“Happy hour at the City Grocery in Oxford, Mississippi is where the whole hip world would spend Thursday night if the Nazis won the war,” I say.
“Why the hip world?” Harry asks.
“Well, it’s a variation on the Hunter Thompson line about the Circus-Circus Casino in Vegas, adjusted for those precious hours of compulsory happiness among our colleagues. But I can’t endorse this sentiment about the Circus-Circus,” I tell him. “A clown-themed casino requires a working knowledge of kitsch, and how it’s different from camp.” Our conversation drifts to Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” and how she never made it to tenure, either.
Both of us admire writers for whom “essayist” was plan B—after journalism or screenwriting imploded—because we’re both on plan B or C. Before academia, he was a labor organizer. I was a postal carrier through two degree programs; 9/11 happened somewhere in the middle and recalibrated my sense of risk.
“Back home in New Orleans,” I tell him, “I stumbled over a man reclining in Washington Square. This was years ago, when I still drank and no one said ‘unhoused.’ He looked up at me and said, Watch your plan B. This is my plan B.”
“What’s your plan B?” Harry knows, better than anyone, that I’ve got one foot out the door.
By now we’ve moved from bread bowls at Panera, where we go to avoid other faculty, to a shared cookie. Everyone I know is on plan B, I explain. Some friends weathered the crashes of 2007-10 by going to graduate school, where stipends paid for groceries and pending degrees kept student-loan payments at bay. Some people stumble upwards: on a sunny day in 1999, my brother Bryan broke his pelvis, hips and both arms in a cocaine-fueled plunge from a rope swing. Culinary school was no longer in the cards; he could have covered the scars from the pins that held his arms together with a chef’s tattoos, but he’d still need to stand to cook. Those were the last days of affordable tuition. Gifted with fierce intelligence, violet eyes and natural charisma, he navigated an engineering degree between drugs and surgeries. Doctors predicted a lot more of the latter; Bryan preferred much more of the former.
Harry never comments when I’m gnawing my lips off in manic monologue; he simply slows the pace of conversation, asks simple questions and makes electric eye contact. He asks again. What’s the plan?
“If I can finish a book in less than ten years, I might get public-intellectual lucky, not Dan Brown lucky. Otherwise, I’ll do the teaching no one wants to,” I tell him. “Which is, frankly, most of it. I had an interview last year where the chair assured me that if I took on a service role in the department, they’d offer me a teaching abatement. They used the same word for containing lead paint and corralling freshmen.”
He’s laughing now, which is my perennial goal… and infinitely preferable to thinking about the future. I came to academia in search of life outside of cubicle land, and a belief in Irving Howe’s promise that when you change the world, the work’s steadiness compensates for the low wages. That was my naïve misprision, but I admit it without regret. If my first choice had been, with Sontag, intellectual life far outside of academia, my second was slow, reflective thinking on a tenure line; and now I’m treading close to choice number three: just teach. Bunker life in a Potemkin village like Oxford had never factored into any of my plans.
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College towns are a little like Vegas. They’re fallen capitals, scourged by development and game-day apartments. The boomer professors got there and built the Museum of the American Rebel; soon after, they withered into Cadaver Bohemias. The Godfather, the department chair who hired me in 2016, was nonetheless confident that I’d assimilate to the sprawling “family” he had helped build there. “Faculty regard Oxford as a suburb of New Orleans,” he told me, referring to the city where I’d lived for more than a decade. “So it won’t be too much of a change.” It was an amiable conversation, in which he assured me he’d hired his first choices for the two posts they’d needed: me as an instructor, and the Superstar writer-in-residence, a bestselling novelist and infamous Twitter provocateur.
On the first day of my visit, I heard someone call Oxford “the Little Easy”; no one has said it to me since. To be fair, I’ve never heard its referent—the Big Easy—used in conversation down South in New Orleans, and I don’t think anyone calls Oxford “the Velvet Ditch,” its alleged nickname, without well-earned embarrassment. When I started my job in Mississippi, I’d been in New Orleans for more than a decade: first as a committed couch surfer, then as postdoctoral striver and adjunct. When it’s time for what the bureaucrats call “the voluntary disclosure of disability”—as though they expect to extract my confession under torture—I am forced to tell men and women with orderly lives that I’m a recovering addict with a mood disorder. Teaching allows me to “reset” my mind with the beginning of a new semester; I sometimes think it keeps a breakdown at bay. The Godfather pays me the highest compliment: I would never have guessed. I want to tell him it’s visible in the gaps in my résumé, but there aren’t any. What I mean is, Look how cheaply you bought me. Evidence enough that I burned through my prospects!
As a recruitment device, the Godfather’s reassurances about Oxford warmed my heart; they felt like a sincerely told lie to welcome me to the family. But Oxford is a five-hour drive from New Orleans; it’s far closer to Memphis and to Jackson. “No one goes to Jackson,” the Godfather said. But 150,000 people live there. The department secured the contract for the Superstar because he was a Jackson native.
The Superstar and I arrived in Mississippi just a year and a half after Anthony Bourdain’s Mississippi-set episode of Parts Unknown (2014). A chef’s work isn’t so different than mine off the tenure track. We perform an elite service; it’s not well remunerated but durable, since the commodity of food or knowledge loses status if you pay a robot to prepare it. Bourdain boasted of his journeyman status, of the pride in hustling hard for a quarter-century in a kitchen. That was my brother’s highest aspiration, and my mother’s plan A. Long after her work as a butcher blasted through her shoulder attachments, she asked me to invent an alma mater for her so she could fit in with men in the book business, her second career. But I never got the story right; I was born in the back of the house, and it shows. For eight years, I taught on satellite campuses housed in Mississippi community colleges; sometimes, I drove three hundred miles a week and saw more of the state in a semester than front-of-the-house faculty see in decades.
“Oxford, Mississippi is a lovely, incongruously eccentric little island, a mutation, a college town, a magnet for writers, thinkers and oddballs,” Bourdain narrated. His stentorian voice eases, smooth as the camera’s tracking shot across Oxford Square. Upstairs at City Grocery, he meets a herd of writers who tell him they’re never leaving Oxford. Why would they? These tenured sinecures are hard to come by, and the upward trajectory of housing prices in this bright blue dot in a field of Mississippi cotton indicates that people want what they have. Median rent is higher in Oxford than in New Orleans: around two thousand dollars per month. It’s closer to a thousand in both Jackson and Memphis. I note this with some bitterness. The university maintains a number of residences as incentive to new hires—not contingent faculty, of course. Superstars get free rent in inverse proportion to their need. A few blocks away, my landlord saved on utilities by disabling the external gas gauge with a bicycle chain.
Before he reached Oxford, Bourdain took the Robert Johnson-B. B. King route around the South Delta for the food: tamales, fried chicken, barbecue. After, he passed through the North Delta—home to the casino complexes and the prisons. He danced at Red’s and Po’ Monkey’s, among the state’s last juke joints. The week I moved to Oxford in summer 2016, Willie “Po’ Monkey” Seaberry died in Bolivar County. The joint never reopened. Red Paden died in 2023; his club’s future is uncertain. The last time I passed through Merigold, I walked the perimeter of Po’ Monkey’s falling porch: on the steps, I saw an open beer with cold beads lingering on the bottleneck, like someone had walked away for just a moment.
“You got to come back again,” Seaberry told Bourdain. “I’ll find somebody to get nekkid with you.” I confess I find these men close to secular saints. My first job, after all, brought me into the orbit of vernacular professors on my mother’s bread-and-coffee route. All of three years old, I handed over loaves and bags as tall as me to men with New York accents you don’t hear anymore, or women with penciled-in eyebrows, a style that’s been banished to the outermost boroughs. Everyone I met taught me… a few words of Russian, or what part of the sidewalk to avoid if I didn’t want to get hit by the metal basement doors. If you spend your life teaching on crowded sidewalks and smoky kitchens instead of tidy classrooms, you are rewarded in the afterlife; you pass like vapor through bottles of cold beer on Brooklyn stoops and the porches of abandoned juke joints.
When Bourdain died by suicide, a professional-class feminist professor held forth to me about how problematic the recovering-addict leather-jacket cool-guy shtick was. I have gone to bed with enough men like that to transfer my tenderness, so I pounded the table in response. Short of tyrants with smuggled cyanide capsules, suicides get a pass—let’s say a decade—from bullshit pious reassessments. Etymologically, ghost and guest are the same word; either might benefit from your hospitality, a word whose roots stretch toward hostis: the stranger. Bourdain chose a career as a Roving Stranger, a familiar icon of Cashews (ecumenical, atheistic Catholic Jewish hybrids who abounded in lost New York). He coaxed his Oxford informants into praising their sterile Oasis. A guest is obliged to let the host lie right to his face.
RED MAPS
I was catcalled for the first time when I was nine years old. Back in the Eighties there was nothing on Clemson, South Carolina’s College Avenue but two bars, a Subway, the student bookstore, Manifest Discs & Tapes and Judge Keller’s, where you bought your orange Tiger Paw visor and polo for tailgate Saturdays at “Death Valley.” The football team won an Atlantic Coast Conference Championship in 1986, an event from which locals date births and marriages. It will linger for a long time, like the “stars that fell on Alabama” in the Leonid meteor shower of 1833. South Carolinians recollect the football win as the moment a sleepy town in the Blue Ridge Mountains became serious business.
During some desperate outing—the kind where my mother searched for something to keep her occupied—I wandered away for a moment. There was a decent bar on the corner: TD’s. Some friends recollect seeing Hootie and the Blowfish there before they were a national punchline; others remember broke legends like Dick Dale or before-they-were-famous R.E.M. Between Subway and Tiger Town, frat boys shout an invitation from the window of their soft-top Jeep Wrangler. At the time, I couldn’t tell the difference between the threat of kidnapping and an attempt to rattle me. Let’s be honest: I still can’t.
A job interview is no less a ritual humiliation than a catcall, as I discovered in ten years of ordering the wrong wine at dinner and drinking too much of it with dessert. Somewhere in Tennessee, Professor Herrmann looked at my CV, and scrolled his eyes all the way to my high school diploma. “I assume your father was Clemson faculty,” he said. “What department?” I could have told him, breathlessly, that my father’s education was interrupted first by his own father’s death and then by a car accident in which he broke his neck and then by drama with the draft board. I could have said that he eventually went to night school with employer assistance while working in a precious-metals refinery, and that he was deemed trustworthy enough to escort platinum from place to place. That trait served him in good stead after the end of the Cold War when, suddenly, the boy who barely got out of school—thanks to the pain in his neck and his jaw—was feted at industry dinners in faraway places. (His job in the refinery was not unlike mine; the wages were never commensurate with the cultural “opportunities.”) I could have added that my younger sister had died during my childhood, and that my parents chose the quiet isolation of the Blue Ridge Mountains as sanctuary from New York for their surviving children.
I could say, I’ve seen so many plan Bs.
But instead I lied, hoping to avoid embarrassing a voting member of the committee with the revelation that there was a stranger in their midst. Yes, I said, he taught economics.
Had I known then what I know now, about faltering institutions and the disappointments of faculty life, I would have had the wherewithal to ask, Why didn’t you start with my mother? Or to tell him that she taught me to feed tables of twenty, lift my brother during his years of convalescence, and how to tell what personal disclosures to men would invite further discomfort. The lie was my failing.
Academic hiring, a mentor told me, is best thought of as a bad first date at the end of which you nonetheless consent to marriage. You might even talk about football to avoid your dead sister; after all, it was her death, not a faculty job, that brought my family to Clemson. Every interview and campus visit made me feel as though I was handing over a possession, and Beth Lightweis was entirely mine. I might have also told Professor H. that the University of Georgia isn’t so far away, and that it is in a better college town than Clemson by far. The day I turned eighteen, my middle sister piled us into the car to get tattoos at Pain and Wonder on Washington Street in Athens. I chose the moon on my shoulder and my oldest sister chose a lubricious tramp stamp and our brother Bryan, so vain about his appearance, couldn’t decide on just the right scorpion. Certain needles would hurt the limbs she needed to drive stick, so our middle sister stayed uninked. As we drove past Clemson’s little private airport, Bryan slid Paul McCartney’s Band on the Run into the Discman tethered to the car stereo by a twelve-volt adapter. “That’s us,” he said, “we’re the band.”
Now that Bryan is dead too, I’d tell the hiring committee that my clearest memory of Clemson is the Rolling Stones playing Death Valley. We weren’t in the rows, but the sounds of the horns in “Waiting on a Friend” rolled across Lake Hartwell to our parents’ porch, where we sat together. Judge Keller’s is still there on College Avenue. The bookstores are all gone, and I surely miss the bins at Manifest Discs & Tapes—which introduced me to both Mother Love Bone and Joni Mitchell—but there’s an Institute for the Study of Capitalism, so I assume the rising tide will lift all boats. Since Bryan will make no new memories, I’ll have to keep the horns sharp. Let the catcallers grow fuzzy with years.
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When tourists come to Oxford, Mississippi, they leave bottles of Four Roses on William Faulkner’s grave. The undergraduates joke about the coed “Fuckners” who lose their virginity there. “Beloved go with God,” his tomb reads. Faulkner does not lie alone; his wife Estelle sleeps next to him. A scholar-friend notes that Estelle made radical changes at Rowan Oak after her husband’s death: she installed air conditioning and cleaned out the liquor cabinet. When Freud died, his widow lit Shabbat candles for the first time since their marriage in resistance to his prohibition of all superstition. The cool, rattling window unit is truly the Ruler of the Universe in the prayers of a Mississippi Presbyterian.
I haven’t had a drink since Bryan’s pancreas began to fail in 2019. Pancreatitis is the alcoholic’s quiet killer. The hormones that bathe the organ prompt your hunger or your satiety; one mechanism is your gag reflex. Those heaving and choking sensations come from your gut, not your throat, the addiction counselor told him. He’d yanked out catheters and pulled free of restraints to get to a drink. He’d gone into psychotic withdrawals in a hospital near the Greenville Zoo where, he assured me, our sisters were easily able to smuggle in animals to watch him while he slept. An elephant lumbered in the stairwell. Mom handcuffed him to a bird.
That was my third year in Mississippi. When I arrived in Oxford, I noticed the barstool sociability of faculty. Then I noticed the professional benefits that accrued to sociability and flew away with the slightest provocation. Academics, who would be quick to problematize the capitalist messaging that “we’re all family in this Applebee’s,” nonetheless expect filial devotion to sustain their workplaces. But their idea of “family” was always strange to me. Families know enough that they never have to build a case against you; you showed them your low character long ago. Knowledge-class workplaces, by contrast, seem to take great pleasure in smoking out a criminal from their ranks; soon after, they decide that your deviation was a “mask-off” moment, a revelation of the deep truth of your disloyalty to the family, while prior acts of amity were mere illusions. A story about “mobbing” featured on the Self-Compassionate Professor podcast focused on a faculty member’s discomfort with a raft of open letters in favor of Confederate monument removal on the Mississippi campus; now no one ever mentions her shunning.
My mask-off moment came in COVID’s early days, though I knew to cover my nose as well as my mouth. All my caution I’d spent on my sobriety; I broke quarantine. Social distancing was a simple matter for faculty teaching traditional-aged students in Oxford; they had money enough to pay for at-home fitness subscriptions with Southern Star Yoga and meal delivery from John Currence himself. They could pod up in the Ditch, certain that you can’t get COVID from someone with a Ph.D. Remote teaching was more difficult for faculty at the underserved branches. A full third of my students had no internet access at home, and more than half lost their jobs in the early weeks of the pandemic. The highest rates of attrition were among students in my classes that were designated online; for many of them, the conditions of life and work that had made online education attractive in fall 2019 made it impossible a few months later. I offered the entire spring 2020 class no-strings-attached incompletes and was astonished by the number of people who accepted with an expectation they’d be back in the classroom in August.
Some of my alienation from my department is my own damned fault—I thought, after a decade in graduate school and social justice “feeling circles,” that it was my job to describe to people the fraction of a problem they’d have to squint to see. No one wanted that. People trained to think “structurally” blamed COVID’s spread on the anti-maskers who drove for Uber Eats and DoorDash. Before long, they were writing to the faculty listserv about colleagues they’d seen maskless in the halls. They went into academia to quaff the brew of rectitude, and COVID offered a way to get their fix.
Come fall, the university placed students in dorms to swell their budgets, then sent strident weekly emails about social distancing and masking, blaming students for infection rates after football weekends padded coffers. The bald hypocrisy of this messaging from faculty and admin surely stoked the hot culture war among conservative Mississippi parents. (This shit is going to get us killed, I told my partner.) I chose to teach “hybrid”—one-third of sessions in person, two-thirds online—and spent most of our in-person sessions showing students how to use instructional technology. Sometimes, I sat and listened to their rage about America’s sclerotic COVID policy. The nod I gave from behind my mask was real, but mine is a hard-left heterodoxy. One colleague, a COVID absolutist I call the Migraine, said agreeing to any in-person instruction enabled Trump. (I’m still waiting for my thank-you note on Mar-a-Lago stationary.)
Closer to New Year 2021, faculty held happy hour in person, shivering on the porch of Snack Bar. By then, the Superstar was seldom seen, but always an absent presence. The Godfather had just retired; the suit who replaced him said all the things academics have said since 1990: we’ll diversify the faculty, solidify our research profile, lure the best graduate students and, once the boomers retire, surplus dollars will drop like plums into our outstretched hands. The mood was celebratory. Someone needed a refill on their old-fashioned and there was debate about how to flag the waiter. “I’m not dying for one of these Bubbas,” the Migraine said, declining to open the heavy oak door that led to a dining room of well-heeled alumni eating forty-dollar steaks. Some family table, I thought. I teach Bubba, and he’s not eating wagyu.
My partner Chip and I drove home to family a few weeks later, after second vaccine doses kicked in. We jumped the line with a little chicanery. (“Can’t you two wait your fucking turn?!” a friend texted. The moral panic would shift, within a few weeks, from selfish monsters are stealing vaccines from grannies to selfish monsters refuse to get vaccinated because they don’t care if they kill grannies. We sleep well in America, knowing our enemies live by no known moral law.) I found my siblings exasperated by my long absence. None of them had a work-from-home option. The eldest sister worked as a supply auditor for an online retailer: busier after the world shut down than before. The middle sister designed delivery protocols for a fast-casual restaurant chain: the most essential job of all. Bryan’s two vocations, civil engineer and binge drunk, were energized by COVID. We gathered with our parents and nieces and nephews in the eldest’s backyard. The drinks flowed; Diet Pepsi for me. Once it was time to leave, I had a choice: to let my unvaccinated brother drive drunk for the hundredth time or pile him into my car, knowing he wouldn’t mask. He agreed to buckle his seatbelt before he slumped against the driver’s shoulder. Not a second of those years offered simple choices.
WHITE FLAG
The year before we joined the faculty, the Superstar took to the pages of Gawker to write about the agonies of academic employment at the small, distinguished liberal arts college from which Mississippi poached him. He wrote of the shame of answering to “intellectually and imaginatively average white Americans who are not, and will never have to be, half as good at their jobs as you are at yours.” (To which many adjuncts, including a few white Americans, will say yeah, I know). That sentiment was praised as bold truth-telling; indeed, the Godfather cited it as the reason Mississippi made the hire. The Superstar’s presence in the room was taken as evidence of a justly and meritocratically organized workplace. Even the claim that faculty at the margins “work twice as hard for half as much” implies that hard work is rewarded, a bet only a tenured professor would take. His critiques garnered applause because they came from within their ranks.
I haven’t earned the right. The dignity of my labor will not be marked by tenure. It arrives, instead, in the moments that I nodded to my students from behind my mask. The headiest COVID teaching often involved AA-style confessions and sharing; we would sit around talking about whose grandmother had died in isolation or whose siblings had relapsed. (I was often grateful for the other protection that a mask offers; they disguise tear streaks). Students got comfortable talking about the contraction of their attention and time. They were honest about their impatience with COVID virtue- and vice-signaling alike. Those years yanked us out of the signature dynamic of the Southern humanities classroom: the conservative student staying stone-faced and waiting for the poe-faced progressive filibuster to end.
The Superstar and I arrived and left Mississippi in short order. When we departed, he’d taught around twenty classes. I’d taught 56 classes for one-third the money. Perhaps only the Divine Right of Kings explains the gap, as Thomas Frank said of the distance between CEOs and janitors. But there’s another explanation, of course. Our disenchantment and disengagement grew in rough parallel, though we only had a handful of conversations and might not instantly recognize each other if we passed on the street. Without his consent, his most essential work was to launder the reputation and virtues of the Ditch Dwellers. Fortress Oxford is protection from the rest of Mississippi; with him in the room, they didn’t have to consider that logic as racist. As for me? It isn’t that they care less about class and contingency than they do about race; it’s that changing my circumstances questions the merit of institutions in which they’ve succeeded. They’d rather think about their tenured asses as targets for DeSantis, Abbott, Lee and Reeves than as plush seats at the table in a rigged system.
When the Godfather retired, my circumstances plummeted. I was moved like a chess piece to compensate for shrinking enrollments on far-flung branches in a period when the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that a full third of community college students were missing. I’d never initiated a weeks-long Fox News freakout by tweeting, like the Superstar, about the fatness of Trump’s booty, but faculty and some students remarked on the sharpness of my elbows. My luck degraded and so did my familial bonds; my sobriety called attention to a problem, and was therefore mistaken for the problem. After three car accidents in three years, a day’s commute to Booneville or Tupelo or Grenada felt doomed. That’ll financially screw you even if you’re not at fault, so in a fit of frustration, I took a second full-time job. Tenure gives an institution exclusive rights to your labor; anything less than that, I thought, and you’re a free agent.
Oxford, however, disagreed.
There’s a quaint little ritual in their ranks. Departing faculty write letters of appreciation to the listserv, enumerating all that they have learned. When the Superstar left, he was nothing less than candid about the ugliness of the Oxford Oasis, the mirage from Mississippi’s poverty and politics: his antagonists nonetheless lined up to kiss his ass. As an eminently replaceable contingent faculty member, I was not entitled to a shoulder rub upon departure. The department’s “leaders” managed to chalk my case up to personal animus and a naïve understanding of how institutions work. When I calculate the wages of my antagonists, I’ll note that stern discipline came from people who made 260 percent of my yearly income. Faculty in public institutions often complain about publicly available salary data; I complain only when it’s false. Walk into the library in Oxford and ask for “the book” to check my facts. These are people who give land acknowledgments before driving home to gated communities, so they are evidently immune to embarrassment.
By the time I said goodbye, I had been punished by the only power I acknowledge. Holed up near my second job while my partner closed up our house on the Mississippi-Tennessee border, I woke to a series of texts one Sunday morning. My sister wanted to know where I was. Was I alone? Was Chip there? Isn’t it spring break? The messages were importuning, strange. My thumb hovered over the arrow to send my response: Is this about Bryan? The day before, my brother drunk-texted Chip about the grand betrayal of my sobriety. As always, he included a song lyric, this time from the Canadian band City and Colour: I used to be quite resilient … now the wound has begun to turn. Sharp punctuation to another binge. My mother texted, but I didn’t read it. Is this about your shitty son? My thumb hovers again. Then Chip’s video call, and his tear-streaked face. It’s Bryan, he’s gone. He went alone, he didn’t take anyone with him.
All we knew—all we knew for a long time—was what the police saw on the bar’s surveillance video. The little ambiguities of his last moments, and the coroner’s verdict of “accidental choking,” will spare my family the pain of saying that he drank himself to death. But he drank himself to death. It was eight days before I sobbed in someone’s arms.
My brother, who died ignobly after a few dry months on probation, drew a sharp line between winners and losers. He knew that he was on one side of the line, and the crying men in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings were on the other. Winners and losers—that’s how academia organizes its boundaries too. I am happy, as I once told him, to be on the losing side, rather than the one assigned to “the Republicans, to the corporate managers of the world, to the winners of reality TV shows,” in Jack Halberstam’s memorable list from The Queer Art of Failure. A list to which I’d only add: the faculty members inclined to yell at waitstaff to fucking hurry until 2020’s raft of smartphone Karens taught them to mind their manners.
The delusions are powerful, and one hears their echoes in the extinction rattle of broken institutions. They do not have to die. There are paths by which we repair ourselves without restoration to some ideal form, although the hill can seem too steep once you’ve paid for your vices with an organ. From now on, I have to clock in and clock out like any other worker. At least I am free from the false promises of faculty life as refuge from market predations and familial agonies and radical isolation.
I spent spring break 2024 with my loves, but now with the bitter addition of a funeral. I took the microphone at the front of the room. We don’t do religion, so I sang the saddest song to compensate for all the drunk karaoke I’d missed since getting sober: Walk right back to me this minute / Bring your love to me, don’t send it / I’m so lonesome every day. When summer comes, Oxford and Clemson and Athens will die too, with promise of some autumnal resurrection. But I never lived there; my nation is my siblings.
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This essay appears in a special section in issue 33, “Education and Society.” Click here to read the other three essays in the section, by Elisa Gonzalez, Agnes Callard and Joseph M. Keegin.
Art credit: Wright Morris, Faulkner Country, near Oxford, Mississippi, 1939. Gelatin silver print, 7¾ × 9½ in. Collection Center for Creative Photography, © Estate of Wright Morris. Courtesy of the Center for Creative Photography.
“Happy hour at the City Grocery in Oxford, Mississippi is where the whole hip world would spend Thursday night if the Nazis won the war,” I say.
“Why the hip world?” Harry asks.
“Well, it’s a variation on the Hunter Thompson line about the Circus-Circus Casino in Vegas, adjusted for those precious hours of compulsory happiness among our colleagues. But I can’t endorse this sentiment about the Circus-Circus,” I tell him. “A clown-themed casino requires a working knowledge of kitsch, and how it’s different from camp.” Our conversation drifts to Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” and how she never made it to tenure, either.
Both of us admire writers for whom “essayist” was plan B—after journalism or screenwriting imploded—because we’re both on plan B or C. Before academia, he was a labor organizer. I was a postal carrier through two degree programs; 9/11 happened somewhere in the middle and recalibrated my sense of risk.
“Back home in New Orleans,” I tell him, “I stumbled over a man reclining in Washington Square. This was years ago, when I still drank and no one said ‘unhoused.’ He looked up at me and said, Watch your plan B. This is my plan B.”
“What’s your plan B?” Harry knows, better than anyone, that I’ve got one foot out the door.
By now we’ve moved from bread bowls at Panera, where we go to avoid other faculty, to a shared cookie. Everyone I know is on plan B, I explain. Some friends weathered the crashes of 2007-10 by going to graduate school, where stipends paid for groceries and pending degrees kept student-loan payments at bay. Some people stumble upwards: on a sunny day in 1999, my brother Bryan broke his pelvis, hips and both arms in a cocaine-fueled plunge from a rope swing. Culinary school was no longer in the cards; he could have covered the scars from the pins that held his arms together with a chef’s tattoos, but he’d still need to stand to cook. Those were the last days of affordable tuition. Gifted with fierce intelligence, violet eyes and natural charisma, he navigated an engineering degree between drugs and surgeries. Doctors predicted a lot more of the latter; Bryan preferred much more of the former.
Harry never comments when I’m gnawing my lips off in manic monologue; he simply slows the pace of conversation, asks simple questions and makes electric eye contact. He asks again. What’s the plan?
“If I can finish a book in less than ten years, I might get public-intellectual lucky, not Dan Brown lucky. Otherwise, I’ll do the teaching no one wants to,” I tell him. “Which is, frankly, most of it. I had an interview last year where the chair assured me that if I took on a service role in the department, they’d offer me a teaching abatement. They used the same word for containing lead paint and corralling freshmen.”
He’s laughing now, which is my perennial goal… and infinitely preferable to thinking about the future. I came to academia in search of life outside of cubicle land, and a belief in Irving Howe’s promise that when you change the world, the work’s steadiness compensates for the low wages. That was my naïve misprision, but I admit it without regret. If my first choice had been, with Sontag, intellectual life far outside of academia, my second was slow, reflective thinking on a tenure line; and now I’m treading close to choice number three: just teach. Bunker life in a Potemkin village like Oxford had never factored into any of my plans.
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College towns are a little like Vegas. They’re fallen capitals, scourged by development and game-day apartments. The boomer professors got there and built the Museum of the American Rebel; soon after, they withered into Cadaver Bohemias. The Godfather, the department chair who hired me in 2016, was nonetheless confident that I’d assimilate to the sprawling “family” he had helped build there. “Faculty regard Oxford as a suburb of New Orleans,” he told me, referring to the city where I’d lived for more than a decade. “So it won’t be too much of a change.” It was an amiable conversation, in which he assured me he’d hired his first choices for the two posts they’d needed: me as an instructor, and the Superstar writer-in-residence, a bestselling novelist and infamous Twitter provocateur.
On the first day of my visit, I heard someone call Oxford “the Little Easy”; no one has said it to me since. To be fair, I’ve never heard its referent—the Big Easy—used in conversation down South in New Orleans, and I don’t think anyone calls Oxford “the Velvet Ditch,” its alleged nickname, without well-earned embarrassment. When I started my job in Mississippi, I’d been in New Orleans for more than a decade: first as a committed couch surfer, then as postdoctoral striver and adjunct. When it’s time for what the bureaucrats call “the voluntary disclosure of disability”—as though they expect to extract my confession under torture—I am forced to tell men and women with orderly lives that I’m a recovering addict with a mood disorder. Teaching allows me to “reset” my mind with the beginning of a new semester; I sometimes think it keeps a breakdown at bay. The Godfather pays me the highest compliment: I would never have guessed. I want to tell him it’s visible in the gaps in my résumé, but there aren’t any. What I mean is, Look how cheaply you bought me. Evidence enough that I burned through my prospects!
As a recruitment device, the Godfather’s reassurances about Oxford warmed my heart; they felt like a sincerely told lie to welcome me to the family. But Oxford is a five-hour drive from New Orleans; it’s far closer to Memphis and to Jackson. “No one goes to Jackson,” the Godfather said. But 150,000 people live there. The department secured the contract for the Superstar because he was a Jackson native.
The Superstar and I arrived in Mississippi just a year and a half after Anthony Bourdain’s Mississippi-set episode of Parts Unknown (2014). A chef’s work isn’t so different than mine off the tenure track. We perform an elite service; it’s not well remunerated but durable, since the commodity of food or knowledge loses status if you pay a robot to prepare it. Bourdain boasted of his journeyman status, of the pride in hustling hard for a quarter-century in a kitchen. That was my brother’s highest aspiration, and my mother’s plan A. Long after her work as a butcher blasted through her shoulder attachments, she asked me to invent an alma mater for her so she could fit in with men in the book business, her second career. But I never got the story right; I was born in the back of the house, and it shows. For eight years, I taught on satellite campuses housed in Mississippi community colleges; sometimes, I drove three hundred miles a week and saw more of the state in a semester than front-of-the-house faculty see in decades.
“Oxford, Mississippi is a lovely, incongruously eccentric little island, a mutation, a college town, a magnet for writers, thinkers and oddballs,” Bourdain narrated. His stentorian voice eases, smooth as the camera’s tracking shot across Oxford Square. Upstairs at City Grocery, he meets a herd of writers who tell him they’re never leaving Oxford. Why would they? These tenured sinecures are hard to come by, and the upward trajectory of housing prices in this bright blue dot in a field of Mississippi cotton indicates that people want what they have. Median rent is higher in Oxford than in New Orleans: around two thousand dollars per month. It’s closer to a thousand in both Jackson and Memphis. I note this with some bitterness. The university maintains a number of residences as incentive to new hires—not contingent faculty, of course. Superstars get free rent in inverse proportion to their need. A few blocks away, my landlord saved on utilities by disabling the external gas gauge with a bicycle chain.
Before he reached Oxford, Bourdain took the Robert Johnson-B. B. King route around the South Delta for the food: tamales, fried chicken, barbecue. After, he passed through the North Delta—home to the casino complexes and the prisons. He danced at Red’s and Po’ Monkey’s, among the state’s last juke joints. The week I moved to Oxford in summer 2016, Willie “Po’ Monkey” Seaberry died in Bolivar County. The joint never reopened. Red Paden died in 2023; his club’s future is uncertain. The last time I passed through Merigold, I walked the perimeter of Po’ Monkey’s falling porch: on the steps, I saw an open beer with cold beads lingering on the bottleneck, like someone had walked away for just a moment.
“You got to come back again,” Seaberry told Bourdain. “I’ll find somebody to get nekkid with you.” I confess I find these men close to secular saints. My first job, after all, brought me into the orbit of vernacular professors on my mother’s bread-and-coffee route. All of three years old, I handed over loaves and bags as tall as me to men with New York accents you don’t hear anymore, or women with penciled-in eyebrows, a style that’s been banished to the outermost boroughs. Everyone I met taught me… a few words of Russian, or what part of the sidewalk to avoid if I didn’t want to get hit by the metal basement doors. If you spend your life teaching on crowded sidewalks and smoky kitchens instead of tidy classrooms, you are rewarded in the afterlife; you pass like vapor through bottles of cold beer on Brooklyn stoops and the porches of abandoned juke joints.
When Bourdain died by suicide, a professional-class feminist professor held forth to me about how problematic the recovering-addict leather-jacket cool-guy shtick was. I have gone to bed with enough men like that to transfer my tenderness, so I pounded the table in response. Short of tyrants with smuggled cyanide capsules, suicides get a pass—let’s say a decade—from bullshit pious reassessments. Etymologically, ghost and guest are the same word; either might benefit from your hospitality, a word whose roots stretch toward hostis: the stranger. Bourdain chose a career as a Roving Stranger, a familiar icon of Cashews (ecumenical, atheistic Catholic Jewish hybrids who abounded in lost New York). He coaxed his Oxford informants into praising their sterile Oasis. A guest is obliged to let the host lie right to his face.
RED MAPS
I was catcalled for the first time when I was nine years old. Back in the Eighties there was nothing on Clemson, South Carolina’s College Avenue but two bars, a Subway, the student bookstore, Manifest Discs & Tapes and Judge Keller’s, where you bought your orange Tiger Paw visor and polo for tailgate Saturdays at “Death Valley.” The football team won an Atlantic Coast Conference Championship in 1986, an event from which locals date births and marriages. It will linger for a long time, like the “stars that fell on Alabama” in the Leonid meteor shower of 1833. South Carolinians recollect the football win as the moment a sleepy town in the Blue Ridge Mountains became serious business.
During some desperate outing—the kind where my mother searched for something to keep her occupied—I wandered away for a moment. There was a decent bar on the corner: TD’s. Some friends recollect seeing Hootie and the Blowfish there before they were a national punchline; others remember broke legends like Dick Dale or before-they-were-famous R.E.M. Between Subway and Tiger Town, frat boys shout an invitation from the window of their soft-top Jeep Wrangler. At the time, I couldn’t tell the difference between the threat of kidnapping and an attempt to rattle me. Let’s be honest: I still can’t.
A job interview is no less a ritual humiliation than a catcall, as I discovered in ten years of ordering the wrong wine at dinner and drinking too much of it with dessert. Somewhere in Tennessee, Professor Herrmann looked at my CV, and scrolled his eyes all the way to my high school diploma. “I assume your father was Clemson faculty,” he said. “What department?” I could have told him, breathlessly, that my father’s education was interrupted first by his own father’s death and then by a car accident in which he broke his neck and then by drama with the draft board. I could have said that he eventually went to night school with employer assistance while working in a precious-metals refinery, and that he was deemed trustworthy enough to escort platinum from place to place. That trait served him in good stead after the end of the Cold War when, suddenly, the boy who barely got out of school—thanks to the pain in his neck and his jaw—was feted at industry dinners in faraway places. (His job in the refinery was not unlike mine; the wages were never commensurate with the cultural “opportunities.”) I could have added that my younger sister had died during my childhood, and that my parents chose the quiet isolation of the Blue Ridge Mountains as sanctuary from New York for their surviving children.
I could say, I’ve seen so many plan Bs.
But instead I lied, hoping to avoid embarrassing a voting member of the committee with the revelation that there was a stranger in their midst. Yes, I said, he taught economics.
Had I known then what I know now, about faltering institutions and the disappointments of faculty life, I would have had the wherewithal to ask, Why didn’t you start with my mother? Or to tell him that she taught me to feed tables of twenty, lift my brother during his years of convalescence, and how to tell what personal disclosures to men would invite further discomfort. The lie was my failing.
Academic hiring, a mentor told me, is best thought of as a bad first date at the end of which you nonetheless consent to marriage. You might even talk about football to avoid your dead sister; after all, it was her death, not a faculty job, that brought my family to Clemson. Every interview and campus visit made me feel as though I was handing over a possession, and Beth Lightweis was entirely mine. I might have also told Professor H. that the University of Georgia isn’t so far away, and that it is in a better college town than Clemson by far. The day I turned eighteen, my middle sister piled us into the car to get tattoos at Pain and Wonder on Washington Street in Athens. I chose the moon on my shoulder and my oldest sister chose a lubricious tramp stamp and our brother Bryan, so vain about his appearance, couldn’t decide on just the right scorpion. Certain needles would hurt the limbs she needed to drive stick, so our middle sister stayed uninked. As we drove past Clemson’s little private airport, Bryan slid Paul McCartney’s Band on the Run into the Discman tethered to the car stereo by a twelve-volt adapter. “That’s us,” he said, “we’re the band.”
Now that Bryan is dead too, I’d tell the hiring committee that my clearest memory of Clemson is the Rolling Stones playing Death Valley. We weren’t in the rows, but the sounds of the horns in “Waiting on a Friend” rolled across Lake Hartwell to our parents’ porch, where we sat together. Judge Keller’s is still there on College Avenue. The bookstores are all gone, and I surely miss the bins at Manifest Discs & Tapes—which introduced me to both Mother Love Bone and Joni Mitchell—but there’s an Institute for the Study of Capitalism, so I assume the rising tide will lift all boats. Since Bryan will make no new memories, I’ll have to keep the horns sharp. Let the catcallers grow fuzzy with years.
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When tourists come to Oxford, Mississippi, they leave bottles of Four Roses on William Faulkner’s grave. The undergraduates joke about the coed “Fuckners” who lose their virginity there. “Beloved go with God,” his tomb reads. Faulkner does not lie alone; his wife Estelle sleeps next to him. A scholar-friend notes that Estelle made radical changes at Rowan Oak after her husband’s death: she installed air conditioning and cleaned out the liquor cabinet. When Freud died, his widow lit Shabbat candles for the first time since their marriage in resistance to his prohibition of all superstition. The cool, rattling window unit is truly the Ruler of the Universe in the prayers of a Mississippi Presbyterian.
I haven’t had a drink since Bryan’s pancreas began to fail in 2019. Pancreatitis is the alcoholic’s quiet killer. The hormones that bathe the organ prompt your hunger or your satiety; one mechanism is your gag reflex. Those heaving and choking sensations come from your gut, not your throat, the addiction counselor told him. He’d yanked out catheters and pulled free of restraints to get to a drink. He’d gone into psychotic withdrawals in a hospital near the Greenville Zoo where, he assured me, our sisters were easily able to smuggle in animals to watch him while he slept. An elephant lumbered in the stairwell. Mom handcuffed him to a bird.
That was my third year in Mississippi. When I arrived in Oxford, I noticed the barstool sociability of faculty. Then I noticed the professional benefits that accrued to sociability and flew away with the slightest provocation. Academics, who would be quick to problematize the capitalist messaging that “we’re all family in this Applebee’s,” nonetheless expect filial devotion to sustain their workplaces. But their idea of “family” was always strange to me. Families know enough that they never have to build a case against you; you showed them your low character long ago. Knowledge-class workplaces, by contrast, seem to take great pleasure in smoking out a criminal from their ranks; soon after, they decide that your deviation was a “mask-off” moment, a revelation of the deep truth of your disloyalty to the family, while prior acts of amity were mere illusions. A story about “mobbing” featured on the Self-Compassionate Professor podcast focused on a faculty member’s discomfort with a raft of open letters in favor of Confederate monument removal on the Mississippi campus; now no one ever mentions her shunning.
My mask-off moment came in COVID’s early days, though I knew to cover my nose as well as my mouth. All my caution I’d spent on my sobriety; I broke quarantine. Social distancing was a simple matter for faculty teaching traditional-aged students in Oxford; they had money enough to pay for at-home fitness subscriptions with Southern Star Yoga and meal delivery from John Currence himself. They could pod up in the Ditch, certain that you can’t get COVID from someone with a Ph.D. Remote teaching was more difficult for faculty at the underserved branches. A full third of my students had no internet access at home, and more than half lost their jobs in the early weeks of the pandemic. The highest rates of attrition were among students in my classes that were designated online; for many of them, the conditions of life and work that had made online education attractive in fall 2019 made it impossible a few months later. I offered the entire spring 2020 class no-strings-attached incompletes and was astonished by the number of people who accepted with an expectation they’d be back in the classroom in August.
Some of my alienation from my department is my own damned fault—I thought, after a decade in graduate school and social justice “feeling circles,” that it was my job to describe to people the fraction of a problem they’d have to squint to see. No one wanted that. People trained to think “structurally” blamed COVID’s spread on the anti-maskers who drove for Uber Eats and DoorDash. Before long, they were writing to the faculty listserv about colleagues they’d seen maskless in the halls. They went into academia to quaff the brew of rectitude, and COVID offered a way to get their fix.
Come fall, the university placed students in dorms to swell their budgets, then sent strident weekly emails about social distancing and masking, blaming students for infection rates after football weekends padded coffers. The bald hypocrisy of this messaging from faculty and admin surely stoked the hot culture war among conservative Mississippi parents. (This shit is going to get us killed, I told my partner.) I chose to teach “hybrid”—one-third of sessions in person, two-thirds online—and spent most of our in-person sessions showing students how to use instructional technology. Sometimes, I sat and listened to their rage about America’s sclerotic COVID policy. The nod I gave from behind my mask was real, but mine is a hard-left heterodoxy. One colleague, a COVID absolutist I call the Migraine, said agreeing to any in-person instruction enabled Trump. (I’m still waiting for my thank-you note on Mar-a-Lago stationary.)
Closer to New Year 2021, faculty held happy hour in person, shivering on the porch of Snack Bar. By then, the Superstar was seldom seen, but always an absent presence. The Godfather had just retired; the suit who replaced him said all the things academics have said since 1990: we’ll diversify the faculty, solidify our research profile, lure the best graduate students and, once the boomers retire, surplus dollars will drop like plums into our outstretched hands. The mood was celebratory. Someone needed a refill on their old-fashioned and there was debate about how to flag the waiter. “I’m not dying for one of these Bubbas,” the Migraine said, declining to open the heavy oak door that led to a dining room of well-heeled alumni eating forty-dollar steaks. Some family table, I thought. I teach Bubba, and he’s not eating wagyu.
My partner Chip and I drove home to family a few weeks later, after second vaccine doses kicked in. We jumped the line with a little chicanery. (“Can’t you two wait your fucking turn?!” a friend texted. The moral panic would shift, within a few weeks, from selfish monsters are stealing vaccines from grannies to selfish monsters refuse to get vaccinated because they don’t care if they kill grannies. We sleep well in America, knowing our enemies live by no known moral law.) I found my siblings exasperated by my long absence. None of them had a work-from-home option. The eldest sister worked as a supply auditor for an online retailer: busier after the world shut down than before. The middle sister designed delivery protocols for a fast-casual restaurant chain: the most essential job of all. Bryan’s two vocations, civil engineer and binge drunk, were energized by COVID. We gathered with our parents and nieces and nephews in the eldest’s backyard. The drinks flowed; Diet Pepsi for me. Once it was time to leave, I had a choice: to let my unvaccinated brother drive drunk for the hundredth time or pile him into my car, knowing he wouldn’t mask. He agreed to buckle his seatbelt before he slumped against the driver’s shoulder. Not a second of those years offered simple choices.
WHITE FLAG
The year before we joined the faculty, the Superstar took to the pages of Gawker to write about the agonies of academic employment at the small, distinguished liberal arts college from which Mississippi poached him. He wrote of the shame of answering to “intellectually and imaginatively average white Americans who are not, and will never have to be, half as good at their jobs as you are at yours.” (To which many adjuncts, including a few white Americans, will say yeah, I know). That sentiment was praised as bold truth-telling; indeed, the Godfather cited it as the reason Mississippi made the hire. The Superstar’s presence in the room was taken as evidence of a justly and meritocratically organized workplace. Even the claim that faculty at the margins “work twice as hard for half as much” implies that hard work is rewarded, a bet only a tenured professor would take. His critiques garnered applause because they came from within their ranks.
I haven’t earned the right. The dignity of my labor will not be marked by tenure. It arrives, instead, in the moments that I nodded to my students from behind my mask. The headiest COVID teaching often involved AA-style confessions and sharing; we would sit around talking about whose grandmother had died in isolation or whose siblings had relapsed. (I was often grateful for the other protection that a mask offers; they disguise tear streaks). Students got comfortable talking about the contraction of their attention and time. They were honest about their impatience with COVID virtue- and vice-signaling alike. Those years yanked us out of the signature dynamic of the Southern humanities classroom: the conservative student staying stone-faced and waiting for the poe-faced progressive filibuster to end.
The Superstar and I arrived and left Mississippi in short order. When we departed, he’d taught around twenty classes. I’d taught 56 classes for one-third the money. Perhaps only the Divine Right of Kings explains the gap, as Thomas Frank said of the distance between CEOs and janitors. But there’s another explanation, of course. Our disenchantment and disengagement grew in rough parallel, though we only had a handful of conversations and might not instantly recognize each other if we passed on the street. Without his consent, his most essential work was to launder the reputation and virtues of the Ditch Dwellers. Fortress Oxford is protection from the rest of Mississippi; with him in the room, they didn’t have to consider that logic as racist. As for me? It isn’t that they care less about class and contingency than they do about race; it’s that changing my circumstances questions the merit of institutions in which they’ve succeeded. They’d rather think about their tenured asses as targets for DeSantis, Abbott, Lee and Reeves than as plush seats at the table in a rigged system.
When the Godfather retired, my circumstances plummeted. I was moved like a chess piece to compensate for shrinking enrollments on far-flung branches in a period when the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that a full third of community college students were missing. I’d never initiated a weeks-long Fox News freakout by tweeting, like the Superstar, about the fatness of Trump’s booty, but faculty and some students remarked on the sharpness of my elbows. My luck degraded and so did my familial bonds; my sobriety called attention to a problem, and was therefore mistaken for the problem. After three car accidents in three years, a day’s commute to Booneville or Tupelo or Grenada felt doomed. That’ll financially screw you even if you’re not at fault, so in a fit of frustration, I took a second full-time job. Tenure gives an institution exclusive rights to your labor; anything less than that, I thought, and you’re a free agent.
Oxford, however, disagreed.
There’s a quaint little ritual in their ranks. Departing faculty write letters of appreciation to the listserv, enumerating all that they have learned. When the Superstar left, he was nothing less than candid about the ugliness of the Oxford Oasis, the mirage from Mississippi’s poverty and politics: his antagonists nonetheless lined up to kiss his ass. As an eminently replaceable contingent faculty member, I was not entitled to a shoulder rub upon departure. The department’s “leaders” managed to chalk my case up to personal animus and a naïve understanding of how institutions work. When I calculate the wages of my antagonists, I’ll note that stern discipline came from people who made 260 percent of my yearly income. Faculty in public institutions often complain about publicly available salary data; I complain only when it’s false. Walk into the library in Oxford and ask for “the book” to check my facts. These are people who give land acknowledgments before driving home to gated communities, so they are evidently immune to embarrassment.
By the time I said goodbye, I had been punished by the only power I acknowledge. Holed up near my second job while my partner closed up our house on the Mississippi-Tennessee border, I woke to a series of texts one Sunday morning. My sister wanted to know where I was. Was I alone? Was Chip there? Isn’t it spring break? The messages were importuning, strange. My thumb hovered over the arrow to send my response: Is this about Bryan? The day before, my brother drunk-texted Chip about the grand betrayal of my sobriety. As always, he included a song lyric, this time from the Canadian band City and Colour: I used to be quite resilient … now the wound has begun to turn. Sharp punctuation to another binge. My mother texted, but I didn’t read it. Is this about your shitty son? My thumb hovers again. Then Chip’s video call, and his tear-streaked face. It’s Bryan, he’s gone. He went alone, he didn’t take anyone with him.
All we knew—all we knew for a long time—was what the police saw on the bar’s surveillance video. The little ambiguities of his last moments, and the coroner’s verdict of “accidental choking,” will spare my family the pain of saying that he drank himself to death. But he drank himself to death. It was eight days before I sobbed in someone’s arms.
My brother, who died ignobly after a few dry months on probation, drew a sharp line between winners and losers. He knew that he was on one side of the line, and the crying men in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings were on the other. Winners and losers—that’s how academia organizes its boundaries too. I am happy, as I once told him, to be on the losing side, rather than the one assigned to “the Republicans, to the corporate managers of the world, to the winners of reality TV shows,” in Jack Halberstam’s memorable list from The Queer Art of Failure. A list to which I’d only add: the faculty members inclined to yell at waitstaff to fucking hurry until 2020’s raft of smartphone Karens taught them to mind their manners.
The delusions are powerful, and one hears their echoes in the extinction rattle of broken institutions. They do not have to die. There are paths by which we repair ourselves without restoration to some ideal form, although the hill can seem too steep once you’ve paid for your vices with an organ. From now on, I have to clock in and clock out like any other worker. At least I am free from the false promises of faculty life as refuge from market predations and familial agonies and radical isolation.
I spent spring break 2024 with my loves, but now with the bitter addition of a funeral. I took the microphone at the front of the room. We don’t do religion, so I sang the saddest song to compensate for all the drunk karaoke I’d missed since getting sober: Walk right back to me this minute / Bring your love to me, don’t send it / I’m so lonesome every day. When summer comes, Oxford and Clemson and Athens will die too, with promise of some autumnal resurrection. But I never lived there; my nation is my siblings.
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This essay appears in a special section in issue 33, “Education and Society.” Click here to read the other three essays in the section, by Elisa Gonzalez, Agnes Callard and Joseph M. Keegin.
Art credit: Wright Morris, Faulkner Country, near Oxford, Mississippi, 1939. Gelatin silver print, 7¾ × 9½ in. Collection Center for Creative Photography, © Estate of Wright Morris. Courtesy of the Center for Creative Photography.
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