Blue Highways: Pleasant Hill, Kentucky

Click on Thumbnail for MapUnfolding the Map

In this post, we visit a Shaker community in Pleasant Hill, and I will muse on 19th century utopian cults and communities, some of which were pretty darn interesting and even a little strange!  To learn where Pleasant Hill is located, why not click on the map?

Book Quote

"From a window on the third floor, where grim watchers had assured Shaker celibacy, I saw far to the east a yellow smear from a power generating plant smokestack.  Some historians attribute the decline of the United Believers to their unnatural views on procreation and cite the Shaker song:

Come life Shaker life,
Come life eternal;
Shake, shake out of me
All that is carnal.

But, since the Kentucky Shakers disappeared at the time of widespread electrification, maybe the lure of a 110/220 way of life kept new blood away from Pleasant Hill.  After all, even the inventive people themselves (circular saw and washing machine) had to check a love of ingeniously useful mechanical gadgets and to guard against (as Howells said) 'the impulse of the age toward a scientific, a sensuous, an aesthetic life.'  The yellowed sky gave me the sense the Shakers were right and that I was standing in the future in that hundred-thirty-nine-year-old building.  Because they cared more about adapting to the cosmos than to a society bereft of restraint, the Shakers - like the red man - could love craft and yet never become materialists."

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 12

Shaker village in the mist at Pleasant Hill, Kentucky

Pleasant Hill, Kentucky

In the last couple of years, I have read a few things about utopian communities.  Some might call them cults, others religious nuts, and some might find them to be refreshing alternatives to society.  One thing is certain: America has seen the establishment and decline of many of these communities centered around utopian dreams.

The Shakers were one group that fit into this type of  classification.  Structured heirarchically, they nevertheless practiced equality of the genders based on the belief that God manifested in both sexes.  Given that, they also practiced celibacy, believing it to be the purest form of spiritual expression.  They didn't forbid marriage, but they saw the root of evil in the fall of Man brought about by carnal desire, and believed that marriage was less pure than celibacy.  Men and women were separated into gender-based living quarters.  They also believed in the purity of hard work, and out of their industriousness they fashioned simple and functional furniture that was prized for its usefulness in the 1800s, and prized as collectors' items today.  They pioneered agricultural techniques, and were not adverse to creating and implementing mechanical solutions to problems such as water distribution.  Shakers also practiced communalism, sharing the resources of the community and limiting personal possessions.  It was a kind of religious communism of its day.

It all sounds nice and pastoral, and perhaps even pleasant if you can get past the part of no sex for the rest of your life.  But that was the tricky part.  The only way that the Shakers could replenish their population was through new converts and through adoptions.  After the Civil War, more people began moving to cities and less people were interested in such a lifestyle.  Even adoptions began to be regulated through private groups and the government and restricting the ability of the Shakers to bring in new children.  Evidently, by 2009, only three Shakers were left in the entire world.

There were utopian societies that were even more strange.  I'm talking really "out there."  Sarah Vowell, in her book Assassination Vacation, describes the Oneida community, another of the American utopian communities, as a community of "sex fiends" who believed in sex without male ejaculation, or what they called "Male Continence."  This practice was born out of the desire of the group's founder, John Humphrey Noyes, to never again subject his wife to the suffering of childbirth, especially that of involuntary impregnation.  This belief bred a whole set of practices that included older, post-menopausal women having sex with young men who hadn't learned how to control their ejaculations.  Girls, according to Vowell, were "annoyingly prone to falling in love," and "were ushered into womanhood by an older male, usually by an experienced boater like Noyes himself."  Thus everyone, under the group's adherence to a concept called Group Marriage, could have sex with whomever they wanted, as long as it was consensual and the practice of Male Continence was observed.  Paradoxically, any type of extreme passion for anything, including the arts was discouraged.  Mediocrity was the norm. The community even developed its own eugenics program.

Oneida community in action

While visiting my wife's parents in Florida, we made a special trip down to visit the site of the Koreshan Unity.  The Koreshan Unity, founded in the 1870s in New York, was another utopian community that believed that the earth is hollow, and that we actually lived on the inside.  They made a number of scientific experiments that they said proved that we inhabited the inside of a hollow sphere.  The community also practiced a religious communism, and women occupied the all decision-making positions that formed the Planetary Court, the only exception being the founder, Cyrus Teed (or Koresh).  There were three levels of membership in the group: non-believers willing to work for the Koreshan Unity who were allowed to marry and to participate in the secular activities of the group; believers who were allowed to marry but could have sexual relations only for reproduction purposes; and believers who made up the core group that did not believe in marriage and practiced celibacy.  The Unity moved from New York to swampland near Estero, Florida and laid out their New Jerusalem.  Unfortunately, after the death of their founder, who predicted that he would live forever, the group dwindled, and the last member died in 1981.  She was able to see the pictures of the earth beamed back from the space missions, and had to conclude after a life of being a devout member of the Koreshan Unity that the founder was wrong.  You have to think that might suck a little.

Koreshan Unity members at graveyard

Such cults and communities are around us and may even touch us all.  My wife grew up in Iowa, home of the Amana Colonies, religious communities known for their dairy products (my wife loves their cottage cheese) and the Amana appliances.  A friend of ours was raised in the Bruderhof, a Hutterite religious group somewhat related to the Mennonites and the Amish, that was founded in Germany and then moved to South America to escape the Nazis.  They now run successful businesses in the United States, and manufacture play equipment and classroom furniture for children, and equipment for disabled children and adults.  Our friend has a complicated relationship with his past in the group, but still maintains his connections with both current and former members of the community.

When I was in junior high school, the Jonestown cult's mass suicide was in the news for months.  The cult started out as the People's Temple less than an hour from where I grew up.  Even I, as a young man just out of college, joined a communal organization, the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, where I lived in a Catholic community, shared possessions with my community members and worked out in the wider community doing social service work.  The program shared certain characteristics, particularly communal lifestyle, with some of these more controversial and strange groups.  Lest one think that such communal living is easy, it isn't, and after two years of it I had my fill.

It all goes to show that humans seek out various degrees of communal living.  We consider those who want to be alone misanthropes and slightly off.  We cluster in towns and cities, while maintaining more or less independence.  We all share together somewhere on the spectrum, from lighting and power to, like Oneida, sexual relations in a group marriage.  But the extreme forms of communal living are hard to maintain.  All that's left of the Shaker community at Pleasant Hill now are silent buildings that stand as a testament to a belief system that once was vital and is now gone.  In the 1800s, with Shaker communities at their strongest, nobody living in them would have believed that their communities would disappear without the divine reappearance of the Lord or His Messengers.  Yet now they stand empty, tourist curiosities.  Their art of woodworking, elegantly simple, is prized by materialists the world over.  Their songs are sung by others.  Is it a sad ending?  Or is it just the way of things?

If you want to know more about Pleasant Hill or the Shakers

Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill
Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer: Pleasant Hill History
Ott's World: Shakin' it Up in Kentucky (blog)
PBS: Ken Burns' The Shakers
Prose and Photos: Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill
Simple Gifts: An excerpt from Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring (Simple Gifts is a Shaker hymn)
Wikipedia: Pleasant Hill
Wikipedia: Shakers

Next up: Danville, Kentucky

Blue Highways: Brooklyn Bridge/Kentucky River Palisades, Kentucky

Click on Thumbnail for MapUnfolding the Map

This post does not center around a city or town, but William Least-Heat Moon (LHM) stopped here along the Kentucky River to talk to a man about a boat.  I wonder if they ever finished it (this was 1978 after all).  Click on the map to discover where you can find the oddly named Brooklyn Bridge and the Kentucky River Palisades.

Book Quote

"The highway, without warning, rolled off the plateau of green pastures and enterred a wooded and rocky gorge; down, down, precipitously down to the Kentucky River.  Along the north slope, man-high columns of ice clung to the limestone.  The road dropped deeper until it crossed the river at Brooklyn Bridge.  The gorge, hidden in the tableland and wholly unexpected, was the Palisades.  At the bottom lay only enough ground for the river and a narrow strip of willow-rimmed floodplain."

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 10

Kentucky River Palisades reflected in water. Photo by Lizette Fitzpatrick: Blog N Kentucky

Brooklyn Bridge/Kentucky River Palisades

Nowhere, as I researched why the Brooklyn Bridge over the Kentucky River is so named, could I find an answer.  I've been presented with a mystery.  Perhaps some reader who stumbles across Littourati can leave a comment and enlighten me.  Of course, we have the world famous Brooklyn Bridge across the East River that connects Manhattan with the bridge's namesake borough across the river.  Interestingly enough, a bridge that connects Cincinnati with Kentucky, known as the High Bridge, was designed by John Roebling, the designer of New York's Brooklyn Bridge.  When the High Bridge (now known as the John A Roebling Suspension Bridge) was completed in 1866 it was the longest suspension bridge in the world.

But the Kentucky River Brooklyn Bridge is a mystery.  Was it so named because, in that part of the country in 1871, it looked like a monumental achievement and on a par with the New York Brooklyn Bridge, then under construction?  Did locals simply refer to it as their Brooklyn Bridge, and the name stuck?  Considering that it crosses at a place where there aren't any major metropolitan areas, the siting of the bridge itself seems to me to be a mystery.

The Palisades, however, are no mystery.  Having not been to this part of Kentucky, I have never seen them, but the photos look beautiful.  I have seen similar rock formations in different parts of the country, but evidently the river and these formations stand out, especially in the fall when the leaves are changing.

LHM spends little time talking about the Palisades, however.  He's more interested in a boat he sees being built down along river.  He seeks out the builder, and finds an older, retired man and his wife who have invested their time, energy and sweat into building a boat that they hope will one day allow them to cruise the rivers down to the gulf.

Not being a seafaring type myself, partly because I seem to get seasick any time I am on choppy ocean water, I can still understand this call.  Both of my uncles were commercial fisherman (one is now deceased but the other is still fishing in his 80s), as was my grandfather, and the ocean was in their blood.  There is something between a captain and his boat.  The captain loves his boat as if it were a spouse.  LHM describes it well in talking with the builder, a man named Bill Hammond, and his wife Rosemary.  He sees a sign above the kitchen table which reads "A boat is a hole in the water surrounded by wood into which one pours money."  Rosemary adds "....And your life."

I remember my Aunt Betty, when my Uncle Elwin was out on the water up in Alaska, waiting for the radio to crackle so that she could make sure that he was all right.  It's every fisherman's wife's fear that she will learn that something happened to her husband in rough seas, that the boat went down.  Fortunately, that never happened because my uncle was a careful captain who made sure he and his crew were safe.  My other uncle, Bob, still takes his wife fishing with him.  If you're the spouse of a person who lives and loves boats, you have to indulge them, if not buy into their dreams.

I wonder if Bill Hammond ever completed his boat, Bluebill, and if he and Rosemary sailed away down the Kentucky River, below the geological columns of the Palisades silently standing and watching as they have for eons, to the Mississippi, the Gulf and beyond?  I hope they achieved their quest.

If you want to know more about the Kentucky River Brooklyn Bridge or the Palisades

Bridges and Tunnels: Brooklyn Bridge
Get Out! Kentucky River Palisades
Jessamine County: Kentucky River Palisades
Nature Conservancy: Kentucky River Palisades
Panoramio: View of Kentucky River from Brooklyn Bridge
Wikipedia: Kentucky River Palisades

Next up:  Pleasant Hill, Kentucky

Blue Highways: Lexington, Kentucky

Click on Thumbnail for MapUnfolding the Map

Meandering around Kentucky, we accompany William Least-Heat Moon (LHM) on his drive around America in his van, Ghost Dancing.  Check out the map for our current locale.

Book Quote

"Along the Leestown Road, near an old whitewashed springhouse made useless by a water-district pipeline, I stopped to eat lunch.  Downstream from the spring where butter once got cooled, under peeling sycamores, the clear rill washed around clumps of new watercress....

"Had I gone looking for some particular place rather than any place, I'd never have found this spring under the sycamores.  Since leaving home, I felt for the first time at rest.  Sitting full in the moment, I practiced on the god-awful difficulty of just paying attention.  It's a contention of Heat Moon's - believing as he does any traveler who misses the journey misses about all he's going to get - that a man becomes his attentions.  His observations and curiousity, they make and remake him...

"....Maybe the road could provide a therapy through observation of the ordinary and obvious, a means whereby the outer eye opens an inner one.  STOP, LOOK, LISTEN, the old railroad crossing signs warned.  Whitman calls it 'the profound lesson of reception.'

"....In Lexington, I passed row after row of tobacco warehouses and auction barns on my way into the thousand square miles of bluegrass wold once called "God's footstool," a fertile land where pumpkin vines grow so fast they wear out the melons dragging them along.  So they say."

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 10

Downtown Lexington, Kentucky

Lexington, Kentucky

How do you travel?  Do you travel with the idea that you must see as much as possible in places that you go?  Or do you travel with minimal goals, rest and relaxation in mind?

My wife and I are often of two minds about our vacations.  When we go someplace, she wants to do as many things that are available and which we have time to do.  If she plans our days, then we are usually going from one place to another - breakfast at a nice restaurant, then the morning looking at an outdoor public art exhibit, lunch, afternoon at a museum, dinner, then perhaps a play or some other activity for the evening.  She is very active, outgoing and wants to see as much as a place has to offer.

I frustrate her a lot, because I am less of a planner.  In truth, I tend to let her plan things and go along, but at times I find myself getting tired keeping up with her boundless energy for sights and activities.  An afternoon sitting at an outdoor cafe and watching people go by would be something that I would schedule, but doing so might mean we miss something.

There's nothing wrong with either way of traveling.  Some travel for rest and relaxation, and some travel for sights and activities.  It depends on what we want.  But the quote by LHM that I pick above is a good reminder of keeping our perspectives no matter how we travel.  Sometimes there is beauty in the ordinary and obvious.  Sometimes the quiet and mundane hold secrets.  Does it matter if we are spending two hours examining a painting in a museum - just sitting there and letting the color and technique and image wash over us - or sitting in a living artwork of a wooded spring and hearing the sounds of the birds and the buzzing of the insects?

My own experience of this beauty in the ordinary came under most extraordinary circumstances.  In Big Bend National Park, on the west side of the Chisos Mountains, the road heads straight for the Rio Grande until you descend off a mesa down into the river valley.  At the top of the mesa, you can look over many square miles of desert where the vegetation is very sparse.  But in the middle of it, seen from probably twenty miles away, is a huge cottonwood tree.  It stands out in the desert like a beacon.  I promised myself I would hike to it someday.

My chance came with a friend.  I told him about my goal, and he was willing.  We set off down the Chimneys Trail and at the Chimneys, a set of rocks that poke out of the desert, we went off trail and headed toward the tree rising in the distance.  In the desert, the distances are not what we seemed.  We hiked for probably 2 hours, crossing five arroyos each deeper than the last.  At the edge of the last arroyo, we reached the tree, but it was surrounded by impenetrable brush on each side, until we went to the west side where there was a way in.  The tree had its own amazing little ecosystem.  Clearly it drew from an underground spring, and it was so lush it literally dripped water on us.  We rested and slept under the tree for probably two hours, completely refreshed after our ordeal through the desert to get there.  Insects buzzed, birds twittered.  In the midst of the sun-blasted silence of the desert it teemed with life that anywhere else would have seemed ordinary, but there seemed like an amazing miracle.

STOP, LOOK, LISTEN is what we had to do in that extraordinary place in Big Bend.  I think perhaps all of us should do more of that.  And speaking of stopping, looking and listening, Lexington is an excellent place to try it.  I've been there twice, though the second time was the time I got a more in-depth view of the city.  My wife finds her stop, look and listen moments at farmers markets, and Lexington has some nice architecture downtown.  And, if you like rolling hills with lots of horse farms and beautiful horse, Lexington will please.  Finally, the Keeneland Horse Racing Facility holds a horse sale and at those times, you might see Lexington locals mingling with famous American horse-racing aficionados, Arabian princes and European royalty.

If you want to know more about Lexington

Ace Weekly (alternative newspaper)
City Guide (alternative newspaper)
Lexington Convention and Visitors Bureau
Lexington Farmers Market
Lexington Herald-Leader (newspaper)
The Lexington Project (blog)
Life in Lexington, Kentucky (blog)
Now Eat This! (blog posts about Lexington restaurants)
Transylvania University
University of Kentucky
Urban Spoon Lexington (food)
Wikipedia: Lexington

Next up: Brooklyn Bridge/Kentucky River Palisades

Blue Highways: Frankfort, Kentucky

Click on Thumbnail for MapUnfolding the Map

We hit the Kentucky state capitol today.  Let the map at right guide you.

Book Quote

"The river loops from the east bluffs to the west bluffs and back again, a serpentine among old buildings that almost makes the town a little Venice.  Had it not been for the last thirty years, Frankfort would be an architecturally distinguished capitol city with streets of forcefully simple, aesthetically honest houses and shops.  But the impulse to 'modernize' nineteenth century commercial buildings, an impulse that has blasted the business districts of almost every town in the country, defaced Frankfort.  The harmonious, proportioned, historic lines of the buildings now wore veneers of ceramic tile, cedar siding, imitation marble, extruded aluminum, textured stucco, precast concrete; and the street level had become a jumble of meretricious, tawdry forms.  But at the second- and third-story levels, graceful designs in brick and stone remained; disregarding the plywood over the upper story window, you had unrenovated history."

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 8

Downtown Frankfort at night

Frankfort, Kentucky

William Least-Heat Moon (LHM) writes about driving into the Kentucky capitol as if he is driving into a bowl whose depression conceals the capitol building.  He calls it a "hidden statehouse."  Writing 30 years ago, he couldn't have envisioned the bigger stage that Kentucky plays on the American scene now, where Mitch McConnell is a power player in the Republican minority and was when the Republicans had the U.S. Senate majority, and those interested in politics watch as Republicans in power scramble to distance themselves from their newest Kentucky political player, Rand Paul.

I wrote in a post a while back about how cities in America are often named after cities in Europe.  I assumed this was the case with Frankfort.  After all, there is a city in Germany called Frankfurt, and I thought that perhaps Frankfort was originally settled by a German or Germans.  But I was wrong.  Instead, Frankfort was a derivation of Frank's Ford, after a settler killed by Indians as he crossed the Kentucky River.  The name was changed by residents who wanted something more modern sounding so, as LHM says, they picked something that kept the barest of their history but which didn't make any historical sense and "cut something between them and their beginnings."

I've often written about the modern aesthetic, and so what most appeals to me about LHM's chapter is the quote I've picked above.  Later on in the chapter, he highlights another aspect of modernization to me, the New Frankfort strip with the chain stores and fast food joints.  His quote, however, focuses on the urge to modernize by "sprucing up" old buildings.  Towns and cities all over America did it, adding new materials and losing something of their history in the process.  If it wasn't retrofitting historical buildings to meet modern aesthetics, it was destroying them entirely.  Sometimes it became hard to believe.

An aside to where I live now, in New Mexico.  In Albuquerque, we had a grand old Harvey hotel called The Alvarado that existed until it was demolished in 1970.  It occupied an entire city block downtown right along the railroad tracks, and evidently was a jewel.  But progress couldn't be stopped, and wrecking balls reduced it to rubble.  Years later, when a transportation center was planned for that spot, the design was made to resemble the old Alvarado Hotel.  The center is just a shell compared to what once stood there, but I like to think that the city realized that it had lost something special.

In Santa Fe, a variant of modernization actually tries to hearken back to what New Mexico originally was, a Spanish colony of adobe buildings.  However, Santa Fe itself became a sort of "Western" town, with buildings that you would expect in the old West.  However, many of those buildings have been stuccoed over to resemble adobe buildings in an attempt to recall an even more distant past, and building codes make any new buildings fit the popular aesthetic.  Does this really recall a past or does it lose some of the history?

Call it what you will - progress or destruction - but cities and towns all over America remake themselves, often under the rubric of "revitalization."  All the places I've lived and work have experienced this.  My hometown looks different than it did when I was growing up.  Milwaukee remade its downtown.  New Orleans seems to live in its somnambulent past while modern growth springs up around it in the adjoining parishes.  San Antonio created the Riverwalk and is trying to revitalize its downtown.  The goal is to draw new people with new needs and desires into these areas, and to do so, cities and town must make their downtowns appeal to them.  Frankfort is probably no different.  However, any revitalization also means denigrating some part of the past to the shadows, until it might get popular again and rise to the surface.  Is this bad or good?  I think it depends on who is observing and what they miss the most.

If you want to know more about Frankfort

Destination Frankfort
Gravesite of Daniel Boone
Kentucky Historical Society
Kentucky State University
State-Journal (newspaper)
University of Kentucky: Frankfort history
Wikipedia: Frankfort

Next up:  Lexington, Kentucky

Blue Highways: Shelbyville, Kentucky

Click on Thumbnail for MapUnfolding the Map

After a tough day's drive, we'll stop with William Least-Heat Moon (LHM) in Shelbyville to get a bite to eat and spend the night.  We'll see a little of Kentucky in the process and reflect on the meaning of a job and work.  Click on the thumbnail to your left to see where Shelbyville is, and the path we've taken.

Book Quote

"At Shelbyville I stopped for supper and the night.  Just outside of town and surrounded by cattle and pastures was Claudia Sanders Dinner House....

"....A man, in a suit of sharp creases, and his wife, her jacket lying as straight as an accountant's left margin, suggested I join them....

"'What do you do?' the husband asked.

"I told my lie, turned it to a joke...

"He said, 'I notice that you use work and job interchangeably.  Oughten to do that.  A job's what you force yourself to pay attention to for money.  With work, you don't have to force yourself....You know what my work is?  You know what I pay attention to?  Covering my tracks.  Pretending, covering my tracks, and getting through another day....'

"'....There's no damn future whatsoever in what I do, and I don't mean built-in obsolescence.  What I do begins and stops each day.  There's no convergence between what I know and what I do.  And even less with what I want to know.'"

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 5

Shelbyville, Kentucky

Shelbyville, Kentucky

LHM spends a bit of time on Shelbyville, which encompasses the end of Part 1, Chapter 5 and goes through Chapter 6.  He writes about spending time at the Claudia Sanders Dinner House, which still exists by the way, and is a restaurant started by the wife of Colonel Sanders of chicken fame.  While there's only one Claudia Sanders diner, and you have to go to Shelbyville to partake of its menu, you can find Kentucky Fried Chicken everywhere.  Claudia Sanders Dinner House and KFC is an interesting contrast between restaurants, one that is very local and specific to the community in which it is situated, and something that I've railed on before, the sameness one finds in cuisine around the the country because of the fast food chains.  And they were born in the same household!

He also walks the streets of Shelbyville, and speaks to some men exposing a log cabin under siding.  He muses on how they are uncovering the past in smells and the feel of the wood while they build and work, and how he envies them.  In Chapter 7, he devotes most of the chapter to Smitty's Trading Post, a roadside stop farther down the highway.  And being of a certain generation, one cannot forget that Shelbyville is Springfield's neighboring town and archrival in The Simpsons.

But I chose to focus on the exchange I highlight above, because it's something that has been on my mind quite a bit lately.  Why, you might ask?  Let me give you the story.  If you've read my About Me page, you know that I am a PhD in Political Science.  I got a bachelor's in English a long time ago, and moved to Milwaukee where after volunteer work, I lived without much direction and worked in non-profit organizations.  It was service that was needed, but it didn't give me much financial security - no retirement and no major benefits most of the time.

After I got married, I moved to San Antonio, worked for another non-profit (at least I had health benefits) but again, no retirement.  During this time I went back to school and got a Masters in International Relations.  I enjoyed the subject a lot, and jumped when I was recruited by the University of New Orleans to go for a PhD.  At UNO, I threw myself into my studies and spent a lot of time helping my fellow graduate students.  I loved the academic atmosphere.  Unfortunately, I didn't spend a lot of time trying to publish papers.  Perhaps it wasn't pressed on me hard enough that publishing as a graduate student would help me immeasurably, or perhaps I didn't listen.  I got my PhD, and went onto the job market just as the worst recession in decades hit.  Universities cut their budgets, making less jobs for more PhDs, and without publications under my belt I was low man on the totem pole.

By this time, I was living in Albuquerque, and I was offered a one-year teaching position at Texas Tech, which I accepted.  In academia, these types of jobs do not get one's "foot in the door."  You can be the best teacher in the world, but publications are what matter most.  I enjoy teaching, love it really, but I was separated by a five hour drive from my wife, and I was lonely.  So I jumped at a job opportunity back in Albuquerque, even though it was in medicine and outside my field, and came back home.

I am now in a job that I am overqualified for.  I am not using my PhD, except when I can get the occasional adjunct teaching gig.  I have a job, which like the man LHM's passage says, I must pay attention to for the money.  There are aspects about it I like, such as working with people, but it's not  teaching about the dynamics between countries or the politics of development in third world countries.  On the other hand, if I were to find my true "work," I would have to adhere to academic conventions.  I would have to put more effort into research and publications, which would probably take away from the teaching that I love to do.  In the Political Science publication world, only about 10% of submissions get published.  Those publications are read by a small number of people.  So, my entire academic employment future is decided by a small group of people who review manuscripts and grind axes if their books aren't cited in my articles, and then read by a small group of people and critiqued and chopped up and commented on and lambasted.

My wife once interviewed a marketing PhD who explained the absurdity of it all.  He said that to get ahead, he has to write articles that if published, will be read by a small number of people in a very narrow discipline.  Yet that's what advances his promotion.  On the other hand, he could write a column or article for BusinessWeek that gets read by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dedicated readers, and that will do nothing for his professional career.  That's crazy.

So, I languish right now.  I go to my job, I make my money and I wonder if I even have the stamina, should I make it through the grueling academic job application process (I did 85 in 2008, got 5 interviews which last 2-3 days, and one offer by a small 2 year college in Wisconsin that wasn't worth my wife quitting her job for), if I will have the wherewithal to endure 5 more years of trying to get published so that I can get tenure.  I'm not sure it's worth it.  At least I have a job right now, unlike many others in our economy.  So for the time being, I must live with "no convergence between what I know and what I do," and dream of the day that educating the paying students in America's colleges and universities is put back in its place as those institutions' primary mission.  To paraphrase the man LHM quotes, perhaps when America outgrows academia, we'll begin to have something.

If you want to know more about Shelbyville

City of Shelbyville
Claudia Sanders Dinner House
Colonel Harland Sanders (founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken)
Sentinel News (newspaper)
ShelbyvilleKY.com
The Simpsons: Shelbyville
Unusual Kentucky: Smitty's Trading Post
Wikipedia: Shelbyville

Up next:  Frankfort, Kentucky