Thanks again, Bojan. Cogent, eloquent, tough minded, informed by decades of experience and well founded in its history. I deeply enjoy your voice on the page, and I’m sorry you live so far away. I’d prefer to be collegial neighbors.
I’m saving it not only for its own sake as a beacon, but because I just got state funding to do a documentary project on Juneteenth; the ethics of doing an African-American-centric project as a Southerner descended from slave-holders as well as abolitionists is, well, not as simple or singable as following a yellow brick road. It’s going to take an ethics of humility and stubborn belief in doing what I think best over the coming months and years.
Re academia—I spent much of my work life as a poet teaching writing, and my last years in academia giving workshops to liberal arts research faculty on how to translate their passions and quirks into fundable projects in publication or the field or in performance. The latter stage, from 2006-2017, coincided with the emergence of ‘digital humanities,’ the podcast and Twitter-sphere and theater of You-Tube. Its best potential in that academic environment was sidestepping the usual gatekeepers—university presses with limited budgets; peer-reviewed journals read by no one outside sub-discipline X but, thanks to corporate publication monopolies like Elsevier, costing $2000/year for a university subscription viewable only on a computer in the grad library; and symposia or conferences and the like, which are not prohibitive to attend on a research travel allowance but can cost tens of thousands to organize and host. Instead, as Kostya describes for documentary makers, one can cultivate a direct (though remote) connection with the viewer, reader, thinker, student, colleague. The cultivation of audience may be difficult or futile, but the premise is still radically worthwhile.
As for being part of the academy as a poet and teacher for many years—MFA 1983, and in that sense complicit—I witnessed trendy and recurrent disputes superficially about postmodernism, structuralism, critical theory, and more. But essentially they were about disputation itself, over and over again devolving into competing cults of personality, ending with variations on “You’re either with me or against me.” In retirement I miss none of that. Being free to document and compose what I want may risk dilettantism, but I don’t have to make a career of setting straw men on fire to illuminate my little Theater of Me.
It’s a knotty conundrum, though, the situation you elucidate. The platforms (theaters, publication outlets) for creative, documentary or scholarly research and expression have changed—have been blown wide open is more like it. But to secure a reputation that also puts bread on the table: that’s more difficult in a completely different way—especially for those of us who live in the Country of Old Men, where what matters comes in print, and the radio glows in the living room. In this sense, it’s easier to understand why many smart students who visit academia stay there forever, given the security it can afford through tenure and the rewards it dispenses for publication (contentious or otherwise).