Not long ago I posted a link here to my piece about Margo Jefferson's On Michael Jackson, from early 2006 -- which, to be honest, I barely remembered reading let alone reviewing, though that says less about the book than it does about the tendency of stuff to fall out of my brain.

And so it seems almost improbable to have suddenly remembered writing this Intellectual Affairs column four years ago, inspired by Elaine Showalter's bizarre yet inane comparison of Michael Jackson's and Oscar Wilde's trials.

Among other things, Showalter wrote that the expression "gross indecency" was an example of Victorian euphemism.

Now it is true that Showalter is "a cultural critic, professor emeritus of English at Princeton University and [as of 2004-'05 anyway] R. Stanton Avery research fellow at the Huntington Library" (per her contributor's note) and no doubt all of that keeps her very busy indeed. But I still think she should find out what "euphemism" means.

Recent news reminds me of a couple of items that are now topical again.
One is a piece on Michael Jackson from early 2006.
The other, from December, is a column on a book called The Art of the Public Grovel, which with the benefit of hindsight Gov. Sanford might wish he had read while on the beach in Argentina.

Vivian Gornick's most recent collection of essays, published by MIT Press, is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle awards. My short piece on it ran last month in The Barnes & Noble Review, and is reprinted here by permission.

Criticism, wrote Oscar Wilde, is "a mode of autobiography.... It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors." Vivian Gornick might well have taken this as an epigraph for The Men in My Life, a collection of eight short essays on (male) writers whose work has won the critic's passionate attention. The act of reflecting on works of literature turns into a kind of introspection-by-proxy.

Not that the essays turn into narratives about herself. Gornick has published memoirs, but not here. She looks at the novels of George Gissing, or H. G. Wells's Experiment in Autobiography, or Randall Jarrell's role as poetry critic, and finds them elaborating themes that resonate with her concerns with "the intimate relation between literature, emotional damage, and social history."

The odd phrase in that sequence being, of course, "emotional damage" -- which in the fabric of her preoccupations is woven in very tightly with the matter of how men and women treat one another. She admires the verbal brio of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth but cannot escape the problem of their misogyny; it raises the question of how much of their brilliance is driven by the need to protect themselves from the dangers to the ego involved in seeing women as human beings. Gornick belongs to the generation of American feminists that was willing to pose things in terms just so stark as that.

All of the essays are short. They strike the bedrock of insight (in the best cases, anyway; a couple never really do) then call it a day. But there soon emerges a pattern, a critical mosaic, that proves rich and complex enough to reward a second reading.

Liverpool Hope University is now offering -- and before we continue with this sentence, let me be clear that I am not making this up -- "a brand new MA in The Beatles, Popular Music and Society, the first of its kind in the world."

According to a PDF accompanying the announcement:

"This MA will examine the significance of the music of the Beatles in the construction of identities, audiences, ethnicities and industries, and localities; by doing so it will suggest ways to understand popular music as a social practice, focusing attention on issues such as the role of music in the construction of regional identities, concepts of authenticity, aesthetics, meaning, value, performance, and the use of popular music as a discursive evocation of place. Furthermore, in a consideration of popular music as a text, popular music semiotics will also be employed."

Well of course it will.

This development was noted here at IHE as a Quick Take a couple of days ago but I am just now catching up. I have been wondering if it would be possible to write this blog post without quoting White Noise by Don DeLillo and the answer to that question is obviously "no." So let's just get that out of the way.

The relevant passage is, of course, Murray Siskind's remarks to J.A.K. "Jack" Gladney, the professor (indeed, inventor) of Hitler Studies at College-on-the-Hill:

“You’ve established a wonderful thing here with Hitler. You created it, you nurtured it, you made it on your own. Nobody on the faculty of any college or university in this part of the country can so much as utter the word Hitler without a nod in your direction… It must be deeply satisfying for you. The college is internationally known as result of Hitler studies. It has an identity, a sense of achievement. You’ve evolved an entire system around this figure, a structure with countless substructures and interrelated fields of study, a history within history. I marvel at the effort. It was masterful, shrewd and stunningly preemptive. It’s what I want to do with Elvis.“

Which just goes to show that you should be careful what you satirize. To my mind, the best commentary on this news comes from Jonathan Bellman at the always excellent blog Dial "M" for Musicology, who writes:

"The Beatles, bless them, weren’t and aren’t a discipline. Sure, study Musicology and do a dissertation on them, or study Cultural Studies and do a dissertation on them, or Psychology or whatever else. But a degree in the Beatles per se? How would that make you anything but a laughingstock? 'Well, I’ve really spent most of my time with the verses of “In My Life”; I’ll have to go review George Martin’s double-speed piano solo and get back to you before answering your question definitively. This really isn’t my area; I’m an Earlyist, and my dissertation was on pitch bending and blues inflections in the Tony Sheridan sessions, so this is well outside my sub-specialty…'

"The global economy is in free-fall and Liverpool Hope University launches a Beatles degree. Sheesh. I’m sure there are Beatles fans all over the world who should be given the degree on the spot for work already accomplished."

You want discipline? Study Throbbing Gristle.

Last month, John Leonard would have turned 70. He was a friend, and an inspiration for Intellectual Affairs; and it has been painful, these past few months, to know he isn't out there reading any more.

I wasn't able to get to New York on Monday for the memorial service, but am glad to see that Charles Kaiser wrote about it for Columbia Journalism Review's website.

In an ideal situation, the comments section below the article should fill up with additional recollections of the event and tributes the man himself. Alas, this is not the case. A spirit of impertinent irrelevance quickly takes over. But at least the first remark -- left by one Hal Davis -- is on topic:

"Leonard once reviewed, in the daily Times, a Marshall McLuhan volume. Each graf started with a large drop-letter capital. The individual letters, reading down, read 'NONSENSE.'"

The medium was the message...Actually that piece also appears in John's collection This Pen For Hire, which I have been hoping to interest some publisher in reissuing for years on the grounds that it provides a critical panorama of American culture (high, low, and all points in between) in the late 1960s and early '70s. And because -- well, hell, I just love the book.

Opening it again now, I find a credo:

"If you happen to be interested in experimental fiction or logical positivism or cybernetics of the brain or ex-Communists or anthropology or Richard Nixon or psychoanalysis or haiku, either your reviews are going to reflect those interests or, when you look into your shaving mirror, all you will see reflected is the other side of the room. And 800 words aren't enough to explain a whole field to a million readers, 95 per cent of whom couldn't care less. So you make some elitist assumptions about the people who will care, and belly flop straight into deep waters."

Just incorporated a link to it in my column today -- but might as well add it here, too: My short item on Richard Brody's biography of Jean-Luc Godard is now up at the National Book Critics Circle website.

Now that the dust seems to be clearing from the IHE redesign, I'll try to start making this blog a bit more regular.

As noted elsewhere, someone recently described Intellectual Affairs as "one of the real treasures of the internet." That was in reference to the column proper, not this blogal annex. (I sure hope "blogal" is a word.) I'm told there will be a kind of "best of IA" selection up here, once more dust settles.

Over at Quick Study, I posted something yesterday about recent zombie-related hijinks taking place in Austin, not too far from the University of Texas campus.

Now comes word -- via The Little Professor -- of the forthcoming novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which according to the publisher "features the original text of Jane Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action....a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers--and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead."

Zombiefication, as Little Prof points out, "might be just what English departments need: a sure-fire strategy for revivifying (so to speak) the canon!" She then sketches a few "reimagined" Victorian classics.

But why stop there? Why not zombie Thomas Mann? For example, a version of the The Magic Mountain in which Hans Castorp and others at the sanitarium fight off the undead between philosophical discussions.

It would be a lot shorter than the original. The zombies would have a clear advantage.over a bunch of TB patients.

Ben Alpers charts the rise and fall, from Kennedy through Ford, of "the White House Intellectual-in-Residence" (not that it's existed as a post officially so signified, of course):

The designated White House intellectual-in-residence may have marked a particular moment in the American presidency. Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford had very different relationships with and attitudes toward intellectuals in general. Kennedy cultivated them. Johnson and Nixon could be quite hostile to them. Ford quite indifferent. But each felt the need to maintain this peculiar institution created by JFK. And their predecessors and successors—many of whom encouraged more active dialogue between intellectuals and the White House—did not.

What distinguished these four presidencies was not, then, a shared, positive attitude toward intellectuals. The phenomenon of the White House intellectual-in-residence may have, instead, been a kind of apotheosis of the celebration of expertise in post-war American political culture. White House intellectuals could burnish the court of the imperial presidency. But as both that vision of the presidency and the status of intellectuals—and social scientific experts in general—began to wane, the logic of this never-entirely-logical post faded as well.

Alpers' reflections are inspired by Tevi Troy's book Intellectuals and the American Presidency (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), which I've got around here somewhere but haven't read.

Alpers also notes that "though Barack Obama has long enjoyed the support of a number of prominent academics and public intellectuals—from Lawrence Lessig to Cass Sunstein to Samantha Power—there’s been no indication that the Obama White House will revive the post created originally for Arthur Schlesinger, Jr."

(crossposted)

At the National Book Critics Circle blog Critical Mass, Eric Banks passes along word that "a reliable source at the Washington Post passes along the scary word that among the budgetary recommendations new editor Marcus Brauchli is making to his board is the elimination of Book World."

I heard the same thing via a prominent young American historian just before seeing this.

Once again ... Members of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) and the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) ought to contact Brauchli to let him know that this is not acceptable.

The idea that such changes have anything to do with a lack of advertising by book publishers is nonsense. Is a sports section funded by advertising from the teams it covers?

UPDATE: Brauchli tells Critical Mass, "We are absolutely committed to book reviews and coverage of literature, publishing and ideas in The Post. Our readership has a huge interest in these areas."

But please note what he does not say -- that Book World is safe and its future secure. This is pretty basic "we are deeply committed to doing whatever it is we are supposed to be deeply committed to doing" language that would be used even if coverage were reduced to printing stuff off the wire.

Politico reports: "High-level discussions about ending Book World have indeed taken place, according to a Post source with knowledge of the talks. However, no final decision has been made."

Somewhere out on The Edge of the American West, a professor sends a note to one of his young charges who has contacted him about the semester's work:

You don’t need to apologize for emailing me two hours after class about an assignment not due until [much later]. It shows that you’re on top of things, and professors love stupids who are on top of things.

It turns out that the entry for "parapraxis" (as Freud himself preferred to call this sort of thing) in one of the online reference works gives another academic example:

An oft-told example is the story of the young university lecturer who invites her doctoral supervisor, a very eminent psychoanalyst, to give a guest lecture in the department where she has taken her first job. At the end of the distinguished lecture, the junior colleague stands up and says “I’d like to spank the speaker”, betraying some repressed frustration, or possibly unconscious sado-masochistic desire.

For some reason this calls to mind Adorno's remark that nothing is true in psychoanalysis except for the exaggerations. (Unless I'm misremembering that.)