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Death, the Mother of All Beauty; and also of BookPorn

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Ok, a morbid start. Still, I thought I’d recall my post from a few days ago when I speculated on the idea that books become art objects as their cultural life decays. Of course, I forgot that the romantics had already covered the ground where death begets beauty—which is not to say it’s false ground or can’t be re-covered in a new key. I was reminded of the romantics by Eric Wilson’s current essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “In Praise of Melancholy.”

One would think that Keats’s life would have fostered bitterness in him, but he remained generous in the face of his difficulties. He didn’t flee to the usual 19th-century escapes: Christianity or opium, drink or dreaming. Though he unsurprisingly underwent pangs of serious melancholia (who wouldn’t, faced with his disasters?), he nonetheless never fell into self-pity or self-indulgent sorrow. In fact, he consistently transformed his gloom, grown primarily from his experiences with death, into a vital source of beauty. Things are gorgeous, he often claimed, because they die. The porcelain rose is not as pretty as the one that decays. Melancholia over time’s passing is the proper stance for beholding beauty.

I thought I might blog more extensively on Wilson’s essay, but it ended up being less interesting than I had hoped. I’m wondering why, for an English prof, he seems so given to the vague and gauzy generalization over the vivid detail or anecdote. Still, credit for reminding me of those romantics. And my title of course is from the ubiquitous Wallace Stevens and what may be the most singularly beautiful poem in the American idiom, “Sunday Morning.”

Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths—
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness—
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to bring sweet-smelling pears
And plums in ponderous piles. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

In the words of the equally ubiquitous Stanley Fish, “Wow. Isn’t that just Great.”

Anyway, I launched into this not to talk about morbidity or about Stanley Fish but to return just briefly to my fascination with books as objet d’art. (I confess I’m not even entirely sure what this means in the Wittgensteinian sense that meaning is in the use. When do you use it? surely somehow differently than “art object” or people wouldn’t say it in French. Or maybe they’re just being pretentious.)

Courtesy of Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading, I again found some absolutely fabulous images of books as works of art at Signonsandiego. The artist, Aaron T. Stephan, has a new show at Quint Gallery entitled “Building Houses/Hiding Under Rocks.” As the website puts it, “he’s converted some 20,000 discarded books into … an artist’s Lincoln Logs.”.

One of my favorites:

Artist Aaron T. Stephan–Building Houses Hiding Under Rocks

Stephan’s website has more of this great stuff. I especially like the wrench made from pages of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement.

Courtesy of Scott McLemee’s column at Inside Higher Ed about the best academic blogs on the web, I came across Rachel Leow’s site Idlethink, though I think she also calls it A Historian’s craft . Rachel regularly posts her photos of books in a running series she calls BookPorn. These are found objects, I guess—I’m no art historian. A beauty she’s discovered in the everyday display of books rather than in the self-conscious manipulations of the book’s physicality. Still, they fall in with my general mulling over what strikes me as a relatively new interest in the book as plastic art.

One of my favorites from Rachel’s collection:

Rachel Leow at Shakespeare and Co

My good friend Julia Kasdorf has a book entitled , The Body and the Book reflecting on women’s roles as embodied readers and writers, among other kinds of embodiment. Rachel’s pieces and some of the others I’ve pointed to over the past couple of weeks make me think we need a book entitled “The Body of the Book.”

Not that I will write it. I can barely make my way around an essay.

(Sidenote: Rachel also had some helpful hints for blog protocols in using her work. So thanks, Rachel. As I say, I can barely make my way around an essay. So far, blogging is pretty much glorified typewriting with nifty pictures as a bonus in case people get bored. Or in case I do.)

Still, I think there is something very poignant about Rachel’s photos. Seeing these photos makes the heart ache. Or at least a booklovers heart ache. Ok, so I’m weird; they make my heart ache. And I think it is somehow tied to the fact that Rachel’s work and other work like it call attention to the materiality, and thus the fragility, of books.

For us, books have been ideologically tied to permanence. Like the old woman in Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” who can’t stand the flowing by of time, for us books have bespoken our longings for and reaching after an unchanging permanence. Turning books themselves in to art suggest that books, too—and the texts and human knowledge they contain???—are more akin to the beauty sown by death, strewn leaves “of sure oblivion.” All the more so because digital culture is proud of its ephemeral impermanence. Flowing as a position of no position.

There’s a tricky dynamic in Stevens’s world of beauty. It’s not that ephemera is beautiful in and of itself. Indeed, change and movement are only beautiful in the hoped for permanence they suggest and make impossible. Beauty is the shape of our desire, aroused only in the awareness of its fragility and passing.

Perhaps this is why the sight of old books—or any books, rightly rendered–makes me ache. They are the sign of all things.

Michael Chabon and Ghost of Wallace Stevens in Political Slug Fest!

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Ok. Again. Not. However, I remain fascinated by the rhetorical irresponsibility that blogging makes possible.

In keeping with the literary politics of the season, the New York Times reports this morning that there’s a new book out with women writers reflecting on Hillary Clinton. The title, Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary Clinton, recalls Wallace Stevens “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Bird.” The choice apparently reflects the content of the book since Stevens’s poem is all about how perspective makes and in some sense is the object of our reflection.

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

Ok, I hope you have a better time making sense of this than I do with my students. After saying “This poem is about perspective” conversation mostly comes to an end and we twiddle our thumbs for fifty minutes. Nevertheless, the blackbird, and apparently Hillary, are nothing apart from how we construct them in our imaginations.

Kakutani isn’t terribly impressed, but I have to say that I find Kakutani too often follows the unacknowledged dictum of many contemporary book and movie reviewers: Slander everything unless you find it absolutely impossible not to. Finding fault too often substitutes for seriousness.

The following is from the introduction by Susan Morrison:

“On a shelf in my kitchen is a campaign button that I picked up during the 1992 presidential race. Over a photo of Hillary (bangs and headband phase—which was basically my look then, too) are the words ‘Elect Hillary’s Husband.’ Back then, the slogan produced a kind of giddy frisson: not only was the candidate just like someone I could have gone to college with—a baby boomer—but his wife was, too. And she had a job! I had only known first ladies as creaky battleaxes who sat under hairdryers and wore brooches. The thrill associated with that button feels far away now, and it’s hard to know exactly why. There’s no doubt that the rinky-dink scandals of the Clinton administration and the dismal parade of special prosecutors took the gleam off the fresh start that the Clintons brought with them to Washington. But that doesn’t quite explain how now, fifteen years later, there is not more simple exuberance at the idea that we may be about to elect our first woman president.
….
“No other politician inspires such a wide range of passionate responses, and this is particularly true among women. As I talked with women about their reactions to Hillary, some themes came up again and again. Many women were divided within themselves as to how they feel about her, and I noticed a familiar circle of guilt: these women believe they should support Hillary as a matter of solidarity. But, because they expect her to be different from (that is, better than) the average male politician, she invariably disappoints them; then they feel guilty about their ambivalence. Some feel competitive with her. Having wearily resigned themselves to the idea that ‘having it all’ is too much to hope for, they view Hillary as a rebuke: how did she manage to pull it off—or, at least, to appear to pull it off? Other women say they want to like her but are disturbed by the anti-feminist message inherent in the idea of the first woman president getting to the White House on her husband’s coattails. Then there are women, like the late playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who are queasy over the way Clinton’s popularity spiked only after she was perceived as a victim. When it became clear that Hillary was going to stand by her man after the Lewinsky fracas, Wasserstein wrote a disheartened Op-ed piece in the New York Times. ‘The name Hillary Rodham Clinton no longer stands for self-determination, but for the loyal, betrayed wife,’ she wrote. ‘Pity and admiration have become synonymous.’

Side note: Morrison’s text is one of many that echo Stevens’s poem. Gates’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, Smiley’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel. A quick Google search shows 44,600 references to the phrase “Thirteen Ways of Looking.” There are, I guess 17 extra ways of looking at the prismatic Hillary Clinton. I find Wallace Stevens resilient popularity and influence on our culture a bit boggling. Maybe it’s because most of us are leading the dull lives of insurance salesman and long to release our inner poets.

Thus the popularity of blogging? Anyone can be a poet now. Everyone is.

So much for craft.

Miscellany: Books as Plastic Art; Leslie Fiedler; Clinton’s Campaign Against Hope.

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Book Sculpture

Many thanks to Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading for pointing me toward this really fascinating page on books as art objects.

A favorite image from the page:

2057160036_ec4b4ef2ba.jpg

I’ve seen a variety of things like this in recent years, and I suspect to some degree that seeing the book as a form of art is tied to a sense of its demise. As things die, they become works of art, perhaps? The Freudians have already covered this, I’m sure. In the infancy of books, of course, books were also thought of as treasurers to be handled like works of art or other revered objects. Books in general were far too expensive for the masses to obtain, and as a general rule this continued for a very long time. Owning books, as much as reading them, signified your cultural and class superiority. This all changed gradually over centuries after Gutenberg, but changed with a vengeance with the invention of the paperback.

Perhaps now that television and the internet have taken on most of the cultural purposes of the paperback and the newspaper—cheap entertainment and ready information for the masses—books are again left to become objects of art, treasures indulged in primarily by a small coterie of collectors. Strikes me as depressing, just a bit, but I still love these photos.

Leslie Fiedler. Who?

I couldn’t help but notice Scott’s post on Friday noted a new book by the late Leslie Fiedler, whom Scott admits he didn’t know. Alas, how far the mighty have fallen. I used to want to be Leslie Fiedler. He made cultural criticism seem romantic. Now cultural criticism has all the romance of oral dentistry or working at Chic-Fil-a. (Does anyone know why they spell it this way?)

Seriously though, Fiedler was one of the few critics I’ve ever known whose work aspired to and in some instances could be called literary. This despite the much vaunted declarations that criticism and theory were literary genres, these made by literary theorists who could not write. Roland Barthes, who I think came up with the idea, also comes close to this ideal in some of his work. But declaration is not achievement. Fiedler and people like Barthes—Fiedler more than Barthes–are to be thanked for showing us that cultural criticism could actually care about and love language, that how it communicates can mesh with what it does communicate.

Clintons continue attack on literature…er…Obama.

By now, I guess, everyone has heard that Bill Clinton and hip-mate Hillary Clinton—or is it the other way around—got in trouble for deriding Obama as a purveyor of fairy-tales and fantasy. In some future post I think I’ll take up the idea that the Clintons who once represented the hopeful face of baby-boomerism, now represent the craggy and toothless grin of what to expect as baby-boomers start using canes and walkers. “No hope for you, people, you silly and naïve young whippersnappers.” My general sense is that the Clinton approach demonstrates again and again that they are part of the system, so broken by it that they have to replicate it, like dogs licking the hands of an abusive master. Trouble is they may be right. Systems persist for a good reason, the gradually wear down the hopes of those who would change them and they are impervious to appeals from those outside their own logic. The smart money still goes with Clinton, but for the moment I feel like I’m still young enough to hope.

But my real issue with all this is the Clinton’s perfidious campaign against the imagination and literature. (Beware those who use the term “perfidious” wantonly). As I pointed out in earlier posts, Clinton has all the literary imagination of a manual on how to fix my furnace. Hillary works too hard to have time for literature. Now they are using a perfectly wonderful and culturally important literary form as a derogatory epithet. As Vladimir Propp could tell them, fairy tales make us what we are.

Do those of us who are reading for our lives, an increasingly aggrieved and marginalized minority who must struggle against the glass ceiling of…well, something I’m sure…set in place by the billions of non-readers in the world, really need the Clintons piling on with their anti-literary epithets?

I think enough is enough. We need to stand up against unthinking and derogatory stereotypes of reading culture.

READERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!

Or something.

Who’s Reading Now? Or, Crises Ad Nauseum

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Trolling around The New York Times I came across this gem.

Ok, so only someone thinking about writing a book on reading would think it’s a gem, but I’ve got to write about something today. Everything’s material.

“The measure of all worth seems to be the question, “does it pay?” The attitude of the vast majority of the American people is distinctly inimical to the pursuit of culture for its own sake, and there are few men who read habitually after leaving college, simply because they are compelled to devote all their time and energies to the making of money in order that they may be regarded as of importance among their fellow-men. “How much is he worth?” That is the question by which the majority of people decide the value of a man….

“[As] long as the money-making ability of a man is taken as the true measure of his worth (and there are many who argue earnestly that it should be,) reading for culture, which is the highest form of reading, will be at a discount, whether among college-bred men or others. Nevertheless we think it highly probably that if an investigation could be made with accuracy, it would be found that the percentage of men who read entirely aside from the professional demands and purely for the sake of culture, would be found to be larger among university men than others.”

The language probably betrays that this isn’t the NEA’s study on the decline of reading, though it’s equally as earnest. It’s from 1900, an article titled “How Reading Does Not Pay” responding to and extending an earlier article that recounted the surprising decline of reading by undergraduates at Princeton University. Of course, all things are relative. I traced down the earlier article, “Reading of University Men,” and it appears that in 1900 20 percent of male Princetonians–the only kind of Princetonians there were, actually–had read Sartor Resartus, 30 percent had read Boswell’s Life of Johnson and nearly 80 percent had read Milton’s Paradise Lost.

I include the links to Project Gutenberg because…well…who knows if anyone reads these works anymore. I did as an English major two and a half decades ago, but most of the students in our department graduate without having read these particular texts and many others that an earlier generation considered necessary. Necessary for what, I leave unstated.

I would mostly be glad if I could just get 80% of the students at my college to read a newspaper, online or no. I did a survey of reading at my college as part of a class a couple of years ago and found that about a 1/3 of the students read even one book a year that was not assigned for a course. Survey’s being what they are, I suspect the statistics are inflated.

We could probably argue about what this suggests about the reality of our own “reading crisis,” such as it is. Digital utopians would, I know, point feverishly to the fact that students now spend a lot of time reading, and writing! New forms of literacy. To which I might say, “Yes, they punch text messages into their 2 by 3 inch phone screens and cackle maniacally at the latest picture with two sentence caption posted to their Facebook pages.” This is a little like giving folks credit for using the English language. Ok, I’m cranky, but also half serious. I do agree with the thesis that a lot of what passes for writing and reading on the web is more like conversation than writing–with all the good and bad things that implies. I don’t think writing has ever been simply a substitution for talking, and the forms of mental and imaginative engagement required by older forms of reading are significantly different than those necessary for conversation.

Still, I’m a little more interested in the rhetoric of concern that motivates discussions about reading. I’m struck by both the familiar and the distinctive flavors of this particular reading crisis at the turn of the last century. On the one hand the lamentation of reading’s decline, and the sense of some relationship between reading and cultural leadership. Readers are rightfully the big men on the Princeton campus aren’t they, these articles seem to assume, just as, in the NEA’s vision at least, Readers are the movers and shakers and thinkers we need to be competitive in the global economy.

Readers as Big Men on campus? Well, here is the flavor of difference. I doubt this is true at Princeton anymore, if it was then. Indeed, the account registers mostly the fear that this isn’t the case, that the rightful place of the cultivated man has been diminished. And what counts as a big man on campus is, more and more, the very capacity to make money that these late Victorians think of as polluting the superior man who should read only for culture, a more high-faluting version of the NEA’s concern with reading for pleasure. Mostly, in fact, our own reading crises are put in the explicit language of political and economic profits and deficits. The failure to read will damage the economy and damage our civic life. The triumph of business in higher education is nowhere more clearly registered than in our efforts to justify reading on the basis that it will help create better middle level managers. The idea of reading for culture alone is not even on the radar, except perhaps in its professionalized version in the mind of Stanley Fish.

More tomorrow on other varieties of reading crises I’ve stumbled over the last couple of days. Sometimes these are seized on by digital utopians as evidence that the NEA is crying wolf. I think they raise a more interesting question. Why is reading always in crisis? And how do the shape of these crises–which I’m willing to say are to a very large degree creations of discourse–and the rhetorical forms through which they are articulated suggest changing cultural values? And why do we choose to narrate cultural crises through crises in reading.

This isn’t at all intuitive to me. The terms change, the cultural positions morph and realign, but what is it about reading that leads folks to assume repeatedly and ad nauseum that we are in a crisis. We seem to have reading crises with the approximate frequency of menstrual cycles. What is it about the nature of reading that leads us to fret over its fragility?

Articles Cited:

How Reading Does Not Pay
New York Times. June 16, 1900
Section: SATURDAY REVIEW OF BOOKS AND ART, Page BR16, 622 words

READING OF UNIVERSITY MEN.
June 2, 1900
Section: The New York Times SATURDAY REVIEW OF BOOKS AND ART, Page BR8, 641 words

Reading about reading about reading about….

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I’ve been reading the winter issue of n+1. Smart people, smart and funny writing. I envy their youth. This issue’s take on The Intellectual Situation—a regular feature that’s a rambling blog-like essay more or less focused on a topic, or at least a loosely related series of themes, or united by a sort-of narrative—focused on the reading situation, among other things, noting especially the sudden prevalence of how-to books devoted to reading.

“Self help-style (sic) books about reading reappeared on the publishing scene in the last halcyon days of “Third Way” capitalism—when the world was embracing a kinder, gentler, freemarket as a solution to all our problems, including the problem of universal education. With that memorable 1999 title, How to Read and Why, Harold Bloom completed his transformation from the vatic close reader of The Anxiety of Influence to a lonely crusader against declining standards. In fact, he wasn’t so lonely: Bloom was preceded, barely, by cultural literacy proponent E.D. Hirsch in How to Read a Poem (19999), and he’s been followed, in recent years, by a number of tenured professors and established writers, and even the odd celebrity with time on his hands: there’s How Novels Work, How to Read Like a Writer, the deliberately parodic Ode Less Traveled, Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introduction series, which followed Penguin’s Complete Idiot’s Guide to Shakespeare and American Literature. Most of these now originate in Britain. Even radical-socialist Terry Eagleton has one called, er, How to Read a Poem.”

They mention, too, John Sutherland’s How to Read a Novel: A User’s Guide, and the grandfather of this genre, Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book. Even then, n+1’s is a necessarily selective list. Others include How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Reading Like a Writer and Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. I’ve just started the latest hot read on reading—or rather non-reading—How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard, which is a book about, among other things, how to not read a book. I would talk about it, but I haven’t read it yet. I did read the review.

Close cousin to these is a veritably new genre of literary non-fiction that I call the reading memoir, books by baby-boomers narrating the wonders of the books we are gradually leaving behind. Maureen Corrigan’s Leave Me Alone I’m Reading. Anna Quindlen’s testimonial How Reading Changed My Life. The industry that is Michael Dirda.

Indeed, too many to name them all, and these are merely the visible edge of a great tsunami of books on reading over the past twenty years. In fact, a quick WorldCat search shows 70,000 catalogued items published on the subject of reading from 1967-1987. Since 1987 we’ve been enlightened by approximately 105,000 new investigations of our crisis. With the publication of the NEA’s latest report, I’m sure we’ll see another 25,000 or so before the decade is out. I hope my own is among them.

This says nothing about the several million blog pages of persons chronicling their own reading habits, experiences, revelations, etcetera ad nauseum. (Who? Me, you say?) Reading is an industry of its own. Indeed, without the sea of books on reading, one suspects that the crisis in the publishing industry would be much more well-advanced. Anxious readers buy more and more and read less and less in the interest of understanding their own demise. Why, Oh Why?

The easy answer, and only one I have, is that this flurry of reading about reading is symptomatic of the very death of the book that we are gradually experiencing. In Verdi’s La Traviata, Violetta, dying of consumption, summons a last illusion of strength on the fantasy of her own resurrection. Like the diva dying on her sick bed, book culture summons a last illusion of strength by reading about it’s own demise. Reading lists are like bucket lists: great things to do before I die, or before books do. This is too easy, but it does seem to me that how-to books appear at those moments when a once dominant cultural practice moves from being necessity to option. Gardening manuals only make sense in a world where people don’t know how to and don’t have to grow their own food. Books on how to make a cabinet or how to wire a house are only for those who no longer learn it as a matter of course from a father or the guy next door. My favorite among books of this ilk is The Dangerous Book for Boys, which guards against the loss of our boyish past and our electronic future by teaching boys how to play…marbles. Reading books about reading is a sign of reading (at least reading books) having become a practice of clubs rather than a necessity of living. Some day perhaps courses in reading a novel will be offered at my local YMCA along with crocheting and scrap-booking. Oh, wait. They already are.

n+1 mocks the how-to books, rightly it seems to me. But their solution borders on the bizarre.

So maybe—is this a crazy idea?—reading needs to be taught, and taught well, rather than sold. Instead of writing more well-intentioned books, why don’t academics intervene directly in secondary school education? Let’s lend them out to state schools, public schools, and community colleges to teach for a few weeks a year. Morally, this is the equivalent of pro bono work in the legal profession. Let’s reward junior professors for community teaching rather than for publishing articles in academic journals. An extra sabbatical year could be offered, during which professors would work closely with young readers. Maybe this experience could actually change the way intellectuals think about literature. If a certain degree of literacy and appreciation for htte complexity of great books (or just good novels) is as necessary for a healthy and free society as we’ve often heard or said it is, then maybe the only way (not the “Third Way”) forward is a Maoist –style cultural revolution in reverse: “INTELLECTUALS: INTO THE SCHOOLS!”

Um…Ok, I appreciate the idealism. I really do. But…um…could it be any more obvious that the folks at n+1 only hang out with people who have gone to Ivy League or Ivy league wanna-bes, and went to the kind of high schools that got them in there. Or that they are too young to have kids in the secondary schools? Or that they are fundamentally out of touch with the economics of higher education. An EXTRA SABBATICAL YEAR??? I guess they’re maybe thinking that the moneyed interests at Harvard and Yale–the only places that can really afford extra sabbatical year–are going to come riding to our rescue. Chances are the cure would kill us. Maybe they could imagine Harold Bloom coming to their high schools to teach reading, but if Harold Bloom had come to my high school I would have been shooting rubber bands at his rather expansive posterior. Or falling asleep. Most academics have a hard time making themselves understood to one another, and we’re going to put them in high schools to teach 16 year olds to love to read???

Don’t get me wrong, I teach at a college where the focus is primarily on teaching, and I think that balance is about right. And a colleague runs a program at Penn State that gets grad students into the schools to do just this kind of thing with reading and writing. My own college runs continuing education programs for teachers to get them in touch with literary and other disciplines once again. We clearly need more connections between the colleges and the high schools, both so high schools can better prepare kids for what they’ll face in college and to help colleges understand where their freshmen are coming from. But let’s respect the expertise of teaching that a secondary school teacher has developed, and let’s help them as much as we possibly can.

Despite the naivete, n+1 is one of the best things going. Maybe because of the naivete. They haven’t yet joined those of us who are old and jaded by, among other things, too much reading.

Justified by Fish Alone

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In his most recent essay for the New York Times, Stanley Fish takes up the much exercised question of whether the study of the humanities can be justified. His answer, predictable for anyone who has followed his work, is “No, and it’s a good thing too.” Of late Fish’s growing irritation with literary and other humanistic disciplines has focused on the fruitless politicization of these disciplines, fruitless because such politicization seeks to change the world in ways that are demonstrably ineffective and that debase the professional status of the humanities in the bargain. Fish is always singular, but to some degree he is one of a large group of cranky elder statesmen who are none too happy with what the literary academy has become in the hands of their academic children and grandchildren. Men—and it is mostly men—like Harold Bloom, Terry Eagleton, and , to a somewhat less cranky degree, Gerald Graff. Fish’s argument in the Times concludes as follows:

Teachers of literature and philosophy are competent in a subject, not in a ministry. It is not the business of the humanities to save us, no more than it is their business to bring revenue to a state or a university. What then do they do? They don’t do anything, if by “do” is meant bring about effects in the world. And if they don’t bring about effects in the world they cannot be justified except in relation to the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them.

To the question “of what use are the humanities?”, the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said – even when it takes the form of Kronman’s inspiring cadences – diminishes the object of its supposed praise.

Fish followers will recognize the argument Stanley has been flogging for nigh on two decades. The professionalization of any discipline is it’s own justification. And in so many ways this is Fish at his inimitable best. Lucid and engaging, persuasive by the force of well-rendered prose alone. (Full disclosure, I had Stanley in a graduate seminar on Milton at Duke; I was and still am so intimidated that I will only call him “Stanley” in prose I am pretty sure he will never read. Professor Fish, always and forever). And there’s so much I want to agree with in Fish’s continuing obsession with this problem. The idea that literature or the study of literature could best be justified by the way it contributes to the revolution has increasingly struck me as excruciatingly reductive, this despite the fact that I’ve written one book and am nearly finished with another that examines literature from a political perspective.

Still, this is mostly an argument about justification that Fish can make largely because he is no longer a dean or department chair having to make justifications. Perhaps he now resents all the years he had to do all that justifying of something that appeared so obviously to him as the ultimate rendering of “The Good.” Indeed, Stanley Fish the institution needs no further justification. He is his own good.

However, Fish’s argument rests on a faulty assumption. When Fish says “Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance,” and that “The humanities are their own good” one imagines that he lives in a metaphysical bubble. This is because, in fact, performance of any activity always depends in some shape or form on things outside its own performance. When I read a book, that personal and cultural good does not exist in an ether of its own making or its own perpetuation. It is made possible by an economy of other personal and cultural goods and other cultural and personal activities. To read the book I take time away from my kids. I refuse to be with my students for at least a spell. I depend on the destruction of trees or the electronic production of pixels, which means I depend upon an economy of human labor and leisure. I also live within the frame of an inevitable personal economy. If only by the fact that I am one body and not many, I do not participate in other demonstrable cultural and personal goods such as the effort to alleviate hunger or to heal the sick.

Any single one of these, of course, need not be the determinative activity that says my decision to read a book is justified or unjustified. But it does suggest that our activities absolutely never exist in a sphere where their own performance is all that counts. In short, the humanities exist within the world already and therefore have effects by the fact of their performance, even if only to the extent that pursuing them must take place within a human economy of means and ends. To “justify” then is simply to give an account of why this cultural good is worth pursuing in light of the world we live in. In the academy this takes the very obvious shape of places within curricula and claims upon the financial well-being of students and their parents. Why is the time and money necessary for a course in literature (or film or philosophy or history) justified? To say that the humanities are their own good is to imagine a humanities without students; indeed, a discipline without human beings. To imagine it so is, from one perspective, self-indulgent. From another it is to imagine nothing at all since there is no world in which such a humanities could possibly be pursued.

The other limitation of Fish’s argument is that he seems to assume justification is only achieved by a transcendental logic. That is, I must point to a foundational reason that will make the humanities (or the simple reading of my book) justifiable. Because I can’t come up with that foundational reason that is beyond dispute, it must be the case that my activity cannot be justified from a perspective outside itself. This is a fairly common deconstructive form of attack on almost anything. However, as Fish surely well knows, many theories of justified beliefs hardly take this form of transcendental logic. More typically, justification is not a form of transcendental logic, but a pragmatic form of argument, or even a network of stories demonstrating use and consequence. In other words, justification is usually much more like the kinds of arguments you have to make to a dean to justify new expenditures. No transcendent logic will work, but a series of stories demonstrating the connection of my activities with the logic and practice of other activities can be very compelling indeed. This justification is what the performance of my own humanistic endeavors depend upon. Why else would a college care to spend a lot of money to let me read books if I couldn’t justify the expense.

Fish’s persistent sense that there is simply no evidence of the usefulness of the humanities is, in fact, demonstrably false if we see each one of these reasons not as an absolute reason but as a thread in a network of argument, a scene in the story of the humanities.

One small example. This week The Guardian reported on the development of a new form of therapy called bibliotherapy. Reading books actually seems to play a role in helping the psychically damaged or depressed to begin a process of managing and even repairing their emotional problems. Brain studies demonstrate that the reading of poetry enlivens parts of the brain that reading non-fictional prose or watching TV does not. Studies in composition and rhetoric demonstrate the deep connection between reading facility and writing ability. Graduate schools in fields as diverse as Business, psychology, and law, repeatedly cite the study of English as a form of preparation. None of these things are exactly the same thing as talking about the deep meaning—or lack thereof—that can be found in literary works (and who, after all, said that this was the only performance that the discipline of literary studies could pursue). But it’s not quite clear that they are completely separate from these activities and many others. These performances are interpenetrating and mutually reinforcing.

We are not our own performance. We dance together or we die alone.

Reference: Maureen Dowd, My Hero

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Actually not, since half the time I think Dowd substitutes irratibility for thoughtfulness. Still, I thought this article was an interesting reflection on some of the gender issues I’ve also been taking up the last couple of days. According to Dowd:

“There was a poignancy about the moment, seeing Hillary crack with exhaustion from decades of yearning to be the principal rather than the plus-one. But there was a whiff of Nixonian self-pity about her choking up. What was moving her so deeply was her recognition that the country was failing to grasp how much it needs her. In a weirdly narcissistic way, she was crying for us. But it was grimly typical of her that what finally made her break down was the prospect of losing. “

This strikes me as unfairly harsh. Clinton is a few country miles from Nixonian. But it does suggest that Clinton’s own construal of the gender war that’s going on over emotion is suspect. Clinton defended herself by saying male leaders are allowed to cry while women aren’t. All tears are not, in fact, equal, nor do they communicate similar things.

Men do, in fact, cry on the campaign trail. Strategically, no less. Cynically, no doubt. But the prospect of a man gaining points by crying because the trail is so hard and the people so unheeding is unfathomable.

Dowd goes on:

“Hillary sounded silly trying to paint Obama as a poetic dreamer and herself as a prodigious doer. “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act,” she said. Did any living Democrat ever imagine that any other living Democrat would try to win a presidential primary in New Hampshire by comparing herself to L.B.J.? (Who was driven out of politics by Gene McCarthy in New Hampshire.)”

“Her argument against Obama now boils down to an argument against idealism, which is probably the lowest and most unlikely point to which any Clinton could sink. The people from Hope are arguing against hope.”

Author! Author! Of course, I’m always most impressed with Dowd’s brilliance when she agrees with my own brilliant opinions.

Mitt Romney, Untrustworthy Literary Flip-Flopper

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With my headline I just thought I’d try out my chops as a writer of currently high level American political discourse.

Seriously, though, Romney needs to lay hold of a literary position and dig in to the trenches rather than pandering to pundit expectations. This past summer the media exploded with disgust and disdain that Romney declared his favorite book to be L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth, a book that I confess has yet to make it to the top of my pile but which John Dickerson at Slate says indicates “very deep levels of weird.” Sensing a scandal in the making, Romney—or rather Romney’s “people”—backpedaled quickly, declaring that Romney’s favorite book was really the Bible. As if we didn’t know that. Battlefield Earth is merely his favorite novel.

This seems to have done little to diminish the very high levels of weirdness the blogosphere detects in the choice of overly long fiction written by the founder of Scientology. My guess is that Romney would have done better to choose something that would overcome the Mormon factor, which for many people, rightly or wrongly, also signifies very high levels of weirdness. (On the other hand, anything sniffing of religion strikes many people in the media as highly weird, so this may not be saying much). Still, I don’t think Mitt’s people wanted the electorate going in to the voting booth with the image of the Romney family Bible stacked on the bedside table alongside the Book of Mormon and a novel by L. Ron Hubbard, especially since that novel focuses on the predatory practices of “hairy 9-foot high, 1000-pound sociopaths” called The Psychlos.

In the passing months, Romney and his people have apparently backpedaled yet further. A gander at Romney’s Facebook page now lists a dozen solid, not to say stolid, books with one novel—Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. What Hemingway described as the foundation of modern American literature takes its place on the Romney bookshelf alongside a variety of business leadership manuals and scary books about the evils that face us: jihadism and Thomas Friedman’s flat world. The weirdness factor seems to be tamped down for good (though I admit I tend to find leadership manuals highly weird, my being a middle level manager in an academic institution notwithstanding).

L. Ron Hubbard has gone the way of all flesh. But so, apparently, has the Bible. The Book of Mormon still has yet to show its face and I really think that some intrepid reporter needs to ask Mitt why that may be. Just what, exactly, is he hiding? Religion is represented by Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life. For many politicos, Warren is clearly much safer than the Bible. He is after all “a new evangelical,” which in our current political lexicon tends to mean an evangelical you could bring to fundraiser without worrying about whether you could offer him alcohol. Certainly Warren’s book can be brought up at a Republican cocktail party without raising eyebrows, something you can’t always say about the Bible. Depends on the cocktail party. I’m not sure that this says a lot for Rick Warren, or for how well people may be reading his book, but the image does go along with Romney’s well-coifed hair and perfectly massaged public image.

Last year I wrote a paper, still being revised, where I speculated a bit on the ways people used books to identify with others. We signal our desires, values, goals, interests through the kinds of books we read—or pretend to read—and how and where we read them. But what exactly is Mitt signaling with all this shelf-shuffling? Probably nothing, except that he wants to be president. I was prepared to write a few paragraphs on the peculiar choice of Huckleberry Finn as a boy who stood against the status quo, willing to give up his status and his standing—little as it was—to try and do the right thing. How different and odd that choice seemed given that Romney seemed mostly about status and the status quo. However, I suspect, frankly, that the leadership manuals are Romney’s real favorites and Huckleberry Finn is a book he remembers from his days as an undergraduate English major at BYU.

I actually think Mitt really likes Battlefield Earth, that this literary slip of the tongue was the real literary Mitt before he realized the weirdness quotient could do him in with the 1% of the electorate that actually cares about what he reads. I liked him better because of it. We all have our perverse reading pleasures. Things we get in to against our better natures. This devious pleasure-taking in the alternative world of literature is one of the great things literature affords us. I think of myself as a half-baked pacifist but I can’t get enough of war movies. Heaven forbid, but I sometimes prefer a vampire novel to the latest tome by Don Delillo or Philip Roth. I actually like the fact that Mitt Romney loves shlocky sci-fi novels that have been badly-written by a man a few pancakes short of a full stack. It suggests to me that Romney’s hair isn’t perfect when he gets out of bed in the morning, that maybe when he can’t sleep late at night he gets on a sci-fi chatroom and becomes Megalorg, laser scourge of the planet Kryl-9.

Or whatever.

Makes him human and interesting, a little like Hillary’s tears earlier today.

What I don’t like is that he seems to change his favorites at the first whiff of scandal. Too much like the guy in high school who always seemed to find a way to like whatever the cool kids liked. The guy held in contempt by even the people he calls friends.

Side bar: Hillary’s Tears: Human all too Human.

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I was pretty harsh on Hillary yesterday and today she goes and cries. I’m sure there’s a connection.

I’m fascinated by the media’s decision to say that she didn’t cry; her eyes merely filled with tears. (What? They are going to zoom in on her face and, if one of those brimming tears falls, suddenly she’s weak?? ) Somehow too, this made her miraculously human for the reporters in the room. I’m not mocking it. I felt it too. After 35 years of hard work it finally seemed like maybe it was just a little too much. Indeed, I was appalled that some in the media questioned whether the tears were pre-planned. Probably a reflex action from a campaign that has seemed buttoned down and machine-like from the beginning. I suspect she’ll get a five point bounce in the polls. Not to be cynical about her tears, but this is the kind of thing that was missing from her candidacy—the sense of spontaneous humanity that Obama pulls from the air with the greatest of ease.

In a just world, perhaps hard work would be all that matters. Not our world, I’m afraid.

Picking up on yesterday’s post, I’m also struck by the way this stuff is so thoroughly gendered. It is almost absolutely impossible to imagine Obama getting away with tears in reflecting on how hard it is to campaign. Or even the brink of tears. We could forgive Edwards if he got brimming eyes while talking about his wife’s cancer, and probably even if he watered up while talking about a young girl who couldn’t get a liver transplant. But if he started dripping over how hard it is to fight the fight, you can be sure his fight would be over. Hillary, of course, doesn’t have it easy; she’s expected to be hard and tough and a man among men, but she’s also got to be soft, got to reassure us that she hasn’t lost the woman within even while she’s going toe to toe with the bad guys. Tears do it for her.

Men would not be forgiven it, as Ed Muskie wasn’t. Men have to show their humanity in different ways. By playing bass guitar for a rock band at the local bar. By reading books that suggest depth but not weirdness. By hunting for geese in Iowa in below zero wind chill.

It’s hard on everyone.

Reading Entrails

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Can you tell anything about a person by what they read? On some level I guess I have to say yes, though I’ve become a bit more suspicious of the general principle and a bit more judicious in the application of any judgment than I used to be. I grew up in a religious tradition that assumed “garbage in, garbage out” was an axiological principle. Thus you absorbed and in some way became what you read. You are what you read, much as you are what you eat. As a result, reading matter was rigorously monitored and, in practice, severely restricted. “Bad books”—stuff that didn’t clearly support our Christian world view—were regularly described as various forms of poison or at least junk food. Things that would destroy the spiritual and psychological body. I wasn’t allowed to read J.D. Salinger while the rest of my junior class in high school gloried in the high literary profanity of Catcher in the Rye. I was morose, perhaps a sign I didn’t think the unwashed were so unwashed after all. You can read my slightly maudlin reminiscence of my youthful reading experiences in the introduction to my book, Recalling Religions (Tennessee 2001). Currently ranked 3,605,185 on Amazon.com! I excerpt just a bit below:

[In] my imagination, the story of this book’s motivations, interests, and point of view threads back to my first encounters with literature, which always seemed to be troublesome encounters with religion as well. My earliest memories of something that might be called “literature” had nothing to do with Twain or Fenimore Cooper or other authors of “boys’ books” that serious young readers were supposed to read. Indeed, I barely knew of their existence. What I did know was tangled with agonized parental debates—probably exaggerated in my memory—as to what was appropriate for a young boy from a holiness church to read. As late as eighth grade, I remember stading alone and wistful at my homeroom window watching my classmates board a bus for the local theater to see Robert Redford in The Great Gatsby. The chances of attending the film had been slim in the first place, since our church forbade movies along with dancing and drinking as contrary to holy living. Still, I had my hopes. School, combined with the responsibility my parents felt to help their smart children be successful in the world, had always been a slick oil with which I could slip through the narrowest confines of home. The Great Gatsby was a classic novel, or so I assured my parents that the teacher had assured me. Such appeals to the greatness of Western culture lost what little cachet they possessed when my mother discovered that in Fitzgerald’s novel a woman’s breast is torn off by a car.

My mother wanted her son seeing neither breasts nor violence. And so, when I pull my copy of The Great Gatsby off the shelf—a book I did not read until my years as an English major at a Christian College—it is this rather self-pitying memory of me at a window that I see most clearly. For the most part, the dead white male writers and their cinematic representations remained far too worldly for a young holiness boy threatened on every side by the corruption of suburban Oklahoma City.

For a while, education underway and then complete, I thought I had grown out of this attitude, but now I’m not so sure. At least I retained the sense that what you read somehow automatically signified something about who you were. The only difference now was that it had a more elitist and sophisticated cast. Heaven forbid that you indulged in pulp fiction, whether romance or mystery. The chosen people were signified by the ability to parse Faulkner or Morrison, or Eliot or Pound or Dickinson or Whitman. By disdaining books sold in grocery stores. Later, as I became deeply involved in ethnic studies, reading Faulkner, Eliot or Pound–for any reason other than showing their faulty white male-ness–was a profound index of intellectual morality, my own ineffable intellectual and political purity made evident in my reading Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Leslie Marmon Silko.This is not the same kind of religious discrimination that shaped my youth, but it did involve a kind of puritanical pulling up of the skirts from the unwashed of the world. Different unwashed, different skirts, same shrinking. Over time I’ve come to think that perhaps it’s not exactly what you read so much as how you read that’s important. Though, to be honest, the values I assign to the “how” are deeply influenced by the what. The average Harlequin romance or pulp western doesn’t bear up to the attentive, critical and imaginative reading that I think signifies something about a person’s mind and imagination. This kind of reading probably is encouraged by certain kinds of books and not by others, even though, having developed this way of reading, it can be applied almost anywhere on the fly, from Desperate Housewives to Coetzee or Lessing. Thus, my general sense that cultural studies is dependent on forms of reading associated with literature, even while literature itself is falling in to disrepair.

The real occasion for this rumination is that on a lark and in the spirit of the political season, I visited the facebook pages of the leading presidential candidates. Just to see, what these people are reading, and whether I could perform a literary psychopolitical biographical reading of their reading. It’s interesting, but I think I’ll stop for the moment and come back to the literary preferences of Barack, Hillary and Mitt in a later post tomorrow.