Why Teach? Obvious: to Change the World

Why do I teach?

Well, I haven’t done so for years, except casually and by the by, and I didn’t much enjoy it when I was doing it?

So, why do you want to teach now?

That’s a story, not a long one, but a story. What it comes down to is there are things I want to do, things I want to see happen, and teaching is necessary to get there.

I went into academia because I wanted to do research. Not only wanted to, but had a passion for it. There was a certain line of investigation I just had to follow. I was able to do that in graduate school, but things got difficult when I took an academic post.

It was a good school, but there really wasn’t much chance of teaching my research, it was just too far from the various courses I taught. So teaching became something that took my time and attention away from my research. That’s not good, neither for teaching nor research.

I didn’t get tenure and after trying for two years, was unable to secure another academic post. So I alternated between making a living at things of relatively little interest, and doing interesting, buy nonremunerative writing and research.

I left the academy thirty years ago. I’ve written a lot since them, as much as a third of half of it online in the last ten years. The research is in good shape, so it’s time to do a Faust and turn my attention to the world.

Throw It All Away: American Heartache Sick of Society

It started with an email to Jon Naar: Let’s meet. Naar, as you may recall, did the first book on graffiti. He took the photos back in '72, found a publisher, and his publisher coupled him with a writer, Norman Mailer. Cay 161 gave Mailer a truth, “the name is the faith of graffiti,” and from that truth a book title was born: The Faith of Graffiti. The book went on to become the “bible” of graffiti.

In his reply, Naar copied graff writer EKG. In my reply to both, I told them about American Heartache, a nice sized roller in an abandoned building in Jersey City:

EKG says, that was by Droid907, I’ll let him know. Thus it was that I got an email from Droid907 asking for a mailing address so he could send me his latest book. A day or two ago the book arrived in the mail: Sick of Society, a collection of fisherman’s tales and doctored photographs. And with it, three stickers and a decal:

Zines have been around at least since Plato. That’s not what they called them in ancient days, but that’s what they were, artisanal books, hand crafted and NOT hot off the presses. There were no presses back then, just scribes, writing away, one at a time. Zines aren’t scribal, but you know a human hand touched each page.