The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

  • Now Playing at Plato’s Cave: “The Reel World”

    Plato opened the first movie theatre, the audience chained to seats, unable to see the projectionist, and there were no refreshments or intermissions. You really had to be a movie buff to enjoy a film at Plato’s Cave.

    McLuhan (Understanding Media, 1964) explained that we must be trained to see movies, for “movies assume a high level of literacy in their users and prove baffling to the nonliterate [the unlit].” If a man disappears from the screen, the nonliterate wants to know where he went. “But the film audience, like the book reader, accepts mere sequence as rational.” And perspective is gravity, gravitas. The nonliterate will not sit still and be quiet in a movie theatre. They lack the requisite cultural-etiquette training, which requires the natural, balanced sensorium (the five senses tuned so that no one sense dominates another) to be dominated by the sense of sight. “For those who thus fix their eyes,” McLuhan explains, “perspective results.” This is why hot buttered popcorn is so popular in movie theatres – the nose is hard-pressed to go two hours with nothing to smell. The movie theatre is the new voting booth, where we learn both what we’re missing and what we want. “What the Orient saw in a Hollywood movie was a world in which all the ordinary people had cars and electric stoves and refrigerators…That is another way of getting a view of the film medium as monster ad for consumer goods,” McLuhan said.

    There are things we don’t want to see, movies we’ve no interest in, TV shows we channel surf away from, books we self-remainder to the rummage sale. We avoid certain conversations, too, closing our ears now to the sacred, now to the profane; there are things we don’t want to hear. Yet touch is the most involving of the senses, and the sense of smell is stronger than the sense of sight, and is tied to taste. Thus we say of a bad movie that it stinks. We instinctually avert our eyes from the ghastly, but when we want to see what we don’t want to look at, we go to the movies. “It is a spectacle,” Wallace Stevens said (“Chaos in Motion and Not in Motion,” 1945), “Scene 10 becomes 11 / In Series X, Act IV, et cetera. / People fall out of windows, trees tumble down, / Summer is changed to winter, the young grow old, / The air is full of children, statues, roofs / And snow. The theatre is spinning round,….”

    “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John: 20-29). Blessed today might be those who have seen and yet still believe. Yet “a fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees,” Blake said in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (and which the neuroscientists are busy trying to explain). What should we see; what should we read? What are our choices? “It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else,” John Cage said, in his “Lecture on Nothing” (Silence, 1973). Just so, Cage gives us 4’33” of silence, but not silence, for we hear what we hear, note what we note, for we have eyes to see, ears to hear. McLuhan predicted YouTube: “Soon everyone will be able to have a small, inexpensive film projector that plays an 8-mm sound cartridge as if on a TV screen. This type of development is part of our present technological implosion.”

    The blogger gets McLuhan’s argument: “The typewriter…has caused an integration of functions and the creation of much private independence. G. K. Chesterton demurred about this new independence as a delusion, remarking that ‘women refused to be dictated to and went out and became stenographers.’” Just so, academics are beginning to refuse the traditional forms of sanctioned publishing, for the potential to blog brings about, as McLuhan said of the typewriter, “an entirely new attitude to the written and printed word.” Back inside Plato’s Cave and McLuhan’s (via Joyce) “reel world,” some critic tries to discern what we’re actually seeing and hearing, as if we don’t have eyes to see, ears to hear. Well, yes, but we can’t see the real thing. Behold, human beings living in an underground cave, blogging. This is a world of appearances, through a glass, lightly shuttering.

  • Sestina Ends Current Hiatus

    Pop Luck Soup

    Lettuce dew the cabbage head chop.
    Sea hear, old gourd face. The squash is still on the sill.
    Radical zucchinis. Carrots pointing and poking.
    Turnip, have you no heart? Don’t be rutabaga.
    Radish reaction. Thistle never do; wilt thou look?
    Please, asparagus more of this.

    Peas, take off your jackets, mix with us.
    Ouch, salt, potato eyes cry, chopped.
    Corn fits in hand like a tool. Look,
    unknotted legs mush the silly
    knuckle-balling tomato out of a rut
    with a nice little poke.

    Habanero the jalapeno poke,
    ice cream koan this,
    rooting around in a bag
    of bluegrass chop.
    Mush run it again through the still
    to get the right look.

    Should put this aside now and let it cool,
    this pig in a poke,
    or something of that ilk.
    I’m not sure what this is,
    and we’re still chopping,
    scrounging at the bottom of the bag.

    A soup should be like a gab,
    like a parade, the curbs full of onlookers,
    the marching bands chopping
    through the lines of folks pushing and pulling and poking,
    heads popping up like thistledowns.
    Sure, and fools with painted faces acting dilly,

    playing out the King’s idylls.
    The clowns are the Court of Garbage,
    composting that and this,
    giving us all for free a new look,
    for in the eye they poke,
    and to the nose they chop.

    So long lives this spicy green silliness,
    bitter chops of arguing arugula,
    this face wears the soupy look of poker.

  • Union Maid: Made and Unmade

    “Don’t talk old to me,” Norma Rae tells her dad. “I don’t like it.” But in the next scene a foreshadow appears when Reuben mentions Dylan Thomas’s “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” for in the next scene Norma Rae’s dad keels over, dead, into a basket of textile spools. “You load sixteen tons, what do you get?” These days, you get “another day older and deeper in [health care] debt,” augmenting the Merle Travis and Tennessee Ernie Ford classic. Labor laws may have rendered some of the early union causes moot, while many corporations may have also already adopted many if not most of the basic wants of the early unions – in most industries. The problem, as Hendrik Hertzberg explains in his March 7 New Yorker comment, “Union Blues,” is funding collective self-interest into political activism capable of representing the working stiff. Corporations can now marshal any number of deep pockets to advance their interests. Are corporate interests the same as the interests of those employed by the corporation?

    But what foreshadowed the fall of unions? When we were kids and Dad was out of work, he went down to the Union Hall, where he put his name on the list. The Union Hall was as important as the Church. We could see the fall of the Church coming, but we missed the foreshadow predicting the fall of organized labor, in spite of, as Hendrik points out, its obvious “failings, all its shortsightedness, all its ‘special interest’ selfishness.”

    James Surowiecki, in his January 17th New Yorker piece, “State of the Unions,” explains the unions’ fall from public grace: unions are now mostly public unions, and their wages and benefits no longer positively influence non-union wages and benefits. Solidarity, or any hint of symbiotic relationship, is lost. Envy and bitterness over disparate working environments have replaced any sense of brother-sister-hood. “Labor,” Surowiecki concludes, “may be caught in a vicious cycle, becoming progressively less influential and more unpopular. The Great Depression invigorated the modern American labor movement. The Great Recession has crippled it.” And will the crippling further atrophy gains made over those years to labor conditions that prevailed prior to the Great Depression?

    The last company town is closing, with little or no foreshadowing. The story was filler in the LA Times; almost without notice, Empire, Nevada is being surrounded by chain link fence as its citizens strike out for elsewhere, forming a tiny diaspora of folks who once owed their souls to the company store. Empire, Nevada, the home of a gypsum mining plant, is being fenced off, and all the folks are getting out, for the gypsum mining plant was home to Empire, Nevada. The edge of the popped housing bubble has reached this far. The company closes; the town closes. “If living were a thing that money could buy, Then the rich would live and the poor would die, All my trials, Lord, soon be over,” goes the protest song of the folk movement. But living is a thing money can buy, as the health care crisis proves, yet the poor just can’t seem to die.

    Jill Lepore’s “Objection: Clarence Darrow’s unfinished work” (May 23 New Yorker) gives us some idea of labor conditions prior to improvements attributed to the rise of unions. Lepore quotes Darrow: “The only difference I can see between the state prison and George M. Paine’s factory is that Paine’s men are not allowed to sleep on the premises.” The Darrow quote comes after Lepore describes that “the factory doors, Paine doors, were locked once the workers got in, at 6:45 A.M., and kept locked, except for a lunch break, until the guards came and turned the key, when dusk fell.” At question in the case, according to Darrow, Lepore reports, was “whether when a body of men desiring to benefit their condition, and the condition of their fellow men, shall strike, whether those men can be sent to jail.” Meantime, the Wisconsin governor had called the National Guard into Sawdust City, where the city and company were essentially the same working entity: thus the government was the corporation.

    The extent to which labor and management can feud was colorfully described in Caleb Crain’s January 19, 2009 New Yorker piece, “There Was Blood: The Ludlow massacre revisited” (Caleb’s piece begins as a review of the Thomas G. Andrews book, Killing for Coal, but becomes much more than that; see his follow-up on his blog). Crain concludes: “When a representative democracy wins people’s trust, it is capable of moderating disputes among corporations, the market, and the individual. Time suggests that nothing else can take its place, though from time to time corporations have offered to do so.”

    Who or what will solve the disputes surrounding our public schools? According to Joel Klein, for eight years chancellor of New York City’s school system, in his June Atlantic piece, The Failure of American Schools, the conflict and divisiveness isn’t between management and labor but between management working with a co-opted union and politicians in conflict with children’s needs. Says Klein, “The school system doesn’t want to change, because it serves the needs of the adult stakeholders quite well, both politically and financially.” Klein concludes: “We need to foster a culture that supports innovation.”

    For all their “special-interest selfishness,” most of our successful corporations have advanced and compete on their capability to innovate, while schools have declined due to their inability to innovate. But is there foreshadowing in the current economic crisis suggesting yet more implosions: Health Care’s inability to innovate; lack of innovation in energy and other green-sustainable industries; corporation management further removed from their work force as a result of globalization, automation, and the replacement of specialized manufacturing or trade skills with generalized office work capabilities; further declines for schools. Corporatism is not capitalism; unionism is not organized labor.

  • Good Grief, Robert Duncan

    Good Grief, Robert Duncan

    …tome views for the eye weary
    this failure of sound is song lost
    the sinking touch, just out of reach
    “grandeurs”? you want to speak
    of Hopkins?

    “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

    Crushed.”

    Meantime, Word.docx
    Objects
    Casually
    Questioning
    yr txt
    my txt
    evrybdys wrds.

  • A Short Treatise on the Writing Virtues

    When the New York Times tells us “consistency is a virtue,” we wonder, but they probably have a point, for “…stubbornness isn’t”; nevertheless, the Times is “willing to consider revisions [to its style manual] when a good case can be made.” But at the risk of being stubborn, is consistency a virtue? Is it virtuous of one to consistently make the same error? And has our modern habit of valuing consistency as a characteristic of good writing infected our reading with an obsessive tendency to look for errors, and when we look for errors, are we not inclined, indeed, duty-bound, to find them? As usual, we are late to the party, but we still read with interest that the Times “recently [Feb. 2009] revised two longstanding rules in The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, the newsroom’s style guide. They were very minor changes, involving simple matters of capitalization and spelling.”

    In Andrew Comte-Sponville’s A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues, consistency doesn’t make the cut. Still, the Times offers solid backing for considering consistency in writing a virtue: “We continue to favor clarity and consistency over a hodgepodge of idiosyncratic preferences. We prefer established usage over change for change’s sake. And we put the needs of the general reader over the desires of any particular group.” In other words, the values of the Times editorial voice are uniformity, tradition, and democratic taste. These are the values created by the printing press, but it’s a stretch to call them virtues. Comte-Sponville does include fidelity as a virtue, and perhaps consistency is a kind of fidelity, but fidelity to what?

    For Comte-Sponville, thinking of virtues should give us “to understand what we should do, what we should be, and how we should live, and thereby gauge, at least intellectually, the distance that separates us from these ideals.” Yet the second half of this stated purpose begins to sound like the formulation of a rubric. But Comte-Sponville goes on to say that he does not “believe any more than Spinoza did in the utility of denouncing vice, evil, and sin. Why always accuse, why always condemn? That’s a sad ethics indeed, for sad people.”

    We know from the study of Old English manuscripts that consistency of punctuation and capitalization was not considered a virtue. What causes virtues to change over time? What are the writing virtues that make good habit?

    Comte-Sponville picks up Aquinas’s question of the relative value of the virtues – can one virtue be considered better than another? Here are the chapter titles of Comte-Sponville’s book, their order a matter of “intuition,” he tells us, rather than prescription; still, one wonders where consistency might be placed:

    1. Politeness
    2. Fidelity
    3. Prudence
    4. Temperance
    5. Courage
    6. Justice
    7. Generosity
    8. Compassion
    9. Mercy
    10. Gratitude
    11. Humility
    12. Simplicity
    13. Tolerance
    14. Purity
    15. Gentleness
    16. Good Faith
    17. Humor
    18. Love

  • All Stung Over By Links of Googled Grace

    We are stung by it, in Flannery O’Connor’s world, where grace is a holy bee attracted to the colors of the soul’s peacock-like feathers, or we are brushed by a mere grace singing like a wind, stirring Wallace Stevens’s “gold-feathered bird” in “The palm at the end of the mind”; its “fire-fangled feathers dangle down,” and we become grace when we are satisfied to merely be. In any case, we can not know if grace will, like Portia’s mercy, “droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven,” or if grace, like Flannery’s wooden leg, will smack us between the eyes as we roll casually under a mellow blue wave.

    So it seemed when we were close to rest last evening, checking our Gmail, and noticed, in the sidebar, links, to ads, whose words appeared pulled directly from our text. After a few clicks, we got to the bottom of this, for Google explains: “Ad targeting in Gmail is fully automated, and no humans read your email in order to target advertisements or related information.” As if we should be comforted by the fact that no humans read our email; it’s not the humans we are worried about, we thought, and thought again of Richard Brautigan’s (1967) “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.” We are living with the machines now, their grace as palpable as bees whose dance would show us the way to an immortal light, which is to say a mere mortal light, but which might be enough to light us a new path to an old palm.

  • Can Business Rescue the Humanities?

    While Plato ruefully proposed to banish the poet from his Republic, today’s Humanities aficionados may seek to bar businesspersons from their club. Yet the Humanities are in crisis, as usual, perhaps for lack of sound business sense, while the sound business sensors, often viewed as eschewing the Humanities, may be nipping in the basement of the human condition, where the good stuff ages.

    Consider three writers whose business experience may have influenced their writing, and whose writings may calm sweating brows in the Humanities: Franz Kafka, Wallace Stevens, and Ted Kooser. Kafka worked for two insurance companies, Assicurazioni Generali, and the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia, where his reports contributed to improvements in workplace safety. One report, for example, commented on “the perils of excavating in quarries while drunk.” Wallace Stevens worked for the Hartford, and, having earned a law degree from New York Law School, eventually earned a position as VP in claims, a job he valued. Few of his peers at the Hartford knew or cared about his poems, but when one of his co-workers came into his office one day asking about one of his poems, Stevens told him not to worry about it, for his co-worker was too literal. And Ted Kooser, poet laureate of the Library of Congress from 2004 to 2006, spent a career at Lincoln Life, another insurance company. John Cage said that when we turn our attention to that music we do not intend, we find the sound a pleasure; just so, we must turn our attention to the Humanities we do not intend.

    This benevolent blogger spent 25 years in the republic of an insurance corporation. After teaching for nearly a decade, he had taken a summer off to consider a career change, selected a national organization headquartered in his hometown of Los Angeles, and bought a new suit of clothes to prepare for the new enterprise. He had been reading Thoreau’s Walden, and was well aware of Henry’s advice, in the opening chapter, “Economy,” to “beware of all enterprises which require new clothes” (para. 15), but he nevertheless bought a new pair of wingtips, on the assumption that these were the shoes worn in the business world. He soon found he was the only one in the office in a pair of wingtips. Everyone else seemed to prefer penny loafers. Thus began his education into business. The office had bells, bells to signal the start of work, bells to signal breaks and lunches, and bells to signal the end of the workday. Indeed, the office had more bells than had any school he could remember, and he was reminded of Poe’s bells, “…Keeping time, time, time…to the throbbing…to the sobbing…to the moaning and the groaning of the bells,” though the office bells touched not the acoustic heart, being electric, and he thought too of McLuhan and Fuller – that old school prepared one to work in a factory, though he watched that factory change with locomotive speed: first the bells were freed, then the men from their ties, and more gradually the women from theirs. But these changes move not linearly, as a locomotive moves, but mosaically, and it’s often difficult to know if change in business is carrying one forward or backward. But the same is true in the Humanities, where bells and ties have also had their heydays, and specialization has now created a mosaic one can read neither “out far nor in deep.”

    And one also finds in the Humanities heavy doses of alienation, particularly in the bust phase of the current devaluing of the purpose of a liberal arts education as academic acculturation adulterates, through competitive forces at work in the market place, for schools are part of the commercial marketplace, as they are increasingly discovering, yet business and schools alike continue to lobby for bailouts, and neither seems to have found a purpose and audience that is sustainable in a self-contained strategy and structure. For all the criticism of the “profits” these days, the universities may have dissed their affections once invested so heavily in the public interest. What’s left is elitism, with no access for the underclass, or, increasingly, even the middle class, but can there be a balanced elitism fueled by the working class? There was in California before Reagan set about to dismantle the best university system in the world. Still, one finds no less alienation in the Humanities than one finds in capitalism. For Marx, “the worker finds work a torment, suffers poverty, overwork and lack of fulfillment and freedom. People do not relate to each other as humans should,” but does this not describe the plight of today’s average Humanities adjunct? Why can’t schools run more like businesses? Perhaps they already do, as reflected in the competitive nature of grades, even as inflation has rendered the currency valueless.

    For businesses have for some time been operating more and more like schools, creating campus atmospheres, valuing continuing education for employees, including executive training that exceeds anything available in the Humanities (Wharton is a good example), inculcating team atmospheres, and creating and running corporate universities that encourage personal, purposeful growth. But schools lack the sense of urgency that permeates the business world. Tenured professors don’t work full time, think alike (the competition is not for ideas, but to maintain the status quo), too much research is funded at the public trough yet is insulated from public view. The separation of business from the Humanities creates a false dichotomy that nevertheless suggests its own solution. The Humanities should embrace business with a sense of urgency, for their Titanic has hit its iceberg, and that the ship will sink stinks with mathematical certainty.

  • Ending Net Asset Value; or, Hook up, hat up, and let go: “Calling Dr. Bartleby!”

    Atul Gawande is a Harvard trained surgeon who writes eloquent prose on health and illness. His New Yorker pieces “Letting Go” and “The Way We Age Now” are full of pathos, ethos, and logos on how and when to die decisions and the bedpan reality of growing old. If he continues his work combining writing, doctoring, and educating, he may some day be up for a Nobel Prize. Gary Becker is a Nobel Prize winning economist and professor at the University of Chicago who writes in his blog, The Becker-Posner Blog, pedestrian prose sometimes infected with either-or fallacies. He shares weekly blog posts with Federal Judge and University of Chicago Law School Professor Richard Posner.

    What usually passes for health care in our current reasoning is health care insurance. Those with insurance believe they have health care; those without may think they have neither. And the health care debate is derailed with decisions before legislators that have to do not so much with health care but with health care insurance.

    Last Sunday, Becker included in his post what appears to be an economist based claim that includes a formula for calculating the value of a year of life: “Presumably, frail elderly people tend to receive less utility from a year of their current life since their lack of health prevents them from greatly enjoying their leisure time and consumption of different goods. However, the utility cost of any time and money they might spend on prolonging their lives is also lower for them. The fundamental measure of the value of a life year is the ratio of the utility gained to this marginal utility spent on prolonging life. This ratio could even be higher for the old and frail than for healthy younger persons.”

    We are becoming increasingly Spartan by the moment, for the reductio ad absurdum of Becker’s argument would have us carrying individuals of any age whose disabilities or frailties preclude utility or whose cost to live outweighs their ability to “enjoy their leisure time and consumption of different goods” out to the rocks to die, as did the Spartans.

    “Welcome to the 23rd Century: The Perfect World of Total Pleasure,” heads the poster for the sci-fi film “Logan’s Run,” which depicts a dome-covered society that eliminates growing old problems by zapping all citizens when they turn the age of 30. The police, called Sandmen, hunt down and kill those who would run from their forced to die moment. Yet there’s a myth, an old story, of life beyond the dome, where people are allowed to grow old. The place where people are allowed to grow old is called Sanctuary.

    But there appears to be no Sanctuary for our elderly these days, at least not provided for by Medicare, for there’s simply not enough money to go around, the Becker-Posner argument seems to go, and we should spend what money there is to go around on those able to enjoy life and consume goods. Perhaps enjoying life, in the worldview of the economist, is consuming goods. In any case, the argument has been boiled down to an either-or moment: either we let old people grow old and die sooner than they would with life prolonging health care (including the R&D necessary to develop that care), or we go broke.

    But there are other solutions. Yet there is another problem with Becker’s formula: the value of an old person’s life is not necessarily limited to what that person can enjoy or consume; the lives of the elderly may have intrinsic value to others. But not, apparently, to young doctors, for Gawande points out the current dearth of young doctors going into gerontology. There’s a shortage, and there’s no short-term remedy to what will be an ongoing need for specialists to treat the elderly. Gawande’s solution is for every health care practitioner to be versed in basic elderly care issues.

    But to be fair to Becker and Posner this week, they do focus on quality of life versus quantity of life and the avoidable invasions of quality by a system not guided by health care concerns but by health care insurance. And Atul Gawande does also question quality versus quantity. What separates Gawande’s argument from Becker-Posner’s is his value of human life expressed in human versus econometric terms. It’s one thing to force someone to die at the age of 30; but is it something else again to force, or even to encourage, that same person to live beyond what most of us, including our ancestors, would recognize as living? Ah, Bartleby! Ah, Doctor!

    Related: An Object Lesson in Health and Happiness

  • Degrading School

    At least as far back as 1965, education researchers knew there existed no correlation between college grades and subsequent career success. In a review of the literature, “The Relationship Between College Grades and Adult Achievement,” published by ACT (the American College Testing Program), Donald P. Hoyt concluded that “…college grades bear little or no relationship to any measures of adult accomplishment” (paper). Hoyt later served as President of ACPA (American College Personnel Association). In a workshop he gave in 1970, he was still advocating for change in testing, assessment, and counseling that would be student focused: “The need for non-standardized measures occurs in two contexts. First, in helping students plan their future there is frequently a need for appraisal of special talents or inclinations beyond those concerned with academic background or potential. Second, is trying to determine the effectiveness of a given program – such as counseling method, teaching approach, or orientation program – standardized measures are seldom appropriate indicators of success” (paper). The workshop asked three decisive questions: “What is success? What is educational success? And how is a person appraised if he is doing well or poorly?” And how does an individual blend another’s appraisal with his own self-appraisal, particularly if he doesn’t speak the appraisal language? “Part of a middle class background,” Hoyt said, “which doesn’t let you enter freely makes you unable to talk. You can’t understand, you can’t feel, and I feel very much personally this way. I think if not the most significant, this inability to talk is one of the most significant problems in education today.” Yet he advocates for student self-appraisal because one of the most important outcomes of the appraisal process is “knowing who the customer is and knowing how he is proceeding.”

    For the most part, Hoyt was speaking to testing assessments, but letter grades, often assigned subjectively, in spite of efforts to create objective rubrics, are also discussed and considered in the question concerning the effectiveness of the assessment process. But does the fact that a grade is assigned subjectively make it any less meaningful? Yet assigning letter grades in the adult student learning environment may lack a persuasive objective. Students may be given a weak rhetorical picture of achievement or progress, what is being measured may not be fitted to what was learned, raw intelligence may be rewarded while hard work may be ignored, and educators may not have reliable assessment data on which to judge the effectiveness of their programs.

    Grading is a game of competition, and, increasingly, gamers are opting out. Last year, Harvard announced it would no longer “assume” courses would end with the traditional three-hour exam. The exams are now the exception rather than the rule. Predictably, not everyone was happy with the decision: “Even Harvard’s new General Education courses will abjure finals. We are left wondering: Without exams to prove it, how can students be sure that they are ‘generally educated’ when they graduate? How can the institution itself be sure? Or doesn’t it care?”, came a critique called “Bye-bye Blue Books?” in Harvard Magazine. Of course it cares, but one escapes a rip tide by swimming parallel to shore, not against the current. Meanwhile, grading is still the only game in town, with or without final exams. Louis Menand, writing in the May 21, 2007 New Yorker, said, “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.” But does every little difference matter? And, if so, matter toward what? Is education like golf? “You’re on your own,” Menand says. “Everything you do in a meritocratic society is some kind of test, and there is never a final exam. There is only another test. People seem to pick up on this earlier and earlier in their lives, and at some point it starts to get in the way of their becoming educated. You can’t learn when you’re afraid of being wrong.” Having to be right all the time both mirrors and shatters the expectation that the student must get an A, every time, on every paper, in every class. Menand concludes with this counter-proposal: “We want to give graduates confidence to face the world, but we also want to protect the world a little from their confidence. Humility is good. There is not enough of it these days.”

    No game is more competitive, where, indeed, “every little difference” is vital to the outcome, than golf. Perhaps graders and graded alike might benefit from a review of the common but deceiving golf card. A par in golf is the number of strokes an average golfer is expected to hit on any particular hole. The pars traditionally are 3, 4, or 5. Comparing golf scores to academic grading, we might say that an Eagle (two under par) approximates an “A” (it being an unarguable assumption that holes in one almost never happen, and when they do it’s a matter of chance, not skill); a Birdie is a “B”; a Par is a “C”; and a Bogie is a “D.” The problem (as the analogy relates to grading) is that most amateur golfers never shoot par; they shoot well below par. The average is D or below. To be an average golfer is to be a below average golfer. That average golfers nevertheless fantasize and consider themselves “A” golfers is one of the emperor wears no clothes hilarities of our time. Golf courses are designed to test the golfer’s mastery of the sport, and some are more difficult than others, and the par for the course reflects this. Women tee off closer to the hole; but amateurs do too, and pros are supposed to hit from the most remote tees. Thus the first, and perhaps only, opponent in golf is the course.

    Grades are the business side of school, the currency of the exchange, and the discussion of inflation and deflation is ongoing, as is talk of the need to revalue or devalue, of the value of the grade against some other currency. I wish we could degrade school. Doesn’t that sound funny? Of course that’s exactly what many think we have done. I got the idea for the term “degrading school” from Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society.

    Related: “Live and Learn: Why We Have College,” by Louis Menand, June 6, 2011, New Yorker.

  • Taking the facebook Pledge; or, The Allegory of the facebook Cave

    I decided again to leave facebookland. I’m back on the facebook wagon. I spent too much time driving around in circles, and my time on facebook was beginning to feel like living on a freeway, not free, and only two ways, on and off, and I had to keep up with the traffic, stay out of the way of semi-posts, watch out for falling photos. True, the sky was blue, the windows down, the radio on, everyone waving to one another: life is good in facebookland.

    I also ditched twitter, which had come to feel like reading in a nest of mosquitoes. When I left facebookland, I was detained by lures of questions asking why I was leaving, and I was distracted by messages claiming that my friends would miss me, specific friends: Jack will miss you; Jill will miss you. Twitter has a slightly different guilt driven, exit poll strategy: I was advised that I may never come back using the same name and address. It’s like going home again: you can go back home, but only as a different person. You may re-enter the facebook highway anytime you want; your friends may not even know you got off. If, when you exited, you de-friended them, that’s problematic, since they may not re-befriend you, but they’ll probably be happy to have you back, and say something like, I thought we were already friends.

    Facebook has features I never used, like the real time chat, which must feel something like an electronic cocktail party rather than an endless freeway commute. It’s not facebook’s fault, my leaving. Facebook is a clean, well-lighted place that never closes, even if it is a cave. There is no night in facebookland; the sun never sets. Part of the reason I found myself soaking up more and more facebook light recently is my new laptop, a refurbished MacBook Pro I bought a couple of months ago. It’s a hovercraft. I love the way the keyboard lights up in the dark. The design is perfect, like a well-fitted, classical guitar. No viruses. As intuitive as a bicycle. It goes everywhere my backpack goes.

    But the primary reason I left facebookland are the writing and reading projects I have going. There’s no pursuit more pleasurable and rewarding than reading and writing. Not that I’ll ever finish any of these projects (can one finish a blog? one might end it, but that’s not the same as finishing it), but that’s of no consequence, whether I finish a writing project or not. Abandoning a writing project is an experience very close to finishing one, though perhaps not as satisfying. One abandons books, occasionally, as ill-suited, poor fits, bad choices. Just so, one abandons one’s own writing projects. Perhaps we were not ready for them, the writing or the books we gradually let go of, until one day, they were simply gone, like past friends. One must read and write every day, without interruption, just as one must pick up the guitar every day, or the brushes or sticks, or the golf club, or the fishing pole, or the shovel or rake, or the hammer, or the ball and glove, or the pool cue, or the surfboard. And whatever distracts from these purposes, these pursuits, must be put away.

    Perhaps facebook is a kind of reading and writing, some new electronic sub-genre, like texting, videos, and other sound bites. But at least facebook is what it purports to be, a social media, driven by advertising dollars, purposed to persuade users to continue, to keep on, to stay in. Facebook is a new rhetoric, a new art of persuasion. Here is facebook’s mission statement: “Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Does the world want to be more open and connected? Apparently so, given the number of facebook users. But what does open mean? How does one measure more? And connected to what? “Open Sesame” gets you into the cave of the thieves, but you don’t want to forget the magic words that unseal the cave so you can get back out. Those magic words might be “Deactivate Account.” Or we are back in Plato’s cave, and though it appears we are looking directly into the light, what we see on the wall of the facebook cave may not be reality, but shadows of advertisements passing before the fire of commerce that burns behind our backs.

    Increasingly, we seem to live in two worlds, “in twosome twiminds,” as Joyce said, the electronics of visual perception (the charge of the light brigade, for Joyce, was the coming of television), and the philosophy of acoustics, and we are drowning in doubt.

    Note: Meaghan Morris, “Chair Professor of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, and Professor in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney,” published a scholarly article titled “Grizzling About Facebook” in the November, 2009 issue of the Australian Humanities Review. The article is not what you might expect. For one thing, Meaghan resists the old journalist codger who would “urge me to spend more time off-line (‘making new friends and maintaining old friendships’) for the sheer good of my soul is a grizzle from those fairies at the bottom of the garden” (para. 9). Yet she acknowledges that facebookland does indeed have its back alleys and unlit corridors:  “I certainly do not mean to suggest that all criticism of Facebook is grizzling. Serious legal, ethical and political issues are arising from or being intensified by the ‘Facebook’ phenomenon (to use a typifying metonym myself), in the process sharpening some of the challenging debates of our time; free speech and its limits, censorship, the right to privacy, the negotiation of social protocols for a transnational economy that thrives on difference as well as inequality, the relations between semiotic and other modes of violence, tensions between legal, communal and performative models of identity, the foundations of community, the power of corporations in our personal lives, and the technological transformation of work are just a few of these” (para. 10). But while recognizing the traps in facebookland, Meaghan seems to think the risks worth taking, and this is what makes her scholarly viewpoint worth listening to: “…what Facebook does well is combine: you can write private letters, play games, send gifts, do quizzes, circulate news, post notes, music and clips, share photos or research, test your knowledge, join groups and causes, make haiku-like allusions to your state of mind and chat on-line with friends, all in one place and time—restoring or relieving, according to need, the pattern of an everyday life” (para. 22), and who among us, Meaghan asks, does not value these life on the street, at work, and at home activities? I’ve mentioned Meaghan’s article in a previous post, here. Meaghan’s article is a scholarly gem.

  • The Elite and the Effete: From Access to Egress

    When did literature become an elitist game? When we started writing? Literature both reflects and influences culture, society, and the individual, but there are many things that reflect our values (what we want; not to be confused with what’s good for us) and influence our thought and action (the automobile; lawns; college), but not everything that reflects and influences our lives is literature. There appears to be an argument afoot, to wit: “I should state up front that I am not a fan of programme fiction. Basically, I feel about it as towards new fiction from a developing nation with no literary tradition: I recognise that it has anthropological interest, and is compelling to those whose experience it describes, but I probably wouldn’t read it for fun.” This from Elif Batuman’s review of Mark McGurl’s The Programme Era, “Get a Real Degree.”

    All cultures experience literature, but only an elitist can afford to read purely for fun. What Elif is talking about when she says “literary tradition” is the tradition of literary criticism, which is a kind of self-consciousness about one’s literature. Part of Elif’s complaint is that the programs (code for the MFA writing programs) lack literary tradition and subscribe to an artificial fabrication called creative writing. But as Eliot said in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “It [tradition] cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.” One gets the feeling that Elif does not consider “creative writing” to be literature, and it may not be, in the same sense that painting by numbers is not art. D. G. Myers seems to agree. Myers values writers not on but in location. Using this rubric, Bukowski, who filled the Los Angeles Basin with alcohol, makes the grade, as would Flannery O’Connor, who filled the South with grace, and Joyce, who filled Dublin with Dubliners, giving them a chance to talk to one another unencumbered by the Church’s program. Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy is another example rooted in place. But people move, and move on.

    If, as Buckminster Fuller explained, specialization leads to extinction, where does literary elitism lead? Literature from the “programmes” sounds a little like the physicists’ string theories, which Robert B. Laughlin unraveled for us some time ago: criticizing string theory in his book A Different Universe, Laughlin says “A measurement that cannot be done accurately, or that cannot be reproduced even if it is accurate, can never be divorced from politics and must therefore generate mythologies” (p. 215). One problem, as described by Batuman, has to do with the program reverence for what it calls craft. Plumbing is a craft; writing is something else.

    Again we find funding the antagonist: “…people on the West Coast work,” Kenneth Rexroth said. “Ginsberg when he came out here, as he said in interviews, was working as a market researcher, which is just a shit job. It’s like being a floorwalker in a dime store. I said, ‘Why don’t you work? How much are you making? Forty-five dollars? You can’t live on forty-five dollars in San Francisco. That’s not money. Why don’t you go to work, get a job?’ Ginsberg said, ‘What do you mean?’ And I said, ‘Ship out…’ You come back with more bread than you know what to do with!’ In the East people don’t think like that” (Meltzer, 1971, p. 12*).

    Elif’s London Review of Books review would still be going out with the tide were it not for McGurl’s tardy response in the May 11th Los Angeles Review of Books, “The MFA Octopus: Four Questions About Creative Writing.” But what is elite? The truly elite do not go in for literature; they go where the money is, finance, or health care, or both, which is insurance, and surely if we can agree on anything it’s that there’s no money in literature. The elite that do go in for literature we might call the mal-elite, the black sheep of the elite, for as Jerzy Kosinski said, “Reading novels—serious novels, anyhow—is an experience limited to a very small percentage of the so-called enlightened public. Increasingly, it’s going to be a pursuit for those who seek unusual experiences, moral fetishists perhaps, people of heightened imagination, the troubled pursuers of the ambiguous self” (Kosinski, Paris Review Interview, 1972).

    Kosinski was no elitist, nor is Elif’s example of a writer she values, Dave Eggers. His prose is characterized by practical matters; his publication efforts (The Believer, which does not publish fiction, but which has been publishing poetry of late; 826 Valencia) take the word to the street, Samizdat-style. William T. Vollman might be an even better example of the non-elitist, non-programmed writer, engaged in some cross-fertilization of fiction and non-fiction, a new prose for a new time. For the University cannot grant access to literature; it can only grant access to degrees. And the egress of disappearing readers from literature suggests that we must start to look for our literature in unexpected places.

    Follow-up:

    Apr 29, 2013: Seth Abramson at HuffPost: “Contemporary Poetry Reviews.” Intro. continues “Program” discussion.

    May 18: Laura Miller simplifies and suggests much ado about nothing. August 22: Daniel Green reviews The Program Era, including an interesting aside: “…another book considering those writers who resisted the migration of literature and the literary vocation into the academy would be an interesting project.” Yes.

    15 Nov 2012: Fredric Jameson reviews The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing by Mark McGurl (Harvard, 466 pp, £14.95, November [2012], ISBN 978 0 674 06209 2) in LRB (subscribe).