University Diaries

PLAGIARISM, HIGH AND LOW

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:19:10 GMT

Two recent instances of professorial plagiarism - New Zealand novelist Witi Ihimaera and, allegedly, Ohio State University mathematician Azita Manouchehri - have UD thinking once more about this odd and endless practice of stealing other people's words and work.

Students, professors, journalists, scientists -- everyone, it sometimes seems, who puts pinkie to keyboard, feels tempted to block and highlight and copy and paste. You read something you like, something you can use, and you find it hard to resist sweeping it up and dropping it down into your manuscript or mission statement.

Serious plagiarists have been at it forever; it's a way of life. No one should have been surprised when a writer whom Ihimaera plagiarized years ago came forward in light of the latest revelation to complain that Ihimaera hasn't learned a thing since he apologized to him for stealing from a history he wrote.

Technological change has made it pretty easy for plagiarists - especially serial plagiarists, like Ihimaera - to be discovered today. The woman (a book reviewer and editor) who discovered Ihimaera's latest plagiarism sensed something wrong with the writing in his just-released novel. She scored her first plagiarism find merely by Googling the book's obscure subject matter. She then began feeding phrases from the novel into Google Books.

Of course you need a sensitive reader, like this woman, to notice something's wrong; without that initial discomfort, the phrases wouldn't get sent through. But assuming a reader with an eye for scrambled styles, a plagiarist today stands a good chance of detection.

************************************

Plagiarism of the sort Ihimaera commits has always been a pretty high-risk activity. When you spend years weaving a large and varied theft-garment, holes get noticed.

The legitimate author may still be alive, and if she happens to find her stitching pulled out and patched into someone else's page, she's going to be pissed. Even if the author's dead (plagiarists of course prefer the dead), and even if the author's obscure (plagiarists prefer the obscure), some fan in Oxford Mississippi or Beaver Oregon may recognize her favorite writer's patterns.

And there's the common reader. Much magazine and newspaper plagiarism gets pegged by subscribers who inform clueless editors that they've been publishing pre-owned prose.

Plagiarism is no respecter of genre. Speeches, letters, novels, poems, plays, short stories, histories, grant proposals, dissertations, newspaper and magazine articles -- all get taken. UD's covered plagiarism stories involving each of these writing forms.

But plagiarism does fall into two broad categories: haughty and pathetic.

Harvard Law School professors commit haughty plagiarism; Harvard Overseers like Doris Kearns Goodwin do too. Haughties plagiarize because they rarely write their own books anymore. They're too busy. Ateliers of students and ghostwriters do the work, and the haughties might not even lower themselves to check it. Their job is to stamp a bankable name on the book's cover and take credit for what's in it. Which includes - sucks for them - taking credit when what's in it was plagiarized by one of their employees.

Ihimaera's is the more common form of plagiarism, the form whose pathos lies in its motives. The pathetic plagiarist seethes with self-doubt. She's not lazy and arrogant like the haughties; she's afraid. Never very sure of her capacities, she gets shakier and shakier with each success. Her plagiarism is a desperate, dead of night stab at her betters.

*****************************

The institutional response to plagiarism is one of many odd things about this odd practice. Universities, publishing houses - they almost always stonewall, deny, prevaricate, and generally fuss about for months before accepting the inevitable. No one likes pulping a book; no one likes admitting that the people on campus who wrote the anti-plagiarism codes for students are plagiarists.

In keeping with their high status, plagiarizing haughties are rarely punished. They blame the theft on the servants and soldier on.

Pathetics tend to get it right in the kisser.

Their midnight mischief dragged to the light of day, they can only stand there and apologize. Ihimaera says he's going to buy back the entire first run of the book. His university and publishing house are still, as of this writing, in the fuss and prevaricate mode. But nothing can stop what's been set in motion - the revelation of Ihimaera as a career plagiarist. His reputation has been trashed, along with the reputation of the university that continues to defend him.

Especially in high-tech surveillance times, pathetic plagiarism calls not merely for condemnation but for compassion. When, knowing how easily you can be caught, you still plagiarize, something's wrong with you. When you know someone like the historian you plagiarized years ago is still out there, and you still plagiarize, something's wrong.

Do pathetic plagiarists want to be caught? Are they playing a high-risk, borderline psychotic game in which they dare the world to catch them out and destroy them?

"ARENDT REMAINED FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE LOYAL TO THE WHOLE PHILOSOPHIC TRADITION THAT HAD HELPED LEAD TO HITLERISM."

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:44:03 GMT

Male hysteria, currently on view here and here, is a strange thing. It's easy to find, among men, examples of writers like those I've just linked you to -- Ron Rosenbaum and Carlin Romano. It's harder to find them among women, though in her heyday Naomi Wolf was like this.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm always tells you to moderate your emotions in your writing, because if you don't, the writing turns out to be about your narcissistic self-display rather than about your ostensible subject. Beyond making you look unpalatable as a human being, narcissistic self-display makes your reader wonder whether you're being self-promoting, attention-seeking, needy, rather than engaging a subject that transcends your particular experience.

Rosenbaum and Romano want Heidegger's philosophical works labeled hate speech and suppressed; they write in praise of a forthcoming book by a French philosopher which argues for the criminalization of Heidegger's writings on the grounds that his fascist philosophy actively recruits new generations of fascists in Europe, America, and around the world.

One-upmanship being at the core of narcissistic writing, Rosenbaum sees Romano and raises him one. My post's title is Rosenbaum's approving quotation of a writer who sees Hannah Arendt, once Heidegger's lover, as one of the loyalists.

John C. Halasz, a commenter at the blog Crooked Timber, seems to UD to sum up the long controversy over Heidegger's politics and views well:

Whether Heidegger’s thought is “fascist through and through”, as Adorno claimed, is not a question that can be readily and easily decided. Certainly Heidegger was always an arch-conservative thinker veering toward the rechts-radikal, and there is a deep strain of a reactionary, irrationalistic, elitist cult of sacrifice built into his thought. And the recurrent trope of the dispensation of being amounting to a fated commandment,- (“a voice which no face commands”),- has an utterly authoritarian ring to it... [W]hatever one thinks of the man and his work, he did raise in a new way fundamental questions, which are centrally important to the modern consideration of the philosophical tradition, regardless of whether one rejects his exact formulation of the problematic or his answers.

Though he reviled it, Adorno engaged Heidegger's thinking with care throughout his intellectual life; he did not call for its criminalization.

An encounter with Heidegger - and with writers influenced by him - is an important component of a serious liberal arts education.

Among other things, this sort of education prepares you for the emergence of hysterics who want you to stop thinking.

CLUELESS

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:29:54 GMT

Stanley Fish, in his latest New York Times blog post, unwittingly demonstrates why there's so much, as he puts it, "hostility toward [professors] and their practices." Let's take a look.

The responses to last week’s column [in which Fish argued that courts should defer to most internal academic decisions at universities] sent a clear message, and that message is bad news for the academy. The perspectives represented were various, but they converged on a single judgment: the academic world is marked by venality, pretension, irresponsibility and risible claims.

Why does Fish begin by calling this news? Anyone who follows the news -- our highest profile university's ongoing scandalous investment story; outrageous compensation for many coaches and presidents; the increasing use of forms of technology that transform the classroom experience into an online data dumping experience; claims that 1,200-student lecture halls bristling with clickers and PowerPoint and laptops provide a valuable educational experience -- knows that this attitude isn't news, and that it isn't without some justification. Many American colleges and universities are excellent (Harvard, of course, remains so, despite its financial greed and irresponsibility); our best schools dominate the international rankings. But many are quite bad in quite a large number of ways, and it is his readers' experience of those schools that lies behind their comments.

Academics are of course aware that there is a certain amount of hostility toward them and their practices, but they like to attribute that hostility to the public relations efforts of conservative critics who, they contend, construct caricatures that are too easily accepted by the public. But the comments I received come from readers of all political persuasions and from both inside and outside the academic world, about which almost no one had a good thing to say.

Almost no one, from any perspective, had a good thing to say. From my perspective as a blogger who has focused on universities for years, this result is unsurprising. In fact there's intensified hostility against the academic world at the moment because the economy's so volatile, with many out of work or anxious about being out of work Americans scrutinizing with special care permanently employed university professors. What does Fish say about tenure?

Why not then get rid of tenure altogether, as several posters urged? If you did that — if all employment in universities were employment at will — the anxiety, uncertainty and low salaries now experienced by the ever-growing army of adjuncts would be experienced by everyone, and, as a bonus, political meddling would quickly become the order of the day.

No serious critic of tenure's arguing for the at will thing, and Fish shouldn't have taken that version of the complaint against tenure seriously in his defense of it. Richard Chait, who has done thoughtful research about the issue and whose ideas about reform are taken most seriously by most observers, has never argued for the abandonment of tenure, but rather for experimentation with various forms of long-term, well-paid contractual employment alongside, for some faculty, traditional tenure. Fish has a straw man going here.

And let's think about what Fish has just said about tenure. Where did that ever-growing army of adjuncts come from? Did it just start racing down from the hills, spoiling for a fight? One of the reasons it's there, and ever-growing, is that tenure has locked into lifetime guaranteed employment quite a few bad teachers, or inactive researchers, who in a less tenured-up world would have opened space for younger, more vital scholars and teachers.

As it happens, UD's a defender of tenure nonetheless -- on the political basis Fish mentions -- but it does no good to pretend cluelessness as to the perfectly understandable bases of people's hostility against the practice.

One of Fish's readers complains about "“bait and switch” tactics when university bulletins list classes that have not been offered in years." Fish responds:

[C]atalogue copy is prepared yearly (sometimes twice yearly), which means that universities are almost always “lying” about their programs. Let’s say a student applies to a department because it offers a specialty he is interested in, and he arrives to find that the key players — the ones he wanted to study with — departed last month. It’s hard to see why he should have a legal remedy. There is really no one to blame...

Has Fish not heard of the computer? Students rarely get course information from slowly prepared print media; everything's online now, including catalogue copy, so there's no reason why it can't be updated rapidly and constantly. Again, I agree with him that legal remedies for complaints about this are absurd; but he's not acknowledging the reality of universities. The problem's not the slow publication of information.

You want to know the problem? Look at Brown University. Look at the University of Virginia.

Brown students have been complaining, as I noted on my blog a few years ago, that they "routinely encounter multiple course cancellations at the beginning of each semester. The Brown history department, for instance, recently cancelled thirteen courses (because of a 'wealth of research opportunities,' its chair boasts). Political science, economics, and a number of other departments, while not as successful in pursuing research opportunities, also turned out impressive numbers of faculty dropouts."

As for Virginia, I'll quote again from a University Diaries post:

"[The] University of Virginia goes Brown one better, boasting not only large numbers of professors who disappear from courses at the last minute, but an entire department – economics – in which no one teaches more than three courses a year. So this semester, for instance, in the economics department, “two faculty members retired and seven other full professors announced their intention to go on research leave at the same time.” Which meant cancelled courses, or courses taught by adjuncts. But that's not all.

To lure and retain economics faculty members [writes the student paper], the University has begun to offer additional benefits [to this department] not available to the faculty at large… . One such change includes cutting the teaching load from four courses a year to three because professors are attracted to the opportunity to do more research. Cutting teacher course loads creates an additional strain on the number of students who are able to take economics classes. In order to make up for fewer classes taught by full-time faculty, the University has adapted by bringing in adjunct professors… .

Three courses a year being the maximum course load for economics at U Va, some professors will certainly teach fewer than that. If they can whittle it down to two, for instance, in the same semester, they’ve won a semester’s leave every year."

Fish concludes his post by throwing his hands up. No amount of self-criticism and self-correction on our part will help:

There is a general sense that academics have cushy jobs they don’t even perform, that they inhabit a wonderland of “privileged sleaze” and display an “overweening sense of entitlement” [Fish is quoting from reader comments here]. [One commenter] speaks for many when he proclaims, “We simply don’t need a cosseted privileged class able to demand lifetime job security in exchange for some hypothetical intellectual function.” They just don’t believe that the yield of maintaining us in a protected enclave is worth the enormous cost.

Rather than throw up his hands, Fish could start somewhere very modest -- say, with the Friday business. Why don't any academics teach on Fridays? (Well, a few -- including UD -- do. Not many.) Why are most faculties all bunched up on Tuesdays and Thursdays between 10 and 3? If Fish wants to know why a lot of people think academics aren't working, he could visit (but he wouldn't be there, would he?) the halls of any academic building almost any time on a Friday and get his answer. People do have eyes, you know.

CONTEMPLATING DESTRUCTIVE FORCES IN A SECULAR, MEDITATIVE WAY

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:53:42 GMT

The first recipient of the Pen/Pinter Prize, in honor of Harold Pinter, and dedicated to writers who, as Pinter put it in his Nobel address, "define the real truth of our lives and our societies," is Tony Harrison, author most notably of the long poem titled V. We'll take a look at some of V (1985) in a moment.

The real truth. Why not just the truth? Wouldn't that do? Did Pinter mean real simply as a sort of intensifier? Or did he mean to suggest that the world presents us with almost impossibly competing truths, each powerful in its own way, but at odds with other perspectives?

I don't think he meant the latter. Pinter was insanely confident of the rightness of his moral and political views. I think it must be that he wanted at once to suggest the difficulty of arriving at both a global truth that isn't packaged for us by a world of political operatives and public relations firms, and a personal truth that we don't in a similar way package in order to make ourselves and other people more palatable than we really are.

"Poetry is not a popular art," Harrison says in a recent interview. "It doesn't change anything. But it reminds us there are ways of contemplating destructive forces in a secular, meditative way which it's important to keep alive. That's what keeps me going." The calm, ceremonial, rhythmic and rhymed sensibility of Harrison's poems hits in a very alive way against their often violent and dreadful content; and out of this collision emerges something that certainly feels to me like real truth. Not to mention real beauty.

*******************************************

Consider the black tar stream of consciousness which is V. The poem's absolutely autobiographical: The poet, who has left his working class roots in the city of Leeds distantly behind him as he's forged a rather glamorous high-culture life of international travel for his various artistic projects, returns for a rare, brief trip to visit his parents' graves. The cemetery lies near a football stadium (soccer to you); it also sits on top of a now-disused mine.

The poem begins like this:

Next millennium you'll have to search quite hard
to find my slab behind the family dead,
butcher, publican, and baker, now me, bard
adding poetry to their beef, beer and bread.
With Byron three graves on I'll not go short
of company, and Wordsworth's opposite.
That's two peers already, of a sort,
and we'll all be thrown together if the pit,
whose galleries once ran beneath this plot,
causes the distinguished dead to drop
into the rabblement of bone and rot,
shored slack, crushed shale, smashed prop.

Marvelous meaty words. They're addressed to posterity -- not in the elevated way of the typical elegy, but in the casual discourse of grimy urban modernity. Words like bard and distinguished dead feel comic, ironic, self-deflating, in this context.

The poet notes the proximity of

the ground where Leeds United play
but disappoint their fans week after week,
which makes them lose their sense of self-esteem
and taking a short cut home through these graves here
they reassert the glory of their team
by spraying words on tombstones, pissed on beer.

This graveyard stands above a worked-out pit.
Subsidence makes the obelisks all list.
One leaning left's marked FUCK, one right's marked SHIT
sprayed by some peeved supporter who was pissed.

It's strange, isn't it? The steady ritualistic movement of the verse form he's chosen, and the jittery anarchic nature of the scene the verse describes... The language persists in a kind of balanced restraint throughout this very long poem, even as the world it evokes splits apart, rots, disintegrates, dissipates.

The language of this graveyard ranges from
a bit of Latin for a former Mayor
or those who laid their lives down at the Somme,
the hymnal fragments and the gilded prayer,
how people 'fell asleep in the Good Lord',
brief chisellable bits from the good book
and rhymes whatever length they could afford,
to CUNT, PISS, SHIT and (mostly) FUCK!

The linguistic control persists, as do recognizable, established forms of poetic beauty. Neologism, alliteration, assonance, careful meter -- all can be found in brief chisellable bits from the good book. Yet the nihilistic obscenity of the desecrating language pushes itself more and more to the center of the poem.

I find
UNITED graffitied on my parents' stone.
How many British graveyards now this May
are strewn with rubbish and choked up with weeds
since families and friends have gone away
for work or fuller lives, like me from Leeds?

... Since my parents' deaths I've spent 2 hours
made up of odd 10 minutes such as these.
Flying visits once or twice a year,
And though I'm horrified just who's to blame
that I find instead of flowers cans of beer
and more than one grave sprayed with some skin's name?
... What is it that these crude words are revealing?
What is it that this aggro act implies?
Giving the dead their xenophobic feeling
or just a cri-de-coeur because man dies?
So what's a cri-de-coeur, cunt? Can't you speak
the language that yer mam spoke. Think of 'er!
Can yer only get yer tongue round fucking Greek?
Go and fuck yourself with cri-de-coeur!
'She didn't talk like you do for a start!'
I shouted, turning where I thought the voice had been.
She didn't understand yer fucking 'art'!
She thought yer fucking poetry obscene!
I wish on this skin's words deep aspirations,
first the prayer for my parents I can't make,
then a call to Britain and to all nations
made in the name of love for peace's sake.

It seems a mental conversation between the poet and an imagined skinhead; yet it's really the poet talking to himself. Harrison says, in the same interview, that he wants to "take on my own instinct to vandalise my own art. There's always that voice - 'what's the point, who the hell wants a poem?' I have to outstrip that dark, negative force to write anything." But he doesn't so much outstrip it here as versify it, and thereby -- oddly -- ennoble it, this self-vandalizing, annihilating tendency that's scrawled all over the graves.

He ends by once again addressing an imagined visitor to the cemetery ages from now.

If love of art, or love, gives you affront
that the grave I'm in 's graffitied then, maybe,
erase the more offensive FUCK and CUNT
but leave, with the worn UNITED, one small v.
Victory? For vast, slow, coal-creating forces
that hew the body's seams to get the soul.
Will earth run out of her 'diurnal courses'
before repeating her creation of black coal?
If, having come this far, somebody reads
these verses, and he/she wants to understand,
face this grave on Beeston Hill, your back to Leeds,
and read the chiselled epitaph I've planned:
Beneath your feet's a poet, then a pit.
Poetry supporter, if you're here to find
How poems can grow from (beat you to it!) SHIT
find the beef, the beer, the bread, then look behind.

THE SUBTROPICS

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 02:32:29 GMT

On the morning of the day my father killed himself, I woke up from a dream in which I was walking through a cemetery. The dream was very clear in my mind.
Just as clear, as I lay in bed, was the following thought: I should call my parents.

I was in Rochester, New York; they were in Washington DC, where my father had not long ago come home from a week in a psychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt. He'd been depressed for months.

I'd visited him in the hospital. It was difficult to see him unshaven and helpless. It was difficult to know how to behave.

I didn't call home that morning after the dream. I got dressed and went to my teaching job at the University of Rochester.

A few minutes before I went to meet my class, I sat in my office, looked at the telephone on my desk, and again felt compelled to call my parents.

Their number rang and rang. No answer.

I got home late that afternoon to a ringing telephone. I knew what it was, and considered not picking it up.

My aunt's voice was unsteady, but she was willing herself to be tough. I spoke to her calmly as she told me the news, and less calmly to my mother when she came to the phone.

Was the last thing he heard, I wondered, the phone ringing with my phone call? The phone call I made because the dream told me to?

*********************************************************

Carl Jung, among twentieth century thinkers, most famously told us to mind our unconscious, to remember our dreams, to respond to their murmur. I've only had one encounter with what Jung called synchronicity -- this coincidence of my morbid dream and my father's death -- but I've never forgotten it, and I've felt a range of emotions about it. Guilt: Since I seem to have known what was what, why didn't I do more? Pride: What powerful access to the collective unconscious I have! Dread: What else will my unconscious reveal? Doubt: Did this really happen? Did I really have that dream, make that phone call? Well, yes, I did. But is the coincidence of my father's death afterwards merely a coincidence?

I doubt anything like this will happen to me again in my life; yet, having happened, it has teased me through the decades since my father's death with the possibility -- a possibility I resist because of the strong empirical orientation I inherited from him -- of deep-lying connections, selfless access to the selves of others, intimations that transcend time and space.

Of course if you're a Jungian you positively cultivate your unconscious; you endlessly record and analyze your dreams; you seek experiences that dim your daylight ego and illuminate darkness. But non-Jungians too quite commonly experiment with various levels of semi- and non-consciousness in order to see what revelatory material might underlie ordinary perception and feeling. In my reading of literature in graduate school I was fascinated by Thomas DeQuincey's opium visions, by Malcolm Lowry's consul in Under the Volcano, with his mescal hallucinations, and by other writers who ventured to the subtropics.

Whatever relationship you have to the underworld, you might be as intrigued as I about a forthcoming book by Jung, a book unpublished and unknown to almost everyone until now. In an article about it in the New York Times, Sara Corbett provides background:

...[I]n 1913, Jung, who was then 38, got lost in the soup of his own psyche. He was haunted by troubling visions and heard inner voices. Grappling with the horror of some of what he saw, he worried in moments that he was, in his own words, “menaced by a psychosis” or “doing a schizophrenia.” He later would compare this period of his life — this “confrontation with the unconscious,” as he called it — to a mescaline experiment. He described his visions as coming in an “incessant stream.” He likened them to rocks falling on his head, to thunderstorms, to molten lava. “I often had to cling to the table,” he recalled, “so as not to fall apart.”

... He found himself in a liminal place, as full of creative abundance as it was of potential ruin, believing it to be the same borderlands traveled by both lunatics and great artists. Jung recorded it all. First taking notes in a series of small, black journals, he then expounded upon and analyzed his fantasies, writing in a regal, prophetic tone in the big red-leather book. The book detailed an unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind, a vaguely Homeric progression of encounters with strange people taking place in a curious, shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled 205 oversize pages with elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued, staggeringly detailed paintings.

... [T]he book was a kind of phantasmagoric morality play, driven by Jung’s own wish not just to chart a course out of the mangrove swamp of his inner world but also to take some of its riches with him. It was this last part — the idea that a person might move beneficially between the poles of the rational and irrational, the light and the dark, the conscious and the unconscious — that provided the germ for his later work and for what analytical psychology would become. The book tells the story of Jung trying to face down his own demons as they emerged from the shadows. The results are humiliating, sometimes unsavory. In it, Jung travels the land of the dead, falls in love with a woman he later realizes is his sister, gets squeezed by a giant serpent and, in one terrifying moment, eats the liver of a little child. (“I swallow with desperate efforts — it is impossible — once again and once again — I almost faint — it is done.”) At one point, even the devil criticizes Jung as hateful.

This book, The Red Book, has finally been released by Jung's family, and will be available in English soon. It will take its place alongside the mystic writings of monks, the peyote memoirs of hippies, and the chemical experiments of Learys and Huxleys. It will almost certainly be bizarre and off-putting and sometimes ridiculous; but it will no doubt also stir our sense of another world, recall us to our memories of fundamental mysteries.

ANNIE LE

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:42:08 GMT

"Most frightening is the fact that Le may have been killed by someone who walks among us, considering the basement of 10 Amistad St. is only accessible with a Yale keycard," write the editors of the Yale Daily News, as they ponder Annie Le's death - her murder - in the basement of a campus lab.

Now that her body has been found, the quiet rituals of grief - flowers massed along the building where she worked and died, candles lit in her name - replace the frenzy of press conferences.
*****************************************************

First dread, and then horror; but also, now, the ceremonies of remembrance that will gradually rescue her from the dehumanizing circumstances of her death, and bring her back to the world in her full humanity.

******************************************************

The academic year has just begun, which makes this death especially painful. There is a piety we feel about the renewal of university life after the summer. The campus teems withall the power/ That being changed can give, as Philip Larkin, describing just-married couples, puts it in his poem, The Whitsun Weddings. It teems with people getting on with their lives seriously, excitedly. In his autobiography, Ted Kennedy recalls his father saying to him, "Teddy, you can live a serious life or a nonserious life. I'll love you just the same, whatever you choose... But you have to make that choice."

*****************************************************

The specific wound of this sort of death is that the decision to live a serious life had been deeply, successfully made. Even the grainy surveillance shot of Annie Le entering the building where she did her experiments reveals her energetic forward stride: Her hair swings as she walks; she carries heavy-looking scientific equipment of some sort in both arms; she seems focused and intent. Her physical delicacy - she was under five feet tall and weighed less than one hundred pounds - is there in the shot too, but it's her confident happy progress through the world that we register.

The fact that Le was herself just about to be married, the fact that she represented an American success story (her parents emigrated from Vietnam) -- these sharpen the wretchedness.

**********************************************************

There have been swine flu deaths at our colleges this season; there are, every season, campus deaths by intoxication, car crash, suicide. Always there is the misery that comes of considering the disappearance of the beauty, power, and innocence of youth.

The university campus is not a monastery, isolated from the uninnocent world; but it is a place apart. The university exists to give the exquisite ambitions of people like Annie Le spaciousness. She was lost in that space, and we will eventually find out how it is she was lost. Meanwhile, our vocation, as students and professors, is to honor her.

HACKING TUTORIAL

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 02:27:55 GMT

When I read that Ian Hacking, a Canadian philosopher, had won a big prize - the Holberg, worth close to a million dollars - I certainly knew the name, though I couldn't remember having read anything by him. His books were all over our house, scattered among shelves.

Mr UD, a political science professor, has long admired Hacking. I spent last night reading some Hacking to see why.

Like Michel Foucault and Richard Rorty, Hacking hacks away at centuries of words and things in order to arrive at some conclusions about what we know, how we know it, and what it means to say that something is real as opposed to socially constructed...

Though, as I read his book The Social Construction of What?, he's really arguing that this is a false, reductive opposition, and a source of a nasty culture war at that.

Hacking's contribution here - one among many - has been to show the complex and dynamic relationship between things we might want to call constructions and things we might call (Hacking uses John Searle's terminology) epistemologically objective. It drives Hacking nuts when social theorists blithely assert that gender and pretty much everything else is entirely socially constructed. He goes after Stanley Fish pretty savagely along these lines.

He recalls the way Fish defended the journal Social Text after it was found to have accepted and published what turned out to be a hoax paper by Alan Sokal (background on the Sokal hoax here).

[In an] op-ed piece to the New York Times, [Fish] was at pains ... to urge that something can be both socially constructed and real. Hence (urged Fish) when the social constructionists are taken to say that quarks are social constructions, that is perfectly consistent with saying that quarks are real... Fish argued his case by saying that baseball is a social construction. He took as his example balls and strikes. "Are balls and strikes socially constructed?" he asks. "Yes. Are balls and strikes real? Yes." ... Fish wanted to aid his allies, but he did nothing but harm. Balls and strikes are real and socially constructed, he wrote. Analogously, he was arguing, quarks are real and socially constructed. ... Unfortunately for Fish, the situation with quarks is fundamentally different from that for strikes. Strikes are quite self-evidently ontologically subjective. Without human rules and practices, no balls, no strikes, no errors. Quarks are not self-evidently ontologically subjective. The shortlived quarks (if there are any) are all over the place, quite independently of any human rules or institutions.

In a more complicated way, Hacking considers in much of his work the intellectual as well as moral implications of our proceeding to act in the world with always imperfect knowledge. Take autism, and mental illness more generally:

There was a debate long ago between the anti-psychiatrist, Thomas Szasz, and Robert Spitzer, who as editor of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals has directed American psychiatric nosology since 1974. Szasz argued that MDs should treat only what they know to be diseases. Psychiatrists treat troubled people, but cannot identify any genuine medical conditions, so they should leave the treatment to healers, shamans, priests, counselors. Psychiatry is not a branch of medicine. Spitzer replied: what about childhood autism? We know it must be neurological in nature, but we have no idea what the neurology is, so we treat it symptomatically, as psychologists. Is it wrong for us as doctors to try to help autistic children just because we do not yet know the neurology?

Hacking rejects the empirically-grounded-or-nothing extremism of Szasz, but he also understands the ethical, intellectual, and indeed political power some forms of constructionist thinking contain:

... I do not, myself, favor the language of social construction. I am discussing it in connection with psychopathologies because many deeply committed critics of psychiatric establishments find social-construction talk helpful. It enables them to begin with a critique of practices about which they are deeply skeptical. I respect their concerns and have, I hope, represented them fairly, if cautiously. On the other hand, I also respect the biological program of research into the most troubling of psychiatric disorders.

You can see why Rorty was a fan of Hacking's. In clear, straightforward English, both of these pragmatists seek ways of thinking that work, and work in the most important way -- to make us enlightened, and compassionate.

RICHARD POIRIER, VAGUELY

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 22:51:15 GMT

Richard Poirier, man of letters, founding editor of the journal Raritan, and longtime Rutgers University English professor, has died.

In an essay in the book Poetry and Pragmatism, titled "The Reinstatement of the Vague," Poirier beautifully defends the act of immersing yourself in the liquid, frothy, language of literature as an act of freedom, an act of resistance to the ordinary, sometimes bullying language of assertion and proposition and point-making that can wall us in. He quotes William James telling his reader to

"set [each word] at work within the stream of your experience." Each word [Poirier continues] will then be recognized "less as a solution... than as a program for more work." Though this is a worthy enough injunction, it is compounded of terminological blurrings that could easily make anyone unsure of just how and where to carry it out. It would be helpful to know, for example, where this stream of experience is located before we begin to set a word at work within it. Is the stream in us? Or is it shared with others? Are we on it, or is it next to us? In any case, how is one to identify the stream as peculiar to oneself - and how are its movements to be traced without the use of words, words that will inevitably mediate and thus contaminate or redirect the stream's flow? What, besides, can be meant by the word "work"? In the next sentence all he can promise is that if we set the word "at work within the stream," we will discover "a program for more work." But this work will produce nothing beyond an "indication" - an "indication of the way existing realities might be changed."

Vague as all of this might remain, there's a real promise within it: "Language," Poirier writes, "and therefore thinking, can be changed by an individual's acts of imagination, and by an individual's manipulation of words." Stephen Dedalus complains about what he calls "the aquacity of language," but far from complaining about it, says Poirier, Dedalus should dive in and start floating. (Ulysses lovers will recognize Dedalus as the driest of characters, refusing to bathe, or to swim, throughout the novel -- his aridity somehow conveying his spiritual paralysis, his refusal or inability to reenter the stream of humanity.)

Drifty language can "insinuate an identity for the speaker without asserting one," Poirier writes, and this insinuated identity implies a freedom from dominant, even domineering, notions of the self. It allows us not to be pinned down by others' interpretations, or by inherited ideas about what it means to be a certain category of human being.

This languid, almost prelinguistic, soundworld isn't merely a high literary sort of phenomenon:

[T]he deconstructive movements of language are [not] unique to literature. ... [O]rdinary people are in fact immensely sophisticated about the mediating and mediated nature of words and phrases. Most of us talk all day and say nothing worth repeating or repeatable. "What did you two talk about?" "Oh, nothing!' It has mostly been sound, efforts to create the gel of human relationships, even as the gel is forever melting away.

In The Names, an entire novel devoted to the contingencies of language, Don DeLillo's main character walks through a section of Athens, listening to people at cafes speak Greek to one another, a language he does not know:

People everywhere are absorbed in conversation. Seated under trees, under striped canopies in the squares, they bend together over food and drink, their voices darkly raveled in Oriental laments that flow from radios in basements and back kitchens. Conversation is life, language is the deepest being. We see the patterns repeat, the gestures drive the words. It is the sound and picture of humans communicating. It is talk as a definition of itself. Talk. Voices out of doorways and open windows, voices on the stuccoed-brick balconies, a driver taking both hands off the wheel to gesture as he speaks. Every conversation is a shared narrative, a thing that surges forward, too dense to allow space for the unspoken, the sterile. The talk is unconditional, the participants drawn in completely. This is a way of speaking that takes such pure joy in its own openness and ardor that we begin to feel these people are discussing language itself. What pleasure in the simplest greetings. It's as though one friend says to another, "How good it is to say 'How are you?" The other replying, "When I answer 'I am well and how are you,' what I really mean is that I'm delighted to have a chance to say these familiar things - they bridge the lonely distances."

They bridge the lonely distances; they create the gel of human relationships. And if the gel is forever melting away, we too are always in motion, in this fluid element, at work within the stream of our experience.

This motion is an odd, trusting, unknowing. Poirier gets at it here:

[W]e are brought together not by a shared commitment to explicitly defined values; we are brought together instead in a shared confidence that we are all somehow accommodated to what Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses calls "the ineluctable modality of the visible." That is, we really do not know what is there or cannot agree on what it is; and yet we assent, or so our most elementary idioms seem to indicate, to the fact that in life and in poetry there is "something" or only "something, perhaps." The value of such verbal sound is that... it points toward future realization, toward the existence of things which it cannot verbally re-present.

We must, in other words, "loosen the gravitational pull of substantives," writes Poirier; we must "stay loose." Swimming with language, constantly afloat, we move from place to watery place, undergoing as we do a kind of self-transformation or self-transcendence. Charles Wright, in his poem Disjecta Membra, puts it this way:

…Take a loose rein and a deep seat,
John, my father-in-law, would say
To someone starting out on a long journey, meaning, take it easy,
Relax, let what’s taking you take you.

A final image that comes to mind is that of prayer flags flying over a river. Here.

Each word set vaguely at work within the stream.

IN MEMORY OF LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 11:07:44 GMT

Leszek Kolakowski's death reminds us that Terry Eagleton's recent attack on the atheism of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins is only the latest instance of a curious but now familiar trajectory, in which a left thinker in his or her latter days (think of Christopher Lasch among Americans, and, among the British, Gillian Rose) embraces, if not the truth of religion, the validity and endurance and even inescapability of its cultural power.

A formidable intellectual, Kolakowski is part of the tradition of scathing post-communist critique associated, among his Polish compatriots, with Czeslaw Milosz. In remembering him here, I'd like to focus instead on his delicate and moving embrace of religion. But I hope it will become clear that his disenchantment with various forms of radical - and even liberal - politics, and his growing appreciation of religious faith are connected.

I say delicate embrace because, like Lasch and Eagleton and, let's say, Philip Rieff, Kolakowski came to believe that communal faith and its rituals and prohibitions, as well as the personal experience of the sacred that underlies faith, was foundational to culture, and to the recognition and maintenance of human dignity; yet Kolakowski ultimately seemed to be saying something like what Freeman Dyson says, in an 2002 essay in the New York Review of Books: "I am a practicing Christian but not a believing Christian. To me, to worship God means to recognize that mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our comprehension."
To accept that there are powerful mysteries that order and give meaning to our lives and deaths, and to find meaning in what you take to be the earthly creations and expressions of that mystery, is perhaps a weak dilution of religion; but it is a kind of faith.

To get more of an idea of this faith, consider this Christopher Lasch interview. Lasch rejects optimists -- progressivists who believe, more or less, that everything's always getting better -- and allies himself instead with the attitude he characterizes as "hope." He stands with "people who believe in the goodness of life and in some kind of underlying justice in the universe... in spite of all the evidence that would justify cynicism and despair. [Hope is] a religious quality. It doesn't need to be attached to any formal creed. [It is] faith."

The poet Richard Wilbur expresses the same idea: "To put it simply, I feel that the universe is full of glorious energy [and that] the ultimate character of things is comely and good. I am perfectly aware that I say this in the teeth of all sorts of contrary evidence, and that I must be basing it partly on temperament and partly on faith…"
It's a matter of experience, a non-doctrinal faith and hope emerging out of the sort of 'astonishment' Kolakowski describes in this way:

People - and by no means professional philosophers only - often have experiences which they describe as astonishment at the fact of existence, awe in the face of 'Nothingness', apprehension of the unreality of the world or the feeling that whatever is impermanent must be accounted for by what is indestructible. Experiences of this kind are not mystical in the strict sense, i.e., not events people interpret as direct encounters with God. They might rather be described as a strong feeling that in the fact of being and of not being - in this very fact and not only in the experiencing person's existence - there is something unobvious, alarming, puzzling, queer, astounding, something which defies all the ordinary, daily norms of understanding. Such feelings cannot be and need not be converted into scientific 'problems'; they are expressed, more or less clumsily, as metaphysical riddles. There is in them no stuff for 'proving' anything if 'to prove' retains the sense it usually has in scientific procedures. Indeed, inserted as links into a chain of reasoning they usually look poor and unconvincing. Yet it is astonishingly foolish to dismiss them, as empiricists often do, as errors generated by the wrong usage of words or subject to explanation as an abuse of semantic standards.

There is a defense here of the simple ground of human feeling and thought, of the primary value for most people of their efforts to work out their relationship to a mystery. Obviously a political movement like communism ignores or belittles this sort of experience; yet even what Michael Sandel calls technocratic liberalism has a tendency, in its championing of the values of strict secularity, and its view of people as above all simple consumers with material needs and wants, to disregard this fundamental, often overwhelming sense of strangeness, and its accompanying sense of / desire for overarching meaning.

Rather than find the incomplete analyses, the tentative affiliations, of some of the writers I've mentioned here contemptible -- Hitchens would no doubt, with Jean-Paul Sartre, dismiss all of this as a species of bad faith -- I find it real. I find in it the feel and the sound and the sense of the actual. Leszek Kolakowski knew in his bones the poverty of vulgar progressivism; if he found himself increasingly attracted to something else, it's because he was capable of awe.

STYLES OF RADICAL WILL

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 22:08:28 GMT

Scott McLemee's recent consideration of the writer Isaac Rosenfeld in his IHE column, Intellectual Affairs, reawakens my own long fascination with Rosenfeld's life and work.

Scott titles his piece Dangling Man -- not only the name of Saul Bellow's first novel, but also a description of the sort of person Rosenfeld, Bellow's lifelong friend, turned out to be:

By the end of his friend’s life, wrote Bellow, his friend was living in “a hideous cellar room” from which any hint of bohemian glamor had long since fled. He had, Bellow wrote, “one of those ready, lively, clear minds that see the relevant thing immediately.” But Rosenfeld’s cutting lucidity left him filled with scorn for any motive involving the pursuit of success, let alone propriety. Bellow wrote that his friend “seemed occasionally to be trying to achieve by will, by fiat, the openness of heart and devotion to truth without which a human existence must be utterly senseless.”

He imposed a grim discipline on himself, a kind of squalid asceticism. To the naked eye it looked like failure. When he died in a shabby apartment, Rosenfeld was 38 years old.

Rosenfeld's self-destructive insistence on cutting lucidity and honesty, on ceaseless rebellion against repression and materialism, inspired McLemee, as it inspired me:

[His] example loomed in my imagination for many years as essentially heroic. Rosenfeld’s intransigence, his disdain for the gods of success, was somehow inspiring, albeit in ways that have not done me very much good over the long term.

"There's no success like failure," sings Bob Dylan in Love Minus Zero: No Limit. Only "bankers' nieces seek perfection."

Intellectuals stand at the opposite edge of the universe from bankers' nieces; like Rosenfeld, they generate an understanding of the world for us, the sort of understanding that changes the world, through their language, their uncompromising emotional sensitivity, and their resistance to falsehood and conformity. They stand, sometimes contemptuously, against what Rosenfeld, in his great 1957 essay about the University of Chicago, "Life in Chicago: The Land and the Lake," called the "more or less healthy and well-adjusted men and women of rather inflexible mind, who regard life not as an adventure but an investment."

I've written, in this blog, about other heroes of mine along these lines -- James Agee and Malcolm Lowry, for instance. Christopher Lasch is up there too.

Scott notes how difficult it is today for intellectuals to assume even a reasonably against-the-grain stance; he quotes George Scialabba on

the emergence of a “new variety or mutation” of thinker in the “modern, efficient machinery of persuasion” necessary to hold highly developed societies together. Scialabba calls this type “the anti-public intellectual, whose function is not criticism, not defense of the public against private or state power, but the opposite.… As a result of the intellectuals’ incorporation en masse into the ‘power elite,’ it now requires far more training, leisure, and resources to penetrate the screen of corporate or government propaganda….”

I'd argue it gets even trickier than that. All sorts of postmodern simulacra of subversive thinkers are currently running around, inside and outside of universities, people who've studied the style of twentieth century alienated intellectuals and aped it.

Up against such odds, is the only option for the authentic intellectual what Scott describes as a pretty much Sisyphean effort to "crash through the screen every so often, with enough luck and a good aim"?

**************************************************

Here Scott returns to Isaac Rosenfeld, and the principled failure of his life. In the absence of a group of intellectuals to whom you can belong, and from whom you can expect support of various kinds, and in the face of constant come-ons from the larger culture in which you're invited to be co-opted as one more manipulator of symbols, you can of course say no. You can take up a close-to- total rejection of the world:

As psychic defense and compensation, [what can emerge is] a spirit of aloofness -- not just about your job, but towards life itself. [This spirit leads] to “embarrassment with human subject matter,” said Rosenfeld [in a talk he gave toward the end of his life], the desperate cultivation of a “flair for the abstract… for the ‘cool.’ ” This sensibility tolerate[s] expression of “nothing too immediate, too direct or emotional, because that would be considered ‘square’ or ‘frantic.'

Rosenfeld is obviously wary of this Warholesque outcome; he satirizes its early stages in his University of Chicago essay:

The ideal is to live a passionless, 'cool' life, exposed, but uncommitted, to many worlds, and to be au courant in them all: to be able to chatter... of drama, books, art, jazz... Aristotle and other philosophers... to avoid extremes of romanticism in sexuality or love, and all extremes of feelings... One undergraduate I know calls the composite formo-frigidist..."

A mild formo-frigidism, if you will, can be an attractive midpoint; it can be where creative, or potentially creative, bohemians tend to locate themselves. I have in mind people like Paul Bowles - restless travelers, expatriates, creators in a variety of modes, people to varying degrees detached -- aloof -- from ordinary life.

Yet under the pressure of a world in which all the rewards, as one sees it, are in the direction of compromise, the serious writer might indeed eventually fall into utter rejection of that world, might find "no escape from the need," writes Scott, "to go it alone."

Need, though, says it all. After awhile, this isn't a decision to become radically aloof; after awhile, this gesture shades into pathology. Rosenfeld, Scott concludes, "turned into an intellectual equivalent of Bartleby the Scrivener, saying, 'I would prefer not to,' over and over, as the years slipped past."

I think the shading here may involve the transition from resisting the world on behalf of a set of ideas that transcend your particularity, to withdrawing from the world on behalf of the defense of your particular, wounded interiority.

In other words, you wouldn't, in the first place, have been Isaac Rosenfeld, brilliant and precocious social critic and artist, if you weren't already endowed with ferocious sensitivity, lucidity, independence, and stubborn convictions about the right way to live. But a series of frustrations and disappointments will make a stubborn, sensitive person like Rosenfeld move not toward forms of rapprochement with the world, but deeper into his own sense of things.

Intellectuals and artists of Rosenfeld's type take a very big risk -- Their ideas and personalities may be so powerful as to bring the world along, to some extent, with them. They may turn out to be like William Blake. Or like Bob Dylan. (Though note that Dylan too withdrew from the world at various points in his life, and still isn't exactly out and about.) Or people like Rosenfeld may simply fail; they may turn out not to have the combination of courage and clarity and obstinacy and charisma and whatever else you need to sustain a radical project, a radical existence.

It's intriguing to me that the final intellectual / soulmate about whom Saul Bellow wrote a novel was Allan Bloom, a man who loved wealth and luxury, a voraciously social animal who had no trouble accommodating himself to the mainstream politics of his time. Yet Bloom, like Rosenfeld, was for all that a principled and I think rather courageous intellectual. He came at things from the right, to be sure, but he shared Rosenfeld's inability to be anything other than sharply honest about what he believed, as well as his obstinacy about being exactly the strange person he was.

Indeed Allan Bloom wrote the sort of book -- a big, controversial book that provoked a national discussion of higher thought -- that everyone expected Rosenfeld to write.

Bloom might, in other words, have come to embody for Bellow a Rosenfeld who can survive, who can live, as Bloom seems to have done, a joyous life.

There's no success like failure, says Dylan. And failure, he goes on to sing, is no success at all.

FIRST WE FEEL. THEN WE FALL.

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 23:39:39 GMT

"One wants glimpses of the real," wrote Harold Brodkey in his last journal entry before his death. "One almost never gets the real thing," lamented Saul Bellow in his last novel, Ravelstein.

Embodied in God, or a loved one, or, say, an adored work of literature or music, the experience of the real, the real thing, must be a perception of the truth of existence. At the very least the truth of one's own existence. Why you are here. What really matters. Who you really are. What Brodkey and Bellow seem to have in mind is a vision or a conviction of what Yeats called the deep heart's core.

In the same week during which we have followed the death of someone so unreal that it doesn't feel as though he had a self for us to mourn, we encounter the letters between the ridiculed and reviled governor of South Carolina and his Argentine lover, Maria.

Whoever released these private emails must have thought he was getting some sort of revenge. He was wrong. In revealing the authentic words these lovers exchanged with one another, he gave us a glimpse of the real.

I understand that the real in this case includes adultery and all its pain and betrayal.
When I first heard the farcical story of the governor's disappearance and then confession, I found it easy to laugh along with everyone else. I found it easy to agree with Charles Krauthammer, a psychiatrist as well as a journalist, that there was something bizarrely self-destructive in Sanford.

Now, having read the letters -- or the excerpts running in the South Carolina papers -- I'm not doing that anymore. The letters reveal nothing more nor less than true thunderbolt from the sky love. English professors tend to be people who love language, and who seek in language, more than in other places, the real. The Sanford/Maria letters have in them the grain of that sought-after actuality. Every word, every phrase, comes from the deep heart's core.

Maria's fractured English is as beautiful as Nora Barnacle's in her love letters to James Joyce.
Perfection after all isn't the real; Michael Jackson's multiply knifed face was a horror. The flaw and the fracture that convey our humanity and its exertions toward expressivity is the real.

Sanford's sincere, halting, emotional prose carries the impact upon him of his having been hit, and hit hard, by passionate love. Rather late in a very public life, Sanford has suddenly felt the bliss of utter enchantment with another human being.

[M]y weakness [is] doing rather than being — though you opened up a new chapter last week wherein I was happy and content just being. Last point worth further discussion... [The film Holiday] made me think of you — its mood and the notion of a holiday (wrapped up in our case over two days) certainly fit as well ... (though our visit in some ways for me was as well less of a holiday than it was uncovering and realization of some things and feelings that again are worth longer conversation)... The rarest of all commodities in this world is love. It is that thing that we all yearn for at some level — to be simply loved unconditionally for nothing more than who we are — not what we can get, give or become. [W]hile I did not need love fifteen years ago — as the battle scars of life and aging and politics have worn on this has become a real need of mine... I feel a little vulnerable because this is ground I have never certainly never covered before — so if you have pearls of wisdom on how we figure all this out please let me know ... In the meantime please sleep soundly knowing that despite the best efforts of my head my heart cries out for you, your voice, your body, the touch of your lips, the touch of your finger tips and an even deeper connection to your soul.

The quietude of private joy with another human being; this seems precisely what so many public figures, so many politicians, don't have. Maybe don't want. How crazy it must have felt for Sanford -- a powerful politician, a presidential prospect -- to be propelled into that realm of the private, where people act spontaneously, without thought of personal gain, and where they make all-too-human mistakes. Maria writes:

I haven’t felt this since I was in my teen ages, when afterwards I got married. I do love you, I can feel it in my heart, and although I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to meet again this has been the best that has happened to me in a long time You made me realized how you feel when you realy love somebody and how much you want to be beside the beloved. Last Friday I would had stayed embrassing and kissing you forever... Sometimes you don’t choose things, they just happen ... I can’t redirect my feelings and I am very happy with mine towards you.
What's striking about the email exchange is how much longer than Maria's Sanford's letters are. When's the last time the man wrote longer love letters than the woman?

First we feel, wrote James Joyce toward the end of Finnegans Wake. Then we fall. Relatively late in a pulled-back life, the governor of South Carolina felt. And of course he fell. But maybe this was - even with all the obvious disasters it brought down on him - a fortunate fall.

A PERSON WHO BLOGS

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 19:50:14 GMT

The latest controversy over the outing of an anonymous blogger has UD thinking about privacy and writing.

It was by accident that UD entered the blogosphere un-anonymous. She'd planned to hide her identity, but she forgot to tell her computer-savvy niece, who helped UD set up as a blogger, and her niece put UD's real name on the blog.

In retrospect, UD wonders how accidental this was. When she tries to imagine writing an anonymous blog, she can't. Given the sort of person, the sort of writer, UD is, given her range of subjects, public and private (the recently outed blogger confines himself to the public realm of politics), it's hard to see how UD could have sustained a plausibly anonymous voice.

The anonymous political blogger - his viewpoint is liberal - wished to retain anonymity for personal and professional reasons:

Professionally, I’ve heard that pre-tenure blogging (particularly on politics) can cause problems. And before that, I was a lawyer with real clients. I also believe that the classroom should be as nonpolitical as possible – and I don’t want conservative students to feel uncomfortable before they take a single class based on my posts. ..Privately, I don’t write under my own name for family reasons. I’m from a conservative Southern family – and there are certain family members who I’d prefer not to know about this blog ... Also, I have family members who are well known in my home state who have had political jobs with Republicans, and I don’t want my posts to jeopardize anything for them ...

Anyone who wants to blog anonymously, for whatever reason, is fine by UD; but she's struck nonetheless by the comprehensive nature of this list of reservations. With so many reasons for wanting to be unknown, why write at all? The classroom reason, for instance, strikes me as silly. Should Posner and Becker have blogged anonymously? Tons of politically out-there professors blog and hold class just fine. And -- because you blog from a liberal point of view your relative's job will be compromised?

No, there's something more comprehensive here about the rather unnerving act of free, individual writing itself -- writing that doesn't take place within the formal and formulaic confines of, say, law review articles - as a sort of unacceptable exposure, a thing that by definition threatens your privacy, that gives too much away, that makes you fly a bit too much by the seat of your pants.

The decision to be not merely a professor who writes formal articles and books, but also a person who writes informal posts, perhaps on a daily basis, is not an easy decision. The book comes packaged by a press; maybe it's part of a series; maybe it's co-written... The article comprises part of a journal full of other, related articles. There's plenty of cover here, if you will, plus a slow, familiar process of publication, reading, review.

Blogging, no matter how public your subject matter, is just you out there, saying your thing in a kind of stark, extra-institutional freedom. Thousands of people - professors from all disciplines, undergraduate and graduate students, journalists, fellow bloggers, scientists, political activists, administrators, government appointees, business executives -- read UD's blog and comment on it all day, every day. That happened not because a press or a professional society or a newspaper or magazine or journal housed and published and accredited her thoughts, but because one day she and her niece decided to make a page on the internet for UD's writing. It was just UD, and it remains just UD.

More and more writing, in the age of the internet, is like this -- unsponsored, free -- and UD thinks, on balance, it's a very good thing. She agrees with Andrew Sullivan:

Alone in front of a computer, at any moment, are two people: a blogger and a reader. The proximity is palpable, the moment human—whatever authority a blogger has is derived not from the institution he works for but from the humanness he conveys. This is writing with emotion not just under but always breaking through the surface. It renders a writer and a reader not just connected but linked in a visceral, personal way. The only term that really describes this is friendship. And it is a relatively new thing to write for thousands and thousands of friends.

… Jazz and blogging are intimate, improvisational, and individual—but also inherently collective. And the audience talks over both.

The reason they talk while listening, and comment or link while reading, is that they understand that this is a kind of music that needs to be engaged rather than merely absorbed.

I'm not sure how much humanness Anonymous can convey. By which I mean to say that while there are some good reasons for some bloggers to choose anonymity, it's a pity they feel they have to. They're not beginning to use the power of this new medium.

UD AND THE TEACHING COMPANY

Thu, 28 May 2009 13:59:21 GMT

I rail against distance learning, laptops in classrooms, PowerPoint, and other trends toward too much technology in university life, yet yesterday I made an audition lecture cd for the Teaching Company.

If the sample audiences around the country to whom TC will now send it like UD's lecture, she'll prepare a TC lecture series. Instead of lecturing to fifty or so people every semester, she'll have an audience that spans the nation. She'll become a distance instructor. Big time.

How to wrestle her way clear of this hypocrisy?

Well, how about this:

Universities are one thing, and companies that make educational videos and disks are another. Throughout her years of blogging about universities, UD's been arguing for the survival of four years of liberal arts education on a campus set apart - physically, metaphysically - from the world of the streets. Professors dwarfed by PowerPoints, students invisible behind laptops, destroy the immediacy of human interaction, the give and take of spontaneous, attentive discourse that challenges and changes you in college.

Universities that move more and more toward downloaded stuff and in-house distance learning units betray their fundamental responsibility as universities to be the unique place in the culture where our full capacities -- public and physical as much as private and mental -- are engaged in the dynamic setting of the classroom. However good it is, distance learning will never be as good as proximity learning -- learning that takes place with other living, breathing beings close to you, with whom you press an issue, embody thought's passion, generate the energy of conflict and complexity.

The university has given you - professor, student - the removed setting in which to express this immediate intellectual activity. How perverse to disdain that setting and stick your nose in your slides and your screens...

But most people are not in a university, and have no plans to be there. The impulse toward enlightening yourself transcends one's university years, and it's fitting that other forms of education, non-university education, exist to respond to that impulse. Yet watching UD talk, in a Washington studio, about how to write well will never be as good as being with her, week after week, in a classroom - challenging her, watching her fuck up, having her get all excited and spit on you while she speaks, laughing at her and seeing what effect that has, running your berserker theory about metaphor by her and getting her riled, etc., etc.

The classroom's unplanned to a large extent. That's the best thing about it. I mean, lesson plans, yes. To be sure. But they're a framework. They exist as something you depart from in the interest of free-ranging inquiry. If UD gets to do Teaching Company lectures, they'll be beautifully sculpted by many careful hands. There will certainly be some spontaneity on her part, some departure from a script, but for the most part this form of instruction will indeed be instruction -- a profoundly valuable thing, but not the same as the experience our universities were established to provide.

TWO CENTENARIES

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 00:06:59 GMT

2009 is the centenary of both Malcolm Lowry and James Agee.
James Dickey coupled them:

[M]y personal heroes of the [totally responsive... intensified] sensibility are John Keats, James Agee, and Malcolm Lowry.
Dickey quotes Lionel Trilling calling Agee's long paean to American sharecroppers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, "the greatest moral document of the time."

More than that, says Dickey, "it's an example of the ability of the human sensibility to go very deeply into life.... [Agee had a] quality of complete participation, of commitment of the self to whatever it was he contemplated."

Lowry too had "this extremely deep immersion in things."

Dickey goes on to suggest that both writers hit the bottle and died young in large part because of their intense sensitivity, their uncontrollable ability to enter entirely into - in particular - the sources of human anguish.

In Alabama, writes Adam Kirsch of Agee, "he was undergoing something very like a spiritual ordeal, in which he was granted a vision of the infinite value of each individual human being, even or especially the poorest." Lowry's narrator, in his great novel Under the Volcano, asks his wife: "How, unless you drink as I do, can you hope to understand the beauty of an old woman from Tarasco who plays dominoes at seven o'clock in the morning?"

Because they managed to get what they saw down on paper before they died, Agee and Lowry can be thought of as two of our more powerful poet gods, in the sense that Richard Rorty, with his religion of art, intended.

Rorty argued for "a religion of literature, in which works of the secular imagination replace Scripture as the principal source of inspiration and hope for each new generation." He suggested that

'spiritual development' is usually used only in reference to the attempt to get in touch with the divine. But it is occasionally used in the broader sense, one in which it covers any attempt to transform oneself into a better sort of person by changing one's sense of what matters most. In the broader sense of the term, I would urge that the novels of Proust and James help us achieve spiritual growth.
The great writer, as "the maker of new words, the shaper of new languages," is "the vanguard of the species." Lowry and Agee immerse us deeply -- in the burden, moment by moment, of being human. At their most powerfully creative, they overtake and change us forever.

To My Friend David, In Memory of his Sister, Eve Sedgwick

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 13:29:50 GMT

A Letter from Key West

To My Friend David,

In Memory of his Sister,

Eve Sedgwick

The southernmost sky is strange at ten at night,
Still mildly blue with midday clouds and a calm
Wind that lifts the clouds to show a star dead white,
Dead white and barely there above a palm's black head.

The three macaws who shriek behind the palms have gone to bed

And all the traffic in the tropics pauses for the moon.

Your sister, you said last week, will be dead soon.

So, tonight, a queer evening on Bone Key
In memory.

This is a world unwilling to dim its light.
A gray deck shines at my feet,
The swimming pool’s electric blue.
The palms shake out their canopies
And their understories.

All thrilling,
In the way of the last Key, with its late night heat,
Its sweet gardenias, and the night blooming jasmines
Glimmering under still-white clouds.

III

The dying coral, the marl's clay,
The bones of the dead that named the place Bone Key --
Consider these at noon, when the passion flower is red.
Consider these at ten, by the gulf and the sea.

Consider where the cancer spread.

“It’s in her spine,” you said.
That was June. And I said,
“What was the word they used?
Somnolent? Slow?”
“That was ages ago.”

The canopy and the understory, the overarching line
And the trace of something deeper…

The delicacy I saw first in her baby pictures
(You showed them to me in Bethesda in 1969.) –
Your pale soft preoccupied-with-a-doll sister.

A piece of paper on the wall of her teenage room
Inked with the beginning of one of her poems:
O little Norwegian city and town!

Beauty, absurdity, and yearning all woven
Into her, her language, her infantile maturity.

The darkly flowing understory that she lifted,
Maternal, into her palms - the masturbating girl,
Fat art and thin art, the closet's episteme –
All of that is lighter now, as light as this queer evening.

RADIANCE

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 18:59:57 GMT

This year's winner of the Pritzker architecture prize, Peter Zumthor, has a rare ability to convey in words the spirit of buildings.

Even rarer, this spiritual disposition accompanies a carpenter's pragmatic sense of materials. (His father was a cabinet maker.)
A short slide show from the Washington Post evokes the eerie, otherworldly feel of his work, work which nonetheless manages to establish a strong sense of permanent emplacement on the earth. There's also a photo of the architect, looking appropriately monkish.

To me, buildings can have a beautiful silence that I associate with attributes such as composure, self-evidence, durability, presence, and integrity, and with warmth and sensuousness as well; a building that is being itself, being a building, not representing anything, just being.
This is altogether different from the tumbly edgy self-conscious postmodernity of Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman; it's got some alliance with Heideggerian notions of rootedness in time and space.... though when you look at the work, it's not nostalgic in the way, say, Leon Krier can be. Instead, Zumthor seems able in some of his buildings to retrieve and revive basic forms and feelings.

Living in Key West for my sabbatical year, I'm most strongly taken with what Zumthor says about light:

Materials react with one another and have their radiance, so that the material composition gives rise to something unique. ... Thinking about daylight and artificial light I have to admit that daylight, the light on things, is so moving to me that I feel almost a spiritual quality. When the sun comes up in the morning - which I always find so marvellous, absolutely fantastic the way it comes back every morning - and casts its light on things, it doesn’t feel as if it quite belongs in this world. I don’t understand light. It gives me the feeling there’s something beyond me, something beyond all understanding. And I am very glad, very grateful that there is such a thing.

The modesty of this admitted lack of understanding, and the conviction that there's much beyond him, expresses itself in work that transcends the maker's ego and makes itself everyone's possession. Zumthor makes a similar point here:

The idea of things that have nothing to do with me as an architect taking their place in a building, their rightful place - it’s a thought that gives me an insight into the future of my buildings: a future that happens without me. That does me a lot of good.

A Sonnet for Nicholas Hughes

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 23:55:15 GMT

Each suicide writes a new life story
With obvious portents like something out of Dreiser
Or like the junior high school poem Richard Corey,
Where, once he's done it, we're so much wiser
To the heavy-foreshadowed script;
The way the doomed life simply slipped
From one heavy-handed plot point to another.

Yes, heavy-handed plotting for the heavy-handed
Who banded plastic bags and smothered.
And yet if we were absolutely candid
We'd see our retrospectives as ordinary fables,
A filling-in of horror-gaps, grief-caesuras,
Narratives that turn unstable stable,
And, in their foolish fond old art, cure us.

THE POND GONE BLACK

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 12:55:25 GMT

Go wrap
Your head in the snowy rivers
Of the Brooks Range.

And that's what Nicholas Hughes did. His father, Ted Hughes, in his bitter poem, "The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother," advised his children to "leave her," leave Plath to the literary beasts feeding off her myth, and escape into their own lives.

Like Natasha Richardson leaving the burden of Redgrave family renown for relative anonymity in New York, Nicholas Hughes left England for Alaska, where he pursued his fascination with the biology and sport of fishing. Avid for privacy and normalcy, he seems for decades to have found it in Fairbanks, where he was until recently a professor at the University of Alaska.

Yet like his mother he was a depressive who eventually could not hold off the darkness.

Of the sorrows his father wrote about in his poem "The Seven Sorrows," this one seems to mark the moment.

The fourth sorrow
Is the pond gone black
Ruined and sunken the city of water -
The beetle's palace,
The catacombs
Of the dragonfly.

DANCE OF THE MILLION VEILS, Part One

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:48:28 GMT

Bernard d'Espagnat, a French physicist/philosopher, has won this year's one million dollar Templeton Prize, given to thinkers who attempt to reconcile religious belief and science.

d'Espagnat's ideas are intriguing enough that UD would like to feature them in a series of posts today, especially his claim that

There must exist, beyond mere appearances … a 'veiled reality' that science does not describe but only glimpses uncertainly. In turn, contrary to those who claim that matter is the only reality, the possibility that other means, including spirituality, may also provide a window on ultimate reality cannot be ruled out, even by cogent scientific arguments.

Atheists will argue that what we don't know about the universe we'll know in a matter of time; people inclined toward religious belief will often argue, like d'Espagnat, that immense obdurate mysteries, being a permanent feature of existence, suggest a larger supernatural intelligent design.

Of course, even if we can agree that there are limits to what can be known, this doesn't mean a god lies beyond the limits. Yet d'Espagnat's point of view is worth further investigation, which UD will now begin. She will chronicle her attempt to acquaint herself with d'Espagnat's ideas in a series of posts, of which this is Part One.

SCATHING ONLINE SCHOOLMARM

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 22:01:03 GMT

Rule One: Never make your reader laugh when she's not supposed to.
SUNY Binghamton got blasted in the New York Times for running a typically scummy Division I basketball team. Big deal. Tell it to Auburn. SUNY should have ignored it. No one cares.

But the president got all huffy, and so did SUNY's newspaper. Let's look at its sports editor's opinion piece.

Over the weekend, a story written by Pete Thamel came out in The New York Times concerning Binghamton University’s men’s basketball program, its head coach Kevin Broadus and other members of the school’s administration, including school President Lois DeFleur. The main focus was to drag the program’s name through the mud, and to be perfectly frank, I was offended by the entire piece.
[Drop "main." Much more importantly, remember what SOS has told you countless times: NEVER begin pieces of this sort by telling people how offended you are. No one gives a shit how you feel. It doesn't advance your argument. In fact, it retards your argument by personalizing things. Remember that a lot of people figure bigtime university sports as currently run are all about raw emotions, and really can't be justified in terms of anything a university represents. This sort of immediate announcement of how royally pissed you are confirms that suspicion. It's a completely empty polemical move.]

[And lose the "to be perfectly frank" nonsense.]
Like any student on this campus, I have heard all the rumblings about the “criminal element” of the team, the recruiting practices of the coaching staff and other gripes. Many of them have come from people who attend other institutions, but very few from people here in Binghamton.
[Why the quotation marks? We're talking about criminals. Remove the marks. Or can only "people who attend other institutions" recognize that people repeatedly jailed for violent crimes are criminals? Is SUNY a kind of mentally challenged Cosa Nostra?]

... [E]ven if these rumors [When did what the NYT report become rumors? You lose your reader's confidence when you do sly stuff like this.] do prove to be true, are we all so naive to think that the exact same thing isn’t going on at countless other institutions in this country? I sincerely hope that we’re not. [Drop the last sentence. And what a powerful argumentative move: Everybody does it.]
So I was surprised to see names from the faculty, and even formers players going on record to sully the good name of the basketball program in this article.
[Sully the good name is a terrible cliche. Everyone knows, and the NYT simply reports, that the sulliers are your coach and players. Our suspicion that we're in Calabria heightens now, as the writer attacks the local clan for breaking omerta.]

After reading through the article three or four times, it became apparent to me that the people quoted in the article, with the exception of most of the administration, were either disgruntled former faculty members, or former players who couldn’t hack it under Broadus’ tutelage.
[Pure example of ad hominem argument, in which, having no legitimate arguments, you hit out at people and call them names. Note that at this point the writer's entire defense of the school is based on visceral emotion...

But SOS! I hear you cry. How DO I defend the indefensible? ... Hold on. There IS a way. I'll tell you in a sec.]
The article also states that Broadus is known for “recruiting good players with questionable backgrounds.” This might be the case; I won’t disagree with that. [Good. You want to concede some stuff in this sort of piece. Good move.] Current stars D.J. Rivera, Malik Alvin and Emanuel Mayben have all had academic issues elsewhere. However, until it comes to light that they’re having the same troubles here at Binghamton, I don’t think there’s any reason to lose sleep over it. [Another cliche, and SOS is confident they're all already in trouble. Wake up.] And yes, players have also been in trouble with the law this season. Alvin was charged with assault, but the charges were later dropped. The way the article portrays the incident, it seems as if he maliciously attacked an elderly women. In reality, he knocked her over while running — albeit in the midst of an accused theft. [BINGO! What a beaut. See Rule Number One. SOS is still laughing over this line, and this is her third reading.] Still, this is a case where the casual reader will misinterpret the facts because of Thamel’s wording. [Yes. We want to be careful how we write.]
As with any negative article concerning the program, the piece brings up Miladin “Minja” Kovacevic. I don’t need to go into what he did; we all know. [What? You mean because he beat someone almost to death and then fled the country?] However, it is important to note that he is no longer a part of the program, and therefore Broadus isn’t responsible for his conduct. Kovacevic was at fault, and no one else involved with the program. [Except the people who recruited him, lad...]
******************************

*********************************

Okay. So you say: SOS! How can I defend my indefensible basketball, football, whatever program??

Listen up. There's only one way.

You have to be able to do a Gore Vidal / Christopher Hitchens / Evelyn Waugh / Oscar Wilde type defensive play here. If you're an undergraduate squirt, you're not going to be able to do it, so you have to hire a grown-up ghost writer. You can try reading those writers and learning their techniques, but it'll take you years to imitate their moves.

The only way to play this one is with haughty sophisticated hilarious cynical indifference. High-handed doesn't begin to get at it. You'll need to saunter onto the field and open with a sentence with such an irresistably rascally drawl to it that your reader laughs along with you at all those bad boys on the team.

Think Truman Capote, sucking on a long cigarette and batting tired ironic eyes at you... Think of what the Ridiculous Theater Company would do with this problem, and do that.

You don't know what the hell I'm talking about. You're not meant to. You're a sincere sports fan. But only camping it up and appealing to your reader's cynicism will win this one.