Mountains Made Low

I’ve been told that I got a little pedantic yesterday, but that it was still interesting. I hope that everyone who agrees with the former assessment agrees with the latter, as well. But today, I promise, I’ll keep it light!

Last week, I wrote about the irony inherent in making coffee in the morning. I noticed, this morning, something that I probably already knew on some level but hadn’t really thought about: The dangers of bleary-eyed coffee-making are magnified at my house.

Magnified, that is, by the presence of a little grey cookie monster.

My “coffee time” is Tigger’s “cookie time”—she gets her daily kitty treats when I go to the kitchen to make coffee.

And believe me, she knows this!

So from the moment I start to walk back the hall toward the kitchen, until the moment I actually put her cookies on the floor for her, she is dangerously underfoot. And it’s especially dangerous when I especially need the coffee. Trying not to walk on her is a challenge at the best of times when she decides she wants to be underfoot. As I’ve said, though, me—pre-coffee in the morning—is far from the best of conditions.

But this morning, at least, we muddled through. Tigger got her cookies. My coffee is brewing. And I’m the only one who got stepped on.

I realized last night that the past week has gone by in a blur. That’s not to say that I have no memory of the week and its events—and, no, I haven’t spent the week in any sort of altered state. I simply realized that when I looked back over the week, I remembered the events of last Sunday night (a point that for no special reason stands out in my memory) “like they were yesterday.” Can’t really explain it. Don’t know that I really have to—I think we all experience moments like that from time to time: Certain events stand out in our memory, and we can’t believe the amount of time that has passed since them, perhaps because nothing that happened between then and now stands out with the clarity of those events. And it’s not that the events of last Sunday were in any way noteworthy—nothing of earth-shattering importance or reality-shaking emotional impact—just watching TV when I was having a hard time getting to sleep last Sunday night.

But that realization put me in mind of a class discussion I had with my Creative Nonfiction students fairly early in the past semester, probably in February, our second or third class meeting. The discussion was about stories, narration, point of view, and time. I’m fascinated by the description of our existence provided by quantum mechanics, though I’ll confess to an imperfect and oversimplified understanding of that description—after all, I’m not a physicist. But ever since I first heard of W. K. Heisenberg’s theories for describing the quantum state of subatomic particles and the implications of Albert Einstein’s theories for our understanding of the spatial and temporal—the dimensional—components of our existence, I have been utterly fascinated by them. In fact, it’s things like this that made me decide at one point that I wanted to double major in chemistry and physics, in college, which I quite honestly might well have done, if i weren’t such a klutz in the lab. (But then again Indiana Jones made me want to be an archaeologist when I was a kid, so….)

At any rate, we discussed these ideas from the perspective of writing, and nonfiction writing, in particular, in class. And I did throw in a little bit of the quantum physics, for good measure. The gist of the discussion was a sort of dimensionality of experience and the ways we can express that dimensionality in writing.

After all, our existence is experience (or our experience of the world is our existence—which ever you prefer). But as we move through the world, we have only our own experiences to go on. And that one-layered, one-dimensional experience likely makes for pretty thin writing, storytelling, or narrative. Imagine a narrative that unfolds only from one person’s perspective as they live it—it would be myopic, in the extreme, and a lot of the unfolding events would be missed.

As more time passes, though, some experiences fade from our memories, and others—those that are, for whatever reason, more important to us—become layered with additional mental information. This accretion can involve the memories becoming linked (a little like hypertext) to memories of other events and situations. It can involve investment of the memories with emotional significance. And it can involve the addition of layers of active thought about the experiences, the learning of lessons from those experiences, and the further understanding of the situations surrounding the remembered events from other perspectives.

Through this building up, that is, our experiences of certain events, our memories of what happened, become stories, and they become stories that we can share.

The process of telling, of writing, our stories as nonfiction essays, then, is a process of mining these layers of experience, thought, reflection, emotion, and significance. In the moment, there is very little to share. In the moment, that is, there is journalism—an account of unfolding events, which is certainly a nonfiction genre. But for me, not a particularly interesting one. The interesting genres, for me, take events as a starting place but investigate the mental and memorial strata in which those events have become embedded. Perhaps a journalistic account of present events can serve as a launching pad for this discussion—something happening now can be the cause for our investigation of past experience. Indeed, this is how thinking often works; why should writing be any different?

But the most interesting writing, for me, digs deep. It is not simply the writing of the I in the moment. There are layers of time involved: the I of now, telling the story of the I of then, with benefit of the expression of the thoughts, experiences, and learning of the many Is in between.

We dig. And we move, as writers, at will between these many Is. Sometimes, we have even—through ruminations and conversations—come to see the events of then clearly enough that we can not only dig deep, but rise above. We can, that is, provide a bird’s-eye view of the situation, knowing—at least speculating intelligently about—the thoughts, ideas, experiences, and motivations of others in the situation. We can, in these instances, move beyond the many Is in our writing, and talk about the situation in even greater breadth, along with the depth the Is already provide.

This depth and breadth of perspective, for writing, is somehow linked in my mind with the understanding of space and time provided by quantum mechanics (or my very basic comprehension of that understanding), and its 10 dimensions of reality.

I’ll admit, here, that once discussion progresses past the 5th or 6th dimension, my brain starts to hurt. But we all have an intuitive understanding of the first three dimensions, limited experience of the 4th, and probably a dim awareness of the 5th, based on what we are and how the world progresses around us.

The first three dimensions are wholly spatial, and we are three-dimensional creatures. At every moment, we are aware of our three-dimensional universe, and, on a limited scale at least, of our position within those three dimensions. We are comfortable with one-dimensional lines, two-dimensional planes, and three-dimensional fields—after all, the third is where we live, and the first two can be expressed within that third.

The twist here, for my understanding is thinking of that two-dimensional plane, instead, as a split, a forking line (which, if you remember 10th grade geometry, still defines a plane). The trickier part of the twist, though, is then thinking of the third dimension not as a field defined by three intersecting lines, but as a fold in that two dimensional split—a fold that connects unconnected points or lines in two-dimensional space.

Okay, rewind. Imagine a traditional map of the world, and pretend that map is completely two-dimensional (in reality, it’s close anyway). If it’s a traditional map, it has London and its Prime Meridian at the middle, the east coast of Russia at the far right, the west coast of North America (Alaska in particular) at the far left, and Antarctica spread out along the length of the bottom. This is our world in two dimensions: it would require traversing the width of the map to get from the Aleutian Islands to Russia’s east coast; and if you wanted to get from the point in Antarctica at the bottom right to the point in Antarctica at the bottom left, you would again have to traverse the width of the map. In two dimensions, this is true even though, in the three-dimensional world as we know it, it is a relatively short sea voyage from Alaska to Siberia, and that distance in Antarctica would be a matter of a single step.

If, then, we fold our map so that the right edge touches the left edge, it becomes a better representation of the three-dimensional world (and Earth) as we know it.

We experience the fourth dimension as time. For us, time is a line moving from beginning to end (birth to death, Big Bang to the end of the universe). Each moment of our (and the universe’s) three-dimensional existence is a point along that line. And we experience the fifth dimension as the possibilities that exist as potential splits along that line.

The higher dimensions consist in repeating the pattern of points, lines, splits, and folds. But they’re not important here, because what I really want is these concepts—points, lines, splits, and folds—not the dimensions themselves.

Each moment of our experience is a point. In writing, we can describe that point: what we see, who is there. But in that point, in each moment, nothing happens. In that point, there is only sensation, not true experience. But when we string enough moments together, they become a line, and describable phenomena become events. And when there are events, we can have experience—in this situation, events happen and unfold, and journalism becomes possible.

When we move beyond a particular event, though, and begin to think about it, discuss it, and reflect on it, that experience takes on another dimension—what my students and I discussed as additional layers. The experience, and our thinking about it, splits from the actual memory of the events, and we see other possibilities. We gain further understanding of our experiences that are quite apart from the events themselves. That understanding becomes part of those experiences, and we become unable to see the events, to think about or write about the experiences, without also considering those additional layers. Our experience of events is shaped not only by the events themselves, but also by whatever other experiences, thoughts and reflections, we bring to bear on them, and those experiences remain always open and subject to change—what seemed horrible in the moment may be seen, later, as a very good thing, or vice versa.

The process of writing, particularly writing nonfiction, then, is more than the process of mining these strata and describing situations, narrating events, and showcasing thought and reflection. Our processes for getting from A to B and for laying down the strata of thought and experience are often so protracted and so diffuse and so bound up in constant revision that it would be impossible to lay them out in writing in anything resembling a straightforward or comprehensible way.

The process of nonfiction, then, is not movement along a line. Nor is it simple excavation and exploration of the strata. Instead, it is moving through and among the lines and splits of experience of, thought about, and reflection on particular events. In writing, we fold the strata and move among points that may not be connected in our experience, but come together to present a clear, cohesive picture of our thinking, without much of the intervening mess.

Writing is a fold in the strata of experience. It connects the unconnected points in those strata, enabling us to move among the points, lines, and splits of phenomena, events, memories, and experiences, in order to bring something important—a lesson, a thought, a way of thinking or knowing or being—to light, to share that important thing with others and test it against what they have learned, have experienced, and know.

I’ve spent my morning thinking “out loud” about these ideas, because it seems to me that this process has been clearly played out in my life this week. If you read here often, you’ll know that there’s quite a bit going on in my life. But a lot that activity is activity on autopilot for me. Getting ready to move is almost rote to me by now, for instance.

It seems, though, that between last Sunday and yesterday, I experienced a peculiar fold in my own existence. I remember what I did, but I ascribe little significance to it. Maybe that happens to us all, on occasion. Or maybe it’s the writer’s elision I’m talking about: I’ve somehow made a connection of significance between last Sunday and yesterday, and while the process of Monday through Friday was necessary in getting me from A to B, it’s not significant for whatever it is I’m currently writing.

And I’m pretty sure I’m writing something—some piece of important nonfiction in my life. I’m not sure what it is, yet, or it would probably be here. But it seems clear that I’ve begun the process of folding my thoughts, memories, and experiences of present phenomena into a story worth telling.

When I decided, ten days ago, that I would be moving from the mountains of North Carolina to the plains of northwestern Ohio, I knew that Mike in the Mountains probably wasn’t going to be an appropriate title for this blog forever. Clearly, when titling it a year ago, I didn’t think I was going to be leaving these mountains any time soon. Just as clearly, I was wrong about that. Such is life, I suppose.

So I’ve decided to retitle it. But I didn’t want to change the URI, http://mountains.michaelkapper.com/, so I knew that “mountains” had to come into it somewhere. This morning, then, it struck me: I’ve written here, on Thursday and yesterday, about how the main reason that I blog is to work through the details of my life. To come to terms with the world and my life.

To make the mountains low, in other words, or to ease the struggles in my life.

So I renamed it, and gave it a new tagline. I welcome comments on both.

I’ve also put a new template in play. After all, the old template had a very Appalachian Mountain feel to it, and I think this new, grey template captures the sense of mountainous desolation—the kind of mountains that need some making low, in other words—that I’m looking for. Not that I’m feeling all that desolate or that my personal mountains are insurmountable, but nonetheless, I like the mojo.

Though the template has changed and some things have been rearranged, though, the blog still works like it always did. The URI for the blog, and those for the posts, are the same. All the widgets are still in play.

I encourage you to remember, though, that the posts in this blog are grouped into themes in two ways: categories and tags. Sometimes these are the same: a post categorized as blog or writing will probably also be tagged with those themes. But others, while similar, have different content. The primary example here is the dating category and the relationships tag: some posts might be marked both ways, but some are clearly about one of these two things, and are not marked with the other (and, in that case, I use the tag more than the category).

All for your perusing convenience, constant reader.

Oh, and I’m working on adding search functionality, too, so you can more easily find what you’re looking for or that favorite post from months ago.

Here it is. Mike in the Mountains’s “blogoversary”! One year ago today, I began this project with a post about moving from Ohio to North Carolina.

I guess, one year on, I can truly say that what comes around goes around.

I have seen bloggers who write an annual retrospective on the anniversary of their blogs (some, indeed, have been at this long enough to have written several). But I’m going to resist that urge. After all, it’s all already there, just waiting for you, constant reader, to sift through the archives and unearth what you want to revisit. The best and most important things from this past year in my life, and particularly in my blog, are, in the final analysis, not for me to decide.

The year itself has been, overall, a good one, though confusing, stressful, and maddening by turns, as well—as you, no doubt, already know. Instead of rehashing events already written to rags here, however, I’m going to give my thoughts on the year itself (perhaps my birthday, nearly two months gone now, would have been a more opportune moment for such reflection, but the blogoversary works, too, I think).

And I’ll start with a thought that has haunted my mind for years, since the ninth grade when first I read Mr. Dickens’s immortal words, words that seem always to be true and never to be quite fulfilled.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

Simultaneously, and not able to be one without the other.

As I wrote yesterday, I blog to think. I write to better understand. This whole, now-yearlong, project has been an attempt, on my part to process the world, to consider who I am, to ponder what I do, and to comprehend how all of that fits together. At least, to make an effort toward those things. An effort, I think, that has met with modest—or perhaps more than modest—success.

And in that regard, it’s been quite a year.

How can I describe it? The first impression that comes into my mind—one that I’ve recently written about, at least a bit—is that of isolation. It has been an isolated time for me. Yes, I’ve made friends, and stayed connected to old friends, and reconnected with other old friends. But I’ve felt a sense of spiritual and social isolation. Perhaps that has led me to cling a bit more tightly to those friends that I do have than I normally might. To those who have felt that way, my sincere apologies.

But it was, I think, a necessary piece of isolation. A necessary white space in the story of my life; though this blog is proof enough that even our white spaces contain stories and information enough for many, many words of telling.

This year has been a time of recovery and growth for me. And while I won’t say “change”—I don’t think I’ve really changed all that much this year—I will add self-discovery to that list. And as I wrote yesterday, and as you’ve no doubt watched as this blog has unfolded, I find that one year on from that post about moving, I have a much clearer picture of who I am, what I want out of life, and my place in the world and its movements.

I needed this year to learn those things. I may have known them before, at some previous point in my life, and since I knew them, some of them may well have changed, but what I knew, I had forgotten, and what is new, I had never clearly known. But now I do, and this year has been necessary for that.

Because, however, I have promised that this is not a retrospective, I’ll leave it to you to revisit the themes and suss out what it is I’ve learned, discovered, and remembered about myself.

That process has also not been without its mistakes, pain, and tears. In fact, it’s been replete with all of these, and I’m sure, as I continue on this path, more of each are coming. I will make mistakes—I’m very good at making mistakes, after all. And those mistakes will bring the pain and tears in their wake, I’m quite certain. I haven’t learned everything there is to know about me yet, of that I’m quite certain, as well.

But, on my blog’s birthday, I’m also quite certain that I’ve done a lot of the heavy lifting in that regard in the past year. I may be wrong—there’s always that possibility—but I’ve done such a lot in this year, that I dare to hope that most of what’s left is maintenance: continuing to explore my mind, my heart, and my world in light of what I have learned this year so that who I am and how I am in the world doesn’t get so far away from me again.

It’s been a hard year, a stressful year, a painful year. But growing pains are part of life. And I’m thankful for the year that it has been. I’ve learned a lot. And much of it, you’ve learned along with me as my constant readers, my mostly silent companions on this journey.

And the journey has been, for me, both the best and worst of times. Perhaps because the worst of times contain within them the seeds of the best: stagnation, damage, and pain carry with them the prospects of progress, renewal, and healing.

Not a retrospective. But a thank-you for taking the journey with me.

And now, Sancho, let’s go and learn what ogreish windmills the next year may bring.

Three hundred sixty-six days and 315 published posts into this blog’s existence (tomorrow is the blog’s birthday, but with the leap year and all, this is day 366), I awoke today pondering what it is I do here and why it is I do it. After all, 315 published posts (not to mention the almost sixty that have never seen the light of day—and never will), represents a fairly substantial chunk of my life over the past year spent typing away, creating this artifact that very few will ever know about, and even fewer will care about. So why do I do it? What is this blog’s raison d’etre?

(And by the way, if you’re in one of those small groups of people I mentioned—those who know and those care—Thanks!)

I’ve blogged off and on for a while—mostly off. Until this past year, I’ve had a hard time sticking with the idea of blogging. Perhaps this was because of some self-image dysfunction on my part: I didn’t believe that my life or my commentary on it would be interesting to anyone else. Perhaps it was because I bought into the critiques of blogging by those who don’t: primarily that those who keep blogs and post to them regularly are exhibitionists and narcissists.

In the past, I considered myself neither. Still don’t. But I may have allowed that critique to keep me from blogging in the past. After all, I have read a great many blogs that reflect one quality or the other, and sometimes both.

Exhibitionism in a blog is pretty much just like it is in life. It brings the things that we generally like to keep private into the public view, and does so shamelessly and tastelessly. Now, as you may have guessed if you read here often, I don’t have all that many taboos. If it’s in the world, it’s fair game for writing. But just as there’s a difference, in life, between holding hands on a walk or kissing on the dance floor and getting it on in a movie theater, so there’s a difference in blogs. There’s a fine line, in this case, between reporting and exhibitionism, but some bloggers cross that line with a regularity that’s astounding. For me, though, it’s usually about what I would want the people I’m writing about to read. If I mention other people, I want them to be able to read that post without feeling in any way betrayed. Even if I don’t name names, after all, they’ll know it’s them. And it’s not just sex (though that’s what we tend to associate most with exhibitionism); it’s everything. And I try not air my, or especially anyone else’s, dirty laundry on the blog.

Narcissism is something different though, and it’s, to some extent, at least, harder for us bloggers to avoid. Because we write about ourselves, our lives, our thoughts, our ideas, our insights. And it’s these last three, I think, that can save the first two from being utterly narcissistic. If I provided you, constant reader, with only a catalog of each day’s events—“This is what happened to me today!”—without any reflection, rumination, or discussion, you likely wouldn’t read here long. And I wouldn’t blame you a bit. Daily life, anyone’s daily life, is simply not that interesting taken in its constituent pieces. Showers and coffee and jobs and pets and children and spouses and dates and tv and everything else that we do day-in, day-out—pretty boring, really. And I’ve seen blogs that are like this, too: a laundry list of a day from Corn Flakes and coffee to Letterman. And that, to me, seems narcissistic, because if you don’t do more than list out your day, why should anyone care? After all, everyone—within a reasonable amount of variation—had the same day you did!

So I try not to do that, either. If you’re still reading here, you must agree that I do it at least tolerably well.

I agree, to some extent, then, with the critics. I have seen a number of blogs that consist mainly of exhibitionism, narcissism, or both. But that’s certainly not all blogging is it? Not good blogging? Not my blogging?

I’ve already started to look at some things I do and don’t do in the blog. Let me continue that for a while:

I don’t name names. Well, very rarely, and only in instances where I the context is harmless and the writing seems to warrant it. If your name (or some variant of it) has been named here, you’re one of a very select few.

I don’t air dirty laundry. You may have noticed that I write about dating or relationships on occasion (on very rare occasion). But I don’t write what I’m thinking about or experiencing in a particular relationship, or with a particular woman I’m dating. Not because I don’t or haven’t in the past year, in life. But really, I’d rather talk about what I’m learning in these situations, what they’re making me think and feel, than provide you with the gory details of the story.

I do try to have a point. When I post to the blog, whether it’s about work or relationships or writing or or coffee or whatever, I want to tell you, my readers, something that I find interesting—something that has held my mind’s attention for a few seconds, at least. It may not always be all that interesting to you—I know that my life essentially consists of some pretty mundane stuff—but I try to say something interesting about it.

I do use the blog to work through my thoughts and feelings. Okay, that may be a bit narcissistic—at least, a little self-centered. But, then, it is my blog. Sometimes there’s no better way to know what I’m thinking or feeling about something than to try to write it down and explain it to others, even if the others are people I may not know who stumble on to my blog.

Maybe that’s why I do it. Maybe I’ve posted 315 posts and God only knows how many thousands of words here in the past year to help me figure it all out—life, the universe, and everything. After all, I’ve figured out a lot about myself, my career (I think), and my way of being in the world in the past year. I’ve learned a lot in this year of isolation in the mountains. A lot, indeed.

And the blog has been the scratch pad for a lot of that learning. And you have been the audience, providing feedback at times, but lots of times just interested in what I had to say. I appreciate that.

I hate to say that I blog as therapy, or anything like it. It’s less “I’m Okay, You’re Okay” than that for me. But I think I do blog to more clearly hear myself think about things. I externalize my thoughts so I can see them, move them about, and bring them back into myself. If, along the way, my thoughts impact you, as well, or (dare to dream) inspire you, or even just make you want to give me feedback on what I’m thinking, feeling, and living—well, then, so much the better, and so much the richer will my thoughts be for your input.

I guess that’s my answer to the question of “Why?” Maybe it’s not earth-shaking, but there it is. And even though the calendar has rolled around on my life, and my sojourn in the mountains is about to end, I’m thinking the blog will continue (still haven’t figured out what to do about the title, though). I have come to depend on it, you see, and through it and with it, on you, my readers.

One year in, then, I want to say thanks. Thanks for reading, thanks for commenting, thanks for helping me figure stuff out and come to some pretty significant conclusions in my life.

And since I’ve, today, come to the conclusion that I do this whole blogging thing to better hear my thoughts and understand life, the world, and my place and way of being in both, I can say with some certainty that the best way I’ve found to understand those things is to write. So as my parting thought for today, I offer an iTunes link (something new to the blog on the anniversary): “Write It Down,” from the album Hosmer and Ninth by the Mercury City String Band. And I encourage you to buy the song (or the album)—the songwriter is a friend.

Thanks again. Enjoy the music.

“Write It Down”
Mercury City String Band
Hosmer and Ninth

This morning, I discovered what is, perhaps, the great irony of my severe caffeine addiction. If you’re an addict like me—a candidate for the Hills Brothers Rehab Clinic at Maxwell House, that is—maybe you’ve already discovered this.

When you’re most in need of a caffeine fix—half-awake (or less) first thing in the morning—you are least able to provide yourself with the coffee that will get you going.

This morning, I rinsed the carafe, filled it, and poured the water into the coffee pot without incident. The pouring without mishap is, I assure you, a minor miracle in and of itself. I ground the beans. And I almost (again, that almost is nothing short of a blue-eyed wonder) dumped the grounds into the coffee maker without a filter.

And, from long experience, I can say that the only thing worse than having to make the coffee when you haven’t had coffee yet is having to clean up a coffee-related mess when you haven’t had coffee yet.

With that, this morning, I had a narrow miss. Thank Heaven for small miracles.

And I think I may have inadvertently stumbled upon the explanation of the Starbucks phenomenon: it’s too hard to make coffee when you haven’t yet had any. But it’s truly frightening, some days, to think of me driving to a coffee shop, Starbucks or otherwise, in my pre-coffee state.

This is a reworking of the post I mentioned earlier. It’s a more concise, tighter expression of the same ideas. Maybe it’s not perfect, but I think it’s better.

That title applies to so many facets of my life. What I read and what I write, certainly, and most obviously. But also how I live. Maybe this distinction has something to do with other distinctions that have strongly impacted my life—both in decisions I’ve made and in the way events have unfolded around me. It’s hard to say for sure, but the difference between scholarship and nonfiction figures prominently in my life.

It’s probably on my mind so much lately because of work. My old work situation, my new work situation, and the fact that I taught a course in Creative Nonfiction this past semester. And because of the years I spent in school preparing for this career and the work I do. You would probably expect as someone who spent 11 years in school, after high school, my life would be consumed with scholarship: reading it, writing it, maybe even being involved in publishing it. You would not be wrong to expect this, either. After all, everyone does.

That’s probably one of the largest factors that has shaped my career up to now. My higher education has been largely (except for my first undergraduate year) at large, state institutions. My BA and MA are from the same urban, open-admissions comprehensive university in Ohio. My PhD is from a land-grant university farther west in the Midwest. In my field, Rhetoric and Composition Studies (a sub-field of English), the doctoral program at this institution is generally agreed upon as one of the best in the nation (in the top three, five, or maybe ten, such programs, nationally, depending upon whom you ask). Its is particularly known for producing graduates whose professorial careers focus on scholarly activity, administration of composition programs and writing centers, or both scholarship and administration. You might say, at this point, that I am not a typical graduate of this program.

I hear about my friends from grad school and the projects they’re working on. Article manuscripts, prospectuses for scholarly books, production of scholarly journals. And sometimes I hear what they’re reading: high theory, others’ scholarly books, journal issues new and old. And I look at my writing: mostly this blog. And my reading: well, if you read here, you know what I’m reading—mostly popular fiction, lately. Myself, I have published one article and one book chapter in the past five years, in the way of “scholarship,” I have presented at a number of academic conferences, of course, but even these have not been scholarship in its truest sense. Even my dissertation wasn’t, really, I think.

And I think this is because I’ve never really developed the scholar’s knack for looking at a text, a phenomenon, a cultural artifact, or the world itself through a critical lens of my own choosing, of my own construction. I’ve never been able to pick that hobbyhorse and ride, so to speak. When I’m preparing a presentation, for example, involving both critical theory and an object of analysis, I often let my fair-to-good knowledge of a wide range of theoretical perspectives and the object itself suggest the frame for analysis. Thus, while I am not a Marxist or a marxist, I have allowed Marx’s Das Kapital to frame a presentation on the character of Spike in the later seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer—the connection being technological vampires. But I certainly don’t view everything through the lens of Marx (and I know there’s no revolution coming), or through the Platonic forms, or through Katherine Hayles’s definition of the posthuman condition.

This lack of critical and theoretical focus renders my work much more nonfiction than scholarship. I observe the world, attempt to understand the events and phenomena I observe, and then attempt to articulate that understanding for others. As I have tried to do this, in many cases, I have been told something along the lines of, “You’re a good writer, but a lousy scholar.” As I believe I’ve said before, I’ve come to take that as a compliment. And I interpret it as meaning that what I’ve written is nonfiction, not scholarship. And I can live with that.

No. More than that. I can be happy about that.

Being a good writer means that my writing is clear and lucid. That people can understand it. And when I look at even my published work, I note that it’s really not aimed at an academic or scholarly audience. Anyone could pick it up and understand it, and, well, get it. It is nonfiction, not scholarship.

I seem, however, to have the smell of that popular style on me, particularly when I’m on the job market. I get professor jobs that focus on teaching, not research. If they get my doctoral program’s emphasis on administration into the bargain, too (though, to be fair, I never took any course work in administration), so much the better. And, again, this is something that I can be happy about.

I can be happy about it because I got into this field because of my love of teaching its pragmatic subject matter: writing—or, more academically, composition, primarily of the first-year variety. That’s why I changed from literature to composition, mid-MA. I fell in love with the teaching I was doing, and decided to turn that teaching in to “what I do.”

And I can be happy about it because the very pragmatic teaching I do—again, writing to first-year college students, in the main—really fits with my overall idea of knowledge and understanding. We don’t theorize writing in these classes; we write. What I do with my students, the way I teach what I teach, is nonfiction, not scholarship.

Which is funny when it comes down to it. Because it’s not just a matter of what I read, what I write, how I teach. That catchy little mantra I’ve been repeating throughout this post is has as much to do with how I live and who I am as any of these other things.

Every day, every moment, I pass through on my way from birth to death, is its own thing, unique to itself. There may be similarities between days and moments, and enough of them that I can form some theories, expect some generalities. The sun will rise sometime each morning, and somewhere generally to the east of where I stand; its location may vary in the east from north to south, and the time of its appearance may vary with the time of year, but it will happen.

Beyond this, though, I am left with each new day, hour, minute, second, moment being completely different from the ones that have gone before. And I must understand each situation—each phenomenon, each passing moment—as a thing unto itself. I cannot, in most cases, generalize from the past or for the future. I must, instead, work to comprehend what I experience as it is.

In this sense, the sense of moments unfolding from unknown to unknown, inexplicable as anything but themselves, casting light and shadows backwards and forwards along my path. Yes, in this sense, my worldview, my way of being, perhaps my very life—along with my writing and the rest of my work—can be summed up in that simple phrase.

Nonfiction, not Scholarship.