"If you had the financial wherewithal to quit your job, would you?"

     A friend posted this question on Facebook today. So, this little post is an answer to her. As I have written here previously, I obliged myself (and my family) to be in a position to do this very thing almost three years ago. For me, it wasn't about "having" the financial wherewithal, it was about making the financial wherewithal. I think that's the more common situation. Short of winning the lottery, few and far between are the people who suddenly say to themselves, "Wow, this family could live on one income. Let's go ahead and do that." It goes against our culture to downsize. We're always supposed to be increasing materially. Yet (as I have wrestled with in a number of posts here before), the desire to buy things, own things, easily becomes disordered thinking.

     So, the beginning of my friend's Facebook post, "If you had the financial wherewithal..." is fraught with difficulties. This became apparent in the responses her post received. Some mentioned the desire to do volunteer work or be a "lady who lunches" in their responses. I think this reflects how we are conditioned to see not being employed as a fantasy situation available only to the rich. But what if "having the financial wherewithal" meant simply being able to pay the bills with enough left over to not be destitute? That's the premise on which I quit my job and my experience with it makes me want to write this post in response to my friend's Facebook post.

Four Surprises about Choosing not to Be Employed:

1. Our lifestyle hasn't diminished. When I decided to quit my job (with my husband's blessing), we sold our house and two cars. We gave away a lot of stuff. We moved in with my mother who had been living alone a block away.
     This is is the part that seemed wrenching at first. We had just had a new porch installed on the house and the housing market had just crashed. It was the worst time to put a house on the market. My husband gave me perspective though. He said, "Well, if we consider the amount of money we've lost on the house as the rent we had to pay for the seven years we lived in it, we got a pretty good deal." (Yeah, I know how to pick a husband.)
     Now, almost three years later, some aspects of our lifestyle have changed. I no longer have a fancy wardrobe of clothing. I do not shop recreationally. I do not have the latest of electronics. We do not eat out. But my husband and I still can buy the occasional toy -- a book, a sari, a carefully planned electronic upgrade.
    The fact that we now live with my mother has made our family life more complete. I don't have to worry about how she's doing, if she's eating well, if she's lonely. We are a family together and that has been an unexpected up-grade in our lifestyle.
     We don't hire cleaning people to come in every other week any more of course which brings me to my next point.

2. There is no such thing as "spare time." When contemplating quitting work, people always imagine what they would do instead. Work expands to fit the time and when you are home, there is plenty of work everywhere. I now regard my job as running the house. There is not enough time in the day to have the laundry, cleaning, cooking, etc. "done." I am busy every minute, as busy as I ever was while employed. There may not be the same kind of intellectual creativity demanded of me as when I was a university professor but I'm never bored. Making the house work is interesting and is best done with creativity and love. I've been enjoying this kind of work -- mostly because I feel so very useful doing it. And that brings me to the next point.

3. Work doesn't miss me. This is the ego-crusher but it's really important to know about this. No one at work pines for my return. My students are just fine. The world goes right on turning and it's as if I were never there. I was never vital to anyone at work. I did good work, sometimes really exceptional work, but that never mattered much to anyone but me. I see that now. I put in long days thinking how lucky the university was to have me to clean up the messes and put things in order but my students never understood the ways in which I was making things better behind the scenes and my supervisors never cared. Having enormous responsibility for what happened in 1000-level classrooms but having almost no real authority was always the worst aspect of being the comp/rhet professor on faculty. I now have insight into that issue.

4. Resolving the difficulty of having responsibility without authority is enlightening. My responsibilities are now given to me by those over whom I have "authority." This is a good situation. And what's even better is that I don't have to deal with issues of actual "authority" at all. Which is to say, I get to be a human being. I negotiate with my family what should be done in the house and they trust me to make decisions in a pinch. They don't micro-manage me and I make decisions based on what is best for them. Yes, that would be the case in the ideal work place too but what makes it work for sure in the home is love. If the work isn't glamorous, that's more than compensated for by the working conditions.

     I am glad I made the decision to leave my career. Just sayin'.

Tomato Harvest 2012

Heirloom Tomato Taste Test Results:
     Ranking for best-tasting tomato as judged by my mother, husband, and self:
          #1 "Costoluto Genevese"
          #2 "Cherokee Purple"
          #3 "Brandywine"
          Also Ran: "Delicious" and "Arkansas Traveler"

My Garden

The steady stream of produce from my roughly 130 tomato plants is peeking about now. I pick them as soon as they start to get a bit pink and ripen them inside, away from the birds. This explains why these photos of my tomato plants show only green tomatoes.


This year, I planted three heirloom varieties that we enjoyed last year: Brandywine, Mortgagelifter, and Delicious. In addition, I decided to try Costoluto Genovese which gets described in the seed catalogues as "heat-loving" and Cherokee Purple because word on the street is it's yummy. I also tossed in a few Arkansas Travelers since they are supposed to do well in our climate. The midsummer evaluation of the plants is in:


Arkansas Traveler
     The plants look pretty good but they are smaller than the other varieties by quite a bit. They want to send up suckers very much but pruning them doesn't seem to reroute that vigor to the main stem. This is frustrating. I'm looking for varieties that will do well with the one-stem pruning I do. The fruit are very small. I won't be planting this one again.

Tomato variety: Arkansas Traveler

Brandywine
     Because I loved the taste of these ugly things so much last year, I admittedly favored them from seedlings. If I had doted on the other varieties as much as I did on the Brandywine, all varieties would have almost certainly done better. I just didn't expect that any other varieties would stand up to these for taste. (And I was so very wrong.) Having said that, the Brandywine vines are mostly very vigorous and some are already six feet tall with stems so thick I can hardly get a thumb and forefinger together around them. The fruit are mostly really huge. The flowers have been mostly very convoluted in shape and the resulting fruit have had truly weird shapes. This is only a problem now and then when it makes it difficult to remove them from the vine without breaking and to cut into sandwich-worthy slices. For whatever reason, the vines in rows going east-west are doing the very best. 

Tomato variety: Brandywine

Cherokee Purple
     These were really difficult to get to germinate and grow to transplant size. Only a small fraction of the seedlings made it into the garden and the ones that did were very weak and spindly until June. I gave them some choice compost in late May and they have responded somewhat. Now a few of the vines are quite robust and producing good-sized fruit. Since these were a success with all family members in the taste test, I'll save seed from these vines for next year, give them choice spots in the garden, and see if I can get more out of them in next year's generation.

Tomato variety: Cherokee Purple

Costoluto Genovese
     I bought these seeds because the catalogue description was very persuasive. They are reportedly old-fashioned in taste and very tolerant of extreme heat. That's what I want for sure. The plants seem to be generally slow. The seedlings developed more slowly than other varieties though they had a much better survival rate than all the others except the Brandywine. But, even now, they are slow in maturing: I have harvested dozens from all other vines but only now have ripened my first Costoluto. Admittedly, I had so many seedlings develop that I just took them for granted. I used these as filler plants during the transplanting phase -- as replacements in places where my more prefered varieties weren't surviving.  I even used Costoluto as the primary variety in my okay-hornworms-you-can-have-these-plants auxillary garden. It's possible that they need the hot temperatures to mature more than the other varieties, so I'll keep my eye on them and see if they pick up the pace a bit in July and August. However, considering how much my mother and husband like these, I'll have to buy seed and try again if I don't get enough from this year's fruit.

Tomato variety: Consoluto Genevese

Delicious
     These plants did well until transplanting. Then, they started dying off. They were reliable germinators though, so I have more than a dozen that have survived and they are now mostly quite vigorous. Two plants (right next to each other) have had a lot of end rot. This is strange because no other vines have had any at all. The fruits are medium-sized and nice and round but they don't have the dense meat of the Brandywine. I may not plant these again next year. I'd rather put my efforts into the Costoluto, Cherokee Purple, and Brandywine.

Tomato variety: Delicious

Mortgagelifter
     What happened to these this year?! Hardly any survived transplanting -- and the germination wasn't great either. The only fruits I'm getting from the few Mortgagelifters I have are much smaller than the Brandywines. I may try buying a package of Mortgagelifter seeds next year just because I have such fond memories of the big tomatoes I got from them last year, but I'm so very disappointed in what I had thought of as the tough workhorse of the tomato garden. Or, maybe, I'll pass on these for next year. It may be more interesting to focus on the three varieties we like -- and maybe try a new one or two.

Building the Garden

     So, I spent March 16 in the back yard building the garden. Below is a photo of most of the yard. It's taken from the northwest corner, facing the southeast. This picture was taken earlier in the week--before the chicken coop was built. You'll see the coop in the other pictures. My thinking on the building of the coop will be explained in a later post. 

      Obviously, the compost heap is in the back. The circle around the birdbath was planted with strawberries that reproduced more than they produced in last summer's garden. I transplanted them here in the late fall. You can see that I have tilled a square ring around the birdbath circle. This is where I will plant about 200 tomato plants.

       
     The photo below was taken from the southwest corner of the garden facing the southeast. This is the site of the chicken coop before it was built.

     While talking with a local woman who expressed interest in my organic gardening, I was asked several questions about beginning the tomato seeds. We have a room in the southwest corner of the house that has a few large south-facing windows. Though the windows have big awnings that keep most direct sunlight out, they are big and bright enough to support seedlings during their first weeks after germination. Here's a shot of some seedlings at the window:

     Once they get their first true leaves, I pot them and put them outside to harden off every day that's not rainy or below 50 degrees. This year, I invested in some plastic pots I found on Amazon.com. I think I paid $30 for 180 of them and they are substantial enough that they should be reusable for several years. I also bought the pale green trays pictured below. I only bought four of them because they were a bit more expensive and I wanted to see if they were worth it. For next spring, I will definitely be investing in some more of these trays but I'll buy them in the winter when the prices are lower.

     This western side of the house is a good place to harden off the seedlings. It's the one spot on our property where the birds leave them alone.

      Once I've set up the scaffolding for the tomatoes, I can leave the hardened-off potted plants behind bird netting for several days at a time. Once a good number of the plants can be left out like this, I feel like the mother of many children whose oldest are finally spending the day at school--a few more hours in my day.

     So, the scaffolding. This is a way of staking my indeterminate tomato plants that I came up with after the season was well underway last year. Necessity was the mother of it--the plants were so tall and heavy, nothing I was trying was working well. What I ultimately came up with (and see myself using for the foreseeable future) is a trellis system in which each module is made of five pieces of 10-foot rebar. Four of the pieces are bent into an upside-down L shape with the top bend at 7 1/2 feet up. Two of the 2 1/2-foot parts of two pieces are zip-tied together. Then, the other two 2 1/2-foot sections of two other rebar pieces are zip-tied together and the fifth piece of unbent rebar is zip-tied on top holding the five pieces together in the shape of a children's swing-set. The rebar pieces are so thin and muted in color that they are difficult to see, but here they are:

      I have two twenty-foot lengths of this trellis on each of the sides of the square ring I had tilled out. I will plant the tomatoes one foot apart and prune them up tightly, wrapping each one around a piece of twine tied to the base of the tomato plant at the bottom and to the top rebar piece at the top. This structure is strong enough to support all these plants when they get to be ten feet tall and are covered in heavy fruit. They have the added advantage of being able to be taken down and easily stored during the winter. Next year I will configure them into a new arrangement. The photo below is the view from the street on the west side of the property. When it is warm enough to plant beans, this view will be on its way to disappearing thanks to a line of rebar trellises that will be covered with purple hyacinth vines. That will give the garden some privacy and protect it from the vicious late-day sun in August.

     Below is a view of the chicken coop at the far south end of the garden, framed by the freshly-built tomato trellises:

Above is a photo taken from the eastern side of the garden. The road and neighbor's grey house will be blocked from view when rebar scaffolding I will build at that end of the garden is covered in the hyacinth vines.

     And here is the chicken coop under construction:

      Here is the view from above. You can see that the square ring of tomato trellises are bisected on three sides by a narrow walkway of straw. (The side of the square closest to the camera has not had the trellises put up yet because I'm needing to get some more rebar.) The tomatoes will be under-planted with basil, lima beans, lettuce, and spinach. down the center of each side of the square I will plant zinnias, cosmos, and Queen Ann's lace. The spare space in the four corners will be planted with peppers, beans, and eggplant.

The Garden: Making It Up As I Go Along

     I have become completely obsessed with my garden. Mind you, it's not much of a garden as yet. I only planted it for the first time last year. It takes time to turn a yard into a garden. Last year, I just jumped in and did the best I could. I was making it up as I went along. I still am.

     That's not to say that I didn't do research before starting last year. I did. It's just that research on when and how to start a garden is not a linear process. For every "fact" I learned, there was a contradicting "fact," all of them asserted by people with very strong opinions about what "works" and what doesn't. Now, I could go on and on about the various reasons I did not go to a large, central authority for answers. I could have gone to the local farmer's co-op, the county extension office, etc. Rather than waxing self-reflective about why I did not make a bee-line for these obvious authorities, let me just chalk it up to the reveling in my dyslexia I have enjoyed since I quit my job in academe. So, my "research" was a disorderly but voracious reading of everything ordinary gardeners were putting online about their own gardens. I felt there was a greater truth to what they were telling me because they weren't doing reductionist experimentation like scientists, they were doing it the way people have done it since the idea of planting first occurred to us. It was fascinating to see on YouTube and read on blogs all these people's experiences. I felt I was learning faster and better than I ever could from a textbook presentation. It's hip to dis the internet but I feel better educated by playing around online than I ever have sitting in a classroom. (Again, we can chalk that up to the dyslexia thing but it seems to me there's something so natural about learning this way.)

     My success with a fairly large ornamental garden while living in Florida (1999-2003) only served to teach me how to garden in the most forgiving setting in the world. From what I was reading online in planning my northeast Oklahoma garden, growing vegetables is fraught with dangers. Just getting started with when and how to plant the seeds was a subject of some debate in the blogosphere. I ultimately concluded that if planting a seed can have various theories, then absolutely everything about growing the plant will too. So, it would be best, I reasoned, to just jump in and try something out, see how it goes, and learn along the way. I picked up ideas and attitudes from many different people online and made decisions about what appealed to me. My dislike for rows of desks in a classroom lead me naturally to seek out gardeners who refused to enforce such unnatural rigidity on their plants. Yet, I found myself drawn to theories about staking and pruning tomatoes (my primary crop) that were tightly controlled. Again, this affords me an opportunity to wax self-reflective about the effect years of Catholic schooling might have had.

     One of my favorite ways to find interesting garden blogs, forums, etc. is to type something like "vegetable garden with flowers" or " beautiful vegetable garden" into Google Images and check out the sites posting interesting pics. For example, this

inspired me to map out a potager garden. I will have these kinds of beds in 2012 but without the raised aspect (i.e., the boards allowing soil level to be higher than the path) and I won't put in any gravel pathway until I decide how well I like it. If it goes well, I'll install the boards and gravel in 2013. Some of the images I found led me to discussions of the practical issues of potager gardens and the history of potatger gardens. I guess I'm plenty visual because this is how I've gotten inspiration for garden plans. For the how-to of planting and growing vegetables, I've been pleased with YouTube's community of gardeners. My favorites are the ones that show me both the failures and successes of different methods they've tried. It feels like I'm getting the benefit of many people's experiences with out having had to go through the trial and error myself.

     In any event, I learned enough to make a fairly good go of it last season. The tomatoes were a huge success in a year when most of this region's growers were having a terrible time getting fruit to set.

I learned that I had to pick my tomatoes when they started to turn pink or the birds would get into them.

The eggplant and bell peppers were less productive. The peas were interesting to grow but the pay-off was not very satisfying and the potatoes were a bust considering how much labor they involved. As for the lettuce, broccoli, and spinach I sowed directly into the garden, well, let's just say that I underestimated the local bird population. I knew that the soil would need to be developed before the veggies really produced well, so, on the whole, I was very encouraged by last year's attempts.

This is my best bell pepper plant on its best day. They were nice but small and thin-walled.

     What I had forgotten in the years I'd been away from gardening was the hypnotic effect a garden has on me. I can pass hours there, fussing with the plants or just sitting and watching them and the insects that visit them. Spending a lot of time there, I got to know the birds, mice, snakes, and moles. In the case of the moles, not a face-to-face communication, but I watched the soil moving around as they visited the garden. I can lose myself completely in the garden and I always return to the house in a blissful state of mind, feeling that the whole world is beautiful and fruitful. And ever since dismantling the garden at the end of October, I have pined for a return.

     So, I'm spending the winter planning my little Eden. Last year, I was only able to break the sod on half the backyard. It would have been overwhelming to try to do the entire 1000-foot area all at once.

This is a view from the southwest corner of the garden with the house on the left and garage in the center.

     If the photo above had been taken in the summer, it would have shown rows of staked tomatoes, bush beans, basil, and a failed attempt to grow a mirliton vine. Now it shows some green that may appear to be grass but is actually sprouts from the straw that is decomposing there with the brown paper under it and the soil and grass from last October. I'm taking the sprouting straw (whatever plant it is) as a sign that all beneath it are decomposing richly. The theory is I will till this under in the spring. However, I'm toying with the idea of not digging it again and just putting another layer of paper and straw into which I will dig the places I will set the new plants into the soil. Among things I haven't decided is where I stand on the tilling vs. no digging theories.

Here, on the far eastern edge of the garden, you can see the layered paper and straw. This shady area under the tree behind the garage was just grass last year, but I covered to too in hopes of extending a nice shade garden here.

A view from the northeastern corner of the garden

     As you can see from the photo above, The southern boundary of the yard is flanked by a jumble of privets that have just been allowed to grow for ages along the chain-link fence that separates our property form the alleyway that runs behind it. The wildlife use this privet as cover and food, so I'm not disturbing it. The only shade it casts on the garden is in the late evening -- in July and August, that shade is very welcome. Below is a closer view of the soil around the only tree in the central area of the yard. Last year, the garden stopped about five feet before reaching this tree. It's not really a shade issue because of its size and shape. The roots aren't much of a problem at this point and I'm hopeful they won't start doing any wacky growing in response to the tilling.

I will mulch over the grass around the drip line of this tall, thin fruit tree.

     The property is a corner lot and the west side is open to a street.

This view from the deck shows the relationship of the street to the garden.

I don't have the funds to build a fence and the needed gates to close this off, so I'm planning a 6-foot trellis on which I will grow purple hyacinth bean vine this year and rotate the tomatoes on it next year. I've also put a rose of sharon and purple butterfly bush in the northwest corner for increased privacy. The only reason privacy is an issue is that I'm self-conscious about the extent to which I'm making this garden up as I go along. In my experience, people see a diminutive female doing yardwork and immediately want to offer advice on how to do it "right." I once had a neighbor roll up in his car on his way home from work to tell me, "Be careful." in all earnestness upon seeing me cutting a hedge. Maybe I could just put up a sign: "I realize I don't know what I'm doing. Please look away. See my blog for explanation." Or the hyacinth vine. Either way.

Lessons in India

Ah, the long awaited trip to Mother India. So much anticipation, so much excitement.  It is not going as planned and this has become an exercise in patience an acceptance. My husband and I are blogging about it here.

The Alternative to the Consumerist Christmas

     A few years ago, I proposed a consumerist Christmas alternative to my mother and husband: instead of buying gifts for each other, we would make gifts for each other. I knew that if I could get the two of them in on the idea, it would be an easy sell to the larger family, and even friends. The idea, however, was dead on arrival and nothing I said could change their minds in the least. My mother informed me that this would take all the fun out of Christmas. This pronouncement confused me initially until I put it in the context of my mother's shopping habit. She goes trawling through discount stores for any item that in any way reminds her of a loved one. She immediately buys these items and puts them in the closet until Christmas or a birthday arrives. By the time I had made the homemade Christmas suggestion, she would have had half a closet full of little items she was excited to give to us. I didn't want to ruin her Christmas, so I backed off. My husband's objection was much more difficult for me to swallow. He claimed that he didn't know how to make anything. I told him he could write something for me. Hell, he has a PhD in English. He can write something. He just kept saying no. It's hard to argue with "no." So that idea for getting away from consumerist Christmas was dead on arrival. Mind you, he was all for the idea of a non-consumerist Christmas--he just didn't like the idea of having to make something.

     But now, I have a new and improved suggestion for getting the stuff out of Christmas: symbolic donations. Rather than searching for a good price on something somehow appropriate for each family member and good friend, we would find a cause that had some connection to something we love about each loved one and make a donation in that person's name. The donation should be small--an agreed-upon amount among all participating. Times are tough, I say $10 per person is fine but since such gifts are tax-deductible, we could probably all afford a good deal more--even in this economy. Here's how it would work: I would do some online research to choose the cause and the recipient organization, and then make the donation in the person's name, asking that an announcement be sent to the person in whose name I'm giving. I then write out a Christmas card to the loved one explaining why I chose that organization to make a donation in his/her name. This card is the thing that should be opened on Christmas morning. Imagine, instead of unwrapping things and stuff, opening pretty little cards with an explanation of why you inspired a donation. It would be meaningful, possibly funny, certainly memorable--I think.

     I proposed this donation idea to my mother and husband a few weeks ago. It was received fairly well. My mother stopped frowning at one point. However, she has since gone on to talk about what she's buying for whom. The husband, however, was game. I think most of my family and his would be too. So, on this Black Friday, let me give the gift of an alternative view of Christmas morning:

For my husband: a donation to The Asha Trust in Uttar Pradesh
The card would say: "Dear Brian, I will always remember your telling me about the talk you had with your mother before she died. You had wanted to make sure she knew how important she was in your life and you instinctively focused on your memories of her teaching you to read. You let her know how precious that memory was to you. I've chosen your Christmas donation in honor of that last visit to see your mother and the love she passed on to you. This year, I've made a donation in your name to The Asha Trust in Uttar Pradesh. This organization teaches children to read and offers them asha (Hindi for "hope"). The Asha Trust is part of a reputable nonprofit and it describes itself like this: 'The project educates the children of socially and economically backward communities (primarily landless laborers or farmers on leased land) in a village near Babhnauli who (1) cannot afford education expenses and (2) do not even realise the importance of education. Currently, most children in the community either never attend school or leave schools by the ages of 10 to 12 to contribute to family income. The project attempts to achieve its goals by running a school that primarily provides basic literacy (Hindi, Math, Verbal, English); with plans to provide basic vocational training in the future.' This year, you are the sponsor for [name inserted]. This year, [name] will learn to read and write because of you. मेरी क्रिसमस, मेरे प्यार!"


For my mother: a donation to the Wildcare Foundation in Oklahoma
The card would say: "Dear Mom, I thought it would make you happy this Christmas to know that a donation has been made in your name to an organization that rescues wild animals in this state, rehabilitates them, and returns them to the wild. Your love for the birds and squirrels has inspired the choice of this organization. This year, you will help prevent the needless suffering and death of 14,000 song birds and 600 squirrels--and dozens of other wild creatures. They also rescue, rehabilitate, and release wild cats, foxes, etc. Your donation entitles you to attend an open house at the facility and the release of a creature being returned to the wild. All the little wild creatures are saying, 'Thanks, Pat!' I hope that makes Christmas a little brighter for you."


For my brother: a donation to Shared Housing of New Orleans
The card would say: "Dear Rick, This year, I've made a donation in your name to an organization that helps elderly and disabled New Orleanians stay in their homes. I remember how heart-broken you were when Katrina destroyed the city we love so much. You said you were glad Mama and Papa weren't alive to see it. THe donatation in your name will help some people remain in the neighborhoods they love. One of the things I thought you would particularly like about this non-profit is that they help people of New Orleans forge relationships of support and trust like we remember Mama and Papa had in their beloved neighborhood. Merry Christmas. I love you, Little Bro!"


For my sister-in-law: a donation to The Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation
The card would say: "Dear Lisa, This year, I've made a donation in your name to an organization that helps save underfunded music programs by providing instruments for students who could not afford them otherwise. I see this as an investment in putting a few more people like yourself in the world because when these kids catch the joy of music, they will pass it down to their children like you have done. Thank you for creating a home filled with joy and love. The world needs more people like you. Merry Christmas!"

It takes a bit of time to research these organizations but I was able to pull these four would-be gifts together in a single day. One more day for the nieces and nephews, another for Brian's family, and I will have spent no more money than usual but will have made very personal gifts. Inviting all these people to gift us in this same way isn't hard to ask since it need cost no more in time and money and is tax-deductible too. I've gone back and forth on the question of the children in the family. Does a 10-year-old want this kind of gift? Probably not--but is that a reason not to give a donation in their name for Christmas? Yeah, they'd be happier opening a toy--at first--but I can easily image the sweet and sensitive children of our siblings getting into this. And isn't it a great education in the meaning of Christmas?

Now I will see what the family and friends have to say about this blog post. Will this version of a non-consumerist Christmas take off?

UPDATE: The husband and Mom have read this and Brian's happy with the idea. My mother giggled through the part about her. Not sure what that means yet. I'll give her some time. She did like the organization I picked for her.

My Visit to Occupy Cork (Ireland)

     When I visited the Occupy Cork (Ireland) camp on the evening of October 20, it was only the sixth day of its existence. Though it is the second-largest city in the Irish Republic, Cork has a population of only around 200,000 people--meaning, it is roughly the size of Des Moines, Iowa. Yet Cork has long been known as the rebel city in Ireland and so it's not surprising to see it making its own, independent appearance on the Occupy scene fairly early on. I've been reading about the Occupy Wall Street camp since the beginning but have not visited it. Like most Americans, I don't have the means to make impromptu trips to New York City so I used a long-planned visit to Ireland as my chance to see the Occupy movement close up. I saw the camp in Dublin the week before I was in Cork. I was delighted but didn't make my way inside for a visit. When I saw the fresh camp in Cork, it felt more inviting--possibly because it was within walking distance of my hotel, possibly because it was so small. 

     I made my way to the camp shortly before the 6PM General Assembly meeting. (I knew there was a 6:00 General Assembly meeting because I'd seen it posted on their agenda sign as I passed by in a tour bus.) I have here a few short video clips I took while there. I wanted to capture the atmosphere but felt very strange holding a camera on these people who I knew would soon be, if they were not already, under the scrutiny of police and private security. So, I didn't record group discussions. Here is a minute or two of the opening of the General Assembly. The meeting begins with protocol instructions so everyone present can participate appropriately. My camera started after instructions were already underway:

     By the way, the young men wearing the yellow safety vests are essentially the security volunteers though what they have written above a smiley face on the back of the vest is "Helpful Steward."

     Again, because I didn't want to be creepy,  I didn't scrutinize the camp with my camera. But for the benefit of those who will not be going there to see, I will give a brief description. (For those who may visit, here's the camp's location on a map Of Cork City.) From the street, one first sees the table and signs set up for giving information to the public. Behind this, one can see an open space between  a narrow section of the River Lee and a two-lane city center street. The modern buildings around it are a few stories high and it was easy to image that the area had usually been the place for the office workers in the area to take a quick smoke; stone benches, a few small trees, mostly paved with a few patches of grass. By night, it is well-lit by tall street lamps. The dozen or so small pup tents pitched on the ground were huddled closely together to afford an open area in front of the stand-up green tarp shelter that served as the kitchen (where all are welcome to eat for free). The space that this managed to open was a perhaps 15' x 10' area. It was in this space that the general assembly took place. For those who have been there, I need only say it was October in southwest Ireland. For those who must use their imaginations: it was chilly and rainy in the noncommittal way harbor towns can be--you'd seem foolish using an umbrella, but you know for sure that you'll be quite damp when you get home. 

     I had heard about the General Assembly in Wall Street. I'd been fascinated by their "human mic" as a creative response to having their megaphones banned. I didn't know, however, what happened at such meetings. Knowing that these Cork Occupiers were just newly organized, I surmised that the discussions would be interesting. It turned out that though they had probably fewer than 100 people there, they had the use of a megaphone. Here's the young man (whose name I came to learn is Saint John) setting up the discussion:

     And so everyone counted off from 1 to 5 and sat down in five separate groups to read the draft of the Occupy Cork statement of purpose. When the count-off came around to me, I demurred. I didn't feel right about assuming I was a regular member of this assembly. I wasn't Irish, let alone a resident of Cork. In addition, it felt like many of these young people were college students and my professional habit of not interrupting students when they are discussing things well among themselves kicked in. Instead, after the counting off was over, I asked the woman next to me if I could follow her to her subgroup. Once our group was seated together, one member read aloud the first draft of the Occupy Cork statement of purpose (see and hear this in the video below). My next post will concern the interesting debates that developed in the discussion. Here's a chance for you to guess what points in this statement would lead to disagreements. Take a look/listen:

"Undead Authors" paper from SWPCA conference 2010

Undead Authors: Anne Rice, J. K. Rowling, 

and Stephenie Meyer Battle

Roland Barthes on the Internet

            The appearance of the undead (whether figured as zombies or vampires) in a story always determines its genre as fantasy. All fantasy is not tales of the undead, but tales of the undead are always fantasy.  This is a commonplace, but recent activity on the part of some of fantasy literature’s most popular figures add a new, chilling layer to the relationship between the undead and fantasy. In spite of Roland Barthes’ 1964 assertion that the author is dead, Anne Rice, JK Rowling, and Stephanie Meyer refuse to stay in the coffin. They drag their decaying flesh around the internet doing what vampires and zombies do: consuming the living to perpetuate the illusion of life. It is certainly nothing new that authors reject the pronouncement of their death, but the internet has created a space in which the author can do the dark magic that renders them a creature of fantasy: they can keep their rotting bodies moving and acting by draining life from the living. In doing so, the fantasy monster does not change the fact that she is dead, she only sustains a terrifying illusion.

            What Roland Barthes said of the mid-twentieth-century literary criticism can be said of the internet:

The author still reigns in histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews,

magazines, as in the very consciousness of men of letters anxious to unite their

person and their work through diaries and memoirs. The image of literature to be

found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his life,

his tastes, his passions….

I would assert that the internet maintains an image of literature “tyrannically centered on the author” and Barthes’ “histories, biographies, interviews, magazines, diaries and memoires” only has a few new additions: blogs, author’s official sites, fansites, and amazon.com. These new venues are unique in all history in that they permit readers to be writers in a space where the author is also just another writer. Barthes asserts that “writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.
” Online, we are all equally disembodied. The text upon which the author hangs her status (e.g. her novels) is a writing that can live in our blogs or fansites as an object without subjectivity. Barthes adds,
”No doubt it has always been that way.” But it has never been so obvious that the author is only a writer. And it is significant that this realization occurs when we are in a space where we, ourselves, are able to literally participate in the objectification of the author.  Of course, it is only when the nature of the undead thing is revealed to the living that they take up a fight against the repulsive thing.  There are no tales of the undead without human protagonists combating the zombies, vampires, or Frankenstein’s monster.  So, though the internet is a space in which the illusion of the author as a living creature is possible, it is also a field of battle. A close look at this battle reveals how the worldwide web has made Barthes’ conclusions about the relationships among authors, texts, and readers visible; and how that visibility has led to what is very like the final confrontation at the end of Dracula, Dawn of the Dead, or Frankenstein: a scene of carnage that is frankly unpleasant to witness.

            Let us consider our three most visible undead authors in chronological order. First is Anne Rice who has had a fascinating journey of her own from penning novels under two different pseudonyms to disguise herself to attaching her self to what Barthes calls the Author-God in the most overt way possible: asserting that her return to Catholicism is behind her new mission to write what one clever online commentator has called “Jesus fanfiction” (http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=19988). Rice has a sharp instinct for what the undead must do. She has made an ugly scramble to eat the brains of the living in her passionate fight against fanfiction that uses her characters. Online fanfic writers have not only been served cease and desist orders, according to a document found in several online fanfiction sites:

The attacks consisted of, amongst other things, e-mailed threats regarding not only

the writing of fanfiction but any writing that any fanfic author attempted to engage

in (regardless of who owned the copyright), attacks on businesses that the fanfic

authors owned and weeks of harassing personal letters sent to fanfic author's e-mail

addresses and guestbooks. Personal information about fanfic authors was also dug

up by Anne Rice employees and used as part of the harassment.

(http://www.angelfire.com/rant/croatoan)

Fanfiction is a remarkably living thing. It is created by writers who, by definition are readers and interpreters of fiction, exactly the force Barthes argues can only live after the death of the author.  Rice has published on her website her absolute dictum on fanfiction:  “I do not allow fan fiction. The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to even think about fan fiction with my characters. I advise my readers to write your own original stories with your own characters. It is absolutely essential that you respect my wishes.” Consequently, Rice enjoys a fanfiction-free undead life on the internet. However, writers of fanfiction are only the most obviously living creatures on the internet. Even the online venues where their books are sold taunt the undead with the voices of their readers.  The wild vitriol of Rice’s attacks against her readers who post on the internet is perhaps only explicable by seeing it as a fight for her (undead) life. Her September 6, 2004 rant on amazon.com’s “reader’s reviews” for her poorly received book Blood Canticle is otherwise mystifying. In it she makes the following attack on those who wrote less than positive reviews on the site:

For me, novel writing is a virtuoso performance. It is not a collaborative art….Every word is in perfect place. The short chapter in which Lestat describes his love for Rowan Mayfair was for me a totally realized poem. There are other such scenes in this book. You don't get all this? Fine. Getting really close to the subject matter is the achievement of only great art. Now, if it doesn't appeal to you, fine. You don't enjoy it? Read somebody else. But your stupid arrogant assumptions about me and what I am doing are slander. And you have used this site as if it were a public urinal to publish falsehood and lies. … be assured of the utter contempt I feel for you…

It is telling that Rice counters the authority of her readers with her presumed privileged relationship with the characters. She does not assert her legal rights to the characters. Rather, she asserts her personal relationship with them, particularly the narrator, traditionally the double of the author:

…the character who tells the tale is my Lestat. I was with him more closely than I have ever been in this novel; his voice was as powerful for me as I've ever heard it. I experienced break through after break through as I walked with him, moved with him, saw through his eyes. What I ask of Lestat, Lestat unfailingly gives.

Because the Author-God has created and found it good, the very act of interpretation is now closed. As Barthes explains:

To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author…beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is ‘explained.’

Anne Rice is more than aware of this. And the internet writers whose brains she wishes to consume seem to understand it too.

            Our next undead author is also fond of using the I-am-one-with-my-characters argument for silencing other voices. But JK Rowling has wisely decided not to become the zombie who beats down the door and eats the brains of the living from their crushed skulls. That kind of unpopularity isn’t her style. She would rather tap on the victims’ bedroom window and seduce the living into baring their necks. Rowling likes to fill in the blank spaces of her own novels after the fact by posting the new information on her website. Most famously, she announced, several days after the release of the last Harry Potter novel, that her unique relationship with the characters qualifies her to out Dumbledore. There’s no textual evidence for it, but we are to accept that Dumbledore is gay because she says so. Mind you, Dumbledore had been gay in thousands of fanfiction stories for years, but Rowling believes it will somehow matter that she says this. Though she has not sought the blood of fanfiction writers as Rice has, Rowing nevertheless strives to disprove Barthes’ pronouncement of her death. The most public display of this was her participation in a lawsuit brought by her publishers against Steve Vander Ark who had compiled the online Harry Potter lexicon. Mr. Vander Ark had the misfortune to be subjected to all of Ms. Rowlings’ various kill strategies.

            On May 15, 2004, Rowling launched her own website, a clever device designed to seduce and hypnotize her prey.  On it, fans are kept busy trying to solve puzzles she scatters throughout the site, enacting a pantomime of their status as her followers. She gloats over their mesmerized bodies by posting “facts” about her characters that are not in the books. The life-draining happens on the page where she links to all approved fansites and bestows awards to her favorites. One wonders if when Rowling gave her fansite award to the Harry Potter Lexicon on June 28, 2004, Mr. Vander Ark felt the sharp incisors on his throat. (HPL) Rowling effused upon the occasion, “This is such a great site that I have been known to sneak into an internet café while out writing and check a fact rather than go into a bookshop and buy a copy of Harry Potter (which is embarrassing). A website for the dangerously obsessive; my natural home.” (HPL) This ability to use her website as a carrot with which to control her fans was brilliant but it lasted only three years. Three years after singing Vander Ark’s praises, Rowling testified in court that his lexicon was “sloppy,” “lazy,” and “atrocious.” In court, Rowling asserted that Vander Ark’s work was of quality so poor it shouldn’t be allowed to see print. When it became clear that this made a great interview quote but not a legitimate legal argument, she brought out her other powerful kill strategy: charity. Vander Ark’s Harry Potter Lexicon had to die so that the author’s encyclopedia could live.  How Rowling’s as yet unwritten encyclopedia would be harmed by Vander Ark’s went unexplained as she went on to assert that proceeds from her encyclopedia would be donated to charity. Clearly, Rowling understands her status as an undead author better than Rice. Rowling makes no dictums, expresses no distain. Instead, she plays for sympathy, letting the press know that her motives are purely philanthropic.  But Rowling also told the press that the Vander Ark case has distressed her so deeply that it was inducing writer’s block. She warned that the turmoil had “decimated the demands of my creative work for the last month. You lose the threads, you worry if you’ll ever be able to pick them up again. I really don't want to cry, because I'm British.” This threat that challenges to her authority could lead her to withhold he writing from us became the stick to her website’s carrot. Rowling fights back with whatever is at hand. Sometimes vampires do.
           

But the threat to withhold writing from the living was a tactic Stephanie Meyer found useful too. Like Rowling, Meyer found having her own website useful for  maintaining the illusion that the author is not dead. On the internet, the space of living words, Meyer could seduce her fans away from places where they are writers into this site where only she speaks. Meyer had occasion to make her own dire threats on that site when, in the summer of 2008, while working on a much-anticipated Twilight sequel, copies of her manuscript (which Meyer had given to an acquaintance) went virile on the internet. No doubt, Meyer was sincere when she posted “I think it is important for everybody to understand that what happened was a huge violation of my rights as an author, not to mention me as a human being.” (http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/ August 28, 2008) At first too trusting of the living, Meyer has been wounded and she seeks redress from those who give her life, her readers. But feeding on them does not serve her purposes. What Meyer wants is not nurishment but justice and that may involve a bit of brutality to get her creator’s attention. Frankenstein’s monster hunted Victor’s loved ones. Meyer hunts her own characters, the beloveds of all her readers:

So where does this leave Midnight Sun? My first feeling was that there was no way to continue. Writing isn't like math; in math, two plus two always equals four no matter what your mood is like. With writing, the way you feel changes everything. If I tried to write Midnight Sun now, in my current frame of mind, James would probably win and all the Cullens would die, which wouldn't dovetail too well with the original story. In any case, I feel too sad about what has happened to continue working on Midnight Sun, and so it is on hold indefinitely…. I am now focusing on spending more time with my family and working on some other writing projects.

In refusing to allow us to be readers anymore, we are deprived of our claim to life. That’s a grim kind of justice but a monster takes what she can get. Essentially, this strategy amounts to the frantic scene at the end of the horror story where the monster threatens to kill any innocent bystander in the vicinity, set fire to the building, sink the ship, or kill all of Victor Frankenstein’s family if not allowed to imitate the living.

            Of course, the most interesting tales of the undead make us feel a nagging sympathy for the undead. But the fact remains that they are unnatural things, almost certainly without souls. And they do harm to the living. In the end, we must take up our pitchforks against the monster, our wooden stakes against the vampire, or whatever head-removing device we have at hand against the zombie in order to do what Barthes calls “the necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner.” The life is in the language, not the author. The author ceased to be when the words fell on the page. It’s not pleasant to watch the undead writhing in a re-death agony, but it’s necessary so that the reader can live. And the reader lives no where more visibly than online where we can acknowledge with Barthes that “We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.” Asserting that authors are just writers like anyone else and that they are, in the end, not original originators of originality but rather “eternal copyists, at once sublime and comic … whose profound ridiculousness indicates precisely the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them.”

The internet is the space in which we can all see that the undead thing can be combated and that its elimination may well be possible. A new day dawns at the end of the tale of the undead.  The living can reclaim their world, a world that perhaps did not appreciate the beauty of the living until it was threatened by the undead. As Barthes says at the end of his essay, “Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer … we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”

7 Things That Reveal a Good Writing Teacher

Compiling this list was a challenge from a reader of my previous post. Let me preface this by saying that there are many different ways of being a good teacher--this is not meant to be an exhaustive list. It is also possible to be a bad teacher and still do these things. For example, no classroom behavior will be sucessful if students can tell the teacher looks down on them. Students have a sixth sense about sincerity and if the teacher doesn't care, neither will they. In the end, teachers have more control over the quality of writing their students do than they often realize. If your writing teacher does these things, there's a fairly good chance you'll have an educational experience.

7 Things That Reveal a Good Writing Teacher

1. Class time is spent talking about how to improve a piece of writing rather than finding errors. The idea that bad writing has errors and good writing doesn't is reductionist. In writing, there are seldom "right" and "wrong" choices. Rather, each choice a writer makes has an effect. The writer must develop the ability to judge the effects of different options. Group discussions of writers' options are the best way to develop such judgement.


2. Technical errors are explained to students--but only when they surface in a piece of writing. If students learned grammar, punctuation, etc. from lectures, worksheets, and red marks, everyone would show up in college making no mistakes. If these methods didn't work on you in grade school, there's little chance they will suddenly become effective in college. What every student needs to know is what mistakes s/he tends to make and how to check for those specific patterns of error.


3. Students have control over what they write about. It's impossible to do your best writing if you have no connection to what you're writing about. Sure, in the "real world," we often must write on topics because someone else demands it of us but why make the writing classroom more difficult than it already is? Good teachers prepare students for success by giving them opportunities to do their best work. It's not necessarily desirable that students be able to write about absolutely anything they choose, but they should be given choices.


4. Multiple drafts are expected. It doesn't really matter how many drafts a writer does, only that s/he works through a piece multiple times with different purposes. Again, the goal is not to simply produce a final product that is error-free and "good enough." The goal of a good writing teacher is to provide students with the experience of controlling the experience of the reader. Even drafts that have nothing "wrong" with them can be developed into richer pieces. (This is also the best way--possibly the only way--to discourage plagiarism.)


5. The teacher's feedback on a returned draft is relevant to the next draft/revision. A good teacher's comments are primarily about the writer's ideas, motives, and choices for revision. Students want to know what did and didn't work in the draft so they can make better decisions in the future. That's all teacher comments need to address.


6. Students are always directed to imagine the response of the reader. The reason for writing is reading. The writer who forgets this is doomed. A good teacher will insist that students practice putting themselves in the place of the reader. This is all that is needed to deal with students' problematic content and tone.


7. Whatever grading method is used, it does not penalize risk-taking. If students believe delivering an error-free and properly formatted product is what insures an A, they will never do their best work. The grading system should consider each student's decision-making within the context of their progression of drafts.

7 Things That Reveal a Bad Writing Teacher

The recent press release by Newt Gingrich (or his press secretary, hard to tell really) has made me eager to share what I know about teaching writing. Someone with a college education wrote that press release--the possibility that it was a professional writer, someone who went to college in order to be trained to write, chills me to the bone. No one is obliged to be a brilliant writer--the very attempt to be a "brilliant writer" is deeply misguided--but everyone with an education is obliged to avoid being a painfully bad writer. Absolutely obliged. Now, my Ph.D. in Composition/Rhetoric/Literacy hasn't conferred on me any real wisdom but what it has given me is the narrow, specific knowledge of how to teach writing. Perhaps more importantly, it has taught me how not to teach writing. So, for what it's worth, here's the absolute truth about it.

7 Things That Reveal a Bad Writing Teacher

1. You are given "worksheets" of any kind. This includes computer software of any kind. Though it is possible that worksheets for the invention process could be helpful in generating ideas and creative thinking, such worksheets would be presented as strictly optional and in a spirit of levity. The day you, as a student, are given a worksheet that is meant to "teach" you something or to "exercise" a "skill," drop the class and get as much of your money back as you can. Writing can't be taught like that--it's probable that nothing really can be. The idea that writing can be distilled into "skills" is, in itself, a dead give-away that what you have at the head of the class is a trained grade-school teacher and not a university-level professional.


2. Your work is returned to you with line-by-line corrections. This is the mark of a teacher with a need to demonstrate his/her technical knowledge at the expense of students' learning. Any teacher who wastes his/her own time doing such a labor-intensive thing when it's absolutely certain not to help the student learn, is either psychologically messed up or completely uninformed. Either way, run.


3. First drafts are returned with technical errors marked. See the explanation for #2--it's exactly the same. The teacher who does this is in the wrong profession. S/he should have become a copy editor, not a writing teacher. As such, I promise you, this teacher only loves the students who don't need help. (If you are a student who believes s/he doesn't need help anyway, you're probably unteachable. I'm trowing that little nugget in here as a lagniappe. You're welcome.)


4. You are required to write only a first draft and a final draft. This is probably a sign that your teacher has too many students to teach properly. This is not the teacher's fault but it is a sign that you don't want this class--probably this school. A teacher who doesn't require you to play with multiple ways of working a piece is either over-worked or uninformed--there is not a third possibility. Get out of that class if at all possible. Your time and money would be better spent reading well-written books--an activity which is, by the way, the only thing all good writers have in common.


5. You are encouraged to use a thesaurus. Good writing is not done this way. Using a thesaurus is a great way to make your writing sound contrived and is an invitation to the worst thing that can happen to a writer: being unintentionally funny. However, a good writer makes ample use of a dictionary to be sure his/her natural vocabulary is truly under the writer's control. If your writing teacher doesn't know this, something is very wrong.


6. Class time is spent generalizing about writing. The only conversation that will actually help you learn about writing is one that is about an actual piece of writing. The only generalization that can be made about all writing is that all good writing is an appropriate response to a specific context. Without a complete understanding of the context and the expectations appropriate to that situation, a piece of writing can't be properly judged. So, if the teacher brings you a reading and wants you to discuss the subject matter of that reading rather than the choices available to its writer, your time is being wasted. This teacher wants to teach literature or social science, or whatever the content of the readings happens to be. Go find someone who wants to teach writing.


7. Student writing is never shared with the rest of the class. Because of the points I just made in # 6, discussing the writing done by the students in the class is the most efficient use of class time. It has multiple benefits to both student and teacher. The teacher who does not make the students' writing the topic of discussion is probably guilty of #2 and #3 as well. Again, this is someone with a psychological need to be an authority, not a teacher. This person is getting his/her payoff by standing at the front of the room, not by seeing you progress. This is a person who should have gone into acting or who has no training as a writing teacher--bad for you either way.