Habituation

"Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not a virtue, but a habit." - Aristotle

Think about the things that you do on a habitual basis. Those old stand-bys that you always turn to when you are bored, stressed, or need some comfort or relaxation. What you do when you basically have free time.

If you are truly honest, many people will find that not all of those habits are truly healthy or constructive.

When I go into a substitute job in the mornings, I come across all levels and all kinds of students. Kindergarten-12th grade. And there is one habitual distinction that I recognize between the more successful classrooms and the more unruly ones.

When I have to continually and habitually pester you to get to work, you do not have a successful work pattern. You are treating the classroom as "free time" when it is not. Your particular habituation is to squander time, which is to squander excellence. It is not a thirst to excell, but rather a saturation of mediocrity. Mediocrity does not work hard; it complains. It protests and fruts and strets, and as Shakespeare said in Macbeth, it "signif[ies] nothing".

I do not believe that achievement comes naturally to 99.9% of people. Achievement means having a goal, and grasping it through work. You do not lose weight if you do not exercise; you must achieve the obstemious habituation of refusing excess food. You do not learn some fragments of knowledge by reading them once; you achieve that understanding through the habituation of "re"-"viewing": reading and/or reciting them over and over until an unconscious understanding of their meaning permeates your pores.

And yet, when left to their own devices, the students I encounter always return to the same habitual infatuations: movies, fashion, and (dear God, how many of them do I have to confiscate?) the umbilical phones/IPods.

We all have attention deficit disorder now. We change the channel. We shuffle our IPod. We see hundreds of advertisements and corporate icons a day. In fact, we are bombarded through constant environmental demands on our senses, both visual and aural. And that is certainly not a habituation that is leading to excellence.

Reviewing

I have been touching up a book review for The Shakespeare Newsletter. It is a nice gig, especially regarding the fact that I get to opine on whatever issues the book raises and often in an interdisciplinary way. The book is by an Art Historian from Yale named Alexander Nemerov, from the University of California Press, entitled Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War.

It is a quite stunning book actually. It takes a performance of Macbeth on October 17, 1863, for which we know very little, and extrapolates a lot of artistic environmental data for what it must have been like to attend that performance on that evening. It so happens that Abraham Lincoln was in attendance and Lady Macbeth was played by a very famous American actress named Charlotte Cushman. Nemerov is very theoretical with his approach, and it is not a book that you devour in a couple of sittings. In fact, you have to take it a chapter at a time and reflect a lot on it. I'll put it this way: imagine being Abraham Lincoln on that evening, attending his favorite Shakespeare play, and hearing references to blood and slaughter just three months after Gettysburg and on the same day that you sentenced a man to execution for murder of a Union soldier (the only eyewitness account of the evening remembers Lincoln leaning back into shadow on just such a reference) and you get the idea. Just simply a stunning imaginative and intellectual exercise.

Imagination like this makes me love my career. Yet, we call for scaling back of "government" intervention and budget cuts. Education is the first to be cut. And in California, the second and third to be cut. Just today, I had a beautiful idea for an article that needs to be written but it would require me to travel for the research and I can not do it on my own finances. So, the next time that people demand that we "share the pain" in budget cuts, just remember that teachers are students too and they can't learn without positions that will foster that learning. It does take money and security just like any corporate job.

I am doing this review for free. The only benefits are that I get to publish my thoughts and I get the book for free (admittedly a fairly expensive book). And if you would like to read it, I will send the review to you for free. If only the world could operate on that level more often...

The Comeback

It has now been several (okay, five if you are keeping score) years since I have blogged.

Sigh.

It has been five LOOOOOONG years, and I am going to begin rectifying that situation forthwith, post-haste, and all of those jolly good terms. I would like to return with posts regarding my favorite topics of choice: literature, the arts, personal travels, political observations close to my heart, and all of that good, fun, thought-provoking stuff.

Let me just say this to be brief: these last five years have not been easy. For the most part, they have been brutal. For every triumph - Ph.D. conferred! - there have been about five huge setbacks. In just the past three years, I have gone through some seriously earth-shaking things, most of which you wouldn't believe if I told you. Let's just say that I lost a dear friend of mine three months ago, way too early: Lizz Ketterer. This was a person who stuck by me through some difficult times in Stratford, and who I had enjoyed the MLA Conference with in January here in L.A. We had ruminated and strategized and parsed through all of those character-building things that we had shared, and then had discussed the future in the difficult field of the Ph.D. that we have chosen as our career.

And then a month later: she was gone.

And that deeply existential moment was only the latest world-crushing circumstance since circa 2008 to hit my world. And there have been more since.

Although I will divulge more at the appropriate times, I would indeed like to stick to the moment and to issues crossing my mind in the present. And for my next blog..."so how is that career going?" Can I leave that blog blank?

I promise that I won't. Thanks for reading.