Stubborn Persistent and Proud of It, I Think

Speaking of stubborn, as I did yesterday, I would have to say that is, for better or worse, probably one of my defining characteristics. I was somewhat reminded of this awhile ago when Jonathon questioned whether certain traits were innate or the result of social conditioning.

I suspect I’m only aware of two of the most infamous examples of my stubbornness because I was constantly reminded of them throughout my life, right up to the point where Grandma would retell these stories to my children to show just how stubborn, or foolish, their father was. Both incidents took place before I was five years old.

The first incident took place when my mother ran out of orange juice. Now, orange juice was a breakfast staple as long as I can remember. Apparently, I found some lemon juice and insisted it was orange juice. Despite my mother’s insistence it wasn’t orange juice, I demanded it for breakfast. My mother gave in, probably assuming I’d quickly admit my error, but I drank the whole glass of juice, insisting the whole time that it was great. Since I’ve never drunk another glass of lemon juice, I suspect I was just being stubborn.

The more infamous incident took place approximately the same time when the family went fishing. We apparently came to a stream that could only be crossed by walking a long log. My dad wanted me to take his hand, but I insisted I was “big enough” to do it by myself. Needless to say, I fell off the log and the only thing my mother could see of me was my cowboy hat floating down the stream. My father was laughing so hard that my mother finally had to push him into the water to save me. Sometimes I think I can remember that hat floating down the stream, but of course that was impossible because I was under it.

Probably the most influential example of my stubbornness in life involved SAT scores. Although my overall scores were high, my English scores had dragged down my overall score. Having earned nothing but “A’s” in high school English, I was too stubborn, or perhaps arrogant, to accept the idea that I was weak in English. My senior year in high school I changed my focus from my Calculus class to my English class, and by the end of the year had decided to change my college major from physics to English, determined to prove “them” wrong.

I never really looked back, though at times I must admit I paused to wonder if I would have been wiser to play to my strengths and go into science, not the humanities. If I were making the decision today I doubt that I would have had to choose so dramatically between my strengths — I would have undoubtably ended up somewhere in the field of computers.

There have been times when I’ve realized that I let other people control me, not directly, but, rather, by telling me I couldn’t do something. Of course, I’ve gone out and done precisely that, just to prove them wrong. Usually these incidents turned out for the best, but other times I’ve realized I’d wasted valuable time doing things I never really wanted to do just because someone said I couldn’t. like it or not, I had let them control my life.

I’ve always felt that since I demonstrated a stubborn streak at such a young age that I must have been born stubborn. I also thought I had inherited it from my father, but it turns out that I may well have inherited it from my mother instead. My mother was raised in an abusive home and apparently stood up to her father even though my dad, a large all-city football player was somewhat frightened by a man he considered “crazy.” As she deteriorated into Alzheimer’s disease near the end of her life and it became necessary to make tough decisions, I was suddenly aware of just how stubborn my mother really was. Perhaps she told all those stories for years because they struck a chord with her. Perhaps she had really encouraged my stubbornness.

The real problem with determining whether these traits are inherited or socially conditioned is that it’s precisely the people whose traits we “inherit” that also raise us, ensuring that we will be as much like them as possible.

My daughter and son-in-law conveniently blame me for Gavin’s stubbornness and temper tantrums, but I just take those as signs the kid’s going to make it in life. A little perserverance is necessary in life. There is, after all, more than a little truth in that sports cliché’ that “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

If You Hear a Strange Sucking Sound

That’s the sound of Loren being sucked into the murky depths of the technoworld. As mentioned before, I’m in the midst of trying to switch to a new web site so that I can include comments (someone must be behind all those hits), establish permanent links to avoid snide remarks in other blogs (of course the blogger who first did that doesn’t appear to be updating his site any more), and generally make it easier to catalogue my entries so that they are more accessible.

Luckily many people have been extremely helpful and would appear to be willing to offer even more help if I were willing to accept it. Jeff Ward steered me through the process of selecting a reasonably priced ISP and acquiring a new name.

Jonathon, the one who publicly urged me to switch to Moveable Type, has been most helpful. When I couldn’t figure out how to switch the columns in the templates provided, he generously volunteered to write the style sheet for my page. What’s up and running so far at In a Dark Time is mostly due to his help, though I rush to assure you that he doesn’t share the blame for numerous elements I’m still messing with.

You see, I tend to be rather stubborn, and, unless I get really stuck, which I’ll admit does seem to be happening more than usual since I started this project, I want to figure out how to do it myself. As a result, of course, I’m way over my head here. It took me nearly two hours to figure out how to change the template to remove the calendar.

I would have thought that adding links to the site would have been done through the Moveable Type interface, but after spending nearly an hour familiarizing myself with the program, I guess you actually have to paste it into the template rather than merely plug it in. Oh Boy. More sucking. I’m not going to spend my days typing “A HREF=”#”>

To make matters even more frustrating, I’m over at Dorthea’s site while taking a break and notice that her links all have the word Fresh attached to the ones that have been recently updated. I wonder how she does that. Big time sucking sound.

Anyhow, yours truly ends up looking for a Mac program and naturally ends up choosing, what else, BBEdit. I’ve tried it before, God I’ve tried it before, but knowing as little as I do about HTML, I’ve always gotten frustrated and trashed the program.

So, I spent much of the morning looking for how to insert “” automatically into my site. It’s there, you just can’t find it by using the help program or anything else that I could find. It turns out it’s under “Glossary” which might make excellent sense if you understand HTML but seemed quite confusing to me.

Looks like I’ll have to add BBEdit to my long list of recent program additions. More sucking on a checking account that’s already nearly run dry.

A Working Man in My Prime

Van Morrison’s “Cleaning Windows” has always been one of my favorite Van Morrison songs, and Van Morrison may well be my favorite singer:

Oh, the smell of the bakery from across the street

Got in my nose

As we carried our ladders down the street

With the wrought-iron gate rows

I went home and listened to Jimmie Rodgers in my lunch-break

Bought five Woodbines at the shop on the corner

And went straight back to work.

Oh, Sam was up on top

And I was on the bottom with the v

We went for lemonade and Paris buns

At the shop and broke for tea

I collected from the lady

And I cleaned the fanlight inside-out

I was blowing saxophone on the weekend

In that down joint.

What’s my line?

I’m happy cleaning windows

Take my time

I’ll see you when my love grows

Baby don’t let it slide

I’m a working man in my prime

Cleaning windows (number a hundred and thirty-six)

I heard Leadbelly and Blind Lemon

On the street where I was born

Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee,

Muddy Waters singin’ “I’m A Rolling Stone”

I went home and read my Christmas Humphreys’ book on Zen

Curiosity killed the cat

Kerouac’s “Dharma Bums” and “On The Road”

What’s my line?

I’m happy cleaning windows

Take my time

I’ll see you when my love grows

Baby don’t let it slide

I’m a working man in my prime

Cleaning windows…

Until recently I was never entirely clear why I liked this song so much, but recent nostalgic lapses have helped to refresh my memory.

I put myself through college in the ‘60’s by doing janitorial work; I was “ a working man in my prime.” Occasionally that included washing windows, but the company also hired a professional window washer because I did such a pitiful job on them. Equipped with the latest high-tech cleaners and cleaning clothes, I spent hours cleaning the windows, only to find them smeared and streaked when I finished.

He, on the other hand, used a little ammonia in a bucket of water, a squeegee, and old newspapers to complete the job and came out with sparkling clean windows. How could I not admire his work? It was simple, required few supplies, and did the job to perfection.

More importantly, though, this self-educated black man could more than keep up with any of my discussions about what I was learning in college. He educated himself purely for his own edification. He had no desire to be anything other than what he was, a window washer. He was self-employed and totally independent. I didn’t realize then how special he was. I do now.

Looking back at those years, I suspect that, except for the wages, I had found the perfect job. I enjoyed working alone at night with no disruptions. If I did my job right, and I took pride in doing it right, no one ever told me what to do or when to do it. I set my own schedule and did things the way I wanted to do them. I spent most of the time while I was working thinking out papers that I was writing for my classes. (It doesn’t, after all, require great concentration to sweep and dust.) If I had realized that this would be the only time in my life when I would have this kind of freedom I would have enjoyed it more.

On the other hand, this was also the only time in my life, except for the last few years, that I had time to learn simply for the sake of learning. I didn’t yet have a career in mind and was simply learning what I wanted to learn. I was exploring modern poetry and philosophy in an attempt to find the meaning of life, an endeavor I too soon abandoned for making a living and supporting a family, but that, too, may be part of what the meaning of life is.

I was also beginning to listen to blues music, though I began with John Lee Hooker, Bobby Blue Bland and Ray Charles, not the earlier bluesmen mentioned in the song. They came later. And yes, I even read “Christmas Humphreys’ book on Zen,” though it took me another thirty five years to read Kerouac’sOn the Road.

It’s only looking back that I realize how much societal expectations determined what I was to do with my life and who I was to become.

Those Radical English Teachers

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.