Sabbatical 3
Last week’s momentum has shifted, yet I’ve never felt busier. Although only an additional 400 words were added to THE BIG RESEARCH AND WRITING PROJECT since last Friday, I have done a lot this week. I never worry too much about ‘down time’ from a project either as I believe strongly in the ‘percolation’ stage of ideas. I may have written very little over the last seven days, and my attention may have been on other things, but in the back of my head everything that I have loaded into it over the previous two weeks has had time to drift around, settle, unsettle, knock up against other ideas, and drift around some more. It’s never not there, and time away from a project can sometimes be just as productive as time on it.
I guess that’s really the whole theme of this Sabbatical. Taking time away to re-energise and re-charge my batteries and have the space away from the treadmill to figure out what I really want to do. What I miss and what I don’t. This time away from the classroom will ultimately make me better when I return to it. Not a waste of time, but a use of time differently. Long term, not short.
To cut costs now I have no income I finally unsubscribed to the WWE Network. From October I will no longer have access. To be fair, it’s been a long time coming, as I watch AEW primarily for my wrestling fix these days (and my FITE TV subscription has survived the budget cuts). I only really watched the WWE Pay Per Views each month, and then only grudgingly. I know things are picking up there right now thanks to the departure of Vince McMahon, and I am as excited as anyone about the prospects of Bray Wyatt returning (possibly tonight on Smackdown), but honestly I haven’t watched Raw or Smackdown all year. Anyway - I’m trying to squeeze as much as possible out of the last days of my September subscription and have been catching up with Stone Cold Steve Austin’s ‘Broken Skull Sessions’. Watching his interview with Cody Rhodes this morning, it really resonated as Cody discussed the need to leave WWE for Japan, and then AEW for WWE again, as well as Stone Cold talking about leaving WCW for ECW. Just the need for a change of place and change of pace. To have fun again and embrace difference and challenge instead of stagnation and ease. Cody had a stable job at WWE but packed it all in to find himself. He took a risk, a gamble on himself, and the gamble paid off. I hope I am equally as lucky.
Certainly the need to ‘find myself’ was the theme of the last Strangely Shaped By Fathers EP, ‘Finding Me’. A strong motivator for finally getting up the nerve to leave and see what else is out there.
So what is out there?
Like I said, I took the foot off the pedal off the writing side of THE BIG RESEARCH AND WRITING PROJECT this week, but only because other things were taking up my time. First, on Friday and Saturday, was an online conference on ‘The Future of Education’. It was an interesting experience to see what current academics in the field of philosophy of education believe the future to be and I was taken not only by how the entire conference seemed dominated by a conflation between education and schooling (something only one speaker - the anarchist, of course - commented critically on), but how disconnected much of what was said felt from actual classroom practice and policy inside those schools. And where policy in schools was probed, how many statist assumptions there still remained within the probing. How uncritical even much of the criticism was. It was an important reminder of the problems of theorising in a vacuum, and further evidence to me that there may be more value in actually teaching, and researching/writing about education on the side, than leaving the profession entirely to jump completely into the vacuum and lose that contact with actual teaching.
Still - all these thoughts are inspiring and energising, and as I listened to the papers and the Q&A discussions (annoyed that despite the hybrid nature of the event, and number of us watching online, they consistently prioritised questions from those in the room, meaning all the questions we submitted into the chat were ignored) I made lots of notes. Some will contribute to THE BIG RESEARCH AND WRITING PROJECT and others will help with future things I want to write.
As I let the experience of the conference sink in, reminding me of both how interesting it can be to discuss these things with fellow interested people, but also of the frustrations and limitations of academia that made me run from it in the first place, I had an additional frustration pop up in my inbox. Long story short - back in June I had submitted an abstract to a call for papers for a special issue of a journal about academic freedom in higher education. My premise was simple: a lot of work and concern goes into the threats to academic freedom in the university, but there is lots of prior work we need to do in secondary schools if we want to inculcate the idea that academic freedom is valuable in the citizenry and future academics on whom academic freedom depends. The abstract was rejected for the journal because of its focus on schools instead of universities, but was accepted for a concurrent blog they were going to be running for the project. I was invited to submit the blog post - literally called ‘Prior To Higher: On the Need for Academic Freedom Before the Academy’ - and submitted it to them early in the summer. Late July or early August. I had heard nothing since submitting, then at the start of September - day one of my sabbatical in fact - I got an email saying they weren’t going to publish it on the blog because they didn’t feel it was right for it. Annoyed there was no further information than that, I wrote back asking what exactly the issue was. Having waited so long to have something I had been specifically invited to write randomly rejected with no feedback at all was pretty poor behaviour I thought. Well, at the weekend I got the further feedback: ‘the editors’ team felt the blog was focusing on pre-tertiary education while our focus is higher education’. Well, duh! That was literally what I had proposed and been explicitly accepted to write! Utterly annoying and a big waste of several months where I could have submitted the piece elsewhere.
The good news is that it’s still a pretty great piece, and now it won’t be for a blog I think I can whip it into shape as a proper academic paper and submit it somewhere better soon. But it was such a poor way to be treated and another reminder that academia is just as flawed and annoying as any other human endeavour.
Like I said - it all served to remind me why I had opted not to pursue academia in the first place when I finished my PhD all those years ago. I actually wrote about it at the time for some online magazine whose name escapes me and seems to no longer exist, but I found the article and had a re-read:
The End of the Line
I started studying philosophy as an academic subject at A-level. During our GCSEs, my best friend and I had enjoyed terrorizing the local church youth leader with our doubts about god every time he visited our school, but countless hours spent in detention for continually questioning the various wisdoms of our elders had caused us to seek a more nurturing environment for enquiry than was currently on offer in our rather parochial classrooms. When we discovered then, that the rival sixth form college ran a course in philosophy; seeing both an opportunity to question received truths without getting into trouble, and a chance to escape the clutches of our small-town education, we both jumped at the chance.
A decade later, a successful philosophy B.A., and M.A. under my belt, and just a few months to go before the completion of a Ph.D., it seems hard to believe then, recalling how eagerly I ran to the subject all those years ago, that I am now planning, post-thesis, to walk, just as eagerly, away.
If you talked to me twelve months ago, I would have told you the same thing that I told anybody else asking about my life-plans: I am going to be an academic. Once the doctorate was in the bag, I would find a job in whatever department would have me, and there I would spend the rest of my days, philosophizing, teaching students, and experimenting with facial hair. Hell, I had even gone out and bought elbow-patches for all of my jackets!
But philosophy is nothing if not self-reflective, and soon, as the major work of my dissertation was done and my mind found itself finally free to think on things other than the ethical justifications for political power, I began to at last address the nagging doubts about my chosen profession that had been growing increasingly vocal inside my preoccupied head.
Is this really what I wanted to do with my life?
As an undergraduate, and even at M.A. level, philosophy had been a means to questioning the world in which I lived, for engaging with, and making sense of, our complicated existence; not as an academic, but as a person. Philosophy allowed me to better understand answers to questions both profound and pressing: what do I believe to be true? Is the war on terror just? Can we ever know right from wrong? What makes a government legitimate? Is there a god?
But as I began my doctoral work, I started to notice the subtle difference between being merely a student of philosophy, and training to become a professional in the field: after years of absolute intellectual freedom in the subject, there was now suddenly a ‘right’ way, and a wrong way to do things; a ‘right’ way that I was finding increasingly limiting.
Each time my rewrites got a new seal of approval, I noticed that there was less and less of myself, and the original intentions of my work, appearing within their pages as, slowly but surely, the demands of my supervisor and department steered my research further and further away from answering the questions that had brought me to philosophy in the first place, and more towards fitting my thoughts neatly into some pre-existing discourse within the field. The originality and uniqueness of my work which had gained me first class grades, grants and scholarships pre-doctorate, was now becoming a hindrance, as my writing became labelled as ‘controversial’.
‘Cut out X and Y’, people would say, ‘and concentrate more on Z’; but their advice bored me. Inevitably X and Y would be, to my mind, the most interesting things about the research, with Z simply being a concession to some earlier criticism, put in only to appease. The more I stopped to think, the more I realized that whilst I still loved philosophy’s potential for enquiry, and the multiple ways in which my own way of looking at the world had been forever changed by the subject; and whilst I still loved teaching philosophy to the first year students I tutored in order that they could then have the intellectual tools with which to broaden their own views of the world; as a profession, academic philosophy seemed all too often to eat itself; myopically stripping the subject of its engagement with the real world and reducing it merely to private, jargon-heavy, conversations, held only between specialists.
Where this revelation leaves me regarding a post-Ph.D. career, I’m not entirely sure; and it is a fairly frightening prospect to realize that you’ve dedicated ten years of your life in training for a job you no longer want! That said, as any good philosopher knows: life is not always about the answers one finds, as much as it is about asking the right sorts of questions, and sometimes it is as useful to know what an answer is not, as it is to know what an answer is.
For that small solace then, I thank ten stimulating years spent studying philosophy. It is only because of the subject’s strengths, that I became able to see its weaknesses, and gain the courage and confidence to reject it and embrace the uncertainties of a life now unplanned.
‘The uncertainties of a life now unplanned’ - that’s right. My first sabbatical which eventually led me to teaching.
So that was the weekend. But it wasn’t all academic discourse. On Sunday my wife and I visited Villa Park to see the opening game for the Aston Villa women's team against Manchester City in the Barclays Women’s Super League. It was my first time back at Villa Park since I was a teenager who hated football but was being dragged along there by my dad to try and get me to fall in love with his greatest passion. His real passion was Bury FC, but he understood they were an acquired taste, so wanted me to experience the joys of the superior local teams and not only his own boyhood franchise. We went to see Coventry and Aston Villa in equal measure, to give me options of who to support. Unfortunately for dad, I opted to support no-one and rejected football entirely. Like my mom’s passion for Shakespeare, which also led to my knee-jerk dismissal of the Bard, my instinct for something I was being expected to like was to rebel. The early instincts of a punk-to-be. Football was all my dad lived for really. Every weekend, every match he could. And I just hated it. Found it boring and cold. Had no skills for playing and found it always triggered my asthma. The idea that decades after our last Aston Villa match together (probably not even a Villa match actually, I think the last time I was at Villa Park was for some games in Euro ‘96, where dad brought me along - including to the infamous Wembley semi-final against Germany - because of some ticket-buying pyramid scheme where you only got access to later game tickets based on the number of earlier ones you bought: my being there gave him access to a ticket to the final) I would be going back to Villa Park voluntarily would have amazed him were he alive to see it. Not only going voluntarily, but as a season ticket holder.
It turns out, I don’t hate football. After years of ignoring it and just assuming that I did, just like Shakespeare, when I came to it later, on my own, it turns out my parents were right: both are pretty great!
It was actually teaching that made me give football a second chance. It was the World Cup the summer before I started my training and I was doing work experience in various schools, all of whom had students excited about the tournament. When England played, they put the games on sometimes and I found myself actually interested. Enough that, over the years, when I caught a match on TV, or there was a tournament with some buzz, or even a particularly competitive match on the playground, I found myself not turning the channel or looking away. Gareth Southgate’s England team were the first game-changer. I actually started watching Match of the Day occasionally after the last World Cup. Watched a few matches when they were on free TV. My wife and I had always liked the idea of supporting the Villa, being as they were local, but discovered how expensive it was to go live and access the games on pay TV. Used to following baseball, where I could watch every Red Sox game they played and follow the team through the entire season (including disastrous ones like this year’s!) it struck us as odd that with football you seemed unable to watch every match and were sort of left with the scraps of whatever highlights the BBC chose to show you.
We’d watched a bit of the previous women’s World Cup, and started watching a bit of the Euros this year with the same sort of half-hearted interest. Not because they were women, but because when we’d watched that World Cup it had been so depressing to see the lack of investment in the women’s game and the second-class citizen way they were treated. As the Lionesses made greater waves throughout this year’s tournament, and it all reached a crescendo in their epic final at Wembley, finally doing what men’s football so consistently failed to do, we listened to the commentary talking about the WSL and the women’s teams and investigated whether we had a local one. We did - Aston Villa Women’s FC. And the season ticket - an investment invert home game - was utterly affordable.
We both loved the idea of supporting the growing movement of women’s football, loved the atmosphere of the Euros, and decided to take the plunge. If Sunday’s first match was anything to go by it’s going to be an amazing season. The 4-3 victory and series of stunning goals was the match of the weekend according to all the punditry, and from the stands of Villa Park it certainly felt that way.
Once again women’s football has achieved what men’s football never could: get me to buy a Villa shirt and become a regular watcher of football.
Monday, of course, was a bank holiday for the Queen’s funeral. I knew I wouldn’t get any work done that day - not because I planned on watching the funeral, but because my wife was off work too and we’d enjoy a Bank Holiday together. Which we did. Except - we sort of ended up watching the funeral too. Now don’t get me wrong - I am completely against the monarchy (not even a republican; an anarchist!) - but I love watching history unfold. Just as I’ve stayed up to watch elections I don’t believe in, Prime Ministers and Presidents I don’t care for, and various other natural and unnatural disasters, I felt I had to at least see a little bit of this thing. Just as, the night before, I had stuck on the live feed of her lying in state on BBC iPlayer just to get a feel of the whole creepy thing. I had avoided the manufactured spectacle of ‘The Queue’ as much as possible (completely avoidable with sensible ticketing), but wanted to see what it was these people were queuing for: to bow and scrape at some lost ideal? To pay respects to an idea? To line up for hours just to shuffle past and nod at a box?
As someone who believes in neither the monarchy nor life after death, the entire thing was bewildering. It reminded me of the stuff in George A Romero’s Dawn of the Dead when the zombie humans shuffle back to the mall because all they know how to do is consume. At the same time though, I understand the strangeness of grief, including grieving for people' you’ve never met and who may be terrible monsters (check out the Queen’s role in brutal colonial abuse). I’ve been sad when celebrities have died and paid my homages. People like Eddie Guerrero, Robin Williams, David Bowie, and Anthony Bourdain. But I was also sad when Michael Jackson died. Whatever awful things he very likely did to children, when I was a child in the 80s and early 90s, he was my favourite musician and Thriller my favourite song. My grandmother used to send me every clipping she found about him in the American newspapers she read with little notes saying ‘I saw this about your friend Michael Jackson and thought of you’. So when he died, even though he’s likely a monster, I mourned. I listened again to his music. And then there’s Chris Benoit - once my favourite wrestler. When we found out he was dead we were devastated and rewatched some of his great matches…until we found out he’d murdered his entire family. That soured the mood. But I still sometimes find myself thinking about some of his great matches even though I know what he did.
And then there’s my parents. I had difficult relationships with both of them and when they each died a lot was still unresolved. But still I grieved. I canonised. I went through odd rituals and did things that made sense at the time but maybe would seem peculiar to those looking in from the outside. This whole album, for instance:
So while I don’t understand The Queue myself, and would never join such a ridiculous thing, I understood why people did, and why they didn’t find it ridiculous. After all, did I not just mention my latter day love of both football and Shakespeare? The fact that these two new enjoyments only occurred after the parents who wanted me to love them were dead is clear evidence that my decision to open my heart to them is in no small way a form of grieving and keeping both mom and dad close. I thought of dad a lot when I sat at Villa Park on Sunday, and think of my mom every time I go to the RSC.
We thought it would be interesting to see the stupid pageantry of it all as the procession to Westminster Abbey began and ended up leaving the whole thing on all day in the background. Sure, I read a book to it, and my wife did some Lego, but it was definitely on the whole time and washed over us both, with certain moments commanding more attention than others. We were part of the spectacle after all. And the RE teacher in me is always looking for good examples of things like funerals to use as a resource in class.
All of which is a VERY long way of saying why, since last Friday’s edition of Sabbatical, by Tuesday I had done very little new work on THE BIG RESEARCH AND WRITING PROJECT, and none at all on the memoir. But Tuesday I had other fish to fry too, as I journeyed down to Winchester to give a talk to their sixth form philosophers about anarchism.
The reviews were good:
Not only were the reviews good, but I loved doing it, and the questions from students after were so thoughtful and thought-provoking. We had a great chat, and Winchester was a lovely city to visit. I would love to give more of these sorts of talks (if you’re interested in booking me CLICK HERE), but the day of travel and the prep for the talk obviously took time away from the other work I’ve been doing. As did my decision to drop in on my friend S R Masters in Oxford on the way home and have a lovely catch up coffee and lunch. All nice stuff, but that, and an evening T’ai Chi class I do, largely took Wednesday out for working much too (although I listened to a lot of podcasts on the drives). I also listened to this classic soundtrack in the car following Jenny Slate’s excellent moment as Audrey in the movie I Want You Back we saw on Sunday:
Man I love Little Shop of Horrors!
And, of course, I had time to draw another shitty cartoon during my downtime at the hotel. Possibly the shittiest yet:
Finally though, yesterday, I had some time to return to my desk and get back to the new normality of my working-from-home life. I did some reading for TBRAWP (as all the cool kids are now calling THE BIG RESEARCH AND WRITING PROJECT), sorted out some correspondence, did a mock interview and personal statement feedback session for a student, started thinking about beefing up that rejected blog post about academic freedom into a proper article, and wrote 4,000 words of my memoir thing, unexpectedly writing about the death of my mother and finding myself weeping uncontrollably and cathartically at the keyboard as I did. I hadn’t really intended to include anything about that in there, but there was a natural and necessary route and it felt good (and incredibly sad) to go there. Emotionally triggering but also lovely to spend some time thinking about her.
And all with time to watch AEW Grand Slam in the evening too.
But I’ve buried the lead a little (buried it a lot really, considering the thousands of words above this sentence). I also got invited to an interview next week for that job I really wanted. The one that is giving me pause about dying my hair pink. I’m really excited about it and hope the interview goes well. The brief return to teaching on Tuesday in Winchester has made me even more eager to return to the classroom and this particular set of classrooms seems really perfect for me. So fingers crossed…
Today I have mainly been writing this while dealing with online grocery deliveries and de-scaling coffee machines (espresso maker and regular percolator. The whole house now smells of vinegar). I’ve also been catching up on the two brand new albums released today:
Andrea from The Manges was our tour manager for a tour of Italy in 1999 and I have always loved this band because of that emotional connection, but their music is legitimately awesome too. Then there’s the new Wonder Years album too, which seems to have some good old-school Wonder Years vibes compared to their last effort:
I’ll need to listen to both several more times before making any final judgements, but I’m liking what I’m hearing so far. I’m also excited about listening to the new Mobina Galore live album:
I saw them support Against Me! in Birmingham several years ago, just a two-piece, and they blew me away. I’ve bought everything they’ve released ever since. Besides all the cool new stuff, this week I’ve been listening to the following playlist:
Definitely a punky vibe happening. Like I was laying down a nest for all these nice new punk albums to arrive into.
Anyway - that’s enough navel-gazing and bullshit. Time to get back to work…