Elif Batuman's "The Possessed": Book Review

 
These garrulous 2010 anecdotes of this Stanford graduate student document how Russian literature permeates the imagination of her peers and mentors. It also shows how unhinged, conniving, and silly academia can be. Nothing new there, but Elif Batuman is also an intellectual, as her Harvard undergraduate preparation shows. She also displays her determination to market herself then as now.

Cadging grants for specious research into Tolstoy's death sets in motion one chapter. Another, the most coherent and slightly less rambling, precedes that in demonstrating how to pitch Isaac Babel in more appealing form than a display of manuscripts in the Stanford library. Here, you get the best example of how Batuman examines herself in relation to her young life's pursuit. She thinks of literature as "a profession, an art, a science, or pretty much anything else, rather than a craft." The tell-tale "pretty much..." signals her habitual preference for the chatty over the sober in her scholarship. It's present, but until the last essay analyzing Devils (fka "The Possessed" itself, it prefers to soft-sell the lit-crit for a coming-of-age assemblage of journalism originally appearing in separate form. It shows. Some information repeats, and the Samarkand stint that's interspersed with the Russian-oriented entries makes the collection lurch about, even if she also links events and thoughts together in revised sections. It's ambitious, and it's certainly more readable, if loquacious.

She's attempting to align her dissertation about "big" novels and the way that they try to make the author's life resemble his or her beloved fiction, as with Don Quixote. "The novel form is 'about' the protagonist's struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his favorite books." Many who do create out of this tension attempt and perhaps fail to answer some of her big "different, insoluble" questions: "Why were people created? Why are all people unhappy? Why are intellectuals even unhappier than everyone else?" No answers emerge.

What energizes Batuman she finds repeated in a reconstructed palace of ice, "the monstrous crystallization of the anxiety that made authors from Cowper to Tolstoy to Mann cancel out their most captivating pages: the anxiety of literature, that most solitary and time-consuming of arts, as irremediably vain, useless, and immoral." This is livelier than much of Harold Bloom, I do confess.

Some of the best parts show off Batuman's eye and ear. Natalie Babel turns "with the expression of a cat who does not want to be picked up." Another woman "spoke in a head voice, like a puppet." One more "chanted in a half-pleading, half-declaratory tine, like somebody proposing an hour-long toast." And, a "few times I saw a chicken walking about importantly, like some kind of regional manager."

As a critic, she attempts to push her education into the greater world, through an extended stay in Samarkand. Her own quest to see if her Turkish fluency and her Russian fascination overlap as she tries to learn Uzbek flounders, for "that didn't make it a reconciliation between the two. When you studied Uzbek, you weren't learning a history or a story; all you were learning was a collection of words. And the larger implication was that no geographic location, no foreign language, no preexisting entity at all would ever reconcile "who" you were with "what" you were, or where you came from with what you liked." A different type of anxiety of influence lurks within this outcome.

When she applies Rene Girard's theory, we return to the diligent doctoral candidate. "According to Girard, there is in fact no such thing as human autonomy or authenticity. All of the desires that direct our actions in life are learned or imitated from some Other, to whom we mistakenly ascribe the autonomy lacking in ourselves." As with ads that feature the beautiful or handsome possessor of the bottle of vodka, this supposed freedom that owner displays means that we are driven not "to possess the object, but to be the Other." This discourages her. Why not stop our pursuit? One novel would be all we needed to disabuse our self from illusion. Love and ambition, what Augustine posited as the "basic premises of literary narrative," would prove failures. Who needs any more scholars "in a world where knowledge, learning, and the concept of difference turned out to be a mirage?" Still, she ends the final entry by claiming if she did it all over, she'd "choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that's where we're going to find them."

Does this book of occurrences and contemplation succeed? It left me interested in Batuman's argument. It also left me somewhat bemused by her privilege (daughter of medical professionals, Jersey suburb, elite education, and a seeming knack at finagling her way into gaining funds), for she adapts the position of a six-foot-tall misfit. She cannot have been all that inept. I think she bobbles her attempt to parallel her unwieldy structure to Eugene Onegin's "strange appendix that doesn't make sense until later, out of order" but at least she tries to bridge the gap between the common reader seeking insight and entertainment, in what could have been a tired trope, the long march to the Ph.D.
(Amazon US 5/9/17)

Academia's introverts

The push now moves STEM curricula forward, shoving aside the liberal arts and all those impecunious pursuits unable to be justified by the tens of thousands parents and students accrue in debt. The government wants to cut programs that don't show results in terms of quantifiable job placements and incomes able to sustain a graduate. The corporations want to use academia as the minor leagues for workers and the batter's cage for lucrative grants in turn funding yet another war machine.

Nothing new. But my friend, who teaches in Liverpool, shared this post by a former student of his. As a relevant aside, searching for an image to grace this piece, I see that a colleague of my friend is at the same university. Joe Moran speaks up at Times Higher Education for the "shy academic" and figures he's at home in its groves. Solitary reflection for this historian infuses then the exchanges he benefits from. Inside Higher Education presents Ellie Bothwell's summation that cultural differences also contribute to the problem. African and Middle Eastern scholars may publish less and hunker down. For America, like England, however, our supervisors step up our speed, for their profits. Qualitative goals, for even reticent humanists, loom.

Keene Short's blog entry (at his Pens and Pencils site today appearing as "Soft-Spoken in Academia") articulates predicaments common to those of us less beholden to this leviathan and more concerned about the little guys and gals, ourselves included, who must bow lest we're crushed by the juggernaut. I contemplate this as the federal budget demands $1.1 trillion for "defense," tellingly,

Keene Short (aka JK) faces, as he starts grad school, the same situation I did back in the Orwellian year at UCLA. As part of the arrangement for doctoral candidates, you contributed your labor to teaching the lower-end courses that the tenured shunned. For what was then about $9k a school year. For the next six, I taught for the whole span permitted for a TA, while pursuing my "terminal degree."

Twenty-three, fresh with a Master's, I was given my first freshman (can I still say that?) composition course. These measured around twenty-five on the roster, a fact I recall with sadness as I will have forty enrolled in my upcoming online course (we must teach at least one annually as a way to boost the institutional profile with more doctorate-level instructors, as the quality lagged overall online. The bloom is off that rose.) One administrator a while back assured us faculty that there was "no evidence" to account for smaller class sizes resulting in improved educational results. I'd have liked to see those data. My tendonitis flares up whenever I carry out the myriad tasks accompanying an online deluge of paperwork, and we're required to be online practically daily. If I take time off, the amount of written assignments small (which can exceed now 250 a week as threaded discussion posts) and big as essays and exams requiring scrutiny (rather than as multiple-choice tests or quizzes textbook-prefabricated and happily used (and abused as answers proliferate online, as I warned them) exponentially soars. I digress to show how technology has heightened rather than eased workloads.

Back to my recent fellow-toiler, he observes how the soft-spoken among us in academic circles fare. JK labels it the "competitive fast-paced aggressively limited-time-offer college-industrial complex."

Portraying his introductory rhetoric course's demands, he finds students want to win arguments. Reporting on his pedagogy course's expectations, he tells how production is pushed upon the ranks of grad students earlier than ever. "Paths" and "timelines" turn students of all levels into hurried output. I teach at a business and tech-oriented institution, where the humanities are on the side, with no majors and no tenure. I'm expected to "turnaround" grades quickly. I am judged on this by both students and whomever mans the Panopticon as we all scurry about online under the pressure to meet "outcomes."

Rather than "patience" or "scruples," JK sees that this system's fueled by "the production of ideas, the teeming blue schools of links clicked on a given day, the riptides of steady marketable publications."

He concludes with sentiments I second. "But there is not a place in the current scheme of things for the soft-spoken, for people who are here to learn regardless of what degrees I may or may not get out of it. I don’t fit in. Maybe that’s a good thing." As for me, yes, I produce. Partly because my predilections, my training, and my interests direct me from within. Partly because a small percentage (reduced now to 15% along with nebulous "professional activity"; cf. the shift from 60% to 45% not of course loads but weight given teaching as opposed to the new 25% for "university and program service" on committees galore) still counts towards a "performance review." And I was born curious.

One final perspective I'll add: we all play parts. I am more aloof and shy on my own as away from the classroom. My third of a century this year in that role requires some aspect of a dynamic "sage on the stage" to thrive and survive for so long teaching. While the "guide on the side" of androgogy is touted as the latest trend, to "spin" the energy back to the students, rousing them from endemic passivity, I'd aver, coming home after one more night of thousands now in my avocation and my career, that we teachers remain the energizers of everyone else in the florescent, screen-proliferating realm we inhabit. To coax our charges out of their smartphone and PC burrows, we have to act as if coaches. This requires a role model that transforms even a shy guy or gal, on both sides of the storied podium.

Newton's Third Law

Even if New Year's is two weeks away, I've resolved this past year to expand my reading material. The echo chamber's become a common phrase the past few months, derided by some who blame whatever ideology one leans to for keeping half of America tuned out from the other half. Both sides sometimes could care less about the other (small 'o' rather than The Other elevated by one side). But I figure it's stimulating to do so, and besides, I've always had unpredictable (a bit at least) and contrarian ideas.

So, I read Ross Douthat in the NYT regularly. This conservative Catholic intellectual's an anomaly, certainly. His take on the campaigns and culture wars from his perspective reminded me not of my Jesuit college, which was decidedly of the "social justice" tilt, but of a few authors I tried out in the stacks during my stint. I roamed them to find among the Eric-Gill- Hilaire Belloc- Chestertonian axis an argument for distributism, a return to guilds, and a William Morris-inspired direction of a benign reform less hostile to the spiritual than the Marxism and/or liberation theology favored by certain professors. I mulled over these issues in my undergrad years, during Reagan's first term, and while I opposed him, I found that the knee-jerk denigration of those like my family who voted for the Gipper as an antidote to the identity politics promoted by the Dems diminished the voices of "my" folks. Unions declining, education faltering, the Church diminishing, their trusted verities faded rapidly. This white working class is mostly mocked, but I understand it.

Not that I backed the GOP, but I didn't cotton to the attitudes of those limousine liberals either. The earnest Michael Harrington's version of democratic socialism appeared as one option some of my circle entered, if gingerly. We were from the blue-collar ranks, the first to go far with higher ed, from average parishes and schools. But the Jane Fonda-Tom Hayden in the People's Republic of Santa Monica's noblesse oblige the DSA exuded for L.A.'s NPR crowd on the Westside, few of whom were natives and many from New York and other bastions of privilege, rankled me instinctively. (I get that way whenever my hometown is critiqued by airy arrivals from wherever.) And when I questioned proto-Maoist radicals at UCLA a few years later during my doctoral quest, as to where their efforts to recruit among the likes of my father's machinists would wind up, as factories left the U.S., I did not get much response as to a shift to consciousness raising among the temps in their monitored cubicles.

Now, as many may have buyer's remorse as to whom they voted for to bring back those tool-and-die jobs my dad did, the choice of the right-wing, as fickle as predicted in their embrace of cronies from capitalism's elite to fill the Cabinet to come, bodes poorly for reforms. No surprise there. But in retrospect, an April 23rd 2016 piece by Douthat I found this morning in the paper pile shows how the lately fevered fears of certain "alt" sites and voices can be placed within a larger context, one the media pass by. I'm unsure how much aligns with what I stumbled across in college, but here goes.

Douthat documents the roughly 2/3 bias in programs (highest in my field of English Lit) against conservative candidates otherwise equally qualified for a post competing with a liberal applicant. 10% of the humanities professoriate total its right-wing. A minority no advocate lobbies for more spaces in the ivory tower. This movement Douthat labels as '“neoreaction,' which in its highbrow form offers a monarchist critique of egalitarianism and mass democracy, and in its popular form is mostly racist pro-Trump Twitter accounts and anti-P.C. provocateurs." (See here for more on the latter contingent's variety, tallied by one who delights to épater le bourgeois.) Douthat suggests these two phenomena emanate from a common core: "the official intelligentsia’s permanent and increasing leftward tilt, and the appeal of explicitly reactionary ideas to a strange crew of online autodidacts."

The Whiggish expectation that we advance inexorably towards a better future outweighs the Newtonian third law of actions triggering equal and opposed reactions. They may be balanced in that one President follows another, and their racial and social stances may be seen in opposition. But are they equal in reactions? Both kow-tow as any elected figure in the U.S. of any stature to bankers, developers, lawyers, tax-dodgers, connivers, and cabals. A shadow government runs our real system. For me, a change of the front man does not mean the backing band has changed utterly for the better. It's as if the lead singer lip-synchs what the talented songwriter pens, the charmer out of the spotlight,

Going beyond the easy depictions of idolizing Him, Douthat discerns a void on campuses. If a discontent wants to revolt against "tenured radicalism," what to do? Those think-tanks don't attack
"the very roots of the modern liberal order." (Deft spin to the derivation of a less-heralded radical.)

"Deep critiques" abound on the left.. Douthat notes that while scholarship on Carlyle or T.S. Eliot or Rudyard Kipling continues, few publishing on these writers would admit any admiration for their politics. Their often racist and anti-semitic outbursts, akin to the antebellum South, make this sympathy taboo. Yet when we erase polarized opposites of Foucault or Zizek, we may lack contexts.

But while reactionary thought is prone to real wickedness, it also contains real
insights. (As, for the record, does Slavoj Zizek — I think.) Reactionary assumptions
about human nature — the intractability of tribe and culture, the fragility of order,
the evils that come in with capital­-P Progress, the inevitable return of hierarchy, the
ease of intellectual and aesthetic decline, the poverty of modern substitutes for
family and patria and religion — are not always vindicated. But sometimes? Yes,
sometimes. Often? Maybe even often.
Both liberalism and conservatism can incorporate some of these insights. But
both have an optimism that blinds them to inconvenient truths. The liberal sees that conservatives were foolish to imagine Iraq remade as a democracy; the conservative
sees that liberals were foolish to imagine Europe remade as a post­national utopia
with its borders open to the Muslim world. But only the reactionary sees both.
Is there a way to make room for the reactionary mind in our intellectual life,
though, without making room for racialist obsessions and fantasies of enlightened
despotism? So far the evidence from neoreaction is not exactly encouraging. The official intelligentsia’s permanent and increasing leftward tilt, and the appeal of explicitly reactionary ideas to a strange crew of online autodidacts. is also evidence that ideas can’t be permanently repressed when something in them still seems true.
Maybe one answer is to avoid systemization, to welcome a reactionary style
that’s artistic, aphoristic and religious, while rejecting the idea of a reactionary
blueprint for our politics. From Eliot and Waugh and Kipling to Michel Houellebecq,
there’s a reactionary canon waiting to be celebrated as such, rather than just read
through a lens of grudging aesthetic respect but ideological disapproval.

Now, where are the insights Douthat invites? Tribalism has been blamed for the intransigence of the divides into which we are born, are classified within and expected to uphold for a demographic tick-box or a employer-mandated form. Order is fragile, but as with global warming and neo-liberal pieties, do these impacts merit dismissal as we crest into planetary chaos? The ebb of standards in the arts and discussion we lament within the chattering classes (at least of a certain age, before the advent of word processors and smartphones), but we engage in the same technologies and share the same memes as our younger charges. I personally get frustrated by the casual reversion to f-this and s-that all around now, but my peers shrug it off. I'm happy that the definition of family expands to same-sex couples and any whom have long faced ostracism. But I worry about the "single mom" trope as if this origin excuses any criticism of blame for the damage a fragmented home may inflict on young or old.

As for patria, I suspect this when nationalism stands for inbred mores and backward selfishness. Much as I have a soft spot for the Irish Tricolour, I remain detached about flag worship, and even the standing for the Pledge discomforts me as I've grown to realize this compromised U.S. Yet I defy its liberal norm in arguing if fruitlessly against open borders as I believe any jurisdiction by its nature should exercise self-deliberation among its citizens as to how many newcomers it can include. This clashes with everyone around me, but it's a tenet for me squaring with sustainable economies, eco-friendly lifestyles, and populist decision making rather than the centralized dictates that the au courant  musical hit Hamilton champions, if glossing over the real Alex's pro-British elitism and trade that favored the wealthy and the Feds rather than the states and those resisting Beltway power.

Religion needs no debate here. It's been contemplated for all my life, let alone many of my posts. The appeal of the atavistic and the ancestral pulses strongly within me. Its dangers and its delights create discomfort and rouse discussion. Suffice to say that "its strange viral appeal" buzzes in my sly soul.

Rule book or blank pages?

The Hedge School 

Five hoot-calls of an owl awoke me this dawn. Regarding this long in my life as my "totem" despite my recent Apache student's warning that this in her culture reads as a death message, I took this as a pre-Election Day harbinger. Sure, the entrails drawn and stars scryed read victory for Her, but our motley He-men loom, "useful idiots" manipulated for those, the shadow government who pulls our nation down.

Such rhetoric may be hyperbole, but the prophecies emitted over this "long national nightmare," to lift a phrase from the recent past which formed my coming-of-age, meant for me, as I've written before here, a skeptical bent towards the claims of power. Originally I looked to "put not my trust in princes, in man in whom there's no salvation/On the day he departs, his spirit returns to dust/On that day his plans die," to summon up a song from my youth taken from the Psalms. I suppose I toss that world-negating cast within my own prognostications, as I've always been drawn to those abnegating Mr. Dryasdust's norm or the stultifying Laputan, from my Confirmation patron St. Francis to the Irish republicans whose "blood" flows in me from a great-grandfather I discovered less than a decade ago was "drowned in mysterious circumstances" on a Land League 1898 delegation from Co. Roscommon to the city on the Thames.

The past few years, since Occupy, have found me delving into left-libertarian and anarchist thought. I did not know the typological niche in poli-sci where my non-state-socialist-sympathizing (but very suspicious of any political machine's machinations) leanings led me, for while some I respect chose Marx, I wanted a simpler, more egalitarian, transformating energy with room for misfits, seekers, and introverts. Even the milennarian schemes of the democratic left, for me, left not enough space for ambiguity, for a quest into the earthy, the numinous, the intellectual, the intuitive all. I suspect authority and recall the first grade meeting with my mom and my teacher, when she castigated me for the look on my face when criticized or disagreeing, a quirk I'm unable to shake. Even when I think I have a poker face, I don't, according to chagrined colleagues who chuckle, chiding me too late.

But I also mistrust the common herd. They're misled, and voting and democracy while ingrained in me betray the machinations of Her against Bernie, the evasion of ethics, the will to power consuming our people and our planet. Too many capitulate. I'm from the once-lauded, now despised "working class," oddly, the "scholarship boy" defined by Richard Hoggart and then popularized by Richard Rodriguez when I was in college on Pell and Cal Grants. But mortás cine, the pride I felt in Montana among those committed to passing on the ways of the heritage in a climate shunted aside for its lack of shade, is lacking in the city where I was born, far from the centers of the community the diaspora tries to grasp. No less than the bien-pensant elites with whom my more modest wife and my college-educated sons associate with, I suppose my own humble liberal arts pursuit churns me out into a chilly milieu, where nothing the DNC ever does can be equated with Him and His, and where flyover countryfolk are mocked and memed, in ways that these elites would never dare due to those of any other category or identification. Where surnames are summed up and approved lineages calculated and promoted. We're charted, boxes to check for Uncle Sam, and inevitably "identity politics" is used to generate gains for some and losses for others, in a society where nobody's the majority anymore.

Getting students to think about this tires them out. I've tried to integrate subversion, different points of view from an ideological range against the norms, but my students and colleagues are career-driven. As my institution symbolizes, one attends not to ask Big Questions, but to get tidy answers. Few then, want to undermine the paradigms by which they secure careers. The humanities attracts the discontents, but even there, most of those studying them today choose their own conformity of non-conformity, where every standard must be overturn. Instead of reading Shakespeare or Milton to appreciate or attack them, it's expedient to abandon them, and analyze Lady Gaga or the Simpsons. I show the five-minute tale of terror that's Hamlet for Bart, but I also include the play itself, first...

We're all able to enter the liberal arts. But now we're told it frees none; it's for the dead, tainted by a certain complexion or class, that it reeks of privilege. Yet out of it, sullied as it is, emerged those all around the world who wrestled with its tensions, and out of them, responded with their own informed creations. On my native island, some in my family tree might have learned Virgil in a hedge school.

As Daniel Mendelsohn asked in Harper's of his own realization of his same-sex attractions as a teen, a man almost exactly my own age: "Do you identify with what separates you from others, rather than what links you to them?" I paraphrase, but this ranking is one by melanin and genitalia on us, that delegates to the front of the line or relegates to the back, the first last, the last first, on Judgment Day.

Othala

(O: Ancestral property.) Inherited property or possessions, a house, a home. What is truly important to one. Group order, group prosperity. Land of birth, spiritual heritage, experience and fundamental values. Aid in spiritual and physical journeys. Source of safety, increase and abundance. Othala Reversed or Merkstave: Lack of customary order, totalitarianism, slavery, poverty, homelessness. Bad karma, prejudice, clannishness, provincialism. What a man is bound to.


This précis brings me round to the past few months. This blog's found me in hiatus. I've continued to archive new entries as book reviews, but I had to beg off after the end of February, vowing to rearrange my stored-up posts in my spare moments. These proved elusive due to heavier teaching loads, tendonitis, longer commutes, and audio books putting me to sleep after drives, rather than in print. I had also piled up as is my wont a lot of titles to review, and these turned into book reports of sorts, one always waiting due to remind me of my academic production line, and my need to please.

One project, which will be a chapter on the evolution of Irish folk-metal for a forthcoming anthology edited by my friend, Dr. Jenny Butler (now lecturing in Folklore at Univ. College Cork, to the delight of many), kept reminding me of procrastination's Sword of Damocles dangling over my greying head. It also kept in the back of my mind her chapter on neo-Druidry. And my drift to the North, videlicet. 

Finishing that task Mid-Summer's Day, I faced then increased teaching online in two courses of about three-dozen students each the past two terms to consume me, along with onsite courses. These online assignments are heavy, and take up a considerable amount of attention. The failure of my work PC (twice now) led to further tsurris, compounded by slow routers at home and the evasion of storing up much on an older laptop resurrected in a pinch (twice now). And I confess, for pleasure and profit in teaching, that FB has taken me onto its engineered conveyor line (no two times the same, thanks to its design, as we pursue likes, seeing our name over and over, and beckoned to share more "moments").

With my talk on anarchist reactions to the Rising timed for the ACIS-West conference in Missoula, I rushed to finish grading as the rush of finals grew during the gathering. Meanwhile the failure of my PC taken with me to Sea-Tac Airport found me reduced to pecking my Kindle for all things electronic. But I was not as despairing as before, for I'd backed up nothing again on the perfidious, aging PC replacement work issued me, all our laptops, it seems, going down around me in the other cubicles from my fellow toilers. Again, a portent of readiness: a call to hunker in, to stay alert now.

For a few friends I trust, from FB and some crossing over from there or to there from "real life" the past decade of change (what else?) in my quest, have all counseled me separately and lately. Prepare for what is to come. Remember my "warrior" side, shown not in battle (for I who was in the first cohort to sign up for Selective Service, who at 17 wrote to put myself on the record as a C.O. opposed to any state-induced induction, who remains committed to rejecting the order to kill even as I teach those who will never hear of my late-teen choice, my classes of 30-70% veterans, who in turn often must go to the nearby VA, to treat their wounds of body or mind.) but in commitment to justice, to a search for meaning, to a suspicion of cant and an intolerance for imposition of algorithms.

Why I am so comprised, due to nature or nurture, the fates or some genealogical resurgence, I'm stumped by my luck or lack in the DNA lottery. I woke up a few summer months ago with a firm resolve in my mind to pull down the copy of Halldór Laxness' Independent People from my shelf. Maybe as an inbred reaction to counter a hundred-degree heatwave here, but I rapidly decided, after enjoying the first few pages, to halt it to find out more about the Icelandic context. That led me to his biography, and his novel The Atom Station, and then Wayward Heroes, newly translated and reviewed. I like that take-down a lot, of the medieval Christian ethos and of group-think, penned as an adaptation of two sagas during the height of the Cold War, written in the last years of Stalin by a committed Communist who had begun to waver in his own faith substituted for his early Catholic conversion, but who remained, cranky, driven to yearn for rebellion in his fiction, and in his career.

A suitable figure to accompany me, Laxness' other fiction will continue to beckon me. I've also been listening to Saga Thing, a nicely punned podcast devoted to great length of the Icelandic corpus. Think of NPR's "Car Talk" but with discussions of the mechanics of kennings and the breakdowns of order rather than transmissions a thousand-plus years ago, related by skalds of their doughty forebears. I also followed along with Njál and Egil in their titular adventures, getting a sense of the guiding forces propelling their compatriots along. While Jane Smiley's The Greenlanders proved a let-down, at least I finally ended that, as I'd hoped to get insight into the failure of that Norse lot. She also stumbled when updating the Decameron into Ten Days In the Hills, so I guess despite her useful summation of the Middle Ages as great for the creative spark as they combine imagination with rigor, Smiley lacks the knack of vivid depiction of this era. Laxness similarly contended four years against depression in the creation of Wayward Heroes, and its appearance in 1952 was during dark Red hues.

Swinging into the long stretch, I've been musing how Norse ideals and a Northern mythos can or cannot align with a cantankerous mindset of mine unwilling to submit to divine creeds or to entertain the notion of deities revealed to us anymore than they are published by DC Comics or churned out as Marvel blockbusters. My students flock to manga and FPS and cosplay more and more, and I tell them that the gods do live on around us, even as churches dwindle and "nones" increase among them.

My exposure to the North gets me curious. My mother's surname although an Co. Mayo-originating clan--able if in legend to track itself back to not only the brother of Niall of the Nine Hostages but the root of their allies as the Northern Uí Neill, Conchobor Mac Nessa from the Táin itself-- I learned a few days ago may betray a Scandinavian tinge, confusingly. For "fionn" connotes a fair or bright one, conjectured by one antiquarian to derive from the lighter appearance of the "Viking" blow-ins. Not sure how this aligns with the definitely indigenous strain that's 93% of my DNA test, but that 6% Central Asian tinge lingers with a distant confirmation of the shamans and the steppes before the Ice Age receded and Doggerland became drained enough to separate the isles from the Continent. And that 1% East Asian may playfully explain my scholarly and personal curiosity about Buddhism, too.

All this circles round to the past few weeks. I'd naturally gravitated in my reading to see, before this surname find, if the revival of Ásatrú I knew of from Michael Strimska's chapter in Modern Paganism (where Jenny B has her valuable observer-participant account of Irish neo-paganism) might be worth a revisit. I reviewed the book a few years ago, and it struck me that only stregheria, the sorcery line in Italy, had arguably survived the Christian crackdown, despite the earnest claims of many that their so-and-so had sustained the Craft in the so-called Burning Times with the romantic or rhetorical excesses that accompany that epoch in New Age tellings. My medievalist training may mean I'm inoculated against rose-tints. I found Strimska's subsequent disavowal of the American folkish contingents of "the native European spirituality" advocated as Ásatrú instructive. As my next document, Stephen McNallen's eponymous primer and survey, confessed if between the carefully phrased lines, the end of the last century found those seeking this controversial path divided between those encouraging all, the universalists, and those folk restricting entry to those descended from the Germanic, Scandinavian, or a bit strangely to me, the Celtic peoples. As the Celts have never been a "racial" (sic) but a linguistically related congeries, the argument of "bloodline" gives me pause. My review elaborates on this and related issues. McNallen's Ásatru Folk Assembly stands for this stance.

I've been mulling this over, as is common for me, the intellectual and the personal quest entangling. The Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens reminds us of the power of "invisible fictions," the concepts sparking links beyond the forager that make our modern realm possible. His subsequent Homo Deus warns of a post-modernism too eager to make us into immortal gods, a reification of the aura that entices heathens towards a hallowed promotion into a deathless realm. Harari suggests the appeal of polytheism for the ancients lay in its corporate loyalties and branding opportunities for the Assyrians, say, or Egyptians, a clever concept. I suppose pantheism, for their own ancestors, felt too diffuse, too localized. The imperial implications of the warrior cult, the Indo-European migrations, appear to complicate the ur-path of the pagans. An anarcho-primitivist critique ends with a boost for the animists. The short-lived Circle Ansuz attempted to take down McNallen from an Antifa angle.

Where I stand on this is under construction, as the sign says. I oppose open borders and approve population reduction for ecological and moral reasons. This puts me at odds with the left. I recognize multicultural realities and encourage exploration of knowledge by whomever wishes to learn. This may distinguish me from the right. But as Harari gently admits, the discredited "evolutionary humanism" of the past century, no less than the "socialist" version attacked, merits consideration, alongside the dominant paradigm of the Whole Foods crowd, liberal humanism. While I took a quiz to find I'm "93%" humanist, as my friend, a fervent atheist if of the Irish Catholic strain also got the same score. So even he mused what might lurk within him, as with me, to tug me towards the mystic.

I understand the consequences of assimilation into our current tossed salad (and this non-meat eater hates lettuce), where even if a European flavor's evident, it's swallowed up in spice and rice, so to say! Monocultures loom, as we're schooled to embrace the Other and we're getting used to portrayals of blends of families and couples never seen aired a few years ago. My students and my neighbors reflect this process. If I teach a story by Joyce or the myth of Plato's Cave, I'm not expecting those only who share my genome or continental origins to be enlightened by their revelations. In fact, I'm increasingly the only one "not of color" in my working environment. Still, I feel the legacy weaken.

That is, for whomever wants to find it, I sense an abandonment of this storehouse of folly and wisdom. Listening to David Hyde Pierce's masterful reading of Gulliver's Travels, the raw disgust and sly satire cutting back any pastel tints of its "children's book" set-up, I reflected I'd read it in high school. I couldn't imagine my current college crowd handling this, even with generous footnotes.

The capacity for comprehension of this, of Huck Finn, of 1984, of Mary Wollstonecraft and Zora Neale Hurston for that matter, seemed distant. If I was teaching where my sons earned their degrees, it'd be different, but even there, reading dwindles. The haunting scene of Marcel Theroux's Far North comes to mind. The heroine, representing the last of our progeny in this era, begins to forget the few constellations she can dimly discern. Civilization collapsed, she faces her fate in the ignorant dark.

So, who gets first dibs on admission to the word-hoard, the barrow-treasure, the sea-chest? For my choice, anyone who wants it, for we all pay homage to that enrichment. So, is that any different for following a way attributed, or more realistically to me, reconstructed from the shattered remnants of what's known to "our extended kin," as a welcome companion--on the bus ride through Irish traces evident still in Montana, to my inbred surprise and inner spark--phrased our common vision-quest?

As a long-suffering adult learner of Irish, one who tries from a great distance to recover my own meaning in part from my island's lore, I recognize the isolation of the seeker. Nobody around me shares my longing, nor communes with my invocations. A few out there advise and commiserate, mostly from the homeland, and two of them have in fact emigrated there from here, for that decision.

My family around me's from another upbringing, and one I accept and value as do my wife and sons. But mine's a different variegation. Its tendrils wind around me alone. I've been called silly for my search, as if for some 'red-haired colleen,' and chided for my inattention to my Los Angeles reality. But I'd never have been here if not born here. As dodgy "metagenetics" as McNallen phrases it, if in fealty more to Jung than science, does resonate despite reason. That Montana encounter endures as what the Swiss magus might label a "meaningful coincidence," of what calls within the lost soul beneath the pessimistic, analytical, and scrutinizing mind. Within, I also shelter an "anima," after all.

My internal jury's out debating this. (I can hear the strident tones of the likely ruler of a nation I increasingly feel disenchanted from, coming down from the t.v. above me. The promise of a midnight rally with Lady Gaga emanates. After sixteen months, there's eight years to go. Twitter tweets and fat-shaming, blaming and railing, comedy appearances and SNL gigs constitute what Lincoln and Douglas debated in their high-falutin' tones, albeit schooled in the classics.) I sit here and type away, in thought. I also recognize the othala, the inheritance rune I've seen in net searches popping up for a reconstituted clan, the "vikelt." While my post-Catholic affinities cause me not to adapt its Scandinavian design as a cross-flag, I recognize the green-and-gold colors that remind me of a land only once-removed from me. It's a construct I've not been able to trace, but it signals some echoes.

John Moriarty, whose voluminous and verbose texts ranged across the stories of cultures all over the world, nevertheless attempted in his Ireland in his last years to establish 'a Christian monastic hedge school' in his native Kerry. I imagine given his formidable eclectic mysticism it'd have defied that classification. His final attempt at convincing his countrymen and women, Invoking Ireland, sought to recover that fragile, thin voice as one like mystic him must have heard, not only at Samhain. My one generation is all that's here and the rest, for hundreds of such spans, rested and roamed in other lands and over another island, even before maybe it was an island. Drawn backwards to that dreamtime, one the scholar turned gardener Moriarty penetrated diligently if densely, I think of what's deemed The Hidden Lives of Trees and I imagine them as "fossils of time" even if a sensible FB pal sneers at my Robert Graves-like position. When lemon orchards fell in my childhood landscape, and tract homes and a freeway replaced where I'd played, I felt a loss as if a parent died. That gap in my youth may gash me in dreams tonight. Overcoming divisions of geography, class, and "race," do I gravitate back for grounding in the nature-nourished? What can an egg-head like me recover there?

As the definition demonstrates above, that Othala rune carries in it both affirmations and inversions. Germanic peoples know the cost of the latter towards the twisting of concepts for evil. Our ancestors likely labored as thralls, or slaves, some sent from Ireland to Iceland. Kings and heroes fill the chronicles, but as Laxness characterizes, stupidity and superstition accompanied voyages and accumulated plunder snatched from the suffering, our probable true bloodline, those defiant against power and then made, as the Odin Brotherhood purportedly commemorates, a persecuted and murdered line of "pagans" refusing the crozier's domination or the crown's domain. This may be a clever conceit for those too elevated to open Dan Brown (myself included).  Given how I resent order not chosen: can one be happy in a pre-modern regimen one undertakes to carry on? Can I--who reckon deities as emanations of our common yearnings, and our inbred projections for making sense out of the confusing, the depressing, and the perplexing-- find fulfillment in alliance with kinfolk?

Last night, before beginning my return, this time on audio, to a attenuated and sinister evocation of secret societies in David Mitchell's ambitious tale The Bone Clocks (I anticipate from the start it'll improve in the hearing as I found the reading of it engaging but enervating), I listened to Méti investigator Mark Wolf's interview about his 2013 follow-up to Mark Mirabello (see above link) on the Brotherhood. It rambled, but Wolf's acknowledgement of the blank pages opened for an adept in heathen paths as opposed to the monotheistic "rule book" conjured a useful metaphor. Increasingly, as with left-libertarian or Buddhist, anarchist or conventional ideologies, I seek the dim light between their cracks, the marginalia, the empty spaces. That may hearken a more solitary quest for me ahead.

Tell Me Why

I took one of "those" FB quizzes recently to confirm what I already have been called. It tallied me up as a skeptic. I wonder if this is inbred? I seem from an early age to be full of questions, not settling for the usual platitudes or casual responses. I want to dig deeper, but I question more even then. A favorite children's book. ca. the late '60s? Tell Me Why.

One of those wonderful productions in the Golden Books series (I think but I may be wrong), it listed hundreds of answers to such questions as "why is the sky blue?" Refracted crystals in the air, I dimly recall. I was reminded of this when today I came across a FB meme citing Epictetus: don't explain a philosophy, rather embody it. I have always been curious and eager to learn more, and except for math and jazz, I reckon I've looked up arcana on just about everything. While my interests shift, it's all striated. Like the Grand Canyon, you can see layers of what compels me to stay up late on this blog. The past few years may show chess, Buddhism, the Irish language, anarchism, or The Who.


It all sinks in. I make connections across limits. Richard Papen's professor of Greek, Julian Morrow, in Donna Tartt's The Secret History contrasts, unfavorably, the linear precision of ancient inquiry with the modern mind, which skips about among associations and whimsies. I embody the latter, but with enough of a dose of the former to keep me somewhat on track, despite what editors and friends may say. I suppose I tread not deeply but widely. I explained the other day to my class Isaiah Berlin's metaphor of the fox and the hedgehog. Despite my homebody stubbornness, I know which I am.

 Milton Glaser, the graphic artist, confided the advice not to hold on to beliefs too tightly, and I find this sensible. Not to be beholden as a slave to any one theory, but to learn from them all, as my philosophy professor wisely counselled me the day I graduated--when he found I'd go on to grad school. Perhaps that is why I never made it to the pinnacle of some of my classmates, but at least I have the chance to keep searching on my own for meaning, rather than be credentialed as a pundit or exponent of one school of thought or one period, one author or one school, in my journey in ideas.

Unshackling the liberal arts

Chelsea Manning urges: "Read everything. Absorb everything that is out there and act as your own filter. Hunt down your own answers to questions. This is the only advice that is actually worth anything. If you don't read these things yourself, then you can't say that you truly understand what humanity has done, and where we are going. We can't spend our lives getting spoon-fed all of our information every day and then expect to understand our world. Only then will you understand that people are still hurting and dying in the world around us." In this Paper interview, I suspect his fervent embrace of transhuman cyber-utopia, urged on by "Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst; design duo Metahaven, aka Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk; and Web-activist Jacob Appelbaum." As the introduction explains: "Together, they weigh the strictures and possibilities not just of government, but of technology, culture and gender." No surprise, given Manning's transition from Bradley. I am not as confident as these enthusiasts that more tech equals more following one's bliss. Manning and confreres eagerly anticipate that tech will unshackle us all. Like her, I've seen a lot.

When I started teaching "Technology, Culture, and Society" to my students, all tech and business majors, in 1997, we used a textbook. Microsoft had barely moved from 3.1 to Windows 97, long since a relic. I relied on written notes, an overhead after I typed them, a whiteboard to highlight them, and my own exams to test my students' comprehension. We chose, locally, our text. Later, as colleagues joined me to teach this course, I lobbied successfully for an option for each of us to use our own current events materials and historical documents, to keep ever-changing content relevant.

Those teaching this course thrived. My colleagues enjoyed tailoring materials to their own expertise and the interests of their students. As tech changed and events flowed, so the curriculum for this course changed. Each term, I'd revise my readings into a packet, and tinkering with syllabi was a joy. 

As with Manning, I resist being spoon-fed.. Like processed food, some packaged contents seem appealing, but repeated reliance on lesson plans weakens the recipient and infantilizes the dispenser. I relished, when I chose to teach college and so to earn my Ph.D. first, a career that rewarded liberty.

About a decade ago, that freedom ended. A top-down administration took over. Our campus lost any autonomy. We were told all campuses had to use the same books, follow the same lectures, and conduct the same exams. That way, somehow it was reasoned, students could move between campuses, and then the emerging online mode, seamlessly. Also, we were all monitored as in turn we monitored our students, via a proprietary course platform. Designed by a major academic publisher, it guaranteed we selected its titles first, and those we liked more, even if we could not choose them anymore, were abandoned. Faculty had little input; we were told if we wanted to have a say, we ourselves should design the courses. But what worked for me onsite, a term now that along with landline entered the language to differentiate old from new "modalities" of communication and data transfer, did not work even for my colleague teaching the same course. I valued most our autonomy.

A year ago, we hosted a Career Day for students. I attended and took the same quiz as they did. After narrowing down the options from dozens I found the one that matched me best as #1: autonomy.  As the outlier at an institution where everyone teaches and majors in fields not liberal arts, I may have self-selected myself out of the herd. Apparently, engineers, accountants, and managers follow orders.

I now try to adjust to the new system. Systems are in place that track all of us, when and where we log in and out. A Panopticon. Still, I alternate my own materials, showing videos and generating discussion in-class that then follows through to that mandated online. This is a "capstone" course building on past humanities and social science courses, but these dwindle. "My" literature course, the only one left after the film and science fiction electives were oddly cut--given what I have found the natural interests of visual learners and techies--keeps getting cancelled for lack of interest, tellingly.

The technology text may enchant some, but I generate lessons out of venerable vignettes or late-breaking news. I share them and I elicit them. Gradually, some try to speak up for themselves. Students start to learn from each other, rather than only my lectures. I teach fewer hours in front of a class but many more online. I divide my time between two sites now, and also I must teach online. Those courses enroll double or triple my onsite ones, and the workload is exponentially far higher. I lack the limited modification permitted me onsite, and the syllabi and rapid online pace are daunting.

I reflect on this as again I prepare to teach, the most taught of all my courses, once again. I estimate thousands by now perhaps went through it, and after nearly twenty years surely as many students have taken this than even my composition courses? I used to teach it every session, and sometimes twice. Schedules enabling online enrollment decrease its frequency, but I do like hunting for new videos and I often glean from Facebook and the L.A. and N.Y. Times tech articles and lively links.

One of the supervisors from the top visited us recently. I told her of my experiences after a decade of imposed standardization. I concluded by urging that she and her cohort "trust us enough to teach."

How my plea was received I am unsure. I used to hear from my directors that "they would keep such-and-such in mind" before getting back to me. When they rarely did, I wondered how they forgot. Now into my third decade of college teaching, I come to understand what has been left unsaid.

It can be a grind teaching the same courses over and over, now in only eight weeks, sometimes with no pause between terms. My estimation of self-motivated and grassroots design become all the more embedded as I age, and as I keep at it. In every creative way I can, I long to make my courses personal, and designed not to trap students or myself in a mold, but to liberate us for the humanities.
(Photo credit: search for "autonomy" found this ironic image and slogan c/o HP's latest acquisition.)
(P.S. Thanks to Anthony McIntyre at The Pensive Quill for sharing this on his fine site, 9-14-15.)

Surplus Labor + me

Judy Cox, explaining Marx's theory in International Socialism (Summer 1998), a SWP magazine, concludes "As alienation is rooted in capitalist society, only the collective struggle against that society carries the potential to eradicate alienation, to bring our vast, developing powers under our conscious control and reinstitute work as the central aspect of life." I write this on Labor Day.

I don't want waged work to be my life's core. Anarchists encourage us to rethink this learned dependence. Mutual aid, voluntary organization, no demands to serve supervisors for corporate gain certainly appeal to my instinct. I want to produce creative work that I could exchange for others' goods and services, rather than a capitalist regime. But few of us "mature" folks have the stomach for dumpster diving or the gumption for petty theft. As I spend so much time and effort at my monitored posts, online and onsite, I reflect on how my occupation incorporates surveillance and management techniques that, in Marx's era, were the domain of the factory (or the prison as Foucault reminded us) rather than higher education. I am not idealizing the dispiriting system that started with Gradgrind, the dissertation and the professoriate. Still, earlier decades last century afforded some space for liberal arts, not all STEM. With digital data, a lurch has accelerated since Cox wrote this. The union where I work was "made redundant" before I was hired. This was a topic nobody confided in to me; I sensed, sub rosa, PTSD.

Lukacs proved as prescient about this loss of limited liberty as higher levels of the workplace became more standardized. In History and Class Consciousness, he pinned down the metamorphosis: "In consequence of the rationalisation of the work-process the human qualities and idiosyncrasies of the worker appear increasingly as mere sources of error when contrasted with these abstract special laws functioning according to rational predictions. Neither objectively nor in his relation to his work does man appear as the authentic master of this process; on the contrary, he is a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system. He finds it already pre-existing and self-sufficient, it functions independently of him and he has to conform to its laws whether he likes it or not.^34"

Cox cites Harry Braverman's 1974 Labor and Monopoly Capital to document this deskilling of white collar jobs and to a situation where managers have a monopoly of control over the production process: 'The unity of thought and action, conception and execution, hand and mind, which capitalism threatened from it beginnings, is now attacked by a systematic dissolution employing all the resources of science and the various engineering disciplines based upon it'.³² Conditions of work, from the length of the working day to the space we occupy, are predetermined: 'The entire work operation, down to its smallest motion, is conceptualised by the management and engineering staff, laid out, measured, fitted with training and performance standards - all entirely in advance'.^33"

This control increases, as Edward Snowden warns. “I don’t want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded.” — “Edward Snowden: ‘The US government will say I aided our enemies,’” July 8, 2013

“A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought. And that’s a problem because privacy matters; privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.” “Snowden Sends Christmas Message To USA,” Dec. 25, 2013. (More quotes here.)

Certainly this (de-)evolution has long been charted. Reading Marxist analyses of how my workplace has altered over the past generation, their reports dovetail with Peter Fleming's 2015 study. This London-based professor of business and society plots in The Mythology of Work, in his apt subtitle, "How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself." But where Fleming seems to depart from the Marxian critique may be in his updated critique of neo-liberal economics and management. Diverging from such as Cox who wishes to restore work as the ground for our purpose, only under our control, Fleming cautions us against embracing those who make work's "impudent needlessness" rather our "basilar necessity" out of "moral rectitude." (22) He also reminds us that "anti-work" arguments based on how the work day is stretched out to eight hours when we can do our task, earn enough for our needs, and go home in a fraction of that day will not satisfy today's capitalists. They don't present us with "finite tasks" to be checked off at our own pace. They offer jobs with "forever multiplying demands." (8) Not for only productivity and profit but one's "display" of "protracted submission" to work's ritual results. Surplus toil increases when the phone and P.C. may call us in at any moment. We are human capital, so managerial emphasis weighs accordingly on not the adjective but the noun. Fleming accounts for why meetings proliferate and bosses summon us to be seen, power plus profit.

Unfortunately, as my review elaborates, Fleming offers solutions as distant as those of some in my current reading of left-libertarians. That is, I agree with and I aspire to many of them, but as my duty is to pay bills, to keep my family fed, sheltered, and schooled, escaping tonight to fulfill my bliss is not an exit option. I also agree, that we start towards our dreams by re-constructing daily reality.

Bryce Colvert writes in The Nation, after revelations of the driven culture of Amazon staff, how we are trapped in this rapid pace of production. "It speaks to an inability to say no. And in the face of that disempowerment, we may be telling ourselves extreme demands are in fact voluntary choices. After all, it feels better to think of time spent in front of a computer well into the night as something done in the service of passion than in the service of someone else’s bottom line." More stress, longer hours, no increase in pay, stagnant wages for decades, work-life broken boundaries: we are the 99%.

Passing Craze

As many cheer on Caitlyn Jenner's transition and welcome any "coming out," is the furor over Rachel Dolezal's allegiance as a black woman justified? According to a statement issued by the organization's head office: "One’s racial identity is not a qualifying criteria or disqualifying standard for NAACP leadership." If we acclaim gender transition and cheer "coming out," why not trans-racial self-identification? After all, the left tells us race is a social construct, created in our clannish minds.

After I wrote that paragraph, I read Frederik de Boer, an academic: "In the end, perhaps Dolezal simply believed the convictions of her academic culture a little too much. After all, we on the left have insisted for years that the various demographic categories we are placed into are merely social constructs, the creation of human assumption and human prejudice. That race is a social construct is a stance that brooks no disagreement in left-wing spaces." Hiring urges that the under-represented gain parity. Those marginalized are urged to gain equality. We institutionalize these incentives; we got her re-invention as a member of "her race".

Marcia Dawkins finds that technology accelerated such re-inventions, same as it does for Jenner. And she thinks the media dismissal of Dolezal as "crazy" blocks us from asking tougher questions. "Why is identity considered an editable 'profile' anyway? Do you have to be a person of color to care and advocate for people of color? Does passing make you a coward, a minstrel or a winner? Are there benefits to being perceived as black? Is anyone’s identity, racial or otherwise, 100 percent authentic 100 percent of the time? And the real doozy: Why do we try to get beyond race by clinging to the idea that race is real?" This contradiction sticks. Ideologues and bureaucrats act as if they are trying to advance people based on their diversity, but this does not dismiss race but affirms it as a label.

Unfortunately since I wrote this original entry, the sinister side of racial identity again surfaces. The deaths in Charleston at a Baptist church recall those of the Civil Rights struggle, which is not a period we have closed our books on after all. Such outbreaks occur more frequently, mass ones every 64 days as opposed to every 200 days a few decades ago. Ironically, blacks and whites are "represented equally" in such attacks. Hatred against the Other, technology enabling murder, increases mayhem.

Nell Irvin Painter adds how an "essential problem here is the inadequacy of white identity. Everyone loves to talk about blackness, a fascinating thing. But bring up whiteness and fewer people want to talk about it. Whiteness is on a toggle switch between 'bland nothingness' and 'racist hatred.'”

Meanwhile, voices of harmony and liberation seek to counter the domination of such pain in the headlines. Some deny race as a social construct but as with our sexual preferences, others stereotype each of us by it. We try to escape categories even as both the left and the right seek to keep us all marked or slotted. I wonder if this unease we face will harden or loosen "racial" categories in the U.S.

Alysson Hobbs notes: "As a historian who has spent the last 12 years studying 'passing,' I am disheartened that there is so little sympathy for Ms. Dolezal or understanding of her life circumstances. The harsh criticism of her sounds frighteningly similar to the way African-Americans were treated when it was discovered that they had passed as white. They were vilified, accused of deception and condemned for trying to gain membership to a group to which they did not and could never belong." I had thought of this immediately when I heard the story emerge, and I like Hobbs wondered why so much vitriol and ridicule was heaped Dolezal's way, mocking her for "blackface."

In the late 70s, the multiracial singer of X-Ray Spex, Poly Styrene, took the mike. She did not look like any other front person, even as a punk icon. One of their best songs has her wailing: "When you look in the mirror/Do you see yourself" and then asks: "When you see yourself/Does it make you scream"? The singer's image, her stage name, her own redefinition came to mind the past two weeks.

Image: Ebony magazine, April 1952. At Polygrafi. "The Delicacy of Racial Appearance."

Follow what leader?

As I've been covering discontents with our current social, political, educational, and economic systems, I range across the spectrum when finding material to comment upon and share here. What I was thinking as I scanned hundreds of entries at LibCom last night for some reading material was how often stolid prose and stodgy statements stood in for entertaining as well as instructive texts. On a forum about recommendations for working-class literature, one comrade's dictum stood out. "the novel is anti-working-class." Perfect. At least I learned about Arundhati Roy's novel, too. Some remembered such gems as James Plunkett's depiction of the great Dublin lockout and strikes, Strumpet City, as well as the usual (not to be diminished by that) Orwellian allegories, Marge Piercy's feminist futures, Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy on Martian terraforming, Jack London (whom at least lefties still read), John Dos Passos, and even the depressing Studs Lonigan. Like JDP and James T. Farrell, Victor Serge was cited (much more) but with a proviso as to the unsanctioned ideological drift (to a right-wing or Jeffersonian populism in the American duo or an insufficiently early denial of Stalinism in the Russian instance. Every committed cadre condemns everyone else as "sheeple."

I wound up only downloading the George Woodcock pamphlet from the depths of WWII, "The Tyranny of the Clock." It is exactly what you'd expect. Like a lot of protest prose, it charts the predicament we are in, challenges the status quo, and then leaves you mulling over... what's next?

So, I opened my FB feed to find the reliable Liam O'Rourke in his Irish Republican Education Forum adding a bit of levity. "The Marxist-Leninist Theory of Humor" is credited to McLaughlin, Tom. "The Marxist-Leninist Theory of Humor," Catalyst, no. 9, 1977, pp. 99-102. I cite two paragraphs to wit:

          Socialist Seriousness.

Under Socialism there will be no classes and consequently no class conflict. Humor will cease to reflect any objective reality and will wither away. Consequently, those who engage in humor after being admonished by Party members will be clearly identifiable as saboteurs. It will be necessary to root out these weeds from the collective farm of Socialism. However, such saboteurs may prove skillful in hiding themselves. It will thus prove necessary for skilled Party members to ferret them out by engaging in humorous dialogue. If, for instance, a suspected saboteur is found to be cognizant of the answers to riddles, or if he replies to the Party member's encouragement by telling jokes, then such a person must be subject to Revolutionary Justice. It is suggested that the death sentence would be appropriate. This should be administered while the criminal is heavily dosed with helium (laughing gas), so that his "laughing death" may prove a suitable object of horror and negative reinforcement to the broad masses of workers and peasants.

Humor will of course continue to be necessary in relations between socialist and imperialist countries as the class struggle continues on the international stage.

This article spoofs the dead hand of Marxian promulgation in similar terms. It made me smile. I presume despite his familiarity with Freirean anti-authoritarian schooling in New Mexico, the director and star of Billy Jack did not write this. I like that he shares the same name, all the same.

So did a post under it directing me to "Flakes Alive!" in The Baffler. DSA member Amber Frost (a name worth a chuckle at least to me) reports on the Left Forum, which evolved from a Socialist Scholars Conference that twice, in the '60s and '80s, flamed up and flared out. Similar combustibility erupted at this NYC gathering. Apparently anyone can pay their fee and get their slot on a panel (and I thought 15-20 minute conference papers were enough). So, 400 events and 1300 speakers result. 

Frost laments the "tankers" (the pro-Man of Steel gang), the truthers (9/11 is apparently a racist hoax against Muslims--whose racial component eludes me, as any reader of Malcolm X's epiphany on his flight to Mecca might agree), and the perpetually aggrieved "marginalistas." She confesses: "there is something truly dispiriting about not being able to distinguish self-identified radicals from the parodies of us imagined by the right wing." Hearing Middlemarch on endless audiobook, I heard the phrase "self-cherishing anxiety"--this sums up the eternal grievances of a conspiratorial mind.

Studying Peter Marshall's massive Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism last year, I was struck by how prescient parts (and not other parts that were pro-feudal and quietist) of the Tao were as to those of us who can't buckle under, and how despite perhaps placid surfaces, betray restlessness at injustice, top-down imposition of inequity, and relentless push for profits, not peace.

There's a lot of reinvention of anti-statist and anti-corporate strategies. But it reminds me of start-ups competing for the venture capitalist's nod in and on Silicon Valley. Lots of young folks burning out while the older, seasoned pros sit back, often tenured and satisfied rather than D.I.Y. and hungry. New generations arrive ready for action, and as cannon fodder for the alliances and collectives, they give freely of their energy until the struggle becomes too much to continue when children arrive and insurance must be paid. This is "impossiblism" as some radicals phrase it: the idea that prefigurative ways of living cannot be sustained now, and the mentality that capitalism forces dissenters to give in.

As I have stated last week, even the Bernie Sanders campaign, I fear, will only deliver a protest vote to Hillary after he has (temporarily and cynically for her) tapped her to lean a bit left of center to swing a few states. Where else will voters for a semi-, if co-opted, democratic socialist turn anyhow? Where can those of us nagging ourselves and you for a more just, equal, society turn, if not to leaders? That is the question and answer of anarchism. In a world where fending for ourselves with reliance on the kindness of supporters rather than strangers wrangles out small niches for survival, this possibility beckons. Weighed down by bills, taxes, responsibilities, how many can embrace it?

Syriza encounters immense difficulties as academics try to run Greece; the Greens regularly march on to little notice at the back of the progressive parade, and the bipartisan fat-cat network bloats and boasts. If Occupy was crushed by Democratic Party indifference, GOP mockery, and the security state collusion which both parties insist upon, what traction does an alternative challenge sustain? Over and over, it's lessons that repeat. Their repetition must speak to our idealism, and our naivete.

"Like a fifteen-year-old who’s recently discovered punk rock, the nouveau “Social Justice Warrior” crowd frequently presumes an undue sense of ownership over incredibly basic, nearly ancient ideas." Frost here may sympathize with me. Many act as if they invented some concept, and like academics or concertgoers at "festival seating" or us on airplanes, they fight over very small expanses of space.

Her whole essay is worth the time. Certainly as my recent train of thought continues, I concur with Terry Eagleton's weariness. In a 2012 interview with the Oxonian Review after Occupy and as Greece revolted against austerity, he noted the advantage of a downturn. "Not deserting politics but trying to add a depth to it, and also, in doing so, breaking with the holy trinity of class, race, and gender. Vital topics though they are, they’ve become such tram-lines on which the cultural left has been moving."

Frost also calls for momentum. She concludes by reminding us, however, that forums may not be it, or more fringe squabbles and academic blather. "It’s quite possible the left is at a pivotal moment in political history: these days, Americans actually like the sound of socialism, and the potential for building a new base is incredibly encouraging. But as much as we should be looking to expand, so, too, must we refine our project. The marginalistas distract, disrupt and deter future comrades. So it’s high time we get a little exclusive: tankies, truthers and tofu may supply a steady stream of battle-tested conference anecdotage, but they’re not going to move us any closer to building a better world."

Emotional rescue

My last post covered a Connecticut high school teacher's forced resignation after a student complaint over an explicit Allen Ginsberg poem chosen by a classmate for in-class discussion. Is the situation any different when college courses come under the same scrutiny? When I raised this on Facebook, some asserted that those in their late teens were in AP English, still under the choices the teacher made for them, and despite the aegis of UConn over that material for credit, they were a captive audience. So, consider Edward Schlosser's cri de coeur after nine years at a "midsized state school."

In Vox, he titles his essay "I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me." (Thanks to an Lisa Flowers for this notice). He starts by noting a shift since 2009. Back then, someone objected to what was perceived as the professor's liberal bias. His supervisor heard him out, and the matter was filed away, and no repercussions reverberated. But now, identity politics reigns. "The student-teacher dynamic has been reenvisioned along a line that's simultaneously consumerist and hyper-protective, giving each and every student the ability to claim Grievous Harm in nearly any circumstance, after any affront, and a teacher's formal ability to respond to these claims is limited at best."

Schlosser tells us that recently, "I have intentionally adjusted my teaching materials as the political winds have shifted. (I also make sure all my remotely offensive or challenging opinions, such as this article, are expressed either anonymously or pseudonymously). Most of my colleagues who still have jobs have done the same. We've seen bad things happen to too many good teachers — adjuncts getting axed because their evaluations dipped below a 3.0, grad students being removed from classes after a single student complaint, and so on." If Edward Said or Mark Twain or Upton Sinclair offend the reader or hearer, they are expunged, lest complaints result in the firing or non-rehiring of what, after all, has grown to 3/4 of American faculty, those lacking protection of or promotion to tenure.

The climate has changed. Racism or ideological factors, rightness and wrongness of ideas in the curricula, dominated earlier complaints. Now, the sensitivity of the student's emotional state matters.

The author locates this transition not so much in the manufactured "outrage" (as I put it) dominating press coverage of incidents as to hyper-sensitive, paranoid students and campus "conduct codes."
He credits the conflation of cultural studies and popular media writers in the media. They desire to "democratize complex fields of study by making them as digestible as a TGIF sitcom." They peddle a facile "adoption of a totalizing, simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice. The simplicity and absolutism of this conception has combined with the precarity of academic jobs to create higher ed's current climate of fear, a heavily policed discourse of semantic sensitivity in which safety and comfort have become the ends and the means of the college experience."

After citing some experts, he notes how exaggerated attention to passing trifles becomes. (Consider how much the purported gender roles of the latest Avengers flick are dissected, or I'd add if he does not, today's breathless headlines of Bruce-to-Caitlyn Jenner's "courage" or a Duggar's disgrace vs., say, the challenges ahead re: global warming given recent, depressing data, or the enduring collusion between bankers and politicians.) "Personal experience and feelings aren't just a salient touchstone of contemporary identity politics; they are the entirety of these politics. In such an environment, it's no wonder that students are so prone to elevate minor slights to protestable offenses." As attacks on philosophy or physics by those claiming concepts invented by tired old men express only Eurocentric shortcomings, we cower.  "All the old, enlightened means of discussion and analysis —from due process to scientific method — are dismissed as being blind to emotional concerns and therefore unfairly skewed toward the interest of straight white males. All that matters is that people are allowed to speak, that their narratives are accepted without question, and that the bad feelings go away."

See the article for evidence of this, albeit via Twitter, that Schlosser shares (or he did until the woman complained of threats--that proof has since been removed, although it helped his thesis). This reductive regression reminds me a bit of Alan Sokol's send-up two decades ago in his po-mo hoax to Social Theory. Schlosser reveals his bonafides: "We can't overcome prejudice by pretending it doesn't exist. Focusing on identity allows us to interrogate the process through which white males have their opinions taken at face value, while women, people of color, and non-normatively gendered people struggle to have their voices heard." Yet he admits, logically, how "we also destroy ourselves when identity becomes our sole focus." Conservative Catholic critic Anthony Esolen agrees when he states that we cannot equate the ethnic or racial makeup of a person with who he or she is, beyond labels.

I doubt if Schlosser and Esolen would find a lot in common, but if Schlosser as he claims does try to balance liberal with conservative voices in his assignments, I'd hope they could find common ground.
"If we are to know that human being, we should not begin with race or class or “gender,” that category invented by social critics who avert their eyes, prim and prying at once, from the frank and plain reality of sex. We certainly cannot end there. If I say, 'Who is John?' you cannot answer me correctly by saying that he is six feet tall, 150 pounds, with Italian and Irish ancestry on his mother’s side and African American and Latino ancestry on his father’s side, with a family income of such and such a year, voting in such a pattern, living on Maple Street and selling insurance. These are all things about John, but they are not John, the man. It does violence to the man to reduce him to such categories. It is an act of contempt for his humanity. It reduces him, not so that we may get to know him, but so that we can manipulate facts about him while not getting to know him at all. It is a study in subhumanity." So Esolen challenges, in his riposte to the race, gender, class theory overtaking all.

Schlosser tacks firmly to the left. But he accepts that attacking the right, or those who have preceded us and who live among us as the establishment, still have their own place at the discussion. Why push them away, to distance them further, in the spurious pursuit of illogical presumption? In conclusion, he admits: "Debate and discussion would ideally temper this identity-based discourse, make it more usable and less scary to outsiders. Teachers and academics are the best candidates to foster this discussion, but most of us are too scared and economically disempowered to say anything." I have written about this issue before and continue to because it weighs more heavily against those of us committed to the liberal arts, those who pass on the humanities in a career-driven, bottom-line world.

We are threatened from above by STEM-propelled reforms that seek often, if unintentionally, to shunt aside the "soft" subjects. We are weakened around us by theory-obsessed pedagogues who replace book-learning and critical thinking from close readings and informed discussions with cant and slant. We are faced by those enrolling with us who often have trouble decrypting the clouded messages of what canonical as well as radical texts and sources convey from thousands of years of human thought. Against this, and growing semi-literacy when it comes to print and visual media, we strive to focus on big questions and tough issues, evading easy solutions or prescribed "PC-correct" content.

"Reading Allen Ginsberg, Talking Civil Rights"

Award-Winning Teacher Fired for Reading an Allen Ginsberg Poem: so writes David Freedlander in the Daily Beast. As I have taught Ginsberg to a diverse cohort  in college and met with varying reactions of disgust, resignation, and acceptance, I wanted to share this article about this memorable lesson. "The poem the student discovered and brought in was 'Please Master,' an extremely graphic account of a homosexual encounter published by Allen Ginsberg in 1968 that begins: 'Please master can I touch your cheek / please master can I kneel at your feet / please master can I loosen your blue pants.'"As Freedlander places this in context of Game of Thrones and Fifty Shades of Grey, he also wonders if part of the crackdown is due to discomfort with the gay message, rather than the act itself.

The district ruled that David Olio, a nineteen-year veteran of the South Windsor CT system, showed “egregiously poor professional judgment,” by reading the poem aloud in the AP English class. Many of the students were 17 and 18 years old, some taking this course in conjunction with UConn for college credit. While this, as friends on FB have countered, does not excuse the fact that students had no choice but to listen to the poem, I wondered if the AP context mattered--I got the reply that it did not, and that this showed unwise judgment on Olio's behalf. What would you have done? Hurriedly suggest another poem might be discussed instead? Asked the class for feedback? Refused to talk about it? Those reactions in turn, given our tremulous times, ironically might have singled out Olio as intolerant. Well, one student had complained that he or she could not focus on a test in a another class the day after this poem had been discussed in the AP course. Three weeks later, Olio had to resign.

Freedlander avers: "to call Olio’s reading of the poem a mistake—a poem a student brought to class and asked to be read—is to say the reading of a work by one of the towering figures of 20th-century American poetry is out of bounds. 'Please Master' was written in 1968, just before the Democratic convention in Chicago would erupt in riots. Ginsberg had already been put on trial for obscenity in 1957 for his poem 'Howl,' which with its casual depiction of gay sex and drug use, and lines like 'The asshole is holy,' was considered far outside the bounds of what was considered good taste. A judge, however, ruled that the poem had 'redeeming social importance' and was unlikely to 'deprave or corrupt readers by exciting lascivious thoughts or arousing lustful desire.' I doubt, having taught "Howl," having shown the innovative (if widely panned) film adaptation, that Allen seduces anyone--at least on the page. His portrayal by James Franco may, but many of my students cringed.

Helen Vendler, one of the nation's leading poetry critics, wrote on Olio's behalf: “Given what students are already exposed to via TV and film, Ginsberg’s poem, which concerns a well-known form of abjection (whether heterosexual or homosexual) reveals nothing new.” Courtney King, a former student and now a planning commissioner, puts it more bluntly. "I mean, if there are parents in town who think their teenagers don’t know what a blow job is, they are sorely mistaken.” She sums it up: “In defense of this whole imbroglio, at least it got people in this town reading Ginsberg.”

My blog title comes from a lyrical fragment I heard back in high school. It was sung by a musician who had an early song banned by the BBC in the late 60's for the f-verb. Al Stewart's "Post WWII Blues" in appropriately Dylanesque homage, from his 1974 song-cycle Past, Present and Future, first exposed me to Christine Keeler, Nostradamus, Lord Grey's phrase about the lights going out in Europe as WWI rose, Warren Harding's middle name, and the Soviet tank battles on the steppes. It's much better than his hits that dominated easy-listening AOR in that decade, be assured. The image caption, expanded, cites Ginsberg: "To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province, your own consciousness." But not too provincial, Connecticut.

Hades and Proserpina

Six weeks ago, I commented in "Free Speech Can Be Scary" about "safe spaces" and the growing inability of certain college students to handle challenges to their worldview, identity, and psyche. Today, I found in my FB feed from an Irish colleague this. She shares my caution that particular elements may well set off sensitive responses, but that education for adults demands they take risks. Apparently, some at Columbia fear, again, the invasion of a student's mindset, based on tolerance and sensitivity.

An op-ed in the student paper summed up a young woman's reaction to scenes of rape in her assigned reading. These upset her, as "a survivor of sexual assault." The article explained how "Ovid’s 'Metamorphoses' is a fixture of Lit Hum, but like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom. These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background." Hades' rape of Proserpina, like many episodes in Ovid, is violent, but surely, many passages of beauty also linger.

I share the image of Bernini. If the mythological context is known by the viewer, violence may arise. If not, this might be taken as erotic bliss, foreplay and seduction captured in unforgettable marble. This tension, for me, might better enliven and enrich a classroom discussion or writing prompt, than a fearful rush to eliminate any depiction of nudity or sexuality from my syllabus or a student's view. As Scott Timberg sums this up in Salon: "Why start protecting students from Ovid in a TMZ world?"

To me, "like so many texts in the Western canon" is its own touchy trigger. How much of the humanities and social sciences can be taught and examined if we fear the content? Do we bowdlerize the readings, so as to censor offending passages? Twice when I showed one of many, I recall, "R-rated" features in my Literature and Film course, some Christian students asked to be excused. I was told by my supervisors that I had to grant them this, and I had to come up with an alternate assignment to meet their needs. Further, as another professor I knew had to do, disruptive content itself might be removed, unless the material had no substitute, or there was a way the course guidelines could be met without the specific example. Say, Huck Finn was assigned, but one might, say, replace it with a slave narrative, or an historical account that lacked the n-word trigger event.

Once I taught that novel to a predominantly black enrollment, at another college. As the Net was barely up, and as shortcuts were lacking for hard work, to their credit, they read it but lacked much enthusiasm. One woman loved the Grangerford episode, but for the sappy eulogies that Twain parodied. My gentle efforts to convince her that these were satire failed utterly. I am not sure if it was me, the content in American Literature (which I made very multicultural while also integrating the canon), or the fact they attended one course after another in a group, after work at Bell. Maybe they were tired of each other after so long. Perhaps I seemed elitist, even if I'm from a low-enough "income background" to have received Pell Grants. Among those "of color" of any tinge, the humanities, whittled from a Norton Anthology, must daunt many business and management majors.

That connects with my other posts about a decline of liberal arts. In a Twitter age, we lack attention for stamina. I was told by a dean that the average attention span of a student is 7 minutes, and that at least every 15-20 minutes, we need in the classroom to shuffle it and them about. Like kindergarten?
(Image: Hades and Proserpina, Bernini.)