Category: Blogging

Caution, you are entering a censored site. Further reading may endanger your physical or mental well-being.

Browsing through my referrer log yesterday, I happened to follow some odd links to a server where a parent had apparently over-ridden a block on my site. Further research revealed that In a Dark Time has been blocked by Family. NET by Clearsail.

Because there’s no clear indication on why my site has been banned, I’m unsure whether to be honored that someone has actually noticed that this site exists or to get pissed off be upset that it has been censored by the Moral Guardians of Christendom.

Hopefully, it’s been censored because of its pornographic content, because I would hate to think that it’s being censored because it’s merely tasteless (one of Clearsail’s motto is “Protecting the Net from Pornography and Tastelessness). Personally, I prefer to think of much of what I write as merely harmless, empty chatter rather than tasteless or pornographic, though there is a certain blandness to it.

Since I received no explanation of why, or even notification, my site was being blocked, I can’t be certain that I’m not being blocked because of the corrupt writings of my former accomplice Diane McCormick, who has abandoned me to write her novel. I do remember cringing over her review of certain Anne Sexton and Allen Ginsberg poems, envisioning the kind of perverted searches that would surely follow such depravity. It would be truly ironic if the writings of that grandmotherly patriarch of the Episcopal church should have brought down censorship on the head of a mere transcendental heathen such as myself.

Perhaps, though, the censorship has stemmed from my unprincipled defense of that anti-American classic To Kill a Mockingbird on the Banned Book Project. In that case, such censorship would at least be understandable. After all, as Emerson remarked years ago, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

Perhaps if I had been pre-warned that I was about to be blocked I would not have included a discussion of the infamous homosexual poet Walt Whitman for I could easily have omitted his works from the canons of American greats in order to avoid appearing “tasteless.”

Checking out Clearsail’s site, though, I quickly got the impression that I did not belong in such noble company. Clearly listed as the most visited sites on their home page were such Christian staples as David Bach’s FinishRich, Epicurious.com, and Biltmore Estate. Surely, I, with my emphasis on voluntary simplicity and environmental concerns, would be inappropriate company for such Christian-oriented company. I wonder if Epicurious offers an alternative menu for the “Last Supper?”

My apologies to Clearsail and their noble efforts to keep the internet free of such polluting ideas. If I had not already been banned from “their internet” I would have gladly purged my links to such revolutionary sites as Visible Darkness, Riley Dog, etc., in order to prove my moral purity.

For, as Milton so poetically argued in his Christian classic, Aeropagitica, “I can ONLY praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”

If you’re old enough to remember Al Capp’s character Joe Btfsplk, you might understand how I feel about my luck lately.

On my way to my doctor’s appointment this morning a lady in a pickup ran a red light and slammed into the front of my bright shiny, red pickup and demolished it. Luckily, it didn’t demolish me, just soaked me with a full cup of hot coffee. Since I was on the way to the doctor, I had him look me over and he couldn’t see any harmful effects from the accident or any sign of asthma, either, for that matter.

But let me back up a few days and fill you in on the events that have surrounded me recently. On Saturday while I was working at my daughter’s house there was a loud slamming noise, and we went up the street to discover a nasty auto accident. Later that night we looked out the window to see the paramedics running in and out of the house three doors to the south. Right after I returned from my own previously described adventure at Tacoma Hospital, the paramedics again showed up at a house two doors to the north of my daughter’s house.

Last night friends visiting from New York invited us out to dinner at a delightful restaurant in downtown Portland. In the middle of our dinner the lights suddenly went out, and we heard sirens surrounding us. Emergency lights came back on, but the electricity never did. We were told that there were several fires nearby and that there had been a number of automobile accidents at blackened intersections. We left the restaurant in eerily dark circumstances, though we safely made it home.

Can this all be sheer coincidence?

Was it sheer coincidence that Jonathon has his worst week ever right after he spent so much time helping me set up my new web site?

Or am I, like the unenviable Joe Btfsplk, trailing a cloud of bad luck behind me?

I’m afraid to pick up the new compound, sliding saw I got to work on the back deck lest I should cut off something more important than the wrong piece of wood?

Do I dare climb the roof to blow out the gutters one final time before the winter deluge hits?

I think I’ll just sit here safely at my computer finishing my new site and hoping that a stray lightning bolt doesn’t decide to blow all the electrical circuits in the house.

I had a delightful three days at my daughter’s home in Tacoma except for the exciting two hours I spent at the Emergency Room at Tacoma Hospital.

The weekend started with seeing my daughter and grandson on Friday while Rich was still teaching. Dawn and I walked around and talked for two or three hours before picking up Gavin at the baby sitters. He had been too excited about seeing “Pahtah,” that’s me, to take his afternoon nap so he was pretty excited when we picked him up. He ran the whole way hope, and it’s embarrassing to admit but I had a hard time keeping up with him and then carrying him the last three blocks home. We spent the afternoon playing and watching Shrek, Gavin’s current favorite movie, for a good part of the time.

After dinner, Rich and I went to Home Depot to pick up fence-building supplies, the main reason for this trip. It’s great shopping at Home Depot when you’re spending someone else’s money. I’d already spent my allotted money over the last few days when I picked up a new Hitachi sliding crosscut saw and a Porter-Cable cut-off saw to finish my deck project. But I still had fun helping Rich spend his money, too. After helping to load 10 60lb bags of several 12 foot long 4×4’s and assorted 2×4’s I was more than ready for bed after watching a dance movie starring Vanessa Williams until midnight.

We actually started working on the fence Saturday morning after a leisurely, but filling, breakfast. A bit impatient to get started, I started digging fence post holes at places we’d discussed the night before. I soon remember how seldom I used the muscles that are used for a posthole digger. After digging two holes, I was ready for another challenge, preferably one that used a different set of muscles. Luckily, there were more than enough choices. Moving 60 pound bags of concrete was one of my choices for a while until I decided that those muscles, too, had had enough of a work out. I ended up cutting approximately 100 8 foot long cedar boards in half to create the 4 foot high fence that we were constructing.

I was exhausted by the time I sat down for a delicious vegetarian Indian style dinner. But it was a good feeling having spent a long day helping someone you love a lot. Everything went well and I had even decided to stay a day longer to help work on the fence Sunday. About 8:00, though I suddenly started having trouble breathing. I tried to ignore the discomfort, but took a Benadryl, thinking I was having some sort of allergy attack. About 9:30 I went to bed, thinking I was just tired. I only lay there for a few moments, though, because I couldn’t breathe at all laying down. About 10:00 we, I with Dawn’s urging, decided that I had better go to the emergency room of the hospital since breathing seemed to be an important part of helping the next day.

I was admitted surprisingly fast, put on several recording devices, given an intravenous dose of Benadryl and Prednisone, and inhaler and a breath test, which I appear to have failed the first time around. Within an hour, though, I was feeling much better and had actually regained the ability to breathe. The doctor seemed somewhat hesitant to send me home, but after consulting with another doctor decided that I could go home with several precautionary medicines.

While waiting to be released, another patient was brought in, one who was obviously much sicker than I was, although he was only 17 years old. Apparently he was a diabetic who decided that he preferred to shoot meth rather than take his insulin medication. He complained loudly and profanely over the next hour, and suddenly I was feeling a lot worse than I had felt when I came in an hour before. He complained that the nurses were “hurting him” by putting oxygen in his nose (previous cocaine abuse?), complained that they weren’t giving him enough “pain medication,” though any pain he was feeling now seems to have stemmed from sedating himself from any awareness that he had a body that he should be taking care of. By now, I was considering just walking out of the hospital. I felt way too healthy to be sitting here listening to some 17 year old who seemed intent on killing himself complain about the quality of medical care at a hospital that probably saw far too many cases like this during a long, thankless night.

Sunday, after picking up my Prednisone, Albuterol Inhalation Aersol, and EpiPen 2-pak, to be used in possible extreme emergencies which the doctor told me was not at all unlikely, I spend the rest of the day helping Rich on the fence. Though it still wasn’t finished when I left for home at 5:00, I thought we had gotten a lot done during the day, especially since I hadn’t been too sure the night before that I would even be around the next day.

Sorry Jonathan, although I taught thirty years in a high school, earned a masters degree and ended up with over seven years of college, I really don’t have much insight into college faculties. I was far too self-absorbed in finding my own truth to be particularly worried about my professors’ school politics. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t find Mark Krupnick’s article, “Why Are English Departments Still Fighting the Culture Wars?,” fascinating.

In truth, there was little in academia that attracted me to that life. After looking at the theses written by those seeking doctorates, I knew that I would never be willing to write the kind of paper that they were demanding when I was in college. I detest “trivia,” or anything else I don’t find relevant to my life, and was unwilling to devote two years of my life to studying something that I couldn’t see helping me lead a fuller life, and not even Yeats demanded that kind of devotion.

The part of Krupnick’s article that rings truest for the high school English departments I served with was that the

archetypal English-department academic, in contrast to academics in other fields, is involved in a quest to know himself or herself and arrive at a more intimate relationship with the good, the true, and the real.

Certainly this was true for myself. It’s the reason I switched from physics to English literature, and, later, the reason I quit my job as a caseworker to become an English teacher. It’s even the reason I continue to focus on this web page while most of my friends turn to other endeavors. And though I wouldn’t attest to it, it strikes me as true for most of the English teachers I have known.

It has often crossed my mind that if I could have actually believed in something that I would have become a minister or a monk. However, having been unable to find any religious organization I could really subscribe to, I have ended up believing that the method and means of seeking truth is ultimately what is most sacred. In that sense, I would also agree with Krupnick that

the role of moral tutor in the United States has fallen to professors of English nearly as much as to the clergy. For the first 60 years or so of the last century, college English teachers were in a better position than pastors and priests — in our mass democracy of recent immigrants — to refine the manners and morals of the immigrants’ progeny. Far from reinforcing old values, professors helped their students to separate from their parents and transcend the past. Professors of English began to derive a sense of their specialness by enabling students to rise above the materialistic values of their uneducated parents, who were striving to establish themselves in the New World.

Judging from some recent articles I’ve read, the Pacific Northwest appears to be less “religious” than most of the nation, but I think fully half of my students got very little “moral education” other than that they got in their English classes. I used to laugh at patrons who argued that schools should just teach “reading, writing and arithmetic” and leave moral education to the home.

What did they want us to have students read, manuals on installing computer programs? It’s impossible to teach American Literature, or contemporary literature, or British literature without teaching “values.” It might not be the values those patrons wanted us to teach, but it was the values that had come to dominate modern literary thought.

Personally, I never felt it was my job to push any one value over the others. Rather, it was my job to teach students how to use their minds to evaluate other’s ideas, to seek their own truth. I tried hard not to indoctrinate my students with my own beliefs. I would even avoid letting students know whether I personally liked an author or not. I always wrote essay questions that could be answered “correctly” in two totally different ways and gave an “A” to the best answer on both sides of the issue.

I suspect that’s there’s more than a little truth in Krupnick’s assertion that

But it’s more illuminating to see Professor X’s attitude in terms of a shared disposition among literary academics, who tend to stake their professional and personal identities on their readings — their evaluations and interpretations — of texts.

Interpretation of the text is, after all, the ultimate Rosetta Stone of all literary interpretation and literary theories. Luckily, most of the authors are dead so they can’t contradict our interpretations 😉 And if they are alive, we can argue, as it has been many times, that once the works are out that they stand on their own and the author may subconsciously include ideas that even he isn’t aware of.

I can speak for no one but myself in relationship to Krupnick’s argument that English teachers are offended more than most professors by opposing theories:

But do English professors identify themselves with their theories and methods more than do their colleagues in, say, history or economics? I think so. Professor X detested the department’s "radicals" because Professor X regarded literature and a proper approach to it as the key to truth and reality.

So English professors tend to experience alternative approaches to the truth as they see it as a personal affront, and cause for counterattack. The personal truly is political.

One of the particularly bright teachers, or one who at least saw himself as particularly bright, and who just happened to be a fellow INTP, argued that style was the most important aspect of writing, much more important than content. After once admitting that I liked Lawrence Durrell’s “Alexandria Quartet,” he used that admission to argue that Durrell was a much greater writer than Thomas Hardy because his style was so vastly superior. Although I was the first to admit that Hardy’s style is a bit plodding and dated, needless to say, I was having nothing of this argument. For me, the insights into human nature and into the human condition are far more important than the writing style. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that the best style is translucent, that the “story,” which, of course, is not the same as the plot, is all the reader should see.

Unfortunately, our relationship was never the same after this confrontation. I had a difficult time seeing this teacher in the same light that I’d seen him before our argument. Of course, I’ve also read that this is one of the dangers of being an INTP, so perhaps my reaction has more to do with that than with being an English teacher.

Considering that every teacher in my English teacher who took the Meyers-Briggs test was an “I” and that three out of the four INTP’s on campus were in the English Department, Krupnick might want to explore that relationship rather than the fact that they just share a common interest in literature.