Here’s what happened: I had responded to a compliment regarding my past credentials in the comments board to this post by elaborating a bit on my background. It’s a device (narrative, personal history) I find myself interested in more and more, since I’m in a transition phase (again), without a clear path forward. (In a recent October blog post here I already broached this).

Then, some hours after leaving my comment, it hit me.

Even though I’m the first person in my family in my generation to go to university, to grad school, or to get post-graduate degrees (including that PhD in Art History from Harvard), I never found getting those credentials difficult. It was, if anything, easy to do research and to write and to think up new ideas. In fact, I earned my PhD in just five years, which in humanities is considered speedy – some of my fellow students were taking twice as long.

Why was it easy for me, why could I do it quickly? Because I was keen, sharp as a knife: I knew what I wanted. Cut right through the bullshit, barreled on, damn the torpedos.

It was a pleasure.

The difficult part wasn’t coming up with new insights, or synthesizing disparate pieces of information, finding patterns, developing a thesis, going where no grad student had gone before… The difficult part came later, once I started teaching and realized what academia was also about.

First, I have to admit one thing: massive stage fright. I had no idea that a big chunk of my job would entail performing in front of crowds. That threw me for a major loop – I wanted everything I did to be perfect, and I was so afraid of public speaking that I initially wrote out every single word of my lectures. It was Pure Agony. I told myself I didn’t have the “winning” personality – because I’m a critical bitch myself – to get my students to love me, and I was afraid, horribly afraid, that they would hate me instead. Besides, I had imposter syndrome, and I never wanted to be a teacher or a performer. I wanted to be a researcher, a writer, a synthesizer, a connector. An ideas person, but definitely someone who thinks stuff up behind the scenes, not out front like a show pony at the circus.

But here’s my epiphany: I really, really came to hate (yet mourn) academia when I understood that at some point you have to stop being an ideas person – at least for a good chunk of the time. Yes, you have to grind out your lecture courses; but once you have them “under your belt,” you can repeat them ad infinitum with minor tweaking for the next few decades. I saw many professors do this. The seminars were a different matter, but even these were often variations on a theme – and that’s what I now realize was so depressing.

My advisors and most of the humanities professors I knew were too often one-trick ponies, repeating the same things year after year after year. It mattered not whether it was their lectures, or their seminars, or the endless variations on their initial dissertation work – even their “new” research was somehow a variation of what they had already been doing for years. In fact, it was imperative that you milked your dissertation for all it was worth and for as long as you could. To me that prospect seemed frightful, phony – after successfully transforming my 1991 dissertation into a book four years later – published by Princeton University Press in 1995 – I didn’t really want to belabor the topic any longer. Big mistake. Exceptions aside, many academics go on to belabor the same topic, over and over again. If the material seems to run dry, the hacks among them just turn up the volume on the unintelligible language, on the verbiage and jargon that no normal human understands, until they can tell themselves that they’re so specialized that they’re an industry unto themselves.

What I couldn’t stand, truth be told, were the limitations of working for years on one idea, of having to take this one idea on a nation-wide road-show (to conferences, symposia, etc.) in an attempt to get as many additional gigs with which to pad the resume, and of then being branded as “that” guy or “that” girl.

Further, because of the sheer numbers of PhD candidates admitted annually, everyone tries to get as specialized as possible – but without taking full account of how they’re already a “product” of the advisor machine. Student X of Professor Z will work on Xz – or maybe it’s Zx. Student X still has to differentiate him- or herself from Prof. Z enough to have some sort of identity. And so, if Prof. Z was working on the signifiers of female clothing in pre-Revolutionary French painting, Student X might “specialize” by focusing on a niche subject – like undergarments, or the transference of petticoat signifiers to colonial revolutionary settings. I’m making this up of course, but only slightly.

In short, the stuff gets stale, stale, stale – like underwear that hasn’t been changed in a generation.

I mourned the loss of academia: it had seemed like an ideal world for a while, like some kind of “Annie Hall” fantasy, lah-dee-dah. I have beaten myself up repeatedly for losing it, but I only have to read a few paragraphs in my discipline’s trade journals to be reminded of its worst aspects: irrelevance, staleness.

And so, although I’m against New Year’s Resolutions, perhaps I should make a note to myself to craft a New Year’s Mantra: I want freshness to guide me.

That said, I now face the real problem of location and wonder whether Victoria is the right place for me.

Just watched the “meltdown” news video you linked to, above. Oh my god. The waste, the waste of it all. Lives, land, stuff, potential. LAND! LandFILL.

Astonishing. (Like, literally. I’m a-stonied, rigid with gob-smackedness.)

“Inland Empire,” my pointy little ass. Highways, gasoline (cheap, then; not now), more subdivisions, super-duper square footage, more oil, more cars, on and on. And what’s left on those streets? People who themselves are on the financial edge, living (if you can call it that) in “communities” (fuck me – what a bunch of crap!) where almost every other house on the street is abandoned/ handed back to the lenders.

And some of those people thought that the bad ol’ city with its “crowding” (actually, density) was the enemy. Wow, were they wrong.

PS: can’t even walk to the grocery store in the “Inland Empire.” How sustainable was that to begin with?

Originally posted as a comment by Yule Heibel on Scripting News using Disqus.

After I wrote that, I wrote some more, but decided against cluttering up Scripting’s comments board and instead took it to my own blog here.

Man, I haven’t cursed this much in text in ages…

PS: My anger and sadness comes in part from feeling that these people who abandon their homes like this have no one to draw on, link to, connect with. No community, no nothing. There’s no one to draw close to — and how could there be, in *wastelands* such as “Inland Empire”? *Waste*-land.

It’s infuriating to see that atomizing people in this way, dis-encouraging them from some sort of organic relationship to place/ community, and telling them instead that *suburban isolation* and all this other bullshit of Stuff-hood (which lands in the dumpster) is the American Dream — that this has been sold as some kind of *goal*.

What the hell kind of community can you have in an Inland Empire? The “community” of new age religions or evangelical-isms? Same old, same old: no fucking history! And by the same token, actual neighbourhoods/ communities have been left in a trashed & destroyed state (see NOLA), so that political willpower and ability to move toward change also gets dis-focused and confused. Wipe out the history, wipe out the memory. Abandon ship, leave your crap, fill the landfill.

It’s enough to make one think there’s method to this madness.

Ok, I’ll leave your comments board now, enough ranting. But that video really riled me up. Usually don’t swear this much.

Pernicious. Inland Pernicious.

So, yeah — it’s a rant.  But you just have to watch this news clip to get it.

Ok, back to your regular programming.  Move along, nothing to see here.