Long Pauses

Category: Debris

  • If You Build It

    The Metro Pulse features a short article this week about the need for a new and much larger library in downtown Knoxville. The unfolding of this project should prove interesting, as it will essentially ask city and county taxpayers how much they “value” the library. The elected decision-makers are already eyeing the $60 million facility recently completed in Nashville, which is a good thing, as far as I’m concerned.

  • Liberalism and Literature

    A comment left here on Wednesday by Daniel Green led me to his blog, which in turn led me to his wonderful article, “Liberalism and Literature.” A critique of the “academic left” and of ideological criticism, in general, Green’s piece is refreshingly articulate, well-informed, and even-handed. It echoes what I see as a growing dissatisfaction with contemporary, theory-centric literary studies — both within academia and outside of it — a dissatisfaction (political, professional, and aesthetic) that I hope to address in my dissertation (assuming, of course, that I ever get around to finishing the damn thing).

    I’m most sympathetic to Green’s argument when he points to the vast divide that separates traditional liberal ideals and the messy details of practical politics from the radical and Utopian ideologies that dominate certain sectors of literary criticism.

    This reductive approach, whereby all subjects are political, either inherently so or made to be so, is detrimental to real politics, which can be safely disregarded in favor of the more tidy rhetorical kind.

    Green supports his case with a spot-on analysis of America’s current political condition, which, as he points out, is itself a chorus of competing fictions. The “radical worldview” he likens to escapist genre fiction:

    an opportunity to leave behind the muddle of ordinary life in exchange for the narrative clarity and enhanced drama stories make available.

    Modern conservatism — steeped in its legends of “gun-toting colonials,” “bread-earning” husbands, and “a group of white founding fathers whose supreme wisdom literally cannot be challenged” — is founded, first and foremost, Green argues convincingly, on a belief in free market capitalism, itself a dominant force of liberal progress.

    It is impossible any longer to think of the “conservative” — at least in the United States — as one who simply resists impulsive change; instead, the postwar American conservative comes fully possessed of a complete collection of well-made fictions, chief among them the unequivocal faith in the “free market” (taken over, to be sure, from 19th century liberals), a fiction so powerful in its influence that conservatives have almost managed to conflate it with democracy itself.

    So what does any of this have to do with “Liberalism and Literature”? Green’s immediate concern here is reminding us that great literature — with its delight in ambiguity, the “universal uncertainty of human life and the agelessly unresolved conflicts stirred up by human aspirations” — is itself a primer for liberal ideals, including, in Tony Kushner’s words, the inevitability of “painful progress.” “I would again maintain,” Green writes:

    that my primary interest in literature — my belief in its capacity to sharpen the mind’s apprehension of the shaping patterns at work both in the imaginative creations of poets and novelists and in the imaginary creations many of us attempt to make of the social, political, and cultural arrangements we must unfortunately settle for in lieu of the more vivid if less tangible worlds evoked by the poets — has made me more alert to the many different forms the aestheticizing of mundane reality can take.

    That’s a tricky leap he has made there, but one with which I am growing increasingly sympathetic. His critics on the left would likely denounce Green’s argument as fundamentally conservative, claiming that by reducing the value of Art to its “universal” nature, he is ignoring the particular economic and “real” political forces that have shaped the making of the Art and our reception of it, and that he is therefore, by default, supporting those very forces. (I’ve made the same claim against Philip Roth’s recent fiction, actually.) But that critique is too easy, and, as a personal aside, it contradicts my own experience of literature. The years I’ve spent studying literature and film have had one great effect on me: They turned what was once a black and white world into a vast mosaic. And that process does, in fact, make a tremendous impact on “real” politics.

    One more note on this article:

    Much has been made — especially in recent years and in conservative regions like the American South — of the dominance of leftist or liberal thought in academia. Green offers, I think, the most obvious explanation for that dominance. I’ve thought the same thing for years, but never took the time to write it down:

    Considering a whole constellation of facts about contemporary America — among them its now unchallenged position as supreme economic, cultural, and military power, its exaltation of business and commerce as indicators of status and accomplishment, its thoroughgoing utilitarian approach to education and manifest impatience with the cultivation of intellect and sensibility for their own sakes — it is not at all surprising that those who choose what was once called the “life of the mind” at its universities would feel estranged from the official values that seem to animate the political and commercial life of American society. Whether such people would identify themselves as “liberals,” “radicals,” “progressives,” or just as independent thinkers, surely it is at the least unlikely that as a whole they would incline much toward the established conservative view of the way things ought to be.

    Good stuff.

  • City Planning

    I’m desperate for distractions right about now. (Note: writing a dissertation on Cold War literature does not qualify as an emotionally productive distraction from grief.) And I think I’ve found a good one. After reading this profile of Iris Miller in the Chronicle, I walked over to the library and checked out the following:

    Two asides: First, I hope I never have to work in an office that is more than a ten-minute walk from a good research library; Second, if you want to read the piece in the Chronicle but don’t have a password, send me an email and I might be able to help you out.

    If there were but world enough and time, if things like jobs and money and familial obligations were of no concern, I’m pretty sure I would live in Washington, D.C. Probably somewhere between Cleveland Park and the National Zoo. As close as possible to the Uptown Theater. The Uptown, which hosted the world premiere of 2001 in 1968, is also where I finally got to see Kubrick’s masterpiece in 70mm for the first time. Amazing.

    Miller’s book is apparently a cultural history of D.C. told through its maps. The other two books should supplement it well.

  • Shit Happens

    Yesterday at 4:06 pm, I pulled onto the campus of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC — the end of my four hour, 265 mile drive. I know it was 4:06 because that was also the moment that the local NPR station announced that, because of weather-related travel difficulties, Tony Kushner had been forced to cancel his scheduled speech and book-signing. I did the only thing I could do. I drove over to my motel and cancelled my reservation, called my wife to tell her the news, then headed west on I-40. 265 miles later I was back home.

    I don’t get upset about things over which I have no control. I just don’t. It’s not in me. I am deeply disappointed, though — and for several reasons that I won’t go into here. The good news is that, during my nine hours in the car, I was able to listen to several evangelical preachers, evangelical money managers, and evangelical counselors on the radio. Things I learned:

    • Meditating on God’s splendor will sustain me in the hard times. Also, meditating on God’s splendor will sustain me in the trying times and in the darkest times. (It was a 3-point sermon.)
    • Once I have saved three months’ living expenses, I should glorfiy God by putting 10% of my monthly income into IRAs and high-yield bonds.
    • Even if it’s painful and boring, I should listen to my wife talk for 10 minutes every night. (Don’t worry, guys, once she realizes that it’s ten minutes every night, your wife won’t need to talk your ear off all in one excruciating sitting.)

  • By the Numbers

    Some interesting facts and figures from The Independent [via a Gauche], including:

    $127 billion: Amount of US budget surplus in the year that Bush became President in 2001

    $374 billion: Amount of US budget deficit in the fiscal year for 2003

    $23,920: Amount of each US citizen’s share of the national debt as of 19 January 2004

    $10.9 million: Average wealth of the members of Bush’s original 16-person cabinet

    88%: Percentage of American citizens who will save less than $100 on their 2006 federal taxes as a result of 2003 cut in capital gains and dividends taxes

    $42,000: Average savings members of Bush’s cabinet are expected to enjoy this year as a result in the cuts in capital gains and dividends taxes

    $42,228: Median household income in the US in 2001

    $116,000: Amount Vice-President Cheney is expected to save each year in taxes

    44%: Percentage of Americans who believe the President’s economic growth plan will mostly benefit the wealthy

    I’ve been daydreaming lately about the upcoming Presidential debates, wondering if the eventual Democratic nominee will find the courage to really take Bush to task. When I daydream, I imagine the Democratic nominee saying something like this:

    Kerry/Edwards/Dean: “Ladies and gentleman, I’m going to be perfectly frank here. Thanks to President Bush’s cut in capital gains and dividends taxes, I saved an additional $42,200 this year. Let me repeat that: While most of you were cashing your $100 refunds, I saved $42,200! I won’t embarrass President Bush or Vice-President Cheney by telling you how much each of them saved (although it’s in the public record).

    “And you know what? I don’t need it. Which is why I donated that $42,200 to my favorite charities.

    “If you believe President Bush when he says that his tax cut doesn’t benefit folks like himself and folks like me, well let me tell you something: you’re wrong. His tax cuts are wrong. And, contrary to what Vice President Cheney may have learned from President Reagan, deficits do matter!”

    I can’t think of a better way to spotlight the real effects of Bush’s tax cuts. Of course, depending on how the pundits respond, this tact might blow up in the nominee’s face. But, man, I would love to see Bush’s reaction.

  • A New Read

    It is time to state clearly what many Christians sense intuitively, and what a few are saying: the Western church is in a historical period of dissolution; and Enlightenment Liberalism is both the engine of our dissolution and its logical end. Liberalism, not Christianity, is the dominant force of Western Modernity. Liberalism is the ideology that enshrines the Enlightenment ideals of a rational and egalitarian society; it seeks maximum individual freedom in politics and markets. As a system of government (democracy) and of material exchange (capitalism), it is the only legitimate ordering system left standing at the “end of history.” It prizes above all else the liberty of an individual to define himself in a fluid environment, unimpeded by any outside constraint save perhaps the reciprocal consent of his fellow citizens—a consent which, by the perverse logic of Liberalism, can almost never be withheld. This freedom, left unchecked, has become endemically exploitative in both the political right and left today, though for a time the areas of exploitation have remained distinct. And it is manifested in a dehumanizing materialism which, in essence, denies the human soul.

    Thus announces Caleb Stegall in his Introduction to The New Pantagruel, a just-launched Web journal “run by a cadre of intemperate but friendly Catholics and Protestants.” If Stegall and his compatriots manage to achieve even half of the promise on display in his introductory comments, then I will be reading each quarter with great anticipation. The journal’s title was inspired by the 16th Century French Christian Humanist François Rabelais. Stegall writes:

    Pantagruelism is, according to Rabelais, “a certain jollity of mind pickled in the scorn of fortune.” It is that odd cast of mind which allows one to see the corruption everywhere, including in oneself, while still loving the world. . . . The Pantagruelist is able to joyfully engage in earthly reality, insisting on seeing both the divine reflection and the demonic shadow. Drawing from Augustine’s view of this age as a saeculum senescens (an age that will pass away), the Pantagruelist is content with the uncertainties of faith for knowledge of the Beyond. This, in turn, frees him to love the people and places he finds himself surrounded by; to see things for what they are: a suggested yet missed perfection.

    Beautiful.

  • Democracy in America

    I see an innumerable multitude of men, alike and equal, constantly circling around in pursuit of the petty and banal pleasures with which they glut their souls. Each one of them, withdrawn into himself, is almost unaware of the fate of the rest. Mankind, for him, consists in his children and his personal friends. . . . He exists in and for himself. . . .

    Over this kind of men stands an immense, protective power which is alone responsible for securing their enjoyment and watching over their fate. That power is absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provident, and gentle. . . . It gladly works for their happiness but wants to be sole agent and judge of it. . . . It covers the whole of social life with a network of petty, complicated rules that are both minute and uniform, through which even men of the greatest originality and the most vigorous temperament cannot force their heads above the crowd. It does not break men’s will, but softens, bends, and guides it; it seldom enjoins, but often inhibits, action; it does not destroy anything, but prevents much being born; it is not all tyrannical, but it hinders, restrains, enervates, stifles, and stultifies so much that in the end each nation is no more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as its shepherd.

    — Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1840

    And nearly a century before television, no less. De Tocqueville is near the top of my “Darren, seriously, isn’t it about time that you read this?” list. I stumbled upon this passage while reading Wendy Brown’s Politics Out of History, a provocative defense of critical theory as a potentially invigorating voice in the discourse of liberal democracy. In the best chapters, she turns for guidance to Nietzsche and Foucault, who could, at best, be described as problematic political figures (what with Nietzsche’s hatred of egalitarianism and all). I plan to finish Brown’s book tonight and post a reading diary entry tomorrow.

    I’m just stunned, though, by de Tocqueville’s prescient description of contemporary America. A few days ago, I walked a hundred or so yards down the street to deliver a piece of mail that had been accidentally put in my box. My neighbor, who I’ve never met, looked at me closely through her window before opening the door an inch or two, deeply suspicious — this in a neighborhood that hasn’t experienced even a bout of vandalism in the six years I’ve lived there. When I run at night, I see the glow of my neighbors’ televisions emanating from behind their closed blinds. And then when I finish my run, I go home, close the blinds, and turn on my television. How sad.

  • Feelin’ Crispy

    I’m sympathizing right now with Clancy, who, a year-and-a-half into her doctoral work, asks, “Is this what burnout feels like? I have so much to do and no desire to engage any of it.” Another friend, a graduate student in psychology and counseling, wrote to tell me that four of the five students who entered her program married have since gotten divorced (which couldn’t bode well for their future as counselors, I would think). Invisible Adjunct is hosting a discussion along similar lines, inspired by Scott Smallwood’s article, “Doctor Dropout.” Smallwood writes:

    On the first day of graduate school, everyone is still a success. All of the students gunning for Ph.D.’s have lived an academic life of achievement: honor roll, summa cum laude, certificates, scholarships, and parents who praise their intellectual prowess. Yet as many as half of those bright students — many of whom have never tasted failure — will drop out before they can claim their prize.

    In some humanities programs, only one of every three entering students goes on to earn a doctorate. No comprehensive national statistics are available, but studies suggest that the attrition rate for Ph.D. programs is 40 percent to 50 percent.

    Of the eight candidates who entered my program in August ’98, only two have completed their degrees, two of us are still dissertating, and the remaining four have moved on to other jobs, families, and places unknown. Four out of eight — that makes us statistically average, I guess.

    I’m feeling a bit burned out myself at the moment. After finishing my second big writing project Saturday evening, I retreated to the couch, where I spent a day-and-a-half napping and watching the first season of The Office on DVD. The writing itself isn’t what’s so exhausting. Hell, the writing is fun most of the time. It’s the other stuff — the messiness of life stuff — that gets in the way and wears a body down. Things like broken washers and dryers, and day jobs, and accidents at the vet that almost kill the tiny orange cat that you bottle-fed for a month because its mother abandoned it when it was a week old. It’s all a high-wire juggling act.

    I’m so tired right now that I can’t even enjoy Kenneth Pollack’s change of heart, or the latest news out of the War College, or the Paul O’Neill and Colin Powell brouhahas. (Okay, so maybe I’m enjoying those a little.) I’m too tired to write up responses to Atom Egoyan’s Ararat (a fascinating train wreck of a film) or Kirby Dick’s and Amy Ziering Kofman’s wonderful documentary, Derrida (which is, of all things, quite charming and funny). I can’t even find the energy to finish up my “2003 Year in Film” post, which I’d hoped to send to Senses of Cinema and which now, two weeks into January, already feels irrelevant.

    But I do hope to get back to this blog every once and while. If anyone’s still reading.

  • My First Block Quote of 2004

    I just submitted my Roth chapter. One assignment down, one to go. And my head hurts. The quote below was good enough to lure me back to the blog, even if for just a minute or two.

    I have often suggested to American Christians that the only way to understand their mission is to ask what it might have meant to witness faithfully to Jesus in the heart of the Roman Empire. Certainly, when I preach in the United States I feel, as I imagine the Apostle Paul did when he first passed through the gates of Rome—admiration for its people, awe at its manifest virtues, and resentment of its careless power.

    America’s preachers have a task more difficult, perhaps, than those faced by us under South Africa’s apartheid, or by Christians under Communism. We had obvious evils to engage; you have to unwrap your culture from years of red, white, and blue myth. You have to expose and confront the great disconnect between the kindness, compassion, and caring of most American people and the ruthless way American power is experienced, directly and indirectly, by the poor of the earth. You have to help good people see how they have let their institutions do their sinning for them.

    This is not easy among people who really believe that their country does nothing but good. But it is necessary, not only for their future, but for us all. All around the world there are those who believe in the basic goodness of the American people, who agonize with you in your pain, but also long to see your human goodness translated into a different, more compassionate way of relating with the rest of this bleeding planet.

    — Bishop Peter Storey of South Africa, as quoted in Ray McGovern’s “Hijacking ‘Him’ for Empire”

  • Affluent Bias

    Brilliant, brilliant article from The L. A. Times (via James Tata’s blog). In “Affluence Remakes the Newsroom,” Tim Rutten argues that contemporary journalism is dominated not by a liberal bias but by a:

    middle-class quietism that the majority of reporters and editors share with other Americans. They are the suburban voters who now cast the majority of ballots in our presidential elections — mildly libertarian on social issues, mildly conservative on fiscal matters, preoccupied with issues of personal and financial security. They are suspicious of ideology with its sweaty urgency and wearying demands for consistency.

    Rutten supports his claims with a fascinating interview with Russell Banks:

    “I was a journalist for 50 years and hate to pronounce, but these are not adventuresome people. How could they be? Most have been to college and then have gone directly into journalism. What can you expect with that sort of background?”

    What you get, in fact, is rather conventional careerism. In Washington, Baker said, that means journalists “who work hard; everybody in Washington works hard. But they lack empathy for the rest of the country. If you’ve never lacked health insurance — and most reporters and editors never have — you don’t understand what it means for the 43 million Americans who are doing without it, any more than the Congress does.”

    In the New York Review, Baker wrote: “The accelerating collapse of the American health care system may illustrate how journalism’s disconnection from the masses will produce an inert state. If every journalist in the District of Columbia had to have his health insurance canceled as a requirement for practicing journalism in Washington, quite a few might … get to know what anger is, and discover that something is catastrophically wrong with the health care system.”

    For Baker, the general lack of empathy that precludes such anger is a far more powerful force in contemporary journalism than any covert political bias.

    Great stuff. And a useful example of how the language of empathy and morality can productively replace (in a sense, at least) all of the tiring partisanship.

  • Changing How You See the World

    Listen to Joe Wright’s commentary from tonight’s edition of All Things Considered. Joe’s a medical student at Harvard — 23 or 24 years old, I’d guess — and he already gets it.

    Addendum: With a quick search I found Joe’s Website. He’s a bit older than I’d imagined, and much more interesting.

  • Moral Empathy

    My dissertation is built around a model of postwar American society that was first proposed by Jeffrey Alexander in Fin-de-Siecle Social Theory (1995) and that he has since expanded upon in The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology (2003). I picked up a copy of the latter a few weeks ago but haven’t yet had a chance to read it. (That I’m looking forward — with great expectation — to doing so over Christmas break probably says more about my personality than I should freely admit.) Alexander has a welcomed knack for translating the often obtuse language of social theory into workable frameworks. Theory and action — a nice change of pace.

    Alexander and Ron Eyerman, co-directors of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University, published a great piece yesterday in Newsday (also available at Common Dreams), in which they argue that the massive economic and social changes necessary to alleviate suffering on a global scale are dependent, finally, upon change of a more fundamental and personal nature:

    Only when the privileged can put themselves in the place of others who are less fortunate, when they achieve moral empathy, can reforms be made.

    “How do we achieve this?” they then ask. Citing as examples the Civil Rights movement, Ghandi’s performed anti-colonialism, anti-Apartheid efforts, and feminism (among others), Alexander and Eyerman argue that the first step is breaking down the binaries that we’ve constructed to simplify our understanding of the world:

    rational/irrational, autonomous/dependent, honest/dishonest, open/secretive, cooperative/aggressive. We cannot have moral empathy for others we perceive as morally incompetent, irrational, dishonest, secretive, aggressive and dependent on authority. In such cases, their fate appears natural and morally justified. But we know that, by representing themselves in terms of the positive attributes, excluded groups can gain empathy among better off people who might come to their aid. Over time the excluded can achieve enough legitimacy in the public sphere to stage social protests that will be taken seriously and lead eventually to reforms. Subordination and inclusion are not static structural conditions; they can be negotiated.

    There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking here, of course, but something about that connection between constructed binaries and “moral empathy” really struck me. As I’m prone to do, it got me thinking about the American church and, more specifically, about the ways in which it has been complicit in many of our country’s more regrettable foreign and domestic policy decisions of late. In its efforts to stem the tide of “postmodern relativism” (or something like that), large segments of the church have worked aggressively to reinforce those simple constructions. It pains me, especially, when I hear Christians parrot Bush’s good/evil rhetoric, as if the Bible’s message of grace were somehow applicable only to us but never to them.

    Today, on AIDS Day, I’m reminded that three million people have already succumbed this year and that another forty million (three-eighths of them under the age of fifteen) are living with HIV. And I wonder why our churches can’t “stand united” to help, why they can’t muster the “moral empathy” to even care.

  • Evolution

    Long Pauses just swam on shore and sprouted legs. The revisions aren’t too dramatic this time, but you will notice a new option at the top of the page. I wanted to go with smaller text for the main content, but I’m also trying to be as sensitive as possible to accessibility issues. You can now toggle between two style sheets, which will give you the option of switching to larger fonts and standard links.

    If you’re interested in adding multiple style sheets to your site, do what I did: read Paul Sowden’s excellent tutorial, then rip off his script.

    Happy Thanksgiving!

  • A Note from Knoxville

    Newsday posted a fun article yesterday about the University of Tennessee’s Anthropology Research Facility. Of course, the word “fun” is totally relative when you’re talking about something like the “Body Farm” — a two-acre plot of land just across the river from UT’s main campus, where donated bodies decompose under the close scrutiny of forensic anthropologists.

    Some of the 30 to 50 cadavers arriving at the Body Farm each year come courtesy of local medical examiners donating unclaimed bodies. But much more frequently, the arrivals are pre-arranged by consenting donors who have expressed an active interest in the facility’s research and who have completed a biological questionnaire detailing their medical histories. The facility has amassed hundreds of these completed questionnaires by its future donors.

    During their talks at a conference held by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, [Dr. Richard] Jantz and fellow researcher Arpad Vass detailed the clues to be gleaned from nature’s disposal process — a process that begins about four minutes after death. Each stage includes its own march of the macabre. Flies begin laying their eggs in available crevices during the fresh stage, said Vass, a forensic scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The gaseous by-products of bacteria lead to bloating during the second stage. In the third, called active decay, the body’s soft tissue liquefies and insect holes proliferate. And in the fourth, or dry, stage, the body becomes little more than bones.

    Nice, eh?

    In a roundabout way, the Body Farm is the reason that I live in Knoxville. When I was researching doctoral programs, my wife’s ears perked up at the mention of UT. She had been interested for some time in forensic anthropology and forensic art and was well-acquainted with the program here. She’s since taken a bachelor’s degree from them and has developed into something of an asset for the department as well. She’s over there right now, in fact, reconstructing the face of a young girl who has gone unidentified since the early-1980s.

    That type of work makes me glad for two things: that there are people out there willing to do it, and that they ain’t me.

  • Heavy Industries

    Y0ung-Hae Chang Heavy Industries Presents is just about the coolest damn Website I’ve found in months. Finally, someone is doing something original with Flash — and by “original” I mean a backward glance to early-Godard all jumbled together with politics and sex and Blue Note jazz. Great stuff. You might want to start with ARTIST’S STATEMENT N0. 45,730,944: THE PERFECT ARTISTIC WEB SITE.

  • Cringe

    So, today at lunch a co-worker was getting us all up to speed on the latest episode of Average Joe, and our conversation turned — inevitably, perhaps — to the sick pleasure we humans seem to take from experiencing others’ discomfort. “The Cringe Factor,” you might call it. I shared a story from my undergrad days, when I found myself trapped in my dorm room as my socially-awkward roommate repeatedly asked out one of his classmates.

    “So, I was wondering if you might want to go get something to eat on Friday . . . Oh, really? Okay, well, how ’bout Saturday? . . . Studying, huh. Well, are you busy next weekend? Maybe we could catch a movie Friday night. . . . . Saturday? . . . Oh, okay. . . .”

    And on and on it went until he finally hung up, looked over at me (I was trying desperately to hide behind a book), and said, “It’s okay, though. I know she likes me because she smiled at me once.” Had there been a hole deep enough up there on the second floor of Cawthon Hall, I would have leapt in head first. Anything to make myself disappear.

    Someone else told a story he had heard on the radio once — a story involving misplaced eyeglasses and a horrible case of mistaken identity. It sounded like an episode of This American Life to me, so I Googled the title of the show and the word “cringe,” and just look at what I found. Bingo. The opening story is classic, but the one that made me want to take off my headphones and run far, far away is Ira Glass’s tale of visiting the set of M*A*S*H as an NPR intern in 1979. Talk about cringe-inducing. Listening to the earnest, 20-year-old Glass ask Harry Morgan why he didn’t take more leading roles reminded me instantly of every stupid word that has ever come out of my stupid mouth. Which is probably the very source of cringe pleasure to begin with.

    Ira Glass, by the way, was also interviewed by the Onion A.V. Club last week, where, among many other interesting comments, he admits to being a fan of Gilmore Girls. So you know it’s worth a read.

  • Friday Colloquy

    On Friday afternoon I subjected myself to ninety minutes of critical scrutiny by a group of professional historians. And it ended up being a damn good time.

    My article, “The American Left and the Problems of History in Philip Roth’s ‘American Trilogy,’” was the subject of this month’s Friday Colloquy, sponsored by UT’s Center for the Study of War and Society. Unlike most academic conferences — wherein, in my experience at least, you read a paper to a small and largely disinterested audience who then ask one or two questions while staring at their watches — the colloquy provides participants with copies of the article weeks in advance. The monthly meetings, then, become sites of informed discussion and constructive criticism. Who knew such a thing could still be found in academia?

    After spending the last three weeks writing and deleting and rewriting and deleting again the opening twelve pages of my first chapter, my confidence was shaky at best. Sitting face-to-face with a group of critical readers was, surprisingly, exactly what I needed. The best compliment I received was that my writing was “refreshingly free of jargon,” and more than one member of UT’s history faculty told me that when my dissertation is published it will be a welcomed addition to the required readings of many undergraduate American history courses.

    Someone might actually read this thing after all. Go figure.

  • Stuck in the Long, Hard Slog

    How many thousands of hours will future historians devote to parsing through the events of this week? Yesterday, barely 48 hours after the downing of an American helicopter in Fallujah, six — and only six — members of the Senate showed up to approve the White House’s request for $87.5 billion, thus guaranteeing our long-term commitment of lives and resources to the future occupation of Iraq. The other 94 Senators, an homogeneous mix of Republicans and Democrats, skipped the vote so as to avoid putting their names in the official record. It’s an interesting strategy. Now they can’t be accused of abandoning our troops or of pouring billions into a useless cause.

    And you know what? I can’t say that I blame them.

    I’ve made a deliberate choice in recent weeks to keep quiet on these issues, partly because I’m tired, but mostly because I just don’t know where to stand. I protested the war last winter because, like so many by my side, I could see this coming. Hell, even Bush, Sr. saw it coming. From his memoirs:

    Trying to eliminate Saddam… would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible… we would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq… there was no viable ‘exit strategy’ we could see, violating another of our principles… Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations’ mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.

    But then we started dropping bombs and killing thousands of people and dismantling what remained of Iraq’s infrastructure, and everything changed. Regardless of his political motives, I gained some respect for President Bush in recent weeks when he threatened to veto any changes to the appropriations bill that would turn our $20 billion “gift” into a “loan.” We owe the people of Iraq at least that much. But, of course, then I wonder how much of our gift will actually make it to the people of Iraq, and how much will simply be funneled into the pockets of American contractors (who might or might not have direct, personal connections to the administration). But, then again, even if the money does go to those contractors, who’s to say that they aren’t, in fact, the most qualified people to do the job and that the Iraqi people won’t benefit in the long run?

    And now you see why I’ve been so quiet.

    I wish I could join the knee-jerkers on my end of the spectrum who are turning up the “bring our boys home” rhetoric. Ray McGovern makes the most convincing argument that I’ve read yet. “Whether or not U.S. policymakers can admit at this point that they were ‘terribly wrong,’” he writes, “they need to transfer real authority to the United Nations without delay and support the U.N. in overseeing a rapid return to Iraqi sovereignty.”

    But, many protest, we can’t just withdraw! Sure we can, and better now than ten years from now, as in the case of Vietnam. If it is true that we are not in Iraq to control the oil or to establish military bases with which to dominate that strategic area, we can certainly withdraw. As in Vietnam, the war is unwinnable… hear that? Unwinnable!

    If the U.S. withdraws, would there be civil war in Iraq? One cannot dismiss this possibility lightly given the history of Iraq. But it is at least as likely that a regional-federal model of government that would include substantial autonomy for the Kurds in the north, the Sunnis in the center, and the Shiites in the south (something foreshadowed by the composition of the existing Council) could begin to function in relatively short order with help from the U.N. While some degree of inter-ethnic violence could be expected, chances are good that this model would still allow a representative national government to function.

    We won’t know if we don’t try. Besides, there is no viable alternative.

    McGovern, the 27-year CIA veteran and advisor to Bush, Sr., certainly understands the issue better than I. (That he directs the Servant Leadership School is another reason that I’m heeding his warning.) And with each day, as the death toll grows (23 already in November), I grow increasingly disheartened. When I heard of the helicopter tragedy on Sunday, my first thoughts were of my own family, who just last week marked the twenty year anniversary of the death of my cousin, who piloted a Black Hawk into (but not out of) Grenada. On November 2, 2023, sixteen other families will mark similar anniversaries and will still be mourning, as ours is.

    But wish as I might, I can’t yet join the knee-jerkers, and I’m not sure why, exactly. Except that I don’t want it all to have been for nothing.

  • Ghosts, Goblins, etc.

    Halloween is the highest of the holy days in Long Pauses land. My wife spends months planning her costume — this year she was Galadriel, I was Harold (from Harold and Maude). Our best friends hosted the party this year, which was attended by folks from the English department and . . . I swear this isn’t a setup for a punchline . . . a group of future reference librarians. Sounds wild and crazy, doesn’t it? Actually, there are great perks to attending such a party, like getting to have this conversation*:

    Post-Attack Roy Horn: Darren, did you catch Philip Roth on Fresh Air today?

    Harold: Oh yeah. It was a rerun from 2000. I’m always surprised by how personable he comes off in that interview. I expect him to be more defensive and bitter.

    Post-Attack Roy Horn: You had to love that question about his influences. Like, was there any chance that he would name someone other than Bellow?

    Harold: Hopeless nostalgic, that one. Whatcha drinkin’?

    Post-Attack Roy Horn: Miller tall boy.

    Harold: Sweet.

    Or this one:

    Andy Warhol: I saw Paris, Texas last week.

    Harold: Wim Wenders, right? I haven’t seen it yet.

    Andy Warhol: Sam Shepard is great in it.

    Harold: Speaking of, what did you think of the CBT’s Buried Child?

    Andy Warhol: I enjoyed it, except for the last twenty minutes. And I didn’t like the way that they turned Dodge into comic relief.

    Harold: Exactly! He should be more cynical and threatening. . . . Does your wig itch as much as mine does?

    Andy Warhol: Totally.

    Or my favorite:

    Collared Green: Dude, please tell me that you’re Harold! I love that costume!

    * Poetic liberties have been taken in the reconstruction of these conversations.

  • Survival Saturday

    College football is the only sport capable of raising my heart rate these days. I gave up on the NFL when Joe Gibbs left the Redskins, and the last time I watched a complete baseball game Brady Anderson struck out in the bottom of the ninth, ending his and Cal Ripken Jr.’s careers. I haven’t cared about the NBA since the Bird and Magic days, and I’ll continue to not care about the NBA until the Bullets make their next championship run (somewhere in my parents’ house I have a banner from the last one).

    But Saturdays in the fall are my high holy days. The obsession came fairly late to me — 1987, the year my sister moved to Clemson and the year I got to see Danny Ford’s Tigers play in Death Valley. Although my official justification for going to Florida State was its fine music school, I mainly went to watch big time college football up close and personal. I got to Tallahassee just in time to see their ACC debut, their first national championship, and way too many missed field goals. Which is why yesterday was such a good day.

    Many people still put a small asterisk next to FSU’s first championship banner because, late in the season, we got beat pretty good up in South Bend. We only made it to the title game, in fact, because the Irish somehow managed to lose at Boston College the next week. Notre Dame beat us again last year — a season in which they played beyond their talent and we were mediocre, at best. Yesterday, finally, the tables turned. 37-0. Good times. Good times.

    And then it got better. Virginia Tech horse-whipped Miami — beat them so badly, in fact, that by the end of the game the ‘Canes were picking fights and getting ejected from the game. Ah, the crooks and criminals who we had all come to hate during the mid-90s, finally revealing themselves once more.

    And then there’s the Tennessee Volunteers, the least impressive two loss team in the country. A team that needed five overtimes to beat the horrible Crimson Tide last week. A team that needed a fourth quarter rally yesterday to beat Duke. Duke! The Vols are just horrible, and the funny thing is that they might just win the SEC East. John Adams has a great piece about them in today’s Knox New-Sentinel:

    Moments later, linebacker Kevin Burnett used the same phrase, “We just have to keep playing Tennessee football.”

    Tennessee football: What is it? It’s counting on the other guys to make more mistakes than you do. It’s relying on somebody else to take care of your business. And guess what? It’s working. . . .

    UT’s offensive braintrust is more creative with excuses than plays. “We won without our starting tailback (Cedric Houston) and safety (Rashad Baker),” Fulmer pointed out. “Mark Jones (wide receiver/safety) was limited.” Wow! And it still beat Duke 23-6.

    If the East championship came down to a vote, I can imagine an athletic director making a case for the Vols by saying: “Don’t forget, they beat Duke by 17 points without two starters. And Mark Jones was limited.” UT doesn’t want or need a vote. It just needs to muddle through against the three worst teams in the SEC – Mississippi State, Vanderbilt and Kentucky – and for Auburn to beat Georgia in two weeks.

    It just needs to keep playing Tennessee football.

    We now return to regular Long Pauses programming . . .

  • Bring ‘Em On

    When Bush landed on the aircraft carrier in that flight suit, I immediately thought, “From now on, just do Bush in the flight suit. Every single time.”
    — Will Ferrell, on life after Saturday Night Live

    Can you just imagine how funny that would be? George W. Bush addressing the United Nations in his flight suit. George W. Bush debating Howard Dean in his flight suit. George W. Bush sitting at his Oval Office desk trying to find Waldo in his flight suit. He really is Too Stupid to be President.

  • Writing a Dissertation

    A diary of my week.

    • 10/22 – 6:30-8:30 am. Wrote about 300 words. I think I’ve finally figured out the structure of my first chapter.
    • 10/23 – 6:30-8:30 am. Deleted about 200 words. Restructured first chapter. Still not happy.
    • 10/24 – 6:30-8:30 am. Wrote about 300 words. I think I’ve finally figured out the structure of my first chapter.
    • 10/25 – 6:30-8:30 am. Deleted about 200 words. Restructured first chapter. Still not happy.
    • 10/27 – 6:30-8:30 am. Wrote about 300 words. I think I’ve finally figured out the structure of my first chapter.
    • 10/28 – 6:30-8:30 am. Deleted about 200 words. Restructured first chapter. Still not happy.

  • World Enough, and Time

    Some days I fantasize about giving up on this dissertation. Mostly I want my free time back. I want to walk into a library and choose a book that has nothing to do with Cold War history or American literature. I want to get up on Saturday mornings, watch a film, and lose a few hours writing up a no-pressure response to it. I want to spend an evening with my wife and not be distracted by the structure of my first chapter, which has been dismantled and rebuilt each morning this week.

    I fantasize about reading for pure pleasure again. If I had the time, I might start with a biography of Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, who died today at the age of 105. Can you imagine how the world changed before her eyes?

    For many Americans, Madame Chiang’s finest moment came in 1943, when she barnstormed the United States in search of support for the Nationalist cause against Japan, winning donations from countless Americans who were mesmerized by her passion, determination and striking good looks. Her address to a joint meeting of Congress electrified Washington, winning billions of dollars in aid.

    Madame Chiang helped craft American policy toward China during the war years, running the Nationalist Government’s propaganda operation and emerging as its most important diplomat. Yet she was also deeply involved in the endless maneuverings of her husband, Chiang Kai-shek, who was uneasily at the helm of several shifting alliances with Chinese warlords vying for control of what was then a badly fractured nation.

    A devout Christian, Madame Chiang spoke fluent English tinted with the Southern accent she acquired as a school girl in Georgia, and presented a civilized and humane image of a courageous China battling a Japanese invasion and Communist subversion. Yet historians have documented the murderous path that Chiang Kai-shek led in his efforts to win, then keep, and ultimately lose power. It also became clear in later years that the Chiang family had pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars of American aid intended for the war.

  • Writing is Hard, Redux

    The alarm went off a 5:45 this morning, and I got up. Lord help me. I actually got up.

    I don’t know how many times I’ve attended Q&A sessions with professional writers, but they inevitably say the same thing: If you want to write, then write. Make it a priority. Get up early, be disciplined, and stop whining.

    So I got up at 5:45 this morning, took a shower, poured my first cup of coffee, and wrote from 6:30 to 7:30. I didn’t write much, mind you, but I made some progress — slow, steady progress, which is the point of discipline, I guess. I also spoke with my manager today, who graciously agreed to let me adjust my schedule so that my one hour of writing might grow into two — two quiet hours alone in the dark of morning when I’m not exhausted from a frustrating day at work, when I’m not distracted by competing obligations and distractions.

    It would all sound heavenly if it didn’t begin so damn early.

  • More on Teaching and Technology

    Russ, a reader from Pennsylvania (and all-around good guy), sent me this email in response to yesterday’s post. Messages this good make me wish I had a comments feature.

    I’m glad to hear Oppenheimer has written a new book. I think his ideas are really essential to trying to get a handle on why our current education fixes aren’t getting to the root of the problems, and well-meaning advocates from both teaching ranks and administrators, liberals and conservatives, have screwed this up.

    I had some doubts concerning the actual usefulness of computers in K-12 education in relation to their perceived usefulness back when the Internet went wide, and Oppenheimer’s earlier piece in The Atlantic gave those doubts some substantive evidence. My take on the larger education crisis is that we cannot effectively educate our populace today because we lack a suitable and convincing “narrative” or “purpose” to justify the necessary expenditures of time and work needed to become an educated people. The narrative of “become educated to get a well-paying job” is insufficient. That has been modified to something approaching “become educated to stay abreast of the high-tech information economy.” That’s also insufficient, in my view. Neil Postman’s book The End of Education put forth a few proposals for replacement narratives, but I didn’t find any of those compelling.

    Yeah, this whole computer thing is suckering a lot of school districts into spending a lot of money on technology and, subsequent staving off of obsolescence — and that’s not to mention the misspending of precious instructional time. The kids of rich or successful families can afford this misallocation of resources; they’ll still receive the time and attention in and out of school to make up for the time not spent wisely in front of a computer screen. It’s the poorer kids who will likely suffer the most, despite their families being told that this technology would level the field.

    I think there’s some hope for a wider discussion of the education narrative question. In his column which ran locally Monday, William Raspberry reviewed a book about the achievement gap and noted that a huge obstacle in overcoming the gap is the lack of a convincing rationale being presented to many African-American youth to justify the toil of education. They’re not falling for the “good job” hook. This raises the larger question that leaves me awestruck: assuming we could find a replacement narrative satisfying to a plurality of the interested parties, how do you go about inculcating that narrative into the schools and the culture at large

    As I told Russ, when I was teaching freshman comp, I would always do a unit on “cultural literacy,” which was my way of forcing students to confront (if not accept) the rationale behind the traditional liberal arts education (“liberal” in the classic, non-partisan sense). Freshman comp was an interesting avenue for such a discussion, as it is the only course required of all UT graduates — the first of the many “Basic Studies” requirements undergrads typically encounter, often begrudgingly. I don’t know if my unit “worked” or not, but I always valued the discussion it would generate. 90% of my students thought of college as grade 13 — as the next, burdensome step toward a high-paying job. So many are so firmly written into that cultural narrative Russ has described.

    I find myself stuck in an odd position: I want to be a classroom teacher, but the tight job market and the “business” of graduate teaching assistantships has left me working instead in Instructional Technology, a field about which I feel ambivalent, at best. I see occasional flashes of value in what I do, but at times I wonder if my salary (and my overhead) could be put to better use elsewhere. It’s a sticky issue, to say the least.

  • A Few Good Reads

    A few interesting education-related links passed through my desk today. The first is to “Rethinking Thinking” from the Christian Science Monitor, which attempts to look beyond the lip-service academics typically pay to the importance of “critical thinking.” Well, to be fair, it usually isn’t just lip-service. Most of us really do want our students to learn how to learn (the goal of any good liberal education). The problem is figuring our how to do it, especially given that brutal combination of increased teaching loads and research expectations.

    Margaret Miller, a University of Virginia professor and director of the National Forum on College Level Learning, is leading the charge to measure what students at state-funded colleges know and can do, including an assessment of intellectual skills. She worries that critical-thinking skills are not truly valued by many state schools and their students. “Students and institutions are more and more focused on the vocational – at a high level, but vocational nonetheless,” she says. “But producing a group of non- reflective highly competent technicians is something we want to avoid if we want a functioning society.”

    Because the curriculum is so fragmented across many narrow disciplines, students have a greater challenge in making sense of it. That means colleges can’t just ghettoize critical thinking in a few courses, but need to spread the focus on thinking across the curriculum. “All disciplines need to become more liberal-arts-like in their focus on the intellectual skills that underlie what they do,” she says. “Some of that is critical thinking, some of it is broader and encompasses that.”

    Along somewhat similar lines, also check out “Are Computers Wrecking Schools?” a review of Todd Oppenheimer’s new book, The Flickering Mind. Oppenheimer’s argument in a nutshell is that the monies and efforts directed toward technology initiatives in our schools have been wasted to the extent that they’ve been removed from sound teaching practices. The only big winners amid the mad dash toward “computer literacy” have been the hardware manufacturers, he claims.

    Oppenheimer is particularly strong in examining the Federal e-rate program, in which technology firms seem to have systematically overbilled many school districts in setting up their Internet services. Oppenheimer describes how, in 2000, the San Francisco school district turned down $50 million in e-rate funds when they found that they could actually build their network themselves, for less than even the small cost they would have had to pay in order to receive the e-rate funding. The hardware manufacturer was marking up the equipment for the federal program far over the prices that the district could get on the open market.

    Oppenheimer appears to have launched a blog on his home page. So far, the only post is a fantastic Frequently Asked Questions — must-reading, I think, for anyone interested in the topic. I especially like this bit:

    6. How necessary is computer training in preparing children for tomorrow’s increasingly high-tech jobs?

    There is no greater hoax in this story than the rush to put young children on computers, in the belief that it will prepare them for tomorrow’s jobs. It won’t-in fact, doing so may well put them at a professional disadvantage. One expert, who used to make educational software, suspects that employers of the future will actually steer away from applicants who were “computer trained.”

    I think I need to read this book.

  • Thanks for the Links

    My host recently adjusted their Webstats software, so I’m now able to get better data about Long Pauses readers. A few more sites that have been kind enough to link to me:

  • This is Persecution?

    So, while driving to and from Atlanta this week we heard two interviews with David Limbaugh, who is out promoting his latest book, Persecution: How Liberals are Waging War Against Christianity. With a title like that, and with the vocal support of people like Ann Coulter, you can probably guess the gist of Limbaugh’s argument: 21st century America is fast devolving into 1st century Rome, where upstanding, Patriotic Christians (who just happen to vote Republican) are being thrown daily to the lions of liberalism. Here, as in most recent discourse of the like, “liberalism” has nothing to do with traditional notions of freedom and equality; it is, instead, shorthand for secularism or atheism or civil libertarianism or socialism or feminism or political correctness or multiculturalism or any number of other, often mutually exclusive political positions. Whatever.

    I only bring this up here because I found it so interesting that I heard Limbaugh level these charges on two different radio stations, one Christian, the other secular, during a three hour drive. In fact, while Limbaugh, the talk show hosts, and outraged listeners railed against those liberals who were limiting their ability to publicly express their faith, we were driving through Chattanooga, where (no exaggeration) one-third of all FM stations broadcast explicitly Christian content. I know that’s not the case everywhere, but come on . . .

    I won’t deny that I’m, at best, ambivalent about the wholesale purging of Christianity from, say, public schools. When more than 80% of Americans identify themselves as Christian, it seems unnecessary to me to systematically remove the word “Christmas” from our calendars. But to call this “persecution” — even after acknowledging the inflated rhetoric that is part and parcel of this type of book — is a disgrace. Has the Church in America become so thoroughly synonymous with middle class comfort that we have to seek out charges of persecution in straw man arguments like Limbaugh’s? Is this our proof that we’re “salt and light”? Disgusting.

    And speaking of straw men, did you catch Bill O’Reilly on Fresh Air? Be sure to listen to the entire interview. The last few minutes are priceless.

  • Academic Blogs

    I chased a link and ended up discovering a fascinating community of academic bloggers, most of whom are like me — insiders with an outsider’s (slightly disgruntled) perspective. If you’re considering graduate school, read the links on the right side of Invisible Adjunct before making any rash decision. A few other blogs of interest:

     

  • Altruism?

    The Times has two articles this morning about the growing numbers of uninsured in America and the effect those numbers are having on the political landscape. After describing the combined impact of rising healthcare costs and unemployment, Robin Toner writes:

    In such times, the plight of the uninsured becomes more of a middle-class issue, more of a symbol of real close-to-home insecurity and thus more politically potent, advocates and experts say. Until now, “it’s mainly been an issue of altruism for a discrete and disadvantaged population,” said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a liberal consumer group. “Now that the losses in health coverage are impacting more middle-class and working families,” Mr. Pollack said, “this issue becomes one of self-interest for a very substantial part of the population.”

    I read pieces like this with only a novice’s understanding of the problem. The “business” of health care is beyond me. Which is why I don’t typically write about our need for something like socialized medicine. But that quote has stuck with me. In our money-saturated political discourse, caring about the health of our least advantaged citizens has become a question of “altruism.” As if it were a purely moral issue, divorced from politics!

    It’s amazing what kind of noise is made when middle-class sensibilities and suburban comfort are threatened. (Any parallels here with the American Church are purely intentional.)