English Department Then and Now

I received in the mail the quarterly magazine from the English Department where I was a grad student and TA many years ago. This issue included a tribute to a professor I remember with fond respect: Samuel Monk. He was an 18th-century scholar best known for his book on the sublime, but in person he was charming and down-to-earth. I took a seminar with him the last year I had classes; it was quite demanding, with hefty readings and frequent papers, but I loved it. We met in a small conference room, just big enough for the six or eight students plus Professor Monk. Once we met in his apartment, an occasion when he served sherry, as I recall. He referred to himself as "an old toper" that day. In pointing to his extensive library, he noted that Samuel Johnson was once described as "buffeting his books." Professor Monk allowed as how he could not conceive of buffeting his own books, only of quietly "rearranging" them.

Anyway, in the magazine one of his colleagues, now retired, wrote about his first meeting with Sam Monk. "It quickly became apparent that Monk "had read the collected works of everybody," this professor noted. That tribute struck me with some force, because it seemed so dated. What came to matter was not how widely a candidate had read, but whether he or she saw everything through the correct prisms of race, class, and gender. Reading about the current doings of the department faculty bear this notion out. One professor, for example, was exploring how democracy wasn't all that great an idea.

Posted by Finn MacCool

The Broken Center and Dante

Here's another example of the power of the blogosphere. Father Richard John Neuhaus, on First Things, notes the passing of Nathan Scott, who sounds like a wonderful scholar and critic (who also liked cigarettes and dry martinis, which also earn points in my book). He mentions Scott's book The Broken Center. I check it out of the library of the college where I used to teach. It's stunning. It surveys modern literature's ways of coping with the disappearance of meaning from life, which coincided wqith the abandonment of faith. It finds parallels betwen 2oth century novels and ancient Gnostic heresies. It displays an amazing breadth and depth of learning, and it resonates with my own sense of modernists like Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald.

It also includes quotes from other works that I now want to read or re-read. For example, he quotes from Richard Sewell on the essence of tragic action: "Man at the limits of his sovereignty--Job on the ash heap, Prometheus on the crag, Lear on the heath, Ahab on his lonely quarterdeck...with all the protective covering ripped off."

Perhaps to balance this book about the absence of a center, I have started The Divine Comedy, which perhaps is the literary work that demonstrates the unbroken center par excellence. I am reading Dorothy Sayers' translation, and it is marvelous, although I am finding myself wanting to learn Italian, so I can read the original text.

Incidentally, starting my own blog has made realize again how hard it is to convey as solid English what seemed so intelligent when it was but a fleeting idea. I thought of Eliot's famous description of poetry in this context:

(a) raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating,
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.

"Undisciplined squads of thoughts" applies equally well to writing a blog post.

Posted by Finn MacCool

Living in the Blogosphere

It is easy to be surfeited with blogs. But then I recall my gradual realization in 2001 and after of how ineffably wonderful was this explosion of ideas, attitudes, information, and humor. My world would be strikingly poorer without Lileks, Powerline, Shot in the Dark, Fraters Libertas, SCSU Scholars (to name the local blogs that I read regularly), or Tim Blair, The Paragraph Farmer, the Anchoress, First Things, The Corner, The Belmont Club, Small Dead Animals, Tom McGuire, Scrappleface, and on and on. What riches. (I had a glimpse into these possibilities in 1994 with AOL, the walled Internet garden. But now it's a world.)

And in what unexpected directions I can be taken. Lileks, for instance, was writing about Bob and Ray, which reminded me that my older sister used to listen to them on the radio in New York (along with Jean Shepherd). I caught the tail end of radio humor; after that, it was wall-to-wall rock and roll for me. But the clips Lileks provided brought me back to Wally Ballou, and Mary Backstage, Noble Wife, and the rest--their whole, addicting, satiric take on things.

Another direction: Powerline was writing about Barack Obama's embrace of the comparable worth idea for jobs and wages. They dismissed it as a feminist idea from the 70s. But it reminded me of my time at a subsidiary of Control Data in the 80s. The company had set up a consulting business to help small companies survive. It didn't work very well, mostly because small businesses are unable to pay for much in the way of consulting. The problem was compounded by the company's decision to transfer dozens of HR staffers from HQ to the consulting firm. The only hope that all these people could actually be turned into consultants with tons of billable hours lay in the passage of federal legislation mandating comparable worth pay. The great model was the ERISA law of 1974, which helped employ armies of accountants. A comparable worth law would require the services of HR consultants who would analyze jobs and come up with some numerical value for each. Control Data had taken some job-analysis software developed by the Air Force and enhanced it for internal use. Now it would supposedly become a huge source of revenue--another case of the company doing well by doing good, its favorite public narrative. Alas, the law was never passed, and the dream died along with the consulting division.

Blogs on Writing II

Another blog on writing is that of the Phantom Prof, who enjoyed some notoriety when her cover was blown last year (I think). She had been writing anonymously about her experiences as an adjunct writing teacher at an unnamed university, and she had delicious fun at the expense of the wealthy students who were, it seemed, a bunch of fashionably turned out and spoiled airheads who didn't do the work and whined when they received poor grades. She referred to the stereotypical female as Ashley; I can't recall the name she assigned to the male counterpart. (I don't have her problems; there are no conspicuously rich students at the community college where I teach. They all seem to work, some at two jobs. Lots are immigrants, from places like Somalia, Nigeria, Mexico, Thailand, and Laos.)

Someone figured out that she was teaching at SMU, her identity was discovered, and her contract not renewed. I enjoyed her dishing the dirt on her students. It's typical of college writing teachers in my experience that we are supposed to be nurturing and supportive (and help the college retain students), and at the same time we want to maintain our standards, and we do not like to be patronized or conned or taken advantage of or dismissed as fogeys. A dashed-off essay that obviously took someone as long to write as it took to type is simply an act of disrespect. As a result, we take pleasure in seeing such undeserving students get their comeuppance as at the hands of The Phantom Prof. We also are on guard against students who plagiarize or otherwise cut corners. I get the sense that the English teachers at my school are quite conscientious; we want to help, but we are not pushovers. To protect ourselves, we spell out the requirements and rules for courses in detailed syllabi, someting that was not much in evidence at the community college where I taught in the 70s, or at the university where I was a TA. With this detailed contract, we can pounce when work is late or sloppy or cribbed.


My train of thought is chugging into another station, as I recall an episode that soured me on the great U where I labored decades ago. I had been teaching Advanced Composition, which was required of Journalism and Accounting majors. The course was offered through the Extension Division, in the evening, so I also got many adult students who were working. I discovered the joys of teaching motivated adults rather than bored adolescents: they came to learn, they had pasts and interesting points of view, they were mostly a joy to teach.

But one class also had a student from Egypt, who had, I discovered when I graded his first paper, a limited command of English. He should not have been allowed in the class to begin with. But I did not pull the right levers to get him transferred quickly, the way my colleagues today would. Instead I gave him low grades and made lots of comments on his papers, trying to help him improve. THe next thing I knew, I was summoned to some sort of tribunal: the student had accused me of giving him lousy grades because of his pro-Palestinian political views. He said he was a victim, and I soon discovered that the U loved coming to the defense of a self-professed victim. The case wound up going to a higher tribunal (the details are fuzzy after all these years), but I vividly recall passing around pages from his papers and asking the professors who were sitting in judgment of me simply to read and judge the quality of the writing for themselves. To my astonishment, they refused to make any judgment, saying it was beyond their expertise. Also working against me was the absence of a detailed syllabus that spelled out the requirements and ground rules for the course. Anyway, I don't remember any punishment or censure, so I must have won my case somehow, but it left me thinking the adminstration and professoriat were spineless, PC wimps. I lit out for the territory of corporate America the next year.

Posted by Finn MacCool

Blogs on Writing

As someone who has returned to teaching college writing courses, after 25 years of doing other thngs, I enjoyed reading some blogs by other writing teachers. One, called Teacher. Wordsmith.Madman,is written by a guy who teaches at Carnegie Mellon. He does a marvelous job of poking fun at gaffes in newspaper articles, for instance. But I gave up checking out his blog because of the coarse denigration of President Bush and his policies. I wrote to him once, explaining how I liked his blog but that I also liked well-writtten conservative blogs like Powerline. He responded by jeering at Powerline for what he called its howler of blaming Democrats for a memo about the Terry Schiavo matter. I replied that the blog was speculating about the possible origin of the memo (Iwhich later turned out to be from the office of Mel Martinez), and that when the truth came out, Powerline acknowledged its error. So where was the howler? Should the blog not have engaged in self-identified speculation? That would eliminate a lot of interesting blog posts. Anyway, it wasn't the disagreement, but the overall jeering, sneering tone of the blog that finally turned me off.

Posted by FInn MacCool

Virginia Tech

Roger Kimball expresses my thughts on this horrific event, at Armavirumque, the blog of the New Criterion:

" Of the many things that can be said about the horrible shooting at Virginia Tech today, one thing that we have already heard too often is that the shooting is offers a compelling argument against citizens owning guns. Right on cue, Jim Sollo, representing Virginians Against Handgun Violence, told reporters that "We live in a society where guns are pretty well accepted. There are 200 million guns in this society and obviously some in the wrong hands." Well, yes. And that means? That we should concentrate all instruments of violence in the hands of an increasingly bureaucratic and meddlesome state, thus rendering ordinary citizens even more defenseless?"

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Instapundit links to Extreme Mortman's selection of the dumbest question asked by a member of the White House press corps yesterday:

"A member of your White House press corps asked this question at today’s news briefing with Dana Perino:

Q Columbine, Amish school shooting, now this, and a whole host of other gun issues brought into schools — that’s not including guns on the streets and in many urban areas and rural areas. Does there need to be some more restrictions? Does there need to be gun control in this country?

Um, more restrictions than we have? And there’s no gun control in this country? Do facts matter anymore? How about intelligence? Certainly there’s some gun control somewhere in this country — isn’t there?"

Posted by Finn MacCool

Wolfowitz

Reading the first stories about the accusations against Paul Wolfowitz, I was thinking along the lines of The Corner post, which marveled that Wolfowitz could be so clueless as to hand his critics a 2x4 to beat him up with. But the Wall Street Journal editorial today examines the 100-pages of relevant World Bank documents that Wolfowitz ordered released. The docs show Wolfowitz bending over backwards to abide by ethical rules. But the way the matter was handled, the head of the Ethics Committee told Wolfowitz he had to direct the HR guy about the terms of the promotion for Wolfowitz's girlfriend. That directive, when viewed out of context, seemed to be damning evidence. But when taken in its proper context, it is actually exculpatory.

The original stories are further examples of the old maxim that people believe what they read in the newspapers, except regarding those matters about which they have first-hand knowledge.

Posted by Finn MacCool

Don Imus and Stokely Carmichael

I was listening to Michael Medved yesterday taking calls about the firing of Don Imus. One African-American caller said he was very uncomfortable with the word "nappy." He did not explain why. It occurred to me that the black power firebrand from the 1960s, Stokely Carmichael, used the word in his well-known formulation, "Our noses are broad, our lips are thick, our hair is nappy." He was trying to get American blacks to abandon white standards of beauty and embrace their own physical characteristics. Hence Afros instead of straightened hair, for example. Forty years later, though, his campaign does not seem to have completely succeeded, if the caller to Medved's show is typical.

Also, in the movie "Barbershop," the new competitor on the block is called "Nappy Cutz," if I recall correctly.

Posted by Finn MacCool

The Inaugural Post

After several years of reading and enjoying blogs such as Instapundit, The Corner, The Anchoress, Powerline, Captain's Quarters, Fraters Libertas, and The Daily Bleat, I have decided to bring my bucket of thoughts to the blogospheric sea. I do so with some trepidation. For one thing, these bloggers seem to have a superhuman work ethic. How do they crank out all that good work, all the time, especially the ones with day jobs? But at the same time I am emboldened by their example. Captain Ed, for example, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at a talk by Jonahh Goldberg, said he started his blog to sharpen his writing skills. And James Lileks wrote today that he has long tought a day lost that did not produce some piece of writing. Anyway, here are a few pensees to start.

Blog Name
I thought of calling the blog "Garlic and Sapphires," after a line from Eliot's Four Quartets, but it was taken, although that blog does not appear to be active. Also taken was Cacoethes Scribendi, a line from Juvenal meaning an insatiable urge to write. So I settled on Nunc est scribendum, a play on the Juvenal quote as well as on Nunc est bidendum, which is Latin for "It's Miller time."

Local TV News
In the Twin Cities, the local TV news on Channel 9 could be so much better. It could do more investigative pieces, for example, or more in-depth stories on local political races or legislative issues. Instead, it has a "Wildest Police Chases" mentality, grabbing whatever graphic video is out there, no matter the absence of any local angle. What a waste of broadcast spectrum. On the bright side: they no longer have Janie Peterson doing the weather; she was fingernails-on-a-blackboard annoying. The new guy isa slight improvement, although he is a collection of odd mannerisms. Where is the latter-day Bud Kraehling?

Garrison Keillor
James Lileks and Mitch Berg have weighed in from time to time on the subject of Garrison Keillor. I don't know what led Keillor to turn so nasty toward Republicans. Perhaps Mitch is right that Republicans could be dismissed or patronized as long as they were not in power. Living in a liberal town like St. Paul, I frequently encounter the view that Republicans and conservatives are not just wrong, but stupid. Condescension is a common attitude; those unenlightened unfortunates who do not see the wisdom of the progressive worldview are just not as highly evolved as those who do.

I prefer to recall Keillor's more individualistic style of years past. For example, in the 1980s he had the humorist Roy Blount, Jr., on the Prairie Home Companion show; Blount did a hilarious sendup of various PC sensibilities: he started out with a trio of backup singers intoning "So fine," in the manner of sixties rock groups. First, someone objects to the singers being black (racist), then to their being female (sexist), then to their being young (ageist), so the end result ( as I recall) was three old white guys singing "So fine."

Similarly, when Keillor had a daily radio program on Minnesota Public Radio, he would sometimes poke fun at the earnest types at places like the University of Minnesota who were pushing their multi-culti agenda even back then. But those quirks seem to have disappeared.

I don't listen to his Saturday show much anymore (the Guy Noir sketches are hard to bear, and there isn't as much bluegrass as there used to be when Hotrise was on regularly). But it seems to me that the appeal of the Lake Wobegon monologues lay in the balance or tension between poking fun at small-town foibles and celebrating (albeit hedged with irony) small-town verities and values. Take, for example, the mother who comes to visit her married son (or daughter, I can't remember) in "the Cities." She is puzzled by their sophisticated, well-heeled ways. When they give a party, she heads for the kitchen to help, only to discover the catering crew; she does not have to do any work, which is disorienting. So is the idea of food in the living room. I did not get the idea that Keillor was having fun at the Lake Wobegon mom's expense.

So too with the anecdote about the grown children who return to Lake Wobegon at Christmas and pretend for the sake of the grandparents that the grandchildren are being raised as good Lutherans or Catholics, when the parents are in fact neglecting the religious formation of the kids. I did not see that as anything but Keillor poking fun at the hypocrisy of the parents and perhaps lamenting the loss of religious tradition.

As I say, I don't listen to PHC much these days, but I wonder if that balance is still there.

After 9/11, I was interested to see if and how Keillor would handle this attack on America. He did work it into a monologue: a Lake Wobegon family had a son who was killed in the World Trade Center. But it was as if the building had been destroyed by a tornado or some other force of nature. It seemed beyond Keillor's worldview to say anything about Islamists who want to kill the maximum number of Americans. Perhaps saying anything along those lines would be to get too close to the idea that we as a nation should respond to this act of war by going to war. Which was what the Bush administration did, of course.