The Last Days of Robertson Also Known as the Two-Fisted, Fighting Poet Doc

Two-Fisted Tales (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

First let us unpack the title of this post. "Two-fisted fighting poet doc" is from a Sinclair Lewis novel, though I don't remember which one, and the fact I can so easily look it up means I don't have to look it up. (1)

Right?

But yes these are the last days of my time as a professor in the Department of Media Studies with special responsibilities in the Journalism Minor at the University of San Francisco. "Last days" is figurative language - a metonymy, I think - in which the part stands for the whole. Days stand for months. I do not retire until May.

Edith wants me to blog out this last seven months. Actually, she wanted me to start the first day of this semester - to create a bittersweet arc, recapitulating a 27-year career and ending on a note of sadness, gladness and/or madness, contingent on events. But I couldn't put my heart into it so I delayed. Somewhat too easy to turn this into an excursion through an archipelago of regrets since my time at USF has been sometimes very good and mostly pretty good and only occasionally not so good at all, though the last five years has been a little Eh a little Ugh and somewhat Oh Come On Not Really?

I do not like regretting. Though it is irresistible to regret since implicit in regret is an assumption of importance and agency on one's part. The sea slug does not regret the operas it did not write. On the other hand, I did some good things, mostly in the classroom, and I always enjoyed teaching and never (Edith reminds me) taught a class the same way twice, which means I never served the same metaphorical meal twice. And some metaphorically feasted and others - not so much. But each day was bright, new, fragile.

One occasionally gets kind notes from former students. One sometimes - oh you know - solicits kind notes from former students. Overall I conclude that over these years I did good. Not perfect. I'm sure if I keep at this journal of days I will not be able to resist identifying specific moments of misjudgment and malconduct. And yet and yet to the end - almost there; I can smell it - I enjoyed teaching and cared about it and could not resist throwing out what didn't work (and often what did work) and tweaking assignments and discarding assignments and writing new bits of lecture and bookmarking new websites and hyperlinking to new blog posts and news stories as if I were going to teach ethics and magazine writing and beat reporting again and again forever.

That's what I have always liked about teaching: Someday I'll get it (almost) right.

Footnote 1: Of course, I looked it up. It's from Arrowsmith, and it's wonderful:

Zenith welcomes with high hurraw
A friend in Almus Pickerbaugh,
The two-fisted fightin' poet doc
Who stands for health like Gibraltar's rock.
He's jammed with figgers and facts and fun,
The plucky old, lucky old son--of--a--gun!

Footnote 2: The Google, like Suzanne, takes you down to her place near the river and you can hear the boats go by and you can spend the night forever and you know that she's half-crazy but that's why you want to be there and she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China and you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind and you know that you can trust her for she's touched your perfect body with her mind by which I mean I looked for a nice "last days" quote and found this:

On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

-  H. L. Mencken

I Now Have an iPad

iPad as depicted in CrunchBase"

... because I am fortune's fool? No. It's just that I am wondering if some device might make paying for news so easy or cool or glamorous or beautiful or convenient that, in fact, being a journalist will not become some version of the artist's life, something one loves but at which someone starves.

I think it was Paul Fussell who wrote some decades ago that being a journalist was one of the few bohemian life choices in America. But I don't recall what exactly he meant by that, if it was the low remuneration that drove his notion. I have certainly told the kids over the years that journalism did not pay well at entry level and not spectacularly at the higher levels -- unless you make it to the TV big time.

And now things are even worse with -- from one point of view -- no hope at all. Whoa. When I say something like that I am allowing myself to mingle my worries about the willingness to the public to pay for "professional" journalism with my general despair over the public's disinclination to want information that challenges its self-satisfaction at knowing enough -- Keep those nasty facts *away* from me.

Step back and refocus. Let's see if the iPad does what I have the read the iPod did, that is, coax people into paying a little for what heretofore they were stealing.

I will keep you posted. I am part of a group at USF sharing perceptions of the value of the iPad in the classroom.

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The Parameters of the Fall 09 Reporting Class Beat

Bounded by Parker, Turk, Masonic and Golden Gate. Click it big.

USF's Peer Group in the U.S.News Rankings

From a Michigan Tech press release:

Overall, Michigan Tech is in the top tier of national universities, ranking 121st along with Arizona State University, the University at Buffalo-SUNY, the University of San Francisco and Catholic University of America. National universities are defined as institutions that offer a full range of undergraduate majors, master’s and doctoral degrees and emphasize groundbreaking faculty research

The Healing Power of Laughter, or How I Became Department Chair

A Good Day's Work Learning About U.S. Census Data

Image via Wikipedia

Because a smart teacher knows he must remain a moving target, this semester I'm going to assign the residential enclave between the University of San Francisco's upper and lower campuses as the "beat" for my reporting class. We're going to learn more about it: who lives there, why they live there, what they care about, how proximity to USF determines what they care about.

I have no idea how well this will work and what stories we will stumble upon, but I've already learned that in 2000 USF was located in census tract 157 and the little neighborhood between two campuses -- which USF students use as a thoroughfare and parking lot, among other things (which would get on my nerves) -- consists of census blocks 3013, 3012, 3011, 4000, 4001, 4002 and 4003. (Here's a map.)

The population in 2000? Here's the link. But I wonder what time of year the census was taken? That might make a difference about how many student renters were caught up in the survey. Every answer produces two questions -- if you're lucky.

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My Bookcases Have Arrived. My Pictures Are Hung. I am Ready to Entertain Callers.

The Capo di Tutti Deani Makes Me an Offer I Can't Refuse

Cover via Amazon

Which is to repeat his response to my earlier post on his phrase that murmurs both threat and promise, that is, "Well, there you go."

Says the Dean:

I like the blog- but there actually IS a meaning for the phrase. The true meaning of "... well, there you go", is really,"... go figure" (as my grandmother used to say). Feel free to use this to your heart's content (or discontent) (or, perhaps, better yet, malcontent).

And I say: My Dean. Tell me who has disrespected you...

Shame of the Soft Hands

It was about August 21 when I moved into my new office in remodelled Campion Hall, now named Kalmanovitz Hall after the beer lord who made the money that funded the foundation that gave the grant that gutted the building that contained the office that hosted the professor that wrote the blog that ....

Ready for an etc., little buddy?

In any event, it was about August 21.5 when I asked for more bookcases. My old office was a filthy little hole, but it had a grand view of the church and it had bookcases elbowing great swaths of desk space, which left almost no space for me.

But my goods were accommodated.

The new office had only two inadequate bookcases, so I asked for two more, not the tall ones but merely the low, for I am not piggy. The first one showed up last month, followed by the second a week later. But the second bookcase was in a box in pieces, and there it sat, useless as a Republican.

Today my resentment at its impudent uselessness was too much. I decided to put it together myself with the little screwdriver I keep about my person.

Well, I won't drag this out. As in a Greek tragedy, let us keep the carnage offstage. I put it mostly together and then it mostly fell apart, just ripping the very crap out of the hardware and fiberboard.

It's not the loss of bookcase that hurts. That loss is a mere frustration. It's the loss of face, enduring the snickers of the maintenance guys who will sort out the wreckage*because once I was a blue-collar guy, a working-class guy, a guy who spent his summers in the steel mill and the auto plant.*

And now I can't bolt together a darn bookcase. And I do mean darn. I have lost the right to use savory language.

Ancient Mariner Sinks

Today a class I made a Geritol joke and then said something like,"You're too young to know what I'm talking about."

On his blog, one of my students wrote: "Jeritol What is this word? Robertson used it in class and I can't figure out the spelling nor what it means. I'm puzzled."

So it wasn't a throwaway, contextually clear enough not to divert. This is not good. Too many of these "stuff you don't know that I do because I'm old" comments might really be alienating rather than .... Rather than what? There's actually no value at all of any kind in reminding kids of what we both know, that I've been there, done that, forgotten I did it and then did it again except damn I dropped it.

It's a *wake up call* -- either that or ringing in my ears.

Nerves. Virtue.

Today I got up at 5:30 -- in the morning in the dark -- because it was my first teaching day, and my first day is always anxious, even though I taught my first college class 41 years ago as a graduate assistant in the English Department at Duke.

Teaching is something you never quite figure out, which is one reason I think I can work happily until I'm 70 or -- and at this point the Dean's blood runs cold and she leans against the wall for support -- even longer. Some days you try things, pedagogical things, and they fall so flat. But that can be invigorating in an odd way. Redemption is only a class away.

(On the earth the broken arcs; in heaven a perfect round. Robert Browning anyone?)

I was up so very early because I scheduled myself an 8:30 class this semester, adjusting my times to the convenience of others, a possibly forgettable fact, so I will remind certain colleagues of it regularly. But isn't the air perfumed with virtue when you rise before the sun.

I got to the university about 8 and bumped into H., who was striding past the parking lot, as if downhill. I stretched my legs and matched his stride so I could brag a little about how early I had got up.

Well, I get up at 4 every day, he said. Every day. Can't stay in bed. I made some weak comment about how he must get a lot done in the morning, and he said well he did walk to work and then home again every day, and that used up a couple hours.

Perhaps, there's the lesson about doing good. It just rubs you up against people who do better.

I've Got to Get Back to Making Videos, Particularly Those with the Power to Embarrass

I did this at the end of Spring semester 2008. I like to think I spoiled the moment for a really nice guy.

Sitting Here Giving My Reporting Students Their Final

Half the final is always a police report -- a real police report rich in irrelevant detail and bureaucratic language -- that the kids must boil down to 100 words. They may, of course, keep going after that act of summary, but they must not "go chronological," as I put it, too soon.

Story telling is a natural human act. Some do it better than others, but we all appreciate the art of Scheherazade, for whom the maintenance of suspense was an act of survival. Yet the aim of certain kinds of journalism is the destruction of suspense: Here is what happened raw and simple. Perhaps that sort of tight focus is a form of misdirection, even dishonesty, in its arrogant assumption that the reporter's frame somehow corrals the truth.

That's the student of Media Studies talking, and it's the right kind of talk. News is made (I obviously don't mean fabricated, only that certain information is selected and pulled downstage) by whoever records it. But that does not mean the summary lead is not a useful thing or always a dishonest thing. If you go too Postmodern and say the critic rules the text and the text is indeterminate as is the material world which is a kind of text, you may become as foolish as one of Swift's floating philosophers, trapped in solipsism.

So I teach the summary lead without shame, though I also try to teach the modesty that should accompany its use.

But moderation in all things, including modesty. Read Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts"

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well, they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Marvelous brilliant cruel poem. It's all about burying the lead, a reporter would say.

Obama Goes to the Haight

What's the metric for determining how hard I have worked as chair this semester? Look no further than my bar bill. During the school year every month or so the colleagues and I walk out for an afternoon drink or two, hitting one bar or another but favoring the Aub Zam Zam, which specializes in martinis, and there are certain things you should attempt only in the presence of a specialist.

Last week one of my wife's bosses told her that she was making everyone else look bad -- because she had done a job so fast that now people would ask why every job wasn't done that rapidly. This is man talk, the positive framed as a negative, so that you have to step back, assess and work your way around before you arrive at the truth on the other side.

This is how many many (did I say many?) male animals do their business, and having a few drinks with male colleagues you sometimes get a fine flow of friendly insult, the equivalent of the 'pound hug,' where men embrace stiff-armed and then flail at one another's backs.

So that's pretty much it when we visit the Haight: increasingly loud and awkward code-talk, as we all try to get in touch with our inner Barney and cannot find him. And what happens when female colleagues come along, which they sometimes but not always do? Well, mostly they sip almost imperceptibly, like bees at tiny flowers. They watch, as if the male animal was more assignment than companion, and file it all away as they get in touch with their inner anthropologist.

You could write a book, they think. As so many women have.

But I have wandered off track. My point is that my clan and I went walkabout before classes started back in August and haven't since. I personally blame the emails, which breed like tribbles.

And, by the way, I am of course aware of Chaucer's Sergeant of the Law:


Nowher so bisy a man as he ther nas,
And yet he semed bisier than he was.


I do concede I don't always resist boasting about my devotion to duty and perhaps exaggerate it a bit. But the fact remains: We were dead to the Haight for more than three months. Now, as it happened an election intervened, and in its aftermath I acquired an Obama hat mostly because it felt so good to buy it on the street in Oakland from a young black woman to whom the handing over of the hat seemed like the giving of a gift, even though I paid her $15. I've worn it here and sometimes there, to the occasional approving nod.

But yesterday I thought: It's time to take my game into the belly of the beast, to show all those Naderites, Trotskyites, libertarians, vegetarians, Greens, connoisseurs of all things Kucinich, your protofascists, nanofascists, hypofascists and fascists manque, not to mention all those bedraggled and dispirited Republicans on the down low who so clutter up the thoroughfare you can hardly find a dry piece of sidewalk, I'm saying I'm going to show all of them just how proud a moderate Democrat can be in these days of half-a-loaf, which will certainly be better than none in the aftermath of Bush backing up the truck and dumping everything in the cesspool and then backing the damn truck into the cesspool and throwing in the keys and then *walking away*, the bastard.

It's a small hope we have about the future when looked at from one angle, about a hat's worth of hope. It's all been going to ruin for so long and so fast, so please just stop the slide, Mr. President.

And then we all take a deep breath. And then we link hands and start the long slow climb back, keeping our mouths *shut* just for the first little while.

And what actually *happened*? Our little tatooed waitress was not amused, though I don't think it was the hat, and a bum asked me for money by reciting political poetry. And you know I think I felt a slight wind at my back, though it may have only been the breathing of my companions, laboring up a slight incline.

The Future, Part II

The Future, Part I

I Am a Clever Fellow

I'm exchanging emails with my Arts Reporting/Reviewing class (Spring 2009) about which genres they'd like to tackle. I make the final call, of course, but I want to give them what they want.

In moderation.

Anyway, one student asked for both recorded and live music, and I said we'll go with live performance because there's "more stuff for those of us with two left ears."

Two left ears. Never heard that before. Googled it. Only 243 hits.

Not bad.

The Kids Do *All Right*

The Kids are Alright

Today I went to work with E.

Her floor holds hundreds, but we were the only ones there, which is why I accompanied her. It's no big thing. If I'm going to grade stories, I can grade them anywhere. Indeed, being physically separated from all diversions other than the candy machines on the 6th floor focuses my mind wonderfully.

Today I graded the AP style test I gave the Advanced Reporting class last week. It was open book -- my god pity the fool and/or copy editor who memorizes the AP Stylebook. Having it bludgeoned into your memory through repeated reference, that's something else. It's like John McCain confessing, under duress and against his will.

But actually commiting it to memory? That's marching a host of valuable brain cells over the cliff, lemming-like, with as much purpose.

Yet yet yet. There are some things even though I insist you should look up everything, I think you should not have to look up.

Is your navel an inny or an outy? I don't want to see that hand creeping inside your shirt.

And so we come to the question on my style test that made me wince.
Four of 13 students choose "alright" over "all right." I understand that usage changes and that all the fine rules of spelling and grammar describe and do not prescribe. (Don't get me started on "hone in.")

How long before those four are correct, and the nine wrong?

it doesn't matter it doesn't it doesn't matter

Reporters don't need to know how to spell anyway, and some of the best of them used to spell the worst and punish grammar like a kid stomping ants.

And these four wrong answers helped *curve* the test grades, which us teachers love god forgive us. Oh we are devils, Satan, satanic even.

And by the way the capitalization in that last sentence is all delicious AP style.

You would have been so nailed.

See the Symptoms Ripple

Since the Giants opened AT&T ballpark, I've shared a couple third-deck season tickets with 8-to-10 USF staff and faculty. The number varies year to year as syndicate members come and go and come again. But this year we've lost enough members that, to quote our syndicate chief, "I guess we're going to have to reconsider whether we can move forward."

We've opened the doors to those outside the university, but so far no takers. It would be a $400 investment for eight games in really pretty good seats -- for the third deck.

The hesitation of others makes me rethink my own decision. Am I being lavish? We also have two A's tickets for a 20-game package in the second deck complete with senior discount. Surely it's foolhardy to have *two* season ticket packages. There's parking. There's BART. There's wear and tear on one's joints walking to and fro. And what about opportunity cost?

When others who from a distance look more prosperous than us draw back, why am I the cockeyed-optimist?

On the other hand, what are the odds I'll die or lose my marbles before our money runs out? Sometimes being a pessimist can make you an optimist, at least short term.,