One person’s heaven is another person’s hell. Here is Jonathan Mayhew’s list of ideal work conditions. It is obvious that I would not survive in his dream conditions, and he would dislike mine. This is one of the most beautiful things about academia: every scholar is very different and complex and can offer students a glimpse into a separate multi-layered universe that she or he is.

So here is what would need to happen to make my work conditions (that are very good to begin with, I have to confess) absolutely perfect:

1. The 2:2 teaching load (meaning 2 courses per semester) as opposed to the 3:3 I now have.

2. My students would be less limited financially than they are, and I could assign any readings I wanted instead of being limited by what the Textbook Rental service is willing to provide or what can be accessed for free because the copyright has expired. I only studied at universities for well-off people where profs easily assigned $1,000 worth of books for every course each semester. Here I had to learn to live in the real world where people have limited amounts of money.

3. The administration would stop trying to bully us with endless discussions of funding cuts, layoffs, etc.

4. People would engage in psychological hygiene and  not dump their emotional garbage on colleagues or students.

5. Colleagues at other departments would be less terrified of getting bad teaching evaluations and would not chicken out of teaching academic writing.

6. There would be a coffee-maker and a coffee lounge at the department with a good selection of coffees. I would not mind paying for the good selection of coffees with my own money. We are Foreign Languages and Literature, for Pete’s sake! We need a coffee-machine.

7. At least half of language courses currently taught at my department would be cancelled permanently. (Can anybody explain to me what goals courses like Advanced Conversation and Advanced Grammar achieve that cannot be achieved in regular literature courses?)

8. I could teach a course on  Spanish literature in translation which is now an area that has been unfairly occupied by the English lit people. Even a very good translation of Don Quijote does not mean the novel is part of English literature.

9. The writing center would have Spanish-language tutors who would help students improve their academic writing in Spanish.

10. I know this last point will make me a freak among my colleagues but my favorite size for a literature course is 20-25 students. For a language course, however, the ideal size is 8-10 students. Usually, it is the other way round but these are the numbers that work for me. This semester I had 22 students in my literature course, and it was the best course ever. It was a far greater success than my literature courses with 4, 6, and 9 students. The 6-9 student course was a lot more lecture-based than the 22-student course which was about 95% discussion and student participation.

And one last thing that is so unattainable that I don’t even include it in this list: ideally, I would have a shower in my office. We live in a climate where the temperature is above 80F 7 months a year and above 90F 5 months a year. So imagine what happens when people have to run from one building to another while carrying stacks of books and papers.

And what would make your workplace perfect?

I will never become Americanized enough to understand the US obsession with sports. Don’t get me wrong, I have enjoyed a good game of soccer or hockey both on TV and live. What I don’t get, though, is why sports need to invade every aspect of human existence in this country. Athletic programs of US colleges end up being a huge rip-off no matter what they do:

Syracuse University has decided to leave the Big East Conference for the Atlantic Coast Conference, which has large payout for members. But Syracuse is bound by its contract with the Big East to pay a $7.5 million exit fee. The university is planning to allocate that bill across the institution.

So now every department will suffer because the Athletic Department wants to get more money but refuses to invest anything into the program.

But The Syracuse Post-Standard reported that both student and faculty groups are asking why the athletics department shouldn’t pay the $7.5 million, and spare other departments cuts. A petition says: “In light of the fact that the Athletic Department is expected to receive an annual increase from the ACC in excess of $10 million per year, we endorse the resolution of the University Senate and Senate Budget Committee recommending that the $7.5 million Big East exit fee be paid fully by the Athletic Department and not out of student tuition.”

Can you believe these losers at the Athletic Department? They want to get all the benefits but pay for none of the costs of this arrangement. And what is even more egregious, the administration seems to be supporting them. I wonder why I never see departments of Foreign Languages or Anthropology demand that the entire university invest millions of dollars into something that will benefit them.

I might be naive but I will never understand why, instead of all these fake Conferences with enormous amounts of money and athletes who are barely literate but pretend to be students, universities can’t have big, beautiful facilities where people come to practice sports without all of these official, pompous, billion-dollar issues.

One of the most curious games identified by Berne is called “Debtor.” Berne said back in 1969 that the need to take on debt purely for its own sake was the defining characteristic of the American identity.

The reason why people take on all these mortgages, car loans, credit card debt, personal credit lines, etc. is not about what they purchase with the borrowed money. Just like alcoholics, they don’t look for gain as much as they crave the pain. The debt organizes their entire existence and charts their life path for them. Everything they do, the way they structure their career and their personal life, even the way they manage their time is circumscribed by the debt. If the debt weren’t there, they would have to write the script of their own lives, and that is too onerous.

The debt also provides motivation in lieu of a broken mechanism of motivation (again, just like the hangover does for alcoholics) and fosters a pleasant feeling of endless guilt.

I know this sounds counter-intuitive at first, but look at any person who can’t stop spending and taking out credit cards. How often does s/he buy completely useless junk that s/he doesn’t even remember buying two days later? Isn’t this an indication that the purchase is unimportant here?

A Philadelphia mother wants her son’s high school teacher fired after he bought the teen the novelFifty Shades of Grey for in-class reading.

Maya Ladson says she was shocked to find a copy of the racy read in her 14-year-old’s book bag back on March 9. That shock turned to outrage when she found out how he got the book.

The really disturbing question here is what the mother was doing rummaging through the 14-year-old’s bag. No book, movie or pornographic material of absolutely any kind can cause as much damage as an intrusive parent who denies the child personal space and rummages through his or her personal stuff.

What’s really horrible is that this vicious freakazoid doesn’t even feel any shame when she announces to the world how easily she violates her son’s privacy:

The school has been on break for the past month. Ladson says when classes resume on Monday, she plans to protest outside the school with other parents.

And now she will make her son the butt of every joke at school. We all know how teenagers react to 14-year-old boys whose Mommies make a public spectacle of  policing their sexuality.

I’m sure this freak is convinced she is a great mother.

From a beautiful post (emphasis mine):

Furthermore, in the rush to destigmatize individuals who have been diagnosed with mental illness (i.e. “It’s not your fault, or anybody else’s!”), are we not paying the price of hopelessness? In other words, psychiatry is saying “there is something fundamentally wrong about you and the way you have been wired over which you have no control. Your problems are not sane adaptations to insane circumstances, but rather these symptoms indicate that your brain is broken.” Psychiatry seems to believe that it is better to tell “the mentally ill” that all they can hope for is the ability to manage their mental illness because there is no recovery (even when clinical data do not support such unwarranted pessimism).

This is precisely what I found so comforting in psychoanalysis. Finally, I was told that what I was experiencing was a completely sane way of adapting to insane circumstances and not some uncontrollable organic damage. Just the idea that it is OK to react to abuse trying to protect yourself from is was an enormous relief. There is nothing wrong with people who react against abusive situations.

Another one of the famous games identified by Berne is “If It Weren’t For You.” I will play the part of a clueless first year grad student in these posts and illustrate somebody else’s theory with my own examples. I was never this kind of student but I can be this kind of blogger for a short while.

This game is played by people who assign the responsibility for their actions to others. One example I find very curious is that of women who claim their careers are impeded by their having to do the bulk of household duties. In reality, nobody ever forces them to be the family’s designated cook and maid. If you look closely at their situations, you will see that they fight tooth and nail, manipulate, and struggle to push other family members away from household chores. The goal is to have an excuse to sigh, “Of course I would publish more / start my own business / get promoted / make more money / go to grad school, etc., if only the mean, bad patriarchal system didn’t make me spend all of my time scrubbing the floor.”

Men play this game, too. Their favorite variation on it is “Of course I would publish more / start my own business / get promoted / make more money / go to grad school, etc., if only I didn’t have to provide for you and the kids.”

The deadliest variation of this game is the one that parents play against their children. Children are too dependent to be able to see through the “Oh, what wouldn’t have I achieved if you hadn’t be born and I hadn’t been forced to sacrifice my dreams for your sake” ruse. When they grow up, they will most likely saddle themselves with the exact same kind of guilt-tripping partner to recreate the familiar environment of being blamed for another person’s failures.

The way to deal with these self-sacrificial fakes is by calling their bluff. “I didn’t ask you for these sacrifices and I don’t need them. This was your own choice,” should be the response to their self-aggrandizing drama. Beware, though, in all probability, the fake will not be able to tolerate the realization that all the failures are of his or her own making and will end the relationship in favor of a more willing scapegoat.

The real object of an alcoholic’s desire is not the drink. The happy feelings of intoxication, the lowering of inhibitions, the social ease that come with alcohol are added bonuses but never the main goal. What the alcoholic really craves is the hangover.

The pain and suffering of a hangover fulfill one or all of the following purposes for the alcoholic:

1. The physical pain serves as a punishment for the alcoholic who is profoundly convinced of his or her own badness and desires to be punished on regular occasions;

2. The remorse and the self-castigation the alcoholic experiences take him or her back into the familiar and comforting childhood role of a wayward child being scolded by an adult;

3. The remorse can also be used as a motivating factor the alcoholic employs in lieu of a broken down motivation mechanism;

4. The physical pain and especially the headache drown out the unwelcome thoughts that plague the alcoholic while s/he is sober.

This is why AA works. Alcoholics get to experience public self-flagellation they crave so much without actually needing to  drink. AA gives them one endless hangover without any drink at all. Remember that one of AA’s “steps” consists of the alcoholic making public penance for his or her sins.

Any real cure, of course, has to address the purposes that the hangover serves for the alcoholic.

Some of you have already realized that I’m retelling Eric Berne’s famous book Games People Play. “Alcoholic” is the most famous of games described by Berne but there are many more.

I’m watching an interview with a Nigerian man married to a Russian woman.

“We have a very happy marriage,” the man says. “What I learned about Russian women is that you do what they say. If you want to stay alive, that is.”

This is why it always entertains me to contemplate the sad delusion of men who marry Russian mail order brides, hoping to get a silent, submissive domestic slave. If anybody is going to be silent and submissive in that marriage, it will not be the Russian woman.

In case anybody is wondering, compared to Ukrainian women, Russian women are quite, passive wallflowers.

By “this” I mean the following comment by reader Lear:

People need to know they’re not alone, that their ideas are also shared by others. They need a place to share their voice and be listened to. Your Blog is that place and for that you’re the popular woman you always wanted to be!

I feel very good now.

I find the whole Niall Ferguson debacle***to be very funny because it demonstrates that the economists are still trying to resolve an issue that scholars of literature have settled decades ago. The biographical approach (meaning, an attempt to analyze an author’s contribution in terms of his or her biography) has long been discarded as useless, unproductive, and amateurish.

The reason why scholars of literature have abandoned the type of criticism where it was acceptable to say things like “Writer X had a miserable relationship with his mother and this colored all of his female characters” is because none of these assertions can be verified. We cannot possibly know anything about another person’s perception of his or her own life. All we can know is how we see that life and what it means to us.

Another problem with the biographical approach is that biographies are just as fictional as any novel. Somebody organized the events of a person’s life into a coherent narrative. In the process, a lot of material was of necessity edited out of the story. How can we know that the events which were not included into the story and that seemed unimportant to the biographer were not of the utmost importance to the person whose life-story is being narrated? If we are talking about an autobiography, how do we know that the author is not presenting us with a set of self-serving and self-aggrandizing lies?

This is why literary critics have long abandoned all attempts to psychoanalyze authors and explain their work in terms of their biographies.

Scholarly disciplines would do well by communicating with each other.

You can observe the intensity of the biographical debate among economists here.

***  “[I]n front of a group of more than 500 investors, Ferguson responded to a question about Keynes’s famous philosophy of self-interest versus the economic philosophy of Edmund Burke, who believed there was a social contract among the living, as well as the dead. Ferguson asked the audience how many children Keynes had. He explained that Keynes had none because he was a homosexual and was married to a ballerina, with whom he likely talked of ‘poetry’ rather than procreated. The audience went quiet at the remark.”