I Am Making People Uncomfortable with My Words and What I Say

Someone sent me a link to this page, in which the content of my previous post is discussed.  I'm not familiar enough with the conventions of livejournal to decipher who says what, but I want to address some of the issues raised there.

• First, in regards to this post, I considered everyone would know of my love for Philip K. Dick and understand that I was having a thoroughly modernist laugh at haughty types who would exclude him from any future canon.
• Second, I'm not laughing (or asking others to laugh) at anything other than an outrageous display of entitlement.  What I mocked in the post was not a particular student so much as a type of student.  Someone suggested this speaks poorly of me personally and as emissary for the profession.  Perhaps.  But only the outrageously entitled will think poorly of me for mocking outrageous entitlement ... and I'm not interested in pandering to that particular demographic.  (White patriarchal privilege being something I demystify in my class, not encourage.)
• Third, the person who compared me to a character in a David Lodge novel (not in a complimentary sense) is onto something: I may not be as much of character as Dr. B., but my persona here is tailored.  (As noted previously, people who meet me off-line often describe me as "nice.")  I've been meaning to write more about this for some time now, but lack the sense of self-importance required to write introspectively for long periods of time.  Maybe someday.
• Fourth, to the person who said "composing it as real seems precisely Kaufman's style," what can I do but confess?  (Again, that is.)  The letter is written in the style of the student's complaint, but I had a little fun with it.  The student may find some of the phrasing familiar, but I freely admit to doctoring the original email.  Granted, I parroted the style and diction as best I could.  (As the resident poets have noticed, there may be a little more lyricism in my version than there was in the original.)  Thing is, writing in someone else's style is something I do rather regularly (if rarely so explicitly).  I'm a firm believer in the apprenticeship model of developing prose and frequently inhabit other writer's voices for dramatic effect.
• Fifth, the complaint is neither recent nor accurate: I'm on a leave of absence this year; and as my former students who piped up in the comments will attest, I'm eminently approachable.  (I could trace the origins of my decidedly feminist pedagogy here, but as I spent last week detailing my "teaching philosophy" for job applications, the thought of that discussion turns my stomach.)

On an unrelated note, I'm not sure what to make of the fact that every six months or so I write something that people genuinely want to share with others.  (Jealous complaints about my over-exposure notwithstanding.)  Building off my recent defense of n+1, I'm tempted to think that were I writing in a more traditional venue, the only things to make the printed page would be those few posts people seem to love.  Only, what traditional venue would publish those?  The more I think about it, the more I believe that without a genre generous enough to accommodate my many misses, the odds of me ever hitting anything shrink to null. 

Comments

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Good Lord, I bore myself.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Also, this thing about being something someone thinks everyone already reads, I'm flattered, but I'm an unemployed (possibly unemployable) graduate student with four cats who just spent the last of his checking account to replace the motherboard on the laptop bearing his dissertation. If this is pseudo-celebrity, please, I'd rather live in comfort, cancer-free, fully-healed and without the daily panic attacks ...

[Who wants a pity party? Who now? You? Never! — The Management]

[A White Bear]

I'm doing a conference paper in the fall on academic conversations online, and this is precisely the sort of stuff I'm going to end up talking about. Everyone likes to talk about community this and that, but what that community creates is a sense that one is known. Like a lot of people here, I've met Scott and think he's in the running for Most Thoughtful Person Evar. And those who haven't met you, but read you here frequently, would proably also, like me, give you the benefit of the doubt, if not to the same degree. That sense of feeling known means we can joke a little more dangerously and put less-fully-formed thoughts out into the world. Until!

Until, of course, someone who has no reason to give you the benefit of the doubt reads that joke or those half-baked thoughts. Then, suddenly, that protective community around you looks to someone like a sycophantic crew of yea-sayers, not "friends" or "colleagues," and your words (yes, your words!) make them, alas, uncomfortable. Of course they would.

One of the hardest things academics have to navigate is the level of intimacy we can have with a classroom, a department, or "the public." There are times in a class when I feel like we can joke a little more freely and be a bit more open, and then, afterwards, I find there was someone who felt marginalized, not entertained, by it. I try to be totally inclusive in that humor, and I tell my students they should come to me if they ever want me to button up my jokes a little higher, but a good laugh can be so salutory that I'm usually willing to risk it.

Even more so on the internet, where people can't see my raised brow, or the shrug I give alongside a half-thought-out thing. People who know me well don't tend to assume I'm stupid or offensive, so it's always shocking to find that people reading me for the first time online have such a judgmental reaction to what I say. It's not that their criticism is unfair, but that I mistakenly thought I was in a safe space to be given the benefit of the doubt.

Sorry, this is long, but I've been pondering these things for a while.

[A White Bear]

Uh, salutary, of course. It's late.

[CR]

So wait, in digging yourself out with these folks you bury me?

haughty types who would exclude him from any future canon

Nice. I'd stop now, if I were you.

[SFL]

It took me a while to find where you clarified information about this student's background. But you can see how I, like a couple of others, assumed that the student was ESL. Regardless, I still hate my colleagues which is *really* what my livejournal was about.

P.S. I have 4 cats too.

[eb]

The discomfort seems to have resulted in a 403 forbidden error on the livejournal page.

[Rich Puchalsky]

That first link gives me a Forbidden message. Has it been closed off?

"On an unrelated note, I'm not sure what to make of the fact that every six months or so I write something that people genuinely want to share with others."

It's the literary journalism training, which defines a narrow intersection between the values of observation, intellectuality, presence of the writer within the story, and ability to write. Most academic humanities bloggers writing about the office sex story would have written something like "You won't believe what just happened -- I came back to my office and there were two people trying to have sex. I tried to get them to stop by keeping them under observation, which reminded me of Foucault [etc etc]". A few people would have commented "Wow, really?" and that would have been that.

"The more I think about it, the more I believe that without a genre generous enough to accommodate my many misses, the odds of me ever hitting anything shrink to null."

No, you're not being megalomaniac enough. What you're supposed to do is define a new ideal that exactly matches the characteristics of what you're already doing. I, for instance, am developing theories around "It Is Best To Read Your Friends, Mostly" and "It Is Positively Whitmanesque To Rejoice In The Writing Of Shoddy Poetry".

[History Geek]

I think they f-locked locked or deleted the post, Scott. The link, she is dead.

The post didn't speak poorly of you at all. There are some out there (and perhaps not the people you refer to since I cannot read the post) of the opinion we should never say anything at all that might 'omg, hurt someones feelings'. Especially a child's students. I mean how dare you laugh at that sort of entitled attitude? Don't you know somehow someone could find it and die a bit inside?

To SFL: I really hoped the student was ESL (as did many of us), but that did not excuse the attitude of the student.

If the lj post is yours, would you mind please unlocking it? It would better allow people to understand what Scott is talking about. If you are having trouble with trolls and commentors you could turn off commenting or freeze the threads.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Actually, I think my link might've 86'd their account (and I'm truly sorry about that, as we ain't even close to the end of the month). Anyhow, here's the text of the link.

[chrischun]

It feels to me like it wasn't meant to be a public post anyway. Highyella's focus and discomfort was as much about the colleagues' words and what they said rather than just your words and what you said. Perhaps the post is locked or removed to protect the identities of the colleagues who responded to your initial post?

Even if highyella were to unlock or repost, the site is now succeptible to trolls and commenters becauses of all the unlocked entries. Based on what I know of LJ, it is a pain to go to each unlocked entry and lock it.

It doesn't look like highyella's journal was intended for high traffic, unlike yours. (My, what great links you have, Granny! I'm afraid to bookmark it because I'm pretty sure I'll be up for another few hours if I do.) If you're truly sorry about 86ing highyella's account, maybe you should reconsider making it so easy for people to find her LiveJournal? If you want people to have the entire context, maybe post the text and remove the names and links?

I don't know! Ow! Stop hitting me! I have to go (checkoutalloftheselinksonyourwebsite) now.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Now that I've read the copy of the livejournal comment, I can see that there is a certain truth to its concept of implied self-criticism and criticism of the field as well as of other-criticism of the archetype of the complaining student.

Here's one of the sentences from the complaint:

"You make me completely uncomfortable with the little things you say in the class like how you talk about television or how you talk about when you are grading our papers and trying to be fair."

That gives the blog post an element of self-reflectivity -- after all, what you were doing when writing it was talking about grading students and trying to be fair. I would guess that most undergraduate students, unless they were fairly confident in their top-of-the-class status, would be made uncomfortable by reading an academic blog, just as citizens are not reassured by hearing the details of how politicians make laws, or church-goers are kept away from the trade gossip of ministers.

But it is also self-criticism of futility, of course. I'll turn to the method of poetastic analysis (write a dashed-off or parody poem, then look back at your word choice, by which choice among limited options you can understand what your "unconscious" was telling you about the subject). My first parody poem (the Poe one) had you incessantly going over your lesson plans. My second (the WCW) was about the wasting of an attempt to teach. For a blog, and a community, concerned about how to teach, the letter represents not just mockery of entitlement, but also confrontation with failure. Not failure to be criticized in the tiresome sense of the commenter who wanted you to seek out the student and solicitously find out what was wrong, but inevitable failure.

[Kerry]

Well, you might be making people uncomfortable with your words (*and* what they say), but you've also made me happy with all the poetry you've inspired. That was great!

[History Geek]

There seems to be some confusion about livejournal. Livejournal journals aren't set up quite the same way as blogger and typepad.

You can't '86' a livejournal account. They either deleted it themself or locked it so that people on their 'friends' list wouldn't be able to read it. You linking to them probably did nothing but bring in people that disagreed with them, and in true livejournal fashion, they deleted or locked it.

[History Geek]

Gah, that should be "so ONLY people on their friends list would be able to read it'.

I swear its noon where I am, I should be more awake than this.

[Jandy]

History Geek is right. Individual LJs don't go down from too much traffic. I'm pretty sure the poster deleted the post; if she'd just locked it, clicking the link would have generated a page saying "You don't have authorization to view this protected entry." What can I say, I've known some rather passive-aggressive LJ people. Also, regarding Chrischun's comment about locking posts--LJ just introduced mass locking in the past few weeks, so she could lock her journal down from trolls pretty easily if she wanted to.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

SFL, apologies for linking to the piece if you didn't mean for it to be. Like I said, I'm not familiar with Livejournal or its conventions, so if you want me to unlink to it (and take down the copy), all you need to do is ask.

——

So wait, in digging yourself out with these folks you bury me?

CR, you misread that sentence. (Which, it turns out, was poorly written.) What I mean was I was having a modernist laugh, in the embrace-of-high-and-low-culture sense, like "Nausicaa," at the haughty types who don't share my sensibility. Granted, I know that's more of a postmodern than modern thing, but I prefer the elevation of modernism to the debasement of the aesthetic in postmodernism.

——

It's the literary journalism training, which defines a narrow intersection between the values of observation, intellectuality, presence of the writer within the story, and ability to write.

That may be it, Rich. (Sans the "ability to write" bit. If only you saw my many drafts.)

What you're supposed to do is define a new ideal that exactly matches the characteristics of what you're already doing.

That's just genius. "Make it what it already is" shall be our (respective) movements' motto.

For a blog, and a community, concerned about how to teach, the letter represents not just mockery of entitlement, but also confrontation with failure. Not failure to be criticized in the tiresome sense of the commenter who wanted you to seek out the student and solicitously find out what was wrong, but inevitable failure.

Failure? What failure? I've never failed at anything in my entire life. (Rinse. Lather. Repeat. Rinse. Lather. Repeat.)

——

Chris, you may be correct. Editing all those names out is going to be a pain, but it's not like I've got anything better to do. (Yes, you do.) No, I really don't. (Yes, you really do ... but you're going to edit those names out anyway.) Stupid conscience.

——

Kerry, I can't take credit for the poetry, but I should highlight some of it in a post of its own. Be right back.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Ah, but in "ability to write", I was referring to it as a value, not an inborn talent. The many drafts show that you have internalized the value of rewriting the post until it reaches a certain standard of readability, dramatic tension etc.

As for failure -- I think that denying that failure ever occurs goes a bit too far towards actual megalomania as opposed to pretend-megalomania. Instead, I'm pursuing theorization of failure as tragically doomed element of the human condition. Even the best writers must secretly look at their writing and see the places where it didn't quite do what they wanted it to do, right? So who are we not to do the same? (This cleverly elides any distinction between "good" and "bad" writers.)

More seriously, it's impossible for any class to be a completely successful teaching experience -- there are always going to be at least a few people who don't get it, either because of their problems or yours or some combination. Thus confrontation with this letter is a confrontration with the element of inevitable failure that must occur within any classroom.

[Paige]

I would like to chime in, as the one who originally sent the email to my grad list, because I thought it was hilarious. I still do.

Yes, of course your persona is tailored -- and by saying that you were like a character in a David Lodge novel (and not in a complimentary sense) I didn't mean to suggest that there was anything especially wrong with that. I am not in the habit of wishing that you were different than you are. I made the comment strictly to explain that I was not intending to laugh *only* at the student, but also at you.

(Not that you seem crushed and in need of clarification, but it matters to me to say it).

And of course you altered the original email. It seemed like your style, and I liked it that way.

I wish now that I had defended you (and sending the link to the list) more strenuously. I didn't, as I thought that being too forceful would discourage responses (it's happened before on that list). I wish, too, that my classmate had actually entered the discussion, particularly as her ire seems to stem partly from the fact that the letter mocks a "potentially brown" person -- which, as your comments reveal, isn't the case.

Anyhow, for the record, your words and what you say are not making *me* uncomfortable (except in the way that good comedy *always* makes one uncomfortable.)

Cheers.