There’s a problem with some of the language used to describe vanishing tenure-track and full-time jobs. Articles describing the problem, like today’s “The Disappearing Tenure-Track Job” at InsideHigherEd, tend to obscure the agency behind these “disappearing” jobs; for example, the author writes that new data shows “how much the tenure-track professor has disappeared.” Here’s another one: “tenured and tenure-track faculty members went from being a slight majority to less than 40 percent of faculty members.” In both cases tenured faculty who exist only in the realm of possibility will themselves into extinction.
Then there are the damned statistics that make the subject of the article. Yes, the numbers in the article’s chart show an increase in faculty and a decrease in tenured faculty, but the percentage differences, a few percent here and there, do a poor job of illustrating the problem because there’s no indication of the dramatic increase in enrollments during the time period the chart covers. (Perhaps a better method would have presented the data in terms of student-teacher ratios.)
In both cases the seeming objectivity masks a (willing or unwilling, witting or unwitting) political agenda. To address increasing enrollments might suggest that wider access to a bachelor’s degree is a problem. To describe the real agents behind those “disappearing jobs” would require pointing fingers at state and federal education policies, the colleges’ budget allocation decisions, and finally to the faculties who do or do not attempt to redress the problem of underpaid teachers with little job security and few, if any, benefits.
These are issues that should be addressed.
If you are a faculty member at an institution granting a PhD in English, how much do you think your PhD is worth? Is it worth the $28,000 a year one state university offers for a 4/4 one-year appointment that comes with no benefits? That institution specifies a PhD as a requirement. How many graduate students should you admit? How many can get a job that will pay the loans necessary to get that PhD? Is teaching a good way to learn to be a scholar? How much teaching?
If you are admitting students for a undergraduate degree and charging them an ever-increasing tuition, what sort of quality of education should you offer them? How good a job can a person with 120 other composition students do? Would you expect that person to channel a large portion of their energy into finding a job that pays more than $28,000 a year?
I’ve loaded these questions to carry just the sort of *bang* side-stepped by articles like “The Disappearing Tenure-Track Job.” They are tricky, even explosive, as my rhetoric suggests. There are many more questions, and there are many more ways to ask them. And any way would be better than pretending that faculties are throwing themselves off cliffs like so many lemmings. Rather, we would do well to remember that in one Disney nature film, the crew standing off-camera herded lemmings off a cliff to provide the illusion that lemmings are self-destructive.
Follow-up:
Greg Bales researched the numbers and compiled a chart which shows that non-tenure hires precisely track with increasing enrollments.
5/12/2009
5/01/2009
Mark Helprin Hates Dolphins
Mark Helprin strikes again, with a book (Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto or Why You Should Get Off My Lawn) arguing, as he did back in 2007, that copyright should be extended as long as possible. An article—Hands Off, It's Mine—in today’s WSJ reveals something of the sort of mindset that would want to “protect” a writer’s work in perpetuity:
Aside from the obvious issues with normativity and general uptightness, this is reminiscent of arguments from the Old Days when T. Rex (Marvin bellicosus) ruled the workshops: “Grrr. Arrgh. Critics pervert my intentions. Grr.” Snarkiness aside, the problem seems to me to be one of anxiety about interpretive efforts. I’m generally annoyed by Harold Bloom’s theory of Big Bees, ephebes, and wannabes, but it seems Helprin has heard the prophecy and fears his lamed child is coming to, well, you know the story.
That this WSJ article comes out on May Day is obviously intentional. A snippet from the Amazon Product Description suggests that the “remixers” are all motivated by a “selfish desire to ‘stick it’ to the greedy corporate interests” that will eventually not only threatens the (Ooh, what will it be? The Republican Party? Helprin’s sexual potency? The sanctity of marriage?) “possibility of an independent literary culture [and] the future of civilization itself.”
Lordy lordy.
I wonder if Helprin would have been incensed by Finnegan’s Wake. I imagine the Beastie Boys really get his (old) goat.
A final note: I came up with my “remix” of Helprin’s title before reading the comments of a customer on Amazon, one J. Yeoman, entitled “Hey you kids! Get off my lawn!” That’s independent invention right there!
when the copyright term expires, the "remixers" will be free to swoop in. He imagines their taking "A River Runs Through It" and transforming it into "a transvestite musical with dolphins."So flarfing or any sort of remixing, quoting, parody, etc is equivalent, in Helprin’s adolescent imagination, to bestiality and what he no doubt regards as sexual perversion.
Aside from the obvious issues with normativity and general uptightness, this is reminiscent of arguments from the Old Days when T. Rex (Marvin bellicosus) ruled the workshops: “Grrr. Arrgh. Critics pervert my intentions. Grr.” Snarkiness aside, the problem seems to me to be one of anxiety about interpretive efforts. I’m generally annoyed by Harold Bloom’s theory of Big Bees, ephebes, and wannabes, but it seems Helprin has heard the prophecy and fears his lamed child is coming to, well, you know the story.
That this WSJ article comes out on May Day is obviously intentional. A snippet from the Amazon Product Description suggests that the “remixers” are all motivated by a “selfish desire to ‘stick it’ to the greedy corporate interests” that will eventually not only threatens the (Ooh, what will it be? The Republican Party? Helprin’s sexual potency? The sanctity of marriage?) “possibility of an independent literary culture [and] the future of civilization itself.”
Lordy lordy.
I wonder if Helprin would have been incensed by Finnegan’s Wake. I imagine the Beastie Boys really get his (old) goat.
A final note: I came up with my “remix” of Helprin’s title before reading the comments of a customer on Amazon, one J. Yeoman, entitled “Hey you kids! Get off my lawn!” That’s independent invention right there!
4/12/2009
Hoax
I just finished, finally after many five-minute snatches during office hours, Alyce Miller’s “Real Fakes and Inauthentic Others” in the March/April Writer’s Chronicle. The essay introduces a list early on of “patterns inherent in hoaxes” like “spacial/temporal distance” and aesthetic/experiential distance.” Though these terms seem useful, they don’t resurface later in the essay at any significant level. Instead the essay serves as a tour through (fairly) recent literary hoaxes. For some reason, and aggravatingly, the essay refers throughout to the New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani as Kukatani. This is not a quibble; throughout, the essay approaches otherness as part of the problem with hoaxes.
The essay covers so many hoaxes—Margaret Jones, Asa Carter, Helen Demidenko, Alan Sokal, Rigoberta Menchú, Ern Malley, Araki Yasusada, that it serves as a good prospectus of hoaxes, but it isn’t able to offer much thinking on the consequences and workings of hoaxes.
Still, one point comes through in Miller’s account, and that is that people like hoaxes (before they know they are hoaxes) because, as she says of Alex Haley’s Roots, they are “so full of ‘truths.’” Well. True enough, despite the dangers of this sort of scare-quoted truth. (Yellowcake? Gulf of Tonkin incident?) So books like Roots, though heavily plagiarized, or, as Miller puts it, “indebted to sources (Haley) hadn’t credited,” still tell us something of a necessary truth.
Fine. So why not call them fiction? This is a point that Miller doesn’t address (Questions for authenticity a blind spot in the Writer’s Chronicle? Never!), and it is very worth of addressing because, to me anyway, it cuts to the heart of the matter. We want it to be true, so bad we’ll accept “true.” Like the Bush administration, we want so badly for something to be true—like, for example, that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks—that we’ll believe what it takes for it to be true. Colbert’s “truthiness” says it well.
It also, to me, gets to another important point: the imagination is feminized. Imaginative works aren’t taken to be worth as much as the “truth,” much less the truth. Fiction is lies and therefore can’t be as true as lies. Works of art are alien, unwanted, threatening because they come to us without the cloak of necessary information. They put the onus all on us. If we like a fiction, it is because we choose to do so. The “truth” of Haley’s narrative is thrust upon us willy nilly.
A “true” story sells.
But then again we pick and choose when it comes to hoaxes or plagiarism . Doris Kearns Goodwin is a perennial PBS talking head, even though she’s been caught copying. Meanhile, Ward Churchill, who is and is not a Native American, is and is not a PhD, is being kicked out of his professorship for plagiarizing and falsifying sources. That is, hoaxing.
I guess the difference here is that Haley and Churchill are playing with identity politics. But isn’t Goodwin playing at being someone she’s not when she borrows so liberally? And she’s not alone. So Goodwin and Churchill are interesting limit cases. One helps solidify the national mythos while the other says what no one wants to hear, or at least what very few people want to hear.
Miller’s essay ends with a grab-bag of Sunday-supplment truisms: “Hoaxes challenge moral, aesthetic, and ethical presumptions; they turn upside down what we hold sacrosanct. They infuriate and defy us. Moreover they critique us. Perhaps, paradoxically, hoaxes will help keep us honest.” I want to take a page from Godelier’s critique of Mauss and point out that, as he says of Mauss’s gifts, hoaxes have no agency of their own.
As I write, a president of a southern university, is defending himself more or less successfully against charges of plagiarism; a professor at Columbia has been fired for plagiarizing, after (she claims and the U sort of denies, waffles about) racial harassment, which may be related to students’ claims that she stole their work.
How we handle our hoaxers reveals what we value.
I worked at book store when The Bell Curve was hot. This was in an upmarket book store in Memphis. Folks in east Memphis and Germantown couldn’t get enough of The Bell Curve. At the same time, the private schools educating these peoples’ children were assigning The Education of Little Tree, along with The Giver and all the typical young adult reading. In these schoools, did they talk about the problems of Carter’s book? The dishonest and problematic authorship? The image it sold and which in turn sold it? Would its readers understand the anger of a man like Ward Churchill? Excuse the fakery of a woman like Menchu, of Haley’s story?
I’m writing this in Knoxville, alongside the Tennessee river, not too far from where the Tellico dam, which was and was not necessary, is and is not useful, sank (without question) the Cherokee village of Tanasi.
Update: Some coverage from Slate on Goodwin being defended by other historians, including Sean Wilentz.
Another update: Errol Morris weighs in on the van Meegeren forgeries in a series of blog entries, “Bamboozling Ourselves (Part 1).” I recommend The Forger’s Spell and, on a related note, the film Who the Fuck is Jackson Pollock.
Yet another update: Michael Leddy over on Orange Crate Art takes up the issue of “What Plagiarism Looks Like,” as it relates to the largely-plagiarized dissertation of the president of Jacksonville State University. This reminds me of my earlier blog entry on the diploma mill degrees the Tennessee Board of Regents said were “jes fine” (apologies to Walt Kelly). As Leddy observes, the penalties for plagiarism diminish as one’s power increases.
The essay covers so many hoaxes—Margaret Jones, Asa Carter, Helen Demidenko, Alan Sokal, Rigoberta Menchú, Ern Malley, Araki Yasusada, that it serves as a good prospectus of hoaxes, but it isn’t able to offer much thinking on the consequences and workings of hoaxes.
Still, one point comes through in Miller’s account, and that is that people like hoaxes (before they know they are hoaxes) because, as she says of Alex Haley’s Roots, they are “so full of ‘truths.’” Well. True enough, despite the dangers of this sort of scare-quoted truth. (Yellowcake? Gulf of Tonkin incident?) So books like Roots, though heavily plagiarized, or, as Miller puts it, “indebted to sources (Haley) hadn’t credited,” still tell us something of a necessary truth.
Fine. So why not call them fiction? This is a point that Miller doesn’t address (Questions for authenticity a blind spot in the Writer’s Chronicle? Never!), and it is very worth of addressing because, to me anyway, it cuts to the heart of the matter. We want it to be true, so bad we’ll accept “true.” Like the Bush administration, we want so badly for something to be true—like, for example, that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks—that we’ll believe what it takes for it to be true. Colbert’s “truthiness” says it well.
It also, to me, gets to another important point: the imagination is feminized. Imaginative works aren’t taken to be worth as much as the “truth,” much less the truth. Fiction is lies and therefore can’t be as true as lies. Works of art are alien, unwanted, threatening because they come to us without the cloak of necessary information. They put the onus all on us. If we like a fiction, it is because we choose to do so. The “truth” of Haley’s narrative is thrust upon us willy nilly.
A “true” story sells.
But then again we pick and choose when it comes to hoaxes or plagiarism . Doris Kearns Goodwin is a perennial PBS talking head, even though she’s been caught copying. Meanhile, Ward Churchill, who is and is not a Native American, is and is not a PhD, is being kicked out of his professorship for plagiarizing and falsifying sources. That is, hoaxing.
I guess the difference here is that Haley and Churchill are playing with identity politics. But isn’t Goodwin playing at being someone she’s not when she borrows so liberally? And she’s not alone. So Goodwin and Churchill are interesting limit cases. One helps solidify the national mythos while the other says what no one wants to hear, or at least what very few people want to hear.
Miller’s essay ends with a grab-bag of Sunday-supplment truisms: “Hoaxes challenge moral, aesthetic, and ethical presumptions; they turn upside down what we hold sacrosanct. They infuriate and defy us. Moreover they critique us. Perhaps, paradoxically, hoaxes will help keep us honest.” I want to take a page from Godelier’s critique of Mauss and point out that, as he says of Mauss’s gifts, hoaxes have no agency of their own.
As I write, a president of a southern university, is defending himself more or less successfully against charges of plagiarism; a professor at Columbia has been fired for plagiarizing, after (she claims and the U sort of denies, waffles about) racial harassment, which may be related to students’ claims that she stole their work.
How we handle our hoaxers reveals what we value.
I worked at book store when The Bell Curve was hot. This was in an upmarket book store in Memphis. Folks in east Memphis and Germantown couldn’t get enough of The Bell Curve. At the same time, the private schools educating these peoples’ children were assigning The Education of Little Tree, along with The Giver and all the typical young adult reading. In these schoools, did they talk about the problems of Carter’s book? The dishonest and problematic authorship? The image it sold and which in turn sold it? Would its readers understand the anger of a man like Ward Churchill? Excuse the fakery of a woman like Menchu, of Haley’s story?
I’m writing this in Knoxville, alongside the Tennessee river, not too far from where the Tellico dam, which was and was not necessary, is and is not useful, sank (without question) the Cherokee village of Tanasi.
Update: Some coverage from Slate on Goodwin being defended by other historians, including Sean Wilentz.
Another update: Errol Morris weighs in on the van Meegeren forgeries in a series of blog entries, “Bamboozling Ourselves (Part 1).” I recommend The Forger’s Spell and, on a related note, the film Who the Fuck is Jackson Pollock.
Yet another update: Michael Leddy over on Orange Crate Art takes up the issue of “What Plagiarism Looks Like,” as it relates to the largely-plagiarized dissertation of the president of Jacksonville State University. This reminds me of my earlier blog entry on the diploma mill degrees the Tennessee Board of Regents said were “jes fine” (apologies to Walt Kelly). As Leddy observes, the penalties for plagiarism diminish as one’s power increases.
4/11/2009
Diane Rothenberg on the Seneca
Jerome Rothenberg has posted a series of entries from his wife’s writing on the Seneca people, specifically her interviews of Harry Watt. Since I want to share this with several people, and he doesn’t provide a single convenient set of links, here are the four pieces of writing he’s posted:
Diane Rothenberg: Corn Soup & Fry Bread: A Reminiscence
Diane Rothenberg: The Economic Memories of Harry Watt (Part One)
Diane Rothenberg: The Economic Memories of Harry Watt (Part Two)
Diane Rothenberg: The Economic Memories of Harry Watt (Part Three)
This work is interesting as an example of ethnography and as an account of contact between “white” and “red” culture at two historical moments: that of the Rothenberg’s friendship with Watt and other Seneca and that of the late 18th-century attempt by Quaker communicants to whiten up the Seneca people by getting them to become property owning farmers with traditional gender roles. (Previously Seneca men had done work to generate some cash; Seneca women had done subsistence farming; and the whole community practiced gift exchange and sharing of resources, a practice the Quaker saw as encouraging “idlers.”)
It’s fascinating reading about something we don’t often hear very much about.
Diane Rothenberg: Corn Soup & Fry Bread: A Reminiscence
Diane Rothenberg: The Economic Memories of Harry Watt (Part One)
Diane Rothenberg: The Economic Memories of Harry Watt (Part Two)
Diane Rothenberg: The Economic Memories of Harry Watt (Part Three)
This work is interesting as an example of ethnography and as an account of contact between “white” and “red” culture at two historical moments: that of the Rothenberg’s friendship with Watt and other Seneca and that of the late 18th-century attempt by Quaker communicants to whiten up the Seneca people by getting them to become property owning farmers with traditional gender roles. (Previously Seneca men had done work to generate some cash; Seneca women had done subsistence farming; and the whole community practiced gift exchange and sharing of resources, a practice the Quaker saw as encouraging “idlers.”)
It’s fascinating reading about something we don’t often hear very much about.
2/22/2009
Louisville
I have just returned from The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900. That’s a mouthful. I very much regret missing Ed Roberson’s reading. Attending the panel on his poetry has put his books on my shopping list and has added Evie Shockley to the list of scholars I want to keep an eye out for. I also very much enjoyed the panel for which I read, and look forward to speaking again with David Need and my fellow presenter Jill Kroeger Kincaid of the U. of Southern Indiana. I was able to spend a few minutes with Barrett Watten, but I was too shy to ask him some of the questions I had about his work. I did, however, enjoy his brief presentation at the panel on teaching difficult poetry, but I was much more excited about some of the things Phillip Metres had to say about his teaching. I was particularly taken with his assignment asking students to consider ways to bring poetry into the world. He told me about papercraft projects and a few projects that might be considered “actions” or installations, though my memory is fuzzy here.
Overall, this continues to be my favorite conference in my field. Its small size makes a much better atmosphere. My one complaint is that the schedulers put so many things that interest me specifically at the same time. I don’t know how they find out what I want to see, but somehow they must, because it happened the last time I was there too.
Overall, this continues to be my favorite conference in my field. Its small size makes a much better atmosphere. My one complaint is that the schedulers put so many things that interest me specifically at the same time. I don’t know how they find out what I want to see, but somehow they must, because it happened the last time I was there too.
2/01/2009
"Vesuvius at Home"
I recently fetched home Adrienne Rich’s On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 (Norton 1979) to read an essay I’d seen referenced elsewhere, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision.” I love the way she introduces the essay:
Having got the book home, I was distracted from the essay that prompted me to check out this volume by a more promising essay: “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson.” I was a bit blown away by this one. I thought I knew a lot about Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson (1985). I knew it was in dialogue with Gilbert and Gubar’s study of 19th-century women writers, The Madwoman in the Attic; I knew it was in dialogue with existing male scholarship on Dickinson; and I knew it was in dialogue with William Carlos Williams. But here’s something new to me, though it’s quite old (1975).
Howe’s book is ground-breaking. It seeks to change the way we understand Dickinson’s lines, arguing also that we place more emphasis on the alternative words Dickinson retained for some of her poems. It argues Dickinson had a Promethean, even Vesuvian spark, seeks to free her from feminist and misogynist readings that call Dickinson, a child, a madwoman, an eccentric old spinster. Its central reading is of Dickinson’s “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—.” And it does this in a wonderfully suggestive and paratactic “poet’s prose” (that term troubles me a little).
And here in Rich’s essay are the same arguments, more or less, the same poem advanced as central to our understanding of Dickinson. Rich has nothing to say about Dickinson’s lines, nothing much to say about form, absolutely nothing I can recall. But the rest is there in this essay. Was this on Howe's mind as she wrote? Is this another person to whom she was speaking? Rich doesn’t appear in the index or the bibliography of Howe’s book. So I’m left to wonder.
Whatever was on Howe’s mind as she wrote, Rich’s essay seems very useful to read alongside Howe’s book. I suppose I’ll add—since I resolved this year to “write, write, or die” to be, when it comes to blogging, as baggy as I want—if you read this essay you’ll see a great selection of Dickinson’s poems quoted.
There are, of course, differences between Rich and Howe. Rich tends to psychologize Dickinson in a way that seems to irritate the Howe that wrote My Emily Dickinson. And Rich tends to see Dickinson’s major gift to be saying “ ‘Someone has been here before.’ ” Howe, on the other hand, sees Dickinson’s gift to be modeling the sovereign power of poetry. For Howe it’s significant that Dickinson is a woman, but it seems to be still more important that we see Dickinson’s accomplishment not as that of a woman for women but as a poet for all poets.
Maybe this is the difference of ten years. Which I guess comes back to Rich’s slam on the MLA. There are still old boy’s networks, but now there are some women in them.
The Modern Language Association is both marketplace and funeral parlor for the professional study of Western Literature in North America. Like all gatherings of the professions, it has been and remains a “procession of the sons of educated men” (Virginia Woolf): a congeries of old boys’ networks, academicians rehearsing their numb canons in sessions dedicated to the literature of white males, junior scholars under the lash of “publish or perish” delivering papers in the bizarrely lit drawing-rooms of immense hotels: a ritual competition veering between cynicism and desperation.Well. Not much has changed since 1971. Now the old boys’ networks contain some women. Maybe I’d say not “funeral parlor” but maybe low-rent red light district. But that’s a matter of perspective.
Having got the book home, I was distracted from the essay that prompted me to check out this volume by a more promising essay: “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson.” I was a bit blown away by this one. I thought I knew a lot about Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson (1985). I knew it was in dialogue with Gilbert and Gubar’s study of 19th-century women writers, The Madwoman in the Attic; I knew it was in dialogue with existing male scholarship on Dickinson; and I knew it was in dialogue with William Carlos Williams. But here’s something new to me, though it’s quite old (1975).
Howe’s book is ground-breaking. It seeks to change the way we understand Dickinson’s lines, arguing also that we place more emphasis on the alternative words Dickinson retained for some of her poems. It argues Dickinson had a Promethean, even Vesuvian spark, seeks to free her from feminist and misogynist readings that call Dickinson, a child, a madwoman, an eccentric old spinster. Its central reading is of Dickinson’s “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—.” And it does this in a wonderfully suggestive and paratactic “poet’s prose” (that term troubles me a little).
And here in Rich’s essay are the same arguments, more or less, the same poem advanced as central to our understanding of Dickinson. Rich has nothing to say about Dickinson’s lines, nothing much to say about form, absolutely nothing I can recall. But the rest is there in this essay. Was this on Howe's mind as she wrote? Is this another person to whom she was speaking? Rich doesn’t appear in the index or the bibliography of Howe’s book. So I’m left to wonder.
Whatever was on Howe’s mind as she wrote, Rich’s essay seems very useful to read alongside Howe’s book. I suppose I’ll add—since I resolved this year to “write, write, or die” to be, when it comes to blogging, as baggy as I want—if you read this essay you’ll see a great selection of Dickinson’s poems quoted.
There are, of course, differences between Rich and Howe. Rich tends to psychologize Dickinson in a way that seems to irritate the Howe that wrote My Emily Dickinson. And Rich tends to see Dickinson’s major gift to be saying “ ‘Someone has been here before.’ ” Howe, on the other hand, sees Dickinson’s gift to be modeling the sovereign power of poetry. For Howe it’s significant that Dickinson is a woman, but it seems to be still more important that we see Dickinson’s accomplishment not as that of a woman for women but as a poet for all poets.
Maybe this is the difference of ten years. Which I guess comes back to Rich’s slam on the MLA. There are still old boy’s networks, but now there are some women in them.
11/05/2008
Race in Education
I have 102 students. Three are black, and the state of Tennessee, where I teach, is 17% black. And here’s a side-effect of Obama’s win that I was expecting and dreading: people saying that, since America has a black President, it no longer has race problems. Ta-daa! The Nebraska higher education system has banned consideration of race in admissions. And Roger Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, in responses says, wait for it, now that we have a black Presidents it’s obvious that there’s no problem with racial inequality. There must be some other reason that our black fellow citizens tend to be poorer, have less health care and less education.
10/05/2008
For Godot
Well, everyone’s excited about Issue 1 of an exciting new journal. Three thousand or so poets in it! “Their” work seemingly generated by an algorithm. Real poets with fake poems. A real anthology with fake poems in it. That sounds familiar.
Many poets are very upset, and you can read some of their angry comments at Harriet, where the article title calls this piracy. Others, like Amy King, are amused. I’m one of those. I think pranks like this reveal a lot about what matters to us, and it’s interesting to notice that some are angry because they’re not in it.
Ron Silliman, normally at odds with the so-called School of Quietude, is in seeming agreement with them today when he calls this journal/anthology “vandalism.” It’s even more fun to see him bragging about a large settlement he won when someone else sullied his good name. If only I had such a name, the suits I could file! Furreal.
The post-structuralist critique of the gnome proper goes right out the old window.
This isn’t good art because it’s making people mad. But good art can do that to people. Dada wasn’t good, nor were situationist happenings. Nor, for that matter, was Language Writing. They got to be good. That artist awaits her contemporaries.
So some label this “flarf,” the content-free poetry of the intertubes.
I think Charles Bernstein’s humor is more accurate, and maybe this is the sort of bailout he calls for.
This happened. And the responses to it are part of the project, and they reveal a lot about how we tend to think of poetry and poets. Is this stuff property? Is it property like a painting should be? What happens to the art work in the age of mechanical reproduction? Oops, that’s old news. What happens to the art work in the age of automated production? Are we cyborgs? Is an algorithm as valid an extension of the poet’s powers as a typewriter?
I can’t spend the time on this today that I’d like to. I have a pile of grading and an article to revise. I can’t do it justice. But I think one reason a lot of people are mad is that they do think of a name as a property and poetry as a profitable enterprise. It’s not surprising to me that those with the most to gain are those that are threatening. The threatened threaten. And it’s not surprising to read on the Poetics List that some poets are mad because they’re not there. No one wants to be shut out. If you’re not on that computer-generated list of three thousand poets, some of whom aren’t even poets, many of whom are dead, well, man, what a slap in the face.
Feh. Now I have to go do something about the kazillian times I said “we can see” in this thing I wrote. We can see that it gets annoying after a while. And We are not amused.
— — —
Is it scrupulous guilt or the desire to procrastinate that brings me back to add: I’m in that anthology. The piece might be somehow derived from some of my work online. It’s hard to tell. It seems to pull from my work, but that could just be a similarity resulting from the fact that the work it reminds me of is also mechanically produced.
It’s no sin to have a mechanical muse. Nor is it a sin to be inhabited by the demon-delusion of self-hood. Now, really, I have to fix all this “we” crap.
Many poets are very upset, and you can read some of their angry comments at Harriet, where the article title calls this piracy. Others, like Amy King, are amused. I’m one of those. I think pranks like this reveal a lot about what matters to us, and it’s interesting to notice that some are angry because they’re not in it.
Ron Silliman, normally at odds with the so-called School of Quietude, is in seeming agreement with them today when he calls this journal/anthology “vandalism.” It’s even more fun to see him bragging about a large settlement he won when someone else sullied his good name. If only I had such a name, the suits I could file! Furreal.
The post-structuralist critique of the gnome proper goes right out the old window.
This isn’t good art because it’s making people mad. But good art can do that to people. Dada wasn’t good, nor were situationist happenings. Nor, for that matter, was Language Writing. They got to be good. That artist awaits her contemporaries.
So some label this “flarf,” the content-free poetry of the intertubes.
I think Charles Bernstein’s humor is more accurate, and maybe this is the sort of bailout he calls for.
This happened. And the responses to it are part of the project, and they reveal a lot about how we tend to think of poetry and poets. Is this stuff property? Is it property like a painting should be? What happens to the art work in the age of mechanical reproduction? Oops, that’s old news. What happens to the art work in the age of automated production? Are we cyborgs? Is an algorithm as valid an extension of the poet’s powers as a typewriter?
I can’t spend the time on this today that I’d like to. I have a pile of grading and an article to revise. I can’t do it justice. But I think one reason a lot of people are mad is that they do think of a name as a property and poetry as a profitable enterprise. It’s not surprising to me that those with the most to gain are those that are threatening. The threatened threaten. And it’s not surprising to read on the Poetics List that some poets are mad because they’re not there. No one wants to be shut out. If you’re not on that computer-generated list of three thousand poets, some of whom aren’t even poets, many of whom are dead, well, man, what a slap in the face.
Feh. Now I have to go do something about the kazillian times I said “we can see” in this thing I wrote. We can see that it gets annoying after a while. And We are not amused.
— — —
Is it scrupulous guilt or the desire to procrastinate that brings me back to add: I’m in that anthology. The piece might be somehow derived from some of my work online. It’s hard to tell. It seems to pull from my work, but that could just be a similarity resulting from the fact that the work it reminds me of is also mechanically produced.
It’s no sin to have a mechanical muse. Nor is it a sin to be inhabited by the demon-delusion of self-hood. Now, really, I have to fix all this “we” crap.
9/13/2008
L=H=C poem
I recently came across a bad physics joke inspired by the Large Hadron Collider: “do my bosons give you a hadron?” One of possibilities of the LHC is, as many probably know, is the possibility of finding the Higgs Boson, a particle presumed to emerge from ripping up the fabric of the universe in some new way. I’m not a physicist, as that probably horribly inaccurate definition would suggest. What’s interesting to me about the joke is that it seems representative in part of a sort of visual poetry resulting from typos, like the use of vodak among internet posters for vodka, a use that has become a joke about typing, much as do ZOMG and other silly acronyms intending to mock the accidents of high-speed typing as a new communication form. I mean there the hadron for hardon. And then there’s the simple visual joke of n for m, another typo product as well as a visual slip. All in all, this isn’t the most intellectual post I’ve ever made—I’m far too overwhelmed with critical projects and grading to say anything very bright—but what’s interesting here is the way this silly joke reveals play as an element of poesis, given the similarity of this joke’s modes of operation to those of more serious poetic efforts. And that seems to me to fit neatly with the purposes of the LHC, spinning things around and smashing them into one another until something interesting happens.
9/02/2008
Ubuntu
absent albatross
bloated beaver
careless chameleon
dada dodo
elegant elephant
frisky frog
gormless gopher
humpy hippo
irritable ibex
jamming jackass
kwazy kookaburra
libidinous lamb
maudlin macaw
naughty narwhal
ornery ocelot
pusillanimous pussycat
querulous quetzal
raunchy redstart
satisfied sea lion
touchy tiger
upset ungulate
vast vicuna
wasted wallaby
xenophilic xiphias
yawping yak
zealous zebra
bloated beaver
careless chameleon
dada dodo
elegant elephant
frisky frog
gormless gopher
humpy hippo
irritable ibex
jamming jackass
kwazy kookaburra
libidinous lamb
maudlin macaw
naughty narwhal
ornery ocelot
pusillanimous pussycat
querulous quetzal
raunchy redstart
satisfied sea lion
touchy tiger
upset ungulate
vast vicuna
wasted wallaby
xenophilic xiphias
yawping yak
zealous zebra
8/24/2008
Fall Courses
This fall I’m teaching three sections of freshman Composition I, which has a heavy emphasis on rhetoric here a the University of Tennessee (Knoxville). And I’m teaching one section of Introduction to Poetry. That gives me 105-110 students, depending on how the adding and dropping works out by the end of this coming week.
In the composition class I’m using Ways of Reading, which is a text full of difficult readings. For example, I lead off the semester by slowly working through Foucault’s “Panopticism” chapter of Discipline & Punish and Nietzsche’s “On Truth & Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” I go back and forth on this textbook. After some semesters I swear I’ll never pick it up again, but I’m tempted back by the way challenging readings motivate students to learn a good, solid reading process and how classroom discussion is much better when its driven by a real need to know. And, despite the fact that the texts in Ways of Reading are from the same perspective as those in, say, Rereading America, students tend to react more favorably to them than “softer” cultural criticism pieces.
In the poetry class, I’m using Western Wind. I favor this text because it emphasizes formal interpretation over thematic reading and because it has some good chapters on sound. I think its selection of poems is a bit weak, so I supplement it with a fat dose of more unusual poetry. I use Blackboard to distribute: sound poems by Hugo Ball and Joseph Beueys; visual poetry by a number of people, including Apollinaire, Marinetti, and Schwitters; and prose poems by Stein, Simic, and some others. I also add a few things from the New York School, and I might add some fragments from Sappho later in the course, when we start reading from Harryette Mullen’s Recyclopedia, which we’re reading for two and a half weeks.
In the composition class I’m using Ways of Reading, which is a text full of difficult readings. For example, I lead off the semester by slowly working through Foucault’s “Panopticism” chapter of Discipline & Punish and Nietzsche’s “On Truth & Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” I go back and forth on this textbook. After some semesters I swear I’ll never pick it up again, but I’m tempted back by the way challenging readings motivate students to learn a good, solid reading process and how classroom discussion is much better when its driven by a real need to know. And, despite the fact that the texts in Ways of Reading are from the same perspective as those in, say, Rereading America, students tend to react more favorably to them than “softer” cultural criticism pieces.
In the poetry class, I’m using Western Wind. I favor this text because it emphasizes formal interpretation over thematic reading and because it has some good chapters on sound. I think its selection of poems is a bit weak, so I supplement it with a fat dose of more unusual poetry. I use Blackboard to distribute: sound poems by Hugo Ball and Joseph Beueys; visual poetry by a number of people, including Apollinaire, Marinetti, and Schwitters; and prose poems by Stein, Simic, and some others. I also add a few things from the New York School, and I might add some fragments from Sappho later in the course, when we start reading from Harryette Mullen’s Recyclopedia, which we’re reading for two and a half weeks.
8/18/2008
Pinksy's American Milton
This morning I read in Slate Pinksly’s “The American John Milton: The Poet and the Power of Extraordinary Speech” with qualified pleasure. In this essay, Pinsky argues for greater appreciation of what I see as the most significant quality of poesis, the ability to make language strange or new. But I’m a bit amused by his choice of vehicle for that: iambic pentameter and inverted or convoluted syntax.
First citing lines of Milton that are indeed powerful, he moves to Ginsberg and to Dickinson, both poets who can be read from some angles, and with blinkers on, as formalists in the sense that neo-formalists would like to apply. He mentions Williams and discuss Pound as poets pushing for a “plain speech” form that betrays the remarkable abilities to make language new.
But the picture is much more complex. Granted, I think Robert Duncan is correct in The HD Book when he suggests that Williams and Pound down-played the strangeness of poetic language in order to appear manly. But both poets wrote verse that was very odd, very much not “plain speech.” I would even argue that the plain speech efforts of Williams like “The Red Wheelbarrow” are in themselves extremely strange:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
Even if that were rendered as a single prose sentence, it would still be remarkably odd. But the line breaks make it even more so, make a point about poesis. That “depends / upon” points up the meaning of word depend, to hang down from, as all the other words in that formal slot similarly hang down from the conditions modifying them: a barrow that is red with a wheel, water from rain, chickens that are white—all dependencies in both senses.
Further, as Ron Silliman has recently remarked, this poem occurs in a prose matrix in Spring and All that is at times very strange, but which also offers clear statements contradicting both Williams’s statements about the necessity of the American vernacular to a poet and Pinksy’s generalizations about Williams’s poetry, as for example: “poetry: new form dealt with as reality itself.”
Still, Pinksy’s essay offers a useful corrective to freshman students who bemoan the difficulty or peculiarity of poetic language. But still more I think do these students’ own efforts at poetry belie such concerns, for I often find them pushing their own language toward oddness and eccentricity in an effort to make it clear that they are capable of creating a reality of their own.
Despite what I say, or Pinksy, or even Williams and Pound, the pleasure of language play will remain fundamental to the use of language. And this will always emerge even in the dullest bodies of poetry.
First citing lines of Milton that are indeed powerful, he moves to Ginsberg and to Dickinson, both poets who can be read from some angles, and with blinkers on, as formalists in the sense that neo-formalists would like to apply. He mentions Williams and discuss Pound as poets pushing for a “plain speech” form that betrays the remarkable abilities to make language new.
But the picture is much more complex. Granted, I think Robert Duncan is correct in The HD Book when he suggests that Williams and Pound down-played the strangeness of poetic language in order to appear manly. But both poets wrote verse that was very odd, very much not “plain speech.” I would even argue that the plain speech efforts of Williams like “The Red Wheelbarrow” are in themselves extremely strange:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
Even if that were rendered as a single prose sentence, it would still be remarkably odd. But the line breaks make it even more so, make a point about poesis. That “depends / upon” points up the meaning of word depend, to hang down from, as all the other words in that formal slot similarly hang down from the conditions modifying them: a barrow that is red with a wheel, water from rain, chickens that are white—all dependencies in both senses.
Further, as Ron Silliman has recently remarked, this poem occurs in a prose matrix in Spring and All that is at times very strange, but which also offers clear statements contradicting both Williams’s statements about the necessity of the American vernacular to a poet and Pinksy’s generalizations about Williams’s poetry, as for example: “poetry: new form dealt with as reality itself.”
Still, Pinksy’s essay offers a useful corrective to freshman students who bemoan the difficulty or peculiarity of poetic language. But still more I think do these students’ own efforts at poetry belie such concerns, for I often find them pushing their own language toward oddness and eccentricity in an effort to make it clear that they are capable of creating a reality of their own.
Despite what I say, or Pinksy, or even Williams and Pound, the pleasure of language play will remain fundamental to the use of language. And this will always emerge even in the dullest bodies of poetry.
8/03/2008
Free (adj./v) Research
The article title almost says it all: “Free Academic Articles Get Read But Don't Generate More Citations” (ScienceDaily). Research has found that a scientific research article made freely available will be read more often than its peers distributed via traditional methods. But it won’t be cited more often. Basically the writers of science research are behaving responsibly with their research; they don’t cite the low-hanging fruit but the best articles for their purpose.
This leads me to wonder when people in the humanities will finally stop killing trees. I have four hard copies of journals staring me in the face as I write this. Of those, three are available online. Though I have the hard copies of these three—all special issues on poets I’m writing about right now—I prefer to use the PDFs I have on my laptop. It’s easier to take notes from them with cut and paste. I can highlight them using the reader software. My computer indexes their contents, so I can search through them if I’ve forgotten the source of a good phrase or citation. But most importantly, they’re always there on my hard drive, and when I work in a coffee shop, at my desk at home, or at my desk at school, I don’t have to worry about not having them.
Yep, I still go to the trouble to dig up the hard-to-find items, but I’m grateful for the electronic copies, and it’s sad that I have to have a university paying for my access to them. Maybe someday that ship will come in.
Another change that I’d like to see: no more of those “books” published for tenure that are a collection of “chapters” that are nothing more than edited versions of articles that have already appeared elsewhere. How, exactly, is that a better use of energy than pursing new writing? Those books are becoming less easy to access than the articles in the journals from which they come.
Maybe instead of acting like a bunch of dinosauria, we could satisfy the publication requirements of tenure based on how often our work is cited, instead of on these collections of recycled journal articles and retreaded dissertations.
This leads me to wonder when people in the humanities will finally stop killing trees. I have four hard copies of journals staring me in the face as I write this. Of those, three are available online. Though I have the hard copies of these three—all special issues on poets I’m writing about right now—I prefer to use the PDFs I have on my laptop. It’s easier to take notes from them with cut and paste. I can highlight them using the reader software. My computer indexes their contents, so I can search through them if I’ve forgotten the source of a good phrase or citation. But most importantly, they’re always there on my hard drive, and when I work in a coffee shop, at my desk at home, or at my desk at school, I don’t have to worry about not having them.
Yep, I still go to the trouble to dig up the hard-to-find items, but I’m grateful for the electronic copies, and it’s sad that I have to have a university paying for my access to them. Maybe someday that ship will come in.
Another change that I’d like to see: no more of those “books” published for tenure that are a collection of “chapters” that are nothing more than edited versions of articles that have already appeared elsewhere. How, exactly, is that a better use of energy than pursing new writing? Those books are becoming less easy to access than the articles in the journals from which they come.
Maybe instead of acting like a bunch of dinosauria, we could satisfy the publication requirements of tenure based on how often our work is cited, instead of on these collections of recycled journal articles and retreaded dissertations.
7/31/2008
Give Me a Break
Tennessee Board of Regents OKs Diploma Mill Degrees
Frankly, the Tennessee Board of Regents’ lack of support for the value of a higher education comes as no surprise to me. But here’s the scoop: “State Employees List Suspect Degrees.”
Basically, state officials and some educators got degrees required for their jobs online by simply filling out a form and writing a check. And the State Board of Regents says that’s okay.
This is just the crummiest, fork-in-the-eye insult the State of Tennessee could give all those people out there with legitimate degrees who can’t find jobs.
My dad went to night school off and on for years transforming his years of carpentry experience into a degree he could use to teach high school shop classes. The State of Tennessee is insulting working-class people like him too, people who invest their modest incomes in education, who end a hard work day with more work to get a real degree.
Frankly, the Tennessee Board of Regents’ lack of support for the value of a higher education comes as no surprise to me. But here’s the scoop: “State Employees List Suspect Degrees.”
Basically, state officials and some educators got degrees required for their jobs online by simply filling out a form and writing a check. And the State Board of Regents says that’s okay.
This is just the crummiest, fork-in-the-eye insult the State of Tennessee could give all those people out there with legitimate degrees who can’t find jobs.
My dad went to night school off and on for years transforming his years of carpentry experience into a degree he could use to teach high school shop classes. The State of Tennessee is insulting working-class people like him too, people who invest their modest incomes in education, who end a hard work day with more work to get a real degree.
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