William Rodney Herring

I was cleaning out the files the other day—not the files in my office file cabinets (I did that in August for the first time in years, and let me tell you, it was so much fun I kept it up for days), but the files in my trusty little laptop, the very device on which I write these words today.  I have three five-drawer file cabinets in my office, full to bursting with the records of class preparations, former graduate students, essays assigned in faculty reading groups, tenure and promotion reviews, offprints and copies of old essays, book contracts, and so forth.  Cleaning out files is, of course, the least rewarding kind of office- and life-maintenance, because when you’re done everything looks pretty much the way it did when you started—which is why you dumped all that extraneous crap in your file cabinets in the first place, to get it out of sight.  The only interesting thing I learned, in the course of winnowing through (or wallowing in) all that paper was that my course records start to go paperless somewhere around 1995.  I always kept my students’ grades (and my responses to their papers) on Ye Olde Computers, all the way back to 1986 when I was TAing the History of English Literature course at the University of Virginia and working on a Leading Edge knockoff with the floppy disks.  But beginning in the mid-90s, almost all my course materials disappear from the file cabinets and appear instead on … well, a series of hard drives leading to the very device on which I write these words today.  So I realized, diligent recordkeeper that I am, that I should have a look at those files as well, particularly the one called “miscellaneous,” which now holds something like five hundred documents.

(True story tangent: a few years ago I was riding Amtrak on my way to a Modern Language Association committee meeting.  From a nearby seat, a man in his mid-thirties asked whether I might be Michael Bérubé of the University of Illinois.  Startled, I said that I was indeed myself but had moved to Penn State in 2001.  He told me he had been a student of mine in an American lit survey class in the spring of 1990, acknowledging that 1990 was quite some time ago and that I probably wouldn’t remember him.  I admitted that I did not remember him by face, but could look up his name on this very device on the seatback tray in front of me, and promptly retrieved all the records from the class, including his.  He was flabbergasted, mostly in a good way, even though on my end the feat was no more remarkable than, say, writing out the alphabet.)

Needless to say, one significant difference between my files and my e-files is that I don’t really have to throw away any of the latter.  My first “professional” computer—purchased with the $2000 computer allowance I was given as a new assistant professor at Illinois—was an IBM PS/2 286, and it had an amazing twenty megabytes of storage on the hard drive.  (I see that these items are somewhat less expensive today.)  But after a couple of years, that wasn’t enough to hold all my course stuff, correspondence, miscellaneous detritus, and the manuscript of my first book, so when the book was published I deleted it from the hard drive.  It might still be on some 3.5” disks somewhere—I don’t know, because I haven’t seen a 3.5” disk in many years.  But that was probably the last time I deleted a manuscript.  Today, I have hundreds of these manuscript and protomanuscripty things sitting around, and I could have thousands more without straining my one-quindecillion-byte storage capacity even a teeny bit.  And so it is that I found an orphaned essay over the weekend, an essay I’m dragging out of the back of the e-closet and offering to you free of charge, just this once.

It was a whimsical piece of fluff for a major national magazine, and I wrote it about seven years ago.  But it was an assignment, not an over-the-transom thing, and the occasion was the publication of National Geographic’s survey of “geographic literacy.”  There were apparently some people who hoped that the events of 9/11 would have led Americans to learn a bit more about Othercountriestan, but they were deeply disappointed to find that in 2002, Americans were almost precisely as colossally ignorant of Othercountriestan as they had been in 1988.  I decided, however, not to take the obvious “9/11 taught us nothing” bait, and offer instead what I thought was a cute little hook in the final paragraph.  My editor liked it, but his editor considered it “evergreen” material, the kind of thing one cannot run even on the slowest news day when nothing is happening except for “Area Dog Bites Man Again.”  I’d thought that the final-graf hook was a pre-emptive answer to that complaint (which is why I thought it up!), but alas, it wasn’t.  I admit that most of the time, when an essay of mine gets rejected (and this happens with some frequency, you know), it’s because the essay sucks.  But this was one of the very few times when the essay didn’t clearly suck (though you may disagree!), so I wound up getting an odd consolation prize out of the experience: my editor passed me along to a friend who worked for Golf magazine, where I wound up writing two 900-word pieces five or six years ago.  (They didn’t like my second effort at all, really—I wanted to argue that the 1979 reformatting of the Ryder Cup, which pitted the US against Europe instead of  just UK/Ireland and led to Europe’s epochal victory in 1985—the first US loss in almost thirty years—provided the impetus for the creation of the European Union.  Not really, of course, but the point is that US postwar dominance of the Ryder Cup maps pretty well onto US postwar dominance of everything else, and maybe now the times they are a-changin’. Golf magazine wanted me to stick to predicting the outcome.  So that didn’t work.  But I loved writing about the Masters for them, and still hope someday to be sent to Augusta National on assignment.)

Anyway, here’s the poor orphaned thing.  It was called “Where in the World,” and I do hope you don’t mind my dredging it out of its probably-deserved obscurity.  I can’t help adding proudly that Jamie, then 11, did better on the geography test than 90+ percent of his American peers (preteen with Down syndrome pwns American public!).  Nick, then 16, did better than 99.99 percent of ‘em, but then, Nick is a former Geography Bee star, having made it to the 1997 Illinois state finals at the tender age of eleven.  I like it that my kids know stuff.

___

In November, the National Geographic Education Foundation released the results of its “2002 Global Geographic Literacy Survey.”  18-to-24-year-olds in nine countries were tested by the survey—Canada, Mexico, Germany, Italy, Sweden, France, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States—along with 25-to-34-year-olds in the US.  And even for those of us who have long since grown accustomed to hearing that young Americans are four times more ignorant of everything than their peers elsewhere, the report is stupefying.

Where to start?  Thirty percent of US respondents could not locate the Pacific Ocean.  A meager thirteen percent recognized Iraq on a world map; one wonders whether there was any significant overlap between this group and the fourteen percent who could locate Israel. Fifty-eight percent knew that Afghanistan was the home base for the Taliban and al Qaeda, but only 17 percent could locate the actual home of that home base.  Astonishingly, every other nation in the survey outperformed the US on this question; 63 percent of Mexicans got it right, 70 percent of the French, and so on, all the way up to 84 percent for Great Britain and Sweden.  On a related front, 67 percent of French young adults, and 66 percent of Italians, knew that the disputed Kashmir region is disputed by India and Pakistan.  Thirty-six percent of Americans got that one.

Reports like these are now a routine part of the American cultural landscape; it may even be possible to say that the American public is reasonably well-informed about the fact that it cannot even identify the countries whose ten-year-olds clean our clocks in geography quizzes.  So, too, liberals’ and conservatives’ responses to such reports have become routine in turn.

The pattern is especially predictable when the issue is American history, and the pattern runs something like this: the Exasperated Educational Institute announces that 45 percent of American college students do not know in which century the American Civil War occurred, and another 23 percent do not know that there was a Civil War at all.  The William Bennett Foundation for a Solid Foundation blames the results on watered-down, “feelgood” college curricula and academic leftists’ disdain for objective knowledge.  The Association of Earnest Liberal Academics replies that students shouldn’t simply memorize names and dates; it’s more important for them to understand the origins of the Federal Reserve System and its relations to emerging global markets than to identify Andrew Jackson and Nicholas Biddle on multiple-choice tests.

This is a plausible enough answer on its face.  Its only flaw is that earnest liberal academics like myself actually aren’t all that sure that most American college students understand the Federal Reserve System and its relations to anything.  So we sometimes fall back on our second line of argument, namely, that college students in 1964 or 1982 were every bit as ignorant as this year’s survey victims.  We’re usually right about this, and the Bill Bennett people are usually wrong in thinking that everything went downhill right around the time the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show.  But rarely is it so depressing for an educator to be “right” about her students and fellow citizens.

What’s interesting about the National Geographic survey, however, is that there simply doesn’t seem to be a cogent strategy for explaining it away.  It’s quite impossible to argue that college-age Americans don’t have to be able to identify foreign countries so long as they know about large-scale population dynamics, migration patterns, and other subjects relevant to “social geography.”  The survey shows quite clearly that college-age Americans don’t know anything about those subjects, either.

Some of my colleagues would suggest that Americans’ ignorance of the world makes perfect sense: the country rallies behind wars in distant countries, surely, because so few Americans have any idea where those countries are or what US policy toward them has been.  Americans are a singularly insular, self-absorbed bunch, and if they knew more about the world outside their borders, they’d be more receptive to internationalist analyses of the world outside their borders.

This argument has some merit, but the National Geographic survey is even more unsettling.  It turns out, for instance, that Americans are not merely ignorant about the world; they’re also staggeringly ignorant about the United States.  Only 25 percent of respondents knew that the U.S. population is between 150 and 350 million; 30 percent put it at 1-2 billion.  Only 51 percent could point to New York on a U.S. map (and only 39 percent of the 25-34 group could do so); 30 percent managed to find New Jersey.  Eleven percent of Americans could not find the US at all—though we can take cold comfort in the fact that in the last survey, in 1988, that figure was eighteen percent.

Two other things have happened since 1988: the number of Americans who think that reading maps is “absolutely necessary” has declined from 74 to 43 percent, and—although the National Geographic survey does not take stock of this—the number of global positioning systems available to ordinary Americans has increased by approximately infinity percent, from zero in 1988 to many, many now.  Automobiles, recreational boats, golf carts, televisions and watches come equipped with GPS; the laptop on which I write this can tell me precisely where on Earth it is.  Perhaps there is an inverse relation between our collective expertise and our collective knowledge: the more sophisticated our navigational systems become, the less we think we need to know.  It is as if we Americans have surrounded ourselves with systems that can tell us precisely where we are—but not, unfortunately, where anyone else might be.  Every last one of us knows that we are exactly where we are right now, and so we shall remain, until our nation’s geographers and educators provide us with the Global Decentering System we so desperately need.

Across the country last week thousands of Americans gathered at more than 850 house-parties organized by the Sierra Club to watch a new documentary, 'Coal Country'. I meant to write about the doc last week but better late than never especially as the movie's screenings have been met with intimidation and outright threats of violence in several places, with the unseen hand of big coal working with local officials to prevent the movie from being shown.

A stunning film that exposes the devastation of mountaintop removal coal mining to the forests, streams, and communities of Appalachia, 'Coal Country' puts the personal stories of residents of the hardscrabble coal towns at the heart of the story -- both working miners whose livelihoods depend on the mines and longtime locals organizing against the devastation of their native preserves. Far from a one-sided polemic, the film is an intimate portrait of the complex issues facing these areas with a keen understanding of the need for jobs, and the relative prosperity that coal brings to areas that desperately need cheap energy.

The trailer gives a sense of the power, beauty, tragedy and inspiration of the film.

Is there something inherently wrong with entrusting a private company to run a prison? Might this even be unconstitutional? As far as I'm aware, no court in Europe or the United States has entertained this question. When and if one does, there will now be a precedent to cite: a potentially historic 8-1 ruling just handed down by the Supreme Court in Israel that overturned a 2004 Knesset amendment permitting the establishment of such prisons.

In an opinion rightly hailed as a "bombshell" in 'Haaretz', Israeli Supreme Court President Dorit Benisch did not deny that privatizing prisons might potentially save money. She simply determined that incarceration infringes on such fundamental liberties that only the state should carry out this function, not least since the alternative is to turn prisoners into a means of extracting profit. "Economic efficiency is not a supreme value, when we are dealing with basic and important rights for which the state has responsibility," ruled Benisch.

The ruling is not without its ironies, among them the fact that Israel doesn't actually have a written constitution, only a set of Basic Laws that are supposed to serve as a guideline for legal rulings. There is also the fact that, as Yonatan Preminger noted in this fine article in the magazine 'Challenge' a year ago, the conditions in Israel's state-run prisons have often been abysmal, with prisoners and security detainees (mainly Palestinians) crowded into cramped, squalid cells bereft of adequate beds and toilet facilities.

BEIJING--During President Obama's recent visit to China, he got some advice on Afghanistan from Chinese government officials – and an offer of Chinese assistance toward a negotiated settlement of the war.

Yang Wenchang, a retired senior Chinese diplomat who is currently the president of the Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs (CPIFA), told a small group of US journalists that China is willing to cooperate with the United States in finding a way out of the Afghan morass. "The two presidents discussed the issue at length," said Yang, who maintains extensive contacts with US and other Western officials as head of CPIFA. "China will cooperate."

However, during a wide-ranging discussion over dinner at an Italian restaurant in Beijing, the former ambassador said that China does not believe that the US and NATO can succeed militarily. "I think Obama should realize from the outset that no outside power can rule Afghanistan. The Russians tried to change the system in Afghanistan for ten years," he said. "Many Americans, especially among the Republicans, want to send more troops. I don't think NATO can succeed."

Follow the Berkeley standoff via microblog. Also see this video of a unionized campus worker addressing several hundred UCSC students during the third day of the current occupation. Best updates on California occupations here; best strike and breaking media from UPTE; and all other UC news at Newfield et al’s place here.

Update 5pm PST: Berkeley police turned off the campus wireless and sent in the SWAT team: the last transmission was the microblogger recording SWAT smashing the hinges off the doors. Image of the cops bursting in can be found here. Latest: reports of 40 UC-B students arrested, 1 seriously injured.

Update 530 pm: it appears that UC Davis is reoccupied, with as many as 100 students occupying Dutton Hall. No blog source yet, but follow this DailyKos diary and this microblog aggregation.

For those keeping journalistic score: the NY Times, LA Times and CNN utterly whupped the trade press on covering the occupations. Best image, LA Times. Second best image: SFChronicle.

x-posted: howtheuniversityworks.com

Arrests of 52 students at UC Davis and others at UCLA ended 1-day occupations at both places, and at San Francisco State, but a new occupation has begun at Berkeley, where the occupiers report that police beat and pepper-sprayed students to re-take the building’s first floor. Students appear to hold the second floor at this time. Two buildings remain occupied by hundreds of students at UC-Santa Cruz, which has been the epicenter of the California occupation movement.

Since the first UCSC occupation featuring only a few dozen students earlier this term, their rhetoric and tactics have spread across the state: even the the more respectable “UC solidarity” movement uniting staff, faculty and students have taken up their mantra, to “escalate” the struggle.

The expanded wave of occupiers, featuring a reported 200-300 students in the Kerr admin building and 500 students in the Kresge town hall, have articulated detailed demands: see below.

From Virginia Woolf’s letters:

Whatever one may say about the Victorians, there’s no doubt they had twice our - not exactly brains - perhaps hearts. I don’t know quite what it is; but I’m a good deal impressed.

She had just been reading “the entire works of Mr. James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, so as to compare them with the entire works of Dickens & Mrs Gaskell; besides that George Eliot; & finally Hardy.” About the experience of reading “G.E.” she writes to another friend, “I was so much struck by her goodness that I hope it wasn’t my article that you thought hard. She is as easy to read as Tit Bits: and it was a surprise to me; magnificent in many ways.” The “article” to which she refers is her piece on George Eliot for the Times Literary Supplement, originally published exactly 90 years ago today. It is a wonderful essay, at once stringent and sympathetic:

[T]hough we cannot read the story [of GE’s early life] without a strong desire that the stages of her pilgrimage might have been made, if not more easy, at least more beautiful, there is a dogged determination in her advance upon the citadel of culture which raises it above our pity. Her development was very slow and very awkward, but it had the irresistible impetus behind it of a deep-seated and noble ambition. Every obstacle at length was thrust from her path. She knew everyone. She read everything. Her astonishing intellectual vitality had triumphed. Youth was over, but youth had been full of suffering. Then, at the age of thirty-five, at the height of her powers, and in the fulness of her freedom, she made the decision which was of such profound moment to her and still matters even to us, and went to Weimar, alone with George Henry Lewes. . . . By becoming thus marked, first by circumstances and later, inevitably, by her fame, she lost the power to move on equal terms unnoted among her kind; and the loss for a novelist was serious. Still, basking in the light and sunshine of Scenes of Clerical Life, feeling the large mature mind spreading itself with a luxurious sense of freedom in the world of her ‘remotest past’, to speak of loss seems inappropriate. Everything to such a mind was gain. All experience filtered down through layer after layer of perception and reflection, enriching and nourishing.

The books are astonishingly readable and have no trace of pomposity or pretence. But to the reader who holds a large stretch of her early work in view it will become obvious that the mist of recollection gradually withdraws. It is not that her power diminishes, for, to our thinking, it is at its highest in the mature Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people. But the world of fields and farms no longer contents her. In real life she had sought her fortunes elsewhere; and though to look back into the past was calming and consoling, there are, even in the early works, traces of that troubled spirit, that exacting and questioning and baffled presence who was George Eliot herself. . . .

[Her heroines] do not find what they seek, and we cannot wonder. The ancient consciousness of woman, charged with suffering and sensibility, and for so many ages dumb, seems in them to have brimmed and overflowed and uttered a demand for something - they scarcely know what - for something that is perhaps incompatible with the facts of human existence. George Eliot had far too strong an intelligence to tamper with those facts, and too broad a humour to mitigate the truth because it was a stern one. Save for the supreme courage of their endeavour, the struggle ends, for her heroines, in tragedy, or in a compromise that is even more melancholy. But their story is the incomplete version of the story that is George Eliot herself. For her, too, the burden and the complexity of womanhood were not enough; she must reach beyond the sanctuary and pluck for herself the strange bright fruits of art and knowledge. Clasping them as few women have ever clasped them, she would not renounce her own inheritance - the difference of view, the difference of standard - nor accept an inappropriate reward. Thus we behold her, a memorable figure, inordinately praised and shrinking from her fame, despondent, reserved, shuddering back into the arms of love as if there alone were satisfaction and, it might be, justification, at the same time reaching out with ‘a fastidious yet hungry ambition’ for all that life could offer the free and inquiring mind and confronting her feminine aspirations with the real world of men. Triumphant was the issue for her, whatever it may have been for her creations, and as we recollect all that she dared and achieved, how with every obstacle against her - sex and health and convention - she sought more knowledge and more freedom till the body, weighted with its double burden, sank worn out, we must lay upon her grave whatever we have it in our power to bestow of laurel and rose.

This month’s big book—it would have been nice to say ‘this year’s’, but having got hold of a copy I discover it more curio than cry-it-from-the-rooftops—is Nabokov’s last, unfinished novel: The Original of Laura. Three things:

:I:
This is a large, thick-paper, orgulous and ultimately self-regarding exercise in the material business of book-making. Plush. Each of Nabokov’s original note-cards is reproduced in facsimile form, with all his neat, slightly childish, un-joined-up pencil handwriting upon them. The text of each card is reproduced in type (‘Filosofia’ a variant of ‘the classic Bodoni font’) below; but (can you smell that? that whiff of gimmicry?) each of the facsimile note-cards is perforated such that they could be removed from the book ‘and rearranged’, says Dimitri Nabokov, invitingly, in the book’s preface, ‘as the author likely did when he was writing the novel.’

All of this seems to me very poorly judged. I can understand, from a practical point of view, Penguin wanting to make an ‘event’ book out of this title—not least because there’s so little here, practically speaking, of the actual novel to be excited by. But it is based on a false premise. Dmitri Nabokov’s introduction, despite his crotchety, old aristocratic manner, is actually inviting a sort of intimacy of the reader. He rehearses his father’s instruction that the unfinished book be burned, and then goes through the reasons why he did not do so, sniping at ‘the lesser minds among the hordes of letter writers that were to descend upon me’ as he does so. The whole book, from a physical point of view, is a sort of mummification. ‘You and I,’ it says, confidentially, ‘we understand the difficulties; we care about Vladimir and his literary genius—we share a filial duty. We respect his reputation too much to ... let us say ... carp at the rubbishy aspects of what is, viewed objectively, barely-a-fifth-finished project. Instead, with ritual solemnity, we shall play the game, and go through the motions: as if the book is still being written, as if the decision not to burn the MS could conceivably be based on aesthetic, rather than commercial, grounds.’ The book, in short, is being presented to us as a fetish.

But here’s the thing: I neither have nor want that sort of relationship with my imaginary Vladimir Nabokov. He is of course one of the twentieth-century writers I admire the most, even—for some of his novels—adore the most; but this admiration, and adoration, has never been about intimacy. He’s not the reader’s friend, or father-figure, or anything like that. He’s something much more aloof—that’s the whole point of him. This exercise in faux-filiality grandly misses the point.

In response to my previous post on Lévi-Strauss, rob reminded me of Derrida’s essay, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” revised from his presentation at the 1966 structuralism symposium held at Johns Hopkins. And not only that. In evoking Kant and capital “R” Reason, rob also reminded me that both Lévi-Strauss and Derrida had been operating within a philosophical tradition that stretches back to Kant though Heidegger and Hegel and various others. While I certainly read in that tradition as an undergraduate, and marked those books in blue, red, and green felt-tip pen, I abandoned it with Derrida, or perhaps with Lévi-Strauss himself – the exact formulation doesn’t matter.

I want to revisit that abandonment. Perhaps, even, re-enact it. In a small way.

Let us consider some passages from Derrida’s essay, which I present not to critique them, but simply to display them. For example (p. 256 in Macksey and Donato, The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, 1970): “In effect, what appears most fascinating in this critical search for a new status of the discourse is the stated abandonment of all reference to a center, to a subject, to a privileged reference, to an origin, or to an absolute arché.” On the next page (257): “There is no unity or absolute source of the myth. . . . Everything begins with the structure, the configuration, the relationship. The discourse on this acentric structure, the myth, that is, cannot itself have an absolute subject or an absolute center.” From the subsequent discussion, in response to Jean Hypolite: “. . . this center can be either thought as it was classically, like a creator or being or a fixed and natural place; or also as a deficiency, let’s say; or something which makes possible “free play” . . . and which receives—and this is what we call history¬—a series of determinations, of signifiers, which have no signifieds [signifiés] finally, which cannot become signifiers except as they begin from this deficiency.”

That is to say, talk and thought of the center, the subject, and the sign are intimately bound together. Eugenio Donato, in his contribution to the symposium (“The Two Languages of Criticism”), notes (p. 94): “It is the possibility of maintaining the discontinuity between the order of the signifier and the order of the signified that permits Lévi-Strauss to avoid dealing with the problem of the individual subject and makes for the extreme rigor of his work.” Note that phrase, “extreme rigor.”

x-posted: howtheuniversityworks.com

Update: you’ve got to watch this video.

Yesterday the UC Regents walked into a room packed with gasoline and nonchalantly lit their cigars--handing down tuition increases that will hike 2010 rates 44% over 2008, turning higher ed into a gated community for the offspring of California’s “Real Housewives” class. Their bet is the usual bet made by the comfortable: someone else will get scorched.  

Back in the ancient days of the Moretti book event I spent alot of time googling “xanadu” and related searchs by way of investigating the xanadu meme. It was nudgy work, but also fun.

I’ve just discovered some more fun things to do with Google. I assume that these have been around for awhile and that many of you know about them. For those who don’t, here’s a few words.

When you’re on the Google search page you’ll see a Show options link at the upper left, below the Google logo. Click on in and you’ll get a column of options listed down the lefthand side. The one’s that interest me are Wonder wheel and Timeline.

When you click on Wonder wheel the display changes so you see a hub-and-spokes arrangement with your search term at the hub and associated searchs at the ends of the spokes. If you click on one of the spokes, that search becomes the hub and has its own array of spokes (which your original search at the end of one of them). You can then click on one of those spokes and . . . you get the idea.

Timeline gives you as bar graph moving from the past at the left to the present at the right. The height of the bar is proportional to the number of times your search term is associated with that date range. Just what that association means is something you have to determine by inspection, though often enough it does mean that your term has appeared in a document written at that time.

The bar graph itself is clickable. When you click on a date range, you get a new bar graph spanning just that range. You can keep going until you’re looking at single years.

I assume one can use these features in service of serious work, though I’ve not tried it yet. I’ve mostly been having fun.

Yesterday my department debated a motion to cross-list a course on Dante offered through the Italian Studies program*--that is, to enable students to take it as an English course, and thus, among other things, to let English majors count it towards the number of English courses they need to fulfill their degree requirements. There was a fair amount of discussion, some of it about practicalities, but some of it about principles. Nobody questioned that it was a good thing to encourage English majors to study Dante, but should their doing so be considered part of their work in ‘English’? If so, why not Boccaccio, Proust, Flaubert, or Tolstoy? It was pointed out that we already cross-list a Russian course on Nabokov. We also offer courses ourselves that feature literature in translation: World Literature, for instance, or Canadian literature (Quebec, remember?). We used to have a course on the Bible as literature. So the working definition of ‘English’ as a discipline is not ‘the study of literature written in English.’ Is it ‘the study of literature written in English, or highly influential on English writers, or in the context of Anglophone colonialism’? Or is the discipline defined, not by its content, but by its methodology? But there is no one ‘methodology.’ What does it mean, in theory but even more pressingly in practice, if we can’t point to anything and say ‘that is not what we do,’ or, to a student, ’this is what we do here’? To be sure, departmental or disciplinary boundaries have many arbitrary or circumstantial features. My university, like most these days, is keen on interdisciplinarity, and most of us recognize that English has been interdisciplinary all along. And yet I couldn’t help feeling during yesterday’s discussion that our inability to explain (or our refusal to delimit) what counted as an ‘English’ course and what didn’t reflected a broad and, in some ways, disabling incoherence in my field. It is certainly pedagogically disabling, at least in classes with a literary-historical framework, because you can’t count on any student having learned anything in particular before he or she shows up, even in a 4th-year seminar. For example, in my seminar on Victorian sensation fiction, many of the students have not studied any Victorian literature before. As far as they are concerned, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Ellen Wood are representative Victorian novelists--and so, in some senses, they are, except that essential to critical work on their novels is some sense of how and why they had until fairly recently been excluded from ‘the canon.’ it is very difficult to engage the class with the implications of our reading Wood at all when they haven’t read any Dickens or George Eliot. Now, English students have yet one more course they can take towards their degree instead of The Nineteenth-Century Novel (or Romantic Poetry or Restoration Drama or African-American Literature or Science Fiction). It’s a zero-sum game for them, after all.

And yet it’s hard not to see it as a good thing that more of ‘our’ students might read The Divine Comedy. I never have, and I know it is my loss.

*The course is taught in English and the works are read in translation.

Unintentionally, mind you. And present company excepted, of course.

He is already to be classed as a “general writer,” corresponding to the comprehensive wants of the “general reader,” and with this industry on his hands it is not enough for him to keep up the ingenuous self-reliance of youth: he finds himself under an obligation to be skilled in various methods of seeming to know; and having habitually expressed himself before he was convinced, his interest in all subjects is chiefly to ascertain that he has not made a mistake, and to feel his infallibility confirmed. That impulse to decide, that vague sense of being able to achieve the unattempted, that dream of aerial unlimited movement at will without feet or wings, which were once but the joyous mounting of young sap, are already taking shape as unalterable woody fibre: the impulse has hardened into “style,” and into a pattern of peremptory sentences; the sense of ability in the presence of other men’s failures is turning into the official arrogance of one who habitually issues directions which he has never himself been called on to execute; the dreamy buoyancy of the stripling has taken on a fatal sort of reality in written pretensions which carry consequences. He is on the way to become like the loud-buzzing, bouncing Bombus who combines conceited illusions enough to supply several patients in a lunatic asylum with the freedom to show himself at large in various forms of print. If one who takes himself for the telegraphic centre of all American wires is to be confined as unfit to transact affairs, what shall we say to the man who believes himself in possession of the unexpressed motives and designs dwelling in the breasts of all sovereigns and all politicians? And I grieve to think that poor Pepin, though less political, may by-and-by manifest a persuasion hardly more sane, for he is beginning to explain people’s writing by what he does not know about them. Yet he was once at the comparatively innocent stage which I have confessed to be that of my own early astonishment at my powerful originality; and copying the just humility of the old Puritan, I may say, “But for the grace of discouragement, this coxcombry might have been mine.”

Pepin made for himself a necessity of writing (and getting printed) before he had considered whether he had the knowledge or belief that would furnish eligible matter. At first perhaps the necessity galled him a little, but it is now as easily borne, nay, is as irrepressible a habit as the outpouring of inconsiderate talk. He is gradually being condemned to have no genuine impressions, no direct consciousness of enjoyment or the reverse from the quality of what is before him: his perceptions are continually arranging themselves in forms suitable to a printed judgment, and hence they will often turn out to be as much to the purpose if they are written without any direct contemplation of the
object, and are guided by a few external conditions which serve to classify it for him. In this way he is irrevocably losing the faculty of accurate mental vision: having bound himself to express judgments which will satisfy some other demands than that of veracity, he has blunted his perceptions by continual preoccupation. We cannot command veracity at will: the power of seeing and reporting truly is a form of health that has to be delicately guarded, and as an ancient Rabbi has solemnly said, “The penalty of untruth is untruth.” But Pepin is only a mild example of the fact that incessant writing with a view to printing carries internal consequences which have often the nature of disease.
And however unpractical it may be held to consider whether we have anything to print which it is good for the world to read, or which has not been better said before, it will perhaps be allowed to be worth considering what effect the printing may have on ourselves. Clearly there is a sort of writing which helps to keep the writer in a ridiculously contented ignorance; raising in him continually the sense of having delivered himself effectively, so that the acquirement of more thorough knowledge seems as superfluous as the purchase of costume for a past occasion. He has invested his vanity (perhaps his hope of income) in his own shallownesses and mistakes, and must desire their prosperity. Like the professional prophet, he learns to be glad of the harm that keeps up his credit, and to be sorry for the good that contradicts him. It is hard enough for any of us, amid the changing winds of fortune and the hurly-burly of events, to keep quite clear of a gladness which is another’s calamity; but one may choose not to enter on a course which will turn such gladness into a fixed habit of mind, committing ourselves to be continually pleased that others should appear to be wrong in order that we may have the air of being right.

I tell you, that George Eliot was prescient, as well as snarky.

x-posted: howtheuniversityworks.com

Does your idea of public higher education include values like fairness and diversity? Yeah, me too. Ditto for the several hundred grad students drumming in the rain in Illinois today, after their union struck to defend tuition waivers. Get updates and join their 2,500 fans on the GEO Facebook page.

Charging tuition to working graduate students is essentially a pay-to-work scheme that would represent an educational death sentence for many grad students, as Robert Naiman at Huffpost puts it.

Noting that the administration’s refusal to bargain tuition security would fall most heavily on “out-of-state, minority, and foriegn graduate students,” AAUP president Cary Nelson walked the line with GEO this morning.

“The diversity that is the lifeblood of the campus is at stake,” he said.

California Students Demand: “Let us Study!"

Psalm 109: 8. It just gets worse and worse. Scared yet?

This post is going to have it all: comics, fonts, broadbrush high-lowbrow cultural opinionation, curiously reasonably priced British TV.

We’ll start with fonts. Why did the modernists go ga-ga for sans serif? Take Tschichold, my recent subject of study. Early in his career, he dogmatizes that there is something technically obligatory, inherently suited to the Engineering Age, about sanserif type. What induced him to make such an implausibly strong claim, and induced others to buy it, was somehow a tremendous aesthetic impulse in this direction. This felt so necessary. Human beings aren’t skeptical of arguments that give them exactly what they want, so bad arguments are often most interesting as indices of desire. But what was the Big Deal with filing down all the little pointy bits, all of a sudden?

I’ve been curious about this for a while, but not really sure to what extent it was a question that made enough sense to bother asking. On the one hand, it’s almost impossible to prove why such-and-such suddenly became fashionable then-and-there. On the other hand, in a general sense, the explanation in this case is obvious since seriously overdetermined. W.W. I was over, the old was out and discredited, the new was in and had to be radical. Type design slots in almost self-evidently with architectural and design modernism. If you feel you ‘get’ what Gropius, Le Corbusier and Adolph Loos were on about, and why then was the time for it, the likes of Tschichold don’t take much, if any, special explanation. (Not that Tschichold was just taking his cue from architects.) Sans serif was clean and machine-y and new and rational and future-looking; a sternly ascetic, hence somehow spiritually intense-seeming reproach to all that came before. Clean type for a clean slate. What more could you ask for? (What more can be said?)

A pretty good book on my shelf: Forms in Modernism: The Unity of Typography, Architecture and the Design Arts 1920s-1970s [amazon]. The author, Virginia Smith, doesn’t have anything vastly original to say about modernism. (It’s a short book; its treatments introductory in most ways.) But she makes typography the centerpiece of her ‘visual set’, which is an interesting and valid enough choice. You can ‘see’ the unity of modernism ‘through’ modern typefaces quite as much as in modern buildings or modern furniture designs.

So: what more can be said about why modernism went for sans serif? If you read Tschichold’s The New Typography [amazon] you find, unsurprisingly, that he thinks what he is demanding fits with larger movements in the visual arts, painting and photography. Very roughly, photography is supposed to have freed painting from the subject. So we get impressionism, expressionism, then (even more so) cubism, futurism, constructivism, abstraction. (You can read quite a bit of Tschichold’s book through Google books. The chapter on “The New Art” covers this stuff in particular.) It’s intuitive what modern abstract art has to do with sanserif. That is, when Tschichold aligns himself with what Picasso and Braque were up to, it’s not surprising, but difficult to pin it down. Maybe all you can say is: modernism. In the air. Le Corbusier: “Style is a unity of principle animating all the work of an epoch, the result of a state of mind that has its own special character. Our own epoch is determining, day by day, its own style.”

But I just got a really good book that advances an intriguing and much more specific hypothesis. High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture [amazon], by Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik (1990). It’s a big, lavish coffee table affair, which went with a MOMA exhibit. I like it because it’s got lots of great pictures, it’s really well written – I go for that whole effortlessly New Yorkerier-than-thou Gopnik vibe – and it turns out to be surprisingly focused on type styles and comics. What could be better? (Nothing, that’s what.) OK, I really don’t have time to talk extensively about comics tonight, more’s the pity. But I am completely awestruck to learn that the earliest clearly superhero-style kick to the face by a masked man was delivered by Bibendum, the Michelin Man, with much sang froid. In 1908. Seriously. Why didn’t they give that guy his own comic book? He’s completely awesome.

Right. Sans serif type. Varnedoe and Gopnik note that, as early as 1911, Braque stenciled in ‘Bal’ and ‘Bach’ in a pair of works. See here and here. Then Picasso responded with “Ma Jolie” and “Still Life With Chair Caning” and such. And others, Gris, got into the act. All this collaging. In New Typography, Tschichold specifically mentions that Picasso and Braque pioneered novel techniques for introducing into paintings ‘materials previously considered foreign to them’, and that then others took this further; but he doesn’t mention, specifically, that Picasso and Braque introduced type specimens into their works. Or that the type they selected to paste in tended to be of a particular character: cheaply printed, blocky, ‘grotesque’ slab-serif or stenciled. Newspaper headlines and bits of old-fashioned (even for 1911) ad copy. Quirkily out-of-context joky-hoky stuff. In part, this evoked ‘the street’, the city, newspapers, cafes, the bustle of modern life; in part, it must have appealed to Picasso and Braque the way cheap stuff, particularly dated – but date-able – stuff is appealing to us today. We have an ironic affection-disdain for mass culture artifacts with ‘camp’ or nostalgia value. The quality of the type sampling makes this cubist stuff ‘pop’ art before pop. You get this counterpoint between the superfine high formal hermeticism and the craphounding dive into culturally low materiality.

This reminds me of Tschichold on type (quoted in my review): “None of the typefaces to whose basic form some kind of ornament has been added (serifs in Roman type, lozenge shapes and curlicues in Fraktur) meet our requirements for clarity and purity. Among all the types that are available, the so-called “Grotesque” (sanserif) or “block letter” (skeleton letters would be a better name) is the only one in spiritual accordance with our time.” But why in spiritual accord? What Varnedoe and Gopnik argue is that, oddly, the ‘spirit’ of the earliest attempts to make 19th Century ‘grotesque’ type essentially ‘modern’ was more mocking-affectionate than straight. Then the traffic between high and low got very complex, in a two-way way, especially when you throw advertising in the mix. Highbrows dumpster-dive for print ephemera, then advertisers copy from highbrows, back and forth. Let me just quote the authors, summarizing one nice source they cite.

Mehemed Fehmy Agha, who formed his tastes in Germany in the 1920s and thus had direct experience of the work of pioneering modern graphic designers such as Lissitsky, was called to America by the publisher Condé Nast in 1929. “Dr.” Agha, as he was known, subsequently redesigned American Vogue and other publications in a way that helped bring the United States into the wave of modernization of type styles and layout sweeping Europe. And in 1931, Agha wrote a brief but acute article that gave an overview of one particular element in the changes he had lived through and affected: the emergence of sans serif as the official family of typefaces constituting the modern style.

Picasso, Braque, and Gris, as we noted earlier, recurrently plucked out of newspapers and ads examples from a certain class of typefaces: chunky, utilitarian, and bearing either blocky serifs or none at all. When they did that, around 1912- 15, these forms were hangovers of the crude poster typefaces of the previous century. The first sans-serif faces, after 1800, may have owed something to the emulation of archaic stone inscriptions from antiquity, as a part of neoclassicism; but a great many of the most prominent ones had been devised out of the necessity, in the huge wooden pieces of type used for posters, to eliminate serifs that would have been especially vulnerable to the physical pressures of printing. The Cubists’ selection of these workaday characters from the printer’s bin, dated and utterly lacking in anything one could call style, represented what Agha called “a light Gallic joke,” that then was taken up in earnest by outsiders in Germany and Russia. (The Futurists, too, adopted rudely bold poster type for the masthead of their journal Lacerba; and Picasso responded positively by including that masthead in one of his works. In the context of the broad and fast-spreading influence of the Cubist and Dada innovations in collage and papier collé, outsiders saw the direct simplicity of these letters, isolated or in word fragments, as an essential element in the new look of modernity. And these eager innovators then formulated procedures that would capture that look – by imposing programmatically tilted type lines and sudden scale shifts, and also by devising new, no-nonsense, “functional” sans-serif type fonts. The vogue for the new typefaces, seemingly so attuned to the machine age in their stripped-down bareness, then spread through magazines to expositions and eventually back out into the broadest currents of public print in the 1930s …

Agha saw that the history of sans-serif type was a wheel: starting from the lowest, least prestigious strata of public currency, moving up by artists’ selection into rarefied levels of avant-garde experiment, and from there revolving back around to reenter, and transform, the widest currency of public language. His typographical mini-history involved only matters of the form and style of the modern world of words, rather than more telling issues of its content; but it points out some basic facts of twentieth century history that are useful to recognize. Above all, it suggests that the world of modern public language and that of avant-garde innovation are not irrevocably separate domains, but parallel historical developments, which have recurrently engaged in exchanges, in both directions. The story is one in which modern art was neither simply an enemy of modern commercial culture nor just an occasional poacher on its territory, but a partner in a complex pas de deux of give-and-take: the one drew from the other, and then vice versa. Agha’s wheel is a pattern of linkages and transformations that moves things from one category to another, from one use to another, and from one level of consideration to another. Rather than trying to define isolating barriers and divisions, it sketches a case for the interdependence, within modern art, between playful aesthetic innovation and powerful social activism, and between things that seem merely utilitarian, even shopworn, and things that, in the hands of an artist,’ can become potent, meaningful, and complex. In this sense, the little tale about type may also be a typical tale-and its wheel-like motion worth remembering in the larger cycle of modern art’s interchanges with popular culture. (pp. 59-61)

Now this is waaay too simple to be a magic bullet explanation of why sanserif took off. Varnedoe and Gopnik, by implication, makes it seem as though the likes of Tschichold must have been straight men, not fully in on the Picasso-Braque Cubist hipster joke about good old slab serif & co.: the cheap, strong stuff! But it strikes me that there’s probably something to it. The Agha article – I would like to read it – is “Sanserif” in Advertising Arts (supplement to Advertising and Selling), March 1931, pp. 41-47. The thing about Agha is: apparently he was kind of a genius, but also a commercial art director. It’s hard to believe that you should ever just plain believe what such a creature tells you. Surely he is pulling your leg somewhat, just on principle?

What do you think? Is it plausible that the grandfather of cool, corporate Helvetica was a kind of ironic, high-lowbrow Cubist straddle?

As for the reasonably priced British TV? You can get The Prisoner: The Complete Series, for only $29. That’s seriously a good deal.

Sorry, man. Sale’s over. (What can I offer you? Ooh, how about a free Gentle Giant sampler: In A Power Free Interview [amazon]. I have never been able to decide whether this sort of thing is a guilty pleasure, a righteous displeasure – or, what’s that you say? you just want to listen to the vaguely Zappaesque madrigal section? Fine, fine. (I like the first track. Sounds sort of like XTC.)

In his contribution to 'Going Rouge: An American Nightmare', 'The Nation''s Washington, D.C. Editor, Chris Hayes, quotes a joke from a friend in publishing: In the future the Internet will consist entirely of Sarah Palin slide shows. It was disheartening this week to watch the exhaustive coverage of Sarah Palin's book 'Going Rogue' and see so few serious responses to the substance of her book. (And yes, there is substance.) The AP fact-checked Palin, but gone almost completely unanswered are many of the policy prescriptions she is injecting into the political debate: Tax cuts to stimulate job growth (been there, didn't work) and drill, baby, drill as an energy policy.

Fortunately, 'Going Rouge' managed to inject some sanity into the debate. Here's video of Naomi Klein on Wednesday's Joy Behar Show, commenting about Palin's economic policies and her role in the healthcare debate. And here's a great video from GRIT TV, where 'The Nation''s Richard Kim, Max Blumenthal, Salon's Rebecca Traister and Alaskan blogger Shannyn Moore discuss Palin's record in Alaska, and how her policy prescriptions would impact women in America. And here's a thoughtful review of both books from 'Inside Higher Education'.

Lastly, here's a podcast of NPR's On Point from Friday. I was on for the full hourlong week in review--topics were Palin, mammograms and healthcare.

Ten types of commenter, of which the last are the rarest.

1. The commenter who has not read the post properly, decides they know what it says anyway, and fires off a series of disgusted observations.




2. Commenter who applies the most uncharitable possible interpretation to the post, and goes straight into rant mode.




3. The commenter who takes the opportunity to make some sarcastic remarks highlighting his (99% of cases are male) own superior scholarship/intelligence and damning the CT author. “If only Chris has read the second treatise of Heinrich von Pumpkin in the original German, he’d be aware ….”




4. The commenter who uses every comment as a peg on which to hang his (yes, “his”) own obsessions about, e.g. analytical philosophy, populism, Palestine, etc




5. The commenter who simply wants to make nasty personal remarks about the CT author, often about female members of the collective, often using an alias.




6. The commenter with a sense of grievance against CT following their treatment in some comment thread back in 2004.




7. The commenter who notices that a CT author said P in 2005 and not-P in 2008, and who gives every impression of compiling an archive of such contradictions.




8. The commenter who has posted in the thread in error, and angrily denounces literary theory in a discussion of Irish cuisine.




9. The spambot.




10. The commenter who reads what we write, tries to have a conversation, is occasionally appreciative, points out mistakes helpfully rather than as “gotchas”, brings their own knowledge to the table.

Sarah Palin may have the headlines.

But Harry Reid has a health-care reform bill, and it is advancing. Indeed, with Saturday night's 60-39 Senate vote to open a historic debate on the measure, the movement humanize America's healthcare system -- which began almost 70 years ago -- is closer to a congressional breakthrough than at any time in its history.

"Ted would be happy," Reid said Saturday night, invoking the name of the late Senator Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, who spent a political lifetime championing health care reform.

The second volume of Robert Harris's Empire series is just out: Lustrum, which covers 63 BCE, Cicero's eventful year as Consul. And I somehow missed Joy Connolly's State of Speech, which looks important.