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# Education 5
- URL: https://david-santin-kilday-dsk.ghost.io/education-5/
- Published: 2026-08-18T10:35:15.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-18T10:35:15.000Z
- Author: David S Kilday

The Education of David Santin Kilday DSK 4.0 Part One David Santin Kilday DSK Copyright 2026 I was mostly educated in Duke University's English department and The University of Pittsburgh's English department. I hold a Master of Arts degree (1993) from the University of Pittsburgh’s English department and a Bachelor of Arts degree (1990) from Duke University’s English department. When I was at Duke, I also studied in the Literature department and in the Art History department. After I earned my Master of Arts degree from The University of Pittsburgh’s English department in 1993, I continued on to study the history of film at The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) for five more years as a Doctoral candidate and Teaching Fellow. I studied to be a Doctor of Philosophy, so, scholastically, I read literature, the literary history contextualizing each work of art, the literary criticism of peer reviewed essays by professional academics on the subject of the primary work of art, and the essays in intellectual history in the history of philosophy which pertained to the work of art and its subsequent criticism. Pitt’s English department required around 5 hours of reading time per day to keep up with the assigned reading for the graduate level classes. Pitt's grading standards for graduate school were known to be more strict than The Ivy League. This is why we Pitt alumni laugh when we hear Pitt referred to as a “Public Ivy.” The English department, when I was at Duke from 1986 to my graduation ceremony in 1990, was a star department. Famous intellectuals, like the department Chairman Stanley Fish, took the department in the direction of contemporary literary theory. Some of this literary criticism was complicated and jargon ridden because it involved terms from Philosophy and new, cutting-edge knowledge. As a student, I was aware that it was best to spend the predominance of my time reading. I became an honor student at Duke by diligently reading the assigned reading which was often capacious. These good reading habits I enjoyed at Duke would be required even more, as a graduate student, than was required by my undergraduate education at Duke. It is notable that an undergraduate education in the liberal arts involves reading many primary texts, the art works themselves. In graduate school in the liberal arts, students read the primary works of art and the secondary academic essays written by professors about the primary works of art. Every quest for new knowledge begins with learning new words, ideas, concepts, books, and essays. As an apprentice in literary criticism, I had a deep and widening field of knowledge to learn, master, and profess. In the Duke English Department, I studied Chaucer, Virginia Woolf, Feminism, and Don DeLillo in small classes in which we discussed the day’s assigned reading. These classroom discussions about literature and the liberal arts were some of the happiest times I had at Duke. I am happiest when I am learning. The English department at Duke was considered cutting-edge. The chair, Stanley Fish (who pioneered reader-response theory and new approaches to Milton) also wrote in the editorial pages of The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Professor Susan Willis, a professor in the Duke English department, professed the women’s perspective in a class I took with her on Feminism. I came to believe, in this class in which I was the only male student, that women’s rights are human rights like Civil Rights are human rights. When we advance the power of the rights of groups that have been persecuted unjustly, like women and African-Americans, we empower our entire society and make it more just and fair. I studied Don DeLillo with Frank Lentricchia at Duke. We read all of DeLillo’s extant novels, with a thoroughness typical of a Duke humanities class. We enjoyed our conversations and dialogues in class about this profound, bleak, tragicomic American author. To study a living author or, worse in the eyes of BritLit, an American author, had once been considered verboten in elite English departments. But here was Professor Lentricchia, a doctor of the old school with vast knowledge and scholastic accomplishment, elevating a New York author with a world-weary, tragically-old sense of perspective and perfect prose, to the rank of high art to be discussed along with the great authors of the English BritLit literary tradition. American literature is probably my longest suit although I have studied English literature too. I also read the pre-Soviet Russian novelists, some German literature, French literature, and Miguel Cervantes, the first novelist of Western Culture. Cervantes’ Don Quixote is considered to be Western Culture’s first novel. Some say the first world-novel is The Tale of Genji but I have just become aware of this Japanese novel of courtly antiquity and I am in the process of reading it. You might know the remarkable story of Don Quixote, the errant knight, and his worldly, wise-cracking squire as the story of The Man of LaMancha, a modern day theatrical version of Cervantes' Don Quixote (like some know The Book of Joseph from the Old Testament of the Bible as Broadway's Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat). The new literary Canon–inclusive of Americans, women, people of color, and the global South–is more progressive and egalitarian. In terms of my depth in American novelists, my deepest suit, I have read all of Melville's novels, and some Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Adams, Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain, Henry James, Saul Bellows, Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon, to name a few. I am proud to say I made the cumulative grade point average (GPA) Honor Roll at every one of my schools: Indian Hill High School, Duke University, and The University of Pittsburgh. I worked hard and sometimes starved. In all my life, I have never had more than $15,000 in a year to spend as discretionary income. So while I have known cotillions and debutante balls, I have also known the necessity of keeping out of debt and the necessity of keeping to a strict budget. 60% of America lives paycheck to paycheck and so do I. In graduate school, I would augment my study of written literature with the study of the art of film so I could better teach postmodern students raised on too much tv blab and too much not-so-smartphone time. Increase your knowledge and attention span. Read the written word. The English department at Duke could be seen as anti-Canon. The literary Canon was considered to be “the best that has been thought and said” but included no Americans, no women authors, no authors of color, no living authors, and it contained elite formulations indecipherable to the modern mass. Of course, the stream of consciousness writing style of the Modern period in Literature is rewarding to read and its academic criticism is informative. Proust’s Remembrances of Past Time, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Dos Passos' America can be readily understood by a mass audience. Just be patient, keep reading, and enjoy the pyrotechnic flights of fancy and deeply considered lines of thought elaborated in the Modern stream of consciousness style. Of course, to the advocates of the Canon, one read Western Literature in this order: Homer's Iliad, Homer’s Ulysses, the Hebrew Bible, Dante’s Inferno, Chaucer’s pilgrimage to Canterbury, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and then William Shakespeare’s comedies, histories, and tragedies, and so on. Complementary to the Duke English department on the West Campus, the Duke Literature department on the East Campus opened up the study of comparative world literature to every form of popular culture from film to romance novels, to science fiction, and even to comic books and video games. On the Duke East Campus, I also studied in the Art History department. I took an introductory class on the history of art, a class on Architecture, and a graduate-school level class on performance-art. The Duke Literature department started as a Comparative Literature department. Comparative Literature departments studied world literature, not only English literature, and often included the study of literature in their native languages. Comparative literary study emerged from the academic study of what was called Philology. This discipline, philology, applied Western Philosophy to Western Literature of diverse nationalities. Professor Radway was a professor of mine in the Literature department. Her work on the Harlequin Romances and other romances validated, through reader-response theory, the healthy results reading these romances can have for women. Professor Jameson was imposing and very well read. He was Chairman of the Literature department on East Campus, when I was at Duke. Jameson was a Modern Language Association (MLA) stalwart. I first encountered him in a graduate-school level class I took in which he subjected the Hungarian literary critic Lukacs to elaboration and critique. During smoke breaks, Jameson would tear the filter off of his cigarette and smoke it raw and unfiltered in a state of mental and physical excitation. I later took an Independent Study with Professor Jameson, and one other undergraduate student, on the subject of Cyberpunk science fiction. The Education of David Santin Kilday DSK Part Two I joined The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) in 1991\. I was a tenderfoot, wet-behind-the-ears, young man in my twenties. After one successful year of study, in 1992, I earned a merit-based scholarship and added teaching as a Teaching Assistant to my role of seminar class and lecture attending graduate student. I would maintain this scholarship and its $1,100 per month stipend, its health care, its free tuition, and its partially-free books until I left the University in despair. I kept up my A average to the end, taught a decent class until the final semester when the wheels fell off the cart and my mission’s focus shifted. I had been self-educating with alcohol and had become chronically depressed. My struggle with alcoholism lasted about 3 years and was really over by the turn of the century. I remember those days of my mispent youth, drinking for two at the bar, lovable lump, soused and alone, drowning the pains in my brain with drink. The Pitt English department program was, back in 1991 when we drank and smoked in the back room of Hemingway's Cafe with Professor Landy in our first semester of Introduction to Critical Theory, multivalent. The English department, on the fifth floor of The Cathedral of Learning, was strong in Composition, Film, and the most sophisticated literary theory. The Freshman English writing program was influenced by Pitt’s method of teaching revision. The doctoral degree from Pitt’s English department was known as The Critical and Cultural Studies Ph.D. Like Duke’s English department, The University of Pittsburgh’s English Department was full of humble professors who were also international stars in the rarified air of Intellectual History, Film History, and Literary Criticism. The academic journal Boundary 2 was edited at Pitt by Paul Bové and published by Duke. Duke also published the academic journal South Atlantic Quarterly or SAQ. I joined a union when I was at Duke that represented graduate students, staff, and professors. The entire University of Pittsburgh has since Unionized. The English department on the fifth floor of The Cathedral of Learning now offers three doctoral programs: Critical and Cultural Studies, Film Criticism, and English Composition. I took a class on the novel with Professor Jonathan Arac when I was at Pitt. This class, in which I learned more about my favorite genre, was taught by the Harvard trained Professor Arac. This man of manners and erudition set a good example. I also admired the way in which Arac taught which was civil and inclusive. With Professor Dana Polan, I studied Roland Barthes (pronounced “Bart” like Sartre is pronounced “Sart.”) in a seminar. I also took a lecture class on Hollywood cinema held at a basketball court. In the seminar on Roland Barthes, we read a huge chunk of his work in translation including his popular Mythologies. Each graduate student had to write a page on the class’ readings in Barthes for every class to spur classroom discussion so the classes were lively because many people took part. I studied teaching with Professor David Bartholomae. Professor Bartholomae was the Chairman of our English department then and one of the authors of Ways of Reading, the textbook we T.A.s used to teach first year students to write and then improve their writing through rereading, rewriting, revision. I studied Film History with Professor Marcia Landy who wrote the book on 1950s British Cinema. She also wrote an antifascist book on fascism as represented in Italian cinema. Professor Paul Bové influenced me at Duke. Bové taught the second semester of Introduction to Modern Critical Practice. This classroom seminar was as structured as Professor Landy’s class at Hemingway's had been loose and full of libations and smoke. When the Library of America canonized Henry Adams, Professor Bové taught all of Adams’ books to us along with relevant historical essays and critical essays. I have studied Bové’s books Love's Shadow and Intellectuals in Power since. David Santin Kilday DSK Part 3 Man in a Mask? My education mostly suffered when I quit Pitt in despair. After I left Pitt, I moved to Portland, Oregon where I created a website to sell wood products that was not patronized. With no interest in my website beyond one crank call, I adjusted my lease to 6 months and operated in Portland before walking out of there shocked to hell but alive on January 1st, 2000\. I crossed the new bridge and got on board the train to Seattle with nothing but the backpack I had carried to Portland to begin with. When I was in Portland, I bought a desk and a chair. I also bought an inexpensive computing system. I slept alone on a Thermarest ¾ length air mattress on the hardwood floor of my efficiency apartment and used a sleeping bag for a quilt while I lived in Portland from June 1999 to Januaty. I maintained my celibacy in Portland as I do to this day. An agent avoids complications. You have no idea how ugly romance, sex, and gossip are to a confirmed celibate, a man of high mind not the low rut of nature, who wants no other company but a good book, and has remained sexless for 29 years (and plans to celebrate 30 years of celibacy, alone). I have said from the start: I will never marry and I will never have children. It might be nice for you but that kind of bondage never appealed to me. I remain in my bubble, immune to violence and death. There can be only one. Each fortune is owned by only one principal I walk through valleys of death and emerge unscathed like some Mr. Magoo, immune to all danger as if protected by great minds, judges and generals of high rank, like some foot soldier running plays for the eyes in the sky in their boxes, gung ho, soldier on. These solitary adventures, nothing but a hot walk. While I stayed in Portland, I had zero, verbal social life but patronized local restaurants, cafés, coffee shops, and bars like Shanghai and my local, regular bar 21\. In 1999, in Portland, I began to hear voices in my head no one else could hear, as if audio speakers were surgically implanted in my head which painfully spewed the audible prattle of evil, criminal shrews from some remote microphone. These voices in my head became more real to me than the world of verbal communication so I remained traumatized, remote, and silent in civil society. The nightclub scene was on the Seattle and San Francisco circuit so I saw some interesting bands when I lived in Portland. The bar 21, like Ds in Pittsburgh, was a port in the storm where you could always count on a good meal, as much drink as you could afford to drink, safety in the crowd, and some familiar faces. Ds was my regular bar when I lived on the South Side flats. Bar 21 was my regular bar when I lived in SW Portland. Both bars were within walking distance. There was also Arlin’s bar in the Gaslamp district off the intersection of Ludlow and Clifton cattycorner to Clifton Skyline. Arlin's was a brisk walk past the Proud Rooster or Sitwells and back home alone again after closing time at 2:00\. I would often eat at Skyline after Arlin's closed. Arlin's was a safe place for a meal, drinks, and they have music in the rear courtyard. Bar 21 in Portland wasn't a sports bar; we liked to watch cartoons. The voices in my head were present nearly every moment of my waking life. They still are. Intellectuals are neutralized by filling their head with blather and blab so that they can't comfortably read, think, and write. Imagine trying to read, think, and write when your brain is 90% occupied by vicious, Nazi threats and the criminal recriminations of vile pigs. I kept my physical health while I was in Portland by taking long walks in the city. When I travelled North to Seattle, I realized I had suffered some cognitive decline when I could barely play a video game I had mastered before. I took a Greyhound bus from Seattle south to San Diego where I called the US military and was told that I was far too old for military service. I took a bus to Denver, Colorado where I stayed for a while at the Jesus Saves Mission. I shifted to Boulder, Colorado where I stayed at the old shelter there until early Spring I took a long bus ride from Denver to Burlington, Vermont where I lived with The Committee on Temporary Shelter for a spell. I have also stayed at Cincinnati’s Shelterhouse where I began to read The New Testament of the Bible and swept up cigarette butts in the atrium. What did I learn from these adventures with nothing more than a knapsack? Trust no one. You always need more than yourself in this world. You never need more than 40 liters of baggage. Leave no trace. I was diagnosed with a brain chemistry and brain trauma problem in the year 2000 at the old Stout Street Free Clinic, in Denver, Colorado. When I was medicated for my illnesses, I significantly reduced my alcohol load. In 2001, after a year of medical treatment, I was approved for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and began to relieve a partial, monthly Disability stipend. My medical insurance was later augmented with Anthem, Blue Cross and Blue Shield. The brain damage and the incessant interior, verbal barrage in my skull from which I suffered was unrelieved until 2023 when I began to write, heal, and grow again. Even then, I hear voices in my head when I write and voices in my head make it difficult to read with the same devotion as I used to when I was a scholar. Now, in Cincinnati, I am a man of private trust fund security, modest Federal and paternal support, and stable housing.