Of straw men and bureaucrats

Over at The Mumpsimus, Matthew Cheney registers his dissent from Elif Batuman’s essay “Get a Real Degree” in the London Review of Books. As I pointed out in a comment, it is a pretty dumb mistake to summarize Batuman as saying “Down with creative writing.”

Cheney does not make that mistake, but he accuses her—and other critics who worry about creative writing’s influence upon contemporary fiction—of arguing in bad faith. “Mostly, I'm just tired of people com­plaining about some monolithic thing called ‘MFA writers’ and their boring books/stories,” he says. “It’s a straw man argument, because to be convincing (to me, at least) a critic must show that a giant glob of the fiction being published in the U.S. today is 1.) boring; 2.) boring because of the effect of writing workshops on the writer—that, in fact, this writer would be less boring had she or he studied investment banking.”

I am among those critics who has advanced that “straw man” argument. “[F]or an entire generation of American writers,” as I put it several years ago in The Elephants Teach, “a tour of duty in graduate writers’ work­shops followed by a life of teaching creative writing has been the standard training and common experience of its time.” Just yesterday I suggested that contemporary American novelists were unlikely to revive the proletarian novel, “because they have passed almost their entire adult lives in creative-writing programs and have small interest in the lives of ordinary, ‘proletarian’ men and women.”

My complaint has never been, however, that most of “the fiction being published in the U.S. today” is “boring.” I have argued instead that the “standard training and common experience” of contemporary novelists, attaching them to a rootless profession that organizes them nationally rather than encouraging them to put down roots in a local habitation, has had the effect of bleaching region and a strong sense of place from much American fiction.

Creative writing also has class effects. One of the things that struck me about Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was that the Berglunds, a former All-American basketball player (that’s the wife, naturally) and an environmentally conscious lawyer, were immediately familiar to me as class types. They differed little or not at all in their tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income from the characters in “a giant glob” of recent American fiction (to use Cheney’s phrase).

The same couple shows up with dismaying frequency—in Joshua Ferris’s novel The Unnamed, for example, Sam Lipsyte’s Ask, Pearl Abraham’s American Taliban (the parents are notable imagines of their class), and even Ann Beattie’s Walks With Men. Lawyers, academics, graduate students, government grant-holders, NGO do-gooders—the circles are very small. And just to show that I am not saying that their class homo­geneity insures that the novels are “boring,” I’d observe that this charge can also be leveled against novels that I have praised to the skies, such as Francine Prose’s Golden­grove and Zoë Heller’s Believers. Many of the best novels published in the U.S. recently have been set among the upper crust of American society, which is described by Angelo Codevilla as America’s ruling class:

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters—speaking the “in” language—serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what busi­ness or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. . . . Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats.Again, to be fair. Franzen does not write to celebrate this class, as repre­sented by the Berglunds, but to strip bare its tastes and social habits. In his review of Freedom, Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times Book Review compared the Berglunds to “the complacent upright parents in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral [who] see their world capsized by their own children. . . .” But here is the difference. Roth’s Swede Levov is a glovemaker, and American Pastoral characterizes the glovemaking process with a close and fascinating intimacy of knowledge.

Creative writing has become a bureaucratized national system for securing contemporary American writers’ place in the right class, among the right people. This is why so much of their fiction is concerned with identity and attitude and the language that expresses them, and so little is concerned with the work that ordinary men and women do. And this is why, when an immensely talented novelist like Jonathan Franzen becomes aware of the class trappings, he falls to observing them with a shrewd and candid eye rather than breaking with them altogether.

Why awful writing is tolerated

Over at Lit Drift, Jessica Digiacinto asks, in a fed-up voice, why awful writing is tolerated. The proximate cause of her despair is last year’s Death Wish imitation Law Abiding Citizen, written by Kurt Wimmer. The film is “so full of every writing Don’t,” Digiacinto says, “it makes our mouths hang open in disbelief.”

I know exactly what she means. Several years ago I delivered myself of a lament about “Bad Writing” that earned me a bit of notoriety in academic quarters. “We work our asses off writing, rewriting,” Digiacinto says; “we beat ourselves up. . . .” And by we she means at least herself and me. Many’s the time that, like her, I have thrown up my hands in disgust when some scholar, in a profession dedicated to preserving and studying literary texts that were written with care, is praised and rewarded for writing that consists of little more than stringing together current commonplaces, uncrackable clumps of with-it terminology, careless voluble obscurity, and idées reçues.

Bad academic writers differ not at all from bad commercial writers. Instead of composing in words, bad writers compose in ready-made phrases. They do not notice when they have substituted approximation for exactitude, because their minds are elsewhere, usually on the unthreat­ening shrug of familiarity they want from their readers.

Digiacinto and I must simply accept the fact that an attentiveness to language is a minority pursuit. My wife has recently fallen in love with Daniel Silva’s series of thrillers with their Israeli hero Gabriel Allon. Eager to read anything that represents an Israeli as a hero, I picked up one of the books (my wife has already read five of them), but I was unable to outlast the first few pages—the prose was exasperatingly limp. My wife, who is a physician, has a motto that she teaches to her fellowship students: “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” In literature, though, “good enough” is no good at all.

Update: As long as I have quoted the great J. V. Cunningham once already today, I guess it’s all right to do so a second time. Why is awful writing tolerated? “Tolerance is almost identical to indifference.”

Jews Without Money

My critical essay on Michael Gold’s 1930 novel Jews Without Money is the main feature this morning at Jewish Ideas Daily.

My argument is that, although Jews Without Money is a “proletarian” novel—the best proletarian novel ever written—its greatness owes little to its proletarian (i.e. its Marxist) dimension. Instead, the novel is a testament to the ability of poor Jews to make a full life for themselves, even a crowded life, in desperate straits.

If any novel deserves to be known as a proletarian novel, Jews Without Money is it. Gold, a lifelong obedient member of the Communist Party, seems to have been the one who first called for a movement of proletarian literature, although his original term was “proletarian realism.” Writing in the New Masses, a radical magazine he co-founded in 1926 to “revive the spirit of the old Bohemian-left-liberal alliance,” Gold said that the literature of the future would be proletarian: that it would perform a “social function” rather than being written “for its own sake.”

Jews Without Money was written according to this formula. Gold uses the word proletarian self-consciously, repeatedly, to give the novel an identifying mark. A fictionalized account of his growing up on the Lower East Side, the novel ends with Gold’s vision of liberation from poverty and social injustice:

     O workers’ Revolution, you brought hope to me, a lonely, suicidal boy. You are the true Messiah. You will destroy the East Side when you come, and build there a garden for the human spirit.
     O Revolution, that forced me to think, to struggle and to live.
     O great Beginning!Everything about the preceding novel, though, gives the lie to this peroration. The “garden for the human spirit” has already been created—by young Mikey’s parents. His mother rushes upstairs to save an Irish child who is choking on a fishbone and later consoles a Italian neighbor whose husband is jailed for murder, leaving her with three children and no friends. “It was marvelous to hear my mother hold hour-long conversations with this woman,” Gold says, “in a polyglot jargon that was a mixture of Italian, Yiddish, Hungarian and English.” Mikey’s father spins outlandish tales for a “convention” of his friends and neighbors, who “held long debates after each story.” His son may dream of a better world achieved by revolution, but his father builds a better world by delighting his listeners with “the thousand-year-old fables of the Orient.”

If only for one book—he never wrote another novel, and descended into a Party hack very quickly after 1930—Gold establishes himself as his father’s son. The novel is not a single coherent narrative but a series of vignettes, each of which shows the spirit of poor Jews trying to live in an inhospi­table climate (“only children are hardy enough to grow on the East Side,” Gold remarks). The characters are poor, but they are not bounded by their poverty. Their unhappiness is caused, not by “America, the thief,” but by personal betrayal, desertion by a spouse, separation from family, the disappointment of children. Their triumphs are fueled by the help they offer one another, the decency they manage to find in mean surroundings.

What Jews Without Money proves is that it is not material conditions but their spirit that defines human beings.

Who thinks or writes like this?

In a short essay on Ethan Frome over at Interpolations, Kevin Neilson quotes two passages by the novel’s narrator, who says about himself only that he has “been sent by my employers on a job connected with the big power-house at Corbury Junction,” although he drops the interesting clue that he has been reading a “volume of popular science—I think it was on some recent discoveries in bio-chemistry. . . .” From this Neilson deduces that he is an “engineer, likely a manager or a supervisor. . . .” And on the strength of this deduction, Neilson objects to the prose that Edith Wharton grants to him:

When the storms of February had pitched their white tents about the devoted village, and the wild cavalry of March winds had charged down to their support, I began to understand why Starkfield emerged from its six months’ siege like a starved garrison capitualting without quarter.Neilson puts his objection in these words: “Now, have you ever met a scientific-minded engineer from the managerial class who thinks or writes like this? . . . I haven’t either.”

Now, I am not exactly sure what Neilson is objecting to here. That putting such prose into the mouth of such a man is a sin against authenticity, fatally compromising the novel’s realism? That it is impossible, destroying the novel’s tragic effect? Merely implausible, making the novel a clumsy vehicle for carrying the reader away?

Two things, at all events, that I don’t think Neilson allows for. Ethan Frome was published in 1911, thirty years after electricity first began to be generated at central stations. If the history of the Boston Edison Company is any indication, the spread and use of electrical power in Massachusetts (the setting of the book) was only becoming widespread around the time that Wharton wrote. The cost of electricity per kilowatt hour dropped by half in the city between 1886 and 1909, according to Boston Edison. The price decrease was the result of engineering improvements and increased demand.

In short, Wharton attaches her narrator to “the big power-house at Corbury Junction” in order to fix the novel’s framing story firmly in the present. An electrical engineer who had risen to have become a manager or supervisor by 1909–’11 would have had to graduate from college around, say, the turn of the century. As historians of the American university can tell you, even engineering students in the late nineteenth century received an education that would strike current engineering students as excessively literary and humanistic. Even if they did not intend to pursue one of the “learned professions,” young engineers were expected, as university graduates, to be liberally educated. A man of Wharton’s narrator’s background would be far more articulate and even poetic than his counterpart today. Neilson does not account for this historical difference.

What is more, his occupation—his interest in popular science—is intended to defamiliarize the narrator, to make him a visitor from a different world and time, almost exactly like Mr Lockwood in Wuthering Heights. The narrator’s distance from events is designed to give Ethan Frome’s story the quality of strangeness, even uncanniness. Once the frame is set by arranging to have the story told to an up-to-date visitor, it is dispensed with, and the question of authenticity or plausibility is no longer relevant (the question of possibility is another matter entirely). The frame is merely a device for generating the fiction.

George Hitchcock, 1914–2010

The news has only now reached me that George Hitchcock has died at the age of ninety-five after a long illness (h/t: Mark Athitakis).

George started teaching at Santa Cruz in 1970, the year I enrolled there as a freshman. He was, I believe, the very first faculty member I met. I knew him by sight, of course. As Jim Hair’s eye-catching photograph from 1973 testifies, George was a striking physical presence, six foot four with a gray mane falling away from a receding hairline, hard to miss. One evening during freshman orientation I was eating in the College V dining hall with my roommate, and went to fetch a glass of milk. George was ahead of me. He lifted the lever on the milk dispenser; nothing came out. He turned to me. “The cows are running dry,” he said in his basso profundo voice. “All over the world, the cows are running dry.” It was my first lesson in surrealism.

George edited kayak, a one-man poetry magazine (hence the name), for twenty years between 1964 and 1984. According to Elaine Woo’s obituary in the Los Angeles Times, the magazine’s name “reflected the manage­ment philosophy of an editor who had come to despair the committee approach to choosing literary submissions.” While at Santa Cruz, I co-founded a little magazine (along with Raymond Carver, John Kucich, and Paul Skenazy) called Quarry. It operated by committee, although the rest of us would have been wiser to defer more often to Carver.

Despite our literary differences, George was extremely generous to me. After I had helped him with something—I can’t even remember what it was now—he sent me a thank-you gift: a signed edition of Philip Levine’s Red Dust, published by Kayak Books in 1971. Perhaps he was trying to tell me something about my taste in poetry. I wrote clotted imitations of Robert Lowell’s early Catholic verse in those days. My poems quoted from the Jewish liturgy in the original Hebrew and required pedantic expli­cation to make any sense. George’s favorite poets made no sense either, but they had a lot more fun doing so.

Two pieces of literary arcana from those years. I interviewed George for the campus television station. (“What do you think of the concept of the poète maudit?” I asked at one point. “Tell me what you mean,” he replied. I launched into a learned disquisition, weaving in references to Baudelaire and Rimbaud, wasting precious air time. “Well,” I concluded, “what do you think?” “Not much,” he said.) I also reviewed his delightful surrealistic novel Another Shore for the student-edited City on a Hill Press. I wish I could find a clipping of the review, but I can’t. The now defunct Story Line Press reprinted the novel in 1988. Copies of it can still be had for a reasonable price. Although the novel is utter nonsense, it is a merry read.

Indeed, that is my dominant memory of George. Although he could be formidable in literary warfare, and though his literary loyalties were as unforgiving as his commitment to the political Left (perhaps even to the Communist Party), he was fundamentally a happy man, who wanted other people to share the poetry that made him happy.

Politics and literature

My comment Sunday on the news that President Obama is reading Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom was not intended to be a political comment, especially not if the word political means “partisan.”

Whether Obama is more or less sophisticated than the “anti-intellectual slob” who preceded him in office is not a question that interests me very much, nor one (I suspect) that any of us is in any position to answer. It is true, I believe, that President Bush cultivated an image of the well-socialized rural Southerner as thoroughly as Obama cultivates an image of the well-read sophisticate who is “the product of three elite schools.” (The hair in the soup is that Bush, despite his reputation, is a heavy reader, something that was kept from the public until the President’s last weeks of office—“awfully late in the day,” as the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen marveled in some perplexity.) For politicians, books and authors are props, which are either carefully staged or sedulously avoided depending upon what the “base,” as the saying goes, demands.

The real question about politics and literature lies elsewhere. In Grand Strategies, Charles Hill suggests that literature can serve as a “tutor” to statecraft. Adam Kirsch scoffs at the suggestion, because (after all) the rational man can no longer approve what the classical poet once glorified: “imperialism and conquest.” For Kirsch, then, the important thing is to determine Hill’s own politics, by which he means Hill’s side in current political squabbles. Thus Hill is “at least a social conservative,” Kirsch warns, since he “dwells often on the sanctity of marriage and family. . . .”

And this is what politics has been narrowed to: as the old Mineworkers’ song used to ask, “Which Side Are You On?”[1] “Will you be a lousy scab,/ Or will you be a man?”—there is no third possibility. Either you deserve a slur or an honorific, and the political problem is to distribute them correctly.

Kirsch can hardly be blamed for not having read Hill’s book with any comprehension, subject as he is to the current commonplace about politics. Hill himself proposes a different understanding. Take his views “on the sanctity of marriage and family,” for example. They do not identify him as a “lousy scab” who irrationally opposes gay marriage (in contradistinction to a rational “man” like Kirsch, who supports it). Rather, Hill argues that marriage, as a legally binding form of contract, is one of the political mechanisms by which primitive uncivilized tribes organize themselves into a modern civilized state.

On Hill’s showing, politics are the extra-personal “strategies” by which people knit themselves together into a polity, and all the members of a polity engage in these “strategies,” even when they take sides to redefine them. (Hence gays’ insistence upon marriage rather than being content with “civil unions.”) The political question in literature is not which side an author is on, but which political “strategies” grab his attention and how he exhibits them in operation in the daily round of life.
____________________

[1] Autobiographical note: both of my grandfathers were coalminers who belonged to the UMW.

Obama and Franzen sittin’ in a tree

When President Obama was “spotted” on Martha’s Vineyard (as if he had not planned to be seen) with Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Freedom, hearts in the republic of letters were set aflutter. The association, after all, was mutually beneficial. Obama benefitted from the prestige of “literary fiction,” while Franzen experienced the once-in-a-lifetime thrill of being brushed with the wings of power. The President does not even have to read the book for the benefits to pile up. And let’s be honest, he probably won’t wade all the way across Franzen’s 500-page novelistic expanse. Obama has admitted that he is has little time for anything more than SportsCenter.

Why Franzen’s Freedom, though? The official story is that a local book­seller “gave” the President an advance copy. What would Obama have done if handed a copy of Sh*t My Dad Says instead? Tony Blair’s memoir would have created too many unflattering comparisons. Jennifer Egan’s Visit from the Goon Squad might have been just as prestigious—and Obama would have been boosting a writer who needs and actually deserves it—but no one has heard of the book, and the President might have seemed “out of the mainstream” if he carried it to the beach so that everyone could see it.

The truth is that Freedom was a perfectly safe choice. Already the second hottest-selling book on Amazon, Franzen’s novel is neither experimental nor a minority taste. And it won’t challenge the President’s political preconceptions. It is the sort of big fat socially relevant novel that was wildly popular in the ’fifties. It belongs to the same company as The Wall or Anatomy of a Murder or Advise and Consent. It is an utterly middle­brow novel whose reputation for “seriousness” is the result of a successful marketing campaign.

Remembering 9/11

Nine years ago today I was driving from Houston to College Station when Islamists hijacked four passenger jets in a coordinated attack upon the United States. I was giving my colleague Itshak Borosh a ride to work that morning; otherwise I would have been listening to the radio.

When I arrived, the worst was over. Having driven an hour and a half in radio silence, I was oblivious to what had occurred. I greeted the department’s computer technician merrily. “How are you today?” I chirped. “How the f——k do you think I am?” he said. Taken aback, I asked what was wrong. “Don’t you know?” he said. But I didn’t. He told me that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center and both towers had collapsed. I stared at him uncomprehendingly. His words made no sense. Nothing in my experience had prepared me to make sense of his words.

I lived in New York for six years, working as a business reporter. Even though the Twin Towers were only about a decade old by then, they seemed to a newcomer as if they had always been there, anchoring lower Manhattan, inhumanly huge, immovable, as permanent as a mountain. To imagine their having collapsed was unimaginable.

I rushed to my office and switched on the radio. No one on the air knew what to say. I found video of the Towers’ collapse on the BBC site. I watched it several times, struggling to do more than gasp.

My lecture course in American literature was due to start, but I couldn’t teach. I still had no words for what I had seen and heard. As I left the building, I ran into a colleague, a James scholar. “Can you believe it?” I asked numbly. (Intuitively I grasped that no one would be thinking about anything else.) “Well, this is inevitably what happens when there is such a disparity of power,” he announced. I was so shocked that I could not react. My colleague nodded as if we understood each other, and went on his way. Only after he had entered the building did I begin to shake with anger.

I have written elsewhere about my students’ reaction, which was far more determined and clear-thinking than my own. Later I learned that most of my colleagues had gone on with their classes as if nothing had occurred. Itshak later told me that he had not even mentioned the day’s events to his students.

But I was in no mood to teach. I cancelled my afternoon class and drove as fast as I could back to Houston. I only wanted to be with my wife. We sat beside each other on the couch till late into the night, watching again and again as video showed United 175 striking the south tower and the Towers collapsing. Since then, of course, network television will not air the footage. My twin sons, born eighteen months after the attack, have never seen it, and I don’t know how to begin to tell them about it. I bought them a copy of Mordicai Gerstein’s Man Who Walked Between the Towers, an illustrated account of Philippe Petit’s tight-rope walk between the Twin Towers in 1974. The book ends by observing that the Towers are gone, but does not say why.

A national silence is slowly enveloping the bloodiest attack on American soil in American history.

Rosh Hashanah 5771

This is just to wish all my Jewish readers a shanah tovah and to prod my non-Jewish readers into wishing me a happy new year!

Talk to you on the other side of the world’s birthday.

Against creative writing

I have been charged—by whom is irrelevant—with being “against creative writing.” And it is true that I have been hard on creative writing, both here at A Commonplace Blog and in the afterword to The Elephants Teach. But as I say in that book, the debate over creative writing has been settled. Anyone who would be “against” it these days, in the sense of opposing its very existence, would be wiping at the front of his trousers after he had already wet them.

What is at issue is how creative writing should be taught. What ideas, principles, models, or parallels should be kept in mind when thinking about creative writing as an academic discipline?

My complaint is that not enough thought has been directed at the question. Creative writing is taught in classrooms around the country (indeed, throughout the English-speaking world) pretty much the same way it has been taught for a generation. As I described it in a memoir of Raymond Carver, who taught it like this, “[S]tudent work, mimeographed and handed around in advance, provide[s] the text for study and dis­cus­sion; and in the name of establishing a ‘community of writers’ which offer[s] its members ‘communal criticism,’ students dominate[] the dis­cus­sions.” The photocopier and the .pdf have replaced the mime­ograph machine, but the basic mechanism has remained unchanged.

Francine Prose’s Blue Angel contains an accurate, and telling, portrait of the creative writing classroom. Swenson listens to a student reading her story to the class, and then must “think of something to say, some way to improve this heartbreaking, subliterate piece of shit. . . .” He is not per­mitted to say that, of course; “classroom etiquette” stops him from saying even that a student can do better. He must never say that she—or anyone—should “bag it and start over, as if no real writer would do that, as if he himself hadn’t pulled the plug on dozens of stories and novels.”

Swenson’s first rule in class is this: “We usually start off saying what we liked about the story.” Then and only then is the class unleashed to tear into the story. They criticize it invariably from the standpoint of anecdote and personal experience. The “most sacred covenant of the workshop,” however, is that the author must never defend her own story.

The students offer suggestions for improving the story, primarily by making it more authentic:

     “So what are you saying?” asks [the student author]. “That I’m supposed to do . . . research?”
     “No,” says [another student]. “Close your eyes. Concentrate till you see the street and the girl and her boyfriend. Till you’re sort of . . . dreaming them. Then write down what you see.”Swenson doubts that his students can do it, but so what? They have been “charged with faith in the power of observation to make something come to life on the page, in the power of language to make something walk and talk.” And that, he realizes, is all that a creative writing teacher can hope to give his students.[1]

It is not enough. For two reasons. First, good writing requires more than the “power of observation,” even more than the “power of language.” As Auden says, it is sometimes necessary to write badly in order to write well—in order, that is, to tell truth, to realize an intention, to keep a prom­ise to the reader. And, yes, something like research is needed too. In other words, good writing must be a discipline of knowledge.

But this is the second and more significant reason why teaching a faith in observation and the power of language—the current aim of creative writing—is not enough. As it is now conceived and organized in the university, creative writing is not a discipline of knowledge at all. It is merely a bureaucracy for the public employment of writers and the boost­ing of English course enrollments. It has no larger purpose; or none that has been thought through.

What purpose should it have? I cannot say for certain, but perhaps the question might at least be debated. When it comes to specifics, I am on this question a reactionary: I believe that creative writing ought to return to its original model. Literary criticism and even literary scholarship ought to be integrated into the writing of stories, poems, and memoirs.

But I am not saying that this is the only possible conception of the subject, that the original model of creative writing should be adopted wholesale, replacing a discredited practice with an untried one. In his book Creative Writing and the New Humanities, the Australian poet Paul Dawson argues for a very different model. He says that creative writing should undertake a social purpose, that it should train writers who will “act as a medium between the academy and the public sphere.”[2]

Dawson and I could not be farther apart in our thinking about creative writing. At bottom, though, is a fundamental agreement: creative writing must be reconceived and reorganized as a discipline of humanistic knowledge, with a far more rigorous pedagogy than is now indulged, and with the recognition that writing demands learning. The “power of observation” is something that writers can develop on their own time. Closing your eyes and dreaming may be essential to the creative process, but not in the classroom.

I guess I don’t see how such a stance as this puts me “against creative writing.” Indeed, I am more for it than many of its current practitioners. I think it can be better, and do not subscribe to the etiquette that prevents me from saying so.
____________________

[1] Francine Prose, Blue Angel (New York: Harper Collins, 2000), pp. 51–55. Ellipses in original.

[2] Paul Dawson, Creative Writing and the New Humanities (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 203–04.

Functioning data, obsolete media

A dispute with a company that charges an exorbitant fee to replace data on floppy disks that will no longer be accessible by the latest version of its software program leads me to wonder if the same thing could happen with the Kindle, iPad, Sony Reader, or other electronic reading devices. As far as I can tell, no one has given any thought to what happens in the sequel when electronic reading hardware becomes obsolete.

After all, those of us who paid full purchase price for data on floppy disks did so under the assumption that, as with the purchase of a print-and-binding book, we were obtaining the contents for all time. What would prevent Amazon, however, from dropping Linux in favor of a different operating system, and then charging customers an additional fee to “translate” the books they had already purchased into the new system?

What happens when Amazon ceases to support the version of the Kindle that you own? Unlike the codex, an ebook requires a piece of hardware—a machine—to be accessible. Isn’t it entirely possible that the machines will be replaced and the electronic data will have to be bought all over again, and again? And that some texts will no longer be available in the new format?

Needless to say, this is not a problem with print and binding. Nearly two years ago, I divided books into two categories: “those which are needed for practical activities and those which are collected, treasured, preserved from destruction.” The Kindle, I speculated, would never replace the latter. And perhaps the reason is that the hardware for accessing such texts—the human mind—is in no danger of becoming obsolete, despite the hostility to it in some quarters.

Tenure

My friend and colleague William Bedford Clark has a delightful poem called “Tenure Deliberations” in his new volume Blue Norther (Texas Review Press, $14.95):

Today the dossiers sit at the head
Of the long table where the Chair convenes
Our meeting. What we say must not be said
Outside this room. We adopt this strict means
Against litigation. Bile and rumor
Move among us as silent witnesses,
While we debate journals, imprints, ardor
In the classroom, what a reviewer says.

Six years, up or out! Nothing personal . . .
But the grim stakes are higher still, for we
Are in the dock; each candidate’s record
Serves as rebuke or vindication. All
Here must judge themselves too and secretly
Cower in what peace tenure may afford.Exactly so. The decision whether to award tenure is as much a depart­ment’s judgment on itself as anything else. So much is code for whether a candidate is, like Count Mippipopolous, “quite one of us.” Questions of status and connections crowd out evaluations of merit and originality. What the department is looking for are the right signs, the reassurance that the candidate shares the interests of the tenured faculty, and in the future will vote accordingly.

In Grand Strategies, which I will be reviewing for Commentary, the long­time diplomat Charles Hill says that the line dividing “precivilization” from civilization is crossed when justice replaces status. Status is related to family or clan; justice is one of the foundations of the state:The state focuses on the public good; the clan cares most for its own private cause. The state is committed to administer justice; the clan is sensitive to its honor. The state recognizes and enforces contracts; the clan may deal in something akin to contract, but hierarchy or status counts for more.Many university departments, especially in the humanities, are organized like clans. Their “silent witnesses” are “bile and rumor,” the stock ticker of reputation among members of a clan. Their tenure deliberations are not an exercise of disinterested and impersonal justice, despite the claim that their decisions are nothing personal. They are the formal means of recog­nizing and enforcing a commitment to a department’s private cause, its honor, and its hierarchy.

Last days of the academic ruling class

Higher education in America is an economic bubble that’s about to burst, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has been saying all summer. When Brooklyn College—a college with an undergraduate Jewish enrollment of twenty-seven percent—assigns a book to all incoming freshmen to serve as the basis of their “common experience,” and when that book is by a radical pro-Palestinian who claims that the government “limits the speech of Arab Americans in order to cement United States policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” you begin to suspect Reynolds may just be right.

The problem is not the assignment. In my experience, few if any of the Brooklyn Collge freshmen will even bother to open the book. I can remember the title of the book that was assigned to all incoming freshmen at U.C. Santa Cruz the year I went up there (it was Arthur Koestler’s Act of Creation), but that’s the sum of what I remember about the book. I bought a copy, but never heard it discussed anywhere on campus. Same for the various books that were assigned to incoming freshmen at Texas A&M University over the years. After the English department made a fuss over choosing them, they were never mentioned again.

The problem is the reaction to Brooklyn College’s choice, as reported by Bruce Kesler (h/t: Instapundit). Donna F. Wilson, dean of undergraduate studies, replied to objections from the retired sociologist Werner Cohn by saying:

Each year professors in the English Department and I select a common reading for our entering students. We choose memoirs (a genre familiar to students) set in New York City, often reflecting an immigrant experience, and written by authors who are available to visit campus. Students in freshman composition respond to the common reading by writing about their own experiences, many of them published in [a campus publication]. This year we selected How Does It Feel to be a Problem: Being Young and Arab in America by one of our own faculty members, Professor Moustafa Bayoumi, because it is a well-written collection of stories by and about young Arab Brooklynites whose experiences may be familiar to our students, their neighbors, or the students with whom they will study and work at Brooklyn College. We appreciate your concerns. Rest assured that Brooklyn College values tolerance, diversity, and respect for differing points of view in all that we do.The invocation of the holy academic trinity of “tolerance, diversity, and respect for differing opinions” is the ceremonial means by which true tolerance, intellectual diversity, and recognition of differing opinions are released into the wilderness. Those who choose books for college study, no matter how politically tendentious and one-sided, are immune to objections from those on the outside.

Yesterday I made the personal acquaintance of such immunity. An English professor at a nearby college dismissed the complaints of the writing majors in a senior seminar, who did not see the point in reading Jacques Derrida.

Rather than an economic “bubble” that is about to “burst,” it is this self-satisfied immunity to public incomprehension and criticism which may at last be fading. There is no way to defend the time and expense of a four-year education which is founded, not upon its economic benefit nor upon the freedom-making greatness of the texts and authors that are assigned, but upon the soi-disant privilege of the book-choosing class.

Note: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Stay awhile, why don’t you? Have a look around. If you are interested in academic questions, this post on why university faculties are dominated by the Left might be to your taste. And here the opposite question is considered: namely, why aren’t there more conservatives in the university?

Damaged in transit

I have been unpacking my library. Because not all of the bookcases have been built, I have just been getting the books out of their boxes in random order. The job has been slowed by the depressing sight of opening each new box. The packers for the van lines did not know what they were doing. My wife says they did not think of books as having any value. Although they wrapped our paintings with extreme care—only because they were framed behind glass, if you ask me—they tossed my books into the boxes any which way. They picked up whole rows and dropped them on their tails with the spines rubbing against the box. Then they piled books on top of them, regardless of any difference in the sizes of the books. The results are dozens of crushed, bent, cocked, and torn books, many with their spines rubbed white from bouncing up and down for twelve hundred miles.

My experience, then, has not been Walter Benjamin’s. Instead of being reminded where I bought a book, and the circumstances under which I read it, I am reduced to asking whether I can afford to replace it. The first edition of Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays was a gift from an old flame, who inscribed it. Does it really matter if it now looks like my wife backed over it in a fit of anger? A hip and glossy study of abstract expressionism looks as if I had thrown it across the room repeatedly. As I recall, that’s pretty much what I wanted to do at the time. Has history been added to my library, or only mimicked?

“It is amazing how books can change the way a room looks,” my wife said. She was marvelling at the whole collection. I am distraught at the fate of a few.

A light summer’s reading

I have made no secret that most of my time this summer has been taken up with what is euphemistically called “relocating.” Other than books that I have read on assignment, I’ve had time for only a few others, none of which got beyond disappointing me. Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman’s biographical study of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher rebbe who died sixteen years ago amidst fervent shouts that he was the messiah, did little more than recast the official Chabad version of the rebbe’s life. The authors were particularly tone deaf in their reliance upon the biographical fact that Schneerson was academically trained as an engineer. Unable to explain how he switched without apparent warning from a secular career to become the world’s most prominent Hasid, they fall back upon saying only that he “engineered” the switch.

Pearl Abraham’s American Taliban, a reimagining of John Walker Lindh’s story, stumbled badly. Abraham makes her John Jude Parish a surfer who is “committed to the daily minute, to living the present in the present tense, to finding the extraordinary in ordinary time, in the here and now.” The choice was an astute one, if Tim Winton’s Breath is a faithful account of surfing. Of course, Winton’s novel came out two years before Abraham’s.

Jesse Katz’s memoir The Opposite Field is about two of the subjects closest to my heart: fatherhood and baseball (coaching Little League baseball, to be specific). There is much to like in the book, but eventually its earnestness began to wear on me. Perhaps I have developed an allergy late in life to lyrical waxing about baseball.

The best book that I read while struggling to organize and manage the cross-country move was Allegra Goodman’s Cookbook Collector. Not her best novel, but an interesting peek into the IPO’s that inflated many a bank account during the dot-com bubble of the ’nineties. Goodman’s shifting point of view, her interest in several characters at once, her refusal to preen or condescend, keeps the novel fascinating on every page. I’ll have more to say on The Cookbook Collector at greater length a little later. For now, though, I’d have to call it the book of the summer.

Hello, Columbus

My family and I arrived in Columbus several days ago, and are settling in. While the locals complain of a heat wave, we newcomers from south Texas look at them incredulously and enjoy the cool snap. The house is in disarray, and the library, designed by my stepfather in red oak, is still under construction. All of my books remain in boxes. Ordinary life has begun to resume, even though school has yet to start. I am grateful to my loyal readers, who have returned to A Commonplace Blog again and again, impatient for new book talk. It is past time to reignite the conversation. Let’s begin again.

Frank Kermode dies at 90

The literary critic Sir Frank Kermode has died at the age of ninety. His most recent book, Concerning E. M. Forster, completed a return to traditional life-and-works criticism, which he abandoned for a spell to become fashionably dense and theoretical. His return from theory was one of the most encouraging events in the recent history of literary criticism. Although never a distinguished prose stylist, he wrote well enough to attract a general audience. And that in itself was a great accomplishment. His like will not soon be seen again.