Author: JDJPlocher

People/ Gamers

“There are people who game, and gamers who people.”
          —a certain stupid college first year

As a college freshman, I was in an odd spot. I’d spent the last two years at a school on the other side of the Atlantic. Home was 1500 miles away from Macalester, but that was 3000 miles closer than I had been a few months earlier. I’d already been through the whole “leave home and reinvent yourself” thing. I had a beard. People mistook me for a senior and constantly asked me for directions I didn’t know how to give them. The way my courses shook out in my first semester made things even easier; most of the academic ground I had to cover was familiar.

Despite all this head start (or perhaps because of it), I fell into an odd spot socially. I engaged in the usual whirl of activities freshman try on at a selective liberal arts college: I was active in the International Organization, the Mac Weekly, band…I was still playing basketball and just becoming obsessed with ultimate frisbee. It didn’t feel like trying things on, though, because I’d already been through trying things on. I was pretty convinced that I just had a wide variety of interests and was such a damn hotshot that I could pursue all of them. That put me in the middle of a very messy social Venn diagram, one in which I had slight overlap with half a dozen different social circles.

The most awkward one for me, though, was with the college’s population of “gamers.” This was 1998. Console games didn’t really have anything to do with being a gamer yet. None of them connected to the still fairly-rough-cut internet. Being a gamer meant playing role-playing games, maybe computer games and the occasional board game. (Catan, anyone?) Mac’s gamers pretty much owned a particularly long set of tables in the dining hall. I’d eat there occasionally. I met my first serious girlfriend at that table.

Still, though, it didn’t really fit for me. The gamers were weird. It was enormously hypocritical of me to think that, given the ways that I’d cultivated my own weirdness. They were socially off-kilter and their humor went to odd places. I felt kind of like I should fit. I ran a Spelljammer game on band trips. I’d run the RPG group at my high school in Wales. I had brought a few of my gaming books to college with me to take up precious space in my dorm room. Tellingly, those books stayed in a dark corner. I pitched but never started a D&D game for the people on my floor—other dabblers in gaming.

That quote above—mine, obviously—became an excuse both to feel better about myself and to keep my distance from some great people. The gamers were bad at being people, I was saying, because they were too gamery. It was too central to their identity. Their awkwardness was going to stick to them because they just didn’t do enough other things. (Truth: I was too nervous and/or condescending to ask them about their other interests. A decade later, they’ve all proven to have many.) I, on the other hand, could game as much as I wanted because I was a person who occasionally gamed. I did so many other cool things that gaming oughtn’t hold me back.

We all know that even smart people are stupid, right? I’ve said a lot of idiotically pretentious things over the years, but that “gamers who people” thing might make my top ten. Certainly the “things said outside a graduate seminar” top ten.

So much has changed in the last fifteen years. Games have invaded everything. The geeks were right. Famous funny people have publicly—proudly—admitted being geeks. You walk into the toy section at Target, you see board games marked “as featured on Tabletop”—a show, on the internet, co-created by Wil Farking Wheaton. I am so late to the party on this.

There’s no doubt that my coming to peace with my gamer-ness has been assisted by all the social and technological change. It’s also been a consequence of my slow outgrowing of high school ideas of what’s cool. Those ideas are stupidly persistent. In grad school, though, I ran into other challenges. As a writer and reader, I’ve always maintained that the best of “genre fiction” can stand alongside the books I had to read as an English major. That insistence somehow didn’t extend to intellectual credibility. A gamer who treasures Adorno’s Minima Moralia? Seriously? How can you put THAC0 and Adorno in the same head? The upshot was that as much as I might ‘fess up to being a gamer (and even played a session with my fellow grad students), those gaming books still tended to stay on a shelf in the spare room.

Don't hate me for owning 4e!

We have many shelves, but this one is the most “me.” Except for LIFE.

About a year ago, they made it out onto the “real” shelving in rooms people actually use. In the new place, they’re in the same unit as my academic books and (“serious”) literature. They’re still on the bottom shelf, because they’re mostly pretty damn heavy and will threaten the quality Swedish particleboard if they’re put any higher. I don’t feel like I have anything to prove any more. That’s one of the flip sides of the last, heavy post: letting go is hard, but it lightens you up. Gamers are people, people are gamers. Whatever. I’m okay being both now. People are people, and even the most awkward of us deserve better than restrictive labels…even when cultural changes have made it comfortable for us to re/claim them.

Of Dreams, Carrots, and Towers

If it wasn’t for disappointment/I wouldn’t have any appointments
—They Might Be Giants, “Snowball in Hell”

Sometimes I miss being asked about my research. Not many people have asked since I defended my dissertation and earned the right to start signing my e-mails with “Dr.” The reason I don’t get asked very often is tied to another question: “did you apply for {insert tenure-track musicology job}?” Last year, the answer to that second question was almost always “yes,” with the exception of a few searches whose early deadlines I missed. This year, my answer will be “no.” When I was finishing my undergraduate work, I thought that professors had the best job ever: flexible schedules, the chance to work with smart young people, the vague but appealing “life of the mind.” I went to a small, selective liberal arts college and my idea of “adjunct faculty” began and ended with the applied instrumental teachers who held down performing jobs and usually had studios at several of the local colleges.

Ten years later, I know a hell of a lot more about adjunct faculty. I’ve been one of the now-ubiquitous adjuncts. Most of the academic workforce in higher education operates off the tenure track. Even so, the tenure-track job I dreamed about when I began graduate school is still dangled before graduate students and contingent faculty like the carrot before the donkey. With a little luck, the right shift in the winds, and a precisely-timed lunge, the donkey can snatch the carrot. The smartest, hardest-working donkeys have a slightly better chance at the carrot than the rest, but only slightly. You have to be a pretty smart, hard-working donkey to get through a doctoral program in the first place.

The chase for the carrot goes on. My friends and I compare notes on which programs write the most respectful rejection letters. We do our best to cheer each other’s successes. With conferences and publications, that’s easy. As a generation of scholars, I think we’re doing fascinating, worthwhile work. When it comes to jobs, though, it’s harder to be earnestly enthusiastic about friends’ success. The odds are good that you applied for the same position, the same fellowship, the same grant. When that happens, you have to be a better person than I am to avoid shading happiness at a friend’s success with hints of jealousy and disappointment. Living in academia is like living in a small town: everybody knows everybody, and even friends step on each other’s toes for want of space to move.

I was more desperate to get out of the actual small town I grew up in than to get out of this metaphorical small town of academia. Like a small town, academia can be comfortable, familiar. My dream lived there. I walked around Minneapolis feeling dissatisfied that my coursework was filled with Continental theorists. I would, I was sure, develop ideas that could elbow their way into the western body of thought alongside Deleuze and Bourdieu and Adorno. I’d use my work in comparative studies to beef up my credentials for musicology positions. I’d make time in my schedule for my kids, even if it meant staying up late and getting up early.

Eventually, nobody had to dangle a carrot in front of me, because I’d made my own carrot, held the stick in my own hands. Although it was much more miserable, it wasn’t that different from my teenage internet romance, where I’d been in love with the idea of being in love rather than with the person I was exchanging letters and books and cassettes with. As I trudged through my dissertation, I had to sell myself on the idea of being done with my dissertation. I finished it in part to spite my only intermittently-supportive institution, in part because I’d already sunk years into my PhD, and in part because I’d sold myself on that idea of being done. Being done would make everything better.

Being done did not make everything better.

I graduated in December. Because of some quirks of academic scheduling and a particularly odd adjunct position I’d taken, I wasn’t teaching in the spring. I took care of my daughter and sat on my hands and waited for something, anything, to come back from the applications I’d spent October and November sending all over the country. I was miserable. I had begun to understand some of the consequences of my mutually laissez-faire relationship with my advisor. My CV was far too thin to insulate me from the chilly job market. I told myself that I’d chase the one-year positions that begin to be announced in the spring. I told myself that I’d get an interview invitation any day now…

…I told myself that I was worthless, that I’d thrown away seven years of my life chasing a degree that was going to get me something between jack and squat. After a decade in graduate school, I was somehow even less employable than I would have been straight out of undergrad. I’d made my wife work full time through our kids’ preschool years, made her live 1200 miles from her family. I was convinced I was failing my family. Late one night it got so bad that I cried for an hour, great wracking sobs that I couldn’t stop. I don’t know what would have happened if I’d been alone. My wife helped me get through that night, and the days that came after.

In March, I went to a conference, hoping it might renew my enthusiasm (and because I had a paper to present). I heard more interesting papers than I’d heard at any previous conference. The society members were supportive. They understood my research and some were excited about the way it fit in with their own work. It was the best conference experience I’d ever had. A week later, I was more convinced than ever that leaving academia was the right next step for me. My peers at the conference were all gunning for the same jobs I was. None of us were optimistic about our immediate futures. The early career professionals committee meeting was filled with too-familiar laments, even though my fellow scholars were excited by and committed to their work.

I admire and respect my friends who are staying inside. They are doing fantastic things in the classroom and in their research. I wish they didn’t have to fight the system so hard to do them. It is inspiring to me that they can draw so much strength from the love of their work, even when they’re shoved on yet another committee or have their course load jerked around for the umpteenth time. I’ve realized I don’t love the work enough to put up with all the rest of it.

Giving up a dream is hard. It’s hard even when you know that giving it up is the right thing to do. It’s hard even when you know the dream isn’t really your dream anymore. Graduate school gets inside you like any other sixty or seventy-hour-a-week job does. It becomes a huge part of who you are. It had become a part of me that I didn’t like, but I couldn’t just cut it away. There are parts of academic life that I enjoy, parts that I’m good at. Ultimately, though, they’re not enough. The calculus of happiness is all wrong. (The financial calculus isn’t any better.) When I was busy sliding down the post-defense slope, none of the things that slowed me down came from the work I had done or thought I wanted to do. That dream of my favorite professor’s life was the thing pulling me down, even though it had shrunk from teaching at my ideal program to teaching anywhere with a reasonable salary and benefits. To get out of my hole, I had to let that dream go.

It would be a better story if this revelation had come in a cinematic beam of light, or while playing with my kids, or while noodling around on the piano. It has been slower than that, an ongoing process without any narrative tidiness. I want to make my life with my words, which is good. Writing is satisfying, and it feels right to me in ways that academic work never quite has. Starting over was, I think, the right choice. But it is still starting over. I apply for entry-level positions while keeping my eyes open for those elusive jobs outside academia where my degrees might help. The doubts don’t go away.

I’ve got dreams to chase again, though, and I like my new doubts better than my old certainties.

Heimweh (On Writing and Place)

You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.
          —Robert Frost

When I was 16, I had lived in two houses, one of them for fifteen years. By the time I was 25, I had lived in three dorms, three basements, four apartments, and—briefly—on a porch. Then I managed to live in one apartment in North Minneapolis for seven years. In that apartment, I started and finished a PhD, spent sleepless nights with two infants and watched them grow. I cooked a lot of meals in the kitchen with the floral-print wallpaper. Yesterday, I put the fourth set of license plates on my trusty, rusty Dodge: Texas (following, from most recent to oldest: Minnesota, Ohio and Idaho). For the first time in a long while, I’m a newcomer.

Place grounds writing. It might allow you, as Frost suggests, to be “a little ungrammatical.” Even a few generations into mass media’s flattening of regional accents, changing places changes the sounds of the language around you. (Never mind moving far enough to land in a different language.) If, like me, you write fiction, you have to pay attention to dialogue. The story of a torrid Miami Beach affair should not feature the linguistic cadences and quirks of North Dakota.

Writing and place intersect in more profound ways than dialect, though. The intersection is also about landscapes—the real and the imaginary. When I moved from Idaho to Wales, my stories filled up with fragile cliffs and dramatic tides. In Minnesota, I was suddenly writing about trees a lot more. Summit Avenue in St. Paul is lined with wonderfully big, old trees, and they seeped into my work. Characters climbed trees, or stared at them, or marked out the seasons by their leaves. I wrote about snow, of course, and snow still occupies a prominent place in my mind, the way it can be a blanket, an obstacle, a coat of paint…

Imaginary landscapes are just as important—in high school, I went to a writing workshop in the same part of Idaho that Hemingway had once called home. That mattered just as much as the dry hills and hidden streams. Summit Avenue? It had big, old, expensive houses to go along with the big, old, trees, especially going up towards the Cathedral. It was the place where F. Scott Fitzgerald grew up, and what led to much of his bitterness about the rich. The Idaho of my youth was all sage brush and cowboys. I knew a few when I was a kid, old hands who’d been on horses since the Jazz Age was happening on the other side of the country. Sometimes it felt like there were more animals around than people. In Wales, it was not hard to populate the fog and the rolling hills with bits of Arthurian legend or the Mabinogion, to read omens into the flight of a crow. Places wear their stories.

So that’s one way writing ties to place: it supplies you with a mental geography. There’s another thing, though, that has really affected my writing over the years: the places I actually do it. I’ve done a lot of writing in coffee shops. True to type, right? But coffee shops are all a bit different. In Bowling Green there’s a combined coffee shop and used book store called Grounds for Thought. They do their own roasting and the coffee is great. Working there usually combined the best aspects of coffee shops and libraries. It was pretty quiet, there were books all around, the light wasn’t too bad…and, like I said, great coffee. There was another coffee shop, though, whose name I’ve forgotten. It was a few blocks closer to my apartment. The coffee wasn’t as good. The lights were brighter than I liked. Usually, there was Christian Rock playing too loud, too. There were times when I needed to go there to work, even though I didn’t “like” it as much as Grounds for Thought. I needed a place that was a bit abrasive to force me to focus. The distractions were just unpleasant enough to make me shut them out. I composed a lot of music in that coffee shop.

I wrote most of my dissertation in two Minneapolis coffee shops a few blocks apart. Sometimes the shops’ hours would decide which one I went to, other times I’d decide on the painfully mundane basis of whether I wanted better coffee or better pastries. (Once in a great while, I could legitimately base my decision on picking the coffee shop with the faster wi-fi.) Over the years, those two coffee shops became almost too familiar for me, and I had to cast further afield to find the right place to write. In the last phases of my dissertation, I’d bike across the river and down towards campus, spending the whole day writing and revising in a coffee shop that I don’t think I ever visited recreationally.

How does all this tie into the post’s title? Heimweh is the German word for homesickness. “Heim” translates to its cognate “home” pretty smoothly, but “weh” is less about illness than about ache. “Heimweh” is as much nostalgia (which has its linguistic roots in the pain of coming home) as it is homesickness. I’ve been feeling a lot of that with the move to Texas. I miss my old haunts, miss my old real and imaginary landscapes. When December comes and there’s no snow on the ground, I expect to be jealous of my friends in Minnesota complaining about windchill and snow emergencies. Thinking about where I am now, I cannot help thinking about all the places I’ve been before. When I get tired—especially when the things that have worn me out are the hassles inherent in 1200 miles’ worth of relocation—I just want to be back there with my familiar joys and concerns.

In the last few days, though, launching this blog and committing myself to writing, I’ve remembered something: from my earliest days as an aspiring writer, I’ve always written on trips. That’s the flip side to Heimweh, Fernweh—the ache to be traveling. (“Wanderlust” can also be translated to and from German as…”Wanderlust.”) The first big text I completed was a travelogue of my adventures taking trains through Europe. Even on shorter, busier trips, I usually keep a notebook and jot things down in it.  An academic conference in New Orleans, for example, inspired key points of the novel I’m writing. Even though there’s cliche in the thought, Texas is a big place. It’s not precisely another country, but it likes to think of itself as one. Along with the Heimweh comes the opportunity to explore this new landscape, to write in new places…and to find new favorite coffee shops.

I think I’ll get by.

What about you, my pioneering handful of readers? Any thoughts to share on how place has affected the content of your work? Or the process of creating it?

If You Build It…

“If you build it, they will come.”

The whispers of Kevin Costner’s cornfield ghosts are not pearls of secret wisdom: if you build it, they might come. They might not. Especially if you don’t tell anybody about it. To get to the truth in those whispers, season them with some negatives: if you don’t build it, they can’t come. You will never get anything published if you do not complete your manuscript. You will never get in better shape without actually doing the exercise.

All the to-do lists in the world won’t change that.

Seventeen years ago, in a rental car somewhere in Appalachia, I told my grandmother I wanted to be a writer. That was my plan. I went to college with that plan, happy to be an English major and mix creative writing with literature courses. I wrote for the school weekly. I put (my) poems up on the wall outside my dorm room. I wore a lot of black.

And then I signed up for a second semester of music theory to secure reduced-price trombone lessons. Even though I kept wearing black, I was soon spending most of my time in the music department. I still took my English courses, and I still enjoyed them. The intersection between words and music fascinated me. I concocted an honors project that involved writing a piece for orchestra, accompanied by a longish narrative poem. I hadn’t given up on being a writer, but I was busy being a composer.

If I had been a little less confident in my writing, things might have been different. As it was, I convinced myself that pursuing graduate work in English was wrong. I hated picking apart literary works; it felt like vivisecting a bird and being dismayed that it no longer flew. I did not think I would get much from an MFA beyond the time to simply write. (Never mind that I was and continue to be interested in the kind of writing usually dismissed as genre fiction, which was not exactly popular in the academy.) No, if I was going to learn something, it would be by pursuing further study in music composition.

That lasted about six weeks. I missed writing papers. I found the pragmatic questions composers asked about music shallow. (I was 22. I thought a lot of things were shallow.) I switched from composition to a dual degree in composition and music history. I got to write papers again. I got to research the esoteric questions that interested me. Meanwhile, I kept composing. I wrote some music that I still like almost ten years later. I was not writing a lot of prose, though, and poetry had pretty much fallen out of my life until I had to concoct a libretto for my thesis composition. By the time I started my doctorate, my work was about performance and theory and sociology, not about words.

I became a scholar, and that conversation in the rental car fell away.

I have spent most of the last seven years of my life taking care of my kids and working on a Ph.D. in musicology. The former gave me perspective on the latter. Maybe a little too much perspective, because I could not make myself obsessed with my research. (I eventually managed to foster an obsession with getting it done, which proved much more fruitful.)

The writing never went away, not really. I’ve written constantly for games, started but not finished a pair of novels, and continued to live with words. Academics live with words a bit differently, but I think that I am mostly finished with being an academic. I’m ready to get back to writing, really writing…writing the stories I care about, the poems that catch in my mind’s ear, about the way that favorite authors have kept me going.

So here I am trying to build something. Thanks for coming. I hope I do my job well enough to draw you back.