Guilty Pleasures

I work in a world of thinkers, readers, and writers. I can stroll out my office door any time of the day and, within minutes, drum up a conversation about Iranian films, English Romantic Poetry, working class poetry and fiction, the films of Frederick Wiseman, the historical underpinnings of Shakespeare's Richard II; I work with feminists, post-structuralists, post-modernists, post-colonialists, specialists in ethnic literature and studies, speech communication experts, a magician, a gypsy moth trapper, photographers, experts in computers, Spanish, French, Native American languages.

I can walk less than 150 feet and find colleagues conversant in folk music, jazz, the Gateful Dead, the arcane minutiae of Atlantic Coast Conference basketball, the labor wars of Harlan County, KY, dog training and care, not to mention rhetoric, James Joyce, the films of Jane Campion, the novels of Willa Cather, parapsychology, the latest thoughts of Pope Benedict XVI, and the latest in urban tales, Sara Silverstein jokes, and the growth of the LDS Church in East Asia.

All of this, and what do I long for? Just one appearance in Eugene by Neil Diamond.

I want someone to come in my office and listen to a three song set of Journey and talk about how their world consciousness in 1981-82 was shaped by "Don't Stop Believin'".

I feel guilty because I love Elton John. I mean I like to hear the Grateful Dead's 6/23/90 Autzen Stadium Eyes of the World -->Looks Like Rain --> Crazy Fingers -->Playin' in the Band-->Uncle John's Band-->Playin' Reprise set after the break while light thunder from the Oregon Coast Range rolled by as much as the next not quite a Deadhead does, but if you want to give me goose bumps and a sentimental gaze, play "Candle in the Wind.

I am stirredby .45 Special and Scooter Jennings' Fourth of July and Shannon Lawson's Bad, Bad, Bad and everything I've heard by Big and Rich.

To get myself in the mood to play the role of Antonio last spring in our college's production of Much Ado About Nothing, I didn't go off by myself before the curtain lifted and listen to Vivaldi or Bach or Beverly Sills, I loaded my MP3 player with Guns and Roses, Patti Smith, and Supertramp.

It bugs my wife that I call my enjoyment of Barry Manilow a guilty pleasure. She wonders why I would feel guilt over something I really enjoy, like Taco Bell Chalupa Supremes or the Electric Light Orchestra or compulsively playing the Boot Scootin' slot machine at the Three Rivers Casino in Florence.

It's got to be John Calvin's fault. The guilt has to be connected to the fact that when I was in my mid-twenties I decided not to go to seminary, not to serve the church as a minister. Instead, I decided to study literature and in my mind I made academic studies holy. It's a classic case of displacement and compensation.

Consequently, I started to feel answerable to the arbiters of "high culture" in much the same way I feel answerable, in my moral and spiritual life, to God. In my mind, teaching the liberal arts became a priesthood. To remain true to the faith, I needed to give my time over to art, literature, classical music, and other such things. I did. And I loved it.

The problem, though, was I started to regard the more "common" pleasures of my life as sinful in a liberal arts, high criticism sort of way.

It's really a screwed up way to experience things.

So, tonight, with the blogosphere as my witness, once and for all, I hereby expunge the words "guilty pleasure" as a phrase I use to speak or think about myself. I will continue to study and enjoy 20th century Israeli and Palestenian poetry, but I won't stop enjoying Billy Collins and Phil Collins. I am not a priest. I am not a cultural sinner.

I'm just easy to please.

"Hey, Debbie! Is the stereo too loud? Should I turn down 'Weekend in New England'?"