This post is pure response to a long critical comment by Michael Blowhard to my liberal groupthink post. I’ve clipped his comment, cut it up, responded point by point. There are many good comments to my post, which I will not respond to just right now, but Michael’s seemed to merit complete coverage. Still, this post will only be interesting to the truly excessively interested.
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John Holbo
This is one of those ‘liberal bias/groupthink in academia’ posts. (Oh goody, you say; another for the pile.) Let me launch off from Mark Bauerlein’s Chron piece, which I agree with almost entirely. And away from George Will’s op-ed,
in which he is agreeing with Bauerlein, in the wrongest way. What makes Bauerlein right and Will wrong? (George F. Will? Wrong? Stop the presses! Get that JAPS BOMB PEARL HARBOR type we save for special occasions. DOG BITES MAN should do.)
Timothy Burke’s latest post needs a comment box. Well, now it’s got one.
Keith Burgess-Jackson responds to Chris’ post. "What’s interesting (and ironic) is that nobody at the site engaged my
argument. In the insular world of liberalism, argumentation is
unnecessary. One mocks conservatives; one doesn’t engage their
arguments." OK, obviously the dogs voting thing wasn’t the man’s argument, so it was very unfair for Chris to seize on that. The argument goes like this: "Some disappointed pundits have said that this [voter rejection of gay marriage] reflects bigotry. No. It
reflects intelligence. The other day, Pat Caddell said that homosexual
“marriage” isn’t a conservative/liberal issue. It’s an
intelligence/stupidity issue. I agree. I have said in this blog many
times that the very idea of homosexual marriage is incoherent, which is
why I put the word “marriage” in quotation marks."
So the argument is: supporters of gay marriage are stupid? Or: some guy says homosexual marriage is incoherent? (How could some guy be wrong, after all? Makes no sense.)
What can we do to get our BoingBoing on (since the kids all love that BoingBoing feeling)?
Here’s a link to a French SF site, Noosphere; but I’ll hustle you through the front door straight to the very best stuff: scans – covers and insides – from a series entitled Club Du Livre D’Anticipation. If you can’t read French (which is really just a mixed-up form of English, so give it a try) this page explains that this was a series of translations of classic English language SF, which you would have figured out anyway. It’s all here: Asimov, Van Vogt, C. S. Lewis, Heinlein, Hamilton, Dick, Moorcock, Smith, Farmer, Sturgeon, Brunner, Butler, Niven, on and on. Pages and pages of mostly charming, Gallic-style illustrations to accompany old familiar titles. Much Metal Hurlant-style goodness. The titles are fun, too. A la Poursuite des Slan. (Not sure what was wrong with plain Slan.) En Attendant l’Année Dernière. (That’s Now Wait For Last Year, but the other way sounds more Proustian than paranoid, no?)
Which is your favorite of the lot?
I’ll just presume to point out a few choice bits from elsewhere in the site. The 17 pages of Ace SF doubles are worth checking. In other news, George Clooney is The Demolished Man. These funny little guns are funny. Conan as you’ve never imagined him. A couple of the Italian covers give you that Gina Lollobrigida in space feeling. Nice horizon on that one.
My top pick is Salome, My First 2,000 Years of Love, by Viereck and Eldridge. The cover is so-so, but I delight in lavish blurbs by famous authors on cheesy editions from unknown authors. Here Thomas Mann does not disappoint: "A great book … a monumental conception … amazingly rich in world vision and in sensuous pictures." That Thomas Mann? Off to Amazon we go. All is explained, more or less. A repackaging of sorts. Sounds strangely fascinating. Does anyone know anything more about it?
Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias (and again) are happy to take Chait’s hint: abolish the NEA. Well, the NEA did two nice things for me this week, so let me tell you what they were. First, as mentioned, I’m studying the NEA’s Reading At Risk survey. I’m glad someone does this kind of stuff. Who knew reading literature was strongly correlated with attending sporting events? (Maybe the NASCAR folks aren’t hating on this arts stuff so badly after all.)
But this survey is hardly matchmaking Eddie Punchclock and Suzy Housecoat to the Divine Muse of Art. This brings me to item two. NEA support for The Capital of Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeyland Review. The DNA of Literature Project. This is just fantastic. It’s great. Wonderful! Searchable and everything.
Welcome to the DNA of literature—over 50 years of literary wisdom
rolled up in 300+ Writers-at-Work interviews, now available
online—free. Founder and former Editor George Plimpton dreamed of a day
when anyone—a struggling writer in Texas, an English teacher in
Amsterdam, even a subscriber in Central Asia—could easily access this
vast literary resource; with the establishment of this online archive
that day has finally come. Now, for the first time, you can read,
search and download any or all of over three hundred in-depth
interviews with poets, novelists, playwrights, essayists, critics,
musicians, and more, whose work set the compass of twentieth-century
writing, and continue to do so into the twenty-first century."There is no other archive quite like The Paris Review interviews.
The National Endowment for the Arts could not be more pleased or more
proud than to make this resource available free to the American public."—Dana Gioia, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts
I’m writing about reading right now; a response to a (draft) essay Mark Bauerlein has written about the NEA’s Reading At Risk survey. I’ll quote a bit from Mark:
These findings [steep decline across the board, especially among the young] won’t surprise those who have spent any time in an average college classroom. Professors have always griped about the lassitude of students, but lately the complaints have reached an extreme. English teachers note that it’s getting harder to assign a work over 200 pages. Students don’t possess the habit of concentration necessary to plow through it. Teachers say that students don’t comprehend spelling requirements. Spelling is now the responsibility of spellcheck. Last October at an MLA regional meeting, a panelist who specializes in technical writing observed that while his students have extraordinary computing skills, they have a hard time following step-by-step instructions for an assignment.
I tend to be a sunny optimist in the face of this bad news. First, I assume profs have been grousing extremely about students since forever. (It is such fun I can’t believe any generation of pedagogues has had the will to forego this perk of the job.) Second, I tend to assume that somehow the rich, strange new cognitive shapes young minds assume are all right in their way. Yes, they can’t spell. (I had always assumed Matt used voice recognition software and was dictating his posts. How else to explain his homonym trouble? Matt has a brain like a planet. If he can’t spell, that means spelling can’t be that important.) But mostly I am just so bookish, and everyone I know is, and everyone I grew up with was, and my schools were crammed with bookish teachers and kids clawing after books … I guess I just can’t quite believe that it could be true that less than 50% of the population has read any literature in the last year. (The idea that you can’t assign a 200-page novel in a college class? Preposterous. Can’t be.)
In this vein, Matt Cheney has a fascinating post about teaching Neil Gaiman’s American Gods to high school students. (And Gaiman is duly fascinated.) Matt hits upon the same hard limit as Bauerlein: "I knew that few of my students would ever have read a book of more than 200 pages." But the really interesting and baffling hurdle actually came next.
The left and right hemiblogospheres are presently linked – if at all – by a corpus callosum of profound mutual contempt. Countless linky axons of aggravation transmit negative affect side to side. I won’t bother demonstrating this obvious fact with links, though I discuss it a bit here.
And so, in the interest of entente – or at least to preclude the need for split-brain surgery to prevent the equivalent of a interwebs-wide grand mal epileptic seizure, as the storm moves left to right and back – I propose … a contest! Awards! For outstanding and meritorious achievements in the field of contempt. I think we will call these awards … The Contumelys! (I imagine sort of a golden turd-looking thing on the head of an human figure, on a pedestal.) I haven’t really worked out all the details because I haven’t worked out any of them. There must be awards for Left and Right. And I think, though I can’t imagine how I could enforce this, that lefties should nominate righties and vice versa. I’m certainly not prepared to be judge, jury nor executioner. Except for executioner. I’m more than prepared to delete comments to this thread mercilessly. Because mostly your contempt isn’t worth much to me. Unless you find some way to profit yourself, or others, by it.
UPDATE: Apparently there are problems with comments not showing, even after waiting, even after multiple attempts to post. Sorry about that. What can I say? Be aware there’s a problem and try again later. Maybe it’s temporary. Kieran?
Brian and Matt are quite right about this. “While others quiver with pre-election anxiety, their mood rising and collapsing with the merest flicker of the polls, he alone radiates certainty.” Whatever can be the point of writing such a stupid column on this theme?
In unrelated news, I’m sure, the invaluable Ray Davis has thoroughly Repressed a simply gorgeous online edition of Andrew Lang’s Prince Prigio.
Can you imagine anything more cruel and unjust than this conduct? for it was not the prince’s fault that he was so clever. The cruel fairy had made him so.
The story has a very wise moral.
UPDATE: Disappeared comment now appearing, but something is wonky with comments. Are other people having troubles?
Over at our other blog, my gnawed lambchop sale has been a considerable success. Cavilling critics may object that I have made almost no money, true, but it has been voyeuristically fascinating to stare in the shopping carts. After a while, all the commercial uncovering starts to make me feel as though I am privy not just to buffies but the Buffy of buffies, as Heidegger might have said. Let us try to make it funnier.
UPDATE: Apparently it’s a dud. In fact, John Quiggin defused it last month. Well, that’s a bit silly not to read my very own weblog. (I knew it was a bit suspicious, what with it being good news and all. What a world, what a world.)
I’ll tuck what now looks to be nonsense under the fold, for the curious. Comments are quite interesting below. And Tim Lambert has an interesting post up in response to the general question. Turns out this is a newer model than Quiggin discussed before.
I’d just like to point out that the best album of 2002, The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, is fully audible on the band’s homepage. (Click ‘music’, then ‘album audio player’.) This is particularly notable in light of the recent inclusion of a bonus track, “Thank You Jack White”. I would also like to mention that the artwork for the album is lovely, and the videos are all worth watching. And all good Christians, I trust, trust that 2005 will be the year “Christmas On Mars” finally enoys some sort of cinematic release, so we can stop just watching the trailer.
A month ago John Quiggin posted about his basically happy experience downloading from Amazon an e-copy (PDF) of China Miéville’s new novel, Iron Council. Let me offer my own happy Amazon/China Miéville’s new novel-related tale.
While everyone else was watching the debate, I was rewriting my lecture on Descartes’ “Second Meditation”. Since you can’t understand it without knowing a bit about Descartes’ physics, I always say a bit about that. My favorite discussion of the subject appears not in any secondary source, however, but in John Barth’s novel, The Sot-Weed Factor:
Following up John Quiggin’s follow-up to my first post on Silenced and Left Behind-style tribulit generally, a couple quick links and thoughts.