I don’t enjoy flying, but I do like traveling. There is pleasure in being somewhere else, in experiencing a different city or country. All that is taken for granted in daily life cannot be taken for granted — and this is especially true when in another country, when the food, language, and culture differs in varying degrees from one’s own. Prior to dinner, the Swiss have apero, a kind of extended meal of hors d’ouvres. In a Japanese restaurant, shoes get left at near the doorway, and hands adjust to eating with chopsticks instead of a knife and fork.  But even in one’s own country, cities are not identical. Normal, Illinois (where I am flying from, as I write this) has three independent record stores on the same block, and a superlative used bookstore — with lots of children’s books — on the same block. And I ran along a trail I’ve never run along before.

When traveling, daily work does not vanish. The draft of the panel proposal must be edited and rewritten, via a series of email exchanges with a colleague at another university. The invited talk itself must be timed, polished, cut, honed, rehearsed.  Emails from students, colleagues, editors, and others require answers.

But all of this work happens out of context, in a different space — on a plane, in an airport, at the hotel lobby, in the back of the taxi, in the hotel room. Because it is happening in different locations, it acquires a slightly different flavor, even a greater sense of clarity.  This sharpness of perception may derive from the simple fact of being somewhere else: because they are unfamiliar, surroundings demand more attention, perhaps heightening attentiveness more generally. It may also derive from urgency: being a conference attendee or invited speaker creates a daily schedule that reorganizes time in ways that cannot always be anticipated.

I like that, though. And, since I’m almost always traveling for business, I enjoy the interchange of ideas — in the Q+A session of the talk, or the conversations over dinner, after the panel session, and so on.  During the past few days, talking with Jan Susina, his wife Jodie Slothower, their son Jacob, my former graduate student Elizabeth Williams (and other University of Illinois grad students, faculty, and families), I’ve learned about lots of books and articles I need to read: Theories of affect, collections of comics, young adult novels. Beyond that, there are ideas that lodge in my subconscious, emerging later, sometimes long after I’ve forgotten the source.  At some point, I’ll ask Jan to elaborate on the connections he sees between Paul Klee and Crockett Johnson.

Though academics work long hours (as I’ve documented elsewhere) for less compensation than we’d like, I feel privileged to have a job in which I get to learn, share what I’ve learned with other people, and learn from other people.

Combining these intellectual exchanges with the displacement of travel brings the experience of learning into focus, sustains a degree of clarity absent from my workaday life, prods me to keep moving forward into new areas.

And it’s especially nice when someone else picks up the cost! (I pay for most conference travel myself, but I’m coming back now from two invited talks, both of which were covered by the host institution.)  So, thanks to the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of English (especially Marah Gubar), and to Illinois State’s Department of English (especially Jan Susina and Roberta Trites), and to everyone who hosted, chatted, came to the talks or otherwise participated.  It’s been a great few days!  Until next time!

Coming from a U.S. state whose governor is working tirelessly to defund the arts, I’ve been delighted to see so much art in Brisbane, Australia — most of it at no cost to the visitor.  GoMA’s Surrealism exhibit requires a ticket, but the rest of the museum has no admission fee.  Back in the States, MoMA has a $20.00 admission fee.

But, in Brisbane, you can…

… carry a giant guitar pick on your back

… kick a giant silver ball

… play peek-a-boo with a spaceship from the future

… or dance with giant angular metal.

All at no cost to you!

And I failed to get a picture of the disemboweled mechanical kangaroos, but those are nifty, too.

Above photo by David Jackmason, webmaster of BrisbaneIsHome.com.

As we celebrate the birthdays of Mozart (255th) and Lewis Carroll (179th) amidst threatened cuts to arts funding, we might re-read Yuko Takao’s A Winter Concert (1995; English translation, 1997).  Rendered in thin dark lines on a white background, mice walk to a concert.  As the pianist begins to play, colored pointillist shapes rise from the piano: a small red circle, a smaller orange triangle, a purple square.  Displaying the piece’s musical development, the shapes, sizes and colors grow in frequency and variation: a crescent moon of yellow, orange, and red; a globe of many colors.  Soon, a full spectrum of sound washes over the auditorium.  When the audience departs, each member brings along some of that color on the journey home.

Music adds color to our lives.  It brightens cold winter days.  It allows us to experience beauty.

Despite what the Governor of Kansas may think, the arts deserve our support.  And I, for one, am glad to pay more taxes, if that’s what it takes. As the protagonist of Leo Lionni’s Frederick (1967) knows, art can sustain us when times are hard.  And, despite news of economic recovery, times remain hard.

There’s a proverb (which may be Persian, I’m not sure) that goes something like this:

In order to live, a person needs two pennies: one for a loaf of bread, and the other for a lily.

If you just have the first penny, you’re merely surviving.  The second penny — the one for beauty — is what allows you to do more than merely survive.  The second one allows you to live.

Support the arts.  If you need a second penny, take mine.

Reports about Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses are burying the lead or omitting it all together.  At a time when the humanities are under attack, this book reveals that humanities majors are learning more than all other majors.  You read that correctly.  The students who are acquiring the most knowledge from their college educations are those who major in English, Philosophy, Music, Fine Arts, Religion, History, Theatre, and Modern Languages:

Students majoring in liberal arts fields see “significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study.” Students majoring in business, education, social work and communications showed the smallest gains. (The authors note that this could be more a reflection of more-demanding reading and writing assignments, on average, in the liberal arts courses than of the substance of the material.)

That’s from Scott Jaschik’s piece in Inside Higher Ed, one of the only articles to even mention this important victory for the humanities.  True, it’s not the lead, and the parenthetical diminishes the importance of the subject.  (That final sentence makes the absurd claim that the humanities have both “more-demanding reading and writing assignments” and somehow less “substance.”  What?)  Their apparent anti-humanities bias aside, Arum and Roska’s study brings good news for those of us who value the humanities.

Why, then, do the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, and others fail to mention the fact that humanities majors are learning more than their colleagues in other fields?  Why are the headlines “University students learn next to nothing” (Macleans) or “New Study Confirms the Obvious: First Two Years of College Spent Sleeping and Partying” (Vanity Fair)?

There are many reasons, all of which have been stated elsewhere with greater eloquence.  (For those who wish to skip a summary of the obvious, jump past this list to the next paragraph.)  Some reasons include:

1. Americans’ anti-intellectualism.  Most Americans distrust the well-educated, and consider knowledge with suspicion.  To point to but one recent example: For the past decade, The Today Show has featured the winners of the Caldecott and Newbery Awards.  This year, on the first show after the awards were announced, Today‘s featured guest was Snooki.  The winners have yet to appear on the program.
2. The widely held notion (by many state legislatures, at any rate) that college is a waste of the public’s money.
3. And, of course, cultural prejudice against the humanities.  English majors: how often do your relatives ask you what you’re going to do with that degree? How many of your classmates ask why you need a B.A. in English to ask “Do you want fries with that?” How many Engineering majors get asked the same questions?

All of the above are either false or based on false premises.  If you’re able to think critically about the world, you’re less likely to be misled (by, say, politicians who claim that we “can’t afford” to fund public education adequately).  If you gain a college degree, you’ll have a better chance at finding gainful employment.  And, as for the notion that humanities majors enter the job force ill-equipped, that’s simply nonsense.

To focus on the students I teach, English majors go on to become librarians, screenwriters, teachers, technical writers, lawyers, journalists.  They work in non-profits, publishing, advertising, public relations.  One former student of mine works for Hallmark.  You can do a lot with a degree in the humanities. As Geoffrey Galt Harpham writes, ”the humanities elicit and exercise ways of thinking that help us navigate the world we live in. For my money, that’s about as essential as it gets.”  To be a student of the humanities is to consider with greater nuance and deeper understanding just what it means to be human.  What could be more important than that?