
Many faculty seem to feel that by being frightened fuddy-duddies with no business sense they will prove they are “intellectuals” … it is all very limited, narrowly liberal, petit bourgeois, and so on.
That is true Jennifer. The safety option also has many academics writing in ‘safe’ areas and, thereby, producing lopsided bodies of ‘knowledge’.
And the industry is extended into what is published and taught. Some areas are purposefully left out.
In the US the slow death of Black Studies is a prime example. Now these programs are being merged with Ethnic Studies programs … a kind of one stop shop for any recognized difference.
You are right about Volvos … in Portland they drive Suburus with ski racks and bicycle racks.
The Suburu, particularly the station wagon, is the new Volvo for liberal academics in particular.
And they wear sandals with socks while talking smack at Starbucks. ;0)
Peace,
Ridwan
Yes. And one is taught that academia is the space of pure and free thought, but that has of course never been the case – it reproduces the elite classes, duh, and the poor scholars some people admire (actually, some of them, like J.C. Mariategui, were actually admirable) are precisely *not* academics (as Mariategui proudly pointed out).
Death of Black Studies, yes. Although it must be noted: those programs were created when budgets were flush. Now that they are not, an important cost saving measure is to consolidate administrative units. Black Studies is *of course* one of the disciplines targeted, but it is not the only one. You get these weak versions of Ethnic Studies, Comparative Literature, Foreign Languages, and on, and on, wherein everything white, Eurocentric, etc., is hegemonic once again.
Also – following on Ridwan’s comment on the vacuity of academia:
Years ago I went to a conference that should have been politically hip but was not. I said to a friend, does this conference seem terribly conservative to you? He said, it seems academic to me. At that time I thought he was letting the conference, and academia, off the hook. Wouldn’t call the conference retro, wouldn’t expect more of academia. NOW, however, I think I see his point.
ANYWAY. When I was younger I thought of academia as a day job … one existed intellectually and artistically beyond it. I got screwed up on this by two forces:
a) everyone who has so much invested when you are an assistant professor – like when you are pregnant, as Lumpenprofessoriat pointed out – in telling you horror stories, insisting you have no power in the whole thing and must feel overwhelmed;
b) Reeducation, which also insisted you feel powerless and so on.
These things just are not true even *with* all of the defects of academia itself. I am sort of embarrassed to have been under their sway for as long as I have but then, on the other hand, destructive discourses such as those are – destructive.
P.P.S. – or, so as not to excuse academia too much: it is a jerk, which is why one must maintain one’s own sense of integrity at all costs. Reeducation, my nemesis, of course demanded everyone renounce integrity. This is bad advice anyway, but it is worse advice for people who are already struggling against another large institution which is also working to undermine.
And – hm – my thoughts are so variegated on this: I say I was less freaked before Reeducation, which is true, but it is also true that academia is as hard as it is for me to reconcile to because I did not ever expect it to be so narrow – it did not seem so in graduate school.
I wrote a reply to this before, but it got eaten…
Anyway, maybe it is a time (a new era) for a different kind of aca-demon. I could be the first!
Aca-demon, good word. (And WordPress is having trouble, it ate a whole post of mine to my research notes blog, SPTC, yesterday.)
Yes. I am more or less figuring I should be one too. It is interesting – my youngest brother, who is much younger (20 years) is in fact the *most* academically oriented, and suited of the whole family, and who has got a project which would make him a bona fide star, and he refuses to be an academic. He says it is outmoded. He will still do his research in dialogue with academics, but not from within universities.
Why does he feel that academia is outmoded?
Oooh, that could be a long answer. His basic point would be, I think, that he is very interested in / committed to community programs, outreach, the university as a resource in that way – and he does not see many of them actually doing this any more, but rather moving in a narrower, more commercialized, R&D direction.