Syndicate and Hague

…at least not for institutions and ways of life.  Elegies of people I can get behind.  Especially one of my favorite Larry Levis poems.  Oh hell, let’s interrupt what is going to be a bit of a rant by posting the poem.

Boy in Video Arcade

Some see a lake of fire at the end of it,
Or heaven’s guesswork, something always to be sketched in.

I see a sullen boy in a video arcade.
He’s the only one there at this hour, shoulders slightly bent above a machine.

I see the pimples on his chin, the scuffed linoleum on the floor.

I like the close-up, the detail. I like the pointlessness of it,
And the way he hasn’t imagined an ending to all this yet,

The boy never bothering to look up as the sun comes out
In the late morning, because Big Deal, the mist evaporating & rising.

So Death blows his little fucking trumpet, Big Deal, says the boy.

I don’t see anything at the end of it except an endlessness,

The beauty parlors, the palm reader’s unlighted sign, the mulberry trees
Fading out before the billboard of the chiropractor.

The lake of fire’s just an oil speck.

I don’t see anything at the end of it, & I suppose that is what is wrong with me,
Among the other things. And it’s slow work, because of all the gauzy light,

It’s hard to pick out anything.

And now I want to talk about this poem. Dammit. Okay, I’m giving myself one paragraph of the troubles and then we’re talking poetry.

Apparently, there’s some consultant running around the University saying student engagement isn’t important in online learning, it’s about maximizing class sizes and delivering content. What this means for faculty, I think that’s a topic to be taken up by someone else with more knowledge of how they’re feeling in all this. But for me, it brings up issues of dominance; a basic tenet of what the U is to serve and what it means to be educated and to get an education. And it downright frightens me that there are people who would go into a university and tell them that student engagement wasn’t important.

You know what I would do if I found out my program wasn’t concerned with its students?

Quit. We’re all worth more than that. Thankfully, that isn’t the case.

So let’s see how that pans out, but I’m going to try to talk about the problems and philosophies underlying that as the weeks go on. Frankly, it makes me nervous for online education because they see it as a cash cow - more students, teacherless classess - we’re living the dream. Or some administrator’s dream. Sadly, it isn’t a student or teacher dream, but that is for another time.

Ah, but Larry Levis.

He makes me happy. I like that he ruminates on what it means to be alive by focusing on the bored boy, the sullen boy, the careless boy - and that the meaninglessness with which he conducts his life is situated in beauty he chooses not to see. And it is what it is - it doesn’t matter to him, but the beauty exists and the banal exists and this is what life is. A subtle moment doing something innocuous and mundane.

I’m not a believer in heaven or hell, which upsets some people. I think of it much differently. I am fond of going to visit my grandmother’s grave and driving by everyone else’s - her parents and brother and uncle; my grandfather and his grandfather and half-brother and step mothers; the Tracys - his aunt and uncle who raised my grandfather; and the oldest part of my Irish family here - Patrick and Elizabeth, who came over in 1845 for a reason I don’t know about and probably won’t ever.

Despite this fondness that makes me visit the spot where her ashes are, I still think she’s dead and done and everything about her that was uniquely and completely her is gone. What I figure is that the way in which we live on after we die is in the impacts we make. I’m not quite sure how this became about my grandmother, but sometimes I think about her hope for us, her faith in our education carrying us through life and making us more thoughtful, better people…and I worry. I worry that even though I believe so passionately and fiercely that postsecondary education can do wonders for your perspectives and critical thought development; I worry that others with more power than I have don’t have a remotely similar philosophy. Call it greed, call it “diminishing funding,” but there are philosophies being bandied about that I literally thought would be laughed out of the room. Things I’m going to talk about this week: the idea of a profit model for courses, “maximum seats” in an online course, media and team development on courses, feminist pedagogy, and general discomfort with the divide between administration and the people actually doing the work and research on what works.

I try to hold myself to standards that my grandmother set - be good, be nice, be smart, and don’t let anyone tell you what to do - because only you know what that is. That’s probably what’s living on in this moment, her message that we have the power to speak, and to speak well. I hope I achieve that most of the time.

Man. She was so great. You all really missed out not knowing her. I cannot believe it has been over eight years since I’ve gotten to talk to her.