I'm getting a PhD in literature. Recently, for a fellowship application, I had to write a personal statement. This happens about every five minutes in graduate school, and usually you just claim to have invented sliced bread and you're done. For this application, however, I was asked to provide more of a motivational story - a narrative, if you will. I sent the finished product to my friend to look it over.

She sent me back her advice. "Remember all those conversations we had about what it means to be a public intellectual?" she said. "I think you should put all of that in there, talk about your role in the public sphere."

Only I don't really believe in public intellectuals anymore. I certainly don't believe that's what I'm training to be. Literature PhDs who are holding onto the fantasy of being public intellectuals are some of the most dangerously unbalanced people I've ever met.

If there's one thing I've learned from the combined brain-power of these lunatics, however, it's that there are multiple publics, not just one. Probably the biggest real "public" that I belong to, galvanized around NPR, comprises some 30% of the nation. Public intellectuals are simply part of an intellectual public, one that values a certain way of thinking and talking. And although I do believe these individuals influence policy decisions, I'm not confident I understand how that happens in the echo chamber that is "public" debate. Moreover, the role of literature in these conversations is that of window-dressing, like the book review by Maureen Corrigan at the end of Fresh Air when the interview runs a little short. Literature pretties up its slender publics without really changing them.

Three of my closest friends dropped out of literature programs at prestigious universities, one to be a doctor, one to be a lawyer, and one to be a teacher. In terms of real-world skills, the last is the only one I can really relate to. Being in graduate school for four years (five if you count the masters), the main thing I've learned about myself is that I enjoy teaching undergraduates. This may not sound like an unusual trait for a person intending to be a professor, but in my department it marks you as a kind of happy-go-lucky, flower-picking dreamer with stars of misplaced idealism in your eyes. In a recent meeting, I mentioned to my advisor that I've been adjuncting at a nearby university. He struggled for a moment with his disgust, shifting uncomfortably in his seat, and finally asked, with a real effort at sympathy, "Do you need the dough?" Somewhat as if I had told him I was stripping, not teaching a survey of British literature.

The study of literature is a backward profession. It was not intended to change worlds; it was barely intended to change minds. The history of literary criticism is tied up with the rise of the university system, which is linked with the rise of market capitalism. Its chief social function is to cement social stratifications by according what is called "cultural capital" to students either born into the elite or able to pay their way in.

The study of literature is a useless profession. However, its purposelessness, as Kant would tell you, is its chief purpose. It is a lifelong intellectual absorption in an aesthetic realm whose real-world effects are mysterious, ephemeral, and unpredictable. No matter how much we attempt to invest it with a politics, it remains stubbornly - not apolitical, but diversely political, diffusely political, political in a funhouse mirror. So we are caught in a public that is not even really a public, a private public, an ivory tower. Any messages that manage to escape through the window and fly out into the real world almost immediately lose their relevance in the tower world. What stays in the tower, however, has real beauty and even usefulness, such as it is, the Kantian aesthetic usefulness of being outside (or inside, but protected by and from) capitalism.

But the teaching of literature, though bound up in social stratifications, is not useless. When you've taught someone something, you know you've done it. The effects of teaching are mysterious, ephemeral, and unpredictable, but you can see them with your own eyes.

The university where I'm adjuncting has a "social justice mission." Does this mean that the ideas taught in the classroom are ideologically liberal? Maybe, but that's not what's important at this university. What's important is quietly announced in the framed photographs that line the halls. This urban university admitted black and white students side by side in the forties and fifties, and the black-and-white photographs show them rehearsing side by side for school plays, studying on park benches, volunteering in the community, raising their hands in non-segregated classrooms, and graduating, with huge happy smiles and stars of misplaced idealism in their eyes. What I am teaching my students in the classroom is the same thing I am teaching myself just by being there, just by caring about their existence, just by putting my body in front of a classroom and learning all of their names. The study of literature is useless, but in a useful way; the teaching of literature is vital.

If you're a man seeking a woman on Match.com, I feel I may already know a few things about you.

For one thing, you like to travel. You realize that on its own this does not make you stand out from the crowd, so you specify further: either you love it but you don't get to do it nearly enough; or you know people always SAY they love to travel, but you really mean it. You are one of those guys that always has a bag packed, ready to sprint out the door the moment your girlfriend comes home from her tiring job, puts down her purse, and says, "Honey, let's go to Madrid right this second!"

Odds are good that in addition to travel, you also love your dog. You may even, in a misguided attempt to attract the cutesy element, have penned your entire profile from the point of view of your dog. This, I regret to inform you, is not clever.

You're either a Cubs fan or a White Sox fan, and a girl who can scream and yell next to you on the bleachers at the ballpark will score definite brownie points.

More on the subject of brownie points: you have a favorite quote. It's from one of your favorite movies, or possibly your favorite sitcom, which is Seinfeld. If a girl can correctly identify this quote in an email to you - brownie points! Nice tits are also a plus, but this is not an issue that gets raised often in Match profiles.

One issue that does get raised: "high-maintenance girls." From your profile I infer that these ladies are all over the internet, trying to get with men in baseball caps. When all you want is a laidback, fun, relaxed type of woman who's easy to talk to and has nice tits. Instead you always seem to meet women who play games, expect everything to be paid for, and only talk about themselves. Which is truly a shame, given the breadth of conversational interests that you could share, which range from running along the lake shore to hitting the gym.

When it comes to music, you will listen to anything if it's good. When it comes to pastimes, you favor eating out and going "wherever the mood takes you." When it comes to love, you just want to treat a woman right. You just want to find that special someone and treat her like a princess. Why isn't it working? What are you doing wrong?

Beginnings

A friend just sent me her blog. I'm jealous. End of story.

Probably not an auspicious beginning. I'm teaching a class on autobiography next fall, though, and I'm going to have the students keep some kind of blog or journal for it. So I've been thinking about starting something of my own along those lines. You know, just to get a better handle on my subject.

I'm terrible in that I never read my friends' blogs. I had one of my own several years ago, but I got tired of liking it and hating it and liking it again and always walking around wondering whether people had read it or not, so I deleted all of it.

I wish now I'd saved some of the content, maybe just so I could spread it around. My life, at the moment, feels content-free. I cook ambitiously and eat with relish; I do Pilates on the living room rug; I talk to my cats. I perform a series of tasks that have to do with my work, but a bit more obliquely than I'd like; in the evenings I watch TV and go to bed between 10:00 and midnight.

I date half-heartedly, every couple of months peeking into the dating site I signed up for almost a year ago. For a moment while scrolling through the pictures I feel a twinge of possibility. Then, as soon as I begin reading their profiles, the men in the pictures recede again. They're like TV actors, unreal, having manufactured themselves into stereotypes in their efforts to be legible. My profile is also a stereotype: I'm a sexy and sardonic redhead from Texas. I mean, that's actually what I am, but I definitely sound like a reality show contestant when I read it with some distance.

In a couple of days I'm leaving for a two-week research trip to Yale, followed directly by a week at Dartmouth. This is not a vacation. I've rented a living situation from a woman who seems a bit hysterical - she's constantly sending me panicked emails, and then thanking me too profusely when I tell her the check is in the mail, or whatever it is. I am doing all of this in my car: I will be driving for a total of three weeks. This strikes me as a dumb decision, but it's easy to see how I made it. I didn't have the money for a plane ticket when the buying was cheap. Also, being alone in the car always sounds more peaceful than it is really.

If it sounds like I'm waiting for my life to begin, that's not exactly the case. I'm just waiting for my blog to begin. I'm waiting for the writing to catch up with the feelings, for the feelings to catch up with the actions. And for the actions to catch up with some vision of what my life is supposed to be.