To Lionel Trilling

In opening, I must ackowledge my debt to the wonderful mind of Lionel Trilling. It is he who has given me the inspiration for the title of this blog. Of this time, Of that place is one of the greatest short stories written capturing the experience of teaching and learning in a small liberal arts environment. And though this blog will not deal with the topic of that great literary work, it does offer - with an adjectival replacement - a phrase which captures the scope and purpose of this journal. This journal will deal with the unprecedented cultural realization of this time and this place. What does it mean to be - now, here? In the face of impending ecological disaster, the commodification of everything including our sense of reality, and the failure of all organized beliefs in a benevolent supernatural masculine entity to pull us out of our banal late capitalist existence, how do we affirm the life that we are living - which, as John Cage pointed out, is so wonderful once one gets one's desires and one's wants out of the way.

This collection of essays will not only deconstruct the institutions and mechanisms that maintain the structural violence now experienced by the vast majority of the world's human and nonhuman inhabitants, but also offer perhaps some alternatives to the life we are living. As a postmodernist, it is no longer a viable choice to deconstruct to the point of throwing the baby out with the bath water as Max Kirsch once stated. As an aspiring public intellectual, the reality of a multiplicity of solutions must be made clear.

Without further exposition, I will introduce the topic of a series of essays on the state of public schooling in the United States - no place to get an education. The series will begin in the next few days and hit upon specific areas until the thesis is thoroughly argued.