Leisurely Labor, Laborious Leisure

It’s May Day! The day before my birthday! The pagan fertility holiday! International Workers’ Day! And as I draw (sort of) nearer to the end of my career as a graduate student, I have been exploring career options, soul searching, and imagining what my life might be like  when my doctoral degree is proverbially in hand (but really hanging on my wall). In short, I have been thinking about labor: What is it? How is it compensated? What “counts” as legitimate labor in the world I inhabit? I have more or less decided that I do not want to follow in the footsteps of Professor X, but am still uncertain about what kind of labor I would like to engage in, or what I want to be when I grow up.

Labor: The word implies difficult work, putting a great deal of effort into something. But it is also the term for the process of child birth, suggesting that while labor is difficult and even painful, it is also productive, vital.

The carpenter labors. We know, because we can see the house he has built. We hear him driving nails, see his back bend beneath the weight of boards and bricks. We can quantify his work, and reimburse him with a paycheck. We understand the labor that others do by the products they create and through our imaginative empathy for their efforts. When we benefit from someone else’s labor, are we not grateful? Within that very sentiment, we acknowledge and affirm our own belief that labor is the not-fun, not-pleasant enemy of leisure. But are we right to do so?

Leisure: Free time, in the sense of being both unoccupied and unpaid. What we do at our leisure, we do for our own enjoyment, for the pleasure it brings us. These activities are their own reward, or so we are told.

But labor and leisure are a false dichotomy that is based on the way that others compensate us for our time. What if I write a magazine article, and I put a great deal of effort or labor into it, but I also enjoy that effort? Maybe the story I craft becomes a blueprint of narrative in my reader’s imagination. Perhaps I select and join my words in such a way that they are like irregular stones which are cemented together, forming a firm foundation upon which a literary image can be built. If I do this for free (like I do in this blog), is this a laborious leisure activity? If I get paid to write the article, is it leisurely labor? This blog: what is it? If you read it, and you gain some pleasure or insight from the text, are you not glad that you have read it? Are you not also grateful (as you would be to the carpenter) that you did not have to do the writing (or building) yourself?

The Utterly Naïve "Artist" Redux: The Re-Artening

I'm pleased to announce that I'll be participating in my second art show this weekend; at the Des Lee Gallery, 1627 Washington Avenue in St. Louis. Another of my collages has been accepted in this year's Washington University graduate student art show, Parabola. The show opens Friday, 11/30 from 6pm-9pm, and can also be viewed on Saturday, 12/1 from 1pm-6pm.

If you're in St. Louis this weekend, please stop by. Parabola is always a fun event and here are some pictures of me and Laura Isaac arting it up at the show last year. (Photos courtesy of Laura Isaac, who is a fabulous artist; follow the link to check out her thoughtful and beautiful work).

If for some reason you can't attend the show--maybe you exist in some incompatible spatio-temporal dimension, or you have been called away on an urgent mission to forge peace in a war-torn land, or you can't walk because your bookie broke your legs (always pay the man on time!)--below you'll find a photographic facsimile of the collage I submitted, along with a description of the piece.

Dissertation Citation, mixed media collage, 9" x 12"

The academic dissertation is the culminating project in any Ph.D. program in the humanities. It must summarize and scrutinize the scholarship to date on the given topic, while also contributing some original and useful knowledge to the field. The writer accumulates knowledge, selects, cites, and interrogates the existing body of scholarship in order to construct this new work. Citations form the intellectual genealogy behind the dissertation; they are the breadcrumbs leading both writer and reader through the forest of research, thought, and literary labor that constitutes the Ph.D. 

Dissertation Citation is a mixed media collage that represents the intellectual work of dissertation writing. As a medium, collage is an act of visual citation. By selecting images and words from printed materials and arranging them in an original way, the collage recontextualizes familiar images and forms, inviting the viewer to scrutinize them with fresh eyes. It is a process of composition done via editing and creative reorganization. 

In Dissertation Citation, pages from magazines, business cards, maps, credit card receipts, museum tickets, advertisements, transit cards, and other ephemera constitute a series of frames within frames. Each layer becomes both an object of inquiry in itself, as well as a contextualizing frame through which to view the subsequent layers. Within the regimented rectangles, randomized bits of color and texture combine in surprising ways, forming unexpected symmetries and patterns. These layers emphasize the analytical rigor, as well as the creative serendipity, that are necessary to write the dissertation.

Professor X and Student Z: A Weird Academic Discourse, Or, A Very UnEnlightened Exchange

Oh Noble Reader! Please know that of what follows: All is true. For the mind yet unsullied by graduate school and the lice-ridden Underbelly of the Academy, read no further, lest your Purest Humanity be corrupted by this all-too faithful depiction of Vice and Cruelty. If, Dear Reader, you have already Fallen into that deep abyss of Highest Education, continue on, and heed not the Example of Professor X.

***

Dear Professor X,

I am eager to schedule the exam for which I have been preparing these several months. I propose date A or date B; please let me know if either of these are amenable.

Best Wishes,

Student Z

***

Dear Student Z,

Exam? Please visit my office so that I can evaluate your level of preparation. Because you have failed to email me as often as I had anticipated, and because I set expectations about your email communications and still chose not to communicate those expectations to you, I had assumed you had left the university.

Best,

Professor X

***

Dear Professor X,

Please accept my sincere apologies for failing to adhere to your expectations for email communication. I have been in contact with Professor B, who I assumed was also in contact with you. It seems like we both made some incorrect assumptions! Wait, you assumed that I had dropped out of school? I find it insulting that you assumed that I had abdicated my responsibilities, rather than assuming that I had my nose buried in books, and that I was focused on my studies. Also, I can't believe that you would assume that I had dropped out of school, and that you made no effort to find out why or if you could help get me back on track. Please do not be offended, but I am not entirely sure that you are human. Or at least not human in the way that other humans might recognize.

Sincerely and apologetically,

Student Z

***

Dear Student Z,

You are insulted? I don't see that you have a right to be pissed at me. I am the one who has a right to be pissed. You did not conform to my secret email standards. I do not understand your approach to graduate school. This is very serious business. I'll have you know that people speak very highly of me. Very highly. I work with lots of people. I do not understand why you think that you have a right to have feelings. Furthermore, I do not understand your suggestion that I am inhuman. What am I, a computer? I will have you know that people speak very highly of me.

Agitatedly,

Professor X

***

Dear Professor X,

Nevermind that I am not pissed and that you are putting words in my mouth. Disappointed and confused? Certainly. May I please implore you to, once again, accept my sincerest apology and inquire how I might mend the situation. I do not intend to fight with you about this. I also speak very highly of you. [Thinking: I also feel somewhat sorry for you, if a lowly graduate student such as myself can offend you to such a degree. I am sorry that you studied at University D with Professor J, and that you will probably never reach his level of notoriety. It is clear that you care greatly about your reputation. I am sorry that providing pragmatic and useful guidance to your students is a task that seems to be beneath you. I am sorry that we are misunderstanding each other so completely.]

Best Wishes,

Student Z

PS Can I please schedule my exam, so that I can get on with my research?

Weird Travels

I know, Dear Reader, you probably find the title of this post to be reductive, redundant, or both.   Reductive, because travel is one of those richly rewarding experiences that I cannot represent accurately using a single adjective.  Redundant, because travel gives us access to a globe of possibilities and (after all) one human's quotidian is another human's weird.  This post, however, will treat a particular subset of travel: the weird in-between world of the tourist experience.  Existing in a temporary limbo in which she is neither at home nor truly abroad, the tourist packs a bag full of dreams and heads off into a kind of parallel universe.  Thanks to the Houston airport baggage claim for making visible the glowing oddity of tourist travel:

Upon arrival in the unknown locale, this parallel universe might seem normal enough.  The laws of physics remain in place; gravity still keeps her feet rooted to the ground.* Faces and food stuffs might seem uncannily similar to the ones she left at home, but also not quite right all at the same time.  The bed in the hotel room seems normal enough.  So does the water in the tap, but something tells her vulnerable digestive system not to drink it.  The towels are still towels, in substance, but they look like this:

She would never mistake towels for fish at home.  But then, she spends such little time thinking about towels, which occupy her cognitive space in proportion to their functionality.  Do they need to be laundered?  Are they waiting for her when she gets out of the shower?  They rarely ever sprout fins . . . at home.

This uncanny sense that the familiar has become foreign is, I think, one of the most interesting aspects of the tourist experience.  And it is most certainly weird.  Don't get me wrong: sight seeing is lovely; encountering new places and people is not only exciting but essential to the maintenance of one's humanity; practicing a foreign language is a humbling and thrilling challenge.  But being forced to reconsider the basics of daily life can cause us to notice them in more detail than we otherwise would.  Can cause us to discover just how unfamiliar they really are. (Like towels... If you live a towel-less lifestyle, substitute some other object.  Maybe a thimble, wooden spoon, or crescent wrench... I don't know what you do at home.)  

There can be a kind of psychic violence in this.  After all, where does it end?  If towels can become unfamiliar, unreliable, perhaps other things can as well.  Perhaps the tourist might find that in this new place, she will become utterly unfamiliar to herself.  While my own recent vacation days in Mexico were spent in relaxing beachy bliss, I had uncharacteristically violent dreams each night.  Normally my subconscious is more Jarmusch than Peckinpah, but this was a solid week of nightly slasher films.  Was this touristic revelation of the daily weird causing a nocturnal mind-war?  I guess it could just as easily have been brought on by my weirdly handless new amiga:

But maybe not.  I brought these gorgeously weird amigos home with me, and my dreams have returned to their typical pacifism:

Here at home, where my brain can safely assume that a towel is just a towel, I suspect that my mind ceases to make war on itself.

And you, Dear Reader, what experiences and thoughts (weird or otherwise) have crossed your path during this summer travel season?  Leave a comment below, and let's compare weird notes.

For some weird photos of the beach in Playa del Carmen, click here.  May your own travels be weird and wonderful!

*Except in the case of interstellar tourism.

Dress Your House, Or, What's in a T-Shirt?

So enough theory, what about praxis?

I had this old Flaming Lips concert t-shirt lurking in one of my drawers for a few years.  Due to the passage of time and the end of the "baby doll" t-shirt trend, it wasn't getting any wear.  But I love the graphic punch and bizarre story it tells; I could never part with it.  Since it had ceased to function as a garment for humans, I thought that it might make a suitable garment for a boring old blue pillow that used to hang out in my living room.  And back in January it became one of my first weird projects of the year.

T-shirt front and back:

After cutting away excess fabric from the t-shirt (which wasn't much, it's a tiny garment), I pinned it right-sides together, and stitched along three of the outer edges, leaving a gap at the bottom.

Then I turned my new pillow cover right-side out, stuffed in the old pillow, and sewed up the bottom by hand.  Voilà...

This makes me so happy. :)

And it earned the Wayne Coyne seal of approval via twitter.

Defamiliarize It

It was Ezra Pound who famously said "Make it new."  Although even I can't seem to figure out where he said it (and I'm supposed to know about these things). As a founder of modernism, the newness inherent in the creative process would be a motivating factor in Pound's writerly aesthetic. 

It was James Brown who said "Make it funky."  Perhaps this is a less fully-formed ethos than Pound's, but on the other hand, maybe it isn't.

Finally, it is I who say, "Make it weird."  Lately I've been very interested in the potential for art to defamiliarize the world; I'm certainly not the first person to find this fascinating, and I take my definition of "defamiliarization" from Viktor Shklovsky, who explains:

"Habituation devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war. . . . And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.  The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived, and not as they are known.  The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged."  From Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays

But it is shocking just how little effort it takes, what a minute adjustment is required to move from blind day-to-day routine to a realization that there is a super amazing world all around us all the time.  It takes only the slight sideways shift of the eye.  So I have been everywhere trying to "make it weird" in the way I look at my surroundings, in the way I use my language, in the way I approach music and the arts.

Here's a defamiliarized tomato: