The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Category: Reading

  • Not the Rubric Itself, but Ideas about the Rubric

    HTMLGIANT recently posted an interesting poetry rubric, evaluative criteria for students writing poems. One would think forcing a student to write a poem would be punishment enough, but grading the effort seems a bit excessive. In fairness to the teacher, maybe the rubric made more sense to the students in the class, or it might have been some sort of administrative mandate.

    I was reminded of an old grading illustration. Here’s the scenario: art class – draw a picture of your house. Little Mary, who loves art, digs in with the crayons, drawing a tiny house below an enormous, blistering red-orange sun in a pink sky. The teacher walks by and asks “What’s that?,” pointing to the sun. “The sun,” Mary replies hopefully. “Oh, but is the sun really that big?” teacher asks, and slaps a C minus bigger than Mary’s house onto her work of art. The scenario is repeated the following art class when Mary downsizes her sun and upgrades her house. Teacher’s response: “Much better, Mary, but that sun is still too big.” The teacher draws a small B minus in the center of Mary’s sun. Mary’s next effort conforms to the teacher’s expectations: a tiny yellow dot in the sky just above the roof of a house that reaches to the top edge of the paper. Grade: A minus.

    Thus Mary learns not art, but that to succeed in school means conforming to the teacher’s notion of reality, a notion that is at odds with Mary’s empirical knowledge, for the sun is, of course, bigger than any house. But in fairness to this teacher, maybe the lesson was perspective. But must every perspective be a fixed point of view?

    Buckminster Fuller describes the effects of the art class scenario in “Education Automation: Freeing the Scholar to Return to His Studies”: “I am quite confident that humanity is born with its total intellectual capability already on inventory and that human beings do not add anything to any other human being in the way of faculties and capacities. What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed, so that by the time that most people are mature they have lost use of many of their innate capabilities. My long-time hope is that we may soon begin to realize what we are doing and may alter the ‘education’ process in such a way as only to help the new life to demonstrate some of its very powerful innate capabilities.”

    Here’s the “Period 9 Poetry Rubric”: “Title, 2 points; Stanza Breaks, 1 point; Line Breaks, 1 point; Concluding Lines, 3 points; So What? 3 points; Imagery, 3 points; Things not Ideas, 2 points.”

    I was inspired to try my hand at a poem in response to the rubric. I made a few changes to the one I posted in comments at HTMLGIANT, so it’s a work in progress. Not sure that’s allowed under the rubric:

    After the Title

    After the title,

    there’s not much more.

    The stanzas break,

    and lines fall apart

    to the concluding

    so what?

    (“…the white chickens…

    a red wheel barrow…”;

    “Not Ideas about the Thing

    but the Thing Itself”)

    The poem total

    never enough.

    Postscript, from Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue. “I’ll pay as much attention to your text / And rubric in such things as would a gnat.”

  • Alice in the World Wide Web

    Poets have their canon, physicists their string, general interest readers their New Yorker, Sartre’s Self-Taught Men their alphabetized reading lists, not so desperate housewives their Pioneer Woman. Does the reader in the Web look for a clean well-lighted place, a site of one’s own? What do you want to read today?

    Alice asks the Cheshire Cat “which way I ought to go from here.” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don’t much care where,” said Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

    How do we decide what to read? Can literature tell us what to read, what we should read? Martin Gardner, in The Annotated Alice (1960), says that “The Cat’s answer expresses very precisely the eternal cleavage between science and ethics. As Kemeny [A Philosopher Looks at Science, 1959], makes clear, science cannot tell us where to go, but after this decision is made on other grounds, it can tell us the best way to get there.” What other grounds?

    Librarians at Alexandria knew how many scrolls were on hand. How many scrolls we now have online is a more difficult question. Ulrich indicates they’ve more than 300,000 “periodicals of all types – academic and scholarly journals, Open Access publications, peer-reviewed titles, popular magazines, newspapers, newsletters, and more from around the world.” Add to those, millions of blogs, scores of white papers, piles of procedure bulletins, egrets of email, spools of spam, pop-ups of poems, Hosannas of EBSCOHosts!

    Why do you want to read today?

  • Bukowski for President! David Biespiel and Poets for Democracy

    from New York Times article, September 3, 1917

    Pablo Neruda is perhaps the greatest example of a people’s poet, and he gained popularity through both his poetry and his public service. In the US, Langston Hughes was a people’s poet, writing in a vernacular that spoke to, for, and of democratic values. From his poem “Democracy” (1949): “Democracy will not come / Today, this year / Nor ever / Through compromise and fear.” Hughes’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, in 1953, during the McCarthy era of harassment, certainly demonstrated this belief, and sealed his fate as poet and citizen, the kind of poet David Biespiel, in the May, 2010 issue of Poetry seems to be calling. Hughes was both poet and public figure, and the activities encouraged one another.

    Biespiel’s call for poets to engage in the Democratic process of public discourse, service, and persuasion borrows its title from the Woody Guthrie song “This Land is Our Land.” Guthrie, like Hughes, spoke in a vernacular for and of his community. How many of the poets Biespiel addresses write in a vernacular that qualifies as a democratic language, in words that speak to, for, and of a community, in words that everyone understands? This would seem to be an important prerequisite for public discourse. Biespiel goes outside the US for his primary example, Vaclav Havel, whose “literary background…increase[ed] the moral authority he summoned in his civic and political life.” But Biespiel mentions Wendell Berry’s 1975 “The Specialization of Poetry,” reminding us of our favorite Buckminster Fuller theme: specialization leads to extinction. In short, today’s poets may be too narrow, not well-rounded enough in background, experience, or temperament to answer Biespiel’s calling, and they may be nearly extinct on the public discourse front.

    In any case, one of Biespiel’s reasons for his claim that poets are best positioned to speak to democratic ideals, that “poets are uniquely qualified to speak openly in the public square among diverse or divisive communities,” is “poetry’s ancient predisposition for moral persuasion,” but we are not convinced that poets are any better equipped than the average citizen to persuade. But that is both the risk and the opportunity – and that being the case, poets had better say what’s on their minds, but not because they are any better equipped than the rest of us. “We permit free expression because we need the resources of the whole group to get us the ideas we need. Thinking is a social activity,” Louis Menand said in the close to his The Metaphysical Club. “Democracy is an experiment,” Menand concludes, “and it is in the nature of experiments sometimes to fail.” It’s that possibility of failure that gives poets the best reason to come out of whatever literary closet they happen to be writing in and develop a truly public voice to accompany their poetic vision and voice.

    Meantime, we were thinking of what an all-time administration of poets might look like, and we came up with this draft (not all positions have been filled): President, Charles Bukowski; Vice-president, Marianne Moore; Secretary of State, Langston Hughes; Secretary of Commerce, Lawrence Ferlinghetti; Secretary of Labor, Bob Dylan; Secretary of Homeland Security, e. e. cummings; Presidential speechwriter and press secretary, William Faulkner; Secretary of Health and Human Services, Sylvia Plath; Attorney General, Wallace Stevens…. You get the idea. It’s not exactly what Biespiel was talking about, but try it with the poets you know. Maybe we’ll provoke a response.

  • From a Buick 6 to a Luxury RV: Crazy Road

    Hollywood steers us down the romance of the road in Crazy Heart, the Jeff Bridges Best Actor effort about a Hank Williams descendant continuing to follow his bliss of hard gigs and one night stands into late middle age roads, his only constant partners a bottle, guitar, and car. This romantic view of the road is peculiarly American, with its roots in Daniel Boone’s Wilderness Road, the Lewis and Clark Trail, and Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited.

    In Bernard-Henri Levy’s (2006) American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville, the popular French intellectual figured out his method early and easily: “The method would be as simple as the questions and concerns were complex. The road, essentially” (pp. 13-14). Few American writers have escaped paying a road toll. One of the first to feature roads, Hamlin Garland in Main-Travelled Roads (1891), did not romanticize the road trip. In his epigraph, he makes sure we understand that the road “is hot and dusty in summer, and desolate and drear [sic] with mud in fall and spring, and in winter the winds sweep the snow across it; but it does sometimes cross a rich meadow where the songs of the larks and bobolinks and blackbirds are tangled. Follow it far enough, it may lead past a bend in the river where the water laughs eternally over its shallows. Mainly it is long and wearyful and has a dull little town at one end, and a home of toil at the other. Like the main-travelled road of life, it is traversed by many classes of people, but the poor and the weary predominate.”

    A precursor to the Naturalist writers, writers who would try to tell it like it is, Garland reflects back on his roads in this 1922 preface to a new edition of his book: “The farther I got from Chicago the more depressing the landscape became. It was bad enough in our former home in Mitchell County, but my pity grew more intense as I passed from northwest Iowa into southern Dakota. The houses, bare as boxes, dropped on the treeless plains, the barbed-wire fences running at right angles, and the towns mere assemblages of flimsy wooden sheds with painted-pine battlement, produced on me the effect of an almost helpless and sterile poverty.”

    This poverty of the road is now camouflaged in neon signs, fast food outlets, strip malls. Gone are most of the Jesus Saves signs, and in their place U-Pick fruit signs, gas stations the size of baseball diamonds, rest-stops the Joads could have lived in. The road blinds and seduces: blinding white headlights and mesmerizing red taillights; corridors of an automobile economy. The camouflage is what makes it possible for a writer like Larry McMurtry to write a book called Roads: Driving America’s Great Highways (2000). McMurtry writes in his preface: “My son, James, a touring musician who sees, from ground level, a great deal of America in the line of duty, says that when it isn’t his turn to drive the van he likes to sit for long stretches, looking out the window. ‘There’s just so much to see,’ he says, and he’s right. There’s just so much to see.” But where does McMurtry begin his road trips? “…in Duluth, Minnesota, at the north end of the long and lonesome 35.” Could it be the road is the only place left some of us can be alone anymore? For to be truly alone, we must be surrounded by others we can not touch nor hear. The road is a crazy place.

  • Get Your Chops Back: Good Writing and Bad

    How do we learn to distinguish good writing from bad? 

    In today’s popular culture and business world, we often hear and find evidence that the average adult spends little time reading. A CQ Researcher report of Feb. 22, 2008 titled “Reading Crisis?” showed that “only 31 percent of college graduates were proficient in reading prose in 2003, a 23 percent decline since 1992. Among students in graduate programs or holding advanced degrees, the drop in proficiency was 20 percent.”

    It’s hard to find time to read and write, and people who neither read nor write have more time to work and play – arguably the primary values of our age. But do we ignore reading and writing to our detriment? They are developmental skills. They require practice. They are skills that atrophy quickly if unused regularly. We lose our chops when the books collect dust. Writing, in particular, is hard work, and most of us don’t suffer from graphomania, while reading material foreign to our everyday vocabulary and experience seems arcane and frustrating. Add to this our desire for instant gratification and we find ourselves living in a community of non-readers.

    The Audit Bureau of Circulations has reported that of the top 100 magazines by circulation in the U.S. today, most are hobby, entertainment, or popular culture, special interest magazines. Only two in the top 100, The New Yorker and National Geographic, might be considered to have a general interest purpose combined with writing that will get your reading chops back. This isn’t to say that there’s anything wrong with popular magazines, but to point out that the reading experience of the average adult in our communities is anemic, and the reading deficit results in a writing void, and an inability to distinguish good writing from bad.

    But what is good writing? If by good writing we mean writing that achieves its purpose, almost any writing might be considered good. But reading material that exploits and panders to the tastes of an audience captive in a comfort zone gets us nowhere. An excellent B movie is one only an ardent B movie fan can appreciate. But is an academic article, blind peer reviewed then buried in a journal with a circulation of 300 (and most of those from institutions) any different? Writing that achieves a purpose that is too narrow is like a plant that is grown in a pot. It can be lovely, but its growth will be stunted.

  • Love and the Age of Democracy

    Imagine life as a serf in an empire. Your father wants to give you to a neighboring monastery in exchange for a pig. But this is actually better than his first proposal, in which he promised your hand in marriage to an old man in a neighboring village. Fortunately, the old man died before the deal could be sealed.

    In The Power of Myth Joseph Campbell argues that the emergence in the middle ages of romantic love as expressed by the troubadours created individual consciousness. “Campbell: But with Amor we have a purely personal ideal. The kind of seizure that comes from the meeting of the eyes, as they say in the troubadour tradition, is a person-to-person experience. That’s completely contrary to everything the Church stood for. It’s a personal, individual experience, and I think it’s the essential thing that’s great about the West and that makes it different from all other traditions I know. It was important in that it gave the West this accent on the individual, that one should have faith in his experience and not simply mouth terms handed down to him by others. It stresses the validity of the individual’s experience of what humanity is, what life is, what values are, against the monolithic system. The monolithic system is a machine system: every machine works like every other machine that comes out of the same shop” (p. 187).

    Campbell is talking about consensual marriage, as opposed to arranged marriage. Even today, the price paid for consensual marriages, in that they often go against the grain of the parents’ wishes for their children, as in the Tristan romance, and again in Romeo and Juliet, is personal freedom and existentialism. You’re on your own. This is the same price Jesus paid, but the Church did not follow Jesus, instead creating a new monolithic system. “Come follow me,” Jesus said; we’ll make our own way, against tradition. This is the creation of the individual as an entity separate from the earthly lord who gets his authority from the state or church or both. In consensual marriage we find the roots of egalitarianism and democracy. What’s love got to do with it? All you need is love, and the courage to, as Campbell says, “follow your bliss.”

    Modern corporations are not democracies, nor is the Church a democracy. Men who marry their jobs or the Church can not live an existential life. They are not free. They have no individual consciousness, and they pay no price, as long as they stick with the arrangement. But these marriages are not based on Amor, which is freedom and personal identity for which one pays own’s own freedom and assumes responsibility for oneself. To become one with a desk? Come, follow me. Sit here. Break is at 10:15.

  • Solving the Texas Textbook Massacre, Scandal, and Mystery

    Textbooks are like disposable diapers, fodder for landfills, their obsolescence planned and forced new editions programmed with regularity. When I was a kid we couldn’t write in our textbooks. The nuns used them year after year – textbooks must not have been programmed to self-destruct quite so quickly in those days. We had to cover our textbooks with brown paper grocery bags, cut cleanly according to obsessive instructions, so the covers fit smartly around the edges, taped carefully so no tape touched the textbook. In spite of this care, or perhaps because of it, I don’t remember the title nor the author’s name of a single textbook I used in my twelve years of regular school.

    A few summers ago I started noticing very old textbooks, from the early 1900’s, showing up in local garage sales. I started collecting them. One day I took a bagful down to the local used book store to see what I might get for them, but the owner was chagrined. “I don’t buy books like that,” she said, and wouldn’t even look down into the bag. Yet Powell’s “City of Books,” in Portland, does a brisk business filling newer-used US textbook orders from overseas, and textbooks, new and used, constitute an enormous, bizarrely regulated industry.

    But the mystery of the Texas textbook scandal is why anyone cares, for who supposes students actually read the textbooks? And even if they wanted to, where are the school districts whose funding is deep enough to afford them? Schools that could have afforded new textbooks no doubt spend their money in other, more productive ways: building multi-million dollar sport complexes, for example. And if they have the textbooks, were they distributed? Or are they sitting in a warehouse, as Michelle Rhee discovered when she took over in DC? In any case, given the unaffordable prices and now the tampering with the credibility and reliability of textbooks, Texas teachers should forgo any of the changes forced by their state board of education and ignore textbooks altogether, avoiding their exorbitant costs, forced new editions, inflated purpose, and questionable educational effectiveness; and the rest of the country should follow their example.

    Will the Education debate go the way of the Health Care debate? In the April 5, 2010 issue of the New Yorker, Dr. Atul Gawande said, “But the reform package [Health Care] emerged with a clear recognition of what is driving costs up: a system that pays for the quantity of care rather than the value of it. This can’t continue.” Neither can Education’s reliance on the textbook system, which is also too expensive and values quantity over quality. No one doubts this, but, as Gawande says, “the threat comes from party politics.” So too with Education. There is, Gawande says, “…one truly scary thing about health reform: far from being a government takeover, it counts on local communities and clinicians for success. We are the ones to determine whether costs are controlled and health care improves.” The same might be said for Education: it will count on local communities and local teachers for success, not state boards of education who confuse textbooks, editing, and censoring with teaching, and who would use a textbook to narrow the entrance to knowledge rather than opening the door to full and open access – access that is alive and growing on the Web, and that should be given more support to be leveraged by schools to lower the costs of education while improving the quality of instruction.

    Instead of the traditional use of textbooks, teachers can use primary sources via the Internet. For in depth analysis, including background and extensive researched reports of current events, school libraries should subscribe to the Congressional Quarterly Researcher (the blog is free; access to the full reports requires a subscription – which most libraries provide). Extensive reports include credible pro-con discussion and annotated and linked bibliographies for further reading. Open Culture is another site that includes free resources, including language, culture, and math and science material – including links to podcasts from reputable universities. Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy is another site that features free and open access to the work of professional scholars (a current fund raising campaign seeks to establish a more permanent and viable funding source – so no, these sites are not free, though they offer free access).

    Students are already using the Internet, and teachers can do more to leverage its resources. Google Books, for all the controversy surrounding the copyright issue, is getting better and students access the site without charge (apart from Internet service) for direct access to both primary sources and critical analysis. Credible and reputable periodicals are on-line, some with full access, others with limited access without a subscription. Scholarly journals are following suit and taking down their wall that limits direct access and frustrates students attempting to learn scholarship and research. And individual blogs such as the Becker-Posner Blog (Becker a University of Chicago Nobel economist, and Posner a federal judge), Caleb Crain’s blog, which augments his professional publications, and the World Wide Woodard blog, the blog of author and journalist Colin Woodard, just to mention a few – there are obviously many more – all provide direct, free, and open access to professional criticism, informed opinion, and scholarly research. Still other sites, like FQXi (Foundational Questions Institute – a physics site), provide forums for professionals to share papers and research, while giving students the opportunity to participate by reading and following the studies and discussion. It was on FQXi that I first saw Garrett Lisi’s recent physics paper, “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything.”

    What we need is an exceptionally simple theory of education. Hopefully it will include open access to primary source documents that might nudge textbooks away from the center of the student’s desk, where the drool is soaking into the garbage bag cover.

    Update: 5-27-2010…It was announced this week that Portland Public High School District has posted just over a 50% graduation rate. I don’t think the problem is textbooks. Meantime, here’s a blog post that touches on a similar crisis in higher ed. Some appear to be worried about the adulteration of their disciplines as ethos moves online. Yet their ships are sinking – see the post referenced below and then read the top post (we agree with Levi): Larval Subjects.

  • …ant, ant, ant, ant, and ant: The Fiction Science of E. O. Wilson; or, What’s Luck Got To Do With It?

    E. O. Wilson’s fiction piece “Trailhead” appeared in the January 25, 2010 New Yorker. The story is science fable, science fiction. The main character in the story, the protagonist, might be the queen ant, or could be the entire ant colony, the superorganism. The antagonist is a capricious nature, and there’s the rub, for the ant is nature, and it’s a curious narrator who separates one from the other to argue a moral.

    This is not the first time Wilson has used science fiction to illustrate a sociobiological theory. In On Human Nature, he creates a “superior extraterrestrial species,” that eats humans, easily justifying their appetite using the same argument that humans use to eat animals. Meanwhile, the aliens are mostly interested in Earth’s ant population.

    What makes “Trailhead” fiction includes the idea that nature, or someone, dispenses luck. But what is luck? From the OED we get “locken to entice.” While, as the OED points out, this is the verb, not the noun, Wilson, in addition to giving us “By luck she had found an ideal site to build a nest,” says “…the dice fell right for the Queen of the Trailhead Colony.” Who rolled the dice? Who or what dispenses luck? In any case, isn’t one man’s luck another’s misfortune? And why is it considered lucky to merely prolong a meaningless life? Answers to these moral questions are implicit in the story, where we find “altruistic workers,” “self-sacrifice,” “viciousness,” and “taboos.”

    But luck drives the theme, for as lucky as the Trailhead Colony queen was, the Streamsider Queen was even luckier: “The Streamsiders had not chosen this site for their own protection. They were just lucky that their Queen had landed there.” Are we lucky that our parents met, that the Big Bang occurred, that our ancestral genes wound up close, but not too close, to the sun?

    The story ends with the defeat of the Trailhead Colony by the invading Streamsiders. “With luck a few survivors [Trailheaders] might then reassemble and restart the colony elsewhere. That is, if they had a real queen. But, of course, they had only their inadequate Soldier-Queen.” The end comes, and “The ants were a doomed people in a besieged city.” They’ve run out of luck.

    Then comes the most surprising part of the theory; the ants are given a choice: “Finally, all that the Trailheaders knew was terror, and the existence of a choice – they could fight or run from the horror.” If luck exists, they will make a run for it.

    Note: Norton has published Wilson’s first novel (he’s 80 years old), “Anthill,” this month.

  • Private Music, Public Music: Vandals Trash Kumbaya – Is Music Making Us Stupid?

    I’m shocked to find the lovely, spiritual folk song Kumbaya trashed by pundits and politicos alike in a bipartisan effort to discredit one of the solid gold traditions my generation sought to carry on – the healing power of music. Yet it should come as no surprise, for music, like politics, suffers from an infection of the big, the bad, and the rowdy. Perhaps it was always so; one’s affections are often awakened by market reality, but we must get to the bottom of this Kumbaya business.

    First, to the phrase Kumbaya (“Come by here” [Lord]) has been added the increasingly popular “ing,” so we now find ourselves Kumbayaing, though hopefully not in public. Kumbayaing is pundit-lingo for working together in teams for the mutual benefit of community members – and what could be sillier than trying to work together? The neologism distorts the song, ignores the music, and mocks the efforts of those who would organize peacefully, all in one cynical, dismissive, and cranky attitude – to Kumbaya is to waste time; holding hands betrays weakness.

    It seems that what we today call Christian Music isn’t liturgical music, or music to gather by, as much as a music market. The religious experience is marketed through music. This isn’t the same thing as music creating a religious experience. Do we not want the Lord coming by here anymore? For “The spirit will not descend without song,” as LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) explains in his study Blues People (1963). Jones explains that the first Christian music in the US was black music born of the slave experience and developed as communal, healing, and organizational. Of course, time and distance also distort, and, as Gary Snyder explains, when ritual is moved from its source it loses some of its power. But the beauty of the music that Jones describes is its very resourcefulness.

    Richard Rodriguez’s influential essay “Private Language, Public Language” went against the grain of the bilingual education movement by insisting that we shouldn’t publicize our private language, the language of our family. Just so, perhaps we shouldn’t market something called Christian Music, for the idea adulterates the tradition and allows the pundits to infiltrate the community without understanding or respecting the values of the community. Consider the following example, where the word spiritual becomes so watered down that it loses all its color and power: Elizabeth A. Brown writes a short review, published in the April 5, 2010 Christian Science Monitor, of The Best Spiritual Writing of 2010 (edited by Philip Zaleski), and what do we find as an example of not just spiritual writing but the best spiritual writing? Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

    Someone’s sighing, Lord. Come by here.

  • Jeeves and Bertie Wooster in Facebookland

    If Facebook was a country, it would have the 3rd largest population in the world, and the least privacy, so why do people continue to move there?

    Inside Facebook, a site that tracks Facebook demographics, shows the Facebook population growing like aphids on a primrose. The fastest growing segment is the female age 55-65 group, but it’s still a young country, with 35% of its citizens between the ages of 18 and 25. The Facebook Pressroom census shows over 400 million citizens living in Facebookland. The US, with about 4.5% of the world’s population, represents about 6% of Facebookland.

    There are certain advantages to living in Facebookland, no morning commute, for example, and though one occasionally receives the message, “something went wrong,” and things often change without much notice, the infrastructure generally works about as good in Facebookland as it does in other countries – sometimes things go wrong, other times things go on swimmingly.

    One easily imagines P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster living in Facebookland. Bertie’s the kind of fellow who would create the occasional heavy weather in the local neighborhood with the ill-thought comment, offending the odd, aged aunt, or posting an unflattering photo, tagging, and upsetting the potential fiancé; but Jeeves would be on hand with the correct password to amend and refresh the errant post. Bertie likes living in the moment; looking neither before nor after, he does not pine for what is not.

    Yet, “One always has to budget for a change in the weather,” Bertie observes to Jeeves, opening another episode with the plate of eggs and b., coffee perfect, at the beginning of Much Obliged, Jeeves. “Still, the thing to do is to keep on being happy while you can.” “Precisely, sir. Carpe diem, the Roman poet Horace advised,” Jeeves fills Bertie in on the classical references. “The English poet Herrick expressed the same sentiment when he suggested that we should gather rosebuds while we may. Your elbow is in the butter, sir.” “Oh, thank you, Jeeves.”

    “I’m thinking of leaving Facebook for Twitter, Jeeves.” “Indeed, sir?” “Yes, Jeeves. Twitter’s the place for the busy metro-man such as myself.” “Yes, sir.” “And rarely do I need more than 144 characters to say what I need to say.” “Indeed, sir.” “Modicum of expression and all that sort of thing, you know.” “Precisely, sir.” “And one can always pop back in and say hello to the Facebook friends, renew and restore and all that, what?” “Indubitably, sir.” “All these newfangled electronic devices, Jeeves, permit one to live in the moment as never before.” “No doubt, sir.” “Might as well give all these musty books the heave ho, what?” “What, indeed, sir.” “Really, Jeeves, we ought to at least get you an email account. Have you heard of Google?” “Oh, yes, sir, and while we haven’t actually tried googling, I believe is the expression, we did early invest a prudent amount in the Google corporate venture.” “Very good, Jeeves.” “Thank you, sir.”

  • Menand’s Meandering PhDs; UFOs; and Joyce’s Jejune Jesuits

    “There are no aliens,” Susan reminded me of Kit’s happy thought number one from Bowfinger (1999), but sensing my disappointment asked to see them – the unidentified flying objects (UFOs) I had just captured on camera. I had snapped them hovering over SE Stark from Flying Pie Pizzeria, where we were celebrating Emily’s birthday. “Maybe they’re coming in for some pizza,” Susan said.

    Having recently read Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, I began to think that chasing flying saucers was indeed an appropriate metaphor for pursuit of the PhD in today’s market. Joyce’s Buck Mulligan agreed, calling Stephen the “jejune jesuit,” for, as Anthony T. Grafton says in his New Republic response to Menand:  “The last hour has come, the times are very bad…Our space is shrinking: only one-third of American undergraduates still major in the arts and sciences, and less than a third of them in the humanities. We get no respect: the media stick to covering our dysfunctions, from the Paul de Man affair to the butchering of Robert Frost’s notebooks…But our worst enemies are ourselves: from William Chace, who argues that we helped to drive away our own students by dismembering the curriculum and substituting ‘for the books themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture),’ to Mark Taylor, who declares that disciplines are obsolete and that ‘there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text,’ to William Deresiewicz, who complains that we cannot talk to plumbers.”

    Plumbers, incidentally, fall under Menand’s definition of a professional: “A professional is a person who is licensed – by earning a degree, taking an examination, or passing some other qualifying test – to practice in a specialized field” (p. 101). Or you can just call a plumber and ask his hourly rate. One wonders if Deresiewicz ever tried to talk to one. In any case, Grafton’s solution sounds like a call to those who would join Joyce’s jejune Jesuits: “…it means finding creative ways to make life instructively hard, for a few years…,” where “a few years,” according to Menand, is a decade of one’s life. For Joyce, who chose to avoid both the Jesuits and the academy, it nevertheless lasted his entire life (Joyce was almost never financially solvent on his own; he lived off private grants – and in that sense he was like a lifelong PhD candidate).

    Juliet Flower MacCannell, writing on Lacan’s Joyce, says that “For Lacan, university discourse is the dominant discourse of our post-Hegelian era. In the introductory section of ‘Joyce the Symptom I’ entitled ‘University and Analysis,’ Lacan writes that Joyce may mean the closing or turning away from this dominant discourse: ‘In accordance with what Joyce himself knew would happen to him posthumously, the university in charge. It’s almost exclusively academics who busy themselves with Joyce. [. . .]. And he hoped for nothing less than to keep them busy until the extinction of the university. We’re headed in that direction’ (JSI, 3).” Frustrated they are too with Joyce’s grandson, Stephen, who, as D. T. Max discussed in “The Injustice Collector: Is James Joyce’s grandson suppressing scholarship?” (New Yorker, June 19, 2006), refuses scholars access to Joyce’s correspondence, and the problem with that is they’ve already picked his books to the bare bone, and, one wonders, to what end, if they’ve not found new readers for them. Perhaps the aliens will find some interest in them.