Confessions of an Autodidact
Posted: July 16th, 2010, 4:43 pm
from Dharma for Dummies, an epistolary memoir by Lrod
Confessions of an Autodidact
Linda,
I took your lead and exchanged a few notes with our dear daughter. I'm so proud of her for graduating. She has been so clever and persevering in her education. Putting herself through UT on the mammary scholarship was genius. She tiptoed through the hazards of that occupation like a goddess walking through garbage. And then her internship in Africa and studies in NY show her grit and courage. I read one of her short stories and enjoyed it very much. I'm sure that you are thrilled by your portrayal in that story...haha.
I hated school as a child. This is why that at a fairly early stage of my academic career I decided to remain in school for the rest of my life. I'm a glutton for punishment.
When I dropped out of college, I did it with a specific goal in mind, to further my education. It was not long after I had learned that schools were wonderful fun but they were also prisons for ideas. It is no accident that universities are called institutions of higher learning and that schools in general are called learning institutions. They are designed to institutionalize as much as to enlighten. The pupils are being taught to survive in an institutional environment and that skill-set is their primary lesson. This is just as well because the goal of most students is not so much an education as a diploma. You remember the day when the degree aspirations of most female students was an Mrs.
Don't mistake my wry cynicism for a disdain for schools and education. I'd rather die in a school than a church any day. Just don't let it be a hospital. Which brings us back to institutions. We need and cherish our institutions; they are edifices to preserve and protect our values and beliefs and histories. But institutions are notoriously slow and lumbering creatures and while they are sometimes large enough to create their own ecosystems, discovery and innovation are the province of smaller, fleeter animals who can forage beyond the clipped greens of the campus. Schools are great places to learn what we already know.
But what if we want to learn things which are unknown? Then we must leave the school and take to Whitman's road, the road he calls the final test of all ideas, religions, philosophies and inventions. I was much more interested in discovery and adventure than obtaining credentials. Besides, there are no accredited universities for poetry. The studies are more esoteric and must be accomplished in the field.
Once I ran into Dr. Baird, our sophomore literature professor, in a grocery store in Oak Cliff. I hadn't seen him is several years since leaving Denton. He was describing his memories of you and I sitting at the back of the class about six inches off our seats. He didn't know if it was love or if we just hadn't come down from the night before....haha. I've kept in touch with Jim Baird over the years through correspondence. I always liked him and thought that he would rather have been sitting with the rest of the students rather than trying to teach the class. Last I heard he was teaching a literature class on poetry in pop music featuring much Paul Simon and Bob Dylan.
In prison I wrote no poems. I wrote few letters. There was pain for me in the mail. It was a cruel reminder of the outside world. It brought news of real things happening in the lives of real people. It told of time marching on without me and the freedom to come and go. It told of marriages and graduations and family dinners, things which I only remembered like a dream lost in the dawn or a former incarnation. Strangely, it was the short-timers, the ones with five or ten years, that were most tormented by thoughts of the free world. The lifers and long-timers knew they would probably never see the outside again so they made peace with where they were.
What I did in prison was read. The first book that I ever read cover-to-cover was The Yellow Feather mystery from the Hardy Boys series. I think I was about five. During my childhood, I was often found with my nose in a book. In adolescence I learned what a refuge and comfort books could be. But in prison they became my salvation. I spent nearly every waking hour reading. I couldn't slip through the bars of my physical confinement but I could escape between the pages books and travel in both time and space. I read about fourteen hundred volumes during my stay. That's nearly one a day. I read anything I could get my hands on. I usually became the cell-block librarian and kind friends on the outside sent me books and magazine subscriptions. Especially at first I read for escape and entertainment. The panoply of books which circulated among the inmates was rich in mysteries and westerns and crime and espionage novels. I can always appreciate a good story so Louis LaMour and Robert Ludlum and Steven King and Raymond Chandler became friends of mine. As time went by I became more selective and gravitated to greater writers like Mailer and Updike and Vonnegut, all of whose libraries I exhausted. Those four years were for me like a bachelor's degree in contemporary literature and that time of intensive reading did wonders for me as a writer. I studied styles and voices and literary devices and in general bathed myself in the words of Hemmingway and Joyce and Steinbeck. I ate and slept with Voltaire and Twain and Camus.
Learning in this monastic manner was the only way that I could salvage good results from a bad situation. If I was going to be locked up, I might as well catch up on my reading. It was difficult to use the prison library. They made it difficult because somehow they knew that the inmates were using these books to escape but they couldn't quite figure out how. So I usually kept a lending library going from my cell. I would put a cardboard box by the door and the other inmates could reach through the bars and take one if they left one. Publishers and book distributors would occasionally donate surplus and returned books to the prison. They would drop a box in the dayroom and there would be 15 copies of Daniell Steele's last bodice ripper or Robin Cook's medical thrillers along with a few Glassblowing for Dummies or How to Profit from Non-profits etc. It was like dumpster diving in the literary sense. These were the books that the idiots who get their reading material in the grocery store check-out aisle didn't want. But even Jackie Collins can teach me things about story telling.
Another way that I entertained myself in prison was by taking college courses. I earned almost as many college credits while I was in prison as I brought with me when I came. I probably have enough credits scattered around in various universities to have an advanced degree. I would gather them up like orphans if I thought that a degree would be of any use to me at this stage of my life. The courses I took behind bars were offered by Sam Houston State University in Huntsville. I have studied at universities from Harvard to Berkeley and UT and North Texas plus a handful of community colleges and I've had some excellent teachers. The intrepid professors that came to teach the social outcasts at the State Prison were among the best I've witnessed. It takes a special kind of teacher to want that duty. I don't think they even got hazard pay. By far the best history lecturer I've ever seen is Charles Olsen of Sam Houston. He was a well-published author in his field and a wheel in the history department at Sam; he didn't need to risk his life for the resume. Prof. Olsen would stroll into class in his crepe soled shoes and dockers, armed with nothing but a number two pencil and off the top of his head deliver lectures that were so spellbinding that even the speed-freak hot-checkers with ADD doing five to ten were entranced and left feeling like they had lived through a piece of history.
Certainly the best thing that anyone can learn is how to learn. We can find out practically anything because of the internet. At some point it becomes a matter of deciding what we need to know. A lot of useless people know a lot of useless things. Information which is vital to my life may make no difference to yours. Hence what we really desire is not knowledge but wisdom.
I'm sending good thoughts for Sativa's scientific procreative attempt. I think it's a miracle but it still gives me the creeps a little bit too. I think I wrote a poem one time called Daughter of Glass when the first test-tube baby was born. I'll bet Sativa gets a short story out of it for sure. That's one thing I like about the fact that most of my children are poems and songs, you don't have to put them through school.
Love to all within kissin distance,
lrod
Confessions of an Autodidact
Linda,
I took your lead and exchanged a few notes with our dear daughter. I'm so proud of her for graduating. She has been so clever and persevering in her education. Putting herself through UT on the mammary scholarship was genius. She tiptoed through the hazards of that occupation like a goddess walking through garbage. And then her internship in Africa and studies in NY show her grit and courage. I read one of her short stories and enjoyed it very much. I'm sure that you are thrilled by your portrayal in that story...haha.
I hated school as a child. This is why that at a fairly early stage of my academic career I decided to remain in school for the rest of my life. I'm a glutton for punishment.
When I dropped out of college, I did it with a specific goal in mind, to further my education. It was not long after I had learned that schools were wonderful fun but they were also prisons for ideas. It is no accident that universities are called institutions of higher learning and that schools in general are called learning institutions. They are designed to institutionalize as much as to enlighten. The pupils are being taught to survive in an institutional environment and that skill-set is their primary lesson. This is just as well because the goal of most students is not so much an education as a diploma. You remember the day when the degree aspirations of most female students was an Mrs.
Don't mistake my wry cynicism for a disdain for schools and education. I'd rather die in a school than a church any day. Just don't let it be a hospital. Which brings us back to institutions. We need and cherish our institutions; they are edifices to preserve and protect our values and beliefs and histories. But institutions are notoriously slow and lumbering creatures and while they are sometimes large enough to create their own ecosystems, discovery and innovation are the province of smaller, fleeter animals who can forage beyond the clipped greens of the campus. Schools are great places to learn what we already know.
But what if we want to learn things which are unknown? Then we must leave the school and take to Whitman's road, the road he calls the final test of all ideas, religions, philosophies and inventions. I was much more interested in discovery and adventure than obtaining credentials. Besides, there are no accredited universities for poetry. The studies are more esoteric and must be accomplished in the field.
Once I ran into Dr. Baird, our sophomore literature professor, in a grocery store in Oak Cliff. I hadn't seen him is several years since leaving Denton. He was describing his memories of you and I sitting at the back of the class about six inches off our seats. He didn't know if it was love or if we just hadn't come down from the night before....haha. I've kept in touch with Jim Baird over the years through correspondence. I always liked him and thought that he would rather have been sitting with the rest of the students rather than trying to teach the class. Last I heard he was teaching a literature class on poetry in pop music featuring much Paul Simon and Bob Dylan.
In prison I wrote no poems. I wrote few letters. There was pain for me in the mail. It was a cruel reminder of the outside world. It brought news of real things happening in the lives of real people. It told of time marching on without me and the freedom to come and go. It told of marriages and graduations and family dinners, things which I only remembered like a dream lost in the dawn or a former incarnation. Strangely, it was the short-timers, the ones with five or ten years, that were most tormented by thoughts of the free world. The lifers and long-timers knew they would probably never see the outside again so they made peace with where they were.
What I did in prison was read. The first book that I ever read cover-to-cover was The Yellow Feather mystery from the Hardy Boys series. I think I was about five. During my childhood, I was often found with my nose in a book. In adolescence I learned what a refuge and comfort books could be. But in prison they became my salvation. I spent nearly every waking hour reading. I couldn't slip through the bars of my physical confinement but I could escape between the pages books and travel in both time and space. I read about fourteen hundred volumes during my stay. That's nearly one a day. I read anything I could get my hands on. I usually became the cell-block librarian and kind friends on the outside sent me books and magazine subscriptions. Especially at first I read for escape and entertainment. The panoply of books which circulated among the inmates was rich in mysteries and westerns and crime and espionage novels. I can always appreciate a good story so Louis LaMour and Robert Ludlum and Steven King and Raymond Chandler became friends of mine. As time went by I became more selective and gravitated to greater writers like Mailer and Updike and Vonnegut, all of whose libraries I exhausted. Those four years were for me like a bachelor's degree in contemporary literature and that time of intensive reading did wonders for me as a writer. I studied styles and voices and literary devices and in general bathed myself in the words of Hemmingway and Joyce and Steinbeck. I ate and slept with Voltaire and Twain and Camus.
Learning in this monastic manner was the only way that I could salvage good results from a bad situation. If I was going to be locked up, I might as well catch up on my reading. It was difficult to use the prison library. They made it difficult because somehow they knew that the inmates were using these books to escape but they couldn't quite figure out how. So I usually kept a lending library going from my cell. I would put a cardboard box by the door and the other inmates could reach through the bars and take one if they left one. Publishers and book distributors would occasionally donate surplus and returned books to the prison. They would drop a box in the dayroom and there would be 15 copies of Daniell Steele's last bodice ripper or Robin Cook's medical thrillers along with a few Glassblowing for Dummies or How to Profit from Non-profits etc. It was like dumpster diving in the literary sense. These were the books that the idiots who get their reading material in the grocery store check-out aisle didn't want. But even Jackie Collins can teach me things about story telling.
Another way that I entertained myself in prison was by taking college courses. I earned almost as many college credits while I was in prison as I brought with me when I came. I probably have enough credits scattered around in various universities to have an advanced degree. I would gather them up like orphans if I thought that a degree would be of any use to me at this stage of my life. The courses I took behind bars were offered by Sam Houston State University in Huntsville. I have studied at universities from Harvard to Berkeley and UT and North Texas plus a handful of community colleges and I've had some excellent teachers. The intrepid professors that came to teach the social outcasts at the State Prison were among the best I've witnessed. It takes a special kind of teacher to want that duty. I don't think they even got hazard pay. By far the best history lecturer I've ever seen is Charles Olsen of Sam Houston. He was a well-published author in his field and a wheel in the history department at Sam; he didn't need to risk his life for the resume. Prof. Olsen would stroll into class in his crepe soled shoes and dockers, armed with nothing but a number two pencil and off the top of his head deliver lectures that were so spellbinding that even the speed-freak hot-checkers with ADD doing five to ten were entranced and left feeling like they had lived through a piece of history.
Certainly the best thing that anyone can learn is how to learn. We can find out practically anything because of the internet. At some point it becomes a matter of deciding what we need to know. A lot of useless people know a lot of useless things. Information which is vital to my life may make no difference to yours. Hence what we really desire is not knowledge but wisdom.
I'm sending good thoughts for Sativa's scientific procreative attempt. I think it's a miracle but it still gives me the creeps a little bit too. I think I wrote a poem one time called Daughter of Glass when the first test-tube baby was born. I'll bet Sativa gets a short story out of it for sure. That's one thing I like about the fact that most of my children are poems and songs, you don't have to put them through school.
Love to all within kissin distance,
lrod