Keep the Humanities, Lose the Fetish

I recently spoke with Leah Falk over at MFA Day Job about the state of higher education in the humanities and the pursuit of academic and nonacademic jobs. It was a fruitful conversation. Here's an excerpt:

Leah: Among MFA students, especially those who come right out of undergrad, I’ve sometimes encountered the attitude that “I don’t have any other skills” but this particular kind of writing. Which makes me kind of mad, because out of necessity I feel like I’ve discovered all sorts of skills and interests in the working world that I wouldn’t necessarily have had to countenance in grad school, or if I’d gone straight from grad school to an academic job, etc. Do you encounter anything similar in English Ph.D. students, or do you think they tend to have a better-rounded sense of their own range of abilities?

Brian: Oh I absolutely encounter that among Ph.D. students, and am guilty of it myself. I still find it somewhat difficult to conceive of what the day-to-day experience of a lot of nonacademic jobs are like. But the important thing to bear in mind is, with academic jobs, so much of the actual work is basic white collar tedium–answering emails, attending meetings, serving on committees, etc. The basic skills that comprise 80-90% of an academic job are virtually identical to the majority of nonacademic white collar jobs out there.

I don’t know about you, but I see it as a two-pronged problem: on the one hand, an anxiety about being able to DO a nonacademic job, and on the other hand, an anxiety about not being FULFILLED by a nonacademic job. In both cases, I think that anxiety is fueled by a poor sense of what both an academic job and a nonacademic job actually entail.

Leah: Yeah, I agree. I think the fear of 9-5 (which I was totally guilty of, and now that I DO work 40 hours a week, it hasn’t totally gone away) comes largely from not being able to imagine any kind of stimulation coming from that rigid a schedule. I think I became more comfortable with a non-academic career path when I realized I’d have just as much time (or more) to write coming home at 5 pm (and not bringing much work home with me) as I would if I were teaching 3 courses a semester.

The whole conversation is worth a read.

If I Ran the Zoo

My last post, in which I shared a paper that I gave at Michigan State University's "Neoliberalism and Public Higher Education" conference, quickly became the most popular blog entry I've ever posted. I was heartened by the positive response, and wanted to follow up on it.

It's important to emphasize that I really do love my job. The day-to-day experience of planning lessons, teaching classes, and consulting with students is immense fun. My colleagues at the writing center are tremendously collegial and pleasant to work with, and there are many ways in which my department is supportive of my professional development. I'm a best case scenario in a lot of ways. Still, as a best case scenario, my experience illustrates what I would characterize as systemic problems in how graduate students are prepared for the job market and how contingent faculty are treated.

So what would I do if I ran the zoo? Here are five things I would change if I could.

1. Schedule course offerings with a view to maximizing the number of full time, full year faculty hires.

I appreciate the headache that is course scheduling for department chairs. Enrollments fluctuate, professors get sick--all manner of last minute changes affect what courses are offered from one semester to the next, and who is hired to teach those courses. Consequently, some faculty might need to be hired on a single semester or part time basis. But from the faculty member's perspective there is an immense difference between a year of guaranteed employment and a semester of guaranteed employment. Departments could do more to minimize this semester-to-semester uncertainty. One significant step would be to take those big intro-level courses like Freshman Writing that are typically taught by contingent faculty, and offer an equal number of sections of those courses in both semesters. Departments could also offer more opportunities for Graduate Student Instructors to teach upper level classes when professors become unavailable at the last minute. Graduate students' funding sources are more flexible, so if departments offered graduate students opportunities to defer research fellowships and gave them financial incentives to teach courses at the last minute, then departments could rely on them more to fill these vacancies, instead of relying on part-time, short term adjunct positions.

2. Revise the PhD curriculum to genuinely prepare graduate students for the academic job market and for the work of a professor.

When I was a student, the English Ph.D. program at Michigan involved two years of coursework (during which you took 3-4 courses per semester), one year of studying for and taking prelim exams (during which you took one course per semester), and 2-4 years of dissertation work (during which additional coursework was optional). Ph.D. candidates had six years of guaranteed funding--a first year fellowship, a year serving as a Teaching Assistant to a professor teaching a large 300-level literature class, and four years teaching writing classes--with other fellowships available to extend students’ time to degree and/or replace teaching. There were two 3-credit courses that every student was required to take: Introduction to Graduate Studies in the first semester of the first year, and Pedagogy in the first semester of the second year. In the first semester of the third year, we participated in a not-for-credit teaching circle for an hour once a week, designed to provide practical support during our first semester teaching writing and led on alternating weeks by professors or graduate student mentors. Other than those, the courses were similar to undergraduate seminars, only with longer final papers and longer readings, including more literary theory.

Certain aspects of this program do an excellent job of preparing students for academic work, but there is substantial room for improvement. Introduction to Graduate Studies served mainly as a bonding opportunity for the incoming cohort, and while I value the friendships I made through that course, it did not contribute in a meaningful way to my professional development. The same goes for Pedagogy, a course that I took while concurrently serving as a Teaching Assistant for the first time ever. This was far too early for me to meaningfully understand the theoretical underpinnings of college teaching, for a literature course or a writing course (the later of which I had zero practical experience with).

If I were designing a graduate program, I would have no required courses in the first year, allowing students those two semesters to explore courses in their fields of interest. In the first semester of the second year, I would require all students to take a 3-credit course titled, “Writing for Academic Publication.” The course would be a writing workshop where students would be required to revise a seminar paper written during their first year, and submit it for publication by the end of the semester. Students would be allowed to repeat the course every year if they wished. Given that a publication record is a requirement for so many jobs, it only makes sense to integrate this requirement into the curriculum.

I would keep the funding structure and teaching schedule the same, but make the weekly teaching circles required all year in both the second and third years, so graduate student instructors would have regular, ongoing access to resources and new, diverse ideas for lesson plans, class activities, grading techniques, and classroom management. I would delay the 3-credit Pedagogy course until students’ fourth year, after students had had a year’s worth of experience teaching literature and a year’s worth of experience teaching writing, and after they had completed their prelim exams and begun dissertation work. The purpose of the course would be to examine pedagogy more theoretically, from the vantage point of an instructor with practical experience. The final project of the course would be to write a sample syllabus for a survey course in their teaching field, and to write a draft of the statement of teaching philosophy that they would have to submit for job applications.

With these changes to the curriculum, graduate students would have two of the most important components of a successful job application--a publication and a teaching portfolio--under their belts by the end of their fourth year. But scholarly writing and teaching are only two of the three prongs that comprise a professorship. Many graduate students have little to no experience with the third prong--service. So much of the day-to-day work of academia is attending departmental meetings, developing curriculum, planning events, etc., but graduate students can go years without any awareness of this part of the job. But this one’s an easy fix: nominate all students to positions on committees at the start of every year, and make an expectation of graduate student service part of the departmental culture. This is already standard practice in other departments at Michigan, such as Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

3. Provide PhD students with substantive opportunities to explore career alternatives.

I occasionally hear stories from older alumni of my PhD program about professors who would scoff at the suggestion that students would want to pursue any career other than a tenure-track professorship at a research university. I’m happy to say that those days are behind us. Professors get how difficult the job market is, and get how unappealing the tenure track life can be, even for those who can achieve it. The stigma of alternative career paths is pretty much gone, in my experience. The only problem now is, nobody knows what those alternative career paths actually are, or how to find them. Professors are at a loss as to how to advise their students who are interested in pursuing nontraditional career paths (either instead of or alongside the pursuit of professorships), and departments are clearly struggling with how to provide resources to their students.

“Alt-Ac” is all the rage, and departments have done some good work connecting students with Alt-Ac career opportunities. This usually means work in libraries, in academic administration, and in publishing. Sometimes it also means teaching in high school. Sometimes it means teaching in community colleges, which really should just be considered “Ac,” since it isn’t really “Alt.”

This is a good start, but it doesn’t go far enough. What we need isn’t simply “Alt-Ac” but also “Non-Ac.” I’m frequently told that the skills I’ve developed over the past nine years--research, writing, classroom management, etc.--translate to other professions, but rarely can people tell me what those professions are, where to find them, and how exactly to make that translation from an academic to a nonacademic context. Departments should work more closely with their universities’ career centers, and host regular events connecting graduate students with people in the tech industry, in the advertising industry, in nonprofit organizations, in state, federal, and local governments, and in the myriad other fields where they could potentially find stable, stimulating employment.

4. Open up (and actively welcome) contingent faculty to professional development resources that are available to graduate students and professors.

This May, Michigan’s graduate school will be hosting a two day seminar titled “What Now? Career Paths Paths for Ph.D.s in the Humanities.” If you follow that link, notice the bold text: “This event is limited to University of Michigan Ph.D. students who began doctoral study at U-M between Summer 2011 and Fall 2013.” As an alumnus and faculty member who is actively seeking more stable employment, seeing this was a smack in the face. Admittedly, this is a program being run by the graduate school, not the department, but it should be open to alumni as well. As for the department, if they are going to rely on contingent faculty who are likely only to be there for a year or two, they should at least provide that faculty with these kinds of opportunities as well.

5. Consider phasing out tenure.

Hear me out: If we’re going to criticize the problems at the bottom rung of the faculty ladder, we should also reflect on how things work at the top. I’ll be honest, I question whether in the twenty first century the tenure system succeeds at what it sets out to do. It is important to protect academics’ jobs so that they can conduct disinterested research, controversial research, and slow research that requires many years to pay off. But tenure only offers those protections to those academics who are already among the university’s least vulnerable employees: those who have achieved the highest level of respect in their field. For those on the tenure track, the drive to publish undermines any interest in producing genuinely creative and worthwhile scholarship. And for most, the criteria for achieving tenure devalues teaching and service in ways that particularly hurt women and people of color, as well as anyone who actually wants to put effort into their teaching.

I don’t have a better model for how to protect academic freedom, and of course I believe that existing tenure commitments should be honored. But universities would do well to rethink tenure, and either redefine the criteria by which it is achieved so as to fix the pressure cooker that is the tenure track, or stop making new tenure track hires altogether. If part time and semester-to-semester faculty hires were eliminated, it might benefit the university to institute a system where all faculty were fixed-term faculty, with contracts from one to ten years in length.

Obviously some of these changes are easier implemented than others, and all are easier said than done. And of course, someone with different priorities might suggest completely different changes. But from where I sit, thinking about these kinds of changes might help make the university’s English department a more equitable, more secure, and more hopeful place to work.

One out of Nine

Yesterday I attended a conference titled Neoliberalism and Public Higher Education at Michigan State University. I presented on a panel titled "Uncertain Career Paths for Graduate Students in a Neoliberal Context." What follows is a lightly edited version of my paper.

One out of Nine

I began pursuing a Ph.D. in English at the University of Michigan in the Fall of 2006. My incoming cohort had nine students--seven in English Language and Literature, two in English and Women’s Studies. When we entered the program, all of us aspired to the tenure track. The last of us just defended her dissertation this January, making ours the first cohort in several years with a 100% completion rate. Nine years out, only one of us has a tenure track professorship. Interestingly, he was the first of us to finish, having completed his degree in only five years, and he was hired by California State University the same year he defended. Another one of us has a full professorship at a small university that does not offer tenure, where he teaches a 4-1-4 load--that’s four courses in both the Fall and Spring terms, and one intensive course during their “J-Term” in January. While his position is roughly the equivalent of a tenure-track job, the teaching load makes it barely possible for him to keep his head above water, and the university’s precarious economic situation places him at some risk (It says a lot when the guy working for the California university system has the most stable job). Another one of us earned a prestigious postdoc at the University of Chicago, which she left to join a nonprofit. Another, who had left a job as a lawyer in order to pursue her Ph.D., now has an administrative staff position at U-T Austin. Another now teaches high school. Another is a stay-at-home parent. And three of us now work as contingent faculty.

That’s the camp to which I belong. I defended my dissertation in the Summer of 2013. In the Fall of 2013, Michigan’s English department hired me as a lecturer. It was from this vantage point where the vagaries of the corporatized university became apparent. Now, at this point, it’s important to note that Freshman writing courses are the lifeblood of English departments. They contribute massively to the department’s enrollment numbers, and they provide graduate students with employment as instructors. This is despite the fact that there is no real reason why writing courses should be housed in an English department as opposed to a separate Composition department--those who study literature are no better qualified to teach writing than those in any other humanistic discipline, and are significantly less qualified than those who study Rhetoric and Composition or English Education. Nonetheless, the fact that every student is required to take Freshman Writing is essential to the health of the department.

When I joined the program in 2006, the tacit understanding was that students would go on the job market in their last year of dissertation work, and if they had not gotten a job by the time they defended, they would be hired as a lecturer, which would provide a buffer year and a second opportunity to secure a tenure track position. By the time I became a lecturer, that understanding had changed. While my cohort boasted only nine students, the cohorts below me averaged at 16 students apiece, meaning that more writing classes were going to graduate students, leaving less for lecturers. Also, most undergraduates want to get their writing course out of the way in their first semester, meaning that far more sections of that course are offered in the Fall than in the Winter. Now, departments could offer fewer sections of Freshman writing in the Fall and more in the Winter, forcing undergraduates to rearrange their first year course schedules but offering more lecturers employment for the full academic year, but instead they acquiesce to consumer demand, and consequently, many lecturers now only enjoy employment in the Fall.

This is the position I found myself in in December of 2013, when the pink slip showed up in my mailbox. In the Winter of 2014 I took a temp position at the library editing digitized texts. But I was fortunate--in the Fall Michigan rehired me as a lecturer, with a joint appointment in the English Department and the on-campus writing center. And this time around I was lucky enough to be rehired for the Winter semester--though I was operating under the assumption that I wouldn’t be until I got word of the reappointment in December.

I recognize that I’m relatively privileged. Lecturers at the University of Michigan make a living wage with generous health benefits, and the workload is manageable--most lecturers teach only three courses per semester, and because I’m jointly appointed in the writing center, I only teach two courses per semester and work ten hours per week as a writing consultant. And I’m privileged in a hell of a lot of other ways--I’m a straight cisgendered white dude who speaks English as his first language. I don’t have kids, or a disability, or debt. I went to college on a scholarship and started graduate school at 22. I’m physically and financially healthy enough to make the sacrifices that academia asks, and don’t have to put up with institutional biases about my race or sex. I’m the bearded, bespectacled, tweed-blazer-wearing nerd that most people picture when they close their eyes and imagine a graduate student, and even I think the system is not working. And I can assure you that my degree of privilege is by no means the norm.

But a lot of ink has already been spilled discussing the various injustices of adjunctification. I don’t want to talk about the problems of underpayment or underemployment so much as the problems of unstable employment. What strikes me are the contradictions inherent in the way that humanities departments frame contingent faculty positions as a kind of way station--a transition job between graduate school and the tenure track. On the one hand, professors will often advise their graduate students to be wary of the adjunct route, as taking adjunct jobs requires a heavy teaching load that will deprive young scholars of the opportunity to write and publish. And on the other hand, with no viable alternative, newly minted Ph.D.s take these positions because they feel pressure to have continuity of employment on their CVs. This seemed at least somewhat viable back in 2006, when I was told that a year-long lectureship was the norm. But now, for the past two years, when the MLA job list has come out in the Fall, I’ve found myself in the position of needing to carry out a dual search: searching for tenure track positions that would start in the following Fall, while simultaneously searching for temporary positions that would start in January. And while a tenure track job is the ultimate goal, finding a job for the winter has been a lot more pressing.

All the while, concerns begin to emerge about the problem of a “stale” Ph.D. and of remaining tapped into your scholarly community. Here too, my university’s model of the lectureship as a way station on the way to a tenure track position is plagued by contradiction. For example, the writing center where I work offers lecturers up to $1,500 to attend one conference a year. But you have to apply for those funds in the same semester that the conference is taking place. So, if I had wanted to attend the American Culture Association’s conference on April 1, I would have had to register for the conference by December of last year, before knowing if I had the job that would pay for the registration fee and travel expenses. Consequently, keeping up with the scholarly conversation in your field becomes nearly impossible, let alone doing any actual writing. When teaching becomes your full time job, and the draconian job application process becomes your second full time job, your job as a scholar falls by the wayside. This is the central irony of the system as it is set up now--constantly having to apply for jobs makes you substantially worse at your job. This is all the more true if you move across the country for a one year visiting professorship, as many people I know have, and even more so if you have a partner, whom you either have to separate from or ask to upend their lives to move with you.

Contingent faculty also have difficulty finding a community within their home department, thanks to various microaggressions that mark their day-to-day working environment. I, for instance, have my own office--something I couldn't say last year--but it’s in a basement with no window. I have a phone, but it’s incapable of making outside calls. This can be particularly jarring when making the transition from graduate student to lecturer at the same university. Despite being both a contingent faculty member and an alumnus, when walking the halls of my department I feel less like a colleague and more like Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused, the guy who stuck around at his old high school a little too long. I remember the moment I realized I had been missing out on workshops and talks from visiting scholars because I was no longer on the graduate student listserv, and thus had been missing a large number of the departmental announcements. I missed out on a lot of good free meals that way. The uncanny feeling of being excluded from resources at your home institution is deeply unsettling.

If this is the life that a recent graduate from a top-tier R1 institution can expect two years after his dissertation defense, then what are we to do? The simple answer, proffered by many, is to opt out of the contingent faculty world altogether. But if we opt out of university teaching altogether, what are we going to opt into instead? As it is, I have no good answers. The two most common alternatives offered to those in my position are publishing and academic libraries--two fields that have depreciated almost as much as humanities professorships have.

The only advice that I could offer to any current graduate student facing this climate is, keep your eyes open for a “plan B” starting right now--don’t wait and see what happens after a year on the academic job market. Because as terrible as the job application process is, at the very least, the MLA Job List does provide a centralized clearinghouse of jobs that you can apply for. Other fields don’t have that. For an academic, perhaps the most perplexing thing about facing uncertain career paths is, where the heck do you find nonacademic jobs that you (a) are qualified for, (b) can sell yourself as qualified for, (c) can make a living at, and (d) wouldn’t be miserable doing? In the past two years, while plugging away as a contingent faculty member, I’ve been exploring my options, and I’ve heard the word “networking” more times than I did in the seven years I spent in graduate school. Having no actual networking skills, I’ve fallen back on that old chestnut, nepotism. I was invited to this conference by my mother, and at the moment my best career option is teaching at a prep school in Boston, a job I only found out about because it’s my fiancee’s old school and she’s Facebook friends with her former teachers. And people say the world isn’t a meritocracy!

As difficult as it is, however, if someone asked me if I think people should go to graduate school in the humanities, I wouldn’t say “no.” I would say no if it involved going into debt. But the stress and financial uncertainty aside, I am still a believer in the humanities. Two weeks ago I attended a symposium in honor of Patsy Yaeger, an immensely influential scholar in the field of American literature, who passed away recently from ovarian cancer. She worked closely with several of my friends, and her office was right across the hall from mine. I sat in this symposium and listened to renowned scholars who had come to Ann Arbor to remember Patsy’s legacy, and they did so not simply by eulogizing her, but by honoring the ways in which she creatively, thoughtfully, and joyfully made them think about the world differently and experience it more fully. Working alongside people united by a shared love of literature, and of applying a critical gaze to language and culture--that is a noble profession. Ultimately, we need to work towards a system where more than one out of nine people deemed qualified for that profession can obtain it.

The Love Actually Drinking Game

More like Drunk Actually

Love Actually is a divisive film. But whatever you think of it, it can make for a great drinking game. You need is nine people and a variety of drinks. Place nine slips of paper in a hat, representing the movie's nine plot lines:

1. Billy Mack and Joe
2. David and Natalie
3. Mark and Juliet
4. Jamie and Aurelia
5. Harry and Karen
6. Daniel and Sam
7. Sarah and Karl
8. John and Judy
9. Colin

Each person takes a plot line out of the hat and drinks at a different time:

1. Drink every time Bill Nighy calls his manager fat.
2. Drink every time Hugh Grant looks awkward or befuddled.
3. Drink every time Rick from The Walking Dead looks longingly at Kiera Knightley.
4. Take a drink for every joke in the Portuguese subtitles.
5. Drink each time you get the sense that Alan Rickman will cheat on Emma Thompson.
6. Drink every time Liam Neeson says something that seems mildly inappropriate to say to a nine-year-old mourning his mom.
7. Drink every time Laura Linney's phone rings.
8. Take a drink for each simulated sex scene between Bilbo and Joanna Page.
9. Whoever is assigned Colin has to not drink all movie, then chug four Budweisers when Colin goes to Wisconsin. They have to finish all four by the time he has sex with the four American women.

Now the most important rule: When Rufus (Rowan Atkinson) makes his two appearances, everybody drinks.

Of course this essentially means drinking at least once each time your plot line comes up. I haven't counted it up to see who would get the drunkest in this game, but everyone's guaranteed to get good and sloshed. You could, if you wanted to, add another dimension by assigning each plot line a special drink--off the top of my head, I'm thinking Irish whiskey for Liam Neeson, London gin for Hugh Grant and so on. Rowan Atkinson's appearances might deserve champaign, or perhaps a drink involving a cinnamon stick.

In any case, this overcomes my main complaint with most drinking games, which is that everyone simply drinks when x, y, or z happens, which is a fun activity, but not much of a game. Giving everyone a role keeps things moving and adds a sense of interactivity. Anyway, enjoy responsibly!

In Defense of The Simpsons' Later Seasons

In 1989, television blessed us with two gifts: Twin Peaks and The Simpsons. Both were eye-opening; for many members of my generation, these shows showed us what television could do, what pop art could do--indeed, what any art in any medium could do. Both shows boasted a knowingness about their medium and genre, combined with a desire to blow up the conventions of that medium and genre in ways that earned them the now somewhat trite descriptor "postmodern."

One of those shows is coming back; another never left. People have mixed feelings about the former: many are justifiably skeptical that, at this point in their careers, David Lynch and Mark Frost are capable of recapturing what made the show great 25 years ago. But most people--many of whom harbor lingering feelings of frustration about how network meddling led to a disappointing second season, premature cancellation, and inadequate closure in the form of Fire Walk With Me--seem genuinely excited about the show's return.

People also have mixed feelings about the latter, with many feeling that The Simpsons has overstayed its welcome. In fact, during a discussion of Twin Peaks, I was recently challenged to make an argument for the past 15 seasons of The Simpsons. Well, okay, here it goes.

First, some very general TV history: Some time around the late 90s (I'm not sure exactly when), the economics of network television necessitated the inclusion of an additional commercial break, meaning that half hour sitcoms went from about 24 minutes of content broken into three acts, down to 21 minutes of content broken into four acts. This change fundamentally altered the style and content of TV comedy. On older shows like Cheers and Seinfeld, the comedy tends to arise from the plot, and those shows took time to introduce guest characters, place the characters in a situation, explain that situation, and allow tension to build before a punchline. Network shows in the 2000's don't have that luxury, and successful shows of the new millennium, like 30 Rock or Parks & Recreation, have to be punchier in their humor, with jokes that rely on quick first impressions or on running gags that don't need to be set up. This change in story structure also explains the rise of the cutaway gag on shows like Scrubs and Family Guy, as well as the quick flashback on shows like How I Met Your Mother. It even plays a part in the ascendance of single-cam sitcoms over multi-cam sitcoms, since single cam allows for faster pacing, as does the lack of a laugh track.

Some may say that this change was creatively stifling, but really, it's a matter of taste. Personally, I'll take the higher joke density of 30 Rock over the thick plotting of Cheers any day. But it's undeniable that the transition hurt a lot of sitcoms. A lot of writers' rooms, including The Simpsons', were filled with people accustomed to the three act structure who couldn't figure out how to be funny in four acts. Right around the turn of the century, a lot of shows like Friends and The Simpsons saw a noticeable dip in quality. It didn't help that The Simpsons' showrunner at the time was Mike Scully, who simply wasn't that good of a writer. Scully was responsible for penning such decidedly mediocre episodes as "Beyond Blunderdome" (the Mel Gibson episode) and "The Parent Rap" (in which a judge orders Homer and Bart to be tied together by a tether). Scully's tenure as showrunner, from 1997 to 2001, was around the time that a lot of people from my generation stopped watching the show regularly.

When people wax nostalgic about The Simpsons, they often invoke episodes like "Homer at Bat," "Kamp Krusty," or "Marge vs. the Monorail"--episodes from what is considered the show's peak, the third and fourth seasons.

You know who was showrunner during those seasons? Al Jean.

You know who took over after Mike Scully in season 13, and has been showrunner ever since? Al Jean.

Now, I'm not saying that the show is as good now as it was in 1993. So much has changed--about the show, about television, about American culture, and about our generation--that that sort of evaluative claim strike me as an apples-and-oranges problem. What I am saying is that The Simpsons of the past ten years has significant merits that deserve appreciation on their own terms--that the show, as run by Al Jean and written by a staff that knows the four act structure--manages to maintain the spirit of the original while displaying a sensibility that is different, but no less valid.

I've been watching a lot of The Simpsons World, the new app featuring every episode ever, and as the random shuffle feature jumps from early season episodes like "Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie" to recent episodes like "Married to the Blob," something interesting happens. I find myself feeling the same nostalgia that everyone feels for the old episodes, but my familiarity dulls the experience of actually watching them, while the episodes of the past ten years--some of which I've seen once, some of which I've never seen--feel surprisingly fresh. The argument that The Simpsons has lost its satiric edge feels less convincing when rewatching episodes like "There’s Something about Marrying" or "Smoke on the Daughter," the latter of which features Homer smacking a cigarette out of Lisa's hand and shooting it four times with a handgun, exclaiming, "I can't believe how easy it's in this country to get cigarettes!" This quick gag playing on Homer's cognitive dissonance vis-a-vis guns and cigarettes isn't even the best satiric line in the episode; in another scene, Bart tells Homer,  "Dad, you never win in a fight against animals. Remember your war with the worms?" to which Homer replies, "That was not a defeat, that was a phased withdrawal."

The more you look, the more moments like this you find in episodes from the past ten years: Julian Assange inviting the Simpsons over for "movie night" consisting of an Afghan wedding being bombed ("At Long Last Leave"); Moe conspiring with Neil Gaiman to steal credit for a YA novel ("The Book Job"); an episode set in the 90's that concludes with this dialogue:

Homer: At least we know there'll never be a President worse than Bill Clinton. Imagine, lying in a deposition in a civil lawsuit. That's the worst sin a President can commit!
Marge: There will never be a worse President. Never.
Homer: Never. ("That 90's Show")

These moments don't serve as cultural touchstones, not because they aren't as witty or insightful as material from The Simpsons' earlier episodes, but because we as a culture have moved on from them. The higher brows have South Park, lower brows have Family Guy, and The Simpsons is an afterthought. But I sense that, from The Simpsons' perspective, that's just as well. The show's status as the old grey mare of the primetime animation landscape is freeing, affording them the space for experimentation in storytelling structure--as in "The Seemingly Never Ending Story," "Eternal Moonshine of the Simpsons Mind," and the "future" trilogy: "Future-Drama," "Holidays of Future Past," and "Days of Future Future." They've also experimented artistically, especially after their transition to HD. The show recently received praise for its Lego episode "Brick Like Me," but that episode's spirit of playing with artistic styles is on display in "Married to the Blob," with its tribute to Hayao Miyazaki; and "Yokel Chords," with its "Dark Stanley" segment; as well as in "MoneyBART," "Bart Stops to Smell the Roosevelts," "Diggs," and "Clown in the Dumps," with opening credits produced by guest animators Banksy, John Kricfalusi, Sylvain Chomet, and Don Hertzfeldt, respectively.

But of course, the heart of the show isn't its satiric content or its artistic content, but its humane treatment of its own characters. Everyone on The Simpsons is, in one way or another, a lovable loser, and at a time when Seth McFarlane and others often present deeply misanthropic views of their own characters, The Simpsons provides us with ways to empathize. In the past ten years, the show has given secondary characters like Moe and Comic Book Guy some genuinely sweet love stories, and has presented us with guest characters who we find ourselves genuinely caring about. Last year's episode, "Diggs," stands out in my memory. While in no way the classic that, say, "Stark Raving Dad" is, "Diggs" presents us with an view of mental illness that is as compassionate and perhaps even more real.

The most recent "Treehouse of Horror" is a brilliant example of The Simpsons at its best, featuring one segment in which Bart and Lisa attend school in Hell, and another parodying the films of Stanley Kubrick. The final segment sees the family haunted by the ghosts of their former selves. Lisa tells the ghosts, "Noble spirits, your time has passed"--likely a nod to all of those who feel that the show has overstayed its welcome. But Lisa isn't saying that the show's time has passed, only that the version of the show that existed in 1989 can't come back. Bart responds with a belch, and Lisa calls him out, saying, "That was unmotivated!"--a reminder that the early episodes are not uniformly the paragons of wit that many of us remember. Its flaws--unmotivated jokes, over-reliance on guest stars, a tendency towards schmaltz--were there in the show's first ten years just as they have been in the past ten.

Later in the segment, Homer is tempted to leave Marge for the ghost of past Marge, and present Marge convinces him to say, telling him, "I know everything you've done, and yet, I still want to be with you." The feeling of familiarity evoked here--of an old relationship wizened by time--is the appeal of later seasons of The Simpsons. The show's core characteristics--its wit, its artistic sensibilities, its characters--have undeniably changed, but they're still there. And I still want to be with it.

Addendum: My brother Curtis and I are of like minds, and he provided his argument "Why I Still Love The Simpsons," over on his blog a few months ago. It's worth a read.

Shanghai, Part Four: A Tale of Three Weekends

This post was written on June 7, 2014, but was not published until now.

Like I said last time, being a tourist is hard. And it's a lot harder if you are a tourist alone. Traveling alone not only means you don't have anyone with whom to share the experience, it also means you are substantially more likely to do something stupid. This is the story of three days visiting places on three separate weekends.

Day 1: The stupidest thing I've done so far

There are two UM professors here for the summer, both of whom are men in their 60's and both of whom are teaching one 13-week course instead of my two 8-week courses. Fred normally teaches at the Residential College at UM and is here teaching a course on the history of Western thought. He gives off an air of cosmopolitan intellectualism vaguely reminiscent of Truman Capote. This is his third summer teaching in China but he still takes a fork with him whenever he goes out. Bill is a biologist teaching a course on the biology of sex. It's his first time in China, and he's here with his wife Sara.

Bill and Sara have unofficially adopted me as their occasional travel companion. They remind me a lot of my own parents--a fairly easy-going academic family of that generation who enjoy good beer and dirty jokes and are frugal but willing to spend money on a good experience. They make good tourists. One weekend they invited me for a tour of Yuyuan Garden. I made it into town and phoned them, only to discover that Bill was feeling under the weather. So I resolved to explore the neighborhood on my own.

I couldn't find the gardens, but the surrounding area boasted a sprawling shopping center (most of Shanghai is basically an endless series of sprawling shopping centers punctuated by high-rise apartments). The entire area had been built in the last 25 years, but in a 19th century architectural style, like an Epcot Center version of old Shanghai.

While taking it all in, two young girls approached me and asked me to take their picture. They said they were students visiting town from Beijing and chatted with me about the U.S. for a while before inviting me to go to a "traditional Chinese tea service" with them. I agreed. This is the stupidest thing I've done here so far.

Having had Bill and Sara cancel on me, I took this as an opportunity to make what the movie Fight Club refers to as "single-serving friends." This had been a common enough experience when I backpacked through Europe. They took me to a hole-in-the-wall tea house down a side street of the shopping area that I couldn't find again in a million years--this should have been a sign that something was amiss, but it went well over my head. They showed a menu, and everything listed cost 66 or 68 yuan--about $11. Pricey for a cup of tea, but this was a "tea ceremony." A woman took us into a room and showed us a bunch of teas, giving the history of each as she poured tiny cups--about two sips' worth a piece. My two companions translated as we went, asking questions about America and acting vaguely flirty between sips of tea. I was growing increasingly anxious. Then the bill came--685 yuan. I was shocked. Apparently the menu I had been shown listed the price per tea, not the price for the ceremony. My two companions initially tried to convince me to pay for them because they were "students." I refused. I should have protested further. Of course, I really should have not come at all. But I paid and left. My companions left with me and asked me to come explore the city with them, but I quickly said goodbye and left them.

Yes, I had fallen victim to what I later discovered was the  infamous tea ceremony scam. The thing left me feeling cheated and objectified, but honestly, the young women were so convincing I didn't even realize it was a scam until well after the fact. Their performance plus my extreme naivete created a perfect storm. The experience still stings, but I choose to consider it an idiocy tax, one that many traveler's must pay in one form or another.

Day 2: European colonialism

A week later, Bill and Sara again invited me and Fred to join them at the Yuyuan Garden, and this time we actually made it. The garden is an elaborate, maze-like space built in the Ming Dynasty. It features stone paths that zig-zag through old wooden structures, the originals on which the architecture of the surrounding shopping center is based. Coy ponds and a wide variety of flora filled the garden, including ginkgo biloba trees dating back to when Europeans still assumed that ginkgo biloba was extinct (this fact courtesy of my biologist travel companion).

After touring the garden, we ate lunch at a restaurant previously visited by Queen Elizabeth II and Bill and Hilary Clinton. Then we took a subway to The Bund, an opulent waterfront neighborhood and famous vestige of European colonialism. The British (and others) did horrible things to this country, but I'll give them this: they built some pretty building and they made good alcohol.

China doesn't have a drinking culture the way Europe and North America do. Their beers are pretty weak and flavorless. So it was a treat when Bill, a beer connoisseur, brought us to The Bund Brewery, where we enjoyed a half-liter of a proper German-style craft beer. We then made our way to the Waldorf Astoria's famous Long Bar, where once only the wealthiest of the wealthiest could even set foot. Stepping into the hotel was like being transported back to the 1930's. This was the Shanghai of pulp fiction stories and old film serials--a land of mystery, adventure, and romance accessible only to a privileged few. It's hard to forget the racism and exploitation on which this place was built, but it's also hard to deny the beauty of the place in and of itself.

That Saturday was the day of Bill's official retirement from UM, so he sprang for the 100 yuan cocktails at the bar. They were both the best and the strongest cocktails I have ever had. On top of the beers, they made for quite a night.

It was a beautiful day, exploring the city with these friends, sharing our impressions of the city thus far. At one point, we walked past a tea house and Sara advised us to watch out, because she had read about scammers massively overcharging people for tea ceremonies.

And I thought to myself, "Well, shit."

Day 3: My favorite day

This weekend I decided to forgo tourism, which is really just another kind of work, and take a true day off. Once again I took the shuttle into the city. But instead of European colonialism, I decided to enjoy some American colonialism. Instead of a tea ceremony, I decided to partake of a coffee ritual. I went to Starbucks. I bought myself a 20 yuan cup of coffee, sat in a poofy chair--the most comfortable chair I've found in all of China so far, including at the Long Bar--and I spent the next several hours making it two thirds of the way through Larry Niven's Ringworld, a science fiction classic that I had until now managed to overlook.

I was interrupted only once for about ten minutes when a man in his 20's took a seat across from mine (the place was packed at this point) and engaged in some small talk. He worked at the Sheraton hotel but confessed his dream of becoming a sports journalist. We chatted about NBA basketball for a little while until his friend met him and he left, shaking my hand and telling me it was nice to meet me, thus restoring my faith in single-serving friends.

Then I returned to Ringworld. Wherever I am, there really are few things I enjoy so much as sitting in a coffee shop reading an old science fiction novel.

NOTE (August 4, 2014): I withheld publishing this entry with the intention of calling my credit card company when I got back to the U.S. I explained that I had been the victim of a scam, and they eventually credited me for $98.56 of the $109 that I had been charged in the tea scam. So, a happy ending.

NOTE (August 20, 2014): Nevermind. Turns out they had only "provisionally" refunded the money while conducting an "investigation," after which they denied my claim. To hell with Visa.

Shanghai, Part Nine: Things I Have Learned

This experience was a test. The experience of taking a test isn't generally a positive one. It's full of stress and work and anxiety. But if you're lucky, you come out at the end of it with a sense of accomplishment. And as any good educator knows, a test doesn't simply evaluate what you know; it is itself a part of the learning process. So what have I learned?

1

I’m too old for this shit. I’m thirty years old. Leaving everything behind and flying solo across the world at the drop of a hat for very little money sounds awesome when you’re in your twenties, but I never want to do something like this again. I am not a rolling stone. I have too much tying me to the U.S., and I’m too set in my ways. Having to adapt to a radically new environment (at least under these conditions) produces more stress than excitement, and it just isn't worth it.

Alternately, I’m too young for this shit. Hopefully, in 20 years I’ll have the money and security to travel to a place like this the way my compatriots Bill and Sara and Fred did, but as it is, I don’t have the resources to make a trip like this comfortably.

2

You can make the right decision every step of the way and still end up with a worse outcome. My situation being what it was in April, accepting the opportunity to come to China was absolutely the right decision, both for my professional advancement and as a unique experience. There was no way to anticipate otherwise. But from the vantage point of July, it is clear that I would have been better off not coming here. All told, this experience was not terrible, but it was not worth it in ways that could not have been foreseen.

3

Generally speaking, my professional identity occupies a smaller component of my sense of self than I thought it would, and professional opportunities often aren't worth the sacrifices in terms of stability, security, and leisure.

4

I am not a writing teacher. My first love is literature, and teaching writing is ultimately just another job. I would probably have had a lot more enthusiasm for the whole experience if I found the teaching more stimulating, but, while I think I have a talent for writing instruction, I don’t have a passion for it.

That said, I do find certain things about teaching writing, especially introductory-level writing, extremely rewarding. A 100-level writing class is an opportunity to introduce students to entirely new ways of thinking and communicating about their world, more so than most college classes, where the students' preexisting knowledge and expectations are more reified. I saw several wonderful moments of growth in my students that were, because of the cultural translation necessary, perhaps even more exciting than anything I've seen in the U.S. Those moments are tremendously gratifying.

5

Some universal truths: wherever you go, the old people seem to be grouchy and conservative, the young people seem to be optimistic and curious, and the university administrators seem not to know what they’re doing.

6

Political discourse shapes our thinking in ways I hadn't appreciated before. This is both a good and a bad thing.

The hardest thing to teach my students is that academic writing is, fundamentally, argumentation. This struck most of them as bizarre and counter-intuitive. They could write very clearly, but were used to writing fact-based reports. The kinds of nuanced, interpretive arguments that incorporate a multiplicity of perspectives is very difficult for them, especially the engineers. At the same time, while they are adept at reading for meaning, they are less likely to apply a critical gaze to texts. If it’s published, the assumption is that it is “right,” and it doesn't occur to them to adopt a relativistic perspective on the correctness of an interpretation

I have to believe that this is tied to the political climate. Imagine a culture where nobody debates politics. Nobody bothers debating politics because there’s nothing they can do about it, so they focus on their own ambitions instead. They can do basically anything they want except criticize the government, and in an ironic way, their minds are freed--freed to focus on making money, raising a family, and other forms of personal fulfillment. Ultimately, the society seems less efficient and less pluralistic as a result, but they also don’t seem to have stuff like this.

7

The world is an incredibly large place.

On my last Sunday in town, I visited the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center, which boasts a gorgeous scale model of the city, an impressive accomplishment that lends appreciation to the immensity of this one city on the mouth of the Yangtze.

I find it a real struggle describing what Shanghai is like, because there is simply no place in the world that conveys the same sublime sense of immensity. It's more than 24 million people sprawled out over more than 2,400 square miles. It's not just the density; it's the fact that the density goes on and on and on without end. The way that Bill described it, you can get out at any metro station and it looks like you're in downtown Dallas. Every station is its own Dallas. The fact that the city functions as well as it does, the fact that it's as clean as it is, is nothing short of an infrastructural miracle. The plumbing, the trash pickup, the air conditioning--when I think about the labor involved in keeping this city from becoming buried in its own kipple, it fills me with awe.

8

Still, the world is an incredibly small place.

After visiting the Urban Planning Center on Sunday, I found myself rushing home. I was running late and was worried that I would miss the last shuttle and would have to take the long, uncomfortable subway ride all the way back to Minhang. I got out of the metro at my station and ran to where the campus shuttle picks up, but found I had just missed it. I walked back to the street and paused for a minute, thinking, since I’m stuck taking the subway anyway, I might as well stop somewhere downtown for dinner. While I’m pausing to think where I should eat, who do I run into? Sara Blair. She was in town for a conference. I ran into a University of Michigan English professor on a street corner in the largest city in the world on the other side of the planet when both of us happened to be in town unbeknownst to one another for completely separate reasons, on my last week here on my second-to-last visit to downtown, all because I was running two minutes late. If I had gotten to the shuttle two minutes earlier, or if the shuttle had been running two minutes late, or if I stayed downtown for dinner originally, as I had been contemplating, we would have just missed one another and probably never known we were in the city at the same time. That's serendipity for you.

9

I might not have been a very good tourist, but what I was was an expat. Being a tourist requires levels of energy, organizational skills, and outgoingness that I can’t muster, at least not alone. Being a tourist involves immersing yourself in a culture (or, more often than not, the comfortable and commodified simulacra of that culture), typically for a few days or a few weeks at most. Being an expat, however, is about solidifying your sense of your own cultural identity. I have never felt more American than I have these two months, and while there’s much to criticize about America, I don’t mean that as a mark of embarrassment or as a limitation.

A couple of times, I went out for pizza or a hamburger, and they were possibly the best meals I ate here (except for Yang’s Dumplings) and not just because they were at pricey restaurants that cater to Western visitors. It’s because they felt like they were culturally “mine” in a way that local cuisine wasn't. Also--and this feels very strange to actually admit—I would often pass white or black or south Asian people on the street and have an Ezra Pound moment:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

It was a very minor difference, but I know I found myself looking at non-Chinese faces a bit longer, sometimes hoping to overhear a bit of English or French or German. It came from a sense that our shared experience of foreignness created a kind of community, and it came from a curiosity as to their story. What brought people to this massive, crazy, overwhelming city? Are they tourists, or are they expats like me? It’s always an interesting question.

10

Peanut butter, Starbucks, and shitty TV shows on Netflix are all life savers.

11

I’m not nearly as anxious as I used to be.

I’m very much a product of the Millennial generation, and like so many of us my life has characterized by a low-level nervousness that can be impeding, if not crippling. Trying new things and meeting new people always feel harder than they seem like they should. I know that this is a product of a rather privileged and sheltered upbringing, and I had come to accept it.

But, coming here, a funny thing happened. This is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I spent the first week in a state of abject terror. I spent the second and third weeks experiencing high degrees of angst over a job interview. But, after the third week, I didn't really worry about anything. I had moments of depression and homesickness, but the nervousness was essentially gone. Coming here and simply surviving has allowed me to feel more “present” than mindfulness therapy or meditation ever did. I’m not so naive as to call this experience “transformative” or assume that it will really last when I get back to my worries in the U.S., but it does feel good.

12

The dumplings are as good as everyone says they are.