Sabbatical 1
I never made a ‘zine. I wrote for a bunch of them in my time, but I never made one myself. I always wanted to, but there were always excuses: no access to a photocopier, not proficient enough with early desktop publishing programmes, no time to do it properly…etc.
I’ve been thinking a lot about ‘zines recently. How, before the internet, they were a great way of hearing people’s stories and perspectives. How there was this whole little community that used to come through my letterbox throughout the year for the price of just a stamped-addressed-envelope. Familiar voices sharing unfamiliar ideas and experiences.
I never liked the ones that were purely about music. Finding out about new bands was always an important function of a good ‘zine, but I liked the ones that mixed the review stuff with personal stories and opinions. Maybe a bit of politics, or a cartoon or two. Or the ones where the reviews at least showed a bit of personality and you grew to know the writer’s tastes and biases. I really liked the ones that continued a narrative of the creator’s life from issue to issue. I went through the break-ups, house moves, marriages, children, new jobs, health issues and all sorts of other life journeys of these writers only for, eventually, the internet to make most of them fall silent as social media and online forums became the new way of sharing our lives.
I was part of the problem myself. I never made a ‘zine, but I’ve been blogging on and off since 2004. And other than my Razorcake subscription and my habitual purchase of each new issue of the sporadically produced stalwart, Artcore, I rarely pick up a physical ‘zine anymore. Like the record stores in my community that close down and I miss but never used because I streamed my music for free, I lament the death of the ‘zine but ignore the knife in my hand that helped to kill them.
Last week, as the summer came to end and the first week of my self-imposed unemployment loomed, I began to get nervous about what happens next. It occurred to me that it might be fun to document the journey. At first I saw a ‘zine in my mind’s eye: I would call it SABBATICAL and I would work on it every week. I would write a bit about what I did and what I was feeling, and then at the end of however long I’m not working for, I’d put it all together and put it out. I liked the idea, but then I asked myself why a ‘zine when I have this blog here already, gathering dust? With my weekly posts every Monday for Philosophy Unleashed and all my other things I was doing, this personal blog has been fairly neglected for the last year. Why not give this blog the Philosophy Unleashed treatment and make a commitment to myself: a promise to update it at least once a week with all the news and reflections from my sabbatical? Instead of a ‘zine, a blog. But a blog with the spirit of a ‘zine?
We’ll see how it goes.
What do I mean by ‘a blog with the spirit of a ‘zine?’ Well, I guess I mean that as well as the personal stuff I might share things like what I’ve been listening to this week (the last episode of season 1 of the excellent NomeansNo Thing podcast, for example, or the cool new Homeless Gospel Choir album, Fourth Dimension Intervention) and weird shit like this comic I drew Tuesday night for no reason:
Stuff like that. But I’d do it all through the medium of talking about my week and what I’ve done with my time away from the classroom, assessing along the way whether or not I think this sabbatical I’m taking is going well and if it all was worth it.
The comic, for example, I guess speaks to the sense of self-doubt I have embarking on this adventure now that it’s finally happening. The decision to walk away from my long-term and secure teaching job and explore other options was, after all, predicated on a lot of assumption and aspiration. The aspiration for a more fulfilling life and the assumption that I would somehow be able to find a way to make that life more fulfilling by stepping away from the security of a regular job I had been doing very well in for over a decade and deplete my wife and my’s collective income by half with no real plan other than the hope of finding something better. Yes, there were some more concrete ideas embedded in the aspiration: a transition from one field of education (the secondary school) to another (higher education and research), or maybe even a transition away from education entirely? A research project I have been wanting to pursue. But all I really knew for sure when I handed in my resignation in January was that I had been at that place long enough and wanted to see what else was out there for me.
Being honest, I think I hoped that by September I would already have another job lined up and the transition from A to B would be seamless. I naively thought that my growing academic publication record, my PhD and other qualifications, some good references and over a decade of bona fide teaching experience, would make me an asset to any university that was hiring. I applied for several jobs that seemed perfect for me but, it seemed, none of the universities agreed. I didn’t even get an interview. For a few I didn’t even get the courtesy of a formal rejection letter. Just the long, cold, silence after the deadline day that meant the job had gone to someone else accompanied, later, by seeing someone on Twitter announce that, from September, they would be working in the department I had applied to in the role I had thought might be mine. Pretty humbling. But then again I did know going in that the current academic job market - especially in philosophy - is hell. That people with far more experience and credentials than I have are struggling to find jobs too. And when your research interest is in something potentially politically toxic like mine - anarchism - and universities are shutting philosophy departments down and looking for publication-generators, not teachers, I’m not exactly an easy sell.
A few months ago, feeling pretty blue about the whole thing, and all the other failed ventures of my life, I wrote the following lyrics for a new song (that’s right - a new song. One of five that at some point during this sabbatical I hope to record and release!). It’s called ‘Too’.
Too many observations
Too many notebooks filled
Too many creative outlets
Too many darlings killed
Too many lyrics sang to no one
Too many words unread
Too many ideas unwanted
Too much repeating what I said
Too much repeating what I said
Too free to be worth buying
Too hard a friend to keep
Too blunt in conversation
Too much the grandson of a priest
Too canary in the coal mine
Too much the spectre at the feast
Too straightedge for your parties
Too many questions probing deep
Too many questions probing deep
Too broken to get better
Too hopeful for despair
Too jaded by the bullshit
Too stubborn not to care
I’m much too stubborn not to care
Too lacking references and mentors
Too few accomplishments of note
Too many other candidates competing
Too many of us stuck in the same boat
Too out of practice for the journals
Too everyday and imprecise
Too radical to take a chance on
Too much lost to a different life
Too much lost to a different life
Too honest for the classroom
Too much daily mental toll
Too few visions of what comes after
Too much losing of my soul
There’s too much losing of my soul
Too much damage to stay longer
Too many things this system lacks
Too many structural complications
Too many years I won’t get back
Too many reasons for inaction
Too much I’ve sweat, too much I’ve have bled
Too used to comfort and to routine
Too easy staying ‘til I’m dead
To whom it may concern
Too often now I feel such dread
Too many sleepless nights
Too much repeating what I said
Too much repeating what I said
I was disappointed, but despite the grim picture of the lyrics, I wasn’t particularly worried. Alongside my mother’s inherent pessimism and neurosis that everything would go wrong, I’ve also inherited my father’s misplaced sense of optimism: something would work itself out eventually. A perfect balance. I wasn’t getting jobs in academia, but I could always go back to teaching if no one wanted me. And did I even still want them? The more I applied for these jobs, the more I started to question the very dream of working in academia. It wasn’t just the competitiveness of the job market, but its precariousness too. Including many of the ‘early career’ fellowships that all seemed to discriminatorily exclude me (and anyone else who had a career break from academia in some other field) because I got my PhD too long ago, everything I was seeing was limited to temporary one-year contracts. Maybe two years. Experienced and excellent people seemed to be having to reapply for a different post elsewhere year after year. The expectation that you might pack up your things and move halfway across the country just for twelve, or even just eight, months of temporary employment seemed inhumane to me. After all, I might have been willing to temporarily blow up our lives financially for a bit so that I could pursue my wacky dreams, but I was only able to do that because of my wife’s secure job and her willingness to be the sole earner for a while. While we’d both very happily move anywhere in the world for a new permanent job that seems interesting and financially secure (especially somewhere in Scotland following our falling in love with the country on a road trip around it this summer) we’re not going to give up that security for something temporary. And I didn’t get married so that I could have a long-distance relationship, living and working in a different city during the week and only seeing each other at weekends. That is no way to live. So the more I looked for academic jobs, the more it started to feel like what I was looking for might not actually exist, and what did exist I didn’t actually want.
Then there’s academia itself. It’s always seemed attractive to me because it values research as well as teaching. Where else can you do philosophy just to do philosophy? But I am also reminded of why I decided not to pursue academia in the first place - the potential for myopia in disciplines who speak in impenetrable jargon about esoteric linguistic issues of little social importance only into their own echo-chambers of specialism, holding conversations that travel in endless abstract circles to tiny audiences with no intention of ever communicating meaningful ideas to the general public. The total disconnect between the research side of higher education and the teaching side. The intellectual gatekeeping that put barriers up to new ideas instead of tearing them down. And all the institutional and administrative pressures that echoed the very same structural problems found within secondary education I hoped to be liberated from: pointless bureaucracy, management divorced from classroom practice, accountability paperwork and targets that helped no one, an impoverished notion of what exactly an education should be. The more I communicated with academics and reacquainted myself with their world, the more I could see that the grass over there on the other side was just as grey and patchy as it had been over here. That the idea of grass being greener anywhere might well be an illusion.
Despite all this I still did not regret having handed in my notice. I knew my time at my old school was over and I needed a fresh start somewhere else, doing something different, even if that something different ended up being the same thing somewhere else. A change of scenery alone would be refreshing after too long feeling like I was treading water. And the impetus for all of this, after all, was always my research I wanted to do, which I could still do even if I wasn’t a paid academic. If anything, without any teaching responsibilities getting in the way - especially teaching new courses, in a completely different educational environment than I was used to, which would definitely be very time-consuming - I could focus on that work finally with gusto.
Hence I started referring to my impending unemployment as a ‘sabbatical’. It seems clear to me that, barring any dramatic transformation of the academic job market, although I still have a few pending applications to be rejected for, I probably won’t be a university lecturer anytime soon. But what I will be doing this year is working on my research before, as the cost of living crisis bites and my hankering to return to the classroom grows impossible to ignore, I inevitably end up teaching philosophy somewhere again. Teaching philosophy is, after all, what I really love. Already this week I am missing it. Missing the start of term and meeting a timetable of new classes. It has been odd going from over a decade of working daily with the babble of thirty teenagers and a staffroom of colleagues to the silence of my study. It has been odd not having others around to share ideas with. To deal with questions and concerns. To have dialogue instead of monologue. Although my cat does try their best to respond to my random comments throughout the day as we rattle around the house together.
Yes, that’s right - he’s got no eyes.
So yeah - a sabbatical from the classroom to research and write a book before I inevitably return to one again. Maybe in a university, but more likely in a secondary school or sixth form college. And maybe two books, not one. Because earlier in the year I started writing a thing I rather grandly refer to as a ‘memoir’ reflecting on my decade of teaching Religious Education and Philosophy as an anarchist, atheist, punk rock loving teacher trying to fit in within a school system I seem ideologically at odds with on so many levels and I’m enjoying working on that too.
Still, as the last Sunday of the summer came to its end and we set the alarm for early next morning, it all seemed a little amorphous and unclear how exactly I would be spending my days once my wife had left for work. I was flying without a net. No income, no job lined up, and no guarantee that anything I am writing is going to help improve my chances of either. In fact - a decision to make. Do I focus my research on producing academic papers to help my chances of getting a university job, or do I write the book I actually want to write, for public consumption rather than the limited audience of academia? Am I writing to shout into a vacuum, or to enact some actual change in the world? I think you know the answer.
The nation has had a busy week since Monday. A new Prime Minister in the awful Liz Truss, the death of a monarch for the first time in many of our lives and the start of the reign of King Charles III. A truly historic September. So what did I do with my first week of sabbatical while the country transformed all around me?
First there is the new routine: work on THE BIG RESEARCH AND WRITING PROJECT every morning from about 9am to 1pm, then lunch and some household chores, maybe take a walk so I’m not just sitting at my desk all day, then spend the afternoon either doing more on THE BIG RESEARCH AND WRITING PROJECT, working on a new Philosophy Unleashed post, working on my ANARCHIST, ATHEIST, PUNK ROCK TEACHER memoir, or doing something else creative, such as playing guitar or just reading a book. I’ve stuck to that routine all week and end my first week with 10,667 good words of research (and about another 10,000 words of random fragments and ideas that need whipping into shape or deleting). I’ve got to grips with the Zotero app to help organise what I’m reading and amassed a pretty big bibliography on there already. The piles of books around my laptop are mounting and after a mild dark-afternoon-of-the-soul on Monday where it all seemed too much, I could, by Tuesday, see the direction of travel for what I’m trying to do.
Can you guess what I’m writing about?
Being at home alone all day and working has, by Friday, started to feel less like another coronavirus lockdown and more like I felt back when I was working on my PhD. Busy and motivating. As well as the progress on THE BIG RESEARCH AND WRITING PROJECT I also seem to have arrived at the 50,000 word mark on the memoir this week. I’ve lined up a speaking gig at a school for later in the month too, about anarchism and philosophy (if you want me to do one at yours too, get in touch!), done some promotion work on the Philosophy Unleashed website, written two Philosophy Unleashed posts for the coming weeks and edited one from a guest writer, helped with the planning of the inaugural conference of the fledgling Association of Philosophy Teachers, and generally been as productive as possible. I’ve also started making some headway in my free moments on the log-jammed playlist of podcasts that had amassed during the long summer holiday. With no commuting to work, and none coming in the near future, it turned out podcasts really took a backseat in my priorities since July. Whenever I can I’ve been trying to catch up with Pod Meets World, The Always Sunny Podcast, Anarchist Essays, as well as the backlog of stalwarts like WTF, Penn’s Sunday School, Wolf and Owl, Las Culturistas, The Adam Buxton Podcast, The Rest Is Politics, and Distraction Pieces. I’ve also been listening to a ton of music while working. It changes by the day here:
Along with the playlist I made to kick the week off:
See what I mean: it’s a blog, but it’s also kind of a ‘zine? Music, opinion, personal stuff, comics, song lyrics, recommendations, etc. The intention is to try and do something similar every Friday to review and reflect upon each week, but we’ll see how it goes.
If I could sum up my first week of sabbatical it would be with the reflection that total freedom is both scary and exhilarating. That I am glad I have had the willpower (so far) to avoid snacking endlessly, to not overdose on caffeine (any more than I usually do at least), and to resist just spending each day watching wrestling. I waited like a good boy until Monday evening to watch AEW All Out with my wife once she was back from work, and I have still not seen Wednesday’s Dynamite because we were both too busy last night. Considering all the drama and shenanigans it feels like I’m missing, I reckon it’s a pretty impressive feat. Hell, I haven’t even watched these videos I found on YouTube of the MTV Alternative Nation punk rock special that changed my life back in 1996 that I’ve been wanting to re-watch for years:
At the same time, I need to be careful not to work too much and burn out early. It is important - as it was during lockdown - to switch off at some point and make a clear distinction between work and play. It is all too easy to sit at the computer a few hours more, or bring a book about prison abolition to bed instead of the Stephen King novel I am reading, and if I do too much of that this will stop being fun. There is such a thing as being too productive.
That said, it’s not bedtime yet and there’s still lot’s to do.
Until next week…