Here's to the High Life

An add that Miller beer has been running for a few weeks finally registered on my awareness today. In the ad, a threesome of beer truck drivers in Miller uniforms, enter a deli and begin observing what is on sale, a $7 candy bar and an $11 can of tuna fish. They declare that such commodities make the "high life" too exclusive and so the store loses the ability to sell Miller beer ("high life" has been on the label of Miller products for as long as I can remember).


What I love about this ad is that it makes me laugh at myself. Since the Great Lakes Brewing Company began churning out "good" beer, I have rarely bought a six-pack of Miller High Life. Actually, my disinterest in Miller likely dates to my discovery of European beers in the mid 1980s. Now in Seattle, I've developed a palate for fresh beer brewed with attention to detail and type.

That said, I've begun to be troubled by the tastes of the folks I hang out with (and so with my own tastes). It's one thing to be aware of fresher, more complex beer. It's another to declare, "I would never eat the Manchego they sell at Trader Joe's!" (You know who you are:).

I am sure that the Manchego sold at Whole Foods or the finer cheese counters in Seattle is different, even better than that sold at Trader Joe's. But Trader Joe sells Spanish Manchego at a price that I (a teacher) can afford. I grew up in Wisconsin (then America's Dairy Land), but for us, cheese was cheddar, swiss, maybe blue. Manchego is pretty exciting in any form. I'm troubled by the notion that my palate will head in directions that my way of life can't support.

I've gotten accustomed to paying $6 a six-pack without even thinking about it. Perhaps I need to think about that, to think about what company my tastes are putting me in. That fact that Miller beer is owned by a South African company that makes enough beer to flood Milwaukee makes me unlikely to switch back (well that and the fact that Deschutes Brewing's Black Butte Porter is, for me, just a lot more satisfying). But I'm going to order up $4 pints a bit more critically.

So here's to advertising undermining the culture it aims to sustain.

On being a writer and taking a writing class

I’ve been reading John Gardener and Seamus Heaney of late, a fiction writer and a poet. I respect the work of the former; love that of the latter. I want to think here about what Gardner says about writing something and about what Heaney believes a writer offers.

To me, the Gardner of The Art of Fiction is a fairly grouchy fiction writer who knows his stuff. What strikes me as really valuable in the text is his thinking about what writers set out to do (he’s talking about fiction writers, but I am going to try to generalize his thinking a bit). He takes as axiomatic that writers have to know the “rudiments” of writing (grammar and, I suppose, paragraph structure and the like). I’m not sure this is always the case but surely it often is. What he follows that contention with is more interesting to me: self-expression does not cause a “writer” to write; rather, it is the desire to produce a kind of writing and an effect that triggers the act of writing. Self-expression, if it happens at all, is a byproduct.

While this is true to my experience, it seems foreign to a lot of the developing writers that work with me. Often students come into my classes with a sense that they will only be able to write something good if they can find a way to express themselves in the text. I rarely am able to convince someone holding this position strongly, to focus instead on working in a genre (the essay, perhaps) or seeking to move a reader or even to create a text that feels one or another way. That said, I am in no way certain that I help developing writers understand what taking on a genre and producing an effect involves; at least I rarely offer genre and effect as compelling aims for writers in a required course.

This begs a question that has followed me around for more than a decade. Are English 101 students “writers” in Gardner’s sense of that word? More importantly, need they be? I have long seen my work in “academic” or civic terms. The point of English 101 is to enable a student practice cultivating arguments and playing with a critical discourse that is used in the college curriculum. I have worked with some version of David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University” in mind; I came down on Bartholomae’s side in the CCC debate he had with Peter Elbow back in the 90s. But as my tenses here suggest, I am changing my mind. Over the past 17 years, I have taught and written with creative writers, and I am increasingly suspicious that they can help me to complete my view of what I do. They ask writers to work on writing as writing, not as participation in a discourse. While I believe both are necessary, the energy my students need to move into a discourse may just be found in being a writer, as writers (as opposed to critics or rhetoricians) define that role.

Consider Gardner’s offerings in the second chapter of Art.

1. Writer’s have to “convince readers” (22).
2. The “mainstay” of all fiction (and I add all writing, with some trepidation) is “moment by moment authenticating detail” (23).
3. Writers convince readers by establishing an authentic context and voice.
4. The purpose of writing (Gardner’s writes “fiction”) is to help us know what we believe by inviting us to enter a dream that is “vivid and continuous” and focused without distraction.
5. Writers tend to perceive themselves either as accountants doing exercises or athletes seeking to win competitions (Gardner’s metaphors—no offence to either accountants or athletes).
6. Writers develop when they produce for publication.

At one level, there is nothing novel here. Gardner’s manifesto came out in 1984, and he largely consolidates a mainstream approach. In many ways, I have been inviting students to adopt just such a writerly role. At another level, this list is revolutionary or at least transformative. If my students entered college writing courses expecting to practice being writers for eleven weeks, we would live together differently. If they came ready to “plot” out essay in the way Gardner explains plot rather than to learn and implement correct organizational schemes, we would have more fun, write better stuff.

I could write for a long time about why many students do not arrive at college expecting (or even willing) to be writers. Perhaps I will. At this point, I want to think about how to make the invitation to write in ways that are compelling but also challenging.

More on that later.

Changing Times

Here's a glimpse into my less thoughtful life.

My students and I are writing just now about college (a theme we often write about), and a question that has been pursuing me as of late is, What difference might the “humanities” make in a college education in the U.S. in the 21st century (we’ve been reading, among other things, Mark Edmundson’s diatribe about liberal education). A narrower version of this question goes like this: What is it that the humanities contribute to a Cascadia education? I suppose my interest is driven in part by the demands of accreditation and a fear of being irrelevant, but I think the interest runs deeper. Between 1981 and 1994, I worked my way to three degrees in English. I studied the humanities because I loved the courses and (for the most part) the people who taught them. Despite the fact that I was moved enough by literature and drama, music and architecture to forego more lucrative and, much of the time, comprehensible interests, I have never written for myself an apology. Oh, I offer to my students various arguments about the value of the courses we are beginning; those arguments may even be valid and compelling. But I have never integrated such an argument to the point that I might offer it to the parents of one of my students (or to group of my students who are themselves parents).

So here goes. I’ll start from the boilerplate that describes the humanities and associated learning outcomes:


Languages, literature, the arts and philosophy are essential cultural expressions of being human. Underlying these subjects are ideas such as aesthetics, ethics, symbolism and creativity that vary across times and cultures. Through the humanities, learners participate in others’ subjective experience of reality and convey their own.

Learn: Learners will gain knowledge of the core content of at least two humanities disciplines and of methods of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.

Think: Learners will analyze and evaluate humanities content, drawing conclusions about the form and impact of human artifacts.

Communicate: Learners will discover and use a creative process to communicate understandings of human experience through visual, musical, dramatic, oral, or written products.

Interact: Learners will investigate the context and language of the human experience to examine and explore their everyday worlds and to expand their experience and under- standing of other cultures and times.

I have to admit that I like the last sentence of our summary: “learners participate in others’ subjective experience of reality and convey their own.” We are suggesting that one studies the humanities to practice listening to the way that others have represented experience and to speak richly about those representations in ways that are honest to her experience.

So what would I watch, say, a lit student doing in order to know where they are in achieving such an outcome? I would want to see her talk about literary texts as historical forms but as a person who is consuming those texts (and not some disembodied expert). I would also want to see her respond to another person talking about a literary artifact. It might be that just the latter would do. If a learner considered a response to a text and explained how that other presented an artifact as an aesthetic form and how that other’s response builds for her a more complete understanding. This “talk” could be delivered in a variety of media (from a book club performance to a conference talk to a website to a podcast to a conventional essay. This “talk” might be aimed at a variety of identified audiences and assessed for its effectiveness.

This sort of performance might integrate (for me and my students) our purpose in studying literature or drama. Our aim would be the ability to talk richly (with creativity and sensitivity) about artifacts that make humans identifiably human. We would aim at understanding hard, theoretical analysis but also at identifying honest responses to aesthetic forms. Rather than taking the experts as the last word, we would aim at being able to listen to the experts so that our own responses become both more expert and also more open to alternative understanding.

Should college take up this aim with an entire course distribution area (15-20% of a degree)? The question becomes easier to answer after this thought experiment. Our students need to learn how to read expert literature and grapple with artifacts that don’t yield an obvious interpretation (think of designing an ad or trying to repair the HVAC system in a hospital). They need to be able to listen generously to other’s ideas and report back those ideas with accuracy and honesty but also go beyond what others say to new solutions. They need to be able to settle in on an interpretation of a situation without rejecting or losing track of the various alternative explanations. They need this sort of humanities.