The Prodigal Son

I've had some time to think about my return to academia while meandering across the windswept arctic tundra that is the SUNY at Buffalo campus, and I've come to a few conclusions (cursory, of course):

I am a chronological anthropologist: Much like the narc that returns to high school at 30 years old to root out the juvenile drug ring, I am equipped with the wisdom that a decade or more of insight affords. Not only can I marvel at the awkwardness of the average college student (their inability to comport themselves, speak clearly, dress themselves, etc.), but also I can marvel at the fact that I was once as awkward, unintelligible, and sartorially challenged. My re-situation within the exact same cultural milieu at a later date has provided me with a more objective look at what those years must have been like for me. In my first two days back at my alma mater (or pater, if we're to keep to the parable analogy) I feel as though I've been granted a wish to travel back in time and watch myself (or students like myself) go through the painfully embarrassing post-adolescent shapeshifting. It's fascinating, horrifying, and impossible to stop watching.

Things have changed: You will say, of course they have. Or you will say, no they haven't, you've changed. Well, I'm here to tell you that I may have changed, but some things have actually changed as well. I have the syllabi to prove it. The prerequisite courses for my move ahead into Art Conservation are pretty elementary, so I didn't expect much waxing philosophical, etc. But when I went to AHI 102 on Monday, I was shocked at how facile it was. 3 three page papers. Compare and contrast. The works of art will be discussed in class and compared and contrasted before the papers are due. Vocabulary quizzes will be multiple choice. No cumulative final exam. No dates are required for artwork recognition. The professor literally apologized for the work that was to be done, then to curry favor reminded the students that there would be no research paper. OK. I'll risk sounding like a jaded old man, but I took AHI 101 at UB, and I have the syllabus. Cumulative final, dates for recognition, compare and contrast essay quizzes to be done in class, research paper, full definition of terms on exams. So, ten years later, the second half of basic art history is fundamentally different, and fundamentally easier. Score one for the tyranny of the student majority.

Copresence is ubiquitous: I have no prejudice against technology. I love my phone. I'm on it constantly. I text like a Japanese teenager. But on Monday I couldn't see a single student in the entire 400 person lecture hall who didn't have his phone on the table or in his hand. I have nothing more to say except it must be almost impossible to teach in those fractious circumstances. The situation was better in smaller classes, but not by much.

This may have been my only option: I decided to pursue this course of study in early November. Since then I've continued my job hunt, but the employment and economic situation here (and throughout the US) has just gotten worse. I've been turned down for two jobs I was qualified for, and none of the other positions available even pay a living wage. I may have picked one of the worst times in history to quit my job, and I'm actually happy that my life path led to me to the safe haven, the grand maw that accepts all comers with a check in their hand, the forgiving mother/father, the insitution of the University.

I guess that's where the analogy ends. The prodigal son squandered his inheritance and then returned to the father penniless, only to be forgiven and celebrated. I've squandered nothing, am returning penniless, only to be treated with welcome indifference.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. I'm actually thankful for this opportunity and I know not everyone has it.

Transitional Note for a Transitional Time

A few days ago I was lucky enough to stumble upon Adam Gopnik's review in the New Yorker of two new Samuel Johnson biographies. My point here isn't to elaborate on Gopnik's review, nor to relate anything specifically to Samuel Johnson - it's to examine something Gopnik mentions as he briefly recounts Johnson's move to London in 1737:

...Johnson had no luck in his dream, of becoming a London writer and wit, for a very long time. He had the misfortune to have arrived in London at a time not unlike this one, with the old-media dispensation in crisis and the new media barely paying. The practice of aristocratic patronage, in which big shots paid to be flattered by their favorite writers, was ebbing, and the new, middle-class arrangement, where plays and novels could command real money from publishers was not yet in place. The only way to make a living was to publish, for starvation wages, in the few magazines that had come into existence...(The new order had also produced a permanently bitter and underemployed class of writers, who had meant to be Popes but were left to be merely beggars in the square outside, and they made their living working for penny-a-line pamphlets and cheap gossip tabloids, creating a constant mouse scream of malice that runs in counterpoint to Johnson's grave sonorities) (90).

A time not unlike this one. As I've mentioned in the past, the plight of overeducated underpaid liberal arts scholars is neither unique nor new. But, after reading this, it was the first time that I entertained the notion that this might be a particularly difficult moment in history due to media transition. Johnson (along with every writer and artist whose career spanned the 17th and 18th centuries) was facing a time when the infrastructure of patronage was being dismantled (not to mention the infrastructure of "royalty") and the foundation of public, for-profit publishing was just being built. I (along with every writer and artist whose career spans the 20th and 21st centuries) am facing a time when the infrastructure of for-profit publishing is being dismantled and the foundation of internet publication is in its nascent stages.

Publishing houses, like patronage, lasted centuries and they are still alive and well. Patronage didn't die overnight, and it never became completely extinct. Neither will publishing houses. My argument isn't that publishing is dead, books will no longer exist, libraries will evaporate, blah blah blah. My argument is that as the traditional model of writing and disseminating work has changed, so has the mode whereby authors and artists get paid. We've gone from a patron's steady allowance or commission of work to a model where we write/make something, get agent, submit manuscript/work, get published/shown, collect royalties/payment to a model where we write/make something, bypass all middle men, find a computer and blog or post pictures of our work, then try to figure out how the hell to make money. With the new model, there seems (so far) to be very few viable options: place advertisements adjacent to your work and receive tangential revenue, charge for digital manifestations (pdf's, etc) of your work, or ask for donations. Of course there are still writers who get paid in the traditional way for work posted to the internet - there are salaried bloggers, journalists, etc. But that's just a residual financial holdover from the previous cultural production paradigm. When patronage was phased out, an entirely new fiscal model was introduced - one based on the free market, supply and demand, widespread literacy, and cheap production methods. As traditional publishing is phased out, we're scrambling, as they are in the music and film industry, to figure out what the tenets of the new fiscal system for art and literture will be. But none of this is news. I'm merely highlighting that we're still walking onto the apron of a very substantial new system, one which is hardly even framed up yet.

As Johnson discovered when he moved to London, given the tools and opportunity, there is no dearth of creative people willing to distribute their work. The glut of young writers was filtered by the sieve of editors and publishers, and eventually, by the public's demand for certain work. One can only hope that this new glut of artists and writers, fueled by the ease and accessibility of the internet, will find a similar filter and a feasible economic model.

Until then, I'll simply add this to the list of difficulties facing artists and writers in our time. As we piece together the shrapnel of a defunct system, the resulting pastiche can be predicted and advocated, but never truly discovered until it has fallen into place.

Not Much Has Changed

The Well Run Dry

Sooner than I thought, and more difficult than I imagined.

My money is, for all intents and purposes, gone. It's lasted about half the time I approximated, and although I was frugal, I didn't see the income I estimated from artistic endeavors (thanks in part to the economy, I imagine, and also because of my change in plans). This has left me looking for a job as I wait for the spring semester to begin. It's also left me thinking about the various trajectories my life (and this process of catloging it) has taken. Alternately optimistic and pessimistic, idealistic and practical, sane and insane, constantly paradoxical, but always, I hope, honest.

Facet candle holders, 2008. Idea stolen from Kindling Shop, Chicago, IL.

I now feel I have to address the possibility that my attempt to become a professional artist is a failure. Or a much, much longer adventure than I imagined. On the surface, it would be easy to say I failed, or my heart wasn't in it, or I didn't give it the time and effort it deserved, but when you look closer, it's a lot more complicated.

As my focus shifted towards returning to school, it shifted away from commodifying my art to the degree that it might provide a viable income. I don't mean that I stopped making art, I mean that it became difficult to sustain both endeavors simultaneously, and the aspects of becoming an artist that I found distasteful began to look markedly worse (eg: self-promotion, branding, incorporation, marketing, strategic alliances, etc). I know on a certain level the negative aspects of becoming an artist are present in everyday life as well; we all must, on some level, market, brand, and promote ourselves. But for most of us, it isn't our primary concern unless we're walking into a job interview or trying to pick up a new mate. I felt hesitant right from the start about making it my primary concern and having it overshadow the actual production of my artwork. And I know, I remember writing about schmoozing and navigating this side of the art world as a facet of the true meritocracy that exists, but that didn't mean I had reconciled all my misgivings. I was, and am still, highly uncomfortable with being a businessmen-artist hybrid. Part of me isn't so sure that I want to rely on my business savvy, networking skills, and ability to sell myself for health care, food, and shelter. In simpler terms, I might just be, deep inside, a consistent paycheck kinda guy.

And, as I took a long, hard, honest look at myself and my skill set, I began to realize I was capable of most anything, but an expert in very few fields, if any. Sure, I can screenprint, letterpress, woodwork, etch, bookbind, and hundreds of other things. But am I highly skilled at any of those things? Not really, to be honest. I'm just good at them. I am the consummate jack of all trades, master of none. And the people in those fields who are highly skilled, who are experts, still often find it difficult to make ends meet solely by making non-commercial art. The people who succeed that aren't experts usually do so via their business savvy or sheer dumb luck. We've already covered the business savvy part, so I'll just say I've never been a lucky guy, and this is hardly the time to be waiting for the luck wagon to come around the corner. The idea of becoming an expert in a particular field or a master of a certain skill has always appealed to me, but I've always understood that it isn't something you achieve on your own, but under the guidance of others. This might be one of the only real chances I have to make that happen. I also understand that some of you may be thinking 'a person can be an expert in their own artistic process, in the field of themselves, and no one else can teach them that.' Very true. But I must also admit here that one of the things I admire most in art, of any medium, is craft. Handicraft. Technical skill. Even if it isn't immediately recognizable or the artist has exploded the index of his skill and replaced it with something ostensibly random, I still enjoy teasing out the craft and admiring the skill. This is something I strive for in my own work, and this may also be an opportunity to hone my weaker skills.

Am I selling out my dream to become an artist by returning to the safety of the Institution? I don't think so, because I'm trying to think of it as a necessary step I didn't previously envision. It isn't that I had to go back to school, but when I looked closely at what I wanted, school became something I needed. More clearly: I've envisaged my future, the skills I want to have, the life I want to lead, and returning to school fulfilled that vision more clearly than pursuing professional art full time.

It's my hope that the prerequisite classes I must take, as well as the classes to come in the advanced degree program, will provide me with a far more extensive skill set and knowledge of art history and art media that I can enfold into my own work. It may be pure rationalization, but I'm thinking of this as a prerequisite, another step on my journey towards becoming the artist and the person I want to be.

One Long Year

Today is the one year anniversary of my sobriety. I celebrated by digging in my heels and moving forward with my new life plan. As of today, I am a student again. I registered for classes at SUNY at Buffalo that I will need to apply for Art Conservation advanced degree programs. If all goes well, I'll be able to start those applications in spring of 2010 and begin a program in the fall of 2010. Most programs are three years long, so I'll make my exit sometime in 2013. I will be 36 years old. To be honest, I never thought I would make it to 30.

I lived hard when I was young. I spent all day, every day, skating - throwing myself down flights of stairs, onto handrails, off launch ramps. Again and again I slammed my body into the ground, over and over I suffered the crippling effects of serious injury. To date I've broken: all of my fingers, all of my toes, my right tibia and fibula, my right ankle, my right heel bone, my left radius and ulna, my left wrist, 3 ribs, my right front tooth, and my coccyx. I've torn: my left ACL, my right ACL, my left MCL , my right patellar ligament, and a series of soft tissues between my ribs. I've sprained: my left ankle, my left knee, my right ankle, my right knee, both my wrists, all of my fingers, disclocated my left shoulder and hyperextended my left arm at the elbow. My injuries were sometimes spectacular, sometimes subtle, but always a reminder of my fragility and mortality. I wasn't one of the kids that thought he was immortal - far from it - the vulnerability of my body to injury reminded me every day that life was temporary.

When I thought of growing older, I could never imagine myself after 30. Not because it was old, and I was never going to get old (which I think it the common cause of this inconceivability), but because I couldn't figure out what I was going to do after 30. I knew I would be too old to skate. I knew what I was interested in, but even then I had no idea how it would translate into a job, a career, or a lifestyle. I simply thought that meaningful existence (as I understood it) after 30 seemed entirely improbable (for me), and as I maintained that improbability, it began to morph into an impossibility. I began to tell myself that I was never going to make it to 30. The way I lived my life was such that I would meet my end in a fiery car crash or a spectacular fall; I'd become the youthful martyr that all of my friends reminisced about. I didn't have a death wish. I liked living. But I had a feeling, a really strong feeling, I was just never going to make it to 30. Now that I think about it, this feeling may have made a distinct contribution to my inability to pull the disparate parts of my life together into a legitimate whole right around the age of 30. I'd told myself that day was never going to come, and when it came, all I could think was "Where's my spectacular fall?"

Needless to say, the fall never came. Neither did the fiery car crash. No sensational decapitation, nothing. 30 passed with a quiet murmur and left me looking over both my shoulders, thinking destiny was late.

Fueled by the conviction that three decades was all I had, in my 20's I lived a lifestyle full of the conventional excesses of the aimless: drugs, alcohol, sex. It was never glamorous, in fact it was often the opposite, but it was definitely propagated by an absence of consequence, or a perceived absence of consequence. I couldn't be blamed, I needed to fit it all in, I was only going to be here half the time everyone else was - or worse, maybe part of me felt like "it won't matter when I'm gone because people will forgive me, and if they don't, I'll never know." An ill-conceived plan at best, if I conceived it at all.

And, as many of you know, it caught up with me. And it caught up quick.

I feel lucky that my breakdown a little over a year ago became an impetus for change; as brutal as an emotional rock bottom is, I still recognize that it doesn't compare to the vicious character of an addict's rock bottom. I'm glad that I never had to experience that, and glad to have the opportunity to move my life away from the possibility. I've learned to live without drinking and understand clearly now that I'll probably never be able to come back to it in a casual way. It doesn't bother me as much as it did at first, because lately I've been trying to figure out what drinking did for me. What it ever helped me achieve.

Let's see: It got me laid. It helped me relax and avoid the sources of my anxiety. It loosened me up so I could actually have fun with my friends. It helped me sleep. It gave me a social crutch, a commonality to rely on. Other than those things, I was hard pressed to find anything. And when I look at those things, I think to myself: I can do all those things on my own. Getting laid is easy. Relaxing and avoiding anxiety are easy if you work hard to structure your life in a healthy way. I don't need loosening up, if I get get going, I'm just as crazy now as I was when I was drunk. Sleeping is easy if you deal with your anxiety and its sources. And finally, if I need a social crutch, I either need new friends or a social crutch that isn't going to give me a hangover. Like volunteering at the Red Cross. You get the point.

After coming to terms with all of the above, it's difficult not to feel regret. Time wasted, money spent, decisions made, physical damage done. But I know I can't dwell on it. I could've never made this decision earlier. No one could've convinced me at 28 to make the changes I've made. Because I believed I wasn't going to make it to 30. It took undeniable chronological evidence and emotional upheaval. Even then it was hard for me to believe it.

This last year has been the longest and the shortest of my life. I've been absorbed in introspection, analysis, evaluation - the days feel agonizingly long as I plod through the mental muck, but those same days shoot by on the calendar, the sun seems to rise and set in minutes. I've had to admit to myself what I'm good at, what I'm not, who I've hurt, how I've hurt them, what it's possible to do, what it isn't. I've had to say hard things to myself and make harder decisions. But I believe it's been worth it, because now it all seems a little more possible, and I don't feel like a ghost. I don't feel like someone that somehow slid past 30, escaped the eye of the grim reaper, and continues to amble along unsure of how to proceed. I'm convinced I'm actually here, convinced I should make something of it, and convinced that I can.

I want to extend thanks to every single person that has helped me make this transition; I love all of you and value your support.

Coming soon: my thoughts of re-entering academia, the first-hand accounts I'll be able to give of the current situation, and determining whether or not I'm a sell-out.

The Dimensions of Certainty

The past ten days I've been re-reading Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. For those of you who aren't familiar, the "novel" is a fictional scholarly examination of a fictional documentary of a fictional event, replete with real and imagined footnotes, as well as a subplot/subnarrative focused on the unfortunate chap who first found the treatise. The book is unorthodox in its format, page layout, and chronology, but for all its gimmicky greatness, there's still a story there and that story is about a house that manifests interior spaces larger than the exterior reveals. It begins with a tiny discrepancy and finally grows to massive proportions that demand a team of explorers and documentarians. The point here isn't to retell the story or review the book, it's simply to present the idea of dimensional complicity. Yes, I know what complicity means.


Consider a dimension as a limit. Say a point wants to become a line, but the one dimension it belongs to stifles its expansion. Say a line wants to become a wall, but the two dimensions it belongs to keep it flat. Think of dimensions and the limits they enforce as the only thing that stands between us and absolute dimensional entropy.

Now consider a dimension as an opportunity. A point is free to become a line, but must find a way to unfold into the second dimension. A line wants to become a wall, but must acquire depth. Think of dimensions and the opportunities they offer as the only thing that makes expansion possible.


This is clearly a pessimist/optimist argument, but I've been thinking a lot lately about how to view the dimensions around me. House of Leaves deals primarily with the possibility of structures altered by perception (what you see is what you get, literally - if the stairs seem endless, they become endless). Is there really any reason that we can't think of our 3 dimensional journey, participating as it does, in the 4th dimension as well, as a structure? Is it possible then, that this structure is altered by our perception of it? Heisenberg was really the first to delineate this in a scientific sense (uncertainty principle and observer effect), and his concern was primarily the effect of observation on technical data, but the upshot is the same. Perceiving the course of my life, as I must, necessarily affects its structure (and consequently, the sensory data I receive and assess). My evaluation, then, is as flawed as any scientific evaluation - but is it flawed in a consistent way? Do you ever become so familiar with your own margin of error that it no longer has any effect?

More importantly, can the way I see things actually make them bigger or smaller? This might be an argument for absolute relativity, so Einstein might be on my side, but according to a footnote in House of Leaves, so is Gunter Nitschke. Danielewski recounts his description of "experienced or concrete space":

It has a centre which is a perceiving man, and it therefore has an excellent system of directions which changes with the movements of the human body; it is limited and in no sense neutral, in other words it is finite, heterogeneous, subjectively defined and perceived; distances and directions are fixed relative to man...

That final line should probably read "fixed relative to a man." Because if the early lines are to be believed, every space is going to be different to every man. Some think this goes without saying, that our notions of near and far, large and small, bright and dark, etc are necessarily different. These, however, are qualitative assessments of space (and for that matter, time), not quantitative. Most of these people would concede that objects in space have an objective quantitative set of properties (extension, mass, etc) that are measurable, re-measurable, and verifiable by peer-review. Except of course, David Hume.


I, like Hume, am beginning to wonder. As I consider the possibility of returning to school for Art Conservation, I feel my interior spaces unfolding, opening outward at a pace my exterior can't match. I hear the clatter of floorboards being layed down in a thousand different hallways, I feel the new neural pathways firing that allow me the luxury of daydreaming or worrying, I see the silent elastic fibers of time extending and contracting before me. Going back to school would require an investment of close to five years and over 12,000 dollars for prerequisite classes. Can I shorten this time just by looking at it differently? Literally? Can I make this room bigger by looking at it differently? Can I conjure the space and time I need by force of will? By application of sense? If I could, would I?

Maybe. Maybe I'd make it all look a little shorter and more possible. If only to take that first step.

Vocation vs. Avocation

I've been advised by more than one person to think of a vocation as something that provides fiscal solvency and facilitates an avocation (hobby, pastime, minor occupation). The idea is simple, and it's proven its feasibility for many artists and writers throughout the years: find something to pay the bills and spend the rest of your time doing whatever you'd like. Until now, I've been fervently opposed to this approach, convinced that I'll be able to turn what is an avocation for most (art-making) into a vocation. I haven't, until recently, considered pursuing occupations that combine the two in a way that doesn't discount the value of either. Sound convoluted? It isn't. Imagine a space where you participate in a creative activity all day long, some sort of art-making that is your vocation, but doesn't involve making your own work. I know there are obvious choices here: art teacher, commercial screenprinter, set designer, costume designer, journalist, copy writer, etc. But none of those appeal to me, and I've been put off by the warnings of friends who have those jobs and feel it actually saps their energy and desire to produce their own work.

QEW Toronto, 2008

Lately, however, I've been considering the Art Conservation program at Buffalo State College. It has a reputation for being one of the best in the world, and amazingly, students receive full tuition remission for three years (ie: it's free). Graduating art conservators enjoy an exceedingly high rate of job placement, not to mention compensation commensurate with the hyper-specialized and unusual nature of the work. Art conservators work in many different fields, from sculpture and painting restoration to paper and wood restoration. Part forensic scientist, part detective, part artist - so far it sounds like a dream job where all of my vices (obssessive compulsive tendencies, perfectionism, meticulousness) would become virtues. So what's the down side? There's plenty.

QEW Toronto, 2008

The artcon program has a massive list of prerequisites - one that wouldn't be so daunting to a fine arts major, but to someone coming from a philosophy/english background it's fairly significant. The requirements? 9 hours of studio work, 21 hours of art history, chemistry 101/102, organic chemistry 201/202, and outside employment/internship with a professional conservator. Those alone would require 4 semesters of undergraduate work, 3 if I was really pushing it, and after all that, there'd be no way to guarantee myself a spot in the advanced degree program. That's a huge investment of time and money without the assurance of a payoff.

Nevertheless, I'm not giving up yet. Coincidentally, there's an open house at the artcon department this Friday, so I'm going to go to feel it out and ask questions specific to my unique situation. I love the idea of being able to use my creative skills, critical skills, and fine handiwork in a job that seems useful, multifarious, and interesting to me. And I also love the fact that the work I'd do would probably be so far from my own work that I wouldn't feel tapped out at the end of the day - perhaps I'd even feel like the vocation had primed the pump for my avocation.

QEW Toronto, 2008

This really strikes at the heart of what I discussed during my examination of liberal arts: the difference between general education and vocational training. Art conservation would definitely be vocational training, and maybe that's what I've needed all along (or at least, recently).

Taking Stock

It's my birthday, so I'm currently taking stock. More on the stock I've taken tomorrow. Until then, enjoy these:

The Artist As Consumer

I spent this past weekend in Toronto at the indie art gathering CANZINE, which focuses primarily on zines, small press, comics, and crafty DIY doo-dads. I recently finished a book, and while purveying my new wares, I had the chance to survey the field and conjure up a few generalizations and blanket statements.

Firstly, artists are a poor, unreliable lot of consumers. Maybe it's a cultivated disinclination towards consumption, maybe it's actual financial hardship, or maybe it's a tacit disdain for similar modes of cultural production (as in "I can do that, and I can do that better"). Either way, the result is the same: ambling crowds of artists and writers shuffling by tables simultaneously admiring and loathing (because they actually loathe, or loathing because they actually admire), and visually mining work for usable materials and concepts, but rarely ever buying.

I'm guilty of the same behavior, especially the overly critical eye. I walk by tables thinking "crap; crap; crap; OK but not my bag; crap; hey that's not bad - how did they do that?" Then I sit back down behind my table (having bought nothing) thinking "these sons of bitches better start buying something." And they do. But it's not the artists who buy - it's the non-artists. Old ladies particularly love the look and feel of my work. Flattering, but as an audience demographic I'm not sure it's exactly what I was looking for. This brings up an interesting set of questions that my friend Ben touched on in a comment: who buys art? who do I think should be buying my art? why? can we really control things like that? do we even want to?

If I suddenly became the poet laureate of elderly women, would I complain? Should I? I can't say I would complain, but I can say it would make me reconsider the content of my writing and the overall aesthetic of my books. I'm sorry, but it's true. And if that's true, I must have some blurry idea of what my demographic is - but at the moment it's only negatively defined as (I hope) not solely women over 65.

Secondly, artists are a loyal network of reliable consumers that can help make selling your art an economically viable pursuit. Say what? Isn't that exactly the opposite of the first point? Yes. Take Etsy for example. Tens of thousands of artist-entrepreneurs have descended on the site in the past few years, selling hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of items. The Etsy community is a virtual marketplace that reflects the positive energy and reciprocal support that is the mainstay of the DIY/craft underground. What does that mean? It means the people who make the things provide positive feedback and constructive criticism to each other - but it also means they buy each other's things. So why can a virtual community like Etsy manifest an economical reciprocity while an event like CANZINE has a hard time? Is it sheer volume of artist/consumers (as in there were 2000 people at CANZINE, but there are 100,000 poking around on Etsy)? Is it sheer volume of art objects (as in with that much stuff, everyone can find something they like that they can't make themselves)? Is it because cheap art is an impulse buy, and it's easier to impulse buy online than face-to-face? Who knows, but chances are it's a combination of all those and more.

As for me, I'm considering including a questionaire with all of my books and art so that I can begin to refine and market to my key demographic.

Guts, Gumption, Gold, and Glory

The UGLY WINNERS one night art show in the upstairs apartment came off without a hitch. It was a great success, well-attended, and positively received. There was only one problem: we didn't sell a single thing. That wasn't the sole objective of the show - I was more concerned with giving unrepresented artists a chance to share their work and meet one another - but it still would've been nice. See - art shows, book fairs, and the like act as catalysts for artistic production - or more accurately, they provide the threat of a deadline, which is always a powerful motivator. But what if all that motivation turned action turned product has nowhere to go? A visual artist can only produce so much without having a market for his work (unless he's lucky enough to have a massive studio or a warehouse - or he makes really tiny work). A glut of work also threatens to devalue individual pieces (it's just supply and demand). And not even just the exchange value - I'm thinking more of artists, bands, and writers that have no "filter" and produce album after album, novel after novel, poem after poem, painting after painting, etc. It skews overall value, or what I might term reception value. I don't know about you, but this wide-net approach to cultural production has always left a bad taste in my mouth. Like if you throw enough at the wall, something's bound to stick, but it doesn't matter what it is. Anyway, the show was a great idea. And I want to have more. But it left me wondering, how many can I have before all the artists' homes are just full of unsold work? How long could we all go on making things, filling our closets, dragging things out and dusting them off, even contemplating throwing them out in order to make room for new things?

Polaroids by Jay Stankiewicz

It also left me wondering about the turbulent economy (which I know has already become a cliche) and the effect it will have on luxury spending, because I do consider the purchase of art a luxury. Or more accurately, I understand that the purchase of art is regarded by a large percentage of the population as superfluous to human needs. People in the Rust Belt/Great Lakes Region have been the victims of a vicious economic vortex for over 5 decades now - so it's not as though there's been a time in recent memory when luxury spending was the norm - but is this recent collapse going to make things even worse? In short, did I pick the worst possible time to try to become a working artist and help promote my friends' work?

The upstairs living room during UGLY WINNERS.

Maybe. But maybe not. I've been buoyed by a recent article that touts Buffalo as one of the top places in the nation to "ride out the recession."

Buffalo's terrible economy shelters it from the benefits of economic booms, but it also makes us almost impervious to the negative effects of economic downturns. Things have always been bad here, we're not really going to notice if things "get worse." In fact, our economic turmoil has cultivated an insularity that's allowing us to move independent of the global crisis. Slowly but surely, even now, our home prices are rising. Employment is on the upswing. Consumer spending is level. Home foreclosures are a fraction of what they are elsewhere. Things out there in the world might be ugly, but here on the economic island that is Buffalo, they're the same, or even improving.

Kit Bowman's "Most Colorful Primate."

Maybe, just maybe, people in Buffalo have already worked luxury spending into their very limited budgets. So I probably have nothing to worry about. At least from a consumer standpoint. From a production perspective, however, things are looking less healthy.

Chris Fritton's "Basic Standing Dive."

Don't get me wrong, I'm not sinking yet. But tightening my purse strings in order to ride out this transition has made progress on the studio space in the garage slow. In fact, it's stopped almost completely because I'm at a point where I need an electrician to come and connect the building to the grid, install a breaker box, and get everything up and running. Luckily the building is wired already, but it's still going to cost a significant amount to get the work done. A significant amount I don't have right now. This was a terrible disappointment (the first major one since I started this project) because I envisioned using the space and time over the winter to produce a number of larger pieces and begin marketing them. Luckily I will have a heated space to work; a close friend is going to Europe from January to April, so I'm going to sublet her huge studio while she's gone.

Untitled painting by BREZO

In the meantime, I'm going to have to focus on writing (I'm putting the finishing touches on a new book entitled "Occupation: Housewife" right now) and teaching (I've landed an intermittent gig with the local non-profit Just Buffalo to teach afterschool and in-school programs in poetry and writing) because I've run out of room for other work.

Astronaut or Astro-not

I've been MIA for the last ten days because I've been reading up and working hard on my NYFA Fellowship Applications. I've discovered a number of resources for emerging artists in the last few months, but NYFA provides the most diverse and substantial help; from fellowships to SOS grants, the money is there - but you have to fight for it. Not only is there competition from other artists, but there's also an aspect of competition with yourself. Maybe competition isn't the right word, but there's definitely a struggle of sorts - a struggle with new forms and formats, with paperwork, with strict guidelines, with articulating your artistic principles (in less than 1000 characters please!), and with designating the self (and products thereof) as your primary economic engine.

The conversion of the self into a brand and the conversion of your art into a series of products/commodities is an emotionally, politically, economically, and ethically tumultuous process, to say the least. I don't think I'm qualified to speak to the issue in the economic terms it deserves (value, use value, exchange value), but I do think I can speak to the emotional labyrinth it calls forth. Unfortunately they're inextricably linked, so forgive me if I cross the line incoherently.

I've been doing all I can to learn about how to create opportunities for myself as an emerging artist, including signing up for NYFA's MARK program , a "new statewide six-month program for visual artists who want a unique opportunity for individualized focus on the professional side of their creative practice." Sadly, so far this has meant nothing but a lot of meetings, seminars, homework, sifting, and filtering. I'm reminded of an old episode of This American Life where they conducted interviews with people who had "dream jobs" that didn't turn out so fantastic. The most memorable? Astronaut. They spoke with a few different astronauts - all of which had dreamed of being astronauts from the time they were very young - and the truth was shocking. It took them years and years to become astronauts. Countless hours in simulators, in flight, in testing and training, undergoing rigorous psychological counseling, etc. But once they achieved the honor of becoming an astronaut, what was their daily routine? Boredom. Paperwork. Meetings. Most of them were never even slated to test experimental aircraft, let alone go into space. The joke was, they were astro-nots, not astronauts. And it wasn't through any fault of their own; they weren't unqualified, they just weren't needed at the time. Sound familiar? Rings of the common line in a rejection letter from a publisher: "We regret to inform you that your submission does not meet our needs at this time." What's the tacit implication? But keep trying. So the astronauts are astronauts in name only, probably won't ever make it into space, but they're supposed to keep hoping and trying. Just like people who are artists and authors in name only (who haven't had the good fortune of being published or sponsored) are supposed to keep hoping and trying. So who's the real astronaut? Who's the real author? The real artist? They both are. One just goes to space, and the other doesn't. The notion here is that being an astronaut involves a lot more than the occasional space mission. It involves a lot of bullshit. But, the astronauts are getting paid, whether they're headed into the final frontier or not. Here's where the analogy ends. Because unpublished authors and underground artists aren't usually getting paid. So when we do bullshit, it's doubly insulting because we usually have to do it for free.

I'm not getting paid to do all this paperwork and go to all these meetings and seminars. I'm not getting paid to spend hours in my basement trying to figure out how to build frames for my etchings. And it's hard. It's hard to look at the clock and think that the time I'm spending isn't generating a little capital that I can exchange for food. And it's really hard to look at pieces that took 20 hours to create, but if/when they sell, they'll only bring the equivalent of 10 dollars an hour. That would be fine if it were constant - but right now, my artistic income is intermittent. I guess that's at the heart of everything I'm doing to learn the business side of art - I just want to see if there's any way I can generate consistent (if modest) income from my labor. I'm not afraid of work. I like it. I don't have pie-in-the-sky dreams of becoming an art superstar, I just want to be a working artist. But not one who's working another job.

First order of business: create a venue where people can see and purchase your work. Check.
Check out the UGLY WINNERS one night art show at my house, 61 Elmwood Ave, Buffalo, October 11, 2008, 8p-11p.

The Guilt of Production, The Production of Guilt

Previously, in conversation with Ric Royer, I touched on the shame associated with cultural production, but recently I've been wrestling with something a little different: the guilt I feel about producing my own work or doing things entirely for myself. The shame Ric and I discussed was a particular sort of discomfort the artist feels when discussing what it is he "does." It's wrapped up in anticipation of any number of complex negative reactions - condescension, befuddlement, bewilderment, feigned interest, etc - but no matter what the response, the result is the same: quiet humiliation. Ric and I never discussed the complex positive reactions someone might have, but no doubt they would lead to quite the opposite reaction, possibly boastful pride. Shame is an externally motivated emotion - people make other people feel ashamed. You split your pants alone, you go home and change your pants. You split your pants in front of a crowd, you feel ashamed, then go home and change your pants. Okay, it's not exactly that simple, shame is a complicated emotion, but you get the point - people are rarely ashamed without some sort of external motivation. Guilt, however, is a little more nuanced.

Guilt is internally motivated - you make yourself feel guilty. It's the result of an internalization of a standard social code of conduct (your "conscience") and the subsequent transgression of that code. If I've internalized the notion that it is wrong to steal, when I steal, I will feel guilty about it. I don't need someone to tell me stealing is wrong to feel guilty, although I might need someone to confront me in order to feel ashamed. The code we've internalized is dynamic; it is always changing, and sometimes aspects of it can even be overridden or rationalized away, but there are often components that remain unchanged (murder is wrong, etc.). I'm currently confronting one of those unchanged components in my code, and having a hard time overcoming it. I think it's wrong to do something for myself, so when I do, I feel guilty about it.

West end of the upstairs office, before.

The origin of this problem is fairly simple - I'm a product of a Western tradition steeped in Judeo-Christian culture that extols altruism and a clinically co-dependent child of divorced alcoholic parents. I was imbued with the idea that doing for others, not the self, is the greatest virtue, and I learned at an early age how to caretake; eventually this developed into the system by which I generated feelings of self-worth. I did for others like I was supposed to, and I was praised; I did for my parents, and I was loved in return. Don't misunderstand me. I'm not knocking philanthropy, generosity, charity, or any of the other countless benefits of altruism. What I'm saying is, as an individual, complete and utter selflessness is a prescription for a barren identity - too much time spent creating other people (in a sense), and not enough time creating the self.

I'm not saying I am or ever have been completely and utterly selfless, that would be a ridiculous lie. I'm saying that I've internalized feelings that equate doing for others as good and doing for myself as bad. In the past, this has caused me intense hardship. In intimate relationships, I tend to overextend myself, I maintain a pattern of giving until it becomes the norm, but it's unsustainable. When I finally do amass the will (or desperation) to do something for myself, others see it as a disintegration of the pattern - in effect, a betrayal. Or the guilt I feel about doing things for myself causes me to hide them instead of addressing them and voicing my intention openly - an actual betrayal. My life, until recently, has been a roller coaster of increasing desire, compulsion, and violation (with periodic catastrophic releases) followed by the abstinence, penance, and atonement of rebuilding the relationships I harmed and self-worth I abandoned. Maybe I should've abandoned it - it wasn't built with the right material anyway.

East end of the upstairs office, before.

The problem isn't that I have no self-control or I'm a bad person - the problem is that I always returned to doing for others as a way to reconstitute my self-worth. If I could've asserted myself and my will forthrightly, secret transgressions and betrayals would've never been required. I could've stated what I wanted, attempted to attain it, dealt with the consequences, and used those experiences to build my self-worth.

I'm sure many people in my life have thought of me as selfish even though I spend most of my time giving to/doing for others. That's because those people focus on the times when my inability to assert my will has caused me to lie or act irrationally: having an affair, picking up and moving with very little warning, etc. But those times comprise a tiny fraction of all my actions - I'm neither selfish nor selfless, I just don't know how to be selfly or self-ful.

This blog is an attempt to do something self-ful (and I'm sure some of you think I'm overachieving), a daily introspective exercise, a research project smattered with some creative philosophical input. But lately, I've found myself turning away from it. Sure it's hard to sustain a full-blown essay every single day - but what really wears me out is when I look at the big picture and see that things haven't changed that much. I've been neglecting the blog to do things for other people. I've been neglecting my art to do things for other people. I've been neglecting the studio project that was supposed to be all for me. The list goes on.

East end of the upstairs office, after.

I've always had quirks about the way I produce art: I produce quickly, efficiently, late at night, normally alone. I always thought that this was the way that I worked best, the way that suited me (I'm impatient). Recently, however, I've realized that during the time I'm producing, I feel an intense amount of guilt. I feel terrible about "wasting my time" on my art when I could be doing something for someone else, or doing something more "constructive." I make things at night when no one is around so I don't have to feel bad about ignoring someone. I make things quickly so that I don't use up precious time that I could spend on/with someone else. As badly as I want to be an artist, making and thinking about art are still things that I "sneak in" between the things I've always done. I still have no concept of how to generate self-worth from the work that I produce (sure, some self-worth walls go up if people see my work and like it, but again, I'm still relying on someone else to provide those bricks).

There's a question about utility here that I'm not fully ready to address - but I'm sure of it because I've had two books in the works for about 6 months now. Instead of getting the books together and putting them out, I've been working on the house. Painting, building, cleaning, caulking, plumbing, whatever I can find. I'm doing those things for myself only insofaras I live here. Really, I'm doing them for the tenant, my partner, the cats, etc. Because I'm fixing the things they use. I'm still not really sure how people use my books or art. I know that they read them. I know that they perceive it. But for some reason I'm really resistant to the idea that they're using them (even though that's clearly what they're doing) - maybe it's because if they were using them, I'd just be making more things for people to use, gaining my self-worth from their response to my work. I told you I wasn't ready to address this. Now the logical conclusion is that I should be making entirely self-serving, totally useless art.

West End of the upstairs office, after.

Either way, what I do know is that I've found no way to garner sustainable self-worth from my artistic output, and I still feel guilty when I produce. I feel guilty because I'm coming a little too close to doing something entirely for myself - so I sneak it in during the wee hours when no one's around. No one makes me feel guilty, no one tells me I can't or shouldn't be making art, no one tells me it's a waste of my time; in fact, everyone close to me is quite supportive. Except for me.

I know this is about utility, I'm going to have to think about it some more. I'm also doing these things around the house because I'm still unemployed and it makes me feel useful, that I can still do things for other people even if I'm not being paid for it. Like pretending I have a job. You see, it's not only about the utility of what I make, but my utility. My usefulness. And sadly, making money fits into that equation somewhere.

The Ethicality of Art

Why instigate the whole cloud of dust (make art)? The whole conversation, in all its myriad and nuanced forms? I said at the end of my last post that I think it's the Right thing to do. But why? Because I'm an advocate of dialogue - but not for the reason you may think. Not because it leads to resolution. I'm not so naive as to think that dialogue is a precursor to resolution, in fact, I advocate dialogue for precisely the opposite reason - because of the inherent conflict involved. Cultural production is a means whereby we propagate an incessant argument, a nebulous linguistic glow, hotter in some spots than others.

Urban highlighting project, 2008. Aquarium gravel.

Cultural production (and cultural criticism, which I generously lump under the heading of cultural production) also serves as a way to push ourselves out into the world. Think of the art you make as a prosthetic limb, one of your own shape and design, manifesting itself in the world. You shape these limbs, these extensions of yourself; you put them out in the world; you increase your size; you're continuously pushing yourself out into the world. Taking up more and more space, enlarging your aesthetic footprint. This isn't as menacing as it all sounds, but there is a particular type of violence in motion, in creation, in the conjuring of ideas, the calling up of that which wasn't before and placing it outside the self. In a crowded space where everyone is pushing themselves out into the world, obstruction, overlap, and obfuscation are bound to occur. These conflicts (and concurrences) are the heart of the conversation - in the end, one must recognize that they aren't conflicts between ideas, or between theories, but between people. The ghost of a hundred thousand dead artists and critics live on through their now disembodied prostheses, reattached to a willing host body. This is the most appropriate metaphor for the arts in academia: academics cutting off their own limbs to wear the flashiest or most powerful prostheses, sacrificing their own hands and feet to continue the conversation, all the while haunted by the tingling in their phantom limbs, all the while thinking about what their own hands and feet would've done, what their own mouth would've said.

Fill the cracks we forget about with something brighter, make them remember they're there.

I'm well aware that this is a vicious criticism of academia that doesn't always hold true, but I feel it clearly illustrates the difficulty discerning the difference between pushing oneself out in the world and continuing to push others out in the world. One can argue that the self, when one looks close enough, is no more than an amalgamation of others in indistinguishable proportion, so we are all merely pushing parts of others out into the world, a bucket brigade carrying the whole history of art/culture forward. To me, this is possibly the most interesting facet of the incessant argument that takes place - the struggle to determine how much of your self is in your prostheses, how much of your self is in your reservations and assertions. Because, as I said before, this isn't a conflict between ideas and theories, but between people, between others and the self, between the self and the self.

Let the wind sweep them away or let people put them in their pockets.

To that end, I think the ethicality in art is integrally tied to questions of identity, to an investigation of the self and others that should be the right of all humans. We should all be allowed to look as deeply as we can into the faces of the past, the eyes of the body that used to own the limbs we're using now. Making art (and everything that goes along with it) is the Right thing to do because it allows us to look closer at ourselves and others, it lets us see the water in the buckets we're carrying, it's let us spit in them or cut our hand off and send it on it's way.

Art and photos, C. Fritton, 2008.

One may think that by advocating the incessant conversation, I am endorsing the academic "house of cards" I've previously vilified, but I'm not. The academic aspect of cultural production is only a small part of the global incessant conversation (luckily for us) - and it's crippled by corruption, misguidance, conservatism, elitism, and capitalism, just like many other aspects of the conversation are: the Art world, museum culture, popular criticism, etc. The conversation is so much bigger and multifaceted than we can imagine; each of those parts are going to have their strengths and weaknesses.

Installation art in Toronto in conversation with mine, taking high-lighting literally.

Soon, I'd like to start turning my attention toward other parts of the conversation, parts that escape some of these handicaps, parts that are setting their own more democratic rules, parts that aren't embroiled in the pandemic problems listed above.

What's My Motivation?

Last night I was typing up pages for a new book, and I started thinking about why I was making it. I mean beyond the reason that I had an idea, and I like making books. I was thinking about why I like making books, why I like making art, and as you can imagine, it led me to think about why I do anything at all. Yeah, I know, how existential. But seriously. Do I make books because it makes me feel good? Because I want people to read them and respond positively, and that makes me feel good? Because I want to change people's minds? Because I want to change the world? Because I think beautiful things improve the world? What exactly is my motivation? Is it purely aesthetic? Is it ethical?

I've read and seen plenty of interviews with artists, and common responses to questions about why they make art are "I can't help it; I'm just compelled to; I have to; I must;" etc, or something similar. They answer the question without answering the question, and rarely follow up with an explanation. Why can't they help it? Why do they feel compelled? Why must they? Just because an artist can't recognize a deeper motivation (or doesn't care to reveal it) doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. I, for one, am not content feeling obliged to do something without understanding why.

Letterpress business card template for my 8 year long project, Ferrum Wheel

I'm a firm believer that all cultural/artistic production involves an expectation of audience even if that audience is the artist himself (see: Henry Darger, even Andy Goldsworthy) or convenes posthumously (see: too many artists/authors to name, but famously, Emily Dickinson). Simply by virtue of being perceiveable/conceivable in the universe, an artistic object/event (or concept thereof) not only expects an audience but requires it. Artist thinks artistic concept: he is necessarily there thinking it, he is his own audience. Artist makes index of concept: again, at least, he is his own audience (now conceptually and perceptually), but more than likely, the audience will extend beyond himself. From this we can assume it is inevitable that conceiving art, creating art, conceiving art that is perceived, perceiving art that is conceived, or perceiving art that is created must make the artist feel a certain way. And if audience is unavoidable, then it must play an integral role in how the artist feels.

Let's take each of those in turn. How does conceiving art make me feel? When I had the idea for this book, I felt excited, challenged, hopeful, nervous, anxious. How many of these feelings are dependent on audience? All of them. I was excited to produce something (an art object) that others (and myself) would see. I felt challenged because the creation of the object always involves some level of compromise between the imagined object and the actual thing, and I try reconcile the two as best I can. I felt hopeful because reconciling the imagined and the actual seemed relatively possible. I also felt hopeful for a positive response (from myself and others). I felt nervous and anxious about an inability to reconcile the imagined and the actual, and a possible negative reaction (from myself and others). All that before I even make a single thing. The only thing clear at this point is that even conceiving art makes me feel a lot of conflicting things. Now since it's impossible for me to conceive of something that I cannot perceive, it's safe to say that I've already perceived the conception of the art object I've conceived. This perception (thinking about my thoughts) doesn't necessarily add much in the way of what I feel, except maybe make me a little more critical of my idea. Creating the art object itself does, however, generate a new batch of feelings, including, but not limited to: frustration, determination, celebration, etc. Many of these feelings are wrapped up in the struggle to apply my physical skills in such a way as to produce precisely the object I envision. When I'm applying my hands and tools in this focused way I feel determined, when it doesn't turn out I feel frustrated, when it does I feel celebratory. Finally, when I perceive art that has been created (by my hand or otherwise), I feel intrigued, contemplative, joyous, disappointed, confused, etc. This, by far, is the most complicated and controversial aspect of artistic production because (unless the artist is the sole audience) it involves any number of people and any number of various reactions. I hardly have time to go into the whole history of aesthetics and criticism, but suffice it to say it's a contentious issue. I'm just trying to figure out why I make art.

I think this cycle of emotions is a key to why I make things. The emotions above are exclusive to me and are by no means representative of how other artists feel when they produce art, but the cycle is not. I think every artist goes through a similar process although the emotions may be different. It's this dynamism, this artificially generated interplay between risk and reward that draws me in - that maybe draws us all in. The velocity (and intensity) with which we experience these emotions is dependent on the length (and intensity) of the project (from a doodle on a notebook to a ten-year outdoor construction piece). It's an autogenous storm, one we stand at the center of, drift in and out of, and sometimes lose our way in.

Maybe if I had to answer the question about why I made art, I would say: Because I'm not just making art, I'm making all the things that go along with it. I'm instigating all those ideas, emotions, and criticisms, in myself and others, the whole cloud of dust.

I know this is a cursory examination, and I'm sure I'll be coming back to it over time. And I know my final statement is just as vulnerable to my earlier criticism of other artist's answers: one could easily ask me why I like instigiating all those ideas, emotions, etc. I think the answer might be a combination of something ethical and aesthetic - like maybe I think it's the Right thing to do...maybe more on that tomorrow.

Check out Ferrum Wheel at www.ferrumwheel.blogspot.com

A Brief History of Liberal Arts, Part II

Renaissance ideals spread throughout Western Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries, and did much to expand education beyond rote memorization into the realm of critical thinking. Italy led the charge, with England, Spain, Germany, and France lagging behind under the weight of a common obstacle: religious strife.

The Reformation instigated educational debates throughout the region, most notably Philip Melanchthon's push for universal literacy in Germany (helped along by the invention of movable type and the printing press), Puritan individualism in England (which served to disassemble not only papal infallibility, but also the authority of clergy and educators), and Samuel Hartlib's radical suggestion of education for all (built on the notions of John Amos Comenius). While these innovators were by no means entirely successful, their ideas served to prod the stubborn, slow-moving heifer of education forward.

The Counter-Reformation wasn't without its contributions as well, especially those of the Jesuits. In 1534, Ignatius Loyola founded the Society of Jesus. Spurred on by the Council of Trent (which encouraged educational activities in order that clergy might "react convincingly against the doctrinal innovations from the Lutherans, Calvinists, and others"), Loyola and the Jesuits established their first college in Sicily in 1548 (79). By 1615 there were 372 Jesuit colleges throughout Europe; by the mid 18th century there were over 700. The Jesuit schools were revered for their efficiency, effectiveness, and academic rigor. The Jesuit program was 13 years long, separated into 3 stages, but the final stage was really reserved for aspiring clergymen. The 1st stage concentrated on grammar, rhetoric, and religious studies, the 2nd stage on philosophy, and the final stage was a 4 year submersion in theology. While the Jesuit's curriculum may not have much in common with modern education, their teaching methods are certainly familiar. They were the first to widely use examinations and grading, urging students to compete, and "marks, badges, and prizes" were often awarded to successful students (81). In addition to being a forerunner of the competition/reward system of modern Western education, the Jesuits were also the first to achieve a level of standardization throughout their schools based on the principles of the Ratio Studiorum (an instruction/guidance manual for teachers and institutions).

As individualism, scientific advances, and new political philosophies percolated throughout the West, they culminated in what is commonly referred to as the illumination, or the Age of Enlightenment. The Enlightenment covers a lot of ground, but Lawton and Gordon try to summarize the general features as such: "belief in the power of scientific reasoning; faith in progress; human rights; freedom of thought and enquiry; and finally, the desire to promote education as a means of furthering the 'Enlightenment project'" (89). Now we're not to believe these tenets were ever penned by someone who participated in the Enlightenment; we're to understand that they're a retrospective assessment of historical data. Scientific, philosophical, and technical developments during this period made schools and universities hotbeds of intellectual debate, theoretical arguments, and controversial ideas. In addition, the sheer volume of new information coupled with the waning power of the Church caused a disintegration of common teaching methods and practices, virtually ensuring that each new school/university would have a new curriculum and a new way of teaching it. "Above all, the Enlightenment...destroyed forever the idea that education was primarily concerned with memorising sacred texts, or indeed any other books. The Age of Reason demanded that education should be concerned with developing the powers of the mind to criticise the status quo and think rationally" (99-100).

Until this time advanced education was still a private affair; it still cost a great sum of money and/or was reserved for aspiring clergy. However, the oncoming industrial revolution would see the rise of a middle class and lower middle class that could sometimes amass enough wealth to buy their way into the system.

During the early 19th century, many theories about education arose out of the nascent field of sociology (or the social sciences), pioneered by Auguste Comte. The later 19th century, however, saw logistical changes as well as theoretical shifts. Labor reformers in England, America, and elsewhere were calling for the mitigation or elimination of child labor. The industrial explosion had created an insatiable employment market, unfortunately to the detriment of more than one generation of young children. When these reformers succeeded, young children could no longer work, so public schooling was devised to fill their idle time. There is more than a hint here of the nationalism that was the impetus for Roman public schools: if the children cannot work in the service of capitalism, they will spend that time learning why it is right to work in the service of capitalism, and this will unify the country. This is not to say that there was some conspiracy in the development of modern public education; I'm sure important figures in education reform/implementation had the children's best interest in mind, but we should keep in mind that their "best interest" did include becoming a dutiful, productive citizen.

Regardless of the loss of child labor, the 19th and 20th centuries were times of great prosperity for Western European nations and America. Families continued to amass wealth, and when children finished their public or private schooling, some families had enough money to send them to colleges and universities. A degree was a status symbol, and ironically, those who could afford a degree rarely needed to worry about whether or not it would benefit them financially. You see, if you look closely back through the history of "liberal education," you'll find that employability was never a concern. The classical Greek economy was based primarily on slavery, and where slaves were trained to do manual labor, citizens were free to pursue philosophy and the arts. In Rome, private education was an exclusive (and expensive) privilege used to sustain wealth and power, and when it was made public, it was only a propagandistic tool to unify the empire. For some time after that, the Church used exclusive education to maintain its stranglehold on Europe - but clergymen were always going to be fed - they weren't earning their degrees "in order to get a job." All throughout the Renaissance, Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and Enlightenment, higher education remained the province of the well-to-do: courtiers, noblemen, aristocrats, and as always, clergy. Even in the 19th century in the public schools in England, a liberal education was for sons of "gentlemen" "who would become leaders of society at home or administrators of the Empire" (195). For over 2000 years, there has been a deep dichotomy between liberal education and vocational training/technical instruction. Only in the last 100 years has the problem arisen of putting a liberal education to work - of somehow reconciling encyclopedic, broad based knowledge with specific vocational requirements. In terms of the history of education, it's a relatively new problem, brought on by the expansion of the middle and lower middle class, the availability of student loans, the decline of high-paying low skill jobs, the overabundance of degrees, and the inability to recognize the difference between liberal education and vocational training/technical instruction. Often in a university, these two sit side by side. Learning how to become an electrical engineer, technically, would be vocational training/technical instruction. Learning how to interpret poetry, on the other hand, would be a liberal education. But we can get both "degrees" at the same place. Both result in very different outcomes. You can see how some confusion might arise - how the myth of the college degree as golden goose might begin: students equate all degrees received from an institution, although some are part of a liberal education and others are vocational training. At one time, it may have even been possible to make the mistake of equating a college degree with economic advantage because all those who received a degree already had an economic advantage.

For more on the American history of education after World War II, see my previous entries Shame on You, Shame on Me and We Are Not the First.

Either way, it's been an enlightening trip through the history of Western education and liberal arts and it's encouraging to see that we're wrestling with a relatively new problem (even if it is still embedded in a terribly old system).

A Brief History of Liberal Arts

Bear with me; the history of liberal arts (and Western education in general) is long, multifarious, and dare I say, convoluted. For our purposes here, I'll keep it brief - but try to remember that the purpose of this investigation is to give us some notion of the depth of the tradition we're participating in and the legacy we've inherited.

The framework of "liberal arts" crystallized during classical antiquity, first in the schools of the Greek city-states, then in the Rome, where sometime around the 5th century it took on the form we recognize as the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and the Quadrivium (astronomy, music, geometry, and arithmetic). In truth, the Athenian educational curriculum from the 6th and 5th century BCE included many of the same subjects: music, poetry, reading, writing, oratory, and rhetoric. Greek education was in service of citizenship, as "all adult Athenians were liable to be drawn, by lot, for public office, or they might need to plead a legal case in front of their fellow citizens" (Lawton and Gordon 13). However, Athenian "schools" were often private tutorships for older boys, "with wealthy parents paying large sums of money for good training under expert teachers" (13). Extraordinary education, even at that time, was the province of the rich, and a method of ensuring success in business, government, and the courts. The popularity of this type of private education (and no doubt the avarice of some would-be teachers) led to the development of private schooling for the 7-14 year old age bracket, but only 1 in 10 of those students went on to more advanced education because of financial reasons. Apparently even ancient Greeks were no strangers to the propagation and maintenance of State control via exclusionary practices of the wealthy. Now it would be unfair to say that these students were taught the premises of asymmetrical social scheming, in fact, quite the opposite. Greek students were inculcated with an ethical approach to rhetoric; teachers advocated honesty and respect for the beauty of a logically sound argument - until the Sophists appeared.

The vibrant intellectual climate in Athens attracted orators and philosophers from overseas who set up small schools or taught in the open air for a small fee - this group of foreign teachers were collectively known as the "Sophists." The Sophists were criticized for their lack of method, their unethical practices, and their moral relativism, but it cannot be denied that their imported ideas had some influence on traditional Greek ideas, even if it served to strengthen them. And it also cannot be denied that when these Sophists returned home, they brought Greek culture and ideas with them. We can see the nascent stages of international intellectual exchange in the Greek model, but the changes it instigated in Athens and elsewhere were subtle; the curriculum and the aim of education remained unchanged for almost 2 centuries, until the arrival of Aristotle.

Shortly after Aristotle's massive contributions to philosophy, logic, ethics, aesthetics, and natural science in ancient Greece, the former city-state of Rome saw its territory slowly expanding. Most people living within the boundaries of Roman territory at this time were farmers. It was primarily an agrarian society, so early Roman education took place at home, and was what we would consider "vocational" training. Manual labor was not regarded as "low" by the Romans as it was by the Athenians, and conversely, intellectual prowess was not cultivated and revered by the Romans as it was by the Athenians. Young Roman boys were taught to farm, read, write, basic arithmetic, and they were introduced the market economy. The earliest schools in Rome surfaced around 200 BCE, and they were private as well, modeled on the schools of the Greek city-states. Students began at 7 years old were taught the same things most would be taught at home: reading, writing, arithmetic, as well as pietas and gravitas. At 12, the student would move on to "grammar" school, where the focus was Greek and Latin grammar, as well as the literature of Homer, Aesop, Horace, Virgil, and Livy. At 16, the major subject became rhetoric, and the focus became oratory, as it was in Athens. Some students even travelled to other famous schools to study rhetoric. We can assume that the same economic forces were at work in Roman education as in Athens; Lawton and Gordon assure us that "such education, at home or abroad, was very much an experience reserved for the wealthy" (25).

By the 1st century some State-sponsored grammar schools (and the schools that preceded them) had been established in Rome and abroad, so "Rome must take some of the credit - or the blame - for the spreading of the notion of the school...it is very probable that by then it was general policy to introduce schooling into conquered regions in order to Romanise the population" (29). It's very likely that the solidification of the Trivium and Quadrivium was an inevitable symptom of the standardization of Roman State schooling. By the end of the Roman empire, "all education was supervised by the State and teachers were only permitted to teach if licensed" (29). While this type of schooling may have been moderately successful at unifying the empire and Romanising conquered populations, it was an absolute failure in terms of personal education. Students were unruly, teachers were unqualified, and often insurmountable language barriers existed. Sound familiar?

The Roman grammar schools didn't survive the barbarian invasions, well at least the "Roman" part of them didn't. Sometimes the schools were taken over by the invaders, but these resurrected insitutions were few and far between, with no consistent curricula. As the Mediterranean and European regions were entering the Dark Ages, schooling was perpetuated by the Catholic church. Monasteries carried on the tradition of education in languages, oratory, rhetoric, while "cathedral schools" were the new grammar schools for younger prospective clergy. The monastic schools and cathedral schools were clearly vocational in nature, they were not educating for the sake of education, rather, "the first priority was to ensure that future priests and monks would be educated to a suitably high standard" (45). Unfortunately the Church ran into the same problem with its public schooling as the Romans: standards declined or were never implemented, and inadequate education resulted. Enter Charlemagne.

Charlemagne is often credited with conquering and Christianizing most of Western Europe and revitalizing education at the end of the 8th century. He built on the schools that the monasteries and cathedrals maintained, insisting that the clergy "be instructed more vigorously and standards be strictly enforced" (47). Under Charlemagne's guidance, what we would regard as a post-scondary school was set up at Aachen, a place where advanced studies of scripture and language could go on. For the next 400 years, the general population remained illiterate and subjugated to the educated clergy, except for select noblemen (and women) who paid for their education. At this point in time, what we understand as the traditional liberal arts curriculum was all but lost; mathematics, poetry, and music suffered the most, washed over by the concerns of the Church.

During the 12th century, some European countries saw the Church consolidate its power by restricting access to the monastic schools to future monks (excluding even noblemen and the wealthiest landowners). As these schools became more exclusive, laymen and even some priests had to be educated elsewhere. In cities, schools sprang up to educate them, but the Church wanted to retain its control over all schooling, so it declared that only teachers licensed by bishops could teach. The Lateran Council made this a requirement in 1179 for all Christendom, and its possible these restrictions benefitted the new institutions by giving some air of legitimacy to them and ensuring the quality of instruction. At this time, the Trivium and Quadrivium were resuscitated and implemented as the standrad curricula for these new "universities." Welcome back, liberal arts.

These early schools weren't called universities, normally they were referred to as "studium generale." They surfaced in Salerno, Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge, but "the first use of the term universitas magistrum et scholarum (university of teachers and scholars) was at the beginning of the 13th century , in Paris" (52). The universities quickly became cynosures of philosophical debate where new ideas and theories flourished, but these rapid changes met with some resistance from the Church, which resulted in the development of the idea of "academic freedom," essentially exempting students and their teachers from ordinary restrictions on speech and thought. Don't get me wrong. They weren't free to say anything they wanted to say. They were simply freer than others to propose questions and answers about the nature of mankind and the universe. All of this "freedom" stewed about for a couple hundred years before boiling over in 14th and 15th century Italy.

As Italy experienced a rise in prosperity and increased demand for educated and highly qualified men, the old-fashioned universities there, Church run or otherwise, couldn't keep up with the demand. New schools were formed outside of the institutions, "often in the homes of scholars, where there was direct communication between teacher and student, and new material was taught" (59). This abandoned the stifling lecture model that was prevalent prior to the shift. The Trivium and Quadrivium remained, but now they were complemented by the study of literature, philosophy, and even recreation and physical education. By the end of the 15th century, these "Renaissance humanists" had even won the struggle to include (and teach) the visual arts (painting, sculpture, architecture, etc) under the rubric of liberal arts. Massive changes took place, and education was becoming more available to those outside the Church and nobility, but it was still far from approaching egalitarian.

Next up: from 1500-2008, how we made it from the Renaissance to here.

This entry is obviously indebted to wikipedia, but also to:

Lawton, Dennis, and Peter Gordon. A History of Western Educational Ideas. Portland, Woburn Press, 2002.

Photo recap 1978-1986

Me at 2 years old, with maternal grandfather and grandmother. Traditional nose-picking pose.

Me with headless mother, 3 years old.

Me doing jigsaw puzzle with mother, 8 years old, shortly before my parents divorce.

Me with my Uncle Scott, 10 years old. He was a child from my grandfather's later marriage.

Naked Singularity, Part IX - Final Installment

The hunt for a graduate school was short and sweet. I wasn't prepared to commit to a PhD anywhere, and quickly found out that terminal MA programs were cash cows for Universities. If you want a PhD, schools might be able to scrounge up funding for you, but if you just want to get your MA and get out, pay up. So the list got shortened to a few strange schools that had funded MA programs in English/Poetics. The University of Maine appealed to me because Orono had a long history with Buffalo (sharing the late great poet and teacher Robert Creeley, among others) and with the exportation of Ben Friedlander from UB to UMaine, it seemed that the traditional dialogue would continue. I knew Ben from times he would sit in for Charles Bernstein; I liked him as a person and a professor, so I thought that working with him would be beneficial to me.

I took a trip in November of 2002 to check out the University and meet with professors. Orono is an 11 hour drive from Buffalo, almost 3 hours North of the border between Maine and New Hampshire. In other words, it's up there. Way up there. I remember thinking to myself as I drove farther and farther North, what am I getting myself into? I arrived at the University in the middle of the afternoon; things were grey, cold, and dreary. The architecture was unimpressive, the campus was active, but not bustling. Quiet for a school of 13,000. I would come to find out it had little to do with the school and everything to do with the students. After a meeting with a few professors and the chair of the department, I sat in on an evening class Friedlander was teaching on Sentimental Poetry. I was myself: brash, confrontational, insightful - but everyone else was so quiet. I hadn't even read the entire book they were discussing, and I had more to say than most of the students. I thought this place could use a kick in the ass. I left the campus ambivalent, arrived in Bangor where I was staying with an enrolled grad student, and turned in early.

The next day I explored the little city of Bangor (the only thing I really knew about Bangor was it had a statue of Paul Bunyan and Stephen King lived there). In the afternoon I met with Pat Burnes, the teaching assistant coordinator, attended a reading by Mark McMorris (part of UMaine's New Writing Series), and ended the evening by having dinner with McMorris, Steve Evans, Jennifer Moxley, and a few others. Discussion at dinner was lively, and I was entertained by the depth and breadth of Evans' knowledge. I found myself thinking there might be life in Maine yet.

I left early the next morning and drove to Maine's coast in search of the ocean. For some reason I thought if I could just see the ocean, it would tell me the answer. Let me know whether or not I should be there. But I couldn't find it. I know that sounds ridiculous, but anyone who's ever been to Maine can concur - the coastline is a jagged series of rocky inlets, small harbors, and uninspiring wetlands. I wanted waves. Great big crashing waves, something bigger than me, something sublime that would draw me in completely or send me home screaming. I drove out of my way for almost 3 hours, and never saw breaking waves. I turned inland towards route 95 and headed home, feeling ashamed. Why would the ocean have the answer? Was I insane? Shouldn't I have the answer?

Flying into Bangor, ME, 2004.

I was doing good work in Buffalo - why did I really want to move? Was it because all my friends had gone/were going to grad school? Was it because I couldn't handle the complexities of my social situation? Was it because I really wanted to learn more about the subject I had come to love and value? Was it because I wanted to escape into the woods of Maine and discover things about myself? I think it was all of those things, but I also think it was to buy time. I had entertained the notion that I might never find a job directly related to my education, but I remained in denial, pushing it to the fringes, telling myself that all I needed was more education and everything would be alright. Then someone would see the value in me, want to put my knowledge to work, and capitalize on my unique skill set. Part of me was still holding on tenaciously to the golden myth of higher education, part of me was probably just drunk.

I decided shortly after arriving home that I needed a kick in the ass, someone in Maine might be able to give it to me, but more importantly, Maine needed a kick in the ass, and I was just the man to give it. I packed up my car, my big fish attitude, and moved to the great white Northeast in August of 2003.

While at UMaine, I taught composition to incoming freshmen and sophomores. I was an atypical teacher; I taught about cryptozoology and the loch ness monster, engaged my students in discussions about DADA and Situationism, assigned activities instead of papers. I was good at teaching, but I didn't necessarily like it. I always imagined when I went away to places that it would be to "work on me," but teaching made me feel like I kept emptying my bowl before I had the chance to fill it. I can tell you one thing for certain (especially those of you who like to think of your students as "teachers"), I learned nothing from my students in Maine except patience and the advantage of having multiple approaches to a problem.

Maine was an exercise in patience. Stores and restaurants closed at 9p, bars closed at 1a, people were reticent and uncommunicative, and the climate was oppressive. I keep late hours, so rarely had the chance to grocery shop or eat out; I'd arrive at bars a half an hour before last call; I'd find myself leading every single conversation I was in; and sometimes in the winter, the temperature didn't clear 0 degrees Faranheit for weeks at a time. I never realized how truly impatient I was until I experienced the interminably slow pace of Maine. I mean, seriously, the speed limit in the city is 25mph. And people obey it. But I learned patience. Not only with the place, but with myself.

Nadja Sayej installation at 107 Neville. Mural, Chris Fritton, framed work, Nadja Sayej, 2005.

This new patience made me a better reader and a better writer, as did guidance by Friedlander, Evans, and Tony Brinkley. I admired and envied their reading skills, vocabulary and wit, and wisdom, respectively. Maine allowed me the freedom to cultivate and integrate a number of varied interests, including, but not limited to: pataphysics, utopia/dystopia, visual poetry, poetics, perceptual science, hermeneutics, Situationism, and Marcel Duchamp. But this meandering appreciation didn't help me in an environment that prizes unilateral specialization - I didn't have a particular focus that was my "project," my "specialty." Evans once remarked to me that the nature of my papers and outside activities led him to believe I "may have been better off going to art school for an MFA." It probably didn't help that I had converted my office at school into an international art gallery that focused on visual poetry from around the world. The space was called 107 Neville; I would have artists mail their work, then I would hang and curate a show for them in the space; the work would change on a bi-monthly basis. I saw it as a way to draw together students and faculty from the art, english, new media, and philosophy departments. All told, 107 Neville hosted 9 shows and featured artists like Nico Vassilakis, David Baptiste-Chirot, Wendy Collin Sorin, Nadja Sayej, Mike Basinski, and many others. It never turned into the multi-disciplinary haven I envisioned because I didn't really understand the insular nature of the departments (and people) in Maine. But it was, as Jennifer Moxley called it when I first described it, "an idea beautifully doomed to fail." And it was a beautiful, fun, and entertaining failure, which in my opinion, is as good as any success.

Nico Vassilakis visual poetry projection, 107 Neville, 2004.

Did I give Maine the kick in the ass it needed? I think so, at least while I was there. I made people drink a little too much, think a little too much, see and do things they would've never done had I not been there to encourage them. I was wild, erratic, cocky, and chronically argumentative, but I brought a lot of positives to the table too. I was decisive, creative, inspiring, and engaging. Apparently students and professors there honor my memory by describing things too hyperbolic, over-the-top, or unusual as "Frittonesque".

Me in Orono, ME 2005, complete with furry earflap cap.

Maine taught me to read, to write, to have patience, to make my own fun, and to honor myself and my personal vision. But it also taught me about the sordid, ugly side of departmental politics, the incessant jockeying and feuding, that the Ivory Tower is as muddy as any place where human beings interact. There is nothing sacred or exempt about it. The most important thing I learned in Maine was on my final day. I had stopped by my mentor Tony Brinkley's office for a goodbye chat. After some small talk and a comfortable silence, he sat up and looked me right in the eye, and said "You know it's all a house of cards, right?" I thought I knew what he meant but I wasn't sure. I said "yeah," but it must not of been believable, because he kept staring at me, and said "Are you sure you know it?" I knew it. And I still know it. He was talking about all of academia. He was talking about building a career writing papers about other papers that people wrote while building their careers writing papers about other papers other people wrote. He was saying, we don't need anymore papers, you don't need to write those papers, go out and Do Something.

I've been trying to do something ever since. After graduating, I co-curated the Soundvision/Visionsound III visual poetry show in Somerville, MA, then moved back to Buffalo. I started the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair. I wrote three books, learned how to letterpress, screenprint, and etch glass, quit drinking, found a stable relationship, and quit my job. I'm doing. I'm doing as much as I know how, but not as much as I imagined.

As hard as I work, sometimes I still feel like I'm in Maine, taking a walk through Bangor at 1a, next to the pitch black Penobscot River, full of ice. I could be the last man if it weren't for the chimney smoke that signals others are out there somewhere, or in there, in the spaces we make so we can keep on making, keep on doing.

Next up: Now that we're done with the history of Me, we'll take my friend Tawrin's advice and do a brief history of this thing we call liberal arts.

Naked Singularity, Part VIII

My new love was one of those all-consuming loves, the ones that make you blind to all of the other person's faults, the kind that swallows you up in warm foam, soothing you while it obscures your vision.

We spent every moment together, and just when I had gotten on the horse at UB, I started skipping class so that we could spend more time together. My grades suffered, and at one point, about 1/3 of the way into my 4th semester, I gave up. Entirely. More completely and finally than I had ever given up on anything. I didn't even gesture towards participation in school; I stayed enrolled in my classes, and when my grades came, I'd received a 0.0.

I'd never failed at anything. Ever. I felt a sense of relief and release, like I'd finally done something I'd been waiting to do my whole life. I'd flouted the silent expectations that my parents and friends had for me. I'd abandoned responsibility; I'd been burned by the fire of failure and survived. But had I? Look closely. This was an engineered catastrophe, a calculated decision. I had decided that I needed to fail, I decided on the terms and conditions, I executed the actions. In every way, this was an artificial failure. And from conception to staging to implementation, it was an absolute success. I'd done exactly what I'd set out to do. Christ Almighty! I was so terrified of failure that I'd engineered one for myself just to see if I could survive it, and was oblivious to the fact that my failure was a perfect success. The real failure was yet to come, and it was an integral part of cleaning up the mess this faux-failure left in its wake.

At the time of this "failure," my mother was caring for my grandfather who was terminally ill with cancer. He'd lived a hard life: working in the coal mines in West Virginia, working on the railroad, chewing tobacco and drinking his whole life, most of it in abject poverty. When he was first diagnosed, the cancer was small and treatable. He ignored treatment suggestions and the cancer spread. At one point he was given 6 months to live. He lived another 9 years. My mother moved in when he was in the final stages, the cancer was in his lungs, his skin, his bones, his organs. She'd just ended a long term relationship under very poor circumstances, and she was still working to support herself while caring for my grandfather, who, at best, was ungrateful. At worst, he was abusive. My mother and I, at this time, had a quietly strained relationship - we'd always been emotional buoys for one another, but she hadn't been able to help me with my break-up or academic woes, and I hadn't been able to help her with her break up or stress that came from dealing with her father. For a short time, I lived with her and my grandfather in the cramped apartment, but it was clear we were of no use to each other.

Here's where the story gets ugly.

While I'd had enough of "failure," and I was again doing well in school, I still had a 0.0 on my record. I found out that I could have these grades dismissed if I could provide evidence of some extenuating family or personal circumstance. Really? A crisis you say? I just happen to have one...

I spent the next couple months rounding up evidence of my grandfather's illness, writing letters to the Dean about how my involvement and responsibility, as well as my mother's, contributed to my academic nil. Abhorrent. Inexcusable. Obscene. Did he just say that he used his grandfather's cancer as an excuse to get poor grades removed from the record? Yes, I did. Did I feel bad about it? Not for a second. You see, my grandfather was a strong man, a hard worker, but he was a bastard. He had led a sordid life that wreaked havoc on those closest to him; he had abused my mom in her childhood, and in his final days, continued to abuse her and behave like an ingrate. The way I saw it, with all the negative things that came out of his life, he owed the world something positive. He owed me something positive. And dead as he was, that man could still do the work of wiping my slate clean. But I was wrong.

This is where I really failed: he didn't owe me (or the world) shit. He owed my mom. The world is full of plenty of terrible people, but it isn't really (or shouldn't be) the privilege of the living to figure out how to exploit their death for individual or societal gain. As small as they were, I was unprepared to carry the consequences of my actions; I had devised a plan, pulled it off, and as soon as I saw that failure wasn't so bad, I wanted out. I wanted to burn something down, but didn't want to stick around to sweep up the ashes. I succeeded at my failure, but I failed when this ruse was a success.

LEAVE - glass etching vispoem, 2008.

Back to academia. My philosophy classes moved along nicely, but I'd hit a glass ceiling when it came to math and science. I'd excelled at the two subjects throughout high school, but when it came to calculus and college level chemistry and physics, I was afloat. The only other subject I seemed to retain a propensity for was English. I would pack my schedule full of philosophy, but if there was an opening, I'd take an English elective. I was still on my quest to figure out what it was to be human; philosophy was taking care of the architecture for me, but when it came to color and emotion, it still left me feeling flat. The English electives I took helped expand the depth and breadth of my knowledge when it came to fiction and poetry, but they also gave me my fix of the illogical, irrational side of humanity. People were full of fire and ice, grand schemes and lowly deceits (believe me, I knew about this one), weird, strange, and unforgettable combinations of characteristics. Very little traditional philosophy I encountered allowed for this kind of exceptionality, but I saw it every day around me, especially in myself. I needed to know more about it, so I dove in.

I completed my BA in Philosopy at UB in 1998, but delayed graduation. I was 4 semesters away from a BA in English, and I had no other plans, so I stuck around. Well, really, there were two big reasons I stuck around: Fred See and Charles Bernstein. See looked like a football coach, big guy, big moustache, but he taught Shakespeare and theories of America. He forced answers out of students, was brutally honest, sometimes short-tempered, but always, always involved. Often our essay responses were limited to 1 page, front and back, sometimes 2. And he meant it. If you wrote more, he refused to read it, or tore it off the staple and threw it out. You'd get your paper back without the second page. His love of the subject matter, ability to humanize everyone involved (inculding the students), and nostalgic recollections of his life and family made him a powerful influence on me. Bernstein, if you don't know already, is a former L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet, essayist, and pope of poetics. He's a brilliant polymath that you can't help but be drawn to - he has a strange sort of easy charisma - especially if you have any interest in language. I'd taken a seminar class with him prior to 1998, but arranged my schedule so that I could take every class he offered and attend graduate seminars I wasn't even enrolled in. He teaches via submersion, an absolute deluge of material is dropped on students (3000-4000 pages) knowing full well that most won't be able to make it through all the material, and they will have to choose what they find most meaningful and important. The freeform classes encouraged experimentation, incorporation of other media, non-traditional writing methods; in short, it was chaotic and unmeasured, and would've been fruitless were it not for Berstein's ability to rein it all in and orchestrate some sort of trajectory.

UB was a cynosure for liberal, radical, and experimental poetry and poetics. I had no idea when I transferred there that I was walking into such a profound legacy, one that was propagated by people like Susan Howe, Samuel Delaney, Robert Creeley, Dennis Tedlock, Ben Friedlander, Bernstein, and so many others. In the space of a few short years, we had visits from the greatest and strangest poets in the world, we were free to ask anything we liked and respond in any way we saw fit. It was freedom I'd never experienced in academia, and my passion for the material and the mode of learning gave way to an exponential increase in knowledge, not only of poetry and poetics, but of people and politics.

I started to see how it all fit together for me, how I could marry philosophy and literature and see the best and worst that humans had to offer. Then I graduated.

By this time, the love of my life had begun to disintegrate; there was infidelity, emotional unavailability, and immature posturing. I was again giving in order to be loved, doing more and more and more and seeing no return - often this is a trademark of my relationships with others because they don't see me as "needing anything." I was confused, desperate, and had no idea how to apply all that I'd learned to my life in the real world. The one thing that I wasn't was unemployed. I was working 9a-5p and one job and 9p-5a and a second job. I hid in my work. I hid from the people I loved, I hid from those who loved me, and I drank too much (I worked as a bartender). At one point I was drinking close to a bottle of vodka a day and juggling intimate relationships with at least 7 different people. It all got to be too much. So instead of facing it, I ran away.

In October of 2000, I sold everything I owned except what fit in my car (again) and moved to Southern California. I don't know what I was doing, except running. I thought distance from my situation would help, give me time to work on myself, and what better place to do it than in sunny Southern California? I'd visited once, and it felt like home. Skateboarders everywhere, perfect climate, fast pace. But visiting somewhere and living somewhere are two completely different things. I still had no plan, retained all of my ties to home, so I was managing relationships from a distance (very poorly), and developing new relationships to strain myself with. I skated, worked as a bartender, got drunk every night, and did absolutely nothing to work on myself. After a year, I was floundering. Sure I had a job, lived a 100 feet from the beach, skated every day in a place where it never rained, but I'd only found two friends. And I'd stopped writing and all other modes of cultural production. SoCal felt like a cultural vacuum - poetry readings were at Borders, little art galleries were almost non-existent (what a change - look at LA now!), and I was suffering. I decided to move back to Buffalo, and the minute I did, something changed. I produced three new books (even before I left SoCal) and started Ferrum Wheel with Ric Royer. It was like my motivation was geographically dependent. But now that I think about it, maybe it was just socially dependent.

After returning to Buffalo, I got an apartment on the third floor of a quiet house on a quiet street. It felt like a nest. I had no doorbell, so if I unplugged the phone, no one could get to me, except via the fire escape, which only a few people dared. I began isolating myself for longer and longer stretches of time. I spent the summers at the same job, the winters off, living on unemployment. I'd drink too much, not eat right, but it was a productive time for me. I wrote a few books, many performance pieces, made 4 issues of Ferrum Wheel, had readings on a monthly basis. Something about being untouchable up there, in my bird's nest, made me feel like I could get things done. I think I'd always ignored my own work when there was someone close to me - I'd either make the decision to spend my time with them instead of make art, or I'd give in to their tacit, palpable jealousy. I worked best when there was no one to compete with my work, so I just began shutting everyone out so I didn't have to feel guilty about working.

Surprise, surprise, my love life wasn't improving. I can't imagine that it had anything to do with me unplugging the phone and disappearing for days on end. I felt stifled by my private life, but also stagnant intellectually. Sure, I was producing, but I wasn't learning anything. And I definitely didn't have a job "in my field", nor any prospects. A combination of private and public pressures made me think grad school might be the answer. Somewhere far away.

Next up: Sorry, it's going to take one more to wrap up the series! Grad school and my move back to Buffalo.

Naked Singularity, Part VII

I forgot to mention one important aesthetic development from high school: headphones. I can hardly overstate the importance of their insulation, invocation, and penetration. Long before I ever understood anything about close reading, I was practicing close listening intensely. Walking the railroad tracks to the bus stop, on the bus, in the hallway, in lunch, in study hall, laying in bed at night. Sometimes I would keep the same cassettes in my player for months at a time (literally). I would familiarize myself with every note, every word I could make out, every convergence and severance, every anomaly. I would listen until it didn't even feel like I was listening anymore, then listen right through and out the other side, like I was hearing it all again for the first time, I'd interpret it anew, then I'd start all over again.

Reading, however, was a different story. By the end of high school, I had read Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Leibniz, Rand, and too many other philosophers to mention - but with no guidance and no clear knowledge of basic philosophical quandaries. I was reading people's answers without knowing what the questions were, and likely, searching for my own answers when I didn't even know exactly what my own questions were. Why am I here? What is the universe? Where did it come from? What is infinity? Is there a god? What is love? Sure, sure, sure. All those and a thousand more. But I no idea how truly massive these questions were and how nuanced the answers had become. Often the philosophy I read made little sense to me, but occasionally I would connect with something; occasionally there'd be a small and partial revelation and I would wrestle with its placement in my intellectual garden. But I pressed on, reassured by the power and solace in these little aphorisms, these little talismans. Soon though, trauma would test the foundation of what I was building, the things I was coming to learn, especially "what is love?"

The day finally came when the summer after my senior year ended, and my girlfriend and I were to head off to college together. We packed up the car, took the 35 minute drive, and unloaded the unsold remains of our lives into the cinderblock hovels even the nicest schools call dorms. It was a humbling time for me; I always had very little in the way of material things, but now what I had could literally fit in the trunk of my car (except for my waterbed, which I couldn't bring to school anyway).

I registered for classes, determined to pursue the course I was already on - philosophy - and become a philosopher (for more on that delusion, see my entry Fireman Syndrome). I enrolled in Philosophy 101, Aristotelian Logic, Latin, Creative Writing, Ethics, and Theology. My girlfriend, though she knew more than I did about college and why we were there, didn't know what she wanted to go to school for, so she picked up a number of disjointed 101 classes. The semester progressed well, but the tumultuous situation with her family continued and the pressure became too much. A week after my birthday in November, and 3 weeks after paying her final tuition bill, she dumped me.

I was broken. I mean broken. I thought I had found love, I thought I knew what love was, I had given everything for this person, given everything I knew how to this person even though I had so little, and it wasn't enough. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, I would cry for hours on end, I became the crazy psychotic jealous ex-boyfriend that followed her places and always, always, "just needed to talk." 3 weeks before the semester ended, it was too much for me, I took my stuff and moved home with my mom. The plan was to commute to school, but I was in no condition. I skipped the remaining classes and my final exams. To give you an idea of the rigorous intellectual standards at the prestigious private institution - I did all that, and still got a 3.6 that semester.

Spun and alone, I was inconsolable. My family had rarely filled the role of emotional consolators, and most of their efforts fell flat. My father tried to fill me with positive thoughts and make me look ahead, said it could be for the better; my mother soothed me, sided with me, and turned against my girlfriend (like all good mothers do to the people who hurt their babies) - but it isn't what I wanted or needed. I had put myself out there, I was trying to build that emotional bridge to someone else, I was desperately flailing, trying to find a person to love me in a way that I had never been loved before - in an unconditional way, for who I was, not what I did. This requires a little elaboration: my parents, I've come to understand, did, and always have, loved me unconditionally. But I didn't know that. After the divorce, when my role changed from son to emotional and psychological consort, I saw my task as supporting my parents. When I did this task right and well, they loved me. Their love was conditional. In my child's mind, I was sustaining them so that they would sustain and love me. In effect, I took on the weight of my own subsistence far earlier than I had to. After years of it, I think that part of me resented my parents and went looking for someone who would love me unconditionally. Instead, I rambled out into the world and gave the first person I could my whole self, and more, in the hope that they would love me. I did the same thing that I'd been doing my whole life, repeated the same pattern - I was giving to be given to, doing things for someone in order to be loved.

Needless to say, I survived. Slowly I started eating again. By the end of December 1994, I had made the decision to transfer to SUNY at Buffalo (UB), away from my ex-girlfriend and to a school that I could afford. A move for survival at the time, I had no idea it would be one of the best decisions of my young life.

Many of my friends from high school had gone to UB, so I immediately fell into a social suport system that was non-existent at the previous school. The anonymity of a large school appealed to me - I could go days without seeing the same people, I could melt away in a lecture with 250 other students. It was what I needed - I no longer felt strong, but I didn't want to be coddled or nursed. I wanted to heal, slowly and completely. I would sit in empty lecture halls at night and write for hours. I would consider myself, my feelings, my thoughts, incessantly; I was cultivating a skill for introspection that I had always possessed, but now it seemed more important than ever that I succeed, that I come to some conclusions about myself and what I wanted to learn. And it came to me one night, in that lecture hall. It's going to sound grandiose, but I wanted to learn what it was to be human. I don't need to point out that this was a poorly disguised way of saying I wanted all of the answers, I wanted to know everything about everything, which is impossible - but somehow, when I worded it that way, it seemed possible.

If I could learn what it was to be human, then I'd have something to say. Something to teach other people. But first I had to pass chemistry. UB was considerably more of a challenge than my first school; my first semester saw me head home with a 2.7. And I was trying. At least I thought I was. I never really had to try before. And hey, I always had an excuse: I was still recovering.

Luckily, with guidance, I became a very good close reader. As my maturity level and openness to external input increased (I'd always been the smartest kid in the room), so did my understanding of philosophical principles and texts. After a number of readings and re-readings of Spinoza, something clicked. I knew that I should be reading just like I used to listen to my headphones. Over and over and over. Until I came out the other side.

I had brutal philosophy professors - some that would hand back papers half a dozen times before accepting them as a final draft. Some that had so much to say that they would rarely stop to answer questions. I was completely overwhelmed by the deluge of material, ideas, and potential answers. I forgot about my girl troubles; I spent my days spelunking into the caves of ontology, existentialism, and logical positivism.

Hardcore and skating were still huge parts of my life as well, so my days and nights were full; I was reining myself back in. Then I fell in love.

Next up: The final installment in the Naked Singularity series, failure, poetry explosion, grad school, and homecoming.