The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

  • Happiness and the Humanities

    Chris Beha’s investigative report (Harpers, Oct. 2011) on the for-profit higher education experiment is an impressionistic view of the inequities of degree access and funding. Not quite Maigret goes to [night] school, but this is US culture, the land of opportunity, and of second opportunity. Is the for-profit model hopeless? Cut to England, where the LRB Blog reports equity firms are about to seize a market opportunity: the purchasing of Universities by private hands. The degree is the product by which we’ll catch the conscience of the customer. Yet Beha suggests an important question: Is college making us happy?

    Maybe college isn’t necessary or desirable for everyone. But has innovation and reform in higher education been hampered by the same self-serving forces that Joel Klein has argued explain the failure of American high schools?

    It’s been a rough month for the Humanities. In Florida, there’s talk of limiting degrees offered to those that are “practical.” One wonders what those might be in the current job market. We need a new word: merittechocracy. But isn’t the market already moving in Florida’s direction? Humanities enrollment and attrition rate at UCLA suggest Westwood is no longer the bohemian capital of LA. The UCLA 2010 annual report offers more insight: “At the same time, we conducted a thorough review of our academic programs with the goal of streamlining majors, reducing unnecessary units and courses, and helping students graduate in a timely manner. We also pursued initiatives that will produce new revenue streams, including an enhanced emphasis on translational research, which will deliver more of our faculty’s inventions into the marketplace and potentially lead to licensing and royalty revenues for UCLA.” The product is big business.

    But there’s a reading crisis spreading perniciously throughout the land. And reading is important. In a November, 2007, report from the National Endowment for the Arts, “To Read or Not to Read,” Chairman Dana Gioia had this to say about reading: “All of the data suggest how powerfully reading transforms the lives of individuals—whatever their social circumstances. Regular reading not only boosts the likelihood of an individual’s academic and economic success—facts that are not especially surprising—but it also seems to awaken a person’s social and civic sense. Reading correlates with almost every measurement of positive personal and social behavior surveyed. It is reassuring, though hardly amazing, that readers attend more concerts and theater than non-readers, but it is surprising that they exercise more and play more sports—no matter what their educational level. The cold statistics confirm something that most readers know but have mostly been reluctant to declare as fact— books change lives for the better.”

    The first front on which to begin combating poverty and inequality is reading. And who’s got the books, if not the Humanities? But if the Humanities, now on the Endangered Animals list, become extinct, who will ask the question, “Are you happy now”?

  • The Happy Humanists of Main Street (a Fragment)

    The Happy Humanists of Main Street (a Fragment): College Humanities now post their letters from Desolation Row. Yet on Main Street, the happy humanists go about their business. Lawrence, the locksmith, time on his hands, having just come back from unlocking Mrs. Tenderness’s pick-up truck, for the third time this week, so she wouldn’t be late with the doughnuts for the firehouse, returns to his Kant. Fritz, the insurance salesman, reliably opening at ten after a hearty breakfast of green eggs and ham before dropping the kids off at school, fills the office with Bach. Next door, at Cindy’s “Ye Olde Beauties’ Parlour,” filled with Dylan’s sailors, the book club holds its weekly gathering. This month, they are reading an Oprah recommendation: Where the Heart Is, by Billie Letts. But this afternoon, the shops will all close early, for Dylan’s circus is in town, and everyone wants to see the daring young man on the flying trapeze, who kicks off the show at three.

    Meanwhile, on the other side of the tracks, the Humanities department is meeting to discuss the sale of Founders’ Field, twenty acres of unused parking lot, but there’s concern the developer wants it for a Walmart. “Shouldn’t we involve the Business Association in this?” Dr. Pfleger asks. “He wants to build a golf course,” Dr. Compson says, not a Walmart. “It’s not big enough for a golf course.” “Nor a Walmart.” “Not a real golf course, one of those miniature woop woops,” Mr. Other said.

  • Culturomics and Google’s Ngram Viewer: More Noise?

    The other day, a few minutes of wilfing led us to Technium’s post on Google’s latest project, the Ngram Viewer. Is Google making us stupid again? But this is serious stuff, as evidenced by the Ngram Viewer introduction in last December’s Science. The Ngram Viewer is a corpus allowing users to search keywords in millions of books and to quantitatively plot the results. So what? A TED video helps explain the development and potential uses. Commentary to the Science article, and to the claims made in the TED video, questions the usefulness of the Google project.

    Is the Ngram Viewer an electronic Tower of Babel? We’re not sure; what are its implications, its practical uses? It appears to be an interesting cultural anthropological tool. The corpus contains “over 500 billion words,” and “cannot be read by a human.” But anyone can access it at the Culturomics site. In the Science paper, “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books,” the authors provide this takeaway: “Cultural change guides the concepts we discuss (such as ‘slavery’). Linguistic change – which, of course, has cultural roots – affects the words we use for those concepts (‘the Great War’ vs. ‘World War I’). In this paper, we will examine both linguistic changes, such as changes in the lexicon and grammar; and cultural phenomena, such as how we remember people and events.”

    Closing the paper is a concise definition of culturomics with a touching comment on its limitations: “Culturomics is the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture. Books are a beginning, but we must also incorporate newspapers (29), manuscripts (30), maps (31), artwork (32), and a myriad of other human creations (33, 34). Of course, many voices – already lost to time – lie forever beyond our reach.” (Not to mention the trunk of writing, molding in our basement for over twenty years, that we finally threw out – the poems were beginning to crawl out of the trunk, climb up the basement stairs, and haunt our dreams.) The Science paper concludes with examples of how culturomics might be used as “a new type of evidence in the humanities.” Yet some of the paper’s conclusions seem obvious: “People, too, rise to prominence, only to be forgotten.” Surely, that “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh” is not a new concept. But their discussion of the impact of censorship is interesting. In any case, the field of Humanities currently needs all the help it can get.

    We played around a bit with the Ngram Viewer. In one experiment we plotted “silence” against “noise,” and found that noise overtook silence around 1961, even though 1961 is the year Wesleyan first published Silence, by John Cage. Cage would have enjoyed the Ngram Viewer. Our Ngram Viewer chart plotting silence and noise is shown below:

  • Evergreen Review, Volume 1, Number 3, 1957

    At a campus library book sale this week I bought for $1.00 a copy of Volume 1, Number 3, of the Evergreen Review. The price new was $1.00 in 1957. It’s a 5 and ¼ by 8 inch paperback, 160 pages. It’s in good condition. There are four black and white photographs, in the middle of the issue, of Jackson Pollock and his studio. Pollock had died in a car wreck the previous year, 1956, on August 11. The opening essay is by Albert Camus, “Reflections on the Guillotine,” an argument against capital punishment (ironic, considering recent events in our own time). Camus says, “As a writer I have always abhorred a certain eagerness to please, and as a man I believe that the repulsive aspects of our condition, if they are inevitable, must be confronted in silence. But since silence, or the casuistry of speech, is now contributing to the support of an abuse that must be reformed, or of a misery that can be relieved, there is no other solution than to speak out, to expose the obscenity hiding beneath our cloak of words” (7). Camus would die, like Pollock also in a car wreck, three years later.

    The issue contains poems by William Carlos Williams and Gregory Corso, including Corso’s delightful “This Was My Meal,” and also a prose piece by Beckett, whom Evergreen Review and Grove Press editor Barney Rosset introduced to the US.

    I stood at the table of jumbled books at the book sale looking through the issue, wondering what it might have been like to read it new, in 1957 (we didn’t have books in my house yet, and certainly no subscriptions to anything, save the daily newspaper occasionally, and anyway, I was just a kid in 1957, though I might have been on the road, with my parents and sisters, driving to the west coast, around the same time as Kerouac, Corso, and some of the others).

    And I wonder what today approximates the Evergreen Review of 1957. In what publication will we find today’s young Robbe-Grillet, or Frank O’Hara? n+1? The Believer? McSweeny’s? Yet Beckett was born in 1906, Ionesco in 1909. Camus died at 46, O’Hara at 40, Pollock at 44. There’s a letter in the Evergreen Review issue from a young Gary Snyder, who was “…do[ing] Zen” in Kyoto. The letter begins with a quote from Snyder’s friend Will Petersen: “You know, we got nothing to worry about.”

  • Gold in these pines

    “We look before and after,” Shelley told his quiet skylark, “and pine for what is not.” Shakespeare would have enjoyed Percy’s pun, knowing naught comes from knot, “like quills upon the fretful porcupine,” this from the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and of Hamlet’s replies, “a happiness that often madness hits on,” follows from the bumbling fool of wise quotes, Polonius. Hamlet suffers the curse of anxiety, and one imagines the prince of plotters distracted by his Facebooking and Twittering, there staging his feigned feelings, for his mood is not hopeful.

    And to what do we owe this staged post? To Jill Lepore’s “Dickens in Eden: Summer vacation with ‘Great Expectations.’” But just this, Jill quoting from one Andrew Miller, academic from Indiana, who, Jill says, “…argued that the novel [Great Expectations] is defined by ‘the optative mode of self-understanding,’ an experience of modern life, in which everything is what it is but could have been something else” (New Yorker, 29 Aug. 56). Ah, where’s a physicist when you need one? For how does one understand oneself when one’s creation is a matter of chance? But the mood of chance may be ever hopeful for a changed ending, a substitute ending, a revised ending.

    And this is McTeague country, Naturalism, where Trina wins a lottery, an experience of modern life, for she might have lost, as everyone else does, and is not winning the equivalent to losing? And we were still considering the Greenblatt  (New Yorker, 8 Aug.), wondering if Rerum Natura might still come at a bargain, “By chance…By chance…By chance…” (29). But if everything happens by chance, why bother introducing any event as having happened by chance? Anyway, the chance of naught creates part of Hamlet’s anxiety, certainly, but even if he takes a Lucretius pill he still has his bad dreams – thus the not of the nutshell and infinite space.

    In the pine, Shelley’s bird sings of jobs, of the disappearance of guilds, for what is not, and of winter in summer and the irony of discontent. This is the anxiety of our time, that it didn’t have to be this way; it “could have been something else.” Yet the physicist tells us that not only could it have been something else, it was something else; in fact, it was what it is and everything else. This is why we tell stories – like one of Leonard Cohen’s “lonesome and very quarrelsome heroes,” who would “like to tell my story before I turn into gold,” where gold is an antidote to anxiety.

  • On The New Yorker On Twitter; or, Drink, Memory

    This week, The New Yorker, on Twitter, is sponsoring a tweet-fest, calling on followers to tweet their all-time favorite New Yorker piece. My first response was a tongue-in-cheek, “The Cartoons”!

    I’ve been reading the New Yorker, a weekly, for over 40 years, but these days when I intone the magic words, “Speak, Memory,” I often receive in reply a feeble tweet, even falling short of the 140 character limit. Anyway, it takes more than a tweet to recall a full piece, at least for this twitterer. I do recall one of my favorite all time cartoons, from the mid-80’s. I taped it to my at-work monitor, until my boss at the time told me he didn’t get the joke. I brought it home and taped it to the icebox. Just so, most of the articles I remember are those I tried to encourage others to read, too. I remember the William Finnegan piece on surfing off San Francisco (August 24, 1992); I mailed it to an old surfing buddy.

    Ian Frazier, in “Hungry Minds: Tales from a Chelsea Soup Kitchen” (May 26, 2008), wrote what has become one of my all time favorites. In “Hungry Minds,” Frazier explores at least three kinds of hunger: physical (the soup kitchen), intellectual (the writers’ workshop), and spiritual (the church). Must every hunger be fed? One might hunger for anything (war or peace; duty or love; work or play; music or silence; risk or safety; celebrity or privacy; memory or amnesia; nirvana or grace), and the human appetite seems insatiable. Then there are the thirsts, which Frazier’s article also touches on (to belong; for community; for recognition; to tell one’s tale; and a thirst to feed the hungry). Human thirst seems unquenchable. What else can explain Twitter?

  • Blues Bus at Berfrois

    Berfrois waves down the Toads’ Blues Bus.

  • Hypercorrect

    Category: Linguistic Etiquette. Answer: Hypercorrect. Question: What is so right, it’s wrong?

    On Jeopardy last night, Alex Trebek, the natty host of the popular game show in which three contestants vie for cash by buzzing first then questioning correctly to a given answer, pronounced Don Juan, “Don Joo-on,” quickly clarifying (no doubt so the phone didn’t ring off the hook) that the Joo-on pronunciation was correct in the context of the answer, which referred to the poem “Don Juan” by the English poet Lord Byron. Wikipedia provides the following detailed support for Alex’s argument: “In Castilian Spanish, Don Juan is pronounced [doŋˈxwan]. The usual English pronunciation is /ˌdɒnˈwɑːn/, with two syllables and a silent ‘J’. However, in Byron’s epic poem it rhymes with ruin and true one, indicating that it was intended to have the trisyllabic spelling pronunciation /ˌdɒnˈdʒuːən/. This would have been characteristic of his English literary predecessors who often deliberately imposed partisan English pronunciations on Spanish names, such as Don Quixote /ˌdɒnˈkwɪksət/.”

    Wikipedia defines hypercorrection: “In linguistics or usage, hypercorrection is a non-standard usage that results from the over-application of a perceived rule of grammar or a usage prescription. A speaker or writer who produces a hypercorrection generally believes that the form is correct through misunderstanding of these rules, often combined with a desire to seem formal or educated.”

    Byron also rhymed “want” with “cant,” and “tounge” with “wrong” and “song.” Anyway, must rhyme always be perfect? Jeopardy, the game show, which I do enjoy, is often mistaken for a game of education, of smartness, but it’s not, at least not in the sense that smart involves critical thinking skills. In any case, my ear, hyperwrong as it often is, doesn’t hear “ruin” and “true one” as a perfect rhyme. And even if we accept Alex’s pronunciation, I don’t hear “Joo-on” as rhyming perfectly with “true one.” But rhyme need not be perfect to be musical. Then again, from Canto XVII, Verse V, of Byron’s “Don Juan”:

    There is a common-place book argument,
    Which glibly glides from every tongue;
    When any dare a new light to present,
    “If you are right, then everybody’s wrong”!
    Suppose the converse of this precedent
    So often urged, so loudly and so long;
    “If you are wrong, then everybody’s right”!
    Was ever everybody yet so quite?

  • Recommended On-line Reading: “Chick Blogs”

    Chick Lit Books is more than a blog. It’s a site devoted to literature aimed at a market segment, an audience that can be socio-economic-demographically defined. Do we read to be so pigeonholed? The “Chick Flick” is a film men should not walk away from and even happily review – if they want another date. But now there’s something we might call Chick Blogs? Novelicious is a Chick Lit Blog, but the pure Chick Blog is something else. The mother of all Chick Blog’s is Susan’s favorite: The Pioneer Woman. Initially the diary of the dislocated urbanite Ree Drummond, who moves from the city to rural Oklahoma, the blog has grown into an industry. It’s been hot locally this summer, and readers of the blog can currently follow Ree’s tracking of a global warming cell that has settled uncomfortably over her entire state. But if that’s too hot for you, consider my latest find and recommended blog browsing, a new blog type, if not quite a new on-line genre, well represented by A Beach Cottage. Often, it seems, these blogs are started and maintained by women who, like Ree, have recently relocated and started something fresh in their lives. Sarah, the author of A Beach Cottage, moved from England to Australia, and lives with her family in a beach house, and industriously blogs about the house and beach environs, and her blog is a cool, restful place. Subtitled “life by the sea,” it’s one of my favorites, even if, as Sarah says, it’s “written with girls in mind.” Thus we might learn something about markets, for something written with a particular audience in mind might very well attract its opposite. From Sarah’s blog, on the beach in Australia, I recently travelled to My Sweet Savannah, where we are informed, “It’s OK to be a follower,” as its nearly 5,000 members attest. For who can resist “finding life’s inspirations” in a “flea market find”? After browsing around Savannah and considering a few arts and crafts projects I might try out with ZZ next week, I travelled to French Larkspur (also suggested over at A Beach Cottage), where I found a photo of what I think is a wooden butter dish; I picked one up at a garage sale a couple of years ago, thinking I might use it as a palette knife. I recommend these blogs for their clear and concise purpose, cleanly and upliftingly presented, with a structure and strategy that’s both enterprisingly winning and honestly conveyed.

  • Prufrock’s Cat

    In the failing fog the Prufrocked cat froms and froes,
    lurking catatonically,
    catcher of mice and men,
    leaving not a trace of trance or dance
    with which we were once familiar,
    catabolic feline with contractible claws.

    A hiss as from a match declares this driven cat with drawn claws.
    This hideous hipstress wears no frown.
    Nevermind, nevermore, familiar
    tuna must suffice; in fact,
    I’m opening the can as fast as I can.
    Fiend, your mane is mean!

    Man knows not your true menace,
    the deceitful pale rose of your delicate claws
    clinking ice to a theremin dance,
    an idle locomotive meowing to and fro,
    the moves of this domestic cat’s
    imagery eerily familiar.

    In what lonely lair was sired this queen of liars?
    Did He who made thee amid mice make men?
    How came you back from the cataclysm?
    Did I hear you in the catacombs caterwauling?
    Yet now you come in dress frolicsome,
    singing, “Do you wanna dance….”

    Though the salty leap gives rise to a contra dance,
    the caryatid looks familiar,
    a choreography of calligraphy, dancing to and fro,
    a sweating menagerie.
    Mind those mendacious claws.
    This mendicant needs no frilly silly cat

    messmate out to act
    some tunahall cancan.
    I too should have been a pair of claws,
    a crawling cat on the lam,
    whose unreadable bedlam mien
    strikes mayhem then saunters off to and fro.

    One more clause regarding this catachresis:
    Whether to or fro on this floor dancing,
    Prufrock’s cat is the cat of a family man.

  • On Downgrades and Grades; or, Dude, Score Thyself

    Yesterday, in a post on her New Yorker blog, Close Read, titled “Rioting Markets,” Amy Davidson, commenting on a surreal week in our markets and cities, a week when one wondered, like Yeats wondered, if the center can hold, said, “We lost our credit rating, after all, in large part because of a riot by ostensible grownups in Congress.” What Amy is saying is that the reason for the downgrade was S&P’s feeling that Congress was unable to lower debt by increasing revenue (i.e. raising taxes), and based on what S&P’s David Beers said following, that the Bush tax-cuts should be repealed, we agree with Amy’s comment, but, and while Yeats could not afford to quibble, the gyre widening as he wrote, quibble we must with Amy’s saying “we lost our credit rating,” for we did not lose our credit rating. We were “downgraded” from AAA to AA+. And even to call this change a downgrade, while accurate, misses an opportunity to talk about the incredible and arcane chicanery of the rating system. It’s like school grades, only worse.

    Here are the possible ratings that Standard & Poor’s might assign to an organization: AAA, AA+, AA, AA-, A+, AA-, BBB+, BBB, BBB-, BB+, BB, BB-, B+, B, B-, CCC to C. Was there ever a school report card this complicated?

    In the recent S&P downgrade, the US was rescored from a grade of AAA to a grade of AA+. For comparison, think of student grades, think A-. Still a good score, excellent, in fact, right? But the general reaction to the S&P downgrade bears some similarity to the grade inflation in US schools, for an A-, as Louis Menand has pointed out, means failure where “American colleges notoriously inflate grades, but they can never inflate them enough, because education in the United States has become hypercompetitive and every little difference matters.” Thus, students who receive a grade of A- may react as if they’ve just been given an F.

    But what does AA+ mean in S&P’s widening gyre? Basically, the score is a stress test. The scores indicate what economic stress level an organization ought to be able to bear and still withstand default. So what is economic stress, and how is that measured? S&P’s explanation for a score of AA includes the ability to withstand a 70% decline in the stock market. That’s like saying you ought to be able to chugalug a 5th of Southern Comfort and still sing the alphabet song backwards.

    Switch to an imagined conversation between Bill and Ted. “What’d you get on the big math test, Dude?” “BB, Dude.” “Most excellent, Dude! Rock on!” An S&P score of BB indicates the ability to withstand a 25% drop in the stock market. Dude, score thyself.