Martin Heidegger wrote that “language speaks” (Die Sprache spricht), and that phrase ought to have meant that this blog should have been producing entries while I was attending to other things. While my appropriation of Heidegger for a lesson about blogs was wrong, Vicki Hearne is right in one of her poems that “time spreads from / The momentary hesitations.” The hesitation in question turned into a few months.
Book Expo 2009 - New York City - personal photo
During those months I did attend BookExpo America 2009, and it proved to be prospectively funereal, as if the gathering was a performance of the reverse of Maurice Blanchot’s The Book to Come (Le livre à venir – 1959).
Tina Brown attempted to persuade some major publishers that they will be undone by technology. Brown used the example of her move to The Daily Beast, a web venture that she indicated altered the way she thinks about journalism and about time, because electronic publishing runs at a different pace from print journalism, one of several pertinent phenomenological differences. The publishers would not engage directly with Brown’s analogy that book publishing faces a similar set of dire circumstances that have impacted newspapers. Several times she attempted to solicit commentary on the analogy, and each time panel members either ignored her or talked in nonchalant tones about tangential issues, such as how they had already positioned their companies to “monetize” new technological opportunities via agreements with Amazon over content for the Kindle. Brown wanted the panelists to engage in commentary about a vision of a world without
Tina Brown (right) - Creative Commons photo from Flickr
books on paper, a vision of a world that might not include an event like BookExpo. Eventually, Brown could not speak at a level to be heard (she arrived with what seemed to be the beginning of laryngitis), and some in the audience must have interpreted her diminishing voice as metaphorical. About half way through the session, Brown’s husband, Sir Harold Evans, took over the moderating duties for her.
BookExpo America itself, by numerous accounts, revealed the vulnerabilities of publishers. Some did not show up for the event; others, like Macmillan, retreated to cheaper, smaller spaces off the main exhibition floor, and almost all of the publishers had reduced their offerings of advanced copies of new and forthcoming books. Attendance was down significantly. The future of books will likely not include some of the companies that served as the engine for this year’s BookExpo, the conference that might be one of the last places for the public to witness CEOs in denial about their current capacities to avoid the same fate as newspapers, and in different ways, libraries.
What will happen when the CEOs of major publishing houses consider books as an accident of the proliferation of paper, when the energy of their thinking turns away from “monetization” and bottom lines, and turns toward books in a richer (non-lucre-centric) context, à laFriedrich Kittler’s Discourse Networks 1800/1900?
You might need to wait to see Food, Inc. on DVD. One theater in all of northern Texas is showing the documentary that will make you rethink your answer to the question: What’s happy about a Happy Meal?
Remember that the Texas beef industry sued Oprah and a vegetarian (Howard Lyman) for “beef defamation,” and lost. Maybe Food, Inc. will lead more people to adopt Oprah’s attitude. The documentary illustrates the numerous ways some large agribusinesses do not want the public seeing, learning about, or thinking about the food from which their profits come.
Yesterday’s BBC World Service radio broadcast included a segment about the Cramer/Stewart exchange as perceived by Megan McArdle, commentator for The Atlantic. During the segment, McArdle declared Cramer and CNBC innocent of even something as simple as violating the advice of P.G. Wodehouse: “It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.”
McArdle told the World (Service) to pin its blame buttons on the overalls of ordinary people, not on the designer lapels of the suits of anyone working at mortgage companies, advertising agencies, investment banks (McArdle used to work at one), the credit companies. And no one should be looking suspiciously at McArdle and others who work at the magazines, newspapers, and media conglomerates who were the hand puppets for the ventriloquists on Wall Street, Fleet Street, and Easy Street. McArdle says: “I think the biggest part of the blame does have to go, not to people like Jim Cramer, but to the vast swamp of ordinary Americans who thought that they had found a way to get something for free.” Rather than to declare McArdle incompetent as an etiologist — after all, she is someone who defines herself through upscale coffee –, we might benefit from attending to the evolutionary picture she offers, a picture that starts off in the “swamp of ordinary people” and progresses to Cramer and Stewart, whom she, by the end of her cameo on the BBC World Service, compares to a pig and a pig wrestler. This seems to be an evolutionary picture McArdle endorses, if we are to trust her comments at the end of her BBC cameo. From the swamp, I can see that she could make as good a pig as those she described on the BBC.
Flickr Creative Commons photograph
Traditionally, pigs have been associated with the rich, those not in the swamp. Pigs do not want to be like ordinary people in the McArdle-O’Rourke hypothesis. According to an O’Rourke article from 1997, pigs have at least two main fears, one of which is becoming like everyone else, one of us ordinary people, and the other of being eaten, a version of phagophobia (pronounce it without a long vowel in the first syllable, and enjoy the added meaning). O’Rourke displays his worship of capitalism and of the rich in his article, while also foregrounding the fear the pigs have of those who support heinous, un-American notions like equality (note that McArdle did not include herself in her judgment about the “vast swamp of ordinary Americans”):
Wealth brings great benefits to the world. Rich people are heroes. They don’t usually mean to be but that’s their moral problem, not ours. Most of the world now admits that free enterprise works. Economic liberty makes people rich. But in our residual collectivism and our infatuation with equality we keep trying to get rid of rich people.
There’s a joke President Reagan told about the way collectivist politicians treat rich people: A traveling salesman stays overnight with a farm family. When the family gathers to eat there’s a pig seated at the table. And the pig has three medals hanging around his neck and a peg leg. The salesman says, “Um, I see you have a pig having dinner with you.”
“Yes,” says the farmer. “That’s because he’s a very special pig. You see those medals around his neck? Well, the first medal is from when our youngest son fell in the pond, and he was drowning, and that pig swam out and saved his life. The second medal, that’s from when the barn caught fire and our little daughter was trapped in there and the pig ran inside, carried her out and saved her life. And the third medal, that’s from when our oldest boy was cornered in the stock yard by a mean bull, and that pig ran under the fence and bit the bull on the tail and saved the boy’s life.”
“Yes,” says the salesman, “I can see why you let that pig sit right at the table and have dinner with you. And I can see why you awarded him the medals. But how did he get the peg leg?”
“Well,” says, the farmer, “a pig like that–you don’t eat him all at once.”
The great Italiam theorist Antonio Gramsci did not have television available when he made the following comments in 1916 about newspapers, but his advice to people about newspapers works equally well for television:
Above all, the worker must resolutely reject any solidarity with a bourgeois newspaper. And he must always, always, always remember that the bourgeois newspaper (whatever its hue) is an instrument of struggle motivated by ideas and interests that are contrary to his. Everything that is published is influenced by one idea: that of serving the dominant class.
US network and cable news are an embarrassment, a children’s view of the world based upon geographical and historical ignorance delivered by people who look like Long Island realtors and whose opinions should be deemed equally suspect.
The answer to the question could include several names, but I choose one for purposes of this post: Fredric Jameson. A decade before the current global financial fiasco, Jameson published an essay called “Culture and Finance Capital” in Critical Inquiry, a journal that had far more clout in 1997 than it does now. Here are some salient passages to give the flavor of Jameson’s piece:
How can you have profit without production in the first place? Where does all this extreme speculation come from?
After the disappearance (or brutal downsizing) of heavy industry, the only thing that seemed to keep it [the U.S. economy] going (besides the two prodigious American industries of food and entertainment) was the stock market. How was this possible, and where did the money keep coming from?
Then there is the grimmer conjecture, in which the capital of an entire center or region abandons production altogether in order to seek maximization in nonproductive spaces, which as we have seen are those of speculation, the money market, and finance capital in general.
Reading the full article without noticing the date on it would leave many readers in an odd chronological space. For another twist on time, Jameson provides an excellent explanation of capitalism’s capacity, through its cultural products, to compress time, to open up new spaces of commercialization via a minimalist aesthetic. He mentions that film trailers are, in many instances, “all you need.” The longer narratives of the films themselves that are previewed end up serving a different purpose. A current development that would bolster Jameson’s reading of temporal condensation is Twitter, a microtrend that causes affluent intellectuals and technophiles to accept a bounded form of communication that insists on offering up its readers only fragments. It is an analysis of the fragment that occupies the last section of Jameson’s essay.
Migrant worker's family - Nipomo, California (1936)
Jameson’s 1997 essay concludes by informing the reader that we are being steered “unwittingly towards a crash.” The crash has come, and Wall Street is twittering. The Wall Street Journal probably now regrets that in its endorsement of Twitter (in October 2008) as a business tool it used a real estate agent as an example.
Twitter can be useful for keeping up with friends, but businesses are also finding ways to employ it. Daniel Rothamel, a real-estate agent from Palmyra, Va., follows feeds from more than 1,000 people, including neighbors and fellow real-estate professionals. The 27-year-old searches the site for people who indicate that they are seeking real-estate help in his area.
We trust that Mr. Rothamel now provides foreclosure help with his feeds.
1900, The U.S. Printing Co., Russell-Morgan Print, Cincinnati & New York-No. 4370
Worried about overworking yourself as an academic? Are you an administrator trying to come up with the next flavor of the month for distance education? We can all move to microlectures, as described in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Apparently, one of this state’s flagship schools has no problems accepting transfer credits from a school in New Mexico that has developed microlectures. The Dean at the school in New Mexico noticed, as some Deans tend to do as masters of tautology, that microlectures are short. “It’s like snapshots of learning.” If we adopt this model, classes could be 5-10 minutes long, demonstrating efficiencies that ought to cause the politicians seeking budgetary constrictions on higher education to lick this flavor. (For more on politicians, see paragraph six of one of Charlie Brooker’s columns.) Microlectures could be especially impressive in a History Department, where, say, a professor could provide two or three microlectures to cover the rise and fall of Rome. It would be like snapshots of history.
We are following the money in the latest scheme to make sure your children’s brains remain mush. Hulu knows what it is all about, and rubs our noses in it as entertainment (see below). In this case, television will not be the source of the mushmaking. It will be people with doctoral degrees. People from colleges of Education. People who ought to know better, but can think only of money, only of short-term gains.
At a meeting earlier this week, one of the Educationists grinned Joker-like to a group of people while announcing that a certain university would be offering courses at three dollars per credit hour under local community college tuition rates. A course that would cost three times as much (maybe more) at the university would be offered to high school students, who would pay the cheap rate for what is called dual credit in a Ponzi scheme for higher education. For this wildly reduced cost, your high school student will be taught by wildly underpaid adjuncts. The university will ask its adjunct faculty members, many of whom are already working two or more jobs to make a living wage, to travel to high schools and other off-campus sites to teach ambitious high school students in courses that will count both as college credit and as credit toward high school graduation. The presupposition goes something like this: a high school class can be made indistinguishable from a college course, or vice versa. What makes the high school class special is the dual credit tuition. As some of you suspected, college is the new high school.
Hugh Fenneyman: Uh, one moment, sir.
Ned Alleyn: Who are you?
Hugh Fenneyman: I’m, uh … I’m the money.
Ned Alleyn: Then you may remain so long as you remain silent.
The dialogue is from Shakespeare in Love, but were poetic justice at work, it would have come from Love’s Labour’s Lost, especially in light of today’s announcement from California that people will be ordered to take two days off each month without pay. The money does not remain silent, but wants to speak crudely, and colleges and universities, instead of resisting, a la Ned Alleyn, embrace the business model of operation. Administrators want to call students consumers, and to refer to education as a product to be marketed. Presidents, Deans, and Provosts gain their posts, in part, because of their devotion to money as fundraisers. Advertisements for leaders in higher education scream out not for scholars, but for entrepreneurs.
Kirp traces the downsizing of the full-time faculty the past few decades (replaced by adjuncts who do not make a living wage in many instances), while more and more public institutions bring in as many students as possible to guarantee an income as state funding constricts year after year. This enormous shift away from tenure-track jobs means, among other things, that fewer people below the level of Dean are protected when speaking out against the trends described above, when asking the money to shut its pie hole while Shakespeare goes on.
The Sundance Film Festival points us to We Live in Public, a documentary about Josh Harris that will likely interest many bloggers who use their web presence in a way described by the film’s title. Living in public was apparently part of the reason that Mr. Harris had what he described as a “controlled nervous breakdown.”
The cat at the end of the trailer deserves some attention, since the documentary’s subject, who introduced cameras into almost every part of his life, addresses the cat as if the cat’s presence is intrusive. You might want to think about the trailer’s cat in relation to the opening comments in an essay called “Derrida’s Cat (Who Am I?)” that you can find at the bottom of this page.
The Keystone Cops who have taken charge of higher education in Austin, Texas have added a new adventure to their ongoing comedy series. You will not be surprised to learn that they still do not know the answer to the question posed by George W. Bush during his first presidential run: “Is our children learning?”
The people in Austin are clever people gone wrong, and they think the road to answering Bush’s question is paved with standards. Hence, we now have a multi-colored booklet called “Texas College Readiness Standards.” The booklet, an Aristotelian nightmare, shows not a single student talking on a cell phone, or drinking beer, or sitting in front of a computer looking at Facebook. It shows instead numerous photographs of young people with books, more than once with armfuls of books. In short, the booklet has no plans to touch down in reality.
The standards you encounter in the booklet are unsurprising, like reading a manual about how to build a pyramid and discovering that it says something about locating and moving about large, rectangular-shaped stones.
As part of the effort to involve more cops in the comedy, I and about one hundred other people in higher education from across Texas were brought to Austin on the taxpayers’ dime last week, only to find out that these standards resist questioning. Even though the booklet clearly labels the items standards, Marty Hougen, Ph.D. and Project Manager, told the assembled group of educators concerned about English standards that the booklet offered not minimal standards but exemplary standards, and that no one responsible for this project on standards imagined the students needing to meet all of the standards. She never said how many exemplary standards students would have to meet to be deemed ready (not exemplary) for college. Clearly, you do not want the standards to be obvious, because then you cannot have meetings and lunches and break-out sessions about them. It takes time to appreciate the slipperiness of the standards, developed by so-called vertical teams, though I am guessing the members sat down some of the time during the drafting of the standards.
Rather than a point by point examination of the booklet’s folly, you might benefit more by descriptions of a couple of quintessential moments at the Austin meeting that will confirm that if your child is a lump of ignorance today, and you send that child to a public school in Texas, well, at the other end of that schooling years from now, you will have a lump of ignorance topped with a graduation cap and a pretty tassel.
Moment #1: Marty Hougen, Ph.D., on several occasions during the group proceedings needs to gain the audience’s attention, and begins yelling, “Five, four, three, two,” and then stops her grammar-schoolish countdown, expecting that people will, like employees on a television show, heed to a recognized formula that indicates the show is about to go live again. You see, the part involving the audience members talking with one another is the dead, unimportant section of the show. Marty Hougen, Ph.D., and her friends at The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and at The Meadows Center are being videotaped for posterity. They are on stage with the lights shining at them, lights so bright that the stars on the stage report frequently that they cannot see the audience. Indeed. We are to be both unheard and unseen.
Moment #2: This moment meshes with being unheard, for Dr. Robert Wimpelberg, Dean of the College of Education at the University of Houston, his school’s location screaming out the point that he is not part of the Austin-centric stars on the stage, dares to ask a series of pertinent questions at the end of the day’s sessions. He wants to know why our stars are introducing standards on top of a previous set of standards (called TEKS — don’t worry, if you are unfamiliar with TEKS, the state wants you to be lost in Acronymville) when international experts have reported that the countries far above the U.S. (and as of this writing that still includes Texas) in global educational rankings employ very few standards, but spend a great deal of time ensuring that the students have a deep understanding of the material connected to those standards. On other occasions, the Austin-centric crowd might have slipped some hemlock into Dr. Wimpelberg’s state-provided iced tea at lunch, but Marty Hougen, Ph.D., after witnessing her colleagues on stage fumbling about with a series of incoherent responses to Dr. Wimpelberg’s questions, declares that the entire session has run past the time printed on the agenda. She thanks everyone for attending, and shuts down the meeting. Applause. Lights out.
Internet Librarian 2007 concluded with a disguise, with Liz Lawley attired as her avatar, Maleficent, in World of Warcraft™.The audience noticed the disguise, but not what it disguised. The close of the conference coincided with Halloween, making the couture choice less suspicious, a trick instead of a treat.
Those in the front row of the auditorium Twittered about it. Bloggers took photographs with the latest cell phone technologies – the iPhone had just appeared, but apparently the content of Lawley’s talk went unnoticed.Professor Lawley returns for Internet Librarian 2008, and I worry about the librarians who listen to Professor Lawley, the ones kind enough to tolerate non-librarians at their conference.I am one of those outsiders, a non-librarian, though I am a Libran.
Dark things were displayed for the audience last year during Lawley’s presentation, though my point is a general one about a genre of presentations dealing with virtual worlds. It might be difficult to refashion the military milieu of a year ago when Lawley spoke, a time when the war in Iraq was arguably a more prominent feature in the American consciousness.Last year, many citizens took note of the quotidian killings of civilians and soldiers in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, Liz Lawley began with what she described as two “live demonstrations,” both of which involved the killing of a creature, one in Second Life™, the other in World of Warcraft™, and no one in the audience blinked. Why was most of the audience in a good humor about someone peddling death during a time of war? Librarians are highly educated people, and surely some must have rejected Lawley’s war of all against all.
In loving and proud tones, Lawley described her special involvement in World of Warcraft™, and how she embraced the competitive, agonistic nature of the game, but she made no explicit connection to the World of Warcraft™ called the Iraq war, or the so-called War on Terror.How could she not have been aware of that?Oh — her presentation fell under the category of gaming.Virtual worlds are not real worlds.I can almost sense some readers wanting at this point to yell out to me: “Get real!”Exactly.
Lawley’s barely disguised presentation did not turn on some difficult philosophical distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal, á la Kant.I believe such words are banned at Internet Librarian anyway.Somehow presentations about virtual worlds receive immunity from questions about those worlds’ blatant connections to the real world (which includes the virtual), and to the real ideological implications of the activities in virtual worlds, most of those activities conforming to the most crass forms of capitalism. (Own an island in Second Life?Buy a new outfit this week with your Linden dollars?Sell your avatar on eBay?)Yet, presenters about Second Life™, World of Warcraft™, and other virtual worlds gain the real world benefits from adding an item to their CVs, convincing their institutions to use travel funds to attend a conference, and gaining professional cachet for presenting at Internet Librarian.Talking about virtual games and worlds involves necessarily the non-virtual world, and non-virtual lucre.
At Internet Librarian, the presenters at sessions on gaming technologies, virtual worlds, and the like, emphasize routinely the importance of play.Who can blame the librarians for wanting a touch of fun in their lives?Some of them sound as if they are not only doing jobs Americans don’t want to do, but also jobs librarians don’t want to do.When given the choice between looking up a 13-digit ISBN, and opening up a can of pwnage on an opponent in some game world, anyone can guess which sounds more fun. Many of the presenters at such sessions also claim on behalf of others that without an integration of this sense of play into the workplace called the institutional library, patrons (a.k.a. customers, users, guests, or smart ALACS– Advocates of Libraries Attached to Coffee Shops) will go elsewhere.
Little attention is paid to groups that would be unable to afford the latest toys mentioned at Internet Librarian’s “buzz sessions,” to the laboring – rather than playing – classes who do not have time to Twitter away, to constituencies that find the idea of Linden dollars preposterous.Internet Librarian could be about questioning and discussing the larger, and sometimes esoteric, forces that impact libraries and learning. It seems too often to be about celebrating technology at any cost, though you can drink the Kool Aid for free.
Attendees learn rapidly at IL conferences that the ranking system for presenters talking about their wares, widgets, and web sites has basically only three categories:
1. Cool
2. Really cool
3. Really, really cool
One of the presenters on free social videoware used all three categories, but as a social networker, she is not, cannot be, alone. Ergo, one supposes that the categories to avoid like the pox are tedious and lame, really tedious and lame, and the apex of annoyance: really, really tedious and lame. The category one wants to find oneself under would be the splendid combinatorial realm of really, really cool and fun. Some antonyms to really, really cool and fun used at IL are: “so last year,” “web 1.0-ish,” and “traditional.”
Outsiders to the conference might have imagined librarians with copious vocabularies that would not depend on the repetition of an amorphous adverb such as “really.” However, that easy locution signals to everyone the point of many of the presentations at IL. The point is to be at the top of the heap. That is the most cool location.
Outside the Portola Hotel in the Plaza
Steve Cohen, substituting for someone who could not present, proclaimed with glee that he always makes sure that he has more “friends” in Facebook than his wife. Mary Ellen Bates established her really, really cool credentials by mentioning a search feature that allows her to determine “who is being blogged about the most,” and that is the person to whom she pays attention. Greg Schwartz told his audience how proud he is that a recent Google search revealed that among the top five listings for “Greg Schwartz,” four had to do with the Greg Schwartz at IL, or what he called his “real persona,” though I believe that phrase qualifies as an oxymoron.
The impulse to attach the most value to what is at the top, to the person with the most friends, to the company with the biggest share of “x,” reinforces the ideology at play throughout IL. Despite all the talk about social networking, establishing communities, enlarging the technological conversation, the driving forces involve agonistic, capitalistic models that value the person or thing that has emerged on top. Egalitarian notions are neither cool, nor really cool. In fact, for those who do not adopt the model at play throughout the conference, some social stigmatizing results. For instance, at Steve Cohen’s session, initially advertised as, of course, “Best of Resource Shelf,” because no one would want anything other than the best, Mr. Cohen ended up in an ugly exchange with a woman who reacted out loud to Mr. Cohen’s assertion, “Attorneys are nice people.” Among other things, Mr. Cohen works for lawyers. A microsecond after Mr. Cohen’s assertion about the character of all attorneys, a woman, who indicated she also worked for lawyers, shouted, “No they’re not.” To negate anything the lively and deliberately fun Mr. Cohen offers constitutes uncoolness, and Mr. Cohen felt obliged to reassert his claim. The audience was spared an extended version of this dialogue:
SC: Attorneys are nice.
W: No they’re not.
SC: Yes they are.
W: No they’re not.
SC: Well, I think they are.
W: Well, I think you’re wrong.
SC: Well, I think your mother….
Had things ended there in a suspended state of equal disagreement, the exchange might not have been memorable. However, Mr. Cohen could not help himself, and enlarged his public dispute with the woman later by projecting both a slide of a job site for those looking for work at law firms in New York and an unwarranted conclusion from the woman’s negation of Mr. Cohen’s axiom that all attorneys are nice. Mr. Cohen said that the web site for jobs at law firms would be useful for the woman who contradicted him, because she was, according to Mr. Cohen, clearly unhappy at her current workplace. Many in the audience laughed. I could not see in what spirit the woman took Mr. Cohen’s taunt, but Mr. Cohen came out on top. He had the microphone, the control of the technology, and the laughter. Doubtless he slept last night in a state of coolness.
Danny Sullivan told the audience for his keynote that bribery is fine. It is all part of marketing, moving to the top of the food chain. It is part of the accepted model. Everyone does it, usually behind closed doors, but Mr. Sullivan says we can all clear our consciences. The alternative is too terrifying. In his example, the horror would overtake you if you found yourself as RC Cola in the race to be at the top of Soda Mountain. Mr. Sullivan proclaimed boldy: “I’d rather be Coke.” More about this later today. I am off to a Coke-less lunch.
Back to Danny Sullivan’s keynote. Mr. Sullivan announced a new, personal asceticism. He told the group that he would not waste his time on companies that might fold and disappear in the near future. Mr. Sullivan wants to associate only with the winners. He thinks Google will be bruised by the current financial crisis, yet it will somehow find a way, amidst its billions in profits, to soldier on, and to vanquish competitors. I thought that I could sense the relief in the room, given the collective investment among librarians in the verb “to Google.” Mr. Sullivan assured the audience that nothing was on the horizon “to Enron” Google, and possibly cause a precious verb to become defunct.
Contrast Mr. Sullivan’s view with a comment by Bruce Lawson about the competition among companies that offer internet browsers: “If there’s no dominant leader, everybody wins.” This sounds progressive, until you read that Mr. Lawson also views capitalism, and corporate competition, as a “war.”
Alvarado Lobby of the Portola Hotel
Mr. Sullivan’s examples in his keynote address were telling, as have been the ones that have been uttered by presenters the past few days. Mr. Sullivan brought out his iPhone during his presentation to make some points about software that he uses to find restaurants. Many presenters assume that the population has ready access to iPhones. Not even one per cent of the world’s population has an iPhone. The iPhone happens to be popular among many people involved with high-priced technology, and others who want to show that they are on the first wave of technological trends, i.e., at least some of the audience at IL.
Yesterday, Mary Ellen Bates used some examples in her presentation about searches on the internet, and her examples involved ATMs and Starbucks. These examples tell an ideological story that needs more attention at IL. When Mr. Sullivan says Craigslist is “lame,” he means that it is provincial in comparison to the kinds of things to which he and his audience have grown accustomed, but it also reveals a clever rhetorical move that generates a sophisticated simultaneity. Call it class un/consciousness. That is, a presenter can mention an item that generates class recognition (class consciousness), while also not foregrounding the audience’s own privileged status. The speaker does not want the audience to recall the billions of human beings who will never drink at Starbucks, use an iPhone, or be able to afford the monthly charges for an ISP (class unconsciousness). How easy is it to forget that only five years ago, a $34,000 per year salary put someone in the top 5% of all wage earners on the planet? We at IL are quite the fortunate group.
From another blogger at IL, Robin Hastings, I learned that there was a session devoted to librarians who devoted extra energies to help what the blogger called “underserved” communities. We all know the code embedded in that adjective. The librarians at that particular session also worked with people in prison, and the prisoners’ families. I hope that Mr. Sullivan was in the audience of that session.
At the Law Library 2.0 session yesterday, Camille Reynolds, Liana Juliano, Connie Crosby, and Jaye Lapachet collectively told a story heard many times at IL over the past couple of years, a version of the “I’m-a-maverick” tale that has been in the news the past few months. The speakers’ presupposition is that the audience, for the most part, has also blazed the maverick’s trail, sometimes unsuccessfully. In the maverick’s narrative, the maverick fights virtuously, but does not always win, and those losses up the ante on the maverick’s virtue.
Mary as Librarian
The generic version of this neverending story opens by painting a picture of the evil opposition. For IL audiences, the world of Mordor consists of the servants of the Eye of Microsoft, or those opposed to open-source-anything, or anyone who does not “get it” (translation: a person indifferent toward the world of 1.0, 2.0, or any of the zeroes to follow) or those who are traditional (picture Mary as the librarian in the Potterville segment of It’s a Wonderful Life). The maverick tells the Overlords of Mordor that the library must move with the times, reject the Eye of Microsoft, and embrace wikis, screencasting, blogs, and the like. Resistance results. (Picture Golem from Lord of the Rings holding the installation CDs of Microsoft Office 2007, and murmuring “precious” over them.) The mavericks see it as their duty to shove a magical pointed stick into the Eye of Microsoft, and bring freedom to their co-workers, whom the mavericks know have secret desires to blog, to use all kinds of open source products, to do cartwheels with their avatars on a beach in Second Life.
Usually, the audience loves these stories of struggle, the mavericks as saviors of some previously mundane world, a.k.a., the workplace. You can hear the same story from people at libraries who have introduced a new open source CMS, from librarians who have brought screencasting to the reference department of their workplace, from mavericks who have convinced their retrograde administrators to spend money on digital cameras and podcasting equipment. It’s the Us vs. Them story that wants no truck with nuance, grey areas, or compromise. The narrators want the members of the audience to shake their fists in unison at Mordor. The room fills with the spirit of maverickicity, and one presenter rises and shouts:
A day may come, when the courage of librarians fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of Fellowship, but it is not this day! An hour of wolves and shattered shields when the age of 2.0 comes crashing down! But it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good earth, I bid you, stand, librarians of the West!
Time for me to recant partially my criticisms of Liz Lawley. This year at her IL 2008 talk, she repudiated her immersion in virtual worlds, and embraced what she called “the tangible.” She confessed that she even stopped playing World of Warcraft for six weeks, while she retuned to primary reality. (With global capitalism – yes, that reality – about to intervene in virtual worlds like Second Life, Lawly showed her prescience.)
Martin Heidegger
Lawley foregrounded the visceral pleasures of certain bits of technology, e.g., the iPhone. “People want to touch it,” she said. She lingered in several instances over knitting, and how “handmade” gifts and products are superior. The introduction of knitting allowed her to explore some existential notions that struck me as pointers in the right direction, but her analysis is still at a relatively early stage, and suffers a bit, because of her own personal investment and entanglement in knitting.
Madame Defarge
The entire talk owed an unspoken debt to Martin Heidegger’s work in Being and Time on what he calls the “ready-to-hand,” Zuhanden in Heidegger’s German. Hand-made objects, for Heidegger, help to orient us to the world, to remind us of the larger context in which we live. For more on this, see the work of Jeff Malpas. Lawley’s energies are devoted to fashioning a bearable lightness of being that would probably be burdened by an introduction of philosophy into her now annual performance at Internet Librarian. Still, it would seem a professional obligation for her to attribute many of the points she made to the source, even if it happened to be a kind of unconscious borrowing of material.
Unlike Lawley, Heidegger was no fan of technology, and the appeal to the “ready-to-hand” includes Heidegger’s valorization of a kind of bucolic life that reinforced his warnings about technology. In other words, Heidegger would have been comfortable with knitting. His living arrangements at Todtnauberg in the Black Forest were no accident, and Lawley likely knows how black (ideologically) that forest was for Heidegger.
While this year’s presentation by Lawley deserves more thought, I look forward to Professor Lawley’s acknowledgment of, and engagement with, the Heideggerian background, and the ideological dangers therein (Project Muse subscription necessary to follow the link). Those dangers are encapsulated in a literary figure from what Lawley might call the virtual side of the history of knitting, viz., Madame Defarge.
It must have been 2000 or 2001 when Cathal O’Searcaigh visited Georgia Southern University’s Center for Irish Studies, and I heard him recommend Mark Doty’s book Heaven’s Coast (1996). When an Irish writer tells an audience that another writer has a way with language, the audience ought to take note, and I did. If John Muir suggested to me that I visit a certain forest, then, if possible, I would start walking toward that forest. After attending to the recommendation, I purchased a paperback copy of Doty’s memoir, and began to appreciate what O’Searcaigh was pointing to in Doty’s work. Here is a brief excerpt from the memoir that might convey an achievement in tone that marks few writers:
Then there’s the notion of the seals as merman, of the creature which embodies the two worlds, unlike us, who live firmly in one medium, despite our brief visits to the other. To be of the coast, a mer-being, is to partake of the liminal, that watery zone of possibility where one thing becomes another, where the rules of one world are suspended as we enter into the next. The coast is the shifting zone of change and transformation. A coast is not a line really but a borderland, site of continual conversation between elements which transforms both.
Now I will read Fire to Fire, and I anticipate other people, not just proud Texans, will pick up Doty’s works, and find themselves transformed by the language.
After Mark Doty won the National Book Award, I went off to the local used bookstore to see what might be available, and there I found a memoir entitled Firebird. I started reading, and the first item had to do with a trip MD made to England, a trip during which he would find out whether he won a poetry prize. MD explains what the anticipatory atmosphere was like for him:
I am behaving as though I am a calm and more-or-less balanced adult, but in fact I’m reduced to something distinctly adolescent by the whole thing. Of course I’d like to win the prize, but can’t quite let myself imagine that; I don’t like to imagine the alternative either. Both options make my self-doubt flare, since to win would seem the strangest of flukes, an honor I couldn’t possibly merit, and to lose would confirm my own restless doubts. This is the terrible dilemma of prizes: we cannot believe we deserve them, and we cannot quite believe we don’t.
That pronoun shift from the “I” to “we” does not bother me as it might in another circumstance. That bit of universalization sounds as if it could withstand a Kantian analysis.
Cicero ranks as an essential figure in the history of rhetoric. Almost all of us who teach rhetoric as a subject in institutions of higher education deal with hothouse rhetoric, a rhetoric divorced from the ugliness of the street, the political backrooms, the alleys where persuasion fails and faces are smashed, appendages snapped. Most teachers of rhetoric, as well as many historians, look past Cicero’s murders, his status as a Roman millionaire, his compromises to keep his own head, his Greenblattian self-fashionings, his allegiances to the ruling class, his slippery claims that he cannot be held accountable for what he says as a lawyer, as in his “Defense of Aulus Cluentius Habitus.” Most of us adopt the picture of Cicero as Cicero painted it. It would do some of us well, before thinking that calling someone a “new Cicero” is a compliment, to read more about Cicero.
From a rhetorical perspective, Obama has proven to be troublesome for people who want to praise his oratory. It cannot be oratory lumped into the same category as his former associate Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Obama cannot afford (yet?) Wright’s kind of theater. Obama probably does not want to betray his own sobriety, his evenness, his sophrosyne, in contrast to something like Howard Dean’s singular (perceived) outburst (the so-called “Dean scream”) that caused people to abandon Dean in the 2004 election. Obama’s sophrosyne has been noted by several prominent comedians who have found Obama inaccessible for the stuff of humor. This might have larger, more interesting implications in light of Anne Carson’s essay “The Gender of Sound.” Here is a relevant passage from Carson’s conclusion: “Lately I have begun to question the Greek word sophrosyne. I wonder about this concept of self-control and whether it really is, as the Greeks believed, an answer to most questions of human goodness and dilemmas of civility. I wonder if there might not be another idea of human order than repression, another notion of human virtue than self-control….”
Charlotte Higgins was kind enough to respond to my comments about her post on Barack Obama as the new Cicero. She suggested that I do some reading, a book about which I am ignorant, but I will find the Matthew Fox book on Cicero and adjust my views accordingly. As part of my appreciation for Charlotte Higgins taking the time to provide edification, I have added a link to her blog on this site. Not every blogger pays attention to the readers, and someone working for a major newspaper has far less time for interaction than most. Maybe I can help to bring to her blog an extra reader or two from this side of the pond.
Who will defend capitalism now?We have no visual record from the major news media of the greed, incompetence, and lies that brought Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers to public attention.No reporter or blogger captured a lasting image of the federal government’s saving the fanny of Fannie Mae. Now, we have a man on Long Island dead, trampled by Black Friday shoppers.That image many people can conjure, since the shopping stampedes appear on news stations every Black Friday, predictable as coverage of the running of the bulls in Pamploma.
People have been hurt in previous runnings of the consumers, and it was simple to anticipate that more severe harm could easily result from the manufactured hysteria over Black Friday sales.People engage in potentially lethal aggression at the prospect of grabbing the first Tickle Me Elmo.Next year, the capitalist catalyst might be a Billious Barbie doll or Callous Ken.The object of manufactured hysteria is almost irrelevant, and almost necessarily impractical. What was the Wal-Mart in Long Island offering at 5 a.m. that could justify the consumers’ behavior?Expect some commentators will find ways to rationalize Jdimytai Damour’s death.
Journalists, for the most part, cling to a 19th-century view of capitalism in which the deaths of servants or workers can be praised when those terminations further the capitalist cause and its celebrities.Thus, the amazing headline in the London Times: “Bombay: Wealthy Owe Lives to Hotel’s Cummerbund Heroes.” The headline’s article accepts a calculus that turns master/servant relationships into a Jeeves-takes-a-bullet-for-Wooster narrative.The following description sounds as if drawn from the London Times of the Victorian period: “The Taj Mahal had been renowned for its sublime service for decades. Few of the hotel’s wealthy patrons would have predicted, however, that the men and women who delivered their meals and carried their bags – people earning a fraction of the sums of those they served – would display such courage….”And did the surviving business tycoons leave the dead hotel workers a tip for such sublime service?
From Richard Winchell's Flickr stream
The article names some of the rich and famous, but the workers end up as a generalized pronoun: “Everything about them was just so, from the impressive moustaches of the impeccably dressed porters who opened guests’ car doors, to the perfectly pressed waistcoats of the bartenders and to the silk saris of the female concierge staff.” Apparently, sublime service would have included dying without wrinkling or bloodying one’s work uniform.It is just so with the proponents of capitalism who will never wonder why the business tycoons and wealthy guests of the Taj Mahal failed to throw their bodies in front of bullets intended for the hotel’s staff. Mr. Damour’s death will likely be forgotten in order to highlight the sales statistics for Black Friday, numbers produced, in part, by the Long Island stampeders accomplishing their mission of shopping at any cost.Who can forget the lesson of 2001 that the most important thing upon which to focus during times of great national tragedy is shopping?
Earlier this year, our politicians preached that socialism is a self-evident evil. Those speeches preceded the bailout of AIG and Citigroup. Those bailouts undermine the rhetoric of free market capitalism, causing media pundits and economists to deny what looks like an unprecedented socialist moment on the grounds that we (no longer the us versus them discourse) are in the midst of an unprecedented moment when markets will no longer be free, but quite expensive.
Maybe this constitutes an unprecedented moment, a day the earth stands still, to reconsider our relationship to capitalism, to stop the running of the consumers, to cease rationalizations for saving the rich and the corrupt of Wall Street, Fleet Street, and Mumbai via indebting the masses for the rest of their lives, and to end tales of virtue involving the poor taking bullets for the rich.Let Bertie take his own bullet.
P.S. Peter Goodman wrote the same day that the piece above was sent off to another venue that did not want it. Goodman must have sensed too that a cultural shift might have been possible, and I wish that his piece had received wider attention.
This video about Shalom Auslander’s latest book captures a bleakness that spirals downward, despite the humor, in a way that might leave some at a loss as to how to right themselves, level off. For a holiday juxtaposition, you have below a bit of earthly heaven from Rogers and Astaire. Auslander might appreciate that Rogers and Astaire had a small hellish episode amidst the earthly heaven.
Clotaire Rapaille is the French person who convinced insecure Americans to buy larger and larger SUVs, and accomplished that during a time when some Americans despised all things French to the point that we had to endure “Freedom Fries.” Rapaille possesses a long track record of tapping into the techniques that demonstrate markets do not work the way so many these days want to endorse, a simple version of supply and demand exchanges in which consumers’ needs determine the products businesses produce — not the other way around. Rapaille has disproven that simple view several times, with several different products, helping businesses to sell to Americans (and others) Eau de Snake Oil in a way that causes the consumers to imagine they need the snake oil.
Here in Texas, we have plenty of mammoth vehicles driven by those insecure Americans Rapaille told the Detroit automakers they could rely upon to express their psychological fragility by paying excessive sums for wholly impractical, elephantine vehicles. The delicious undertone of Rapaille’s laughter can be heard in the defensive rationalizations provided by the people who succumbed to the sales pitch. They feel safer. They have more room for the spoiled children. Some have tax breaks from the government for being suckered into the sale. It’s no accident that another French person, Pierre L’Enfant, designed Washington D.C. on behalf of the first President of the United States. During the “Freedom Fries” episode, some Americans forgot about the French people, such as L’Enfant, who fought alongside other members of Washington’s army in the cause of American independence. Such details complicate a simple story that depicts Americans as always in the driver’s seat.
Creative Commons Flickr photograph
As the automakers plead their case for maintaining the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed, the President issues public statements about wanting to rescue the market rather than the workers of Chrysler, Ford, and GM. The President worries about “the psychology of the markets,” as if, thanks to Rapaille and his rhetorical victims, the markets were not already in a psychological state one must describe as pathological. At least one piece of evidence for the pathology manifested itself in late September when a journalist wanted to know how the government decided that $700 billion for various Wall Street businesses would be the correct number to bring about an ecomonic panacea, and the response was: “It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”
The First Verse has been reviewed in several places, and has recommendations from several well-known figures, including Colm Toibin. Toibin’s blurb on the dust jacket attempts to encapsulate the book as one about how easily the young are led astray. Toibin and I did not read the same book.
Though I cannot remember how the book crossed my path, I do recall that it seemed an excellent candidate as a text for the Literary Criticism graduate class that I begin teaching in a few weeks. The person recommending the book highlighted McCrea’s ability to harness the attraction of literature, the ways in which literature captures people, or opens doors into seemingly mysterious and compelling worlds. Since esotericism (textual versions of divination) often becomes thematic early on in literary theory courses, McCrea’s book seemed like a natural. Had to make my way through it, before placing it on the list of required books for the course.
The random readings and interpretations of those readings that occupy the main character, Niall, serve the novel well, and most readers will notice that McCrea’s acquaintaince with the setting seems connected to the author’s own academic and literary journey, a journey in its early stages. Since this is the first verse in more than one sense for McCrea, readers can look forward to more of his writing. In fact, McCrea has a piece about Dublin in this month’s Independent. While I have become a fan, the book will not become part of the reading for the graduate course for a few reasons, the first of which is that the esotericism functions as a driving force in the novel, and then brakes abruptly at the end, at a point when further rumination about the general issue of interpretation would have suited the main character’s intense curiosity as well as the novel’s seeming insistence on hermeneutics. My guess is that the length of the novel could be justified as an outgrowth of the author’s personal experiences. Yet, had the text been reduced by about a third, it might have sustained the dynamism that exists in the first third, when people and things come alive.
Part of the power of the book shows up in McCrea’s willingness to sustain the main character’s appreciation for the quotidian in the face of the temptation to dive completely into the wild world of esotericism. Stanley Cavell’s work on the interactions of the ordinary and the extraordinary comes to mind (e.g. Cavell’s reading of a Hoffmann tale that involves an automaton).
Is there a McCrea fan club on the web? If not, someone should start one.
Holiday reading will resume now with Netherland, a book that several people have praised. Netherland does not seem a candidate for the graduate course’s reading list, so the search continues.
We are at the other end of the spectrum from “Funes the Memorious,” Borges’ famous story. After the fiasco of A Million Little Pieces, we now have a memoir about the Holocaust that has been misrepresented. Not that the people involved failed to remember accurately. They admit to acting consciously to deceive, offering further testimony to the world’s attachment to something other than radical relativism. The movie based on the faked memoir, An Angel at the Fence, will proceed, and the filmmakers plan simply to recategorize the work as fiction, perhaps in an unconscious tribute to Baron von Munchhausen, while the author of deception tells people that giving the profits from the film to Holocaust survivor charities will suffice as penance for his forced confession. Mr. Rosenblat and Roma Radzicki offer no objection to the blood money the film will generate. To be fair, Oprah will need to haul Herman Rosenblat in front of the cameras again, and do for Mr. Rosenblat what she did for James Frey after uncovering Mr. Frey’s scam. Oprah could wheel out a Mark Twain quotation on the show: “I sometimes think it were even better and safer not to lie at all than to lie injudiciously. An awkward, unscientific lie is often as ineffectual as the truth.”
As university budgets across North America contract, expect your local administrators — President, Provost, Dean, and even the occasional Chair — to revert to verbiage worthy of feral children, and to protect their own interests and jobs first, while sacrificing others in the name of (to use the appropriate student vernacular here) whatever. We can start low and then look high, but it is all beslobbered with reactionary childishness that wants to look like thoughtfulness.
Daumier, "Third Class Coach"
The low sample surfaced locally, a nearby Provost quoted in U.S. News about how beneficial it can be to unbother oneself about hiring people full-time with benefits, and to turn instead to adjunct faculty who can be paid precious little ($2,000 US per course in many instances at the Provost’s home institution), and the adjuncts receive no health benefits. In the highlighted quotation, adjuncts in Nursing receive apparently $3,000 per course. Must be so-called market forces at work that raise those adjuncts’ salaries 33% higher than the salaries of their colleagues in the humanities. At $2,000 US per course, an adjunct in the non-Nursing sector who is considered full-time could make over the course of two semesters (considered a full year in academic life, since summer teaching is under a separate budget), $16,000, a full $2,000+ below a living wage. Texas Woman’s University has its second task force underway to address the matter of inadequate compensation for adjunct faculty members, but the current task force has been told by the person quoted in U.S. News not to expect any extra funding for adjuncts, but to look toward giving adjunct faculty members other forms of alleged compensation, such as improving their working conditions by offering access to computers and offices, as if those are amenities. Provost Clayton has not expressed a wish to give up any of her own salary to ameliorate the problem.
Texas Woman’s University Provost Kay Clayton says raising the share of part-time faculty about 4 percentage points to 44 percent in the past five years might be helping her students. For instance, by hiring moonlighting nurses for about $3,000 per course to teach some nursing classes, the school helped keep this year’s tuition at $6,500 a year and, Clayton says, provided better teachers. “That is a real benefit to the students, because they are practitioners and bring in a wealth of experience,” she says.
What are those benefits to students whose instructors are nurses trying to make ends meet by teaching classes in their spare time from their full-time jobs as nurses, in the hours after a hard day’s work tending to patients? Doubtless those instructors will be at their peak performance during the “moonlighting” hours. Remember that the tuition for courses taught by moonlighters is exactly the same as that taught by full-time faculty making living wages with benefits, and whose career choice was to teach the students. It is their profession, not a secondary job to which they bring a “wealth of experience” from another job. One reason it is currently difficult to find Nursing faculty to cover all the Nursing courses is that academic salaries cannot compete with what nurses can achieve financially at hospitals and elsewhere. In many cases at universities, it’s all about the Benjamins.
The high example (though low in other senses) comes our way from Yale University. President Richard Levin sent a holiday message to all employees at Yale in December. The letter houses a cornucopia of rhetorical devices used by academic administrators, the best of which falls under the category of sigetics, the rhetoric of silence, a strategy that allows David Swensen and his colleagues in the Yale Investments Office to keep their jobs and this year’s bonuses, even though they are directly responsible for Yale having lost about one-quarter of its endowment. Imagine losing $4 billion of your company’s money and not only maintaining your job, but also being rewarded for the actions that precipitated those losses. Still, someone must pay, and President Levin’s Dear John letter goes out to the people who will be abandoned financially. Here’s the item, far down in the letter, framed in terms of something connected to non-faculty staff, because the people who will pay for David Swensen’s speculations are low in the ranks of concern at academic institutions:
We will reduce 2009-10 budgets by an amount equal to 5% of the salaries and benefits of all non-faculty staff.
Not even a thought that, say, a small university-wide reduction in the salaries of all those making $75,000 US a year or more at Yale, the Corporation, might produce enough savings to prevent such a reduction. No one at the top wants to open that discussion, or to talk to the people directly. The letter tells its readers to send via e-mail suggestions about budgetary savings. Applying this technological distance is another typical rhetorical strategy for academic administrators, a version of the dreaded task force. My guess is that those messages to suggestions@yale.edu will be at least as interesting as President Levin’s letter. Readers here ought to feel free to use that e-mail address, and to communicate to President Levin a suggestion or two, but be sure to compose your missive after watching There Will Be Blood.
This is not breaking news, but since I did not know it until this week, it was news for me. Mark Doty has been participating in a lively discussion about poetry over at Slate. That is cheering.
What causes chagrin on this topic is that Texas is losing Mr. Doty. If you follow his blog (see the links section of this site), Mr. Doty charts his move eastward and northward. For those of you who are his new neighbors, we Texans expect you to treat Mr. Doty well.
If you do not know why Flann O’Brien is important to this blog, you will. If you have not read Flann O’Brien’s writings, you will. If you need to be lured into the experience, today is your lucky day. Here is a piece from O’Brien about a trip to the dentist:
In the art of dentistry we have a permanent threat to the integrity, harmony and indivisibility of the human entity. One has only to recall momentarily the works of Aristophanes to realise it. It is quite wrong to think, much less to talk, about a tooth being ‘extracted’. The operation is by no means so simple. On the contrary, here we have complexity that embraces the human, terrestrial and occult continua. In reality the whole body is amputated from the tooth. The operation is thus as major as may be. Where a living person is deprived by gas or drugs of self-competence and consciousness and then divided into two parts by means of steel instruments (as happens in a simple ‘extraction’), it will be evident that there has been violent and irrevocable interference with the personal integrity of the patient and thus proportionately with the balance of the entire universe, of which he is for himself the sole perceptor, sensuant and interpreter. Always remember that life and living is simply a relationship between the cosmos and the human cosmiculate.
If your old root canals did not appreciate that, you surely were brought to attention by the word “cosmiculate.” That word alone is worth the price of admission. The price of admission in another sense is rather inexpensive — $4.95 US at Half Price Books, or if you pay in Euros, the store would owe you money, given current exchange rates.
This entry is in honor of my nephew-in-law, Matt.
Photograph available by kind permission of Janet Attard
A colleague has written from University of Tennesse at Martin that the administration there plans to consolidate departments in order to save approximately $400,000. These kinds of amalgamations will take place more frequently as the economic problems deepen. The solution that fails to occur first to many administrators is the abolition of administrators to save money. The New York Times article presents data indicating that is where the trimming should occur, since administration has grown over the years at the expense of instruction. Call this trimming data-driven management.
The great Italiam theorist Antonio Gramsci did not have television available when he made the following comments in 1916 about newspapers, but his
The dialogue is from 
The people in Austin are clever people gone wrong, and they think the road to answering Bush’s question is paved with standards. Hence, we now have a multi-colored booklet called 
stars are introducing standards on top of a previous set of standards (called TEKS — don’t worry, if you are unfamiliar with TEKS, the state wants you to be lost in Acronymville) when international experts have reported that the countries far above the U.S. (and as of this writing that still includes Texas) in global educational rankings employ very few standards, but spend a great deal of time ensuring that the students have a deep understanding of the material connected to those standards. On other occasions, the Austin-centric crowd might have slipped some hemlock into Dr. Wimpelberg’s state-provided iced tea at lunch, but Marty Hougen, Ph.D., after witnessing her colleagues on stage fumbling about with a series of incoherent responses to Dr. Wimpelberg’s questions, declares that the entire session has run past the time printed on the agenda. She thanks everyone for attending, and shuts down the meeting. Applause. Lights out.
Though I cannot remember how the book crossed my path, I do recall that it seemed an excellent candidate as a text for the Literary Criticism graduate class that I begin teaching in a few weeks. The person recommending the book highlighted McCrea’s ability to harness the attraction of literature, the ways in which literature captures people, or opens doors into seemingly mysterious and compelling worlds. Since esotericism (textual versions of divination) often becomes thematic early on in literary theory courses, McCrea’s book seemed like a natural. Had to make my way through it, before placing it on the list of required books for the course.
The high example (though low in other senses) comes our way from Yale University. President Richard Levin sent a holiday 
