Weblog Entry - 04/15/2002: ""

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04/15/2002 Entry: ""

One of the comforting things about reading others' blogs--especially those in which people natter about their personal lives--is the reminder that I'm not the only one who falls into these intermittent spells of unfocused, drain-circling, time-frittering torpor [waving to Anna and Destina]. Over the weekend I started four lengthy philosophical list-posts, and two or three deep-type blog entries, all of which wittered away into a tangle of unfinished thoughts and now languish on my hard drive. I got maybe three paragraphs added to the story. This, after a weekend that I largely spent sitting in front of the computer.

This morning, I read three blog entries on the general topic of intellectualizing in fandom -- Naomi's, and then Jenny-O's response, and Sarah T's rejoinder to Jenny. One thing that interests me is that all three of them seem to be making at least one common point: "Don't tell me how to have fun, dammit!" With, in Naomi's and Jenny's case, some undercurrent of "And my way of having fun is better than yours."

What makes these conversations so emotionally fraught, I think, is that in American society at least, whether we like it or not, there is a substantial prestige and class loading on being an academic, being an intellectual. I'm chronically aware of this because, while I come from an upper-middle-class academic background, I work on a daily basis, in an academic setting, with people who emphatically do not -- students from poor or working-class backgrounds, who are often the first in their families to go to college. So I've had to become more aware of the various traps I can get myself into: how my accustomed ways of talking can have the unintended effect of establishing superiority, putting down; how my default assumptions about others' interests, goals, motives for being in college can come across as elitist or (at best) utopian; and how my efforts to downplay all this stuff can seem (and can be) offensively patronizing. For me, academia's my home country, and like any citizen I can veer back and forth between patriotism and mockery, loyalty and criticism, with the basic security of someone on home turf. But these students are immigrants, trying to learn the customs and the language, and torn (as I think immigrants must usually be) between the aspirational desire to belong, fit in, achieve, and a fierce loyalty to where they came from, defensiveness about the ways they feel put down, and a resentful need to belittle that to which they aspire, to take the stuffing out of these people who seem to think they're so damn much better.

I have my own conflictedness about intellectual discussion, which grows out of the fact that I used to be an intellectual, and am not, really, any longer. "Intellectual" defined here as someone whose deepest joy is playing with ideas, theorizing, analyzing and re-synthesizing, working concepts out to their conclusion. For most of my younger life, that was it for me, my defining reason for being on the planet. But at some point -- well, I remember quite clearly when I stepped off that path; it was the end of my stint at UC Santa Cruz, when I was finishing up my protracted BA, twenty years ago. I'd been studying normative political philosophy, with considerable intensity, and the natural next step, the one my profs were nudging me toward, would have been to go into a doctoral program in some theory-dense field. I considered it; I even filled out a few applications. But at the same time ... it was like I'd been spending a lot of time living in the high mountains, and while that's exhilarating -- very clean, very pure, huge epic vistas -- at the same time, the air was getting a bit thin for me, it was cold up there, and I started losing my grip on what I was doing, having bad falling dreams, and finally I decided it was time for me to pack up and haul ass back down into the lowlands, with all the proles <g>, and do other things with my life. Which I did.

So nowadays I feel like the aging ex-jock, with the bad knees and the incipient beer-gut, standing on the sidelines and watching the kids at play. I remember what it was like to be in the game, the pure, exhilarating, soaring joy of it; and it's still fun sometimes to go out and knock the ball around, even though I can't really get it out of the infield any longer. But I'm not in the game; I won't, or I can't, suit up and go out for the full nine innings. By which I mean -- dumping the sports metaphors, and circling back to where this entry started -- that while I still like tossing ideas around, I no longer have whatever it takes to carry them through to conclusions, tie the pieces together, do the thinking-through and summarizing. And to me, that's the defining element of being an intellectual--taking responsibility for your ideas, working them out to the end. I take that kind of responsibility for my writing, mostly; I don't for my theoretical pifflings. Which makes it less fun, for me, because the pleasure really comes in taking it seriously enough to give it everything you have. Taking it seriously enough to really play, the way the great players do.

Replies: 90 comments

If it's any comfort, Kat, I'm often tremendously impressed by the attitudes you express here towards higher education and think you must be a great help to your advisees. It's lovely to see someone so dedicated and thoughtful in that position.

The curious thing about that debate is that it's actually an intersquad match, professionally speaking: Naomi, Jenny, and I are _all_ grad students. But, in terms of class issues, well, let's just say that the assumption that Jenny appears to be taking, that if you happen to have a prestigious institution's name in your email address, you must have lived a life of privileged ease, is both (a) inaccurate and (b) offensive. I don't like playing the game of more-disadvantaged-than-thou, but the idea of someone who identifies as lower-middle-class thinking they need to explain to me how poor people think...it's pretty funny. I didn't go off on that in my rant, though, because I live in hope that she just didn't think it through.

Posted by Sarah T. @ 04/15/2002 01:00 PM CST

And to me, that's the defining element of being an intellectual--taking responsibility for your ideas, working them out to the end. I take that kind of responsibility for my writing, mostly; I don't for my theoretical pifflings. Which makes it less fun, for me, because the pleasure really comes in taking it seriously enough to give it everything you have. Taking it seriously enough to really play, the way the great players do.

This part just really resonated for me. I didn't choose to come down off the mountain, I fell/was tossed. It's hard to get back up there without the ski-lift of being in school in some way, shape, or form, and I know that if I didn't have writing...

Well, I'd be pretty damned depressed.

Posted by Te @ 04/15/2002 05:12 PM CST

It's hard to dedicate yourself wholeheartedly and long-term to anything without a support system; if it weren't, I'd've picked up a lot more languages by now, and I'd be a much better quilter. ;) In academia, I have classes, and conferences, and colleagues who will tell me that what I'm doing is interesting and where I'm going wrong. I sometimes think that if I had a larger circle of fanfic-writing friends in my favorite fandoms, I'd write more fanfic; it's something I get ideas for, but -- like Kat said, only the other way 'round -- I don't often follow through on them with the same thoroughness that I usually apply to my academic work or my attempts at fandom analysis.

Posted by Naomi Chana @ 04/16/2002 08:56 PM CST

i never really understood the divide you've described until i started working as a nurse, where for the first time in my rather sheltered life i spent most of my time with co-workers who had, at max, a two-year associates degree.

it struck me again when i was in midwifery school and we read Women's Ways of Knowing, because some of my classmates had a really hard time with the concepts there, while all I could say was, woohoo, this is *such* a great book, and I loved *this* about it, and *that*, and of course I lent it to my sister *three years ago* and only just got it back, so I can't remember enough to make any more specific references, but the conversation between me and a dear friend who'd finally gotten her BSN after eighteen years of nursing and was really struggling with hitting a wall in our masters program--well, I'm sure I'm still an arrogant intellectual elitist when I'm at my worst, but I hope I'm not as bad as I used to be.

It took me years to understand, on a visceral level, that there were people out there who truly did not grow up knowing they were going to college, no question, and probably to grad school as well. I'm lucky that's the way I was brought up, I suppose, but I'm no longer as complacent about it.

Posted by shell @ 04/17/2002 11:36 PM CST

The whole discussion about college and the ivory tower life is still so painful to me. Seventeen years ago -at the age of 40 --I realized that I lacked the financial resources to continue in graduate school. I got my BA in my 30's but just couldn't continue - althogh I desperately wanted to. My family are/were upper middle class but they had no intention - in fact, were openly hostile to my college aspirations. My father prevented me from going to college after I graduated from high school (Magna Cumme Laude, Honor Society and a very high SAT score). I wanted to go, knew that this was the path for me and was prevented from taking it. I got my BA in my 30's but by the age of 39 saw all financial sources for older students drying up (Thank you very much Regan, Bush and other Republican assholes!). Guess it's part of the harshness of our society - you only have one chance and if you can't take it/make it, the door slams shut forever.

namaste SF Nancy

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