Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

Train Trestle, Train Trestle To the tune of an old Nick Cave song,              Some would say you block the view  of nature, of the sky, of the dirty, old  dumpster behind Lakeview Resort. I love your economy and utility. The nature lover in me dismisses  your role in bringing belching  smoke to the heartland.  Yet the romantic in me is  enamored with travel. Like most Americans, I  respect the promise of  coast to coast travel  that you exemplify. Dark metal and creosote wood bisecting nature. Green grass peeks from under  the wood of your tracks. The foliage will take back the land, but you will still peek from  beneath its lush carpet. Nature and commerce be damned. We all have a job to do. 

" One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the  'impossible,' come true.”  -F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up , 1945 I should be working on many different things, including applications, revisions, and grading student papers. Yet I find myself at a cross roads, torn between doing the things I love and trying to keep food on the table. I struggle at being an academic, a teacher, a citizen of this mess of a country, while working sixteen hour days. I feel disappointed and broken if I take time to watch a movie or listen to a record. The mounting stress and anxiety bleeds into my work, etching my writing and my scholarship indelibly until the two become inseparable, a misshapen hulk of a thing, trending between monster, art, and commerce. I know that this will someday end at the inquisition or the tenur...