Getting Out of Town

I've been doing a great deal of whining lately, and probably what I need to do is just get away for a bit. Only that's a lot easier said than done around here.

Almost wherever I lived as a child, "out of town" was anywhere from a couple of hundred yards to a short drive away. In Cottonwood, the first real home I remember--even though it was my grandparents' and not my parents'--we were already out of town. In fact, the nearest real town (where I was born) was several miles up the road. Our house was next to the L. A. Aqueduct, but outside the compound of houses in which the power-plant workers lived, there was wilderness. Desert, to be more exact, on the verge of mountains (Sierras), with broad vistas across the Owens Lake and the Inyos beyond. Only a couple of ridges away lay Death Valley. We actually had to be on the lookout for mountain lions and snakes, and had to be careful not to fall into the aqueduct if we didn't want to get to the San Fernando Valley the hard way. The aqueduct is one reason why the land was so empty then; mining operations around the turn of the century had built settlements on the lake, like Keeler pictured below, which are now ghost towns or nearly so. The end of profitable mining and the drying of the river coincided to wreak economic devastation on the inhabitants.

After my grandfather died and my grandmother moved to Lone Pine, she lived on the east side of town, only a block away from more desert, this time closer to the Inyos than the Sierras. But if I wanted to be by myself or just go for a walk, all I had to do was get over a barbed wire fence and I was beyond the pale. Often, my grandmother and I would hop in her old Chevy and go for a ride in the Alabama Hills, a primeval landscape of weathered granite boulders now popular as a venue for space opera movies and SUV commercials. A few folks live up in there, but mostly it's open land. I took Beloved Spouse there for a ride the last time we were in Lone Pine, and we found a decomposing cow carcass. Some poor bovine got through a fence and couldn't get back, so she got stuck and died.

In Taiwan, after my parents moved us to Yang Ming Shan (most of which is now a national park), each of the three different houses we lived in over three years was within yards of a trail into the mountains. I often went out hiking alone (a true free-range child, I think), on one of the trails, or across the endless rice paddies that stepped up each hill. I'm pretty sure folks knew where I was most of the time, due to an active local grapevine, but I felt free and powerful and on my own. At the time I was reading through Enid Blyton's repertoire of stories about children caught up in adventures with pirates and smugglers, and I was pretty sure this was as close as I would get.

Nowadays, if I want to get away, I can still drive a bit north and east, but that's the only possible direction. As Dallas inexorably sprawls northward, it's bleeding through Richardson and Plano and Allen, and what little open space separates us is rapidly being filled in by new housing developments and shopping malls. I'm not altogether unhappy about one of these, because it's going to mean a bookstore (albeit a Borders; in a town of 150,000 we only have two others--Half Price Books and a single antique book seller on the Square in downtown McKinney) and a Whole Foods Market. But it also means that all the open land that made this place tolerable thirty years ago (when we used to take the kids out on Sunday drives in the country, and when their Montessori school was located on an acre out in the middle of nowhere) is nearly gone. Leaving me with, quite literally, nowhere to go. I'm just not willing to spend the gas and enlarge my footprint that much just for a short-lived jaunt down a country lane and a depressing ride back to reality.

This has probably sparked my willingness to let part of my property go wild, and let it become whatever it wants. If I can't get to the country, a few trees and some wild plants bring it to me. This will have to do for now, I suppose, although we both fantasize about open ranchland in Paraguay after seeing an episode of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, or a trip into the mountains after watching Sunrise Earth and seeing moose in the middle of a Teton lake.

What still amazes me is my memory of flying west to Olympia last year for my Aunt and Uncle's fiftieth wedding anniversary party. I fly reluctantly, not really believing in aerodynamic theory, and am pretty white-knuckled for the entire trip. But I was glued to the window, watching mile after mile of open space drift by beneath me. There's still lots of sparsely occupied property in this country, and an abundance of uninhabited land. If you don't believe me, spend a few hours on Google Earth, traveling west on a line from Dallas to Seattle. One reason that there's anything left is, of course, due to a general scarcity of water. But those of us who love the desert would be happy with a trickle of stream and an expanse of openness. It puts things into perspective in a way nothing but a trip into space or a sailboat in open ocean can quite replicate.

We are, after all, only a speck--a mote, as they say, in the eye of God. Our sheer numbers and proximity to one another help convince us of an importance that's really only transitory and ephemeral. We're powerful enough to mess things up pretty well, but probably not powerful enough to do everything in. The earth does abide--as we could see much better if we could only get the hell out of Dodge once in a while and spend some uncivilized time in some of that open space.

Photos: A road in the Owens Valley, near Big Pine and Uhlmeyer Spring, taken in 2006; two photos from Aquafornia's Flickr photostream of the LA aqueduct: the old Pittsburgh Plate Glass factory on Owens Lake, where my father once worked, and a picture of the aqueduct intake from whence the Owens River water gets sent south to the Haiwee Reservoir; the Alabama Hills by Daniel Mayer, via Wikimedia Commons; an old photo of Keeler, California, from an unknown source; a WikiTravel shot of Yang Ming Shan, up the road from where we lived.

Summer Daze

Were there some rain in the forecast, I could probably break out of the dog days a bit more easily. Rain has a way of freshening things, even if it provides only a brief respite from heat and usually means a rise in humidity. Earlier in the week, when I saw tropical depression/storm Edouard forming in the gulf and heading into the Houston area and tracking north, I was somewhat optimistic. A small storm can bring relief without much damage, but we only got a couple days' worth of cloud cover from it. The temperature did get low enough (mid-90s) to keep me from turning on the A/C for the duration; today, however, things are back to normal, and the animals are draped all over the house like limp fur rugs.

Even last night's spectacular opening ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics offered only an evening's worth of distraction. But they were cool in the metaphorical sense--though clearly not in the literal sense. Leave it to Zhang Yimou to put on the most spectacular of events and to combine tradition and state-of-the-art technology to dazzle us and bring a tear of gratitude to the eye of someone who still hasn't shed the spell of things Chinese.

I had, in fact, only a day earlier, ploitered (there's that lovely word again) away a morning by looking at northern Taiwan on Google Earth, trying to figure out where I had lived as a youngster. I'm getting closer, I think, although it's probably a fruitless search, given the forty-five years that have passed since I left. But it's fun, and every time I try it, the images are better. As much as I want us to start doing a better job of evaluating our technologies before we adopt them, I can't help but be amazed by what we've learned to do in the past half century--including the incredible electronic scroll that rolled out in the middle of the Bird's Nest stadium last night.

Here at home about the only beings who seem to be enjoying my back yard these days are the birds. I'm trying to be really conscientious about filling up the watering holes for them, and there are, at this moment, several flocks hopping around on the lawn looking for bugs in the grass (which is still a bit damp from having been watered last night), and a few individuals bathing themselves energetically outside my window. If I were slightly more energetic, I'd head to Target to see if I could find an inflatable kiddie pool on sale for a few bucks, fill it up, and go join them.

But I'm too lazy even to do that. The most physical thing I can manage this afternoon is moving my fingers across the keyboard. I'm still working on assessment strategies for my classes, and trying to strike a balance between satisfying the administration and sticking to my philosophical guns about what education's all about. It astounds me that with all my experience and training, and my love of my subject matter and my students, and my assurance from those who contact me years down the line to tell me that yes, I have in fact enriched their lives--that somehow it's not enough. I have to produce numbers, because quantification is now everything.

It's fortunate that my particular institution recognizes this tension and tries to help us negotiate the obstacle course laid out by the all-powerful accreditation machine, but all of our effort is really directed toward making it easier for outsiders to understand what we're doing. They can't come in and spend a couple of weeks actually attending classes, talking to instructors and students within the learning context, and discussing how we construct our classes, how we evaluate our students, what we are trying to accomplish, and how to do a better job when they find things lacking. They want grids and charts and rubrics. They trust not, because they believe only in the myth of objectivity, and not in the reality of meaning. And education is all about meaning.

And so I plod. Instead of spending the time augmenting my knowledge about my field and learning new things to pass on to my students, or discovering new ideas about what the past meant to those who lived it, I labor to translate what I do into something measurable.

Oh, to hell with it. I'm going to ice up a pitcher of tea, take a book, and go out and join the birds in the shade, under a tree. That's the way to spend a summer day.

Image Credit: Another Cézanne translation, this time into an Art Nouveau version, from the summer of 2006, by Kevin O'Flaherty.

Walking in Place

Perhaps it's simply the season--the lethargy and inertia that emerges in the heat of summer--or maybe it's the specter of change in the work environment that shadows my teaching life these days, but I can't seem to get much done today. To paraphrase (badly) Bob Dylan, I ain't goin' nowhere.

In the first place, it's getting hot. In a house without central air conditioning, temperatures over 100 can be debilitating--even when some of the rooms have window units that keep them cool enough. These days we're only using two rooms--the bedroom and the study. We'd probably leave the bedroom out of the equation, except at night, but we have an old cat (18 years) who doesn't like to come downstairs. The other three feline members of the family occupy open window sills and the grate where an old heating unit used to be housed, but which is now simply open to the space under the house. The attic fans pull cool air up through it, and at least one cat can be found lounging on it all day. The dogs stay in the study where we do most of our work, and which is curtained off with a portière from the rest of the house so they can still run out and bark at the mail carrier and any passing dogs or baby strollers that have the effrontery to use the sidewalk in front. I've jacked the thermostat on the units up to 83, which is quite comfortable, but it's really hard to get any work done in any other part of the house.

The summer quarter is in full swing, and my students are, so far, engaging and hard-working; but the department in which I teach is bereft of a director at the moment, and the search for a new one entails a certain amount of angst among the affected faculty. Because ours is a proprietary school, run by a corporation interested in its profit margin, we tremble at the notion of being saddled with martinet fixated on assessment and student retention, rather than on the problems of teaching the liberal arts in an institution that tries hard not to be seen as a trade school, but is still ambivalent about the necessity of what we do. While all this is going on, I'm spending most of my non-teaching time revising lectures to make them more visually exciting in order to combat student prejudices against history courses. The past just isn't immediately relevant to these guys, so I have to show them how cool it all really is--in 100 images or fewer per week.

But even the rather pleasurable task of finding some new images for my upcoming Vienna Secession/Art Nouveau lecture hasn't been enough to stave off entropy, and I was busy procrastinating this morning (by playing with my new printer/scanner, reading today's New York Times online, and sorting through my image library). In the Times I ran into a review of Ammon Shea's new book, Reading the OED--about reading through the entire Oxford English Dictionary. Since noodling through my compact edition of the OED is one of my favorite ways to ploiter ("work to little purpose"--a word mentioned in Nicholson Baker's article), I enjoyed both reading the review and checking out Shea's minimalist web page.

Later, while revisiting my image library (which is, as it turns out, enormous--about 5000 strong), I ran across the results of a workshop my students used to do at midterm. Before, that is, the assessment regime caught up with me and I had to start administering exams to gauge their progress on course objectives. At any rate, the assigned task involved setting up a still life patterned after an impressionist or post-impressionist painting, taking a digital photograph of the results, and then manipulating the photo back into an image in the style of a nineteenth-century art movement. It was always fun, and the results were often brilliant; and now I'm thinking of making it a segment of the exam.

The still-lifes were usually patterned on works by Paul Cézanne or Vincent van Gogh, and usually involved plates of fruit, pitchers or glasses, and table cloths. But at one point I brought in my hiking boots and a copy of van Gogh's painting of his shoes--made philosophically notorious by Martin Heidegger's essay, The Origin of the Work of Art. I've used some of the results to illustrate this post--and included Wikipedia's image of the painting here for comparison.


Just this week I have been newly amazed with the creativity our students muster, especially in light of tight deadlines, heavy work-loads, and an accelerated program. While sitting in on a colleague's course in Conceptual Typography, I have spent the last three weeks (four hours per week) trying to keep up with these kids, and not doing a very good job of it. The software is difficult for an old fart (Adobe Illustrator and In Design, neither of which I had even opened before the course began), the assignments are challenging (although rather fun), and the students' solutions are always far more creative and energetic than mine are. Still, I can see how what I'm trying to teach them can help them to ground their creativity and perhaps make some new connections.

So now, having completed my ploitering for the day, I'm inspired to get back to work on the lecture. At least until the sun hits the west windows and I'm forced to close the shades and retire from the heat with a cold beer in front of the A/C.

Image credits: Midterm workshop in History of Art and Design II, Summer 2006: Amy Saunders, Brent Hollon, Lucy Miron, [Vincent van Gogh], and Tiffany Obenhaus. Click on the images for larger views that show them off quite a bit better than the thumbnails do.