Letters-to-the-editor idiocy knows no nation

I'm sure that many of my readers, like me, received as an extra punch to the gut the news that the plane shot down over Ukraine was carrying more than 100 HIV/AIDS researchers. This doesn't make the story worse, exactly--298 lives lost is a tragedy, whoever they are, and the geopolitical crisis doesn't care whether they're vacationers, bankers, or scholars. But it's a loss on top of those losses to think of how this affects an urgently important field of research.

(And I bet I'm not the only one who's occasionally looked around the plane en route to a conference and thought, "damn: if this goes down, there goes half of Donne studies.")

So I wasn't surprised, on my flight back to the States yesterday, to see that one of the letters to the editor of the Guardian was also thinking about the relationship of the MH17 crash to the future of scholarship. I was, however, TOTALLY surprised by what he considered the tragedy an occasion to opine on.

Here's the letter in its entirety:

The overall loss of life in the Malaysia Airlines disaster (Report, 18 July) is the primary concern, but a separate issue is raised. Around 100 were scientists going to a conference in Australia. Is it not time to ask why such trips are necessary? The advent of large-screen TVs and rapid transmission of data and the spoken word mean it is no longer necessary to send thousands of people around the world at great expense and at major environmental cost. Now we have lost a very large number of people expert in the science of Aids. What cost will this be to those suffering from the disease?

Dr Simon Harris
Wrexham

Clearly, if there were no academic conferences, the public would be better off.

Writing as discovery

For my sins, I read David Brooks's column as many times a week as it appears (and for Cosimo's sins, I often read them aloud). Usually they're not worth the energy of mocking publicly, but today is an exception, because today's column opens with Brooks telling us how to write. Worse, he's telling us how he tells his students to write:

I tell college students that by the time they sit down at the keyboard to write their essays, they should be at least 80 percent done. That's because "writing" is mostly gathering and structuring ideas.

Obscured within this idiotic and irresponsible statement are two important ideas. The first is the useful reminder that "writing" involves an awful lot of thinking (and reading and researching) that goes on apart from the time spent at the computer or with pen in hand. The second is that the structure of a piece of writing is as important as the ideas it expresses.

But for most people, writing, developing ideas, and deciding on structure are mutually constitutive and not easily separable into distinct stages. Brooks seems to believe he's giving his students the same advice as John McPhee, whose elaborate and idiosyncratic approach to structure is the subject of a long New Yorker essay from last winter. But even a casual read reveals that McPhee does a tremendous amount of writing even as he's still figuring out an article's structure. Personally, I know writers who do extensive preliminary outlining and who spend days or weeks ordering their ideas in their heads and on notecards (or dry-erase boards, or whatever), but only a small number then find the subsequent writing an efficient and straightforward process. If this is true of Brooks, then that's terrific--but it isn't really what McPhee describes and it certainly isn't true of most writers. Indeed, I've found that for less-experienced writers, a preliminary outline often winds up foreclosing possibilities: students are anxious when their ideas start to go in directions that don't fit the script, and so they decline to pursue those ideas--or they keep them, but in a structure that no longer makes any sense.

Because I actually teach students writing semester in and semester out, and because I know how inclined they are to cling for dear life to whatever pronouncements previous instructors have made or whatever frameworks they've provided (DIE, FIVE-PARAGRAPH ESSAY, DIE), I don't say stupid shit like, "80 percent of your writing happens before you write" or "writing is just structuring ideas." Writing is how most of us have ideas, not simply the end result of them.

For my part, I teach students that structure is vitally important, but that the right structure isn't always apparent until later. It might make sense to start with an outline, but whether or not they start with one, they should take a hard look at the structure of their essay once it seems done and see what might need rearranging or reconsidering. (I tell them that I often outline my own essays only after I've written a good, coherent draft, in order to better see what the component parts are and to understand the larger logic at work; it's a way of stepping back to see the big picture.)

Writing is hard. Teaching writing is harder. But everyone who does both knows that there isn't a single right way to write--the right way is the way that works for you. We benefit from hearing about other people's processes and strategies and trying them on to see which might be helpful, but no method should be presented as definitive. John McPhee doesn't do that in his essay, and I'd thank David Brooks not to do it either.

And with that rant, I close out 2013. Catch ya on the flip side.

Office of alumi counter-relations and de-development

I've written before about how cluelessly patronizing and tone-deaf I find pretty much every fund-raising appeal from my alma mater, whether delivered by letter, email, or in person (I can't even talk about the go-get-'em-tiger speeches given by my class treasurer and reunion gift officer last year, which resembled nothing so much as a branch manager's exhortation to his team to meet that month's sales targets). But every single one pisses me off.

Here's the latest:

Dear fellow alumni,

It was about this time of year that each one of us carried that last armload of books back to the Library before graduating. What did you feel as you pushed them across the desk or slid them into the book drop—relief, joy, sadness, gratitude? Well, did you know that when you give to the Alumni Fund, you can choose to give directly to the Library through the "Library Resources" bucket? The Library puts your dollars to work immediately to ensure that its resources stay up-to-date, its expert librarians can help every inquiring student, and its couches are comfortable.

No matter how you took advantage of the Library during your time at [INRU], we hope you will join us in giving back today by designating your Alumni Fund gift for Library Resources! Visit [website] today.

Boola boola,
[Alumni Fund Officers]

Now, okay: I react especially negatively to this approach because I work in higher education and my own institution's library doesn't have half the resources (whether in the form of books, databases, or comfy couches) of my alma mater. But I don't think that's the whole of it; I have a hard time imagining this appeal being effective with anyone I know, even those outside of higher ed.--plenty of whom are sentimental about their college days and prone to nostalgic reveries about Saturdays spent in those grand reading rooms or prowling the stacks.

Because however callow and heedless we may have been in our youth, and however much we may have taken INRU's resources for granted, we've all been out in the world since then. We probably all have connections to or emotional investments in at least a dozen organizations with relatively shallow pockets: our local schools, arts organizations, places of worship, homeless shelters, and so on. If I'm nostalgic about my experiences in INRU's libraries? I'm going to give to a literacy organization, or a local library, or the library at my kid's school--not to an institution with a $20 billion endowment, whose libraries are nicer than those at 99% of the world's universities.

Maybe I just don't know anyone capable of giving truly big bucks--the donors the university really wants to cultivate--and maybe such people respond differently to such appeals. But as someone intensely fond of her alma mater and capable of donating annually in the low three figures (but who does not), what I want from a fundraising appeal is, first of all, a direct acknowledgement of the university's fabulous wealth. I want an acknowledgement that there are other charities out there that I might (and do) consider worthier.

That's the most important thing, actually: the acknowledgment that decades of need-blind admissions (and extremely generous financial aid) mean a lot of graduates neither come from money nor go on to it, and that even more graduates have an uncomfortable and ambivalent relationship to INRU's wealth. Then I'd like a pitch that explains why--despite those facts--I should still give: because the recession has cut into the endowment, forced them to freeze faculty lines, imperiled the university's ability to fully fund students with family incomes below $65,000. Whatever.

Maybe they can't do that second part, because it's not true. Fine. But imagining your alumni as living in a sentimental bubble, in love with nothing so much as their alma mater and untouched by any financial pressures of their own--well, that's gross. If those people exist, I don't even want to know them, much less be taken for one.

Wanna to know why I don't give even the minimal sum that covers the cost of my alumni magazine subscription? That's why. Boola boola.

Catch-22

For me, tenure has meant becoming more deeply invested in my institution: suddenly caring about everything, from wonky procedural matters to bigger-picture college-wide initiatives.

But caring leads to constant irritation. And my prior capacity for irritation was not small.

Popery and arbitrary government

I was in my campus office grading papers, prepping for my night class, and periodically scanning the internet in the hopes of finding something to do other than grade papers or prep for class when someone tweeted "habemus papam #fumatabianca"--and I gladly abandoned my grading for what I thought would be twenty minutes but turned into more like ninety.

And, whatever. The end of a papal election is a cool enough thing to see "live," and with much the same pleasure as watching the Oscars or a royal wedding: there's lots of pageantry; other people are watching and chatting about it; there's a small chance that actual history might be made. In other words, it's 4 parts diversion to 1 part news. While waiting for the Big Reveal, I hung out on Facebook and Twitter trading jokes with friends about what was taking so long, about the goofy marching band, and about how well the next pontiff might or might not accessorize.

As a Catholic, I care who the next pope is, but a new pope is unlikely to impact me that much (at least compared with a new pastor or bishop or even a new U.S. president). Moreover, I'm not a deeply-informed Vatican-watcher. I'd followed the coverage of Benedict's resignation closely and had read up on some of the papabili, but I didn't know anything about Bergoglio; if I'd heard his name mentioned as the runner-up in 2005, I'd forgotten it as soon as I'd learned it.

All of this is to say that I'm not setting myself up as a vaticanista, nor as someone who takes the papal election unduly seriously. But I still found myself exasperated by all the morons on the internet who took the occasion to leave drive-by comments (often on otherwise funny, smart, irreverent threads) like, "don't you know Bergoglio's VERY AGAINST gay marriage??" or "The fact that a woman can't be pope is OUTRAGEOUS!!! When is the Catholic Church going to get with the program?!"

Uh, yeah. Everyone on planet earth knew that no woman was going to be elected, nor anyone who had ever said anything that might even be misconstrued as supporting gay marriage. Thanks for that trenchant and original critique, Mr. New-Age Hippy, Ms. Ex-Catholic, or Dr. Atheist.

Partly it's the tone-deafness and the bad manners that bug me. When someone you know is enthusiastic about something (even something you think is dumb or evil) you don't barge in and say "OMG THAT'S SO STUUUPID." No. You bite your tongue, you roll your eyes. . . and you talk smack about that person behind her back. Partly, it's the combination of ignorance and arrogance. Not all of those fascinated with the papal election are themselves religious: I have secularist friends who are historians or just political junkies who were posting updates on the conclave several times a day. But those of us who do care, for whatever reason, are probably more informed than those who just want to talk about how bad the Catholic Church (or organized religion, or religion) is.

Few practicing Catholics are unaware that problems exist in the church, and none of us, liberal or conservative, are really that interested in ignorant opining, even when it comes from those with whom we might otherwise make common political cause. As a progressive Catholic, I can assure my liberal, non-Catholic friends that I know the church's problems much better, and have thought about them much more deeply, than you have. I'm completely not interested in your opinion--unless you are, let's say, a religious historian, or otherwise have access to some immediately relevant body of knowledge or area of expertise that you're going to draw upon.

If you're genuinely interested in knowing what (and how) I think, I'll happily have that conversation with you one-on-one. But I'm not going to engage with someone whose own insight is minimal and who isn't interested in listening.

*

As for Francis, I'm reserving judgement. I joked on Facebook that the options were basically "huh! coulda been worse!" and "OH NO"--and we seem to have gotten the former. I'm prepared to be surprised by him, but won't be surprised if I'm not. Popes are like Supreme Court justices: there's stuff we sorta know about them, but it's not always predicative--especially since they serve for life and aren't directly answerable to anyone.

Change will come, sooner or later, either from inside or outside--and when it comes it's going to be dramatic. Increasingly, I think I might be alive to see it. Whether that's a good thing only time will tell.

Ethnic pride group requests greater ghettoization

Today's New York Times has an article about an Italian-American group suing Columbia for what the group claims is misuse of a donation made in the 1920s. The legal merits of the case seem awfully thin--the suit is brought by descendents of the original donors and there appears to be no money left to misspend--but I'm interested in what the case says about the extremely limited, even ghettoized understanding of "Italian culture" advanced by the aggrieved descendents.

The case concerns a large, beautiful building (now landmarked) built in the 1920s by a group of Italian-Americans and Italian immigrants and donated to Columbia to support the study of Italian culture. According to the Times, "For decades, the house served as a hub for Italian scholarship and community at Columbia. The university's Italian department resided in the building. A donated collection of some 20,000 volumes of Italian literature lined the shelves." Now, however, the Italian department is housed elsewhere, there's no longer an Italian cultural student group, and the 20,000 books are housed in the main library.

But the building is still used to support Italian scholarship--in fact, it's now owned by the Italian government: by the 1990s the building needed millions of dollars' worth of renovations, so Italy purchased the building, paid for the renovations, and then gave Columbia a 500-year lease on the place. It now houses the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, "[h]alf of [whose] board of guarantors are appointed by the university and half by the Italian government."

And yes, you guessed it: even though the building is jointly run by Columbia and by actual Italians, and it exists to support and promote the work of Italian scholars and scholars of Italy, that isn't Italian enough for the donor descendents: in their suit, they claim that Columbia "owe[s] a fiduciary duty of obedience to the donor families to ensure that La Casa is used to diffuse Italian history, culture, art and literature to promote the educational and spiritual uplift of Italians in America." Instead, they charge, the building has become an "enclave for Columbia staffers and traveling European academics, including many in disciplines wholly unrelated to Italian history and culture."

To the extent that the complaint is about a reorientation away from undergraduates, the donor descendents have a partial point: the Italian Academy's activities aren't aimed primarily at undergraduates, though their schedule of events from the past few years does include regular public lectures on topics in Italian culture, readings of Italian poems in translation, and concerts of Italian music (and the Italian Department's undergraduate homepage publicizes those events).

But although the donor descendents might reasonably think that this isn't what their ancestors had in mind in the 1920s and 1930s, it's equally reasonable to think that their ancestors would have been thrilled that, eighty years on, Italy and Italian Americans don't need a separate building, library, or advocacy group to celebrate their cultural achievements. In the early twentieth century, Italian Americans were still a ghettoized and despised ethnic group. It makes sense that an immigrant organization would wish to instill pride in its sons and daughters by promoting the glorious achievements of the Old Country in ages past. But in the early twenty-first century--seriously, is there any non-English-speaking country that Ivy League students want to visit more than Italy? Majoring in Italian--like majoring in French or art history--is understood as signalling someone's membership in the elite.

Surely an immigrant group has arrived once that's the case--and once the study of Italy and Italian culture isn't limited to ancient Rome and Renaissance Florence. Isn't the opportunity to learn about (and from) twenty-first-century Italian neuroscientists, sociologists, and industrial designers a real recognition of the creativity and innovation of the Italian people?

Well, you'd think.

Religion that serves you

There are a lot of twenty- and thirtysomethings at the church I attend, which isn't particularly surprising: my parish is a lively and active one, located smack in the middle of an artsy neighborhood popular with college students and recent grads.

Some of the young people are energetically involved in the life of the parish, while a larger number are more or less just passing through: they're living in the area for a few years, they're in the habit of going to mass, and this is the most convenient church. Others really just seem to be passing through: probably once a month we wind up seated near a young couple who seem ill at ease and uncertain about even the basic responses or the order of the mass. My standard assumption is that such couples are church- or faith-shopping, or contemplating marriage: one or both might have been raised Catholic and been away for a while, and they're trying us on to see if we fit.

I've got no problem with that, or with passers-through of any variety; I've tried on churches myself. During one period of my life I was so unable to decide between one extremely conservative and one extremely progressive parish that I just floated back and forth between them for four years. (What attracted me to the one repelled me in the other, and vice versa.)

What I do have a problem with is those people who act as though whatever it is that they want or expect from a church requires nothing--no effort, no participation, not even a little friendliness and good humor--in return. They want to walk in and feel immediately comfortable, immediately special. Having some tenuous identity as Catholics means they should have RIGHTS! Rights to rites, in fact, for nowhere is this attitude on greater display than in nonpracticing Catholics who want to get married or have their kids baptized in the church.

Today was a baptism. We have a lot of baptisms at my church, sometimes as many as three or four a month, and I generally find them delightful. Babies tend to be cute; their families tend to be happy; and the two priests who serve our parish are warm and genial and extremely well-practiced (rarely does a baptism add five minutes to the usual length of the service). But today was not one of the delightful ones.

I was serving as lector, so I'd heard the parish administrator talking to the presider before mass about the baptismal family. She mentioned that they seemed confused and unfamiliar with the service, so would need more guidance from the priest than usual. Whatever, I thought. New parents are allowed to be flakey and confused, or the baptism might have been the grandparents' idea; who knows.

But I spent all mass staring at this family (they were seated in the first two rows and I was seated up in the sanctuary) and I couldn't figure out whose idea the baptism could possibly have been. They all looked like they'd been dragged there against their will. The parents, the godparents, all four grandparents, and several adult siblings were present, and no one seemed to have any idea what was going on. One set of grandparents made an effort--they sang the songs from the hymnal and used the pew cards to follow the new responses--but no one else did. No one else attempted a response, recited even the Lord's Prayer, or so much as picked up a pew card or opened a hymnal (though they all received communion). The baby's parents nudged each other and whispered during the homily. Throughout, the looks on the faces of the family members ranged from stoic endurance to sour displeasure.

And you know, I'm all for being welcoming. I'm fine with meeting people where they're at, and I understand that lots of cultural Catholics have a sentimental attachment to ritual and fetishize various signifiers of the religion without actually wanting to be a part of a community of faith. I don't love that attitude, but insofar as cultural Catholicism indicates a genuine attachment to the religion of a person's childhood, my position is that it's a net good for those of us who are practicing. Such people often send their kids to Catholic schools. They show up en masse for the baptisms and first communions of their nieces and nephews. They have relatives who go to church regularly--they may even have an aunt or uncle who's a nun or a priest--and many of them think occasionally that they really should start going to church again themselves. They belong to a community, in other words, that supports the community of actual believers.

As I say, I get this. What I do not get is people who think religion--or whatever symbolism or meaning or social benefits they think accrue to religion--comes entirely without participation. Belief may be personal, but religion is relational. It's about community. It depends on community. And being a part of a community means that you have to give at least a little something in return. Like, say, your engaged and interested presence, however infrequently you may show up.

But for some people, even that seems a terribly high bar.

Divas vs. team players

Around the time that I started this job, someone on the internet had this advice for new faculty: if you act like a diva, you'll get treated like a diva.

In its original context, this advice was meant in a strictly limited way: the author was encouraging new faculty not to feel obligated always to be "team players" if that meant never saying no, never having time for their own research, and taking on burdensome service assignments while their other colleagues always seemed too busy to do their fair share. Those who act like divas by prioritizing their own needs and insisting on the value of their own work, argued the advice-giver, are usually accorded more respect--and their needs, time, and scholarship assumed to be more consequential.

I think of this advice often; in fact, I thought of it today when I had to send someone a cold, bluff-calling email: no, you're the one who dropped the ball; I will not make this ridiculous sacrifice because you didn't have your shit together--and in fact, if you can't come up with a better solution, I'll just withdraw from this thing that benefits me not at all but that you're depending on me to do.

(Ahem.)

But as good as this advice is in some contexts, it cuts another way, too. If you act like a diva--that is, like an unstable, impossible-to-please, crazy person--people will treat you like one: they'll say whatever they have to say to make you stop throwing things, and then vow never to work with you again. And unless your value to them or the institution is so high as to make you irreplaceable, they pretty much won't.

We're all familiar with the professor who swears he'll quit his job! if some minor thing happens or doesn't happen--or who tells you he'll never forgive you! if you vote a certain way in a department meeting, or teach a class he considers his exclusive property, or whatever. And in my experience, those people are not taken seriously. They're ridiculous, because their demands are out of all proportion to what they're bringing to the negotiating table. (You'll quit? Yes, please! You'll never speak to me again? Wait--is that a promise?)

The key to being a successful diva, I think, is actually to be a good team player. If it's clear that you value the mission of the place as a whole, and want it to succeed, and if you're pulling your weight on a departmental or institutional level, you can throw the occasional fit or make the occasional big demand when (and this is key!) you're genuinely being disrespected or not having your essential needs met.

And, of course, when you can live with the consequences. A diva doesn't say she's going to walk if she's not prepared to walk.

Very special, very unique

I probably wouldn't read the New York Times wedding announcements if I expected to find nothing in them to mock, but I don't read them solely to make fun of them. In fact, they've provided me with much useful information over the years.

But of all the ridiculous things that people do with or reveal in their wedding announcements, nothing entertains me more than the earnest attempts some couples make to "create new traditions" or cobble together meaning out of traditions that are not their own.

Today's winners: a coupla white folk getting married in a "traditional Inca ceremony" presided over by a shaman.

Oh those girls and their books!

This New York Times article from a few days ago has been making the rounds on my social media sites: lowly book technician discovers an engraving by Paul Revere! And, yeah, the part about making an unusual find is nice (the engraving isn't the first known copy of the image, though it's very rare). But the article itself is stupendously bad, written in a voice of sentimental condescension. Here are some early paragraphs:

Day after day, a tall, shy woman weaves her way unnoticed through the earnest and learned campus swirl of Brown University. She enters the hush of a library, then promptly vanishes from sight.

[. . . . ]

Ms. Malchodi is more spiritually attuned to books than her Orwellian job title might suggest. She came to Brown as an undergraduate in the early 1980s, but life wound up demanding her study. Soon she was working in a College Hill bookstore rather than reading in a college library, and making cabinets rather than writing papers about her beloved Romantics.

One day she saw an advertisement for a bookbinding and conservation job at the university. She has been here ever since--though mostly underground--inspecting old books, submitting to their long-ago stories and vanishing to where now is then and then is now.

In the ensuing 20 years, gray has come to her hair and a husband and twin girls have come to her life, yet wasn't it all just yesterday? When Wordsworth thrilled her heart? When Wordsworth lived?

So okay, that's some bad prose right there, and it's on the writer, not the subject. But I wonder whether the two aren't related, for this is the way that lots of educated people talk about old books: in terms of rapturous sentimentality. Books are precious things! Oh, the dust of ages! Oh, the tooled bindings! They connect us to the past! Why, who knows who leafed these pages before us?

It's also worth noting the way that book-loving is so often feminized. It's a charming, quirky, unpractical, feminine habit, this ability to get lost in books and to have a passionate emotional relationship with them as objects. It's not that there aren't male book-lovers in the world or in popular culture, but as I noted some while back, the relationship that gets drawn between men and books tends to emphasize their deep thoughts and their pursuit of knowledge. Male book-lovers are writers and scholars. Female book-lovers may occasionally be imagined as writers and scholars, but more often they're simply readers--and the kind of readers who go into misty raptures over that old-book smell, and touching the past, and all that shit. Their thoughts about books don't matter; it's their relationship with books. They're books' most most devoted acolytes, and perhaps by extension the devoted acolytes of (mostly male) writers.

Don't get me wrong: I love books, too. And I own a couple from the seventeenth-century and get a little thrill from them. But I wish female book-lovers weren't so often portrayed as passive daydreamers, for whom books are just another form of daydreaming.



(This portrayal is rather better.)

Hate-reading

Guilty as charged:

[I]f a subject has absolutely no idea how they're coming off to readers, then it's all the more outrageous and, for me, all the more enjoyable. Some of my tried-and-true hate-reading regulars include an ex-roommate who refers to her significant other as "The Boyf" and brags about how she only eats at Michelin-starred restaurants; a former co-worker who extols the values of juice cleanses and composes lists with titles like, "The Top 10 Ways to Stay Present and Centered;" the friend-of-a-friend whose wedding site features a countdown ticker and engagement ring video montage; and the acquaintance who has a "fashion blog" even though she only ever posts black-and-white photos of herself in American Apparel leotards. I'm endlessly fascinated by how obnoxious these people are, and equally entertained by their ignorance of that fact.

I do this a lot. And when I say "a lot," I mean A LOT. But hey, at least now I have a name for it!

Professional-class parenting

I have the usual feministic mixed feelings about Caitlin Flanagan's work, but I found myself agreeing with much of her article in the April issue of the Atlantic. Nominally, it's a response to Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother--or really, a response to the many responses to Amy Chua--but it winds up being mostly about the high-stakes college admissions process.

Flanagan argues that the real reason so many decent, thoughtful, upper-middle-class mothers are upset by Chua's book is that they simultaneously believe that their children should be less burdened and overscheduled, more imaginative and more free to follow their own passions--and that their creative intelligence and own-bliss-following should win them a spot at Princeton. They're therefore made frantic by the conflict between their beliefs about progressive parenting and the reality of college admissions. Ivy League schools have so many applicants that they don't have to choose between admitting quirky, creative kids (whose one or two great passions mean their report cards are a little patchy) and admitting overscheduled, super-achieving automatons. Princeton could fill an entire entering class with superachievers who are also quirky and creative and passionate.

Now, I haven't read Chua's book and I don't have children, but Flanagan's analysis rings true with what I hear and see around me in the debate about top-tier colleges and universities: admission to such schools is seen either as a real and significant judgment on an adolescent's intelligence and abilities--or as a process that rewards only the dull and the driven, who spend long hours coloring, furiously, within the lines. In my experience, neither is true--or maybe both are, but to a much more limited degree than either the Ivy League's obsessives or its detractors suppose.

I'm therefore supportive of Flanagan's proposal that those parents who really care about their children's individual passions and intelligence adopt what she calls "The Rutgers Solution" (where "Rutgers" = the flagship state school of your choice):

If you make the decision--and tell your child about it early on--that you totally support her, you're wildly engaged with her intellectual pursuits, but you will not pay for her to attend any college except Rutgers, everything will fall into place. She'll take AP calculus if she's excited by the challenge, max out at trig if not.

Now, Flanagan doesn't seem to be serious about this proposal; she's just making the rhetorical point that upper-middle-class parents in certain areas of the country, like the NYC 'burbs, would never seriously encourage their kids to drop AP classes or enforce their bedtimes--thus solving the problem of stress and burnout--because even as they bemoan the academic rat race they would also consider sending their kids to Rutgers a sign of their failure.

But I think parents might benefit from taking her proposal seriously, at least with some caveats: it strikes me as unnecessarily limiting to tell a child that you'd only pay for her to attend a local university--some of us were motivated precisely by the idea that we might go someplace we'd never have to see any of our high school classmates again--and it's not the child's ambitions that are really the problem anyway; teenagers drive themselves hard either because they genuinely enjoy the work they're doing (and/or desire its end result), or because they've erroneously been led to believe that they will only be happy and successful in life if they attend one of approximately 15 different colleges.

So rather than saying, "We'll only pay for you to go to college if you go to Rutgers," say, "We expect you to go to college, and if you work hard, you'll get into Rutgers." And then see who your child is, and what she can do, and recalibrate. If the kid has other ambitions, she can bring up other colleges on her own (or not). If the kid is having a hard time, tell her about all the other academic and life options available.

This is more or less what my own parents did. They attended every academic and extra-curricular event I was involved in, and they were hugely affirmative about my accomplishments, but they never suggested that there were better colleges than the local flagship; other options simply weren't on their radar. Once I started looking at fancier schools they got interested and involved--but I still never had the impression that they cared (in any neurotic personal way) where I wound up. They were equally cool with my brother's decision not to go to college right after high school; they were happy about and interested in his high-tech job, and equally happy and interested when, a few years later, he applied and went away to college.

In the end, then, Flanagan's essay is a little incoherent; she takes, as always, too much glee in exposing what she sees as the hypocrisy or limited self-knowledge of "professional class parents," seemingly more interested in flagellating than in reassuring them, even though her essay could provide cause for reassurance. Toward the end of the article she notes that rejection from an Ivy League school is no great tragedy, since there are lots of colleges and universities out there, full of good teachers and smart, interesting students. However, she doesn't conclude on that note, but on this one:

most children today can't have it both ways: they can't have a fun, low-stress childhood and also an Ivy League education. This is what [Amy Chua] understood early on--as the good mothers are about to learn, when the heartbreaking e-mails and letters from the top colleges go out this month--that life is a series of choices, each with its own rewards and consequences. In a sense, that is the most unpalatable message of her book. . . that the world really doesn't lie before us like a land of dreams. At best--at the very best--it can only offer us choices between two good things, and as we grasp at one, we lose the other forever.

And all I can say to that is: give me a fucking break. This isn't a real double-bind, or at least not for any parent who is genuinely concerned about her child rather than the values or judgments of her fellow parents.

Photographing life

Last week we spent most of an afternoon at MoMA. It was midday and midweek on a sunny day, so the crowds were manageable, but there was one inconvenience: people standing in front of the art taking photographs.

I'd seen a certain amount of this in recent years, but never thought that much about it. Some people, I supposed, just didn't want to pay for the postcard in the gift shop--and others might be actual artists who wanted a digital image so they could blow it up on their home computer and scrutinize the brushwork or whatever. But at MoMA there was an epidemic of photo-taking, and as best I could tell, most of the visitors were not taking photos of just a few favorite works, nor were they trying to prolong their pleasurable experience in the museum. No. They were going from painting to painting, taking photo after photo (often two in succession: first of the painting and then of the text on the wall beside it), spending no more than 10 seconds looking at each painting with their unaided eye.

This baffles me. I don't have an especially sophisticated critical vocabulary for talking about the visual arts, but even someone with no training can experience art--and that experience is why I go to museums and exhibitions: to see differently and to feel differently. There's a reason that I always visit a couple of paintings at the INRU art gallery when I'm in town: what affects me can't be reproduced photographically. I have to sit quietly in front of them, and feel whatever it is that they make me feel.

I've never taken photos of museum art, but these days I take a lot fewer photos, period. Facebook has made me conscious of the degree to which my own photo-taking is and always was an act of artificial self-construction. At some point when I was 23 or 24, Lulu and I went out on the town with a couple of friends and took a disposable camera with us. We took shots on the street, in the bar, in another bar, in the taxicab. "Damn!" Lulu said, looking at the photoset later. "We look amazing! This is so much more fabulous than our actual life."

For years after that I took a camera to every social event and on every weekend trip. And there my friends and I are, perpetually: over brunch, over dinner, over drinks, at weddings and houseparties and barbecues, striking antic poses and smiling big, happy, open-mouthed smiles.

But these days, taking photos feels increasingly like a duty: I must preserve this memory! I must get a great shot and then crop it just so! I must post pictures of my trip because friends and family will want to see them! When we arrived at our hotel last week, I had a moment of regret that I hadn't brought my camera, before realizing: dude. I lived in this city for six years. What would I photograph?

My friends, obviously, and me and my fiancé being fabulous, and great weather, and maybe a couple of places I hadn't been before. But, eh. I'd rather have the experience.

For the record

I loathe Sophia Coppola's movies, although I've seen almost all of them; I keep thinking that there must be more to them, or that I was just in an ungenerous mood when I watched the previous one. And without fail, I walk out of the theatre full of rage at what narcissistic, self-indulgent nothings they are. (Though gorgeously shot and composed, I grant you.)

A. O. Scott's fawning review of Somewhere does nothing to convince me it's any different:

The opening shot of "Somewhere". . . prepares you for what is to follow in a characteristically oblique and subtle manner. A black Ferrari circulates on an otherwise empty desert speedway, driving in and out of the stationary camera's range as the noise of its engine oscillates between a distant whine and a full-throated roar.

The car completes a few more laps than would be necessary if the point of the scene were traditionally expository--if all Ms. Coppola wanted to convey was the fact that somebody (we don't yet know who) was driving around in a circle. . . .

[This is] a film that never raises its voice. . . but that nonetheless has the power to refresh your perceptions and deepen your sympathies. As it proceeds from one careful, watchful, slow shot to the next, a sad and affecting story emerges, about a father's loneliness and a daughter's devotion. But the experience of watching "Somewhere". . . is like reading a poem.

OH MY GOD. Kill me now.

Furloughed

Well, kids: it looks as though everyone's favorite accidental governor will be furloughing yours truly--along with some 100,000 other state workers--for one day a week, effective almost immediately, until the state budget is passed.

In case you can't do the math, that's a 20% salary reduction.

Nevermind the fact that this is almost certainly illegal (and nevermind the fact that Flavia may be forced to drink rail gin for the next little while); this is the stupidest cost-saving measure I've ever heard of.

Allegedly, it will save the state millions of dollars. But the implementation costs (or so I've been told by those whose states or employers have already instituted furloughs) will cut that savings significantly. The state will also lose tax revenue. And since the unions are already taking action, the state will be on the hook for legal expenses--and if the measure is eventually found to be illegal, as it has been in other states, it will prove to be a huge net loss once all that money is refunded.

I understand that the governor is trying to play hardball with the state legislature and with the unions, and I have some professional respect for a good brinksman. But this isn't brinksmanship. This is just stupidity.

Desperate products call for desperate measures

Them what knows Flavia knows she don't drink vodka--and that she is, in fact, a bit of a snob about it. She drinks gin, boys. And whiskey.

Okay, she might drink vodka on the rocks if there's nothing else in the house--but she's of the opinion that most vodka drinkers, even or especially those who are so emphatic about only drinking Grey Goose, or Belvedere, or whatever, are fond of vodka primarily because it doesn't taste like alcohol once they mix it in with a bunch of sweet, fruity, girly shit.

So this feature, at Jezebel, delighted her extravagantly (click on each of the thumbnails for the full image and the hilarious commentary). It confirms all her prejudices, and she likes it when that happens.

The kids are alright

Last weekend Cosimo and I went to see a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It was put on by a local company that seems to have a canny sense of its audience: their play selections aren't especially daring (hence, MSND), and they obviously strive to keep them accessible and appealing to people who may not have much background in Shakespeare. This particular production was energetically choreographed, heavy on slapstick, and set during the "Summer of Love"--with lots of Beatles songs as incidental music. But since the troupe is also really talented, these things weren't just bells and whistles, but used in the service of smart, subtle, interesting interpretations.

Smart, but accessible! The perfect combination!

Well, you'd think. But we wound up walking out of the theatre behind a few fifty-something couples, and overheard their conversation. They'd loved the production. Then one of the husbands mentioned that their teen-aged son was studying the play in school, and one of the other husbands asked whether he or his class were going to see it.

"I don't know," the first man replied, and then laughed. "We were telling him they should--but now, after seeing it? I think this version would just confuse the heck out of the kids!"

The others laughed, shook their heads, and agreed.

Because, you know: if it's fun and has Puck wearing bell-bottoms, it must not be Real Shakespeare.

Biblical illiteracy

I recently purchased the King James Bible on audiobook (60 CDs! complete with attractive and convenient carrying case!), and since then my in-car time has been all about getting cozy with The Word.

It's for work, of course, or mostly for work: I know the Bible decently well, but it's been a long while since I read it in any systematic way, and I've never read the KJV except piecemeal. But naturally, the audiobook isn't intended for scholars, and as a result it's ridiculously cheap: I got the complete set from Amazon for just over $30--or exactly the same price as the audiobook of Hilary Mantel's novel Wolf Hall.

The comments on Amazon make the target market for this product clear, while also revealing some depressing things about twenty-first-century Bible reading and biblical literacy. Quite a lot of the reviewers describe the King James version as the "authentic" text of the Bible or "God's word in the original." (One or two people claim that the KJV is "the best and most accurate" translation of the Bible, which at least identifies the text as a translation--though without doing much to establish the commenters' own credibility.)

Now, I'm delighted that there are so many people out there listening to, and presumably a much larger number reading, the King James Bible. But I'm not so thrilled about the ignorant, ahistorical, unliterary, and arguably un-spiritual way in which they seem to be doing it.

The King James Bible is lovely, and its translations of various stories--and, more generally, its prose rhythms--have had tremendous influence on the literature of the entire English-speaking world. And goodness knows I'm all for exposing more people to the syntax and diction of Early Modern English. But it is not the best or most accurate translation of the Bible, much less God's Word in the Original, and to imagine that its Olde Timey language makes it more spiritually authentic is to confuse aesthetic effects for divine ones--and that is fundamentally un-Protestant.

But then, contemporary Protestantism is pretty un-Protestant, isn't it? And as someone who is deeply intellectually invested in the Reformation, I think that's a scandal. I'll stick with issues of biblical engagement for now, though obviously there are others (Jesus's face on the side of a building, anyone?). Most of my self-identified Christian students do not know the Bible. I don't live in the Bible Belt, so I lack a certain kind of evangelical student, but I do have students who are very active in their churches, who occasionally make arguments based on "what the Bible teaches," and who not only have not read the entire Bible, but who barely know its major stories; I've gotten blank looks when I mention Moses in the bullrushes, or the parable of the prodigal son.

Let me be clear: I'm very happy to live in a secular society, and I don't sit around bemoaning the average student's lack of biblical literacy; the ability to catch a passing biblical reference is nice, but not essential (that's what footnotes are for--and when a work's engagement with the Bible really matters, I give my students the relevant biblical passage; in certain classes, I've made the KJV itself a required text).

But the average Protestant--and I mean the average, church-going Protestant, someone who claims his religion as an important part of his identity--does not appear to be reading the Bible himself. He relies upon other people to tell him what the Good Book "says," and from what I can tell, many if not most nondenominational church services don't even present the text of the Bible in any systematic or thorough way. These days, ironically, a Catholic who attends church every Sunday is likelier to know the Bible than many Protestants who do the same.

That leaves the Bible in a strange limbo: continually touted as the Word of God, but removed from the intellectual and spiritual traditions that made meaning out of it.

And though I'm both a Catholic and a secularist myself, this breaks my heart.

Shakes Invaders

We were about 45 minutes into our three-hour Shakespeare class the other night when the classroom door opened.

I was perched atop the instructor desk in front of the blackboard, my 25 students arranged before me in a semi-circle. We were working through a scene in Troilus and Cressida, and when I heard the door open, slightly behind me, I didn't look over. I was mid-sentence, and figured it was a student slipping in late.

Instead, a young man and young woman walked right into the center of the room and started performing part of the banquet scene from Romeo and Juliet.

We stopped abruptly. Fucking theatre kids, I thought. They must be advertising a production. Assholes. But since I knew the scene, and they'd already started, I figured I'd let them finish--surely they were just going to do the shared sonnet, and would be done in another dozen lines.

But they got to the end, kissed, and kept going.

The door opened again, and a third person came in: the Nurse. She got out a few lines, but when it became clear they weren't going to stop, I stood up.

"Thanks so much," I said sharply. "But you have the wrong semester: we do tragedies in the spring."

For the first second or two, even after I'd stood up, they didn't break character, but showed every sign of wanting to continue.

"You can leave NOW."

They slunk, grinning and only slightly abashed, to the door. As they got there, the woman playing Juliet announced something about this being a senior project--guerrilla Shakespeare, or some such shit.

After they left, my students and I stared at each other, rattled. We confirmed that none of us knew what the hell that had been, and that it hadn't been planned by any of us. One volunteered that she'd seen them doing this around campus--in the student union, and the bookstore.

There was a bit more nervous venting, but finally it seemed time to regroup.

"Okay," I said. "Let's return to the play we're actually reading, which is not Romeo and Juliet." I paused, thinking fast. "But the language you just heard Romeo and Juliet using--that overblown, self-consciously romantic language? That's really the same language Troilus is using in the scene we were just looking at. . . "

From the back of the room one of my students called out, "NICE segue!"

"Yeah," I shot back. "Most important thing I learned in graduate school."


* * * * *


We recovered, more or less, but what strikes me most about the episode is how different my reaction was from that of my students. I was pissed from the moment the actors entered, and although I didn't know what they were doing--and thought one of my own students might have engineered it for some misguided but well-intentioned purpose--I knew they weren't supposed to be there, and that I could get them out. My students, though, were much more shaken; some seemed genuinely upset.

It occurs to me that this is about the power dynamic in the classroom: I'm in charge and I know I'm in charge. My students, in a way that I don't often think about, are not in charge--even in a boisterous class where it can take me a while to get them to quiet down or to hush those having side conversations. Yes, they can tune in or tune out, and get up to go to the bathroom without asking my permission, but they don't feel they have the power to change what happens in that confined space; when something does happen, all they're able to do is watch.

The interruption also made me think about how vulnerable the classroom is. We think we're in a separate and semi-charmed space for those 60 or 90 minutes, but the world can come inside without our permission--whether it's jerky drama students or a medical emergency or a kid with a gun.

I'm still pissed at the actors (I spent almost 24 hours walking around muttering "fucking theatre people" under my breath), but I'm not sorry to have had the chance to think, in a concrete way, about my obligations to those in my charge for a few hours every week.

Many are the ways of sucking

Apologies for the unannounced hiatus--I had a couple of posts brewing, but not yet fully thought through, when Cosimo and I left for a week with his extended family in New England.

Our cabin in the Maine woods, less than a quarter-mile from the beach:



(One of my friends in Boston said to Cosimo, upon meeting him and hearing how we'd spent the previous several days, "You took Flavia to nature?" Yes: and nature survived.)

But because it's August and crunch time, I brought work with me: a book manuscript I'm reviewing. I read half the thing the day before we left, in a splendid blaze of productivity, and the other half in dribs and drabs in the car to and from our various destinations.

It's a collection of essays on a topic of immediate interest to me, so the task was worthwhile even though the essays themselves varied widely in quality. Having just read a dozen pre-publication essays, though, I now consider myself in a position to give advice to essay-writers everywhere.

So! Among the things I would strongly recommend you not do, especially if you have any regard for your future reviewer's travel companion, who may not be wholly interested in hearing her exclaim about the iniquities of your essay for miles on end:

• Refer repeatedly (and in tedious detail) to your article on the same topic published fifteen long years ago, which apparently didn't get the attention you think it deserved.
• Mention how poorly-received the conference-paper version of your essay was.
• Spend nearly half your essay on a lit review establishing how appropriate a particular critical approach is to your topic--and how entirely validated that approach has been by major scholars in the field for nigh on 20 years now. Especially do not do this if you subsequently
• Spend pages and pages patting yourself on the back for the boldness and radicalism of your approach.
• Change your topic--not just your argument, but your entire topic, including the texts you're looking at and the theoretical approach you're taking--in the middle of your essay.
• Open with a long and self-congratulatory anecdote that has no real connection to the rest of your essay.

Seriously, dudes. I know we're academics, and thus inherently self-involved--but please try not to appear that way.