toothless teaching
I. Compelling, if Incomplete
Avoid, IMO, all thinking that must be called only conservative or progressive, or swings between either pole with something like manic unrest. There are better ways to categorize one's tendencies, even those that are political. Okay, so with that caveat, this article on why literature professors have killed their political relevance is maybe conservative in some sense (New Criticism! the 50s!), but also delivers what I can only call a burn born of our "everyone is now saying neoliberal" moment:
Literature professors have affected America more by sleeping in its downtown hotels and eating in its fast-food restaurants than by telling one another where real prospects for freedom lay. Ten thousand political radicals, in town for the weekend, spend money no differently than ten thousand insurance agents.
Literature professors under the guide of New Criticism, and bolstered by the need to teach all the G.I.'s from WWII, thought their great political contribution was to resist propaganda. That seems a far better political aim than the current Foucault-ian bastardizations running rampant across most grad-student syllabi. Investigate language rather than ghosts of hierarchical unfairness, and thereby give students the tools to resist, oh I dunno, the windbaggery of half-literate autocrats who, with 280 characters a day, have outpaced both professors and news personalities alike? Sounds reasonable.
II. The Last Person to Know Everything
Sabine Baring-Gould happens to have been the last man who knew everything.
One really does mean everything. The Victorian parson's interests included but were not limited to philology, anthropology, folklore, children's stories, hymnology, hagiography, geology, topography, painting, optics, metallurgy, ancient and modern history, musical theory, biblical archeology, the plausibility of miracles, the minutiae of the English salt mining industry, and the theater. Among the 130 books he published were an anthology of Old Testament apocrypha; biographies of Napoleon I and the Caesars; histories of Germany, Iceland, North and South Wales, Cornwall, Dartmoor, the Rhine, and the Pyrenees; a guide to surnames; a 16-volume collection of saints' lives and a compilation of medieval superstitions beloved by H.P. Lovecraft among others; numerous volumes of sermons and dozens of novels; a theological treatise on the problem of evil; numerous works on ghosts; a surprisingly scholarly Book of Were-wolves. He also composed some 200 short stories and thousands of essays, prefaces, and magazine articles; he produced two collections of original verse and two memoirs and left behind a vast correspondence, thousands of pages of diaries, and a remarkable quantity of half-digested research.
III. New York City!?
Amazing video of New York City circa 1911, with the frame-rate slowed and ambient noises added. Uncanny and beautiful.
IV. I Keep Doing This Podcast
My friend Bill is really smart and says all the smart things on this once-a-quarter book club chat we do. Kazuo Ishiguro is an oddball author and his most enigmatic/frustrating/ambitious book, The Unconsoled, was our latest Big Read. You can also listen if you just happen to miss my high-pitched stuttering.
V. Opinion(s)
Hobbes is not a figment of Calvin's imagination. He's not simply magically anthropomorphic either. The latter is obvious - he turns into a stuffed animal whenever Calvin is with other people. The former is also obvious - Hobbes is given THOUGHT BUBBLES when he and Calvin interact one and one. Not all the time, but most often when he's sleeping in the sunlight and ignoring Calvin. Sometimes, a panel will end with just Hobbes and his thoughts. That's not Calvin's perspective. That's the omniscient narrator who sometimes zooms into Calvin's POV and sometimes zooms out.
In what might be related news, I got my second master's and it's the only degree I like. If the things I love could easily be supported outside higher ed, I'm almost positive I'd have done no schooling. Or at lot less. Or so I like to think. But the truth is I was too raw and at such a personal disadvantage vis-a-vis what a writing/literary life looked like. The writing MFA can be an arbitrary and (ostensibly) exclusive gatekeeping system to such an extent that I'm pretty sure people have stopped recognizing its democratic function. Idiots like me get the chance to punch above our weight before we're ready, and perhaps become ready only for the opportunity.
Although, spoiler: most of us are still bad at writing, and published or not, always will be. At least we'll be technically sound, however generally bad we remain. (Put that in the brochure. You're welcome.)
God Bless.