The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Writing

  • When Reading Was Everything

    Alfred Kazin’s Writing Was Everything is about 20th century US reading. The book could have been titled Reading Was Everything. It’s the text of Kazin’s 1994 Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard. There are four sections, a short prologue, “All Critics Are Mortal,” and three chapters: “Before the War,” “During the War,” and “After the War.” The War is WW II. But it seems we’re always somewhere in this context, before a war, during a war, or after a war. For my generation the during chapter would be Vietnam, and while there have been more recent wars, many of us still seem stuck in the after of that one. Kazin doesn’t even mention Vietnam; for him there was only one war. This doesn’t matter; for all wars are the same, and we are all always before, during, and after one.

    Kazin places all relevant writing in a cultural context of social and political forces; the greatest forces for his generation were socialism and totalitarianism. The was in the title is informing; it establishes the value of literature as remembering. Writing is looking back, going home again. Kazin began his writing career during the depression as an independent book reviewer, and he became a professional critic, but Writing Was Everything opens and closes on the critical note that literary criticism is not literature. For it’s literature that was everything, and Kazin deplores today’s “ideologues [who] ignore the imponderables of existence that are still with us after all the work of science, technology, analytic philosophy, psychology, deconstruction, or linguistics, after all the political, racial, and sexual debate so hot in the academy.” For Kazin, literature is the “value we can give to our experience.” Thus he deplores that today’s “academy is so preoccupied with status that it can proclaim literature to be only a branch of criticism, just another ‘discourse’.”

    After the war, Kazin discovers Milosz, who invokes Blake’s Ulro: “What is the price of Experience? Do men buy it for a song? / Or wisdom for a dance in the street? / No, it is bought with the price / Of all that a man hath: his house, his wife, his children.” I thought, “this is Job,” and a few pages later we do find Job: “Poetry to him [Milosz] is profoundly a recall, not a mere presentation of lived experience. It resembles what he calls ‘the cries of Job,’ not our endless defenses and explorations of the ego.” When everyone is down, as in the case of Job, when everyone is on trial, as in the case of Kafka, when everyone is hungry, beat, and destitute, as in the case of Simone Weil, an important voice for both Milosz and Kazin, “…when an entire community is stricken…poetry [becomes] as essential as bread.” Milosz claimed not to understand the spirit that prompted his poetry, and therefore, in his own teaching, he “limited [himself] to the history of literature, trying to avoid poetics.” Kazin, in Writing Was Everything, does essentially just that, sticks to the history of the writing, believing that “what gets us closer to a work of art is not instruction but another work of art.” Each writer Kazin introduces is introduced by another writer, until the reader has met them all, albeit briefly (the book is only 152 pages), and understands that their writing is a dialog. There are writers missing from Kazin’s discussion (Beckett, for example, for whom writing really was everything, but Kazin may have had difficulty figuring out what to do with Beckett’s seeming absence of cultural or political context), but I was happily surprised at the space given Flannery O’Connor and Simon Weil, who are among the many writers Kazin talks about that he knew personally.

    Writing Was Everything is one of the books I picked up at the Multnomah County Library book sale a month or so ago, in perfect shape, hard back with dust jacket intact, for $1. I’m slowly working my way through the pile of books I picked up at the sale.

  • Excerpt from a Conversation with Jean-Paul Sartre and B. F. Skinner

    BFS: “Man is perhaps unique in being a moral animal, but not in the sense that he possesses morality; he has constructed a social environment in which he behaves with respect to himself and others in moral ways.”

    JPS: “I can bring moral judgment to bear.”

    BFS: “The essential issue is autonomy. Is man in control of his own destiny or is he not?”

    JPS: “Man makes himself. He isn’t ready made at the start. Before you come alive, life is nothing; it’s up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing else but the meaning that you choose. In that way, you see, there is a possibility of creating a human community.”

    BFS: “Behaviorism does not reduce morality to certain features of the social environment; it simply insists that those features have always been responsible for moral behavior. Man continues to build machines which dehumanize him. He can remedy these mistakes and build a world in which he will feel freer than ever before and achieve greater things.”

    JPS: “We do not believe in progress. Man is always the same. I am responsible for myself and for everyone else.”

    BFS: “Why do people behave as they do? It became a matter of understanding and explaining behavior. It could always be reduced to a question about causes.”

    JPS: “It’s all quite simple. He can’t start making excuses for himself. There is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom. We have no excuse behind us, nor justification before us. We are alone, with no excuses. Man is condemned to be free. There are no omens in the world. No general ethics can show you what is to be done. This theory is the only one which gives man dignity.”

    BFS: “Control is another matter. Refusing to look at causes exacts its price. The behaviorist has a simpler answer. What has evolved is an organism, part of the behavior of which has been tentatively explained by the invention of the concept of mind. No special evolutionary process is needed when the facts are considered in their own right.”

    JPS: “There is no human nature. Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Man is responsible for what he is. And when we say that a man is responsible for himself, we do not only mean that he is responsible for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men. It is impossible for man to transcend human subjectivity.”

    BFS: “A scientific analysis of behavior must assume that a person’s behavior is controlled by his genetic and environmental histories rather than by the person himself as an initiating, creative agent.”

    JPS: “In order to get any truth about myself, I must have contact with another person. There does exist a universal human condition.”

    BFS: “We often overlook the fact that human behavior is also a form of control. No mystic or ascetic has ever ceased to control the world around him; he controls it in order to control himself. We cannot choose a way of life in which there is no control.”

    JPS: “Existentialism isn’t so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn’t exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing. What complicates matters is that there are two kinds of existentialist; first, those who are Christian, and on the other hand the atheistic existentialists, and then the French existentialists and myself. What they have in common is that they think that existence precedes essence, or, if you prefer, that subjectivity must be the starting point.”

    BFS: “The major difficulties are practical. In any case we seem to be no worse off for ignoring philosophical problems.”

    (This invented converstation was created with quotes blended from Sartre’s “Existentialism is a Humanism” with Skinner’s “About Behaviorism.”)

  • Honor and Shame: Born Again Off Maggie’s Farm

    When Huck decides to help Jim at the end of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he really does believe he’ll go to hell for his actions. Yet he’s awakening from a cultured sleep; he’s being reborn. First, he’s accepted the responsibility of a decision; he must act: “I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell.’” Huck was born into a culture that passed on as a value the idea that to help a runaway slave was a crime and a sin. It’s a culture informed by codes of honor and shame. “It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming.” And at the end of the book, when Huck decides to “light out for the territory,” he’s saying that he ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more. The orphaned Huck has been born again.

    This same sense of honor and shame opens Crossan’s discussion of Mediterranean cultures in his “The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. Honor and shame are cultural core values, but more, they become the very persona of the culture: “Honor and shame, then, could be defined as the ideology of small, discrete, and unstable groups competing permanently for basic resources that are attained insecurely and maintained precariously but where conflict must be reluctantly transposed into cooperation for the most precious resource of all, marriageable women” (p. 15). But like Huck, Jesus ain’t gonna work on this Maggie’s farm no more, either. It’s clear that honor and shame, as enculturated values, become emotions enabling control, and one must be born again to escape the enculturated entrapments.

    We see both examples come together in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, where the culture described in Huck Finn finally plays itself out, and Quentin’s suicide, prompted, among other things, by his worrying over his sister Caddy’s reputation, will continue forever his argument with his father who has told him that virginity as a value is a man-made tool to control women, the same explanation Crossan argues: “Boys. Men. They lie about it. Because it means less to women, Father said. He said it was men invented virginity not women” (p. 96). But Quentin can’t stomach the irony: “And Father said it’s because you are a virgin: don’t you see? Women are never virgins. Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature. It’s nature is hurting you not Caddy and I said That’s just words and he said So is virginity and I said you dont know. You cant know and he said Yes. On the instant when we come to realise that tragedy is second-hand” (p. 143).

    An example of the controls at work can be seen in Joseph Campbell’s “Tales of Love and Marriage,” from his The Power of Myth. We’re now in medieval Catholic culture, where marriages are arranged, but Tristan and Isolde decide they are, absurdly, in love, in romantic love. Isolde’s nurse delivers the warning, but Tristan, too, has had enough of Maggie’s farm: “And if by my death, you mean the eternal punishment in the fires of hell, I accept that, too” (p. 190).

    A culture’s core values, what it desires, finds expression not necessarily in ideology but in personality, in the masks individuals wear to get along with their neighbors. The existential decision to be born again shucks the mask. James Joyce leaves Ireland and the oppression of the church’s values of honor and shame, its sanctioned hierarchy of rich and poor, ecclesiastical and secular, its discriminations of right and wrong. And Samuel Beckett ain’t gonna work for the text, no more, ripping off the mask with the inside out eyes, the mask that conditions us to see ourselves as others see us, and to find there outside acceptance and respect. Everyone working on Maggie’s farm must wear the same mask.

    How we vote is also probably an enculturated core value. Louis Menand, in “The Unpolitical Animal: How political science understands voters (New Yorker, August 30, 2004), argues that “Voters go into the booth carrying the imprint of the hopes and fears, the prejudices and assumptions of their family, their friends, and their neighbors. For most people, voting may be more meaningful and more understandable as a social act than as a political act.”

    “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm, no more” is an existential decision, like Huck’s, and announces a rebirth, affirming that one’s existence precedes one’s essence, and that one has taken individual responsibility for one’s own essence.

  • Hybrid Reading and “Sex and the vote”

    Newspapers are dying, but as they slide into immateriality, they’re looking for ways to merge into Internet traffic. Regular columnists are forced to blog to establish stronger and closer connections with their audiences. No doubt many regular columnists are already longing for the days when they had the highway to themselves. Blogging, of course, invites comments, which multiply, and comments are easier to post than letters to the editor, which often go unpublished, while comments, rarely edited for clarity or decorum, bring the commenter instant gratification, however short-lived or inconsequential, yet columnists don’t seem to be completely ignoring them. Stanley Fish regularly gets hundreds of comments to each of his posts at the Times Opinionator, as does Nicholas Kristof. Print periodicals are also struggling, but we are beginning to see engaging hybrid forms, offering a kind of communication in the round for readers, with several noteworthy add-on benefits. These benefits go beyond simply allowing on-line access, or putting the print copy on an e-Reader. At the New Yorker, added value on-line features include interactive live chats with authors, videos, audios, podcasts, and slide shows (some of the on-line features do require a subscription).

    The newspaper is a mosaic with boundaries, the Internet a mosaic without boundaries. As the newspaper continues to get watered down daily in new irrelevancies suggested by the instantaneous availability of information via the Internet, it continues to lose revenue from defecting advertisers and subscribers. Yet the hybrid forms suggested by the New Yorker have the potential to renew and revitalize public discourse. At the Oregonian, The Stump is essentially a group blog produced by the editorial board. The Stump is an on-line extension of the newspaper’s Op-Ed pages. We begin to see that the salvation of the newspaper may come from removing the mosaic’s traditional boundaries with a hybrid form that will include more interactive reading opportunities.

    One of the difficulties of programming the hybrid link from newspaper to Internet is still the newspaper’s limited space. The Stump, for example, prints the beginnings of articles on the editorial page, but readers must go on-line if they want to read the whole article (where they can also comment). I didn’t know my “Sex and the vote” (Nov 4) piece had made it to The Stump until a friend emailed me saying he had enjoyed my little piece in the paper. I wasn’t sure if he had gone on-line to read the entire piece or not. Then again, how often do any of us read to the end of a piece? That’s part of the nature of the newspaper. The mosaic character and layout encourages it; the hybrid link, a link frozen in hard copy, continues the tradition.

  • Shakespeare of Main Street: How We Should Teach English

    Evidence for the claim that Shakespeare did not write Hamlet, Lear, Othello, and the rest, is often cited reasoning that an uneducated farm-boy moved to the city lacks the formal education necessary to explain the depth of knowledge, experience, and wisdom found in the plays.

    Though prowess with language is not necessarily a school learned skill, the rebuttal to the Shakespeare as author naysayers is found in Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare. For one thing, Shakespeare indeed was educated. Says Greenblatt, “…[Shakespeare] was sent to the Stratford free grammar school, whose central educational principle was total immersion in Latin.” Portland Public Schools should adopt the school’s method. The school day ran for twelve hours, six days a week, year round. “The curriculum made few concessions to the range of human interests: no English history or literature; no biology, chemistry, or physics; no economics or sociology; only a smattering of arithmetic.” What did they study, then? Latin. Latin was the sole subject, but from their Latin studies came everything else, including reading and performing ancient plays, providing the students with exposure to a world peopled with characters caught in life’s web, preparing students, no doubt, to navigate that web skillfully and purposefully. “And,” says Gleenblatt, “the instruction was not gentle: rote memorization, relentless drills, endless repetition, daily analysis of texts, elaborate exercises in imitation and rhetorical variation, all backed up with the threat of violence.” Sounds like the Catholic high school I went to; well, the threat of violence part, anyway.

    So Shakespeare was educated, but still steeped in folk culture. He chose not to write in Latin, but in the language of his home, countryside, and city – the vernacular of his time. In any case, Shakespeare does not appear in his plays. Greenblatt explains that “virtually all of [Shakespeare’s] close relatives were farmers…he seems to have taken in everything about this rustic world, and he did not subsequently seek to repudiate it or pass himself off as something other than what he was.” If there are snobs in a Shakespeare audience, they don’t know what they are hearing.

    And, as it turns out, what they are hearing is akin to what they will hear today if they open their ears to the speech of Main Street, as is evidenced by new research and a new play being performed at the University of Kansas in the original pronunciation of Shakespeare, a pronunciation that we might recognize as coming from someone in our own family.

    How should we teach English? By immersing our students, as Shakespeare was immersed, but not in Latin, in English, in English literature.

  • Trilling’s “The Meaning of a Literary Idea”; or, the Essay as Argument: Why The Research Paper Should be Abolished

    The more we fragment the further we get from the emergent whole, a picture that is satisfying for its very wholeness – in a way that an examination of any one pixel or isolated group of pixels can not be satisfying. A study of a part of something can never be as interesting as a study of the whole to which the part belongs. Yet the Humanities has fragmented into so many divergent and divested parts that an emergent, whole picture is now easy to miss. And this is true not just in the continuing bifurcations of disciplines, but in the splitting apart of self-contained disciplines. Consider, for example, the English department. English was once the repository for the study of literature, by which was meant a unified study of composition, language, and literature. Perhaps one concentrated in language and linguistics as opposed to literature. Still, the proper study of the English major was literature. (A recent article in The Oregonian reported that in most of the last 20 years the Portland Public School district has ignored its ESL responsibilities to disastrous results. This should come as no surprise, since we have meantime mangled teaching English as a 1st language.)

    The English department is now the place students go to learn to write research papers, and even this part is at risk, as various specialty disciplines have already begun to teach their own. The “art for art’s sake” attitude is in part responsible, for it denies the literary work its ideas, while “art for art’s sake” is an ideology, not an idea. In “The Meaning of a Literary Idea,” Trilling explains: “Whether we deal with syllogisms or poems, we deal with dialectic – with, that is, a developing series of statements.” In other words, what we have come to call “creative literature,” is no different in form than what we must now call “non-creative literature,” though of course there is no such thing: there is only one literature, all of it creative, and while literature may consist of various genres, such as fiction and non-fiction, poetry and drama, the impulse to further split non-fiction into creative or non-creative fiction can only have its source in funding disputes arising from the splitting of the discipline – for it can’t possibly have anything to do with reading, writing, or critical thinking. This is true because, as Trilling says, “The most elementary thing to observe is that literature is of its nature involved with ideas because it deals with man in society, which is to say that it deals with formulations, valuations, and decisions, some of them implicit, others explicit.”

    Ideas are organic; ideology is manufactured. Ideas are malleable; ideology is rigid: “Ideology is not the product of thought; it is the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have very strong ties of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding.” And so in ideology, Trilling explains, we lose sight of this wholeness: “…an intimate relationship between literature and ideas, for in our culture ideas tend to deteriorate into ideology.” If Trilling could say that “poetry is a heuristic medium…a communication of knowledge,” then why do we feel compelled to divorce essays (personal or any other kind or name the latest textbook has invented) from research papers? The very idea of the research paper is essay turned ideology. We must either abolish the research paper or watch literature continue its slow demise toward extinction, an extinction of ideas.

  • Remembrance of Things Past: or, The Card Catalog – ACCESS CLOSED!

    What better way to close Open Access week than with a post on the card catalog? The Library of Congress’s In Custodia Legis (the blog of the law librarians of congress) has posted a photo of a notice users still find at the entrance to the card catalog, and librarian Christine Sellers explains: “When you walk into the Reading Room of the Law Library of Congress, you might notice something you haven’t seen in a while. A card catalog that is still in use, though no new cards have been added since December 1980.”

    Open Access is necessary – efficient, effective, fair. But more, the virtual world, its backlit windows, are like Whitman’s “…Houses and rooms [are] full of perfumes, the shelves [are[ crowded with perfumes, I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it, The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.” Though we can not smell it, the virtual world still attracts us, like a sterile flower.

    We miss not just the card catalog, its thumb-worn cards housed in red oak, carefully annotated by the librarian’s perfect pencil, but we miss too the smell of the open stacks, the aisles and shelves of books like Ferlinghetti’s Backroads to Far Places. But that’s not all we remember and miss. We miss the mimeograph machine, helping teacher turn the drum, watching the press emerge, holding the freshly inked papers to our face, smelling the wet ink. We miss the feel and smell of the pages of books, the large windows full of available light, and when the sun slanted through the library windows on warm summer evenings, the lighted air in the high-ceilinged library, like Ezra Pound’s, from Canto XCIII: “…The light there almost solid.”

  • Dogo and Gidi: 9 Spoonerisms on Samuel Beckett

    1. Gin Fall
    2. Trapp’s Last Crepe
    3. Dappy Hays
    4. No nymbols were some intended
    5. Onds and Edds
    6. Lirst Fove
    7. More Kricks than Picks
    8. Toof Laughs
    9. Tacastrophe

  • Opening the Patient in Open Access Week; or, the Great Research Hoax

    At first glance, The Atlantic’s “Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science,” by David H. Freedman (November, 2010), about the inaccuracies, contradictions, reversals, and errors in medical and pharmaceutical research, looks like something out of the National Enquirer: can this hoax be, to this extent, true? Alas, Dr. John Ioannidis’s 2005 article, published in JAMA, goes unchallenged – its conclusion: “Contradiction…[is] not unusual in highly cited research of clinical interventions and their outcomes.” What this means is that 90% of your doctor’s advice about what you should or should not be doing health-wise is probably based on faulty or biased research. The timing of The Atlantic article, arriving in mailboxes in the middle of the international Open Access week, couldn’t be better. “Though scientists and science journalists are constantly talking up the value of the peer-review process, researchers admit among themselves that biased, erroneous, and even blatantly fraudulent studies easily slip through it,” reports Freedman.

    Sponsored by SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, Open Access week seeks to raise awareness of Open Access initiatives worldwide. It’s possible that the Open Access movement will alleviate many of the pressures on researchers that have led to the problematic results described in The Atlantic article, primarily, as Freedman quotes Ioannidis, because “at every step in the process there is room to distort results, a way to make a stronger claim or to select what is going to be concluded.” But why? Why would researchers not want to discover what’s really going on? Because, Ioannidis says, “There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressures researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded.” It’s that conflict of interest that Open Access has the potential to cure.

    Our friends the physicists have been both dipping into the infinite cookie jar of funding and publishing open access style for some time. It was at the FQXi Community site that we first became aware of Garrett Lisi’s paper “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything.” But if Ioannidis is right, and as the number of papers on string theory might suggest, most research probably reduces to simply that most everything is wrong. But, no worries, for Ioannidis concludes, at the end of Freedman’s piece in The Atlantic, that “Science is a noble endeavor, but it’s also a low-yield endeavor. I’m not sure that more than a very small percentage of medical research is ever likely to lead to major improvements in clinical outcomes and quality of life. We should be very comfortable with that fact.” Buckminster Fuller was very comfortable with that fact. Fuller thought it was necessary to pay for all the researchers on the bet that one of them would come up with a viable idea to pay for all the others and then some.

    If science is a low-yield endeavor, what’s poetry? Still, Open Access holds the potential for improving the quality and honesty of research, publication, access, and discussion of scholarly papers in the sciences and the humanities. The irony of course is the cost associated with behind the pay wall journals coupled with the findings of Ioannidis. And why would the problem be any different in the Humanities? But will Open Access remedy the research problems discussed by Ioannidis? It’s possible, since the peer review process changes – with more eyes on the product, and the strength of closed and biased editorial voices of certain periodicals and coteries of peers is quieted down. What should we be reading? Open Access has the potential to open the walled cherry orchard to everyone with an appetite, for is 90% of our poetry critics’ advice about what we should be reading also based on faulty and biased research? Ioannidis and his meta-researchers have uncovered a hoax, one that’s been a long time in the making and continues to sicken the patient.

  • Arrangement in C Major for List of 14 Selected John Cage Titles

    1.   “Cheap Imitation”

    3.   “Ear for Ear”

    7.   “But what about the noise of crumpling paper which he used to do in order to paint the series of ‘Papiers froisses’ or tearing up paper to make ‘Papiers dechires?’ Arp was  stimulated by water (sea, lake, and flowing waters like rivers), forests”

    9.   “Dad”

    11. “Four Walls”

    13. “A Chant with Claps”

    14. “Bird Cage”

    12. “Greek Ode”

    4.   “Fads and Fancies from the Academy”

    10. “Empty Words with Music for Piano”

    2.   “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)”

    8.   “Composition as Process”

    6.   “Art Is Either a Complaint or Do Something Else”

    5.   “Grace and Clarity”

  • Where Michael Kinsley Meets William Faulkner; or, The Beat Goes On

    “The danger is in the neatness of identifications,” Beckett said in “Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce,” and “literary criticism is not book-keeping.” Perhaps a certain kind of journalism is book-keeping, the kind that embeds meaning in pre-packaged classifications, designations that deprive individuals of their unique character by assigning them to a group, where they are given a number.

    I am today more than ever before it seems identified as a Baby Boomer, someone born between the years 1946 and 1964, according to the Atlantic’s Michael Kinsley, in his “The Least We Can Do,” a call for the Boomer generation to satisfy its promise to the country, to redeem its sins of excess by giving back, by paying off the national debt. The call is to behave now like Faulkner’s Isaac in “The Bear,” denying our inheritance, for, after all, no one can own the land, as the housing crisis now teaches. Of course, there’s already not as much land as there once was, our having, like Quentin in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, sold off a portion to pay for our year at Harvard.

    We began our retirements at the end of a century of wars that ended in yet another war, a war that Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, called, not the least bit wearily, the “first war of the 21st century, implying it would be yet another century of wars: “But really, this is precisely what transformation is about. Here we are in the year 2002, fighting the first war of the 21st century, and the horse cavalry was back and being used, but being used in previously unimaginable ways. It showed that a revolution in military affairs is about more than building new high tech weapons, though that is certainly part of it. It’s also about new ways of thinking, and new ways of fighting.”

    “You are a lost generation,” Gertrude Stein told Hemingway, suggesting that the post World War I survivors had been both abandoned and set free by their parents’ great war, the war to end all wars. But twenty years later they would find themselves caught up in another great war, and after that one they would be called the Beat Generation, and beat they were, the Boomers’ parents. Now we are burying the beat, yet the beat goes on. You can’t buy the beat.