My first teaching job was at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and when I got up to face freshman classes there, I realized I was in a strange country and that I had to learn a good deal about it, from the very ground up. I began to study there popular culture as a way of setting up a more natural dialogue with my students, that is I began to study the sports, the humor, the comics and it was literally while studying “The New Yorker” and “Time” that I hit up only the discovery that if you don't understand these everyday things that are absolutely basic part of our lives, it's rather futile to be teaching Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold, and even Dr. Johnson, if you can't even grasp the nature of your own world, why spend your time studying somebody else's world?