Eternal Vigilance

The RedRoom Blog contest for the week has me brainstorming about the concept of freedom. So I'm free(dom) associating and doing my best Toby Keith impersonation. Minus the jingoism and xenophobia.

Freedom is...

=====================================

. ...taken for granted. I recall with clarity the day I learned this fact: the police cracking batons against the door, the screaming as they flung it open, and the hostel keeper telling us to get out of our beds and pull our luggage into the floor.

I was in Edinborough, Scotland, sleeping in a hostel with 50 or so of my closest friends in closely arranged double metal bunk beds with naked mattresses. My eyes burned when the police flipped on the florescent lights and roused everyone. It was 4:00 AM.

I was on a week's vacation from the school where I was studying in London, and though my friends and I arrived early in the evening, we decided (with practicality typical of 20 year-olds) that rooms would be easy to come by, so a better way to spend the dying twilight was to hang out on the parapets of Edinborough Castle.

(Side note: we stopped at a pub and ordered fried fish for dinner, and after 40 minutes, asked the barkeep if it was ready. Stunned, he swore loudly, raced to the kitchen, apologized profusely, and after another 15 minutes, we got a free meal.)

These distractions meant we waited until about 11:30 to find a place to sleep, which (after being told "no vacancy" at many stops) relegated us to a hostel in a fairly impoverished neighborhood. I cocooned myself in the blanket they provided and, despite the crackling sound of the plastic mattress cover, I finally drifted off to sleep until awakened by the clanging on the metal door.

Something had apparently been stolen in the area, so they were going through the hostel, searching everyone's luggage. I walked away from my bunk in a somnambulistic haze. But while their hands unzipping and feeling through my luggage soon jarred me perfectly awake, I felt no less stunned.

One doesn't take one's constitution abroad. Scots law is very clear on the police's right to search you without a warrant if something's gone missing. I moreover realized that we were likely suffering this interrogation in no small part because the hostel was made up of 25% backpacking Americans and 75% poor people with nowhere else to go.

And while it is patently true that abuses like this are more common among the powerless even here in the U.S., that night I assuaged my bitterness with the knowledge that there was at least a piece of paper--a statement of principle--that said individual privacy still meant something back home. If we sadly fall short of it, then thank God we at least have something of which we are falling short.

So when someone tells you that we should go into "high crime" neighborhoods and just search for drugs without real probable cause since "we know they're there" or that "I don't care if the government taps my phone because I've got nothing to hide," remember that we have some profound liberties in the US, written into law by people who were conversant with violations of civil liberty in practical, rather than abstract, terms.

And, most certainly remember that freedoms are rarely taken from our citizens by force. Usually, in the name of security, or patriotism, or religion, or party, the citizens hand them right over.

Know them by their fruits, or alternatively, by their novelty plates.

Standing in line at the Thornton's gas station near my neighborhood, I spied a rack of novelty car plates--the kind you screw to the front of your car to make sure your it professes your religious beliefs or sports team affiliation or desire to waste your presidential vote on the dangerously inexperienced Willie Nelson.

The plates were stacked deeply on the rotating rack, and these were the four I saw:

1) Against a deep purple background, a hot pink script proclaimed the car's occupant "Blessed"

2) On black, the red, slashed lettering let everyone know the driver was "Sucking Gas and Hauling Ass."

3) Three red crosses centered in a white background admitted the car's owner was "Not Perfect--Just forgiven."

4) Another white background, this time with cartoon rhino warning the reader: "Cautious: Extremely Horny."

An open tension between sacred and profane shapes the atmosphere of so many small Kentucky towns. For my money, no literary work captures this as perfectly as Silas House's Clay's Quilt.

While this little rack of novelty plates did not sum up this tension quite as well, it certainly did so more succinctly--in just about the time it takes the old guy in front of the line to finish up his scratch off tickets.

My Thesis Statement

But criticism, real criticism, is essentially the exercise of this very quality; it obeys an instinct prompting it to try to know the best that is known and thought in the world...
-- Matthew Arnold "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (1864)

Not long ago, when I was near UK's campus in Lexington, I swung by the William T Young library, hoping to take a look at something I wrote ten years ago.

On a bookshelf in the basement, I have a version of my Master's Thesis that I preserved in the most resplendent form available to my grad student means: a Kinko's strip binding.

However, I knew that unless the Graduate School took my $80 and bought a seat cushion for Steven Masiello, a leather bound, golden embossed copy of my contribution to English Literature rested somewhere in the tower atop the William T. Young library. After a good discussion with my former committee member, Jonathan Allison, I saddled up to a computer, looking for my manifesto.

Sadly, the as-of-yet-uncorrected misspelling in my Thesis's catalog citation ("The Yankees of Yoknapatawpha: William Faulkner and the Hartless [sic] Yankee Myth") was an inauspicious beginning to my glorious return to the halls of academia. But, having spent a solid year of my life both arriving and departing this building under starry skies, I had little difficulty ascending the steps and finding the appropriate bookshelves.

The Young library's stacks are the space-saving mechanical kind that slide back and forth--the racks compressing and decompressing like an accordion. Having found the right rack and waited for it to groan open, I slid my finger along the spines.

There it was.

No misspelling on the binding, thank God. Jason McKinley Williams in a golden sheen surely commensurate with the glorious revelations within this thin tome.

Unfortunately, when I opened it, the crisp pages crackled like those in a college dropout's Calculus book. It seems neither the world of Faulkner studies nor (shockingly) the public at large had been poring over my analysis of how Faulkner reframed popular turn-of-the-century narratives about "Bloody Reconstruction" in his own treatments of both that historical era and the desegregation struggle that filled him with both immeasurable hope and intense anxiety.

Their loss.

I hardly even looked at it beyond the Acknowledgments page. After all, though eighty pages and ten years in my past, I could probably recite it from memory. I slid it back into the shelf, content.

Then, my fingers crept across the names of old colleagues, and I think about those stacks of books piled up in each of the monastic cells that passed for Teaching Assistant offices (6 TA cubicles in the same space as one professor's office). I think the strain and preparation of sharing our ideas at conferences. I think of literally reams of paper crumpled and marked over--the ideas discussed over turkey sandwich lunches or beers at McCarthy's.

Though you might expect disappointment to be my appropriate response, I assure you this is not a lament. "Terminal Master's students" (as those of us not going on to Doctoral study were known) understood that after our degree comes in the mail, the best end for our scholarship was to end up in someone else's works cited page. But to stand there in those racks was simply a valuable lesson on having perspective in our daily lives. To ponder the wondrous toil and passion of those days, and see it neatly stacked in alphabetical order, resting quietly in endless row of other people's black, gold embossed legacies.

Faulkner, who wrote so prolifically and almost exclusively about the inhabitants of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County once said, "I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it."

Even if the influence of my scholarship remains limited to a few colleagues at UK and the audiences of a couple of sessions at the Twentieth Century Literature Conference, I'm very pleased at my little postage stamp of Faulkner studies. It wasn't specious, it wasn't pretentious, and it will remain my little brick in UK's symbolic tower of knowledge (at least until they clear out the Thesis and Dissertations and turn the tower into sports equipment storage or a Kindle repair shop.)

I can say I learned it, said it, finished it, and, in the end, it was the best I knew and thought.

The blank page as a mine (mind?) field

"Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything really good." -- William Faulkner

It's amazing to me how this generation of young people, which likely writes so much more than many previous generations (though in the fragmentary phrases and phonetic inventions of text messaging speech) seems so paralyzed by the blank page.

The academic achievement of the student does not seem to matter; high performing students and low performing students alike will say to me repeatedly: "I don't know how to start."

At first, I presumed their anxiety came from the challenge of writing an introduction. Any conscientious writer knows well the tension inherent in moving quickly from nothingness into an engaging piece of writing. However, even my attempts to have them defer the introduction altogether--just write a thesis and then go into the first point--fail for many writers.

Many years ago, I read a writing instructor refer to some students seeing the blank page as a mine field--a place where their pens or pencils travel gingerly because mistakes and failures lie everywhere. My first go-round of teaching, I saw a few of these students. Now, a large proportion seem to write just waiting for the explosion.

To counter this anxiety, I'm trying hard to have them express their ideas in whatever language seems comfortable. If the tone is informal, actually conversational, or even in text speak, I'll take it on the draft if that's what is required to get their hands and minds to move confidently across the page. "My paper will sound totally ghetto," one student told me today. However, I feel confident we can work to get their diction and tone correct in revision if we can just get them comfortable expressing on paper the great ideas they express so willingly when I ask them to talk about their position.

There are people who would say this is capitulating to the forces breaking down the English language. Maybe it is. But for me this is not a theoretical issue; I have 16- and 18-year-olds showing up each day and I'm paid to make them better readers, writers, and thinkers by the time they leave.

I simply believe that if students come to high school hearing only non-standard English at home, practicing non-standard English through constant text messaging, and lacking the wide reading that might tune one's ear to standard English, Language Arts teachers are forced to get them to express their ideas in whatever way possible.

I just think I can teach proper English employing a draft loaded down with colloquialisms, but I can't teach students how to better express their ideas if those ideas never make it past the pen.

Rediscovering Snow Days

When I decided to leave my career in software development to teach English, I knew that my thorough planning for the switch could never prepare me for everything I would encounter in my new vocation.

Some of these unexpected experiences have been arduous and challenging. Some have been exhilarating and profoundly gratifying. Some seem simply absurd.

In that last category, I place "rediscovering snow days."

Mind you, the beauty of re-encountering snow days in my mid-thirties doesn't derive from merely missing work; sloth has never been my sin of choice. When my cell phone shudders awake on the bedstand and Bill Meck's missive shimmers with the good news, I immediately jump out of bed. I inevitably spend the morning grading or making lesson plans, relishing the completion of these tasks in serenity, outside the pandemonium of the school day.

In any case, we teachers work very long hours, but we get plenty of time off during the year.

No, the absurdity and beauty I've discovered in the snow day come from re-connecting with this experience I had presumed I'd left behind. Like a sort of meteorological prodigal son, I abandoned the delight of having the elements dictate my daily work, and now I have recaptured that sublime joy.

(OK, perhaps too far.)

Regardless, things that are great about Snow Days:

The Anticipation:
Standing transfixed in her closet, trying to determine what to wear, my wife used to ask me about the forecast, and I never had the slightest idea. I worked in a climate-controlled environment that never closed and therefore wholeheartedly ignored the weather.

Now, between December 1 and March 1, I can tell her the barometric pressure in inches of Mercury and hectoPascals. I scrutinize the subtle shifts in time stamps of Doppler radar like Jim Garrison pored over the frames of the Zapruder film. I could stand in for T.G. Shuck if the situation ever arose.

Not working and feeling great
When most people have an unplanned absence from work, either illness or bereavement is the cause. Both are physically and mentally taxing, and that fatigue is exacerbated by your knowledge of the work piling up while you are gone.

Not so for the snow day. The weather did something unusual, so you don't have to work. You may feel great. If the roads clear up, you may go out and see a movie. If you see your boss there, that's fine too. He or she is also feeling great.

Playing in the snow
My back yard spills down into a valley and is obscured from the neighbors, so I can frolic to my heart's content or my back gives out. And since my dog Scout (pictured) is so adept at making a canine version of snow angels, it's only right she should be afforded the opportunity.

Sure, it takes about 20 minutes to remove all the caked-on snow and get her dry, but what do I care? It's a snow day.

My guest editorial today in the GRC newspaper...

Group Think

In the stands of a GRC football game, it is all so simple. We are all clad in red, all cheering for a common goal. We celebrate together in victory, console each other in defeat. It is the pure joy of sports: supporting your team no matter what.

This identification with a group satisfies a natural impulse. We congregate around people with similar interests and beliefs. Whether you consider yourself popular or nonconformist, you and your friends likely share similar tastes in clothing, hobbies, and music. This is simply human nature.

However, this impulse endangers us when we forget that we are individuals in those groups, and that those groups do not define us. Unfortunately, many forces in our society desperately want us to forget.

Consider the controversy over the recent education speech by President Obama. A week before the speech, a student asked my thoughts about it and told me she would refuse to watch. Perplexed, I asked why she would not listen and she told me she was a conservative and disagreed strongly with Obama’s liberal policies. She had heard about a boycott campaign promoted by radio personalities.

I told her that while I was certain her 4th block teacher would not force her to watch the speech, my advice was that, regardless of her political affiliation, she should listen to the President’s message. In the end, she would either have her opinion changed in some way, or she would have additional evidence for denouncing Obama’s policies. After all, we gain nothing by only listening to people from our chosen group and ignoring differing voices.

Unfortunately, there are others who gain quite a bit.

Many people and institutions have a vested interest in you forgetting your individuality, swearing allegiance to a group, and behaving in predictable ways. If politicians know that once you register Democrat or Republican you will always vote along party lines, what motivation do they have to address your particular needs? If Aeropostale knows you will purchase anything bearing their logo, why should they improve their products? If a group of friends know you desperately cling to their approval, what will prevent them from acting in ways that are hurtful to you?

The only way to counter this pressure is to follow the advice I gave my student: listen. Certainly listen to people from your group of friends, activities, or political parties. But never be afraid to hear and honestly engage ideas different from your own. If you have not questioned your principles, you don’t have any; you merely have some group’s platform.

Most significantly, listen to yourself. Let neither the insistent shouts nor incessant murmurings of any group drown out the pure, simple voice inside you: your own, true will.

The life cycle of a high school neologism

On my Facebook status, I commented on the speed with which my students can create a new word, or conjure some new meaning for an existing word, and drive it headlong into cliche.

My favorite current example is the word "beast":

Beast (transitive verb):
1. To excel at; to perform exceptionally on

Examples:
1) "I totally beasted Montgomery County's point guard."
2) "Our color guard is going to straight up beast that band competition."
3) "Chill out, Mr. Williams; I am beasting this essay."

By the time I become aware of these coinages, they are already racing toward banality. But in my brief tenure as a teacher/sociological observer I've sketched out the following life cycle:

1. Day 1 - Word spawned - the actual germinal moment is shrouded in mystery. "Beast" may have come from the popularity of the phrase "He is a beast" amongst teenagers. Or someone may have just texted ChaCha with a request for a random word.
2. Day 2 (Before lunch) - One student uses it in discussion and gets odd looks and chuckles from classmates.
   
3. Day 2 (After lunch) - Two or three students per class use it ironically, casting sideways glances, bemused at the moronic nature of the coinage.
4. Day 3 - The coined term constitutes 60% of the words spoken by teenagers in the school.
   
5. Day 4 - Some teacher uses it in class: "Hey, you guys totally beasted that vocabulary quiz." Under desks, inside sleeves, thumbs dart across cell phone keypads. It all happens quickly now.
6. Day 5 - Students only use the word ironically, casting sideways glances, bemused at the lameness of that word.