There is nothing new for regular readers of this page, but as I am getting past the horror of indexing my latest academic book (most horrible experience of my writing life), I decided to get started blogging again with a bit a biographical rehash of my life up to my fiftieth birthday, as on that date I intend to go from private author who can hide behind the excuse that I was only writing experiemental works of fiction and non-fiction to see if I could do it (unfortunately, decided that I could) to writing works in the public space. After my 50th birthday, I will judge the success of my writing by how much I am able to sell. So I expect a long run of failure, before I am discovered two days before my death by a New York Times book-reviewer (at last!).
My First Life: My Experience in Grad School
I went to graduate school in 1988—the year before Limbaugh came on the air—and I had similar experience to the one described by Limbaugh and others in the 1990s of an academia that was taking up the cudgel of conservatism and using it to define the boundaries of what is and is not acceptable as academic thought. Since I had been a perfectly acceptable student in my undergraduate courses, I was shocked to find that I was being likened to a Nazi on my first day of grad school for raising my hand and saying that I liked to outline my papers. I never got past that moment in eight years of grad school. This came to define my status as an outsider in the circles of academe, a position I have become quite comfortable with.
But I approach the 25 year old problem of what to do about political correctness very differently than Limbaugh does, because I was in grad school when I encountered the problem, whereas Limbaugh attempts to view the problem from his position as a college dropout who knew better than to listen to his liberal professors. I liked my liberal professors; I just didn’t think that they has as many answers to the questions being raised by their profession to knowledge as they thought they did. The sticking point for me was (as it was for everyone in the 90s) the work of Derrida, a philosopher who said that anything one could construct one could deconstruct. This made him the enemy of conservatives, who wanted (and still want) definite answers to questions that ultimately have no definite answers. This has marginalized conservatives among liberal academics from taking their place in the serious academics argument. In response, conservatives have acted as Derrida says they will. Exluded from inclusion in the halls of greatness, they have gone on to found a different set of solutions to human problems.
I was briefly captured by the arguments of conservatives in the mid-90s, because conservatives recognized what was happening to me, whereas liberals were constantly blaming conservatives for the problems that I was having as a Nazi in the midst of people who claimed to know nothing but still had the backbone to stand up to me as a Nazi. This didn’t (and still doesn’t) make any sense to me. This was, in my mind, akin to saying “We ourselves have answers” without addressing the philosophical nature of those answers. In my mind, if one truly believes that everything is subject to deconstruction, then that would apply to everyone’s solutions, not just conservative solutions. This is a problem that the Wikipedia page on Derrida recognizes as aporias (puzzles or paradoxes) even within Derrida’s system. I eventually learned to ignore the political bent of such vicious (to my mind) people who were so connected to the good that they did not (and never would) their problem with harmless little old me. It was enough that they closed the doors behind me as theu ushered my out of their private little conclave of non-believing believers. This was aporetic nonsense to my mind, but who was I to say what the truth of my situation was. I was there ro find out, but no one would answer my serious questions except topoint me to “experts” who “now knew” that there was no truth. “How do they know?” I would ask, and for my impertinence for asking what seemed to me to be a valid question (and I’m betting that this sounds like a valid question to you, too) I was told things like “I am old; when you get to be my age, you’ll see it this way, too” (for the record, I don’t), and “What we need is to retire to fresh ground, where older questions about the value of reading can be washed away, and we can begin reading without such tired and unfruitful notions as reading literature for it’s ‘value.’” This seemed to me to take away any reason that I should not quit reading literature and go make money. (I always have to swear that these things happened, because no one ever believes me; and end even when I do swear, people doubt my veracity; I swear that these are exact quotes said to me.)
Since no one was getting to the root of my problem, I briefly flirted with conservatism until I realized that, just like liberals, they had a lot of complaints but few answers to the philosophical status of their ideas. I sought in my dissertation to come up with a better reasoning than the one that obtained within and without the Ivory Tower. As a result of my getting nowhere on the University of Illinois campus, I ended up and taking my show on the road, because no one would listen to my ideas on campus. I gave 10 papers on 10 separate topics in two years (from Chaucer’s Troilus, to Shakespeare’s Richard II, to the model for the Pop-Max Cultural Conference in the Tale of the “Four Parisians” in my Poker Tales), and at the end of two years, I calculated that I was one of the most productive scholars, whether grad student or full-time professor, in the department. To my astonishment, they rewarded me with a pair of scholarships that enabled me to move away from the campus where I could get no respect.
But in spite of my having met my academic hero, Withrop Wetherbee, at one of these conferences, and in spite of his having said that I was a “powerhouse” whose ideas would change the way future scholars would look at literature of allegory. Within my own school, I was getting no respect. I had to switch advisors because my original advisor had seen nothing promising in a paper I handed in on the role of logic in a medieval poem. He told me that I “had no future in academia.” This was clearly an invitation to leave academia, but I had found another advisor who was less harsh. She was a Spenser scholar who as impressed with the fact that I had given a paper on Shakespeare’s Richard II in spite of my never having read it in any class, as well as my detailed knowledge of bibliographical work of Ronald McKerrow. (I know, how cool am I?).
She agreed to sponsor me if I would add a year on to my tenure in grad school and would study for medieval and Renaissance literature in a department where everyone else had to prepare for only one exam. I did it. But even after six years of working with my advisors, who were wonderful people and who were unbelievably indulgent of my alternate take on a subject that everyone else (at least at UIUC) took for granted as solved, on the last day of my education on which I defended my 450+ page dissertation, one of my indulgent advisors said (after six years of working with her) “Oh, now I see what you are getting at.” I was crushed. And even after they gave me my PhD “with distinction” for outstanding work, I felt that I had failed to completely surround the problem of deconstruction that I had set out to solve for.
My Life in Business: After Grad School
It wasn’t until I had left graduate school that I was able to figure out the last piece of the Derrida puzzle. I took the time to read some of the books that had propelled me into grad school in the first place. The first of these was Cochrane’s Christianity and Classical Culture. In it I found the final part of the theoretical answer that I was looking for. If you’re interested in my solution to the academic problem of meaning in a deconstructable world, you can read my work on A Literal Reading of Spenser’s Book of Holinesse where I point to the philosophy of Augustine as holding answers that the modern world has overlooked (but let’s face it, you’re not, nor should you be; it’s an extremely academic book; even English majors don’t read Spenser).
My life after grad school was tough. I had no job. There were only 13 medieval jobs posted that year, and 1ith 1,000+ applicants for every one, I was not surprised to find myself without one. What was more scary to me was the fact that I got out of graduate school at the age of 33 and was looking at the world as a guy who would be getting my first tenure review at the age of 40. And as it happened, my friend and professor, Joel Relihan asked me to write a chapter in his book called The Prisoner’s Philosophy on the extension of his ideas about his idea about a guy named Boethius (I know, you never heard of him; it doesn’t matter; and I don’t mean it like when the Old-Timer in my Poker Tales tells the Kid it doesn’t matter; it really doesn’t matter). My purpose was to extend Relihan’s late classical expertise through the Middle Ages, which I did. He failed to get tenure the year that I was waiting for another year to pass so I could try my hand at another academic job. If were to get a job—not a long shot, as everyone of my academic colleagues that had applied had gotten one—I would be facing the prospect of going to work at 40. And this was precisely the age that people at Budget Rent-a-Car were getting laid off to make room for younger, cheaper workers. I was facing a choice in my life between my pursuing my passion for literature and the probability of not getting tenure at 40 years old because my ideas, which played so well on the road, did not play well when others had to face all the implications of my ideas at home.
My Life in Business: Reading 100 Business Books in a Year
I made my decision on the basis of my having found that, in spite of my deep background in literature, that I was asking really stupid questions like “What’s incremental revenue?” and about the role of profit in a corporation. Having been to graduate school and having learned how to cover all the bases in any subject (I have spent 10 of 20 years as a teacher teaching freshman rhetoric), I wasn’t going to read just a few books on business. I was going cover all the bases of business. And what I found in my 100 business books drove me out of seeking employment in academia, because business had answers that were missing in my academic life, including how to actually proceed in a world without relying on a theory that had become intolerant of my answers to the problems of deconstruction. It wasn’t six months before I had decided to become an entrepreneur and forego my academic dreams.
One of the first serious business books I read—other than books like Wess Roberts’ Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun, which I soon pegged as fluff intended to prop up people who felt that their lives were not as purposeful as they once hoped—was Frederick F. Reichheld’s The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits, and Lasting Value. It was there that I learned that the balance that obtained in academia—the balance that President Obama’s speeches are centered upon—is not the way to make money in a competitive world. Money is not everything, but if you want to get ahead of your competition, you need to refine your search to take advantage of your most profitable customers, because 80 percent of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers. This is known in business as the 80/20 rule. I have treated it before on my blog (see here), but its importance goes back to Vilfredo Pareto and his Pareto Principle. Pareto himself thought that it was unfair, and perhaps this is why he supported Mussolini’s attempt to redistrute incomes across the population more equitably in much the same way that Obama is attempting to do 100 years later.
It seems obvious to me in hindsight, but this revelation of an imbalance in nature as the natual state of affairs shocked me at the time. It also introduced a divide in my thought—an aporia, for my academic readers—that needed fixing. I could either pitch in with Obama and the people who wanted to unite the world from its internal divisions, but this would make it impossible to make money in the competitive world of business; or I could leave business behind and retreat to the world of purer, more noble, and wiser academia, but this would mean foregoing the claim of academia to “wholeness,” as I would be leaving out piece of the whole competitive of human experience, and that would mean that my retreat from the world of competition would make me safe only as long as people didn’t question my status as an academic expert. That’s not the sort of thing that appealed to me—I’m far too radical to take anyone’s words for things if they do not appear to me to have the final answers, and I had had enough of that experience when I was in academe to think that it would work on anybody except the most naïve thinkers. Alas, I was not so wired, so I decided to get around the problem in a different way.
My Life in Business: My Drive Towards Entrepreneurship
Unlike some of my friends, who have told me that they found their situations in business dull and who wished that they could do something meaningful with their lives like I had (believe it or not, this still happens to me all the time), I left academia, went into business, and have never looked back. It wasn’t easy. I got hired as a full-time secretary at Budget, and after a year I got promoted to the position of marketing analyst, a position I was very uncomfortable with, because every other person had an M.B.A. and I had never even taken a business class. It wasn’t that I wasn’t confident that I could do the job (being an American I have no shortage of confidence in myself), but I felt like my bosses were taking advantage of my lack of qualifications. They thought I would never leave.
I was too insecure in that job at a company that constantly downsizing itself, and when my boss, who I liked a great deal, came downstairs and asked me what I did all day, I panicked. I found another job that paid twice as much as any of my academic colleagues were making on the basis of my experience as a marketing analyst (a job I nener thought I deserved). I have never been motivated by money, but by way of my life’s goal of fixing the problem of Derrida, I have to tell you, it was nice not to have to worry about my future as much as I had been for the last 15 years.
I continued work, and I went back to teaching, this time at DeVry on the basis of my continuing education. I walked into the office applying for an English job, and walked out with a job as a computer teacher on the basis of my having passed my MCSE (Microsoft’s server certification) and my intent to get an MCSD (Microsoft’s computer software certification). I taught computers part-time for 3 or 4years. But my goal had been set at Budget, while I was still as secretary. I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and within four years of work, I quit my last full-time job, and struck out on my own as a database programmer of large-scale distrubted (mostly SQL) databases for companies like Accenture and International Harvester (again, it doesn’t matter whether you know what I’m talking about). I love wotking for myself and have never looked back.
My Life as a Writer
I am still be working for myself, though I had to change my business once more after I suffered a stroke in 2004. I lost the power to speak, and it took me two years to get it back, so I decided that writing books on the basis of my expertise (in English of all things) was the wayforward after I had lost the power to express myself that it seemed to me in hindsight I had taken for granted.
In my life as a writer, I have been working on notions built up over my long post-academic career. Thus far, my works include the first in a series of three “Books for the Rest of Us,” Writing for People Who Hate Writing (currently off the market until I can redesign it); Poker Tales, a work about the complex interactions between people in what most people think of as the “silly” game of poker; and my forthcoming work of literary criticism on the very unmodern yet still better than modern way of reading the first book of The Faerie Queene, a work that every scholar says is important but which no one in the modern world understands and even fewer read. I own each of the topics I write about on Amazon. I have the best-selling work of fiction on poker for adults. I am the only person to have written a book-length study of Spenser’s pivotal but unread work of Holinesse (as again, I am the only person to have written a book-length study of the topic), and I am of the few people who have written a book targeted as peple who hate writing (although tt’s a huge market as my research indicates that 50% of my students dislike writing and 20% hate it).
I will continue to write new books, including my almost finished work on Art in the Age of Talk Radio, a book in which I take the art world to task for taking their positions as “whole” in a world where they do not take the “whole” of human experience into account but flee that aspect of life that makes us rich in favor of an untenable position in which people are not forced to compete. And I take the world of talk radio to task for believing that their Puritan existence in what Limbaugh calls “realville” gets them any closer to the imaginative center of life, where people and ideas mix yogether, with some people thowing really good ideas in to the ring (like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs) and some people throwing in really bad ideas into the ring. The marketplace will sort out good ideas from bad, even it does it imperfectly. In the case of Jobs and Gates, all the money and powerof IBM didn’t make up for the fact that Jobs and Gates a better imaginative vision of the unknown future than IBM had. Money toppled after them and away from the world of IBM accordingly.
I feel that my life as a writer is not to attempt to guide my reader into a perfect response to my work. There are no “perfect responses to the world. Not in academia, and not in business. My humble goal has been to respond to the world in a very different way than the master Modernist, James Joyce, who wanted to substitute his personal experience for his readers’ personal experience by showing how deep the roots of his literary experience are. I like my personal experiences, and I don’t want to give it away to a guy who can’t guarantee his experience as the last word on experience anymore than any other people’s experience in a Derridean universe of universal, democratic, and existential choice.
Insstead, it has been my goal as a writer to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before. When I put it like that, it sounds derivative and perhaps a touch trite—could I do so far as to say that it’s my own version of aporia?; nah!—but this weakness will only motivate me to try harder the next time in my desire to make an American art form that proceeds from myself as an individual experience without reference toyour response to what I have written. This seemse better than an insistence that you bow your head to me, as others bow to a collective art form derived, not from themselves, but from European hierarchical authors like James Joyce. That’s not my style.
Read my Poker Tales, and it won’t a bit of difference to me whether you think what I think matters at the poker table. It’s no skin off my nose how you react to the hands being played. It doesn’t even matter if you like poker, since poker is a cipher for a uniquely American way of reading. It doesn’t matter to me if you get the serious moral tale beneath some extermely silly tales, like the tale I call “‘Knuckles’ and ‘The Louse’” that my mother calls “Popeye” for reasons that will be obvious to you if you buy a copy of my book.
My job as an author is to point out how difficult the complex choices you have to make in your own lives are. It is not my job to solve them for you. You are in charge of the moral ground of your own experience, and who am I to disagree with the choices you make? My books are educational tools, but what use you make of your education is up to you.
Cheers!