>Yoshie Furuhashi quoted Oscar Wilde:
> >
> > To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something
> > better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by
> > a machine.
>
>God, this dumb guy should have seen how happy I was driving across the
>jobsite after we'd got done staking all this curb just three hours ago!
>My crew think I'm mad but their souls are dead to beauty. All those
>lovely lines and arcs of little orange flags! Really it's hard to
>believe a fellow artist could be so unsympathetic.
Creating lines and arcs of little orange flags might be different from being required to 'disturb dirt' for eight hours.
>Manual labor for no
>purpose other than to enrich the overdogs is, of course, empty labor. But
>manual labor to help enrich one's community, one's family, oneself, is labor
>of the highest order.
Why *manual* in this sentence, DP? Why? Why isn't any work to enrich one's community, family, self, 'of the highest order'? I want to know.
Aren't you on lists like this because some other effort than said labor might contribute to the enrichment you claim to desire? Or is it just another forum to flex your sweat and be impressed because someone else was in an even more glistening macho element of 'the service'?
>Socialists used to think this way, before they went to
>college, got tenure.
You think...? If you don't know 'working-class' or 'manual-labouring' socialists, Marxists, communists, unionists and various other 'ists' who are those ists because they want to transform their work from the moving-dirt form of labor to something quite different then you must lead a much weirder more cloistered life than most of these tenured graduates you deplore.
So we're going to -- I've read a bunch of posts on this thread before replying -- list our workerly credentials are we? What the hell for? If I'd never raised a sweat in my life; if I'd been born to privilege and opportunity; if I'd worked in 'intellectual' or even office-work all my life (as if that's not manual labor anyway) -- that would not prove or require I fail to enrich the above list of good ideas.
I was irritated this morning to see that I'd inadvertently included a sig file on one of my earlier posts -- I'd been dumping it because it's no longer accurate -- irritated because I know being a tenured academic is somehow a disqualification in this conversation. And yes I did get tenure this year -- about which I am so happy I think I forgot to breathe for a while.
But maybe the sig file does make a point -- sure it makes as much of a point as your noble work as a janitor. Over the years I've worked making take-away food, as a bank teller, as a mail clerk, selling clothes in a boutique, selling Avon, as a student, cleaning houses, tutoring Japanese, as a marketing analyst, and then as an academic. For very significant periods of my life I've also been a full-time 'housewife', and unemployed. This academic life is the easiest I've had not because it's the least hard work -- it's not -- but because it's the most pleasurable, productive, stimulating and rewarding. I also think it's the form of work which enables the most above-mentioned 'enriching' activities. By light years. It is so much more wonderful in all these ways than disturbing dirt -- which I have also literally been employed to do -- that I am personally offended by the implication that there is *by default* something honest and vibrant about the disturbing-dirt form of manual labor.
And I can still make fish soup, though indeed my risotto is better and my cheesecake is legendary (though I just know dessert is probably not Thoreau-esque enough to count).
Catherine [proudly the following...]
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Dr Catherine Driscoll
Associate Dean (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences) Head, Adelaide Research Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences
ARCHSS administration: judith.barlow at adelaide.edu.au
Phone: (61-8) 8303 4817 | Fax: (61-8) 8303 4882
Lecturer, Department of English Convenor, Cultural Studies major (Bachelor of Arts)
Email: catherine.driscoll at adelaide.edu.au
Phone: (61-8) 8303 5627 | Fax: (61-8) 8303 4341
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