Why I Can’t Read Novels Anymore

[Or Eat Sitting Down, When Alone;
Spoiler: It’s About Panic]

I hope it’s temporary, my inability to read. Rather, I should call it my disability in reading. I’m actually reading much more perhaps than ever before, since it’s all the time. But it’s so fragmented and erratic. I read news stories, alerts, tweets, threads, threads, threads. It’s twitter and its ilk becoming like rabbits in Australia, taking over. Fragments and bits, all distilled to pungent effects, like so many stabbings of wit and pure essence, pulling us this way and that, leaving us enervated and depleted, and ultimately, unfulfilled.

The old curling up with a novel, and doing so as a routine in my life, over long stretches of time, no longer seems possible. The reading nowadays is forever in snatches, sometimes precipitated by a buzz on the phone, sometimes stolen in a moment of distraction, sometime sought after in a pursuit of something—not sure what—but primarily a distraction. There are distractions that come unbidden, and distractions that are sought after, but whatever the pursuit or activity, all that seems to “be” is … “distraction.” This is my (and our society’s) current state of growing pains at the takeover by cell phones, social media, new journalism, contemporary consumption of culture, the agonizing human condition, the loneliness of modern life, the desperation for remedies, the nostalgia for a simpler, long-form type of life. Nothing is long-form any more. The shelf-life of ideas, dreams, aspirations, plans has shrunk. We scramble and move on, in ways that have lost a defining purpose or value. Why bother, though we don’t ask that, so we just keep the perpetual motion going, till it, mercifully?, stops.

Is this all but the logic, still, of a parent losing a son in his prime, or rather just before his prime?

It is. But it extends far beyond me too. We’re all feeling it in the ennui of 2022, post-pandemic (kinda), post-Trump (kinda), post-analog world, post unconnected world. The frenzy of 24/7 news and communication and being is getting to us all, and it’s not all bad, just mostly.

And I’m so busy, and everyone is in crisis. I have trouble justifying that selfish indulgence of long form reading as a regular part of life. But I worry as I skate along the surfaces of distractions that I am cutting myself off from hope, from possible immersion in that very thing that will cure me, that will help me find solace and understanding and calm—if only through transport to another place, not one of my own creation, a place that can provide healthier “distraction” in realms of greater possibility, where some unseen core of truth or energy will give us something essential for health and hope and joy.

I worry about my inability, our society’s inability, our youths’ inability, to carve out that slow pace, that shutting down, that putting on blinders that is reading. And without reading, I fear for the sanity and peace of the future world. Why can’t we turn away, shut out the outside world, and transport ourselves into that place, whatever/wherever it is, and however created by an author, and let that author and that world carry us along?

I bring this up during my deep dive, maybe halfway into the oeuvre of Margaret Atwood—not in books, but via Audible. So, the novels are being consumed, and at a relatively good rate, but not by reading, sitting, and being alone and focused solely on the book. There’s no underlining in ink. No pausing. No reflection, note-taking, and writing. So, it’s a different experience—again, not wholly negative, or deficient. 

If I’m ever to leave this new “reading” experience (and of course that day is coming, but no need to be morose or lugubrious about it), I’ll miss the performance aspect of the reader. Such pleasure in the human voice telling us a story. Such pleasure in the intonations, the singing, the sound effects, the interpretations. We’ve always had artists putting their stamps on a literary work, when, say the work is translated from the page onto the screen in a movie adaptation, for instance. But there, the interpretive license went too far, sometimes giving directors and other creators too much license to remake the work in their own image. With an Audible book, the interpretation is fully constrained to the author’s words, and the interpretation becomes only an enhancement, not a divergence.

When I was consuming Virginia Woolf on Audible, it was the breathy and beautiful Nicole Kidman who enchanted me through To the Lighthouse, and then it was the less-breathy, but equally enchanting and beautiful Annette Benning taking me through Mrs. Dalloway. I got to know these readers … through their intelligent interpretations, their miraculously deft performances—and my heart swelled with such gratitude. Thank you for doing this for me! Thank you for reading to me. Thank you for the simplicity and elegance of it.

But now I have a problem. I can’t listen to Audible outside the car. I just can’t do it. I can’t hunker down, hour after hour, while at rest, and approximate the old routine of reading. My impatience and distraction and anxiety about “the impending” (no noun to follow, just “the impending”; that’s what has kept me from the old way of reading)—prevented me from listening, despite the profundity of my gratitude. 

I should note an evolution in my Audible life which began last summer with Virginia Woolf. I read my Audible Woolfs, dare I say, on the treadmill (that just sounds wrong) this past summer, when I had time [cough, excuse] to exercise. Now, however, I listen to Audible solely in the car, where fortunately (?), I find myself every day. On my daily commute, and even short errands, I find I am able focus on the words and story, almost fully, but certainly enough to be “carried along”—both by the story and by my auto-pilot driving. Is that auto-pilot phenomenon real? Should I trust it? I can’t be sure…. But where I am now … I need the car; I need to be driving somewhere in order to read. It’s both a pragmatic need, but also metaphorical for the simultaneous escape and purposefulness, or the not having to choose between them. Most of all, it’s where I can give myself permission to “do nothing else” but luxuriate in the possibility of an author’s universe.

As I said at the onset: I hope I it’s temporary, my inability to read. I don’t always want to be driving to read. And the pandemic, which confined me to the house for nearly two years showed me that all my travels, and thus all my books, may evaporate into the ether, without notice. Also, this long-form reading works well for novels—but what about all the other kinds of reading I should return to? Philosophy? Meh, I guess I could do without philosophy; non-fiction works fine on Audible. Maybe I shouldn’t panic … about everything.  

Earlier this week, Atwood recommended against panic. As she accepted the Hutchins Prize (a bit of news I read, alas, old school/new school, as one of those Apple News distractions on my phone): “[D]esperate times require desperate remedies, and our times are desperate. However, instead of all these chariots and swords, I’ll propose something simpler. Don’t panic. Think carefully. Write clearly. Act in good faith. Repeat.” And so I will, but with a voice in my ear and a going someplace, at least for now.

Punch Buggy Hammurabi

Of the many joys Margaret Atwood brings in her unique approach to analysis, commentary, and Explanation of How to Look Wryly and Appreciatively and Quizzically at All Things Human in This Phase of Our Evolution, we get her random set pieces where, in a tour de force, she merges realities of parenting, the Code of Hammurabi, theories of debt, magic, law, fungibility, reciprocity, and more, in a voice that instructs, guides gently, and makes one smile with profound gratitude for this fellow traveler helping us register it all. This one comes from “Ancient Balances” in Burning Questions, her collections of essays from 2004-2021:

…[I]n the 1980s there was a strange ritual among nine-year-old children that went like this: during car rides, you stared out the window until you spotted a Volkswagen Beetle. Then you hit your child companion on the arm, shouting, “Punch-buggy, no punch-backs!” Seeing the Volkswagen Beetle first meant that you had the right to punch the other child, and adding a codicil—“No punch-backs!”—meant that he or she had been done out of the right to punch you in return. If, however, the other child managed to shout “Punch-backs!” before you could yell out your protective charm, then a retaliatory punch was in order. Money was not a factor here: you couldn’t buy your way out of being punched. What was at issue was the principle of reciprocity: one punch deserved another, and would certainly get it unless an Out clause was inserted with the speed of lightning. 

Those who fail to discern in the Punch-buggy ritual the essential lex talionis form of the almost four-thousand-year-old Code of Hammurabi—reformulated as the Biblical eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-a-tooth law—are blind indeed. Lex talionis means, roughly, “the law of retribution in kind or suitability.” Under the Punch-buggy rules, punches cancel each other out unless you can whip your magical protection into place first. This kind of protection can be found throughout the world of contracts and legal documents, in clauses that begin with phrases such as “Notwithstanding any of the foregoing.”

Atwood, Margaret. Burning Questions (pp. 113-114). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Launching “True Saint Xavier”

This Thanksgiving, when the upheavals of our recent years still sting us and bring sadness, I find myself being thankful for an old colleague, gone now for several years. His spirit is needed. He harkens back to (what now seems to be) a make-believe time of hope and camaraderie.

A group of us is launching a new website, “truesaintxavier.org,” as yet another effort to fight the good fight for the welfare of our students, our programs, our heritage, and our legacy. We think Saint Xavier has lost its way, (or has been hijacked), and we hold out hope that we still have time to right the balance, adjust our waywardness, and step into a more secure future.

In looking through my files for material to include at the new site, I came across an email from Richard Fritz from 2010. He shared his message with the “Faculty Only” listserv. It’s a response to the crisis of 2010, which led to the University’s reduction of its retirement match by 50%. SXU had had a rather generous match—10% (or was it 11%?)—but as a result of the financial crisis of the Dwyer-Piros administration, the University asked faculty to sacrifice—temporarily, as understood by many—so as to tide over the institution in a difficult time.

Richard died in 2017 after a devastating illness that gave him some time to prepare, but not enough, and not the right kind, and not with the right kind of leave taking. As if there could be such a thing.

Though Richard and I were colleagues for two decades, I really didn’t get to know him until his final years at SXU when we served together on the Faculty Affairs Committee. Richard had always intimidated me somewhat. He was tall, with a piercing intellect and passionate commitments, a good beard and sports coat, a born academic. He was one of those persons who seemed to stand for so much more than a single faculty colleague could stand for, and he was prone to lecturing (if I could say such a thing in a positive sense).

I thought I might break through in my intimidation after I found out he was close friends with one of my close friends from college days, Anne Marie. They were neighbors, and to hear Anne Marie speak of him as a friend and neighbor was disconcerting to me, and even when I worked with him on FAC, I only rarely mustered the courage to have one-on-ones with him. But we did have those conversations, and I grew to love him—both for himself, and for the way he epitomized for me the “long-term associate professor” who made it his mission to care for his students, above all else, as his “love language,” or more, his raison d’etre for being an academic. 

There was something stentorian about Richard—but often with a quaver in his voice in public speaking. Whatever it was, when he spoke, it was important. At faculty meetings, there would occasionally be a Richard speech. In elegant sentences, with rising emotion, he put the focus on students. No one could gainsay he was an excellent teacher. I had a little more—or different—insight to his teaching than most others at SXU, since my daughter Genevieve was a sociology major, and she had discovered that Dr. Fritz was “that professor” who was to be the influence, the guide for her academic journey, a mentor she could respect and appreciate her whole life. 

She had more Richard stories than I. And she had that kind of context that encapsulates, I would argue, the “true Saint Xavier.” When she would begin a sentence with “Dr. Fritz says…” we knew some insight … and a lot of heart would be shared. Richard always spoke highly of nurses and teachers, and so he scored points with both my wife (a nurse) and me in these moments when he was quoted back to us during family dinners, debates, and just being together.

So, as we launch “True Saint Xavier,” I want to invoke Richard’s spirit. But I have another layer to add on first. That additional layer is an email message I wrote and sent to a group of colleagues about 18 months ago, just after the SXU administration withdrew their recognition of the faculty union. That was when I first rediscovered Richard’s email of January 5, 2010:

From: Angelo Bonadonna <abonadon@sbcglobal.net>
Subject: A Voice and a Message, Both Lost
Date: July 24, 2020 at 11:46:48 AM CDT
To: ***
 
Dear Colleagues—Yesterday, when searching my records for the year of the retirement match reduction (it was 10 years ago(!)—in 2010), I came across this email from Richard Fritz. It’s Richard at his best, and in telling the story of past sacrifice, he captured a bit of the soul of the SXU faculty, administration, and community—all in a way that seems so other-worldly these days.
 
I’m not sure what can be done with a message like this one. It’s more than just nostalgia that prompts me to share it now and ask you to consider what might be done with it, as we move forward to mobilize our colleagues. Richard’s is one of the voices that has been silenced—not directly by this administration, of course. But I worked closely with Richard in his last years at SXU, and it was clear to me that the institution was breaking his heart. Much, I’m sure, can be said about current conditions and leadership approaches—how they make the attitude and rhetoric that came so readily and naturally to Richard ten years ago impossible to conceive today.
 
The video documentary that Genevieve will be distributing in draft form in a few days has, as one of its themes, “the silencing of faculty voice.” I’d like to ask Gen (who revered Dr. Fritz) to consider dedicating the video “to the memory and mission of Richard Fritz, and all the lost voices of SXU…”
 
In the meantime, this Friday afternoon, take a moment to be with Richard a bit!  —Angelo
From: Fritz, Richard B.
Sent: Tue 1/5/2010 3:42 PM
To: Appel, Florence A.; Faculty-Only List
Subject: Dire Circumstances Redux
 
Dear Colleagues:
 
In the early 1990s (I believe it was 1993), the university found itself with an unexpected debt.  We were between two to three million dollars short of the amount required to pay our bills.  The situation was serious.  Several staff members were laid off and the administration scrambled to find ways to fill the gap.  There was talk of the university folding.  They were very unsettled times.  Scary and disheartening.
 
Several faculty meetings were convened; all were very well attended.  Numerous faculty members spoke up to discuss our role in solving the problem.  Dozens and dozens of ideas were proposed, every single one of which involved financial sacrifices on our part.  It was clear that the faculty understood the gravity of the situation.  It was also apparent that each and every one of us loved the university and were willing to go to great lengths to save it.
 
A solution was found.  In consultation with the administration, the Board of Trustees, and their faculty colleagues, the Faculty Affairs Committee created a voluntary “give back” program in which faculty members could reduce their salary by a certain percentage (I think it was 7%, but I’m not sure) for the remainder of the year (roughly seven or eight months).  Those who accepted the voluntary reduction would have a matching amount added to their pay check the following year.  As I remember, over 70% of the faculty participated.  It is not an exaggeration to say that this simple remedy saved the university.  Everyone, including the administration and Board of Trustees, acknowledged that the salary reduction program was the key factor in returning to economic stability.
 
The beauty of the program was that it did not require opening up the contract.  The program was voluntary, and therefore was not a “collectively bargained” agreement in the formal meaning. It was, in a sense, a collective faculty offer to pitch in.  The program did not impose universal participation.  There was no praise for participating, no stigma for not participating.  In fact, most people didn’t know who participated and who did not.  People gave back because they thought it was necessary and because they thought it would help.
 
Here we are again.  We didn’t ask for this (we didn’t the first time, either).  But we will help.  There is absolutely no doubt of that.  We, the faculty, love Saint Xavier.  It is more than just a job.  It is a place that transforms our students lives and gives meaning to our careers.  You all know what I’m saying, and could probably say it better.  The point is, we will not let the university fail.  We will do our part.
 
But as in the past, we must make our contributions wisely.  We must know what we are doing so that we can ensure that it will  work.  We must know the extent of the problem and the exact nature of the salutary effects of our contribution.  Will it be enough?  Too much?  Will it stabilize the institution?  And what assurances will we have that this problem won’t happen again?
 
Also, anything we do must be done in full concert with the Board of Trustees.  They are responsible for the financial well being of the university. Any contribution we make is virtually meaningless unless it is coordinated with their master plan.
 
In the past, FAC generated a solution that saved the university.  The current Faculty Affairs Committee has members who are both experienced and creative.  One member, Brian McKenna, served as a faculty representative to the Board of Trustees for many, many years.  He knows how they think and how they function.  Others, including Flo Appel, Norm Boyer, Suzanne Kimble, and Peter Hilton were here the last time we went through this.  Their leadership, in collaboration with Interim President Durante and the Board of Trustees, is central to solving this problem. I don’t know what kind of solution will be offered.  Perhaps it will involve reductions in retirement contributions or perhaps salary paybacks.  Whatever they decide, I trust Interim President Durante and our Faculty leaders to guide us to a solution in a collaborative, equitable, and timely fashion.
 
Richard Fritz
Sociology Dept.

SXU and HLC: Who gets the (dis)credit?

November 4, 2021

The recent online discussion among colleagues who assess the current Administration of SXU in opposite ways has led me to reflect, once again, on where we are as an institution. As I prepare my comments for HLC next week, I find myself reflecting on issues like agreements and disagreements and how to navigate them fully and respectfully, “love/hatred of SXU,” sabotage/”disruption” of HLC, and, perhaps most of all, how so many of us feel traumatized and depressed by institutional life at this university in 2021—where the conflicts and destabilizations of our own community are compounded by those prevalent throughout both higher education and our society as a whole .

Suffice to say, the SXU community is divided on how best to plan for, invest in, and pursue its future. Some point to the current administration as being instrumental in turning the university around, making operations leaner, saving money, and investing in programs in new ways so as to focus and strengthen the SXU “brand.” Others point to the administration as weakening longstanding programs, creating end-arounds on faculty ownership of the curriculum, reducing the role of faculty input, damaging established governance structures and processes, and promoting a climate of perpetual crisis and need to anticipate potential crises on the horizon.

Both sides seem motivated by worthy intentions to shape the university into a sustainable and successful institution of education. Their means and ends vary. Divisions abound—among those who have been long-serving and those who are newly hired; among those serving in tenured and those in non-tenured roles; among staff and faculty members; among those in the president’s inner circle and those not; among those who are well-compensated and those who are not; among pragmatists and justice seekers; and more.

Not enough has been done to heal divisions. I have been a vocal critic of the president and of those I’ve considered her enablers, and so, I must accept some responsibility in not always promoting the conditions of unity. I have placed blame at the feet of the president and Board of Trustees for promoting divisions and ignoring pleas for conversations and joint problem solving. I believe that the current administration has embraced a dynamic of “you’re with us or you’re against us.” I believe their actions have been power moves above all else and strategizing for strengthening their base and weakening opposition.

My convictions along these lines have prevented me from adopting a more balanced rhetoric.

This semester in my Rhetoric, Writing, and Society class, we have studied some alternatives to the (essentially male) rhetorical tradition that focuses on persuasion and argumentation by proofs to get the audience to accept a pre-established conclusion that the speaker (as a kind of leader) would have the audience accept. In contrast, certain versions of emerging feminist rhetoric place less emphasis on “changing the audience,” or even “adapting the message to the audience,” and instead features “bearing witness” of a speaker, who often attempts to relay the ways in which they have been hurt, but yet who, often with  brutal honesty, confide their own weaknesses, contradictions, and deficiencies—all in an effort to “raise consciousness” and possibly enlist humanizing consubstantiality of other conflicted, complex individuals.

Karlyn Kohrs Campbell presents the outlines of a feminist rhetoric that features personal, concrete, and individual experience—even in addressing exigent circumstances that carry life and death implications—and that would seem to require focused and directed or “led” collective action. In contradiction to a traditionally rhetorical, “persuasive” response, a feminist response could be oriented around consciousness raising as the sine qua non or starting point:

The only effective response to the sensation of being threatened existentially is a rhetorical act that treats the personal, emotional, and concrete directly and explicitly, that is dialogic and participatory, that speaks from personal experience to personal experience.

“The Rhetoric of Women’s Liberation”

And so, what would it look like if those of us on opposite sides of our SXU chasm were to attempt such rhetoric?

Even now as I write with a conscious desire to take a more unifying stance, as I try to bear witness to my experience, rather than call out the misdeeds of others, I find myself rehearsing my grievances, unable to let go of the rationales, defenses, attacks … the list of breakdowns, the threats … that I “know could be remedied, if only”—If we just could come to the table, direct our energies, and start pulling in the same direction. That is, I am trapped by my traditional, argumentative, prove-my-point, male rhetoric that ever propels me to shout, louder and louder, the validity of my thesis.

How do I retrench? My own history has been full of so much emotion and heartache; I should have little trouble being “personal, emotional, and concrete.”

In bearing witness, I have to ask, “How did I become a ‘faculty leader’?” It is not something I sought, and for many reasons: I am not a particularly good public speaker; I am not the best informed on the history of issues; I don’t think well on my feet; I am one who will always shift the focus from specific tasks at hand to some kind of “larger picture”—that, whatever its value, would always seem to subvert timely action. But when I was offered the position to lead—first, through mere representation on the Faculty Affairs Committee, and then to the position of chairperson, I felt that I did possess certain strengths that might be of help—qualities of character, emotional maturity, patience, right-sized ego, courage, right-sized assertiveness, general goodwill, and—yes—love of SXU, where 3 of my children have graduated, where, in 1996, my wife, an Irish Catholic, and I, an Italian Catholic, both alums of Loyola University, felt blessed to be able to plan on setting down roots and becoming members of a campus that reinforced the best aspects of our Catholic identity—both for ourselves and our young children who might someday attend. I felt the integrity of my intentions in accepting a leadership role would compensate for my deficiencies of leadership and organization. The challenges were all-consuming, but the work, ultimately, led to responsible purpose and action.

Much of the difficulty of serving on a faculty committee involves the “herding of cats” problem that ensues when so many independent, intelligent, and often strong-willed people, as faculty are, find themselves trying to organize and serve a collective purpose. There were divisions in FAC, as there were in the general community, and those divisions could be intense and stymieing.

Yet, above FAC’s divisions was a deep consubstantiality of the value of the committee’s work. For years we had had such exemplary leadership from colleagues like Arunas Dagys. I say “colleagues like,” though truth be told, I’ve never seen another like him. He’s larger than life—physically, emotionally, morally. He exudes strength, humility, and pragmatism all in equal doses, all with confidence and intelligence and resilience. I hesitate to call Arunas my mentor, for fear that I, in my failures, might cast some shadow over his excellences. I don’t mean to be sycophantic in my adulation, but I know no proper way to “eulogize” Arunas. Whether or not he was my mentor, he was certainly my inspiration.

I think of my failures when I relive the phone call of May 28, when Board Chair, Patricia Morris, with a quaver in her voice, in the “presence” of me, Associate Chair Jackie Battalora, and our attorney, Robert Bloch (“presence” in quotes because the message was sent via a conference call in those early days of the pandemic) took a stab at faculty governance and severed the university’s longstanding relationship with both the union and the Faculty Affairs Committee. Even then, I, in my arrogance thought “This will not stand.” Or I was, “Okay, okay…our move. We’ve got Robert Bloch. We got a new faculty unity. We have a new approach of exposing in public and with reason and professional calm and direct statement.”

But I was foolhardy to have hope, and that hope has not been helpful, and the damage done by FAC’s arrogance to take on the president rather than retrenching and waiting her out and preserving the union structure is inestimable. Throughout my time as chair, I would rehearse the first principle of the Hippocratic Oath: “First, do no harm.” And here it was: under my watch, the university union was crushed. My ensuing depression centers on this failure. And a vortex of anger and disappointment and licking of wounds has left me confused and despondent, but also scrambling, as I find my resilience, fortunately, has not reached its limit.

For one, I mustn’t elevate my role so as to take on that full responsibility. The truth is that the May 28th action was but the logical endpoint of many prior actions, all set in motion through a decision made years earlier in the hiring by the university of an expensive anti-labor law firm. This action, while regrettable, was not illegal, or perhaps not even immoral. But as Arunas’s voice echoes in my head: it was not pragmatic—not in the “big” sense of pragmatic, the sense that the union and the university could work together to find a sustainable path that protected all with some basic minimums of compensation and working conditions that laid the necessary groundwork for future developments. Arunas’s rhetoric of pragmatism was always so persuasive, since its fruits, always, were so visible in principled decisions over many years that featured the big view of sustainability. “Neither side should be allowed to game the system.” And in listening to the comparisons, analyses, and solutions he would propose in recommending policies, it was clear he had done his homework, a lot of it.

The busting of the union struck me to my core. Beyond the personal disappointment in myself for not knowing how to sidestep this disaster, there was the transformation of SXU, there was the setback to the labor movement in world-historical terms, there was the collective failure—of the FAC group to unify the faculty, but also of the faculty to understand what was happening, to trust the leaders as to implications, to commit to doing whatever was possible to forestall permanent damage, and to honor the tradition that had been built, with such promise and potential, for 40 years.

The PR campaign of the administration to point fingers at FAC for the decision they made also hurt. For the year prior to the action, public communications between Admin and FAC were strained, verging on hostile, while always delivered under some veneer of professionalism. But there was a dishonesty, slander even, in many characterizations of our committee by the Administration. We were accused of distributing “erroneous, flawed, and misleading” data; despite our proofs of the correctness of our information, no retraction of such accusations took place. In one notable public slander made directly by the president, we were blamed for the decision not to record negotiation sessions; and post-May 28, we were accused, without evidence, of behaviors and advocacies on our part that led to the breakdown in negotiations.

The slander, mischaracterizations, and imputing of motives by the Administration were indignities, yes, but most of all they hurt me as a person. To quote another feminist critic, Natanson, the hurt is more than just a passing blow:

When an argument hurts me, cuts me, or cleanses and liberates me it is not because a particular stratum or segment of my world view is shaken up or jarred free but because I am wounded or enlivened—I in my particularity, and that means in my existential immediacy: feelings, pride, love, and sullenness, the world of my actuality as I live it.

“Claims of Immediacy“

The busting of the union was unnecessary, immoral, and unproductive—and the hurt it caused me sent me into a depression that, dark as it was, was primarily a private matter of me adjusting to a new reality. I was thrown, as one colleague put it, “into a fugue state” (or was she talking about herself? Not totally clear…). But what happened the next year went beyond me, and beyond the union.

What happened the next year, in the context of Covid, was a barrage of brazen actions by the Administration to solidify their centralized and unchecked power. The counterpart success of unification by the faculty in response produced a strong Senate voice, who pronounced clear and important decisions on matters of bylaws, faculty voice, and curriculum. I needn’t rehearse here the faculty vote of no confidence, the Board’s doubling down in their knee-jerk affirmation of the president’s leadership, the dismissiveness of the entire administration of 2/3 of the faculty in expressing such dissatisfaction with the direction of the university: What FAC had seen in private for the first three years of the Joyner presidency was now laid bare, obviously and loudly, for all to see and hear.

Where are we now? We are as divided as ever. But I hold out hope that, through some adjustment—I hope on the part of all, including me—we can begin moving forward and shore up our mission and collective resolve to realize it in its strongest aspects.

Reading A Wonderful Waste of Time

I started reading son Terry’s book, A Wonderful Waste of Time, right when it came out—of course. But that was in the midst of the chaos—all the disruptions of the pandemic, teaching, union busting, and the general apocalypse of modern life. Once I ascertained, a hundred pages in, that the book was indeed a treasure to be savored, I set it aside to be lingered over—well, dare I say?-—when I had time to waste. And, as SXU duties subsided this year in June, that time was here.

What I like about Terry’s book—in particular, reading it now—is that I feel I am re-entering the world after a weird 15-month interlude. The pandemic brought a sense of doom, and nothing can be the same after our collective descent into the fugue state that has been quarantine. At this time, despite the very real devastation and suffering experienced by some, many of us have emerged unscathed or even improved. It’s confusing. Yet somehow Terry’s recollections of the summer of 2017 resonate–oddly—with both pre- and post-pandemic psychology, all of it overcast somehow with the cloud that was the pandemic itself. The mix in this book—Terry’s wistfulness, his realness, sweetness, misanthropy, simple appreciation, hope, and wry resignation—all of it seems such a good fit for my summer mind this particular summer. I’m doing my reading super slowly, a chapter a day, trying as best I can to synch up the dates of this summer with those of 2017, the year chronicled in the book.

My momentary (but recurrent) takeaway is that there’s a hopelessness to everything about the Frontier League. And yet today I heard Terry describe himself (in the book) as a “Frontier League junkie.” That’s an unusual expression for a stolid fellow like Terry, and in the book, he has put a spotlight on the highs and lows (and even-keels?) of his addiction, not necessarily to say or do or request anything urgent. The Frontier League is what it is. But in the process of being that, we’re learning about this cranky broadcaster, as he gently and rigorously thinks through everything, openly sharing his quirks and not-so-quirkish dispositions and routines: his love of walks (in town, not in games, heaven forfend!), his love of work—of escape from work, of talking shop with colleagues, and—always—of giving and receiving what is expected, whether it is in the making of an accurate, informative call for an anxious fan or in providing lunch and a clean work space for a visiting team’s broadcaster.

One reads, and asks “Why? Why is this story being told?” Answer: It’s a wonderful waste of time. Kinda like this span of 80-90 years some of us are blessed to have. And in this sense, I put Terry’s book in the category of Ken Burns’s remarkable reflection on life shared with Terry Gross at the end of the interview on his Vietnam documentary (coincidentally recorded in the late summer of 2017 (September 27), right about the time that Terry is chronicling). If war is “human nature on steroids,” Frontier League baseball is the “ambivalence of summer on steroids.” In passing the time with us, Terry takes us into the side-roads of his mind, league history, local color, personal stories and rituals, a tragedy here and there, kindness, reflections on motivation, and, in one memorable passage, an image of Gary Cooper/Lou Gehrig at the carnival on a game day(!). It’s wonderfully connected, the hopes, disappointments, and enduring possibilities of all these professionals traveling by bus through the night, across the Midwest. You can take almost any passage to get the feel, and so, here I share a characteristic moment snatched from today’s reading in Chapter 15:

We finish in the early evening and I’m left with a night to myself in Florence [Kentucky]. I decide to expand my horizons and really explore the area by foot in a way that I haven’t before. Florence is famous for its mall, immortalized by a water tower that is visible from the highway that proclaims “Florence Y’all.” The legend goes that the tower originally said “Florence Mall” back in the 70s, but because the mall hadn’t opened yet, they weren’t allowed to advertise for a not-yet-existent business. Rather than paint over it, they changed “Mall” to “Y’all” with the intention of changing it back when the mall opened. The redesigned tower, though, proved so popular that the sign has remained as repainted all these years later. 

Today, I make my first ever trip to this mall that is so famous it needed a misprinted water tower advertisement. I feel like working in the Frontier League has allowed me to witness first-hand the collapse of American malls. Often, local malls are the only place to hang out near the hotel, perfect for getaway days. They also provide the richest array of restaurants. I’ve become a regular mall walker, getting my exercise in by going from one end to the other with all of the octogenarians. When I first started in this league, the local malls were still bustling, full of strong businesses and hearty customers. Now, it seems as though half the storefronts are empty and the mall walkers are sparse. One of them approaches me today and frantically demands, “Do you know what the Enola Gay is?” “Sure,” I tell her, and she sighs contentedly, thanks me and walks away. What a strange encounter. I didn’t even prove to her that I knew the Enola Gay was the ship that sunk the Titanic.