A few questions for Andy

Recently SJSU's College of Social Sciences asked me to answer a few questions about my teaching and research. I'd dreaded this assignment for the past few weeks. Having completed it, though, I found it a useful opportunity to reflect on where I am these days. So I figured I'd archive those thoughts here...

1. What research questions currently preoccupy you?

While my research has generally focused on communication and the built environment, studying structural and perceptual flows whose apparently distinct places convey inhabitants to a singular space, I have begun to examine disruptions in those flows. Initially I explored, somewhat optimistically, the production of “locale” in roadside architecture, arresting places whose evocations of home and community provide a nostalgic and therapeutic response to the stresses of contemporary life. More recently, though, I have concentrated on the somewhat more ambivalent rhetoric and performance of seemingly (but almost never actually) abandoned places. Currently I am interested in the uses, aesthetics, and ethics of “ruin-tourism” practiced in places like Detroit, Post-Katrina New Orleans, and the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

2. What personal factors contributed to your study of communication and the built environment?  

I recall a conversation with a senior colleague, now retired, in which I outlined some plans for research into the history and design of postwar motels, now often used as long-term apartments, halfway houses, and shooting galleries. Summarizing my plans, I noted how my interest in roadside architecture began during the years when my spouse and I drove between Ohio and Florida to see our families. I was quite surprised when my friend asked, “but didn’t you tell me that you lived in motels for awhile?” I was amazed that I had somehow forgotten that dimension to my personal interest in the built environment. Fleeing an abusive relationship, moved by my mother to the relative safety of a Mom and Pop motel, I grew to appreciate the freedom evoked by roadside architecture – and the fear too. Coming to grips with that continuum of feelings is a personal factor shaping my research that long precedes the academic purposes of my work.

3. What has been most challenging in your research and teaching?

While I bring a scholarly interest in theories and frameworks to the classroom, as well as a humanist belief that study and contemplation are valuable skills whose outcomes may not be “measured” or “assessed” in some contemporary meanings of the words, I recognize that many SJSU students (and some administrators) bring what they perceive to be more practical concerns to our interactions. Many folks struggle with the notion that we should cultivate a keen interest in the world beyond our material ambitions, to read, to travel, and to explore a wide range of topics for the pleasure of doing so, for the opportunities to join the human conversation of values, interpretations, and possibilities, without being forced to account for the energies expended in these endeavors as one would complete a spreadsheet. Of course, addressing this struggle is a challenge worth undertaking.

4. How has your position in SJSU contributed to your research and teaching? 

As an SJSU faculty member, I have sought out opportunities to fund my travels, chances to experience the flows and disruptions of places that have contributed directly to my publications and lectures. Along with traditional college grants and departmental matching funds, I have sometimes needed to negotiate some non-traditional opportunities. For example, when asked to teach a second peer training course during my service as director of the university peer mentor program, I agreed with the proviso that my additional work be compensated with a one-time travel allotment. With those funds I completed a cross-country road trip in 2008 whose outcome included one of my most favorite scholarly articles, “Two roads diverge: Route 66, ‘Route 66,’ and the mediation of American ruin.” Though my research has required some similar appeals over the years, I have found that my university is willing to support my road-tripping and globe-trotting ambitions as long as I advance a productive array of scholarly output.

5. Do you have a hidden teaching talent? 

I have developed a small repertoire of songs that I’ll sometimes share with my students to advance one point or another. For example I love to sing “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” in COMM 149 (Rhetoric and Public Life) when we’re discussing Disney’s corporate vision of American domestic spaces, an ideal future of consumer technology. I also sing “[Get your kicks on] Route 66” in any class that includes a discussion of travel and tourism. My singing is not technically a talent, because I can hardly boast a gifted voice. But my willingness to express myself in song contributes to a memorable learning environment – for good or for ill.

6. What is one book that changed your life (or teaching/research) and why: 

John R. Stilgoe’s Outside Lies Magic is a nearly perfect collection of essays that build to a coherent argument for the need to sharpen our acuity about the human-made world around us. I return to his book often to borrow illustrations about how the built environment consists of layer after layer of patina that can be scraped away through physical or mental means, revealing more than mere history as an intellectual exercise but rather the means to encounter bygone modes of life that shimmer like William Gibson’s semiotic ghosts. Outside Lies Magic encourages readers to become explorers of the “why” of everyday life. One example: Stilgoe says that if you peer into the cabinet under the kitchen sink of an early twentieth century house, you stand a good chance of finding apple green wallpaper – the same color found in that era’s police stations and asylums. Read the book and find out why.

7. What is one website/journal/newspaper (in your field) you follow without fail? 

While I scan the international, national, and regional journals that host the scholarly conversations of my field, I must confess that I almost never read an issue cover to cover. Speaking as a former journalist whose work was measured by its relevance and accessibility, I find far too much of our academic writing is laden with foggy, derivative, and frankly soul-sucking prose. Accordingly I don’t follow publications as much as I read a few authors whose works, which typically appear within and beyond one particular field, demonstrate a balance of intellectual sophistication, practical utility, and aesthetic quality that inspires me to improve my own writing.

8. What is some advice you’d give to newer faculty or students?

I encourage newcomers to balance enthusiasm and dedication with a healthy degree of stoicism. Far too many folks approach their duties with a kind of zealotry that blinds them to the subtleties of why people and things work as they do. People who approach each challenge and each obstacle as a matter of success or failure (or worse, as good or evil) end up being frustrated – and frustrating as co-participants in SJSU life. Successful faculty and students bring zeal to their tasks, yes, but they never lose sight of the fact that the world is far more complex than their desires, and that they are merely one part of a much more complex universe whose workings often defy easy understanding. A little stoicism – not dour acceptance but a deeper reservoir of patience and humility – goes a long way in this life we have chosen.

Emerson and Over-Soul

Continuing my lecture-prep on Emerson, I have been drawn back to his essay, “The Over-Soul.” Here are a few quotations that rose to great me this morning:

“Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Always our being is descending into us from we know not whence” (p. 189).

“I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine” (p. 189).

“When I watch that flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up, and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the visions come” (p. 189).

[One ought to] “speak from his character and not from his tongue” (p. 189).

“We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE” (pp. 189-190).

“We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole of which these are the shining parts, is the soul” (p. 190).

“When it breathes through his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love” (p. 191).

“All reform aims in some one particular to let the great soul have its way through us; in other words, to engage us to obey” (p. 191).

“The influence of the senses has, in most men, overpowered the mind to that degree, that the walls of time and space have come to look real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits is, in the world, the sign of insanity. Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul” (p. 192).

“[The soul] converses with truths that have always been spoken in the world, and becomes conscious of a closer sympathy with Zeno and Arrian, than with persons in the house” (p. 194).

“Speak to his heart, and the man becomes suddenly virtuous” (p. 195).

“[The over-soul] arches over [individuals] like a temple, this unity of thought, in which every heart beats with nobler sense of power and duty, and thinks and acts with unusual solemnity. All are conscious of attaining to a higher self-possession” (p. 196).

“We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its manifestations of its own nature, by the term Revelation. These are always attended by the emotion of the sublime. For this communication is an influx of the Divine mind into our mind” (pp. 198-199, emphasis in original).

“The moment the doctrine of the immortality is separately taught, man is already fallen” (p. 201).

“The soul is true to itself, and the man in whom it is shed abroad cannot wander from the present, which is infinite, to a future which would be finite” (p. 201).

“No answer in words can reply to a question of things” (p. 201).

“The only mode of obtaining an answer to these questions of the senses is to forego all low curiosity, and, accepting the tide of being which floats us into the secret of nature, work and live, work and live, and all unawares the advancing soul has built and forged for itself a new condition, and the question and the answer are one” (p. 201).

“The intercourse of society, -- its trade, its religion, its friendships, its quarrels, -- is one wide, judicial investigation of character” (p. 202).

“That which we are, we shall teach, not voluntarily but involuntarily” (p. 203).

“Among the multitude of scholars and authors we feel no hallowing presence; we are sensible of a knack and skill rather than of inspiration” (p. 204).

“[The poet’s] greatest communication to our mind is to teach us to despise all he has done” (p. 205).

“Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching” (p. 206).

“Deal so plainly with men and woman as to constrain the utmost sincerity and destroy all hope of trifling with you” (p. 207).

“When we have broken our god of tradition and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with his presence” (p. 207).

“The heart in thee is the heart of all; not a value, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and truly seen, its tide is one” (pp. 208-209).

“More and more the surges of everlasting nature enter into me, and I become public and human in my regards and actions” (p. 210).

“The universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of time” (p. 211).

Emerson's Self-Reliance

Daguerreotype of Ralph Waldo Emerson
from Wikipedia

Preparing for a lecture on Transcendentalism, I enjoyed an opportunity to review Emerson’s beloved essay, Self-Reliance. This is the kind of stuff my mom insisted I should study when I was a kid, but it reads much differently decades later. Some of its impact has slackened, some has sharpened, and some has appeared all at once anew. I’m using an old Apollo Editions collection, so I cannot account for the exactitude of the quotations, but I’m happy to share nonetheless.

Ne te quaesiveris extra: “Do not seek outside yourself” (p. 31).

“To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, -- that is genius” (p. 31)

“In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty” (p. 32).

“We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents” (p. 33).

“How is the boy the master of society; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits… You must court him; he does not court you” (p. 34).

“Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members… Self-reliance is its aversion” (p. 35).

“Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist” (p. 35).

“Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to this or that; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it” (p. 36).

“Your goodness must have some edge to it, -- else it is none” (p. 36).

“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude” (p. 38).

“Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee” (p. 41).

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” (p. 41).

“To be great is to be misunderstood” (p. 41).

“The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag life of a hundred tacks. This is only microscopic criticism. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency” (p. 42).

“All history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons” (p. 44).

“What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded?” (p. 46).

“The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, the essence of virtue, and the essence of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachers are tuitions” (p. 46).

“We first share the life by which things exist and afterwards see them as appearances in nature and forget that we have shared their cause” (p. 46).

“All my willful actions and acquisitions are but roving; -- the most trivial reverie, the faintest native emotion, are domestic and divine” (p. 47).

“The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is profane to seek to interpose helps” (p. 47).

Man “cannot be happy and strong until he… lives with nature in the present, above time” (p. 49).

“And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains unsaid; probably cannot be said; for all that we say is the far off remembering of the intuition… it is a perceiving that Truth and Right are” (pp. 49-50, emphasis added).

“Why then did we prate of self-reliance? Inasmuch as the soul is present there will be power not confident but agent. To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies because it works and is” (pp. 50-51).

“We fancy it rhetoric when we speak of eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is Height, and that a man or a company of men, plastic and permeable to principles, by the law of nature must overpower and ride all cities, nations, kings, rich men, poets, who are not” (p. 51).

“Virtue is the governor, the creator, the reality” (p. 51).

“I see the same law working in nature for conservation and growth. The poise of a planet, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are also demonstrations of the self-sufficing and therefore self-relying soul” (p. 51).

“Isolation must precede true society” (p. 52). 

Marcus Aurelius Meditations

Image from Pierre-Salim

From time to time I will revise and expand this entry, a collection of excerpts from Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, a set of personal notes that the Roman emperor wrote near the end of his life.

These quotations demonstrate Aurelius' commitment to stoicism, a school of philosophy that guided his efforts to lead while maintaining his integrity and humility. These Meditations contributed to Marcus Aurelius' reputation as a philosopher-king (b. 121, reign: 161-180).

While I am currently limited to the Dover Thrift Edition, which is based on the 1862 George Long translation, I plan to bolster these excerpts with the 2002 Gregory Hays translation later this summer. Thereafter I might augment this post with traces from Anthony R. Birley's biography.

Nature

"Nothing is evil that is according to nature." (II:17)

"The universe is transformation; life is opinion." (IV:3)

"For the stone that has been thrown up it is no evil to come down, nor indeed any good to have been carried up." (IX:17)

"If there is a god, all is well; and if chance rules, do not also be governed by it." (IX:28)

"Time is like a river made up of the events that happen, and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place, and this will be carried away too." (IX:43) [See also V:23, VI:15, VII:19, and IX:29]

Virtue

"The same man can be both most resolute and yielding." (I:8)

"Do what is necessary... A man should take away not only unnecessary arts, but also unnecessary thoughts so that superfluous acts will not follow after." (IV:24)

"Good fortune is good disposition of the soul, good emotions, good actions." (V:36)

"Consider yourself to be dead, and to have completed your life up to the present time; and to live, according to nature, the remainder that is allowed you." (VII:56)

"He who pursues pleasure as good and avoids pain as evil is guilty of impiety." (IX:1)

"Wipe out imagination: check desire: extinguish appetite: keep the ruling faculty in its own power." (IX:7) [but also see V:26]

"The universal cause is like a winter torrent: it carries everything along with it. But how worthless are all these poor people who are engaged in matters political, and, as they suppose, are playing the philosopher! All drivelers. Well then, man: do what nature now requires. Set yourself in motion, if it is in your power, and do not look about you to see if any one will observe it; nor yet expect Plato’s Republic: but be content if the smallest thing goes on well, and consider such an event to be no small matter. For who can change men’s opinions? And without a change of opinions what else is there than the slavery of men who groan while they pretend to obey? Come now and tell me of Alexander and Philip and Demetrius and Phalerum. They themselves shall judge whether they discovered what the common nature required, and trained themselves accordingly. But if they acted like tragic heroes, no one has condemned me to imitate them. The work of philosophy is simple and modest. Do not draw me aside into pomposity." (IX:29)

"The spherical form of the soul maintains its figure, when it is neither extended towards any object, nor contracted inwards, nor dispersed nor sinks down, but is illuminated by light, by which it sees the truth, the truth of all things and the truth that is in itself." (XI:12)

"Make yourself like Empedocles' sphere, 'All round, and in its joyous rest reposing.' And if you shalt strive to live only what is really your life, that is, the present, then you will be able to pass that portion of life that remains for you up to the time of your death, free from perturbations, nobly, and obedient to your own daemon [to the god that is within you]." (XII:3)

Oratory

"I did not fall into the hands of any sophist, and I did not waste my time on writers of histories, or in the resolution of syllogisms." (I:17)

"Let us try to persuade men. But act even against their will when the principles of justice lead that way." (VI:50)

"Speak both in the senate and to every man, whoever he may be, appropriately, without affectation: use plain discourse." (VIII:30)

"No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such." (X:16)

"Remember that this which pulls the strings is the thing that is hidden within: this is the power of persuasion." (X:38)

"You are a slave: free speech is not for you.'" (XI:30) [This is a quotation cited by Aurelius.]

Endurance

"Do the external things that fall upon you distract you? Give yourself time to learn something new and good, and cease to be whirled around." (II:7)

"Take away the complaint, 'I have been harmed,' and the harm is taken away." (IV:7) [see also VIII:47]

"Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear." (V:18)

"In one respect man is the nearest thing to me, so far as I must do good to men and endure them. But so far as some men make themselves obstacles to my proper acts, man becomes to me one of the things that are indifferent, no less than the sun or wind or a wild beast. Now it is true that these may impede my action, but they are no impediments to my affects and disposition, which have the power of acting conditionally and changing: for the mind converts and changes every hindrance to its activity into an aid; and so that which is a hindrance is made a furtherance to an act; and that which is an obstacle on the road helps us along this road." (V:20)

"The best way of avenging yourself is not to become like the wrongdoer." (VI:6)

"'A cucumber is bitter.' Throw it away. 'There are briars in the road.' Turn aside from them. This is enough. Do not add, 'And why were such things made in the world?'" (VIII:50)

"One man prays thus: How might I sleep with that woman? Do you pray: How shall I not desire to sleep with her? Another prays thus: How shall I be released from this? Another prays: How shall I not desire to be released?" (IX:40)

Order

"The intelligence of the universe is social. Accordingly it has made the inferior things for the sake of the superior, and it has fitted the superior to one another. You see how it has subordinated, co-ordinated, and assigned to everything its proper portion and has brought together into concord with one another the things that are the best." (V:30)

"We are all working together to one end, some with knowledge and design, and others without knowing what they do, like sleeping men, who are, according to Heraclitus, laborers and cooperators in the things that take place in the universe." (VI:42)

"That which is not good for the swarm is not good for the bee either." (VI:54)

"All things are mutually intertwined, and the bond is holy; and there is hardly anything unconnected with any other thing. For things have been coordinated, and they combine to form one universal order." (VII:9) [See also IV:45]

Cosmopolitanism

"If the intellectual is common to all men, so is reason, in respect of which we are rational beings: if this is so, common also is the reason that commands us what to do, and what not to do; if this is so, there is a common law also; if this is so, we are fellow-citizens; if this is so, we are members of some political community; if this is so, the world is in a manner a state." (IV:4) [See also X:15, XII:26, and XII:36]

"My city and country, so far as I am Antoninus, is Rome; but so far as I am a man, it is the world." (VI:44)