The New York Sophist

There’s nothing like it. Bukowski really nailed it when he wrote about it. It’s my second day here at the Saratoga Public library doing some work and it’s overflowing with joy for me.

I’m in Saratoga Springs with my partner as she is here attending a state teacher’s meeting. I tagged along for support, good dinners, to fetch coffee from time to time, and to enjoy a new town together. But when she is in meetings, I have to find something to do. The public library is always a good choice, wherever you are.

The Saratoga Public Library on November 3, 2024

I like writing and working from home but this comes with a test of willpower: Can you stay seated, typing and reading, for a long enough time to get a boil going and then for the boil to actually cook anything properly? Chances are, no. There are myriad things to attend to at home such as cleaning, supplying the house, taking care of a whiny little dog, and various other chores. For example, today I spent a long time on the internet and the phone making doctor’s appointments (or trying to). This wasn’t the case when you are out of pocket and in a space reserved for a very specific kind of work – the work of words.

Charles Bukowski said it best about the library. For him it was a respite from the continuous torture he faced from his parents and from the other students at school. He would often skip and go to the public library instead where he would read a lot of the works that would inspire him to become one of the greats himself. He wrote a couple of odes to the library:

When I was dying of hunger and nobody wanted to publish me, I spent even more time in the library than I have ever since. It was wonderful to get a seat by a window in the sunlight where the sun could fill my head with music. (1965)

and from a poem “The Burning of the Dream” about the destruction of the library that saved him during high school:

it is
thanks to my luck
and my way
that this library was 
there when I was
young and looking to 
hold on to 
something
when there seemed very
little about

The relationship with the library is a layered thing. It was for me a place to find fun books on a weekend, then it became a weapons plant – something like Q’s lab when James Bond is being equipped for a mission. Many summers I would be asked to be dropped at the public library in Lakeland, Florida when visiting my Dad. There wasn’t a lot to do that interested me so being there was great. I could read and listen to CDs. They had quite the collection. I could also just look at whatever book caught my attention.

High School debate brought about the weapons lab, where the library was transformed into a place to sharpen iron and learn new spells to cast against one’s opponents. A grimoire of potential magic words for debate became a place to then write my own, drawing from it to create depth and flow for my own writing from high school to college. Since graduate school to today, the library is the place I go first when crafting ideas. I draw as many books as I can from it and then see where they can take my words. So far, so good. I’ve written a lot, and I’ve written many things that I think people like. Although I haven’t really written anything that is at the level of moving attitude and feeling that I would like.

Practice with writing is essential and I don’t do it as often as needed. Finding a space to dedicate to it is hard. I think I’ll try my own library now that I’m home from my fun trip up north. Working in your own space is a bit more challenging as there are distractions galore and priorities that can easily dethrone the practice of writing. Trying to draw upon old books to find new ways to say (or cast) the magic words about takes energy and time, two things that capitalism does not like to share. You should be consuming! That consumption shouldn’t inspire you to create, but to consume more! It’s a formidable foe.

Tomorrow will be a trip to a new library to me to donate books. Even this can be a distraction from writing. Reading can be a distraction, although a significant amount of reading is needed to be able to write anything decent. The energy for this art is enormous. And we think AI drains energy. Think about how much you are fighting against to write just one simple paper for a class. Your mind wants to think about a ton of other things. You feel anxious about all the other things that need attention. And also, what are you trying to say? What do you want to say? What does the paper want to be? What does the audience (aka the teacher) want the paper to be?

It’s a lot and too much at once. One thing at a time. A place and a means and a mode are what are needed for practice. And the writing will never be very good. But it will be done and contribute to a future writing, a future engagement that maybe someone will like.

I’d like to say I have a new job but this would be equivocation. What’s really happening is my relationship with my job is totally different than it used to be due to distance in many ways.

The first kind of distance – geographical. I now live an hour and 20 minutes from the office. This is very different than a bus ride, or a 15 minute walk to the University. I miss those days but I also don’t. I think the commute is just the price for the higher quality of life that I have out here in deep suburban New York.

I do not miss living in New York City, even with all the nice food and the museums. I am totally ok with sitting here and reading in the afternoon. Or typing a post like this one instead of reading or writing something directly engaging with work.

Another form of distance is identity. I no longer identify with the University as a member of the community, if I ever did. There was a time when this was somewhat important to me, that the University reflect my values or be doing things that are not actively harmful to my work or position in the world.

Now I just accept the University as a failed structure that allows me to have the position I have. I am quite distant from caring much about the goals, vision statements, or plans of the University at all. What I’m focused on is providing the best classes I can for the students and hope to provide them some value and the means to craft value in some way. That’s really it. I also like the library and being able to study or read things to improve my perspective on the world, the people in it, the field, and my own work.

I am distant in another way too – I don’t feel connected to the events on campus. I would like to attend a lot of events that look interesting but there’s no way to justify a three hour drive for a one-hour event (or perhaps less) on a day when I wouldn’t normally be on campus. This issue creates a relationship where I cannot participate in the community in the way that I was used to or accustomed to. I hardly went to the events as it is, but now that they are even more distant it’s tough to feel connected to a community, even one where you could imagine going to different events.

The most difficult distance is the one from my old self. I recently saw a photo come up on my Amazon Echo of me in the first month of working there and I looked very different – a cheerful sort of optimism I no longer recognize. The hardest thing about the recognition and acceptance of the new job is that I really do have to accept this position, this subjectivity is long dead. That’s tough for me regardless of how cynical I am!

I think I can remain hopeful and positive about reading and writing, about posting here, about making videos and teaching. At least I hope that I can remain hopeful!

Photo by Taneli Lahtinen on Unsplash

The most valuable things for me in college were reading books and discussing them (or listening to the professor talk about them). The other valuable thing was being in clubs, meeting people and making relationships.

I don’t think either of these are possible any longer. Students are on campus a minimal amount of time due to the cost and that runs interference on these kinds of relationships – there’s no downtime. Secondly, they are taking 18 hours a term to reduce cost as well, which obviously interferes.

I also don’t think students can or want to read a book anymore. They try, but they can’t do it. So assigning a book is like assigning something they don’t know how to do. But they won’t say it, because they feel they should know how to do it.

So assigning a chapter or two is all you can do, but the students are so well-trained to think of school as cutting corners, trickery, breaking rules, deception of the teacher that you really don’t know if they read it or not.

Therefore the only reason I wanted to be a professor – to share in these experiences from the other side, to make them possible, is no longer possible.

I’ve become a very bad teacher recently and I’d like to figure out why.

Reflecting on what a bad teacher is, I’ve come up with the following ideas

1. More interest in the material and the value of the material outside of the students’ interest
2. Dismissal of student concerns as equaling in importance to the course material or events
3. Inability to make easy, meaningful connections between course material and the sphere of student engagement (i.e. what’s on their minds)
4. Inability to create meaningful assessment experiences for the students

All of these things are elements of bad teaching and being bad at teaching, but perhaps the bad teacher is someone who just disregards these and doesn’t worry about them popping up in their pedagogy.

The bad teacher might not be bad teaching, but bad teaching is still a problem.

What can be done?
Perhaps more attention to what students think and concern themselves with would be helpful. More supplemental material for the course would be good too, such as audio and video recordings that help support class time.

Trying to reconstruct narratives of the teacher’s first contact with the material to determine how it made an impact on them, then considering ways to make that same sort of connection today with the situation we face.

Distributing power over the course activities to the students in a major way without any intervention or refusal to accept what they propose.

Maybe these things will work. I might try to return to Neil Postman’s 4 declarative sentences and 30 questions rule for having a class – what that means is that is all you are allowed to say if you are the instructor.

Rhetoric historians – I know you are reading. Please let me know what the analogue is to this issue? I beg you, I need to read some of the historical material.

Rhetoric has been ruined by the Institutional Rhetoricians. By this I mean rhetoricians who think NCA is more important than rhetoric; that NCA represents rhetoric; that NCA can provide a good accounting or defense of rhetoric; that think NCA doesn’t exist as a function of rhetoric.

J.M. O’Neill founded the discipline using rhetoric to craft a professional role of speech teachers at the University level. He did this not because he was an NCA officer, went to legislative assembly, or any of that bullshit. He was able to do it because he was an artist, his medium being debate.

We cannot lose rhetoric to the institutional jockeys. Many of the people are interested in power, status, authority – but above all that they are interested in having a substantive role. The mark of the institutional rhetorician is the person who has intense anxiety about what Kenneth Burke labeled “the paradox of substance.” They cannot ever feel comfortable with the label “rhetor” or “rhetorician” because they don’t like having to defend it and explain it – something rhetoricians and rhetors delight in. Instead they invent and lie. They call themselves “political scholars,” “legal scholars,” “scholars of race and gender,” or whatever the title de jour might be.

Instead, why not say you are a scholar of rhetoric and you study race? Or gender? Or trans-politics? Or anything! Why not that? Because they are lazy and they do not want to have the discussion about rhetoric one more time.

The field is in that conversation and that articulation every time. Every time we articulate what rhetoric is to someone, someone who might not have been lucky enough to encounter it before running into us, we breathe new life into the field. We renew it and we welcome more into it. The power of it is that we can articulate, without constraint the importance of examining whatever issue it is that we wish to study and discuss. No other field has that latitude. None.

But that’s not all. Rhetoric has the capacity to instruct others how to talk about what matters in ways that bend other people, that transform matter, that alter what matters to them. It’s a teaching art, and many institutional rhetoricians resent having to teach that. Instead they want to be admired; they want to be the smartest person in the classroom saying the smartest thing about race, politics, the first amendment, whatever they love. Instead of opening the tent wide and inviting others to become advocates – effective advocates for issues – they would like to keep the group small and keep the spotlight on the few people who they think “have it right.”

Grasping to hold onto a slippery rock like NCA for your identity is kind of sad – reminds me of Ralph Ellison’s essay The Little Man at Chehaw Station where he talks about how we hang onto the rocks of tribal identity when we fear the phoenix that results from the combination of various identities. This is a great way to think about “the paradox of substance,” and one that Ellison would approve of, after all he and Burke were friends.

Why do rhetoricians scramble for the stable when the unstable and the shady are their home? I’ll end with a quote:

“The Sophist runs away into the darkness of that which is not, which he has had practice dealing with, and he is hard to see because the place is so dark.” ~ Plato, Sophist (254a) trans. Christopher Tindale (I think).

The Sophist might not be your identity as a rhetorician, but one thing is certain about them – you can call them whatever you wish but they were people who were interested in teaching others how to speak, relate, and create meaning within their community. That’s admirable. They didn’t flee to the institutions of Athens; they used them to riff off of to create the words that would create the meanings that were valuable to their students and their audiences.