I don’t expect I will be teaching much longer at UCSB. Retirement approaches. Maybe it’s a good time to be leaving, before the flood, as it were. Though really I would prefer to go more on an up note.
But the UC continues troubled. Once they charged students only “fees.” But now these “fees” have gotten so huge that it seems disingenuous to call them that. They are thinking now…well, maybe, we should be honest and call those fees what they are in fact: tuition.
What you call them, however, is not as important as the rapidity with which whatever-they-are have risen.
June 10, 1984 was a Sunday and sunny. I remember because that was the day Carol and I got married in the garden of a friend’s house.
The Lakers and Celtics played that day. I didn’t get to watch because I was getting married. The Lakers won, but then lost the series in seven the following Tuesday, June 12.
June 10, 2110 wasn’t a Sunday, but a Thursday. Still it was a sunny day, and once again on June 10 the Lakers and the Celtics were playing.
This time I got to watch the Lakers go down to defeat putting a ruinous cap on an otherwise very pleasant anniversary day.
Man, June 10, 1984 seems like a long time ago. Magic, not the sullen Kobe, was the center of the Lakers and they all wore short pants.
Last night I had my first ever “African food.” At least I think it was African food having been prepared by Africans who said it was African food. The Africans are two students Carol befriended and I have come to know over the last year. One is from Ghana, the other Nigeria.
The meal consisted of rice, a heaping mound of it, covered with a thick tomato sauce containing chunks of beef and seasoned with garlic, black pepper, salt, and something called Maggi, the brand name for a kind of soy sauce, I think it was. And on the sides of the mound of rice slices of fried plantain.
Really a good and substantial meal, though it wreaked havoc with my dyspepsia. Significant gas, belly distention, and even now in the morning my stomach is still gurgling.
I can’t attribute this all to the meal however. The guys knew I am a Laker fan, and they invited us over to watch game 5 of the playoffs with them. They are however are rabid Celtic fans. So I had to sit abjectly as they crowed, the Lakers having gone down to ignominious defeat. That probably didn’t help my digestion either.
So it is, for the purposes of comparison…using my new audio technica usb device, and recorded on Audacity software…too bad I failed to tune the guitar adequately….audacity.mp3
I lost my ipod so, while working out at the club, I listened to the radio on my original Sony Walkman. The back fell off that a while ago. The battery keeps falling out. But I found one in the back of my locker that still had some juice. Consequently I heard a cut off a new album by Stevie Miller. I couldn’t believe it. Maybe the guy needs some money. The cut was a dance tune and the lyrics ran partially and something like (this is not a direct quotation):
Don’t worry if you can’t find someone to dance Just get up and shake your (Oh, no, Stevie!) pants.
Pants! My ass. That’s either a desperate or very lazy rhyme.
Followed closely by something like:
Just reach out and grab ahold And squeeze till your blood runs cold.
That is not only lazy. It’s illogical. I mean blood running cold is what happens when you’re about to die.
Of course, Stevie also gave us the immortal:
Some people call me the space cowboy Some call me the gangster of love Some people call me Maurice Cause I sing of the pomputus of love…
Actually, these are classic. But I swear there is no such word as “pomputus.” But I can understand making it up since “I sing of the pomposity of love” just doesn’t cut it.
Still these are little things compared to the downright disturbing lyrics I heard down in the locker room. They were piping in some satellite radio and I caught myself listening to the refrain three times to make sure that I was hearing what I was hearing:
I don’t care who you are I don’t care where you’re from I don’t cane what you did As long as you love me…
This person is so desperate for love that he appears to have lost all his faculties. I mean is this a love song; or a song of self destruction.
It’s like I don’t care if your last name is Hitler, you come Texas, and you eat babies. As long as you love me?
Recently Brother Dan and I have been getting together a couple of hours each weekend to play guitar and sing songs. Here is So It Is again with the two of us as recorded on a digital device while we played in his converted garage.
This is a facile distinction. But I intend it playfully.
In my reading around in various documents and in listening to colleagues, I have heard frequently: “Then I wrote it up.”
I think there may be a good deal of difference between the concept of writing implied in “writing it up” and that other concept of writing called “writing it down.”
The writing it up conception of writing seems to be shorthand for something like: “Well, now I have done my research, be it empirical or book research, made my calculations, defined my methodology limitations, reached my conclusions, and now I am going to write it up.” I am not saying writing it up is the easy part; the rules governing writing in the sciences, in areas especially like physics, are incredibly complicated. One must know and follow the appropriate forms for writing it up; still these forms are given. One doesn’t, in writing it up, make up the rules for doing that.
The writing it down conception of writing would seem to be something else entirely…almost. I think it shorthand for the saying: “How do I know what I think till I see what I say.” When one is writing something down one does not necessarily know before hand one’s conclusions or even the general point that one might wise to make. When one is writing it down, one is attempting by the word (social in its very nature) to externalize some internal confusion, perplexity or even irritation and though that gain some insight or hold upon that very confusion, perplexity or irritation.
Henry James or Hegel–they wrote it down. They did not have thoughts or perceptions and then write them up. In fact, in the case of writing it down the distinction between thoughts (as something inside the head) and words (as necessarily outside the head because social) is tenuous indeed. When one writes it down one is trying to say what one thinks, and what one thinks is no more or less than what one has written down.
I guess I am old school (if there ever was an old school); the world is not heading my way. I believe fairly resolutely in the idea of writing as writing it down. But then I am not a scientist or empiricist. I have never been research oriented, though I recognize the value of it. In my particular educational experience, what proved of most value to my understanding of the world and of myself in relation to that came from writing it down. This was never easy, always a struggle. And unlike writing it up, there is no end really to writing it down.
I can’t say now and probably never will be able to say, “There! There! I have written it down.”
The Thursday before last I attended a meeting of the UCSB Academic Senate. There I stood, feeling rather stupid, in front of the assembly while the President of the Academic Senate read from a prepared text about my ability as a teacher pretty much roughly as follows:
Dr. Nicholas Tingle is a continuing lecturer in the Writing Program, and he has taught writing since 1980, before the Writing Program was even established. One of his supporters describes Nick as “a reflective teaching practitioner, as a gifted and supportive colleague, and as a wise, fair, and dedicated administrator.” Another states simply, “Nick is a supremely gifted teacher.”
A co-director of his program comments that “Nick has far exceeded expectations of lecturers whose primary duties are to teach nine courses per year,” noting that he “has regularly presented at all of the major conferences in our discipline, has published in the most important journals, and has published a number of important texts…”
Nonetheless, he adds, “it is in the area of teaching where Nick truly shines. Going into his fourth decade of service at UCSB, Nick has not merely rested on his well-deserved laurels as an excellent teacher; rather, he continues to think deeply about the interface between pedagogy, psychology and learning theory, in order to understand his role as a writing teacher, and to grow and evolve as a teacher”
One former student asserts the following of Dr. Tingle: “While being creative and entertaining, he was simultaneously the most efficient, organized, and effective teacher I have ever had.”
Finally, a letter from one of his former students speaks to Dr. Tingle’s impact in the classroom. The student writes, “the work that I completed in that course is the work I am most proud of from my years in college, as Nick encouraged us to explore and research a topic that we were passionate about. I think many of Nick’s students would agree that we got a better sense of who we are because of what Nick challenged us to do.”
For his dedication to teaching excellence Dr. Nicholas Tingle is awarded a Distinguished Teaching Award. Congratulations, Dr. Tingle!
Then Chancellor Yang, the head of UCSB, jumped up from his seat and insisted on posing next to me with the certificate awarded to A Distinguished Teacher, at which moment they following rather ridiculous picture (I look like Stan Laurel) was taken.
After Carol took another picture that I like better. Then yesterday I was told that the picture with Yang is now featured on the UCSB Writing Program website. That’s pretty cool.
That’s about that for the DTY stuff, though I will get my 1000 dollar stipend May 7. I wonder what will be left after taxes.
I want to be happy, I guess. Though I would settle, if it is in fact settling, for J.S. Mills definition of that as the absence of pain or suffering. That would do me fine. But I think the great bulk of people who are not me (and that is the great bulk of people) want something more. Not that I would know myself what that might be exactly. I seem to know less and less about that mythical “most people.”
Zygmunt Bauman looks into this business of happiness in his “The Art of Life.” There he argues, pretty definitively, I think, that happiness has little or nothing to do with affluence. Experts have tracked the correlation of the rise in GNP with happiness, and they report, according to Bauman, “that improvements in living standards in such nations as the the United States and Britain are associated with no improvement–indeed a light decline–in subjective well being.” Further: “On the whole, only a few percentage points [on the happiness index] separate countries with an annual income per capita between 20,00 and 35,000 dollars from those below the barrier to 10,000 dollars.” Leading Baumont to assert: “The strategy of making people happier through raising their income does not seem to work.”
Apparently the “advanced” western nations have not only their own physical complaints, like colon cancer, but also their particular spiritual or psychological problems. Along with not being so happy, the people of the “advanced” nations also, according to Baumont suffer from “…an uncomfortable and uneasy sensation of uncertainty, hard to bear, let along live with permanently. Of diffuse and ambient uncertainty, ubiquitous yet seemingly unanchored, unspecified and for that reason all the more vexing and aggravating..”
He’s right about that. Whether or not we are heading to hell in a hand basket, there’s certainly a good deal of uncertainty about where we are heading, and how that direction, whatever it might be, will affect our daily walking around and whether or not we will find what we want in the grocery store or anything there at all. That could be paranoia. But if all the bees die, then more than likely so will we.
Consumer society has sought to salve the wound of this uncertainty by giving us plenty of goods to consume. This, however, has not led, according to Baumont, to happiness but to the endless pursuit of it. Baumont puts it, “One of the most seminal effects of equating happiness with shopping for commodities which are hoped to generate happiness is to stave off the chance that the pursuit of happiness will never end.” As one of my students put it, “I looked in my closet. It was completely full. But I had absolutely nothing to wear.” Her clothes, because of incessant changes in fads, had worn themselves out just hanging there.
Somebody benefits I suppose from this incessant churning of goods. Somebody is making profit, and the endless pursuit itself keeps the wheels of industry world wide churning. If Americans and the members of the other western nations suddenly stopped consuming, the whole damn world economy would collapse.
But we’re not going to find happiness this way, even as the absence of pain.
