Some of the Road, Most of the Time

Up early this morning, going through a manuscript by one of my resident PhD students, and thinking, this is really good work. I can see one, two, three things to point out that will add value, and we'll talk about them, but then I'll get out of the way. There is a stage in your life as a mentor when you think you know better about eveything. There is a better stage, later, when you know you still have tricks you can teach a really good student, and you do so, but you don't have to get your fingers on everything.

Then I spent some time rummaging through some century-old scholarship on balladry in America, and as I did so, I sensed that I was framing in a whole new room for the house of interpretation I have been building for the re-emergent field of Great Plains folksong. This reminded me that I still have oh so much yet to discover and learn, that I am still capable of discovering and learning, and that this is what I do. Three-score and ten is just a platform.

At this point my phone sounds, and on the end is a great friend in a country town who has a promising idea for an art installation that would draw people onto the land and teach them about ways to live on it, settler and indigenous. (I'm not going to say anything more specific about his ideas, they're his, and I know he'll write about them soon.) I'm still thinking about that conversation and giving thanks there are people who ring me out of the blue with such notions.

But off to the office on a nasty winter day, whoops, I'm in the ditch, gun it, there, I'm out of it, and on with the day. I'm supposed to be in Vermillion leading a delegation of student presenters at a conference, but the South Dakota blizzard scotched that, so here I am back in class. Heck with it, I turned the operation over to my graduate students and watched them operate, and they did a better job than I would have. Which is another aspect of teaching at this level.

Done with that, hustle now, off to the archives, where my methods students are streaming in and opening document boxes and trying to figure out this game of archival research. I set up in the lobby and tell them, come out and sit with me when you need to talk about what you're trying to do. One and two at a time, they do, always with pretty much the same query: What am I looking for here? Well, I don't know, what are you finding?

In each case I come around to saying, You're asking the right question at this point, which is, What is my question? And there are two ways to find it. First, keep rummaging through the documents, see what emerges, see what things align into patterns, see what interests you. (My fellow old-school historians will recognize this as the Idealistic theory of History--watch and wait for the Idea. Yeah, it's kind of mystic.) The other way of finding your question is to look at the secondary literature, the books and articles around your subject, and see what ideas other scholars have induced from, or brought to, the subject. Just be sure that if you get your idea this way, you bring it to your own material as a question, not as an answer to be imposed on the past. This, too, is teaching on a pretty high order. I had some research of my own I had intended to get done, but there wasn't time. Many thanks to our eminently professional archivist who kept the place open late for us to get work done tonight, even though he was feeling under the weather.

And who pointed out as I was leaving, Hey, you know the interstates are closed, right? No, I didn't, I hadn't been looking out the windows. So I rang up Dr. Kelley, who was across town on an arrand, apprised her of the situation, and convoyed up with her to track our way home via the snowy section roads. We could see some of the road most of time. There's a big fat metaphor in there somewhere.

Now it looks like tomorrow is a snow day, which is good, because I have printed out a couple more essays I'm beginning to revise for publication, I should write a couple of Plains Folk radio scripts for recording on Friday, and I need to work out the order of service for Friday night's Willow Creek Folk School, No. 130.

Hey, join us on my Facebook timeline. We'll livestream from the Salon on Willow Creek at 8pm CST. Pop some popcorn, we're doing murder ballads this week.

O Lord, they're going to hang me
It's an awful death to die
O lord, they're going to hang me
Between the earth and sky

You're guilty, dude, Lord have mercy on all of us.