Just Ask

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I see a lot of headlines, and not a few books, that puzzle over something that there’s an easy way to resolve: why do evangelicals (I’m thinking here of the sort that back Trump despite his pretty obvious criminal, predatory nature) think the way they do.  The solution is to ask evangelicals who’ve come to see things a bit differently.  I’m not the only one, I can assure you.  Many professors of religion (particularly biblical studies) and not a few ministers came from that background.  If they were true believers then, they can still remember it now.  At least I do.  I was recently reading a report in which the authors expressed surprise that evangelicals tend to see racism as a problem of individual sin rather than any systemic predisposition society imposes.  To someone who grew up that way, this is perfectly obvious.

I’m not suggesting this viewpoint is right.  What I am suggesting is that there are resources available to help understand this worldview.  To do so, it must not be approached judgmentally.  (I sometimes poke a little fun at it, but I figure my couple of decades being shaped by it entitle me to a little amusement.)  I don’t condemn evangelicals for believing as they do—that’s up to them—I do wish they’d think through a few things a bit more thoroughly (such as backing Trump).  I understand why they do it, and I take their concerns seriously.  I know that many others who study religion, or write articles about it, simply don’t understand in any kind of depth the concerns evangelicals have.  It’s only when their belief system impinges on politics that anybody seems to pay attention.

Maybe this is a principle we should apply to people in general.  Pay attention to them.  Listen to them.  Care for them.  Relentless competition wears down the soul and makes us less humane.  Religions, for all their faults, generally started out as means for human beings to get along—the earliest days we simply don’t know, but there is a wisdom in this.  In any case, if we really want to know there are people to ask.  Who’ve been there.  Whose very profession is being shoved out of higher education because it doesn’t turn a profit.  Learning used to be for the sake of increasing knowledge and since that’s no longer the case we see guesswork where before it would’ve been possible to “ask an expert.”  I often wonder about this, but as a former member of a guild that’s going extinct, I simply can’t be sure.

Learning to Write

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It’s a reciprocal relationship.  Ideally a symbiosis.  The publisher has a reach, and know-how, that an author lacks.  An author provides content the publisher needs.  Yet publishing is a business in a capitalistic world and has to (unless subsidized) turn a profit.  As an author who works in publishing I’m skewered on the horns of this dilemma.  It’s heartbreaking to see the lengths some authors go to only to find out their book is priced the same as a week’s worth of groceries.  Or three tanks full of gas.  Who buys a $100 book?  Libraries.  Well, some libraries.  Occasionally a publisher will run sales, if you order direct, but by then interest in your book (which may be timely) has passed on.  You become just another name on the shelf in the Library of Congress.

I’m looking for a publisher for my sixth book.  This has to be someone who understands that even $45 is beyond the reach of most intelligent readers.  “What the market will bear” feels like the death sentence to the years of your life you’ve put into writing the thing.  A friend once asked me, “Why do you do it?”  For authors the real question is “How can you not do it?”  The need for the validation through publication runs very deeply in some people.  More deeply than our national love for Taylor Swift.  It has to do with meaning.  Purpose.  A sense of what we’re put on earth to do.  

Image credit: Codex Manesse, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The standard “wisdom,” and practice, is to publish in hardcover, priced for the library market, and if it sells well at $100, perhaps offer a paperback.  Hopefully priced lower than $45, but don’t hold your breath.  “What the market will bear,” should be your mantra.  It’s a wonder that civilized people ever got educated.  I grew up on cheap books from Goodwill, which is all I could afford.  College, on borrowed money, taught me the price of reading seriously.  It was a lesson I never forgot.  I’d begun my faltering steps to writing books while in high school.  I started writing short stories even earlier than that.  It has been a life of writing.  Even series books, I’ve come to see, are too easily exploited in this way.  My shortest book is priced at $40.  At least I know that I’ve written some collectors’ items.  Take heart, my fellow writers trying to emerge from academe.  There are other ways of being in the world.  And some of them may even be symbiotic.

Bigger Picture

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One of the quirks of my thought process is that I tend to look for the bigger picture.  I’ve always done this and I suspect it drives some people batty when they ask me a question and I begin to answer from what seems to be a tangent.  (I also think this is why I performed well in the classroom.)  So, when I saw the article by Eric Holloway on Mind Matters, titled “Why Is Theology the Most Important Empirical Science,” I had to take a look.  Mostly a series of bullet-points that point out some of the religiously-motivated ideas that led to scientific discoveries, the article is useful.  My penchant for the big picture goes a bit broader, however.  The entire worldview in which the scientific process was born, and thus its underlying presuppositions, are religious.  Science and religion are the dogs and cats of the thought world but I’ve seen dogs and cats live happily together.

Science has always been with us.  Early peoples weren’t benighted troglodytes.  They observed, hypothesized, drew conclusions.  Science as we understand it, however, began in the Middle Ages in Europe, drawing on observations from earlier thought in the Arab world.  The context in that Arab world was solidly Muslim.  The Middle Ages in Europe were solidly Christian.  None of this discounts the contributions of Jews to the whole, it’s merely an observation regarding the larger cultural outlook.  Many of the principles of science even today (for example, that people are categorically different from other animals) are based on those religious worldviews.  We seldom go back to question whether we might’ve gotten something fundamentally wrong.  Meanwhile, the dogs began to chase the cats.

College as a religion major involved a lot of discussions about basic presuppositions.  Then questioning them.  Not much of this went on in the classroom (Grove City was, and is, a conservative Christian school).  The wonderful thing about higher education is the bringing together of people with different outlooks.  It was those after-hours conversations that helped form my questing nature.  I’d already started asking bigger questions when I was a child, annoying my parents and, I suspect, sometimes vexing clergy.  A single human mind is too limited to grasp it all, but it seems to me to deny religion a place at the table is to leave out massive amounts of human experience.  Of course, economics, the dismal science, seems well on the way to eliminating the study of religion in higher education.  And we will have lost, if this happens, a large piece of the bigger picture.

Photo credit: NASA

A Footnote

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I was recently compelled to use footnotes.  I don’t mean the clever asides that capable writers sometimes utilize to spice up subjects by making points off topic.  No, I mean the kind with author, date, title, city, publisher, page number.  I deal with footnotes daily—it’s an occupational hazard.  As a recovering academic I’m trying to get away from using footnotes on everything from grocery lists to daily meeting reminders.  Cite your sources!  That’s the kind of rhetoric that’s pounded into the heads of bright young people, often preventing them from learning to think for themselves.  At this stage of my life a footnote is more often trying to find someone who agrees with what I’ve observed for myself.  Hmm, did anyone ever say that before?  If so, where?

My concern goes down to the level of cities.  Yes, cities.  Standard format requires you cite the city in which a book was published.  This ridiculous pre-internet artifact had a purpose originally, but I have worked for two international publishers and I can tell you two related, and perhaps contradictory points: employees can tell which office a book is from: New York or London.  And unless you work for said publisher there is almost no way for you to know.  So if a publisher has offices in a dozen cities, you need to write a dozen of them in your footnote.  Does this sound like a rational thing to do?  Don’t get me wrong—it’s important, very important to cite the publisher.  But it’s not like there are a ton of presses around with the exact same name.

There’s a move among some reference experts (refperts, if you like) to do away with the city in footnotes.  It’s a reasonable guess that Cambridge University Press is pretty widely recognized.  And that Cambridge is located in Cambridge.  Or course, there’s a Cambridge in Massachusetts, and I hear there’s a university there as well.  In any case, if you don’t know where a publisher’s located, there’s a remarkable invention called the internet where you can look it up!  Pedanticism comes naturally to academics, I suppose.  Had I not been one I would probably have had no reason to write such an anal post as this.  Still, there’s a larger point: when is one able simply to assert what one knows?  I frankly don’t remember the page on which I read most facts I point out in my writing.  Often I notice them myself and recognize them as facts when there’s good, solid evidence.  Of course, I really should footnote that.  If I can remember in which city the appropriately named Random House is located.

How do you footnote this?

Scholarly Publishing

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So here’s the thing about innocuous names—they don’t work well with the internet.  Search engines throw a rod trying to find something so insipid that it might mean anything.  I’m driven to this topic by the fact that “Scholars Press” or something like it, is used by a number of organizations, some apparently predatory.  If you’re a scholar of religion you know to what I’m referring when I say “Scholars Press.”  You know the neat, trim little monographs that you consumed like popcorn while writing your dissertation.  Try to find a history of the press online.  I’ll wait.

So finally I heaved myself out of my chair and got an actual book (imagine that!) off the shelf.  It is a volume I purchased when the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature met in Orlando.  A conference to remember.  So, along with Woody and Buzz Lightyear, we were gathered to learn about religion and I finally shelled out for Ernest W. Saunders’ Searching the Scriptures: A History of the Society of Biblical Literature 1880–1980.  There I found what Google couldn’t: Scholars Press dates from 1974, a joint venture of the two societies.  Originally it published books from the University of Montana at Missoula, and later moved to Chico, California.  Finally it settled in Atlanta and eventually split into two as AAR and SBL took on the publishing of their own books.  I saved myself several minutes of probably fruitless scrolling.  It seems nobody else is really interested in this.  I am an historian of religion, but an historian none the less.  I wanted to know the sequence of events.

I am curious when the two decided to break up this venture.  There was a divorce, or temporary separation, between the societies some years back—I can’t recall when it was—that seems a logical time for them to think about taking on their individual publishing programs, but then again, they may have started before then.  In other words, I don’t have the date when Scholars Press dissolved.  Religious studies, I realize, is a small discipline.  For many colleagues it’s their entire world.  Some of them write histories about various aspects of it—I saw a book that I want to read about the murder of a religion professor Ioan Culianu back in 1991—but compared to history or English, we’re minuscule.  And we don’t seem very curious about ourselves.  We’re an odd lot, that’s for sure.  And we don’t always pick the best names.

In Praise of Libraries

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It felt like a rare, and momentous moment in a young writer’s life.  While working at Routledge I happened to notice that the New York Public Library did not have a copy of A Reassessment of Asherah in their catalogue.  The first edition was published in Germany, so I wasn’t surprised that it was not there.  Gorgias Press, however, had published a second edition and few people were citing it.  I contacted the office on Fifth Avenue and offered to donate a copy.  A librarian contacted me and we set up a time.  I went between the stone lions (Patience and Fortitude by name), met my contact, and handed my work over without ceremony.  He seemed genuinely glad to have the book and I felt like I’d made a small contribution to a big city.

When I need a pick-me-up I look at WorldCat.  WorldCat is a conglomeration of library catalogues where you can find just about any book, including obscure ones, such as mine.  I recently hopped on to see how many libraries had Holy Horror.  (The answer is 90.)  While there I decided to check my others.  Nightmares with the Bible registered 68.  These numbers aren’t bad considering neither publisher markets the books and they’re priced too high.  The Wicker Man is still new and is only in 42.  What surprised me was when I looked back.  A Reassessment of Asherah is in 305 (total for both editions, one being in the New York Public Library).  What really surprised me was Weathering the Psalms, which 324 libraries claim.  Since it’s priced under $30, maybe there is something to the idea people will buy books if they can afford them.  As an editor I know that sales of monograph over 300 are considered successful.  Two of my books qualify.

Publishers don’t share sales information.  I can look up those at my current publisher, and I can check some on Nielsen’s BookScan (now called NDP BookScan), the service publishers use to get an idea of other publishers’ sales.  That’s the same Nielsen that does television ratings, by the way.  Searching my own titles there is too depressing, so I stick to library catalogues.  Libraries are feel-good places.  (I couldn’t help but notice that Princeton has all my books—thank you, Tigers!  The seminary has my first two, but the university has my books on horror films.)  I can just feel all the ideas in the air.  And I’m humbled to have contributed to them in a way, no matter how small.

Why Write Then?

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People far smarter and more prominent than yours truly have pointed this out, generally in vain: academic writing is driving itself extinct.  And some of us will not mourn it, if it does.  You see, academics are taught to write with an erudition and pomposity that satisfies dissertation committees made up of people who had to do the same.  This academic hazing generally obscures otherwise interesting observations.  Now thoroughly indoctrinated, academics go on to write their next book, and their articles, in this same turgid prose that obfuscates mightily.  To what purpose?  So that those critics higher on the food chain won’t be tempted to take on this morsel, preferring instead some “popularizer” who actually knows the craft of writing?

Poor writing is poor writing.  Those of us who’ve graded undergraduate papers have spent many red pens (I used to use green, so as not to be so negative) correcting bad stuff.  Why then do we give in to writing even worse ourselves?  I’m not proud.  I’ll admit that I’ve read academic books I really didn’t understand.  And it wasn’t because I’m not properly trained.  It’s because the writing was so full of jargon and “scholar X said but scholar Y rebutted”s that I get lost in the jungle.  One of the things repeatedly said about my teaching, back in the day, was that it was effective because I could explain complicated things in ways people could understand.  Isn’t that the purpose of publication in general?  Too many scholars write only for other scholars.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but if they wrote clearly maybe some of the rest of us could get in on the conversation.

I’m sure I’m not the only one to get really excited about a book.  The topic doesn’t matter.  Shivering with anticipation you order it and await its arrival, staring out the window awaiting the postie or the Amazon van.  It arrives and you caress it a little before opening it.  Then you find it’s written in academese.  You struggle to get through it, uncertain that you’ve really learned anything at all.  Except how not to write.  Those in higher education lament that the system is crumbling.  One of the reasons, I contend, is that nobody can understand what they’re saying.  What’s wrong with writing for the average, educated person?  Do you need sixteen five-syllable words in one sentence?  Look, I bought your book because I already believed in you.  If you make me regret my spending you can be sure that I’ll be purchasing someone else’s books from now on.

Worthy of Note

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I admit it.  I use Wikipedia quite a lot.  When I was teaching I wasn’t one of those professors who said “Don’t use Wikipedia,” but I did say that if students used it they should look up the references and make sure they were legitimate.  Wikipedia is quite an achievement—a place to go to find out about many things, but not everything.  This leads me to an observation that I hope isn’t uncharitable: there are a lot of underwhelming pages on the website.  Anyone can edit it, of course, but I see quite a few pages of academics that have no more than a short paragraph of an (often) unremarkable bio, followed by fewer books than I’ve written.  And they have an encyclopedia entry.  It makes me wonder what it takes to be noteworthy.

I know quite a few Wikipedia page subjects.  Most of them are nice people.  Their greatest accomplishment is having landed a university post—maybe that’s enough to make someone noteworthy these days.  I haven’t managed to do it.  But many have.  And most of them don’t have their own pages.  I’m a realist about things like this.  My books don’t sell enough copies for anyone beyond you, dear reader, to recognize me.  This blog hasn’t had a million hits yet (it’s halfway there, in any case) and I can’t seem to retain followers on Twitter, or X, of whatever it is this week.  But then again, I don’t expect to be on Wikipedia.  Some people that I think should be aren’t.  Popularity shouldn’t be the measure of importance.  (That works both ways.)

It used to be that I’d run across Wiki pages with a header saying that a subject didn’t seem noteworthy enough.  Sometimes such warnings were even for publishers—those of us who write need to find outside information about publishers, no matter how small.  I don’t see those warnings much any more.  I suspect Wikipedia is so large (over six-and-a-half million pages) that constant policing would be necessary.  And how would it feel to have someone put a page together for you only to discover later that you’d been removed for just being too ordinary?  That’s gotta hurt!  Everyone, it seems to me, is notable.  All people should be paid attention to.  I suppose the rank and file of all of us would clutter Wikipedia endlessly, but I still do wonder how it is that surviving in academia is enough to make a person essential to know about, beyond their faculty webpage.

Life Learning

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One thing a recovering academic must learn is that the vast majority of people don’t really care what drives the academy.  They aren’t too worried about larger issues as systemic racism, or various groups’ feelings of unequal treatment.  In fact, most people are just looking to get by, keeping depression and hopelessness at bay.  There are few avenues to break out of the middle class, and even fewer to move up from the lower.  And going to school hasn’t been presented to most people as an opportunity, but as a chore that must be done until work can be secured and they can pursue surviving on their own.  This truth comes to me time and again when I’m reminded that deep thinking doesn’t sell books (not unless you’ve already established a reputation) and that if you try to bring the concerns of the academy to the public, they’ll look the other way.

The real trick, it seems to me, is educating people without them knowing they’re being taught.  People don’t like being talked down to.  Understandably.  When I listen to people without college educations, I learn a ton.  This is my matrix as well—it’s where I grew up.  Higher education changes the way you think, but it shouldn’t prevent you from communicating with those who are the vast majority of people in the world.  Anything can seem to be normal when it happens long enough, even living in ivory towers and discussing things almost nobody else cares about.  You see, I’m a realist.  And I still have a lot to learn.

When I write my books, my style is accessible but my topics are academic.  It has taken me years to realize this simple fact.  Anyone can read my books from Holy Horror on and understand them, but why would they want to?  The questions raised are those of the academy, and those in the academy know you by your specialization (ancient West Asian religions, historically declined, thank you).  A glance at how my Academia.edu page is viewed tells the story.  Nobody who visits there is interested in horror films or this blog.  They want the resource that can’t be renewed—my work on ancient history of religions.  I’ve moved to horror because I find lots of very intelligent people here.  Like those with whom I grew up, they are generally ignored by the academy.  They are also very accepting of outsiders.  You have to unlearn being an academic.  And it might just lead somewhere productive.

In Praise of Lecture

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As I look at our world and see divisions that certain politicians only make worse for their own gain, I wonder where we’ve jumped the rails.  I was just reading about science lectures in the early part of the last century.  This reminded me of a public lecture on dinosaurs that we attended in Edinburgh with some friends.  Yes, we were graduate students looking for stimulating, and inexpensive, entertainment.  I’ve always considered entertainment a learning opportunity.  Having grown up both poor and curious, I feel a fascination regarding most new things and I began to wonder why we don’t have more public science lectures these days.  We really enjoyed the dinosaur talk.  I think the lecturer was Jack Horner, but what really stuck with me was not his name, but the good feeling the talk left behind.

At Nashotah House, Milwaukee and Madison were both a little too far to venture for an evening lecture.  We had to be in chapel early the next morning, and besides, I had already started waking up early (around five in those days) to do my research and writing.  When we came out of Nashotah, the internet had taken over the world.  Let’s face it, when you reach, say, middle age, you don’t want to have to go out much in the evenings any more.  At least if you’re an introvert like me.  Particularly when it’s cold out.  And how do you even find public lectures these days?  We live near several colleges and universities in the Lehigh Valley, and I get occasional notices, but the lecture in Edinburgh was actually in a public venue, not a university site.  You see, I think that’s what we need to get people back on the side of science and critical thinking.

The internet favors your biases.  Algorithms send your way more of what you’ve already seen.  Each click brings someone some income.  (I hasten to add that I get no income from this blog; I pay for the privilege to post on it.)  Wouldn’t it be better if towns had lecture halls and scientists (and others) had the name draw to bring people in?  While at a small venue in the Easton Book Festival a couple years back, a university guy from New Jersey talked to me after my presentation.  “We don’t have many opportunities for smart entertainment,” he told me.  I’m no scientist and there’s a real debate about the “smart” part, but I took his point.  You used to be able to find public lectures that were cheap or free.  And everyone left feeling like they’d received a gift.

Nuts and Bolts

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It all began with an innocent laugh at the local hardware store.  It was Saturday morning, around 8:30 and I had to get some nuts and bolts.  Literally.  From those neat little trays that separate out individual pieces that may be the last place on the planet you can spend just a dime.  These local stores have an honor system with little bags on which you write down how many of which piece you took and the price.  Also a dying breed, these bags are made of paper.  One other guy was there doing something similar and when I picked up my bag, another clung to it and slipped to the floor.  He laughed.  Then apologized.  He explained that he seldom made it through the day without some aspect of Murphy’s Law taking place.  I let him know I didn’t take his laugh wrongly and that I knew Murphy’s Law, perhaps too well.

He then told me that he thought he’d write a book about it.  A novel, he said, like the book of Job.  My ears perked up.  Only this time, he suggested, God had to treat Job so that only bad things happened and used Murphy’s Law so that they would turn out good.  Every good thing God wanted to do would have to appear evil at first.  I encouraged this stranger to write this book.  I meanwhile couldn’t believe that I was having a conversation about Job with someone I didn’t know in a town where I’m still a bit of a newbie.  Do I have “former Bible professor” written on my forehead?  Even when I’m wearing a mask they seem to be able to tell.

Job, according to William Blake

But seriously, although I don’t get out much any more throughout my life I’ve had strangers approach me with religious issues for conversation.  Often at the strangest times.  I wonder if this happens to other people.  You can’t assume someone will know the book of Job, or what it’s about.  You can’t know that a stranger won’t take such a story idea the wrong way.  Me, I was counting out nuts and bolts.  Perhaps I was there to build my own Frankenstein’s monster.  Or some evil device to end the world.  Would Job calm me down or rile me up?  As it was, I was glad for the diversion.  8:30 on a Saturday morning is well into the day for me, having been awake for over five hours already.  And I’m glad to have an innocent laugh from a stranger.

Thinking Teaching

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I am a teacher.  Although no longer employed as one, my entire mindset is geared toward the profession.  Those hiring in higher education have no clue about this sort of thing.  Apparently nobody else does either.  I’ve worked in business now for over a decade and a half.  During that time only one employer has shown any inkling of understanding the importance of clear teaching.  Instead, most promote busy people trying to explain things in sound bites that lead to confusion, compounded daily (sometimes hourly).  The immense waste of resources this entails is staggering.  It is the most inefficient system I can imagine: in the rush to convey sometimes important information, necessary pieces are left scattered on the floor like seeds under a bird feeder in migration season.  In our rush to do our jobs, we settle for half-baked rather than paying a baker to make proper bread.

This is a constant frustration for someone who has the soul (and mind) of a teacher.  Our society undervalues educators of all stripes.  And, yes, many people go into teaching without the requisite gifts or motivation.  I’m certain I’m not alone in having had a high school or college course where the teacher was completely disengaged or perhaps in out of their depth.  Students shut down, hate school, and then spend their lives making uninformed decisions on everything from politics to profession.  Teachers—good teachers—are the future of any nation.  I know our young are our future, but if they’re inadequately taught, take a look at the headlines and see what happens.  Why is it so difficult to see that if children aren’t taught well, institutions will perpetuate that model until everything is a barely contained pandemonium?

We see this happening in history.  A people or culture gets to a point where they just begin to implode.  Too many things that just don’t make sense have been built on top of other things that just don’t make sense.  The whole thing begins to collapse.  I see this happening all the time—the hurried email that simply doesn’t explain anything, sent in haste before moving on to the next sophomoric task just to get the job done.  When businesses take a look at budgets and feel a little scared, some of the first positions to go are those of trainers.  “People will figure it out,” they seem to say.  And we see the results.  Evolution has made teachers of some of us.  Many of us, of necessity, are doing something else for a living.  If only all jobs came with a blackboard.

Obscure Subjects

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The world is so full of things that require further explanation that I can’t believe there aren’t more universities.  No, seriously.  If you look closely, or even casually, there are so many things under-documented that it’s a wonder we get along.  Instead we focus on criminals who want to be president and deny science is real.  Alas.  What brings this on is that I’ve been working on a book that involves researching pop culture.  Naturally, there are books and articles to read, and even videos to view.  Still, some information just doesn’t seem to be out there.  I’ve run across movies that appear with no explanation.  They’re simply there.  Sure, you can find the name of the writer, director, stars, and such, but how did that movie come to be?  Unless someone (normally a journalist) has followed up the story of its origins, there’s really nowhere to go.  Unless there are extras.

I’m remembering how CDs came with liner notes.  (Does anyone remember CDs?)  Good notes gave you further information on the music.  It was documented.  There was an explanation.  DVDs often lack that.  If there aren’t “extras” on the disc, the liner notes don’t help you much if they don’t exist.  Now that we stream everything a search on IMDb is about the best you can do.  Sometimes Wikipedia helps, but only if the article cites its sources.  We need more information.  I read a lot about movies and I’m always glad when an author has found a source that explains a bit more about why this particular film exists.  Are we that non-curious?

Believe me, I know the world is too full of things already.  On some subjects too much information is already available.  Things like movies, and music—things that really move us—however, are left hanging in the air.  I’m curious about them.  I suppose I could subscribe to trade magazines, but I wonder why those who’re already paid to be professors—professional researchers rather than erstwhile academic hacks like yours truly—aren’t all over this.  Academic respectability can be a real problem sometimes.  I know I didn’t feel like I could explore these things until I’d been ousted from the academy.  You see, I think we need more universities.  Places where the curious can go to learn about even more obscure subjects, but subjects that are really important to people.  It seems a far better use for our ill-gotten gain than spending it on lawsuits just to bring down those that education could take care of as a natural benefit.

Modern Work

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The entertainment industry has proven itself, time and again, resistant to recessions.  It says something about our lives that we need that outlet no matter what.  The New York Times has been looking at the writers’ and actors’ strike in Hollywood as a piece of what they are calling the “fractured work” puzzle.  Noting how inequality inevitably increases in a capitalistic system, they put the screenwriters into a situation with which I am unfortunately familiar—that of the adjunct professor.  Adjunct professors now make up some three-quarters of the teaching force in higher education.  In case you haven’t had the misfortune yourself, an adjunct gets paid by the course (not very well, by the way) and has no benefits—medical or, often, retirement (some state schools are required to offer the latter, but you’ll never be able to retire on the pittance you receive).  The idea is that work is being broken into smaller chunks so that entrepreneurs can pay less for work done.

Everyone knows such a system isn’t sustainable.  It will crash.  Unless it’s reformed.  Some people have asked me about becoming a copyeditor for a job.  The thing about copyediting is that it’s freelance work.  Publishers generally don’t hire copyeditors full-time.  You can make a living at it, but it’s self-employment.  You need to set aside the money for retirement and health insurance.  As well as taxes.  And you have to work long hours to make it pay off.  I tried it for a year, but I’m a slow reader.  It was clear that I didn’t have the right literary stuff to make such a living, so I had to move into acquisitions instead.  If you know me personally you may find that ironic.

Those of us who’ve always sought a spiritual existence, however defined, often don’t fit into a capitalistic system.  Especially if you question doctrine.  That’s why I became an academic—or at least tried to.  It’s one of the few places where people with my skill set can thrive.  Work often defines who we are.  Usually one of the first questions to arise when you meet someone is “what do you do?”  Specialists often suggest dissociating our selves from our jobs—I suspect that’s more necessary in positions in which a person is unwillingly being taken over by a position that’s not fulfilling on some level.  Wouldn’t it be better, since we’ve opted for fractured work, if we made it something you could do for a career?  The New York Times suggests specializing, but be careful, dear reader, in what you decide to specialize.  The “market” may well dry up on you and striking may not even be an option.

Life Semesters

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Some people have a school calendar in their blood.  For me, that was one of the great appeals of the teaching profession.  I worked a lot during summers—class prep and research take a lot of time and the two go naturally together.  I didn’t mind the ten hour days, and more, during the semester either.  When you’re doing something you love, you become your job.  It was quite a shock when the job counselor at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh told me that I had to separate myself from my job.  The two were one.  I would sit in that Oshkosh office researching for classes I’d never taught before.  My first year at Nashotah House I was writing 90 pages of class notes per week.  Anxious, but loving it.  There was so much to learn!  But that calendar has some natural breaks.

Academic careers involve sprinting that goes on for about four months straight.  Then you get a break of a month or two before sprinting again.  For those of us with my mental condition, that way of living just fits.  The 9-2-5 job is parsimonious second-pinching.  I’ve talked to other professionals in the field and they say the same thing—when your job involves thinking, there are no such things as fixed hours.  When I’m out on my jog before work and my mind comes up with a solution for that intractable problem that awaits me once I fire up the laptop, I’m working.  It’s just not “on the clock.”  It’s gratis.  Part of the problem is I don’t cotton onto sitting in front of a computer all day. Being “in the office” ironically hurts productivity.  In the teaching world you walk around and talk to people.  Summer days are spent with your nose in a book.  What’s not to like?

Not everyone, I know, is stimulated by that kind of lifestyle.  For me, it just works.  Some years I’m able to carve out a week’s vacation in the summer.  I try to save up enough vacation days, however, to get the week between Christmas and New Year’s off—a mini semester break.  When a person’s mind works in a certain way, finding employment that coincides with it is important.  Many people like the structure of a work day.  It tells you when to sign in and when to knock off.  It tells you when to eat lunch and when to take breaks.  Others prefer alternative work arrangements.  The 9-2-5 has never sat well with me.  It’s because the school calendar is in my blood.