So I’m doing this thing where I rewatch 80’s Hollywood blockbusters, for science. John Hughes. Disappointing. Ghostbusters holds up. But that’s Bill Murray. (You know, I was watching Ted Cruz’ speech – well, bits of it. And I thought to myself: why am I even able to watch this for a second? I think the answer is: he looks a little like Bill Murray. The eyebrows.) Beverly Hills Cop. Unwatchable. Die Hard. Damn good, after all these years. And on and on, for the sake of science. Finally I got to Raiders of the Lost Ark. On Blu-Ray. I was so looking forward to this one. Haven’t watched it in 20 years. I was sure it was going to be, just as I remembered it, a perfect gem. A love letter to the pulps. The Platonic Form of summer blockbuster fun. It knows what it wants to be, and it is that thing, and that’s fine. And just enough comedy to go with the action. A perfect role for Harrison Ford. Spielberg is a great director. And – it turns out to be … just good. Not great. Dammit. I didn’t love it anymore! Where has my love gone! [click to continue…]

A new report  from the British think-tank Demos (for the group of the Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament) on the quality of democracy in European countries makes some interesting claims. It states that Hungary and Greece are ‘the most significant democratic backsliders, with Hungary in the bottom quartile for all measures of democracy’.

But while democratic values may be at risk in both countries, it seems to me that this is happening in different ways. In particular, the way government control is exercised in the presence of parties of the far right is quite different. In Hungary, the government has consolidated political control by moving further toward the positions adopted by the far right. In Greece, the state faces a crisis of authority that is worsened by the activities of the far right.

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Oh, Belle. Belle, Belle, Belle. First, you told us some authors were such a bunch of sexist dillweeds that you didn’t really like their novels all that much. In a throwaway sentence! A sentence that made it clear that you in fact didn’t read such books at all, but merely checked the covers for sexist content and then threw the books away in the trash. In. The. Trash. And then John said you could read fast. Biased much LOL! Yeah, well, so fast that you stopped reading books completely after you reached a sexist sentence! Because that’s manifestly what ‘reading fast’ means. Yes, and then you had an actual man testify again on your behalf that you finished books even if you didn’t super-love them. Like–probably the only chick in the world, seriously! How was any of us to know that “reads books fast” means “reads books”? What is this, some kind of crazy advanced logic class, or a blog?

So then you explained at length, that you were only talking about this one group of male authors who wrote more or less from the ’50s on, and that you didn’t like their novels because you thought they weren’t good novels. When since is that a reason not to like a novel, I would like to know, Missy? Any anyway, Belle, your problem is that you’re reading the wrong thing. Nobody cares about these books anymore! Or, as a commenter suggested: “No. It seems your definition of ‘important’ is skewing your choice of reading, so not surprising that your results are skewed. I’d suggest that you drop everything else for a while until you’ve finished reading all of Pratchett and Banks.” [Here I must note that for whatever odd reason this rubbed me the wrong way. I have already read all of Pratchett and Banks (except maybe one Tiffany Aching one?). The knowledge that there will be no new Iain M. Banks novels dismays me. He’s one of my all-time favorite writers full-stop. WHY AFTER 500 COMMENTS WOULD SOMEONE NOT ASK IF I HAD READ THEM ALL FIRST BECAUSE YOU KNOW, I VERY WELL MIGHT HAVE? Unnamed commenter: I don’t hate on you; it was almost bad luck that you…naw, you still shouldn’t have been so patronizing. But, like, talk to me, dude, what were you thinking?]

Well, dear readers, someone does care about these authors. Someone cares very, very much, and that man is University of Toronto Professor David Gilmour. In a recent interview with Random House Canada’s Emily Keeler, he explained his teaching philosophy:

I’m not interested in teaching books by women. Virginia Woolf is the only writer that interests me as a woman writer, so I do teach one of her short stories. But once again, when I was given this job I said I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love. Unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women. Except for Virginia Woolf. And when I tried to teach Virginia Woolf, she’s too sophisticated, even for a third-year class. Usually at the beginning of the semester a hand shoots up and someone asks why there aren’t any women writers in the course. I say I don’t love women writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down the hall. What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth….
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Van Jones to Cornel West:

Do you think that you’ve shown enough love toward President Obama?…Where is the love for this president?…You’ve got the first black president, and where is the love? I understand the critique, but where is the love?”

It’s like what Gershom Scholem wrote to Hannah Arendt in response to Eichmann in Jerusalem:

There is something in the Jewish language that is completely indefinable, yet fully concrete — what the Jews call ahavath Israel, or love for the Jewish people.  With you, my dear Hannah, as with so many intellectuals coming from the German left, there is no trace of it.

Only classier.

So, somewhere, someone proposed this idea, and other people said, “yes, that sounds like an excellent and educational idea.” Children from the Hartford Magnet Trinity College Academy (which seems to be a magnet school in a majority minority public school district, but I’m not 100% sure) went for a 3 day field trip last year to a place called “Nature’s Classroom” in Charlton, MA. The students were notified about an “optional” Underground Railroad Skit 30 minutes before it occurred, on the last night. There, according to testimony from a father filing suit on behalf of his 12-year-old daughter under the Civil Rights act (along with some more ordinary “damages” suits against the school board), this happened (her re-telling, via the father):

Before we went into the dark room, we were lined up outside and asked to imagine running with our families in Africa. The slave master finds us and beats, stabs, and kills my father in front of me. I went into a dark room where I had to sit on my bottom with my knees touching; my legs fell asleep and were hurting….the instructor told us,”we don’t need any sick slaves; if you get sick we will throw you overboard.” I was told that sharks were following us and could smell our blood.

So far so good, right? But here’s where a teachable moment–turned into a terrible catastrophe. No, jk obviously, this is the most insane horrible thing I’ve ever heard of! But it does get worse.
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Is it really the case that pretty much all the Important Male Novelists of the mid to late 20th-century are such sexist dillweeds that it is actually impossible to enjoy the books, for many intelligent people? That would be a bummer, wouldn’t it? Unfortunately, the answer is yes. Best suggestion for contemporary author of well-rounded female characters, from Tom: Kim Stanley Robinson. I LOL’ed. Shall we consider together?

John Updike, Norman Mailer: self-explanatory. If I get pushback on this I just…I don’t know. All right, The Naked and The Dead is an OK novel but after he turned into the Baron Harkonnen of Important Male Authors his literary credits were retroactively revoked. I read that novel about Egypt twice, don’t y’all make me go there! (Why? Because it was there. No, really. It was at my house. It’s why I’ve read The Tommyknockers twice also. It was at my house and then it was at a backpacker place in Melaka I stayed in when I had wicked jet lag for a day.) Philip Roth: sorry dudes, it just be’s like that sometimes. Saul Bellow: I am not qualified to say! Readers, please advise. Gaddis: aw, aw…goddamn. Did you–couldn’t you just have left out–? There has never been a book I enjoyed so much, that I threw against the wall so hard and hated so utterly as JR. It was devastatingly clear in the first hundred or so pages how unhappy I would be. And yet so skilfully gulled! Don DeLillo: Here quite a decent case can be made that he just hates everyone. And yet–yet–he hates some people more equally than others. Just set him side by side with J.G. Ballard, who truly hates everyone, and you will see what I mean.

Jonathan Franzen: he’s by no means the worst of the lot! He’s just young enough to know better. Some objected below that none of his characters are real, but rather all represent ideas in the fashion of… Look, I yield to no man in my love of Mann. I am a woman who, when packing to go to the beach in Thailand, decided to re-read Buddenbrooks. I know my Mynheeren Peeperkorn, Mr. Franzen, and you have not written a Mynheer Peeperkorn. Also, it is precisely Franzen’s desire to be an Important Male Novelist of the 20th Century that is so grating; he is a squirrel in the “random reward” group of a Skinner-box experiment that investigates how frequently the squirrel will press the lever that dispenses cocaine. D.F. Wallace: a good writer who is not such a sexist dillweed that it prevents one from enjoying his work, and is nonetheless an officially canonized Important Novelist. How satisfactory! He also needed an editor, though. Does no one have an editor? Do they rely on the firm rock of the horrible-looking PC OS to keep them real?
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This is rather depressing. More info here. And seriously, we really need more conversation and action – whatever that may be – to counter the level of anti-Sikh and anti-Muslim hate going around. (I guess perhaps it is not yet confirmed in this case that it was a hate crime, but it certainly sounds like it.) Know of any organizations with helpful initiatives in this domain? Please share.

Monday, September 9, was David Petraeus’s first class at CUNY. As he left Macaulay Honors College, where he’s teaching, he was hounded by protesters. It wasn’t pretty; the protesters were angry and they didn’t hold back.

The protesters’ actions attracted national and international media attention—and condemnation. Not just from the usual suspects at Fox but from voices at CUNY as well. [click to continue…]

Australia’s new conservative ministry has just been sworn in, and while it includes Ministers for Border Protection (that is, stopping refugees) and Sport, and even a minister for the centenary of the Anzac landings on Gallipoli in 1915, there are no longer ministers for science or higher education[^1].

This is part of a fairly consistent pattern. The US Republican Party recently vetoed the creation of an unpaid position of National Science Laureate. In Canada, the Harper government eliminated the position of National Science Advisor, among many other anti-science moves. All of this reflects the fact that scientific research on topics like climate change and evolution regularly reaches conclusions that conflict with the policy preferences or religious beliefs of rightwingers.
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I don’t want to step on my husband’s post, so I am merely supplementing it, because I think there is something that deserves enough excerpts to warrant a post rather than a comment. To wit, this article from The Toast, “You Wouldn’t Like Jonathan Franzen When He’s Angry.” I am turning off comments to this post so we can talk in the thread below.

Jonathan Franzen is the angriest novelist in the world. He is the novelist who is so angry he cannot move. He cannot eat. He cannot sleep. He can just barely growl. Bound so tightly with tension and anger, he approaches the state of rigor mortis.

He is angry because Salman Rushdie uses Twitter, and nowadays people can buy books on the Internet, and the Home Depot, and he had to go to Germany one time, and also some women exist who have not had sex with him….

Think of all the women who have never slept with Jonathan Franzen. His anger must grow by the day. Soon it will envelop the world, and we will be forced to bow down in chains before it, and create ziggurats out of human corpses as terrible tribute. Some of these women who Failed To F#ck Jonathan Franzen might now be on Twitter, which is wrong because of a German essayist who is now dead.

To quote one of the most internetty minds of our generation, “heh, indeed.” Now I will speak my part, and then fall silent, except for the part about where we get into a huge argument in comments because I think pretty much all the Important Male Novelists of the mid to late 20th-century are such sexist dillweeds that it is actually impossible to enjoy the books. For me. Except William S. Burroughs, and that is because he does not want to sex chicks up. Not even a little bit. He wants us to be able to make clones, and then just go live on another planet with only men and boys and million-year-old crab creatures made of radioactive cadmium and then have gay sex there. It is astringently refreshing to have a novelist not care about having sex with you at all. It’s the best! Goodbye, poorly drawn female characters who exist as trophies for when the protagonists level up after a boss battle with Freudian analysis!

Now, dudes, part of shared bank accounts and having children and shit like that is that you can coordinate on stuff and divide responsibilities sensibly. Am I going to sit down and read about the Fourfold Root? No, I will ask my husband, “hey peaches, what’s this with the Schopenhauer here, am I giving a f*@k or what?” Then he can answer on account of having written a dissertation about it. And he arranges for everyone to go to the dentist, and parent-teacher conferences, and guy stuff like that which I as a mother, am not really into. Similarly, as John is a busy person who doesn’t have time to read novels which are both extremely long and quite bad, I can read them on our joint behalf. No, I can also read long good books on our behalf, so I can tell John crucial stuff about Proust like when the last volume opens and it seems as if all the characters have come in fancy dress but then… I read very quickly, stupidly quickly, a skill I primarily use to read the equivalent of a 500 page paperback, but made of internet bullshit, every day (I’ve checked). The Corrections, Jesus. It didn’t even have to be bad! There were many aspects of it that were very well observed and memorable. It needed an editor. It needed a nano-particle of self-awareness that was doing something other than comparing the distance of Franzen’s masturbatory ejecta to that of Philip Roth. Something that might, eventually, if nurtured in a caring bosom, maybe some kind of DH Lawrence glorying sheaf of wheat in the firelight thing, become humility. Just for like a second! It needed negative 4089 C of sexism to return to conditions amenable to reading rather than being the heart of a the giant blue-white star which is poised, even now, to go supernova in the center of the swirling storm of Eta Carinae. Let us never speak of Jonathan Franzen again.

We are bookish intellectuals here! Why then should we lack for a thread in which people can complain about Jonathan Franzen’s essay? I can sort of sympathize with Franzen’s evident desire to hit a trollier-than-thou Krausian high note. Suddenly Here Comes Everybody – and they all want be just as individual and superior as I do, the bastards.

In his defense, Franzen does seem to be aware that he looks like Calvin, complaining about the results of using the Duplicator Machine.

When Coase died I thought about penning, in his honor, a prolegomenon to a possible sequel to his Theory of the Firm. I would propose a theory of the Fall of the Book, organized around an account of precipitously falling transaction costs, sentence by sentence. Why is it ever better for an individual sentence to incorporate with hundreds or thousands of others? Why isn’t all intellectual life transacted on Twitter? (I’m busy today, so maybe you could write this theory, piecemeal, in comments, so I don’t have to.)

What happens to writing when every sentence can be – hence is under peer pressure to be – its own marketing department?

I do get why Franzen feels that he, as the serious author of big, serious books, is heroically trying to hold the line. (Full disclosure: I have never read The Corrections. I don’t have the time.) But the irony is that his Guardian essay isn’t complaining about anything for which there aren’t already perfectly good, complaining memes on Know Your Meme. Still, as Kraus remarks. “Many share my views with me. But I don’t share them with them.”

Great news! The faculty union at the University of Oregon, whose struggle I reported on a few days ago, has forced the administration to give up its extreme proposals on faculty freedom, autonomy, and privacy, and has signed its first contract. Thanks in part to all of you who wrote the administration.

Here’s how one union member, in an email, describes the victory:

Over the past week, the administration has completely backed off its extreme proposals around faculty rights and free expression.  Specifically:

The contract guarantees that freedom of speech includes freedom to voice internal criticism of university personnel or practices.

The administration completely dropped its proposal to regulate faculty’s right to consult with outside organizations.

The administration completely dropped its proposal to be allowed to “monitor” and spy on faculty emails, files or web surfing, and can only access faculty computer usage for truly “legitimate” needs such as system maintenance (with “legitimate” now a defined and grievable term).

The administration completely dropped its demand about owning all creations, inventions and course materials of faculty — we agreed to set up a joint union/administration committee to discuss this issue in the future, but until and unless that committee comes to voluntary agreement, there will be no change in the current policy, under which faculty own their own products.

I’m sure that the many messages from faculty across the US and internationally helped convince the administration to do the right thing.

Thank you to all of you for weighing in on this!

Proving once again that if you care about the future of the academy you should join a union, if you can, or support academic unions, if you can’t.

I haven’t seen a copy of the settlement, but the union also reports that it won average salary increases of nearly 12 percent over the two years of the agreement and minimum salaries for non-tenure track faculty. You can read more about the settlement here.

Congrats to the union! Well done.

“Yesterday”:http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/2ebe4036-1a02-11e3-93e8-00144feab7de.html#axzz2fLYIOrfd in the _Financial Times._

bq. The Netherlands’ newly inaugurated King Willem-Alexander has made his first annual appearance before parliament one to remember, with a speech effectively announcing the end of the generous Dutch welfare state. … “Due to social developments such as globalisation and an ageing population, our labour market and public services are no longer suited to the demands of the times,” the king said, in a speech written by the Liberal prime minister, Mark Rutte, and his cabinet. “The classical welfare state is slowly but surely evolving into a ‘participatory society’,” he continued – one, that is, where citizens will be expected to take care of themselves, or create civil-society solutions for problems such as retiree welfare.

Rene Cuperus has an article on the “politics of this”:http://www.policy-network.net/pno_detail.aspx?ID=4466&title=The-Dutch-social-laboratory-From-progressivism-to-populism-&utm_source=Policy+Network+List&utm_campaign=78cdbb14dc-State_of_the_Left_Month_Year_NEW_TEMPLATE2_27_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5d3568f16b-78cdbb14dc-301016437 in _Policy Network_ today.

bq. the actual political and social situation in the Netherlands … is quite depressing …The country is [a] member of the Northern Elite Club of Triple A creditors, but at the same time it is suffering from Southern European-style economic problems: a home-made housing bubble, rising youth unemployment, marginal economic growth. … For that reason, political trust in the social-liberal Grand Coalition of the conservative-liberal VVD (prime minister Mark Rutte) and the social-democratic PvdA (Party Leader Diederik Samsom; Vice Prime Minister Lodewijk Asscher) is at an all-time low. The established parties got all the blame for the predicament of the Dutch economy, whilst the populist protest parties are sky high rocketing in the opinion polls. This applies especially to the right-wing populist PVV Freedom party of Geert Wilders, and to a lesser extent to the Party for the Elderly (50Plus) and the left-wing Socialist Party (SP).

bq. The Netherlands now has become one of the populist laboratories of Europe and the world … One could even state, that this new Netherlands constitutes and represents a huge warning to other countries, especially to neighbouring Germany. For Germany, the Netherlands has transformed from a positive guide land to follow into a “negative guide land’’ not to follow. The Dutch developments are a nightmare scenario for Germany, an image of fear.

I don’t know enough about Dutch politics to comment intelligently. But I know that some of our commenters are in a much better position, and would be interested to see what you have to say.

Today is the fortieth anniversary of Gram Parsons’s death in Joshua Tree, CA, a death famously followed by two funerals, after the coffin containing his body was stolen from LAX by his road manager so that he could be cremated in the desert (as previously agreed, apparently). Relatives got the partially incinerated body back, and completed the job (as it were) in Florida. There’s even a rather uneven film about it: Grand Theft Parsons.

When Parsons died, he’d never had a hit record. He was a too-rich young man from the South, who loved country music, fancied being a rock star, and who threw much of his talent away with the drugs and booze he could readily afford. Not much to admire, you might think.

Parsons’s fame rests on five albums: the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo, the Flying Burrito Brothers’ Gilded Palace of Sin and Burrito Deluxe, then the solo GP and Grievous Angel (the latter two cut with the top session musicians his money could afford). All of them contain a mix of his own songs and covers of classic country and sometimes soul. His own compositions, written in the country-rock idiom he helped invent, are suggestive, even enigmatic, vignettes of American life, love, faith, betrayal and death. “$1000 Dollar Wedding”, perhaps my personal favourite (though I change my mind all the time) tells a story of death and tragedy, a wedding transformed into a funeral, but what, exactly, has happened? We have to invent a lot of that for ourselves. “Sin City”, recorded with the Burritos, also tells a story of something. What? Evangelism? Conflict between money and faith? “The scientists say, it will all wash away, but we don’t believe any more ….” And other songs depict childhood, nostalgia and loss: “Hickory Wind” (recorded with the Byrds and re-recorded on Grievous Angel), “Brass Buttons”, in which he remembers his mother. None of them have dated.
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