Publish & Perish
Perishable Publications
Dear Paula & Colleagues ACT (Some
qualitative assessment to supplement the
Digital that is going around.)
Except for the first several years out of gradskool
while teaching atN.C. State
of Professionalism -a-um, I eventually lost interest
in air port Holiday Inn Banquet Rooms & name-tag
conferences, panels, papers, as I fell in love with
Place & Local Foosball so to speak, disc-ing fields
for Ernst Laursen, picking straw berries for Dr. Mahy,
driving the Bluebird bus to town for Sam DeVries,
riding fire engines with Tom Showalter, painting dorms
& Gladfelter for Old Top, hosing down the piggery
while my daughter clipped piggy-toenails, raised a
heifer for a blue ribbon at 4H and padded her college
admissions Curriculum Vita with down-on-the-farm
rural agrarianism attractive then as hangover from the
60's; small was beautiful, and we began to realize our
gold mine nestled in the Blue Ridge. .
That fall our beagle got elected homecoming queen.
PLACE was becoming a dominant theme among
creative non-fiction courses.
Charity began to begin in the home and I let slide
subscriptions to PMLA & The Journal of American
Literature: falling, falling, fallen to amateur standing..
It’s now this bad: responses my students write in
class are more lively & engaging than pro texts
assigned for study & resurrected in real time under
fluorescence surrounded by cinder block: miracle
workers cultivating local food un-eclipsed by freeze
dried mind-on-a-page dropped by dead white myn
& multi-culturalists from other times & places:
stammering digressions, inchoate constellations
struggling toward articulation, shuffling toward
Bethlehem to be born again and again as it were;
and it’s no contest what counts unassessable as it is:
making sense precedes the made
as existing precedes essence, and
rolling our own holy smokes beats
the hell out of buying the cellophaned
pre- wrapped & packaged quality
controls not with standing. ..
I wouldn’t confess this if I hadn’t just received
notice of contract extension so that free at last
free at last I might consider my self tenured-in,
as they say, dead wood lulled by a false sense
of security and the slow smokeless burning of
decay so as to express myself:. professionalism
be damned. Damaged and damaging:
I will profess.
I’m trying to make good use of the notion
SNICKER
which I’m stealing from J__ H__ his response
to K__B__, him recognizing that “idealistic”
ideas mentioned in professional academic environed
mentalities inclined to empiricism & instrumental
application will naturally generate resistance often
signified by a snicker, raised eyebrow, tongue in
cheek perhaps, rolling eyes—all of which represent…
(I claim, for the sake of argument and a
topological if not taxonomic description
of what might be called the liberal arts
landscape —not to be confused with
liberal art, a horse of another color)
…a borderline transgression between two or more
incommensurate realms & source of emergence and
emergency crucial to innovation —the news that
comes from noise. . .
Snicker etc lets me know I am at the interstices.
Crossroads between amateur and pro, say—or
maybe hanging between ndividual idiocy and the
common sense. Outlaw territory.
In-Betweener-Land.
Trespassers W.
Years ago, driving north fromDurham Hartford
a 61 Buick Le Sabre loaded with xmas gifts, two
children and wife, cruising up 95 thruVirginia
6 a.m.: a sudden red wink not unlike a snicker appeared
on the dashboard signaling some thing amiss in the total
system, problems of generation, generator, alternator,
voltage regulation perhaps: wink winks but never
specifies. . .
Monkey wrenching my
North-to-Connecticut
cybernetic thesis-driven
cover-the-ground agenda:
winking a wink of
significance.
Be aware.
Frontiers yet unknown, collision trajectory among matrices,
frames of reference, agenda, belief & bias systems:
snicker tells me so.
Wink. Rolling of eyeballs.
Whole System signaling:
Oyez! Oyez! Obey! Obey!
Love it:
Amo. Amas. Amare.
Factor-it-in: messengers & monsters.
Stalwart pioneers and amateur standings.
Assess. Evaluate. Put into play. Send in the
snicikers. There ought to be snickers.
xxxooo, Sam
Perishable Publications
qualitative assessment to supplement the
Digital that is going around.)
Except for the first several years out of gradskool
while teaching at
of Professionalism -a-um, I eventually lost interest
in air port Holiday Inn Banquet Rooms & name-tag
conferences, panels, papers, as I fell in love with
Place & Local Foosball so to speak, disc-ing fields
for Ernst Laursen, picking straw berries for Dr. Mahy,
driving the Bluebird bus to town for Sam DeVries,
riding fire engines with Tom Showalter, painting dorms
& Gladfelter for Old Top, hosing down the piggery
while my daughter clipped piggy-toenails, raised a
heifer for a blue ribbon at 4H and padded her college
admissions Curriculum Vita with down-on-the-farm
rural agrarianism attractive then as hangover from the
60's; small was beautiful, and we began to realize our
gold mine nestled in the Blue Ridge. .
That fall our beagle got elected homecoming queen.
PLACE was becoming a dominant theme among
creative non-fiction courses.
Charity began to begin in the home and I let slide
subscriptions to PMLA & The Journal of American
Literature: falling, falling, fallen to amateur standing..
It’s now this bad: responses my students write in
class are more lively & engaging than pro texts
assigned for study & resurrected in real time under
fluorescence surrounded by cinder block: miracle
workers cultivating local food un-eclipsed by freeze
dried mind-on-a-page dropped by dead white myn
& multi-culturalists from other times & places:
stammering digressions, inchoate constellations
struggling toward articulation, shuffling toward
Bethlehem to be born again and again as it were;
and it’s no contest what counts unassessable as it is:
making sense precedes the made
as existing precedes essence, and
rolling our own holy smokes beats
the hell out of buying the cellophaned
pre- wrapped & packaged quality
controls not with standing. ..
I wouldn’t confess this if I hadn’t just received
notice of contract extension so that free at last
free at last I might consider my self tenured-in,
as they say, dead wood lulled by a false sense
of security and the slow smokeless burning of
decay so as to express myself:. professionalism
be damned. Damaged and damaging:
I will profess.
I’m trying to make good use of the notion
SNICKER
which I’m stealing from J__ H__ his response
to K__B__, him recognizing that “idealistic”
ideas mentioned in professional academic environed
mentalities inclined to empiricism & instrumental
application will naturally generate resistance often
signified by a snicker, raised eyebrow, tongue in
cheek perhaps, rolling eyes—all of which represent…
(I claim, for the sake of argument and a
topological if not taxonomic description
of what might be called the liberal arts
landscape —not to be confused with
liberal art, a horse of another color)
…a borderline transgression between two or more
incommensurate realms & source of emergence and
emergency crucial to innovation —the news that
comes from noise. . .
Snicker etc lets me know I am at the interstices.
Crossroads between amateur and pro, say—or
maybe hanging between ndividual idiocy and the
common sense. Outlaw territory.
In-Betweener-Land.
Trespassers W.
Years ago, driving north from
a 61 Buick Le Sabre loaded with xmas gifts, two
children and wife, cruising up 95 thru
6 a.m.: a sudden red wink not unlike a snicker appeared
on the dashboard signaling some thing amiss in the total
system, problems of generation, generator, alternator,
voltage regulation perhaps: wink winks but never
specifies. . .
Monkey wrenching my
North-to-Connecticut
cybernetic thesis-driven
cover-the-ground agenda:
winking a wink of
significance.
Be aware.
Frontiers yet unknown, collision trajectory among matrices,
frames of reference, agenda, belief & bias systems:
snicker tells me so.
Wink. Rolling of eyeballs.
Whole System signaling:
Oyez! Oyez! Obey! Obey!
Love it:
Amo. Amas. Amare.
Factor-it-in: messengers & monsters.
Stalwart pioneers and amateur standings.
Assess. Evaluate. Put into play. Send in the
snicikers. There ought to be snickers.
xxxooo, Sam
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