Re: Real world and marginalization

[Latisha LaRue <kfischer@keller.clarke.edu>]

But Jeanne:. . . 
	All the really good writing and scribbling goes on in the 
margins anyway;)
			Katie Fischer

p.s.  Happy Birthday, Paula.

> James
> 
> Reading your post about cowboy poets, thinking about my reactions to
> finding that Alpine Texas is getting plumb chic and land prices going
> through the roof now that--gasp!--no less a celebrity than Robert James
> Waller his own se'f has bought a ranch in the vicinity and taken up being
> a cowboy in his spare time. 
> 
> But...  chalk it up to Seasonal Affective Disorder. Or maybe menopause. Or
> too much caffeine. Or not enough. But I have some whimsical thoughts about
> this marginalization business.
> 
> You feel marginalized.  I feel marginalized because I'm an administrator
> and everybody hates us (though I appreciate the occasional "no, we like
> you okay, Jeanne" notes that I get).   Middle aged white males feel
> marginalized.  Eighteen-year-old female Urdu poets feel marginalized.
> 
> Who's in the middle?   What if nobody is?  What if all of us are on the
> margin someplace?  If there is no middle, then...as we look across the
> empty space and see the other margin...it will *look* to us like the
> middle but isn't.   Or, if there is no one in that space, then, if there
> is also empty space outside of us...then all of us on these margins are in
> all the middle there is. 
> 
> Everybody by now probably knows I really hate that term marginalized.
> Venting my spleen here.  Once again, insisting that the language surely
> provides us with better, more precise words to describe situations such as
> discrimination as opposed to just feeling alienated.  
> 
> But meanwhile, I hope the folks in the blizzard out east are digging out
> okay, hope Paula has a splendid birthday, hope Jon's was ditto, hope
> Katie's was too, and wish everybody a happy new year.
> 
> Jeanne Simpson
> csjhs@eiu.edu
>