This blog is a resurrection. What was a failed attempt to record my furious but brief cooking phase will now serve as a space for literary things. The name originally referred to my desire to cook with the best ingredients on a limited budget ( I suppose I still have this desire but mainly focus on eating rather than cooking). I briefly thought of changing the name to something more literary but after some extremely cheesy allusions and one rhyming pun (see title of post), I ultimately realized TPC still captures the aim of the blog, in a way. Its referent has changed from cooking good food to producing "gourmet" analyses on a limited intellectual budget. And unlike food, knowledge doesn't have a shelf life, and I can continue to amass quality ingredients slowly but surely. It is a great example of the malleability and arbitrariness of words.
That being said, I am not unaware of the implications of coupling the word "poor" with bourgeois/leisure notions of the gourmet or connoisseur. I really did not mean to say that I am truly in poverty, a very serious and all-too-real situation in this country and one that I probably ought not to make light of. But again, the alternative was a rhyming pun/allusion, so I hope you will forgive my entirely irresponsible and unconscionable use of the word "poor" when I am in reality well-fed and somewhat paid-up.
Yet if I consider the name in connection with two of the three literary figures I invoke in my "about me" section, a surprising ideological picture emerges. Jude Fawley is the working class protagonist tragically denied entry into Oxford because of his class in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. In Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, Paul Pennyfeather is expelled from Oxford after getting mixed up with the wrong crowd and ends up defaulting on his inheritance, forcing him to seek employment in a-gasp!-public school. I have always identified with these figures because I too carry deep anxieties about my worthiness in higher ed, have had to withdraw from a very good school after being my own bad crowd (although I did go back and finish), and am currently teaching ninth grade English. I can't help but feel like an outsider trying to break in again, trying to crack the code and secure the mythological creature known as the tenure-track position. I feel so much like Jude at times, so desperate to just learn, learn for the sake of learning, yet so much knowledge seems sequestered and out of my reach. The realization of everything that I have not read and do not know can be overwhelming, and I cannot help but think myself intellectually a little below the poverty line, (although I've become pretty good at managing my savings). In my world, knowledge is currency, and when one is trying to crack the code of higher ed, one cannot help but be a subconscious Marxist.
And apparently one cannot help but practice expressivism while blogging.
"The Poor Connoisseur" it will remain. For now.
"producing "gourmet" analyses on a limited intellectual budget. And unlike food, knowledge doesn't have a shelf life, and I can continue to amass quality ingredients slowly but surely. It is a great example of the malleability and arbitrariness of words."
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting way to think about learning (exploring new foods, judging / valuing), about our own knowledge making (producing analyses that others think worthy), about the ways we make knowledge (ingredients and what we do with them, or not), and about the complexities of "meaning" (words, signifiers, signified). If we call this expressive, we have overcome the decades of sneers that so often associated with that concept. Good for you / us.
One of the ongoing gifts of learning is the awareness of the layers and contingency of "meaning," too, as you discover with your acknowledgement of using "poor," so readily and trying to stipulate what you mean and don't mean. I always count these as positive when I yet again realize how much I take for granted.
I wish I could tell you that your feelings of being an outsider will go away, and that once you have the T-T job and earn tenure that you will be "inside," but I'm not sure that feeling ever goes away. That's not bad, either. What would we do if all of a sudden we finished getting inside? Where else would be go. Fortunately, we are always on that learning path, and I for one hope it doesn't end, at least for me.
I do understand the feelings though. I wish I knew of ways to invite learners to join us on the path and develop a different attitude about what we know and don't know. Seems to me that an ideally hospitable learning environment is one were roles of host and guest are always alternating, because we all have the opportunity to learn from one another and to learn together. I'm trying to imagine a way to consider us always already insiders and outsiders, depending on the perspective.
Great start on the blog, Lindsey.