Three Beautiful Things 03/27/08: The Say Hey Dog, Calendar, I Found It!

1. When I throw the ball for Snug and Maggie and Charly, Maggie can always snag it the ball out of the air. Snug is almost always out of sync. Today, one time, the ball took a high bounce and the usually awkward Snug snared the ball before it hit the ground. My heart swelled.

2. I spent most of the day figuring out the course calendar for the class MBayless and I team teach. Her part of the course is American Working Class Literature and mine is Composition: Research and it's been an endless quest for me over the last twenty-three years of teaching research of trying to figure out a way to move my students through the process of research and writing in a disciplined and productive way. It's the hardest course I teach, but I keep coming back to it, ready to tackle its challenges again.

3. I found my DVD copy of Harlan County, USA. I thought it was lost, but now it's found and it raised my spirits significantly to have found it!

Three Beautiful Things 06/08/07: Party, Sly, Looking Back

1. What a great party! Every year our English department invites faculty, current students, and students who have finished LCC and gone to the U of Oregon or elsewhere to have a potluck get together. I so enjoyed relaxing, talking, laughing, eating good food, and learning more about students present of from the past.

2. I was in a sly mood today and when I feel that way I'm even more of a wise acre than usual and today a bunch of us laughed about smart alec quips I directed at colleagues, especially my teaching partner, Margaret.

3. I read all the retrospective essays our Working Class Lit/Research wrote yesterday and it's especially gratifying that they learned more than they had ever known in our course, especially the history of labor about stories rarely told, such as the Pullman porters and the miners of Harlan County, KY and the Sunshine Mine.

Three Beautiful Things 04/17/07: Coal, Annhilation, Nine Innings

1. I've seen the movie at least five times now and with every viewing I am more deeply affected by "Harlan County, USA". It's hard to argue against the assertion that this is the finest documentary movie in existence.

2. I've been previewing "Dr. Strangelove" for my Lit of Comedy class as we study war satire. As I grow older, I more and more deeply admire Peter Sellers' beauty as an actor. His ability to embody a character, let alone, in this movie, three characters is nearly unparalleled, imho.

3. I listened to the Detroit Tigers build a pretty good lead on the Royals, blow it, recapture the lead, and defeat Kansas City. It's a pleasure to have and XM satellite radio subscription during baseball season and fill my study with the sounds of radio announcers bringing the games alive.

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'?"

Silver Valley Look #2

Here's Ron Hileman, one of the nine survivors of the Quecreek mine flood of July, 2002. If I had seen the four people in this picture, say, at the Coeur d'Alene Casino near Worley, Idaho, I would have immediately thought they were from the Silver Valley. They aren't. Nor are the families and miners and structures in these pictures, taken in Harlan County, Kentucky. The men seen above, attending the funeral of miner John McCoy, who died in the Sago, West Virginia mine disaster of January, 20o6, they aren't from the Silver Valley, either. But that look, that look that comes from being in the face of forces beyond understanding, the forces of gravity, of carbon pressed for millions of years, of the heat of the earth as one moves more deeply inside it, and, most of all, the force of death, that look prevails. Miners and mining towns live in the company of death all the time.

This fact is largely ignored. For example, it's common, especially in the world of sportscasting, to romanticize and glorify the blue collar guy, the lunch bucket worker. To call a basketball player like, say, Ben Wallace, a lunch bucket guy is absurd. Unlike NBA basketball players, lunch bucket guys don't just work hard, they often put their lives in danger. They work on assembly lines, in front of blast furnaces, in the company of huge falling trees; they pull boards off moving belts, descend deep into mines, breathe paint fumes, coal dust, sulfur dioxide, bleach, and other toxins. Many of the blue collar guys I worked with in Kellogg, Idaho were constantly doing something to escape being conscious of their work: alcohol, weed, speed, acid, peyote buttons, snowmobiles, motorcycles, horse races, gambling: most of it done away from the work place, some, like the drugs, at the work place.

The Silver Valley Look does not belong to the Silver Valley. It's just where I first came to know it. Look deep into every luxury we enjoy, automobiles, electrical appliances, the production of electricity itself, batteries, slot machines, our paved freeways, rubber rafts, the books and newspapers we read, look deep into them and the Silver Valley Look will look back at you. It's a look that can be admired for all the labor and production it stands for, but it's also a look that reflects the careless nature of the American workplace, where dangers are ignored or compromised in service to the profit margin, but at the cost of some workers' lives and of many, many workers' souls. And maybe yours and mine.