quit lit, quit it

As you are probably aware, Dear Reader, there is a scintillating sub-genre of academic writing devoted solely to the experience of leaving the academy: colloquially called "quit lit." For the most part these essays are either written by tenure-track faculty members decrying the inability of those in charge (academic associations, administrators) to create more faculty positions or by tenuously-employed adjuncts lamenting the inability of those in charge (tenured professors, administrators) to create more faculty positions. There is a lot of grieving and shame and heartbreak. The academy is crumbling! The humanities are dying! It's all someone's fault! There is no trace of humor or self-depreciation anywhere to be found.

These articles are hilariously misguided, but I read them anyway, mostly for the sheer joy of muttering emphatically to myself while doing so. Basically, my take is that anyone who thinks it's the responsibility of academic associations or administrators or faculty who were tenured pre-1990 to somehow create jobs in the worst humanities labor market in the history of forever is straight up craaazy.

Crazy not because they want to be professors, but for a much more pedestrian reason: they are not acknowledging reality. I am no expert, but even I know the truth! And the truth is that nothing will change for the better in the humanities job market until two things happen simultaneously: 1) more undergrads start studying the humanities, and 2) the labor market of PhDs willing to teaching those students for little or no pay disappears. That's it, guys! That's the whole show. Students need to want to study medieval English poetry and you and 499 of your closest grad school buds cannot agree to teach them for $1000 a class and no health insurance. But neither of these things is remotely happening right now, and no amount of faculty awareness or administrative layoffs will make it true. (Even if you succeeded in cutting administrative positions (which everyone seems to think is a great idea that will solve every problem in higher education, despite the fact that faculty don't even want to run a meeting, much less a department) the leftover cash will just go to that fancy new data science institute anyway, so think again.)

However! There is one article, Pilgrim at Tinder Creek, which is not only the best but perhaps the only good example of quit lit. It's a meditation on the similarities between the academic job market and Tinder, and when I read it I was really mad, but only at myself because I wish I had written it. (Alas, I've never been on the academic job market or on Tinder, so there was no way I could have, but...envy is always irrational, right?) It's funny and self-deprecating and sad and makes no claims about solving any kind of crisis.

The author, Andrew Kay, has written a follow-up which does not disappoint: a couple years out from his adventures on the job market, he travels to the latest MLA meeting and, fortified by booze, surveils the current state of his former profession. He meets with his dissertation advisor for what amounts to a therapy session, randomly chats people up at the hotel bar, and de-briefs with his grad school friends via video chat. It's worth reading.

And his article reminded me again why I liked his first essay so much: he's not angry. He's just sort of occasionally sad and feels like he's lost an intellectual home. He muses rhetorically at one point about maybe trying to find a reading group of retirees with whom he could discuss extremely difficult poetry and eat rice krispies treats. The aptness of this joking aside is greater than the sum total of combined insights in the rest of these essays: this is precisely what most people really miss when they leave academia, a community of people to talk about obscure books and eat snacks with. I too want to conjure up a reading group with whom I will discuss esoteric philosophy and eat donuts. Admitting this feels kind of small and sad, though, so no one says it.

Instead quit lit authors try to diagnose "the crisis" and rail against the injustices of the labor market, and in doing so they just throw up fancy jazz hands up around what remains: due to forces outside their control, they can't find a way to get paid to read and think about the things they want to read and think about. To me this is not an injustice, but rather a small, sad truth. It's not necessarily less important for being small and sad, but it is ultimately more personal than structural. The problems of the humanities and higher education are not a conspiracy: they are simply unfortunate. But if we raise up every disappointment to the level of injustice, and every personal defeat is treated like a systemic crisis, then no one will ever get to just feel sad about the whole thing, start esoteric book clubs, and move on with their lives. 

Midwest College Town, USA

Some thoughts about my first couple weeks living in Midwest College Town, USA:

• There are hills here. Not steep ones, but still: hills! This sounds totally insane, but the one thing I was dreading about moving back to the midwest was the total flatness of the place. Something about it just really bummed me out when I lived in Chicago. But it turns out that my understanding of the midwest was paltry, because some parts of it are not as flat as a pancake. 
• Real winter is kind of great. I always knew that DC was the south (and it is, no question) but living there for so long I forgot what it's like to live in a place where snow isn't considered a natural disaster. You can check back with me about this in April when it's still snowing, but for now I'm enjoying my first actual winter in a long time. 
• There appears to be no crime here. I am kind of stunned by this. I mean, people leave strollers and shovels and furniture out on their front porch and assume no one will steal it! And no one does! In the parking lot at the grocery store the other day, someone left their car running with a dog inside and just walked away. And as far as I know no one got in the car and drove away with it (and the dog). Josh still insists on triple locking every door, but I'm fairly certain we could just leave the doors open and be totally fine. 
• There are so many grocery stores here, it almost feels like overkill. Within a ten minute drive of our house we have a Kroger, an enormous Meijer, Whole Foods, Target, and three nice independent grocery stores. I had a great grocery set up in DC, but this kind of choice boggles my mind. I honestly don't understand why a smaller town would have more grocery options than a big city? It seems counterintuitive. 
• My life as an unemployed person looks very similar to my life as a graduate student. Granted, living in a college town means it's hard not to feel like everyone is at school, but it's undeniable that my default lifestyle is very grad school-ish. Right now, for instance, I have a whole stack of books to read (what else is unemployment for? when else will I have time to read Paradise Lost?) and a nice comfy spot in the graduate student library. I'm carrying my backpack around campus and buying terrible student coffee, and...it's pretty great. The best part: none of these undergrads are at all interested in asking me questions about their paper on Rousseau. 

no place like home

When I moved to DC in late August of 2009, I was not very excited to be back. (I lived in DC during high school and had never planned to return.) I drove down from New York in a rented truck with my soon-to-be-ex-roommate. She dropped me off at my apartment and helped me unload my paltry amount of stuff, and when she left I walked a couple blocks to the nearest Safeway, where I proceeded to wander through the aisles, crying. I was sad about leaving my roommate (she was moving to London) and my whole family (who were back in New York). But I think I was most sad about leaving New York itself—I loved New York like it was a person I couldn't live without.

I still love New York like it's a person I can't live without. (I tend towards melodrama occasionally.) When people find out I'm originally from there, the most common question they ask me is whether New York is better than DC. This is a dumb question, and the honest answer is no—there is objectively no better or worse, the two places are very different. The question people don't ask me, but should, is whether I personally like New York better than DC. The honest answer to that question is, unfortunately, yes. I admit that it doesn't make much sense: New York is an extremely difficult place to live. Loving New York is like loving an interesting but tragically high-maintenance person—the rewards may outweigh the hassle occassionally, but you need a lot of patience. Most people shouldn't sign up for that life.

Despite my tragic love for the place, I don't regret leaving New York. I like DC a lot, and it's been very good to me for the last 9.5ish years. I've made a lot of good friends, eaten a lot of good meals, and read a lot of good books. I met Josh here (still a mark in the "plus" column, in case you were wondering). I wouldn't trade my years in DC for anything. It would be very easy to stay here forever.

I realized a couple years ago that most people who have lived in a place for this long do decide to stay indefinitely. Friends who moved here when I did either left years ago or bought houses and put down roots. I could never quite picture putting down roots here—I'm sure I could have, but I realize now that I would have had to actually decide to do it. And it never happened. It's like I've been dating DC for 9.5 years and we're breaking up because I could never quite bring myself to propose.

Moving here for grad school turned out to be the right decision. I had no idea if it would turn out okay at the time—hence the crying in Safeway—but in retrospect, it really did. And now I'm leaving DC for a new town, for similarly worthwhile reasons, and I don't know if it will turn out okay this time, either. I may cry in another supermarket at some point, but I've come to realize there are worse things that can happen to a person. 

things I've learned while preparing to move, cont'd

I found the combination lock I used in high school today and, incredibly, I still remember the combination. I found the lock, thought to myself, "oh, this must be the one I used in high school" and then the numbers just popped into my brain. But last week, I forgot how old I was. The brain is a mysterious thing. And I wish I had thought to memorize something more useful when I was 17, because apparently I would still be able to remember it now. 

things I've learned while preparing to move

1. Most people don't own 400 books. Or even 200 books. So if you tell a moving company you have about 700 books (I did a rough count), they will use this information to charge you extra. Which might be reasonable, when you consider what 700 books must weigh. 
2. Almost all the furniture we own was procured either a) for free with imperfections (bookcases that sat in a flooded basement, a table missing a drawer, etc) or b) secondhand. This is to say: it's quite possible that we will end up paying more to move our stuff than it took to purchase all that stuff. This feels somehow undignified. 
3. When I met Josh, he had basically no furniture and all of his many books and DVDs were piled on the floor of his apartment. And when I moved in with Josh, I brought with me basically just books, a bookcase, some rugs, and my clothes. We are clearly not interested in having stuff (except books), and yet together we have somehow accumulated enough furniture for it to be a hassle. Perhaps this is the definition of adulthood? You are an adult when, even unintentionally, you collect too much stuff to transport by car? 

those who enjoy or suffer one another

“I thought love meant equality,” she said, “and free companionship.”

“Ah, equality!” said the Director. “We must talk of that some other time...Equality is not the deepest thing, you know.”

“I always thought that was just what it was. I thought it was in their souls that people were equal.”

“You were mistaken,” said he gravely. “That is the last place where they are equal. Equality before the law, equality of incomes—that is very well. Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food. You might as well try to warm yourself with a bluebook."

“But surely in marriage . . . ?”

“Worse and worse,” said the Director.

“Courtship knows nothing of it; nor does fruition. What has free companionship to do with that? Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not. Do you not know how bashful friendship is? Friends—comrades—do not look at each other. Friendship would be ashamed...”

—C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength

the &^#!@(* side of history, cont'd

From a recent essay by Jon Baskin, a portion of which includes an excellent meditation on my least favorite idea:

"The notion that history has a definite direction, and that only some people are on the "right side" of it, has always been attractive to intellectuals on the left; among other things, it offers a clear cause and mission to those of us prone to worry about being decadent or superfluous. On the other hand, it makes history into a bus that will run us all over at some point...and it threatens to render intellectual debate a strictly intramural affair. If politics is a war between the allies and the enemies of history, then arguing in good faith with the losers can only be either a sign of weakness or a waste of time. It's a high-theory variant of the mindset that animated our in-house demographers at the Center [for American Progress], who used to delight in proving, with the aid of laser pointers and the latest in data analytics, that there was no reason to consider the arguments of red-state Bush voters, since they would all be dead soon. This was 2004."

It is delightful have my views on the "right side of history" upheld so perfectly—an extremely rare delight!—so my sincere thanks to Jon Baskin. I would, however, encourage him to go further: I would say that the idea of right side of history is not just attractive to those on the left, but to all humans who wish to feel secure in their ideological worldview, which is to say: pretty much everyone. (Myself included—no one in their right mind writes a whole dissertation about an idea they find uncompelling.)

Baskin is correct to call out the left in particular, however, insofar as the phrase, "the right side of history" has a progressive pedigree. I applaud the right for avoiding the phrase, if only because it irks me mightily, but the idea is still everywhere in right-leaning thought. It's just that, for the right, history is regressive, a story of the slow withering of ideals, moral character, and general uprightness. And for the left, the story of history is the slow flowering of inclusion, enlightenment, and general wellbeing. For both sides, these tendencies are inexorable, born along by trends so all-encompassing that they seep into our mass consciousness and shape our material lives without any effort on our part. The end result is that all you, Dear Reader, need to do to ensure history happens is to jump aboard ship (the correct ship!) and dip the very tip of your oar in the water. You don't need to get sweaty at all, and there's no need to consult the map; just watch your cable news channel of choice, send out a few choice tweets, and bask in the glow of historical righteousness.

I've had people dismiss my argument about this by pointing out that if we were so sure we knew where we were headed, we wouldn't all be so anxious about the other side winning. But the anxiety is not about history, which we're pretty sure of, it's about ourselves. For the left, the right can't possibly succeed in the long-term because their goals are ultimately too small-minded, bigoted, and backwards; for the right, the left can't possibly prevail because their goals are ultimately too depraved and untraditional. Even the victory of the opposing side actually spells their defeat; they might be winning now, we think to ourselves, but it'll end badly and we'll right the ship. What makes us anxious is the everyday impact of these short-term reversals: what if the other side doesn't lose until after my 401K is wiped out? What if the other side wins before I can buy enough guns to form a well-regulated militia? What if the disaster happens before my kids need student loans? What if my life is inconvenienced by those idiots over there who chose the wrong boat?! 

Baskin is quite right that this view has the terrible outcome of making history into a bus that will run us over: we don't want to ask difficult questions, or listen to the idiots in the other boat, because it's all a waste of time—history will straighten them out in the end, so why bother? But what Baskin might be discounting is the great comfort we find in this approach to history, and by extension, in ideology—even if we're about to be squashed like bugs, at least we know where we're headed, and we can plan for the approaching impact. It's a comfort that's utterly wrongheaded and breeds terrible politics, but a comfort that is nearly impossible to discard.