Posts by Tim

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Elaine Showalter just doesn’t know what she’s talking about:

Q. You say a literary history has to make judgments. Give us an example of whom you see as overrated, whom underrated?

Overrated: Gertrude Stein. She played an important role in the development of modernism, but she played it for men. And she is just not readable. She became viewed as a “sister”: That doesn’t sanctify her work. We can criticize it.

I look with a critical eye at contemporary poetry, too. There are a great many talented woman poets today, but I don’t think any of them measure up to a Sylvia Plath or Adrienne Rich. I don’t feel any male poets do either.

You know, if you’re willing to write off contemporary poetry by women, then yes, it’s a lot easier to say that Stein’s development of modernist literature was only for men. And I think it’s ridiculous for a professional literary critic, even an old, cantankerous one, to write off a major writer for not being “readable” and dismiss serious scholarship about her writing as motivated by “sisterhood.” Because what it does it allows you to take Stein down a peg without having to similarly discount Joyce, Beckett, Faulkner, Celan, or any of the “unreadable” men who took on the writing of language as powerfully as she did.

Gertrude Stein stands at the front of every major American literary movement of the 20th century (and plenty of the European ones too). And it’s not just the crazy experimental ones — the minimalist-realist school of Hemingway and Carver, the creative-critical modes of a lot of our best thinkers. If you want to be a serious reader of literature, you have got to grapple with Stein — at the very least with Tender Buttons and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which is as good and as readable a novel about literature as you’re ever going to find.

Matt Richtel whines:

Technology is rendering obsolete some classic narrative plot devices: missed connections, miscommunications, the inability to reach someone. Such gimmicks don

Ouch:

Several generations of college students learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk and White, and the result is a nation of educated people who know they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write “however” or “than me” or “was” or “which,” but can’t tell you why. The land of the free in the grip of The Elements of Style.

So I won’t be spending the month of April toasting 50 years of the overopinionated and underinformed little book that put so many people in this unhappy state of grammatical angst. I’ve spent too much of my scholarly life studying English grammar in a serious way. English syntax is a deep and interesting subject. It is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don’t-do-this prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can’t even tell when they’ve broken their own misbegotten rules.

That sounds like standard-issue Chronicle of Higher Ed blunderbussery, but the author, Geoffrey K. Pullum, knows what he’s talking about — he’s a linguist, and co-wrote The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language — and the bulk of the essay is a startlingly comprehensive, point-by-point, and erudite take-down of Strunk and White.

Read more…

I had a dream a few nights ago where I was defending my dissertation. Actually, it wasn’t clear if it was my dissertation defense or another job interview. Anyways, this is what I said. (Replace the word “Rehabilitated” with “Educated.”)

That night, I slept peacefully, content to finally have revealed the truth.

Teletwitter (or “Twittergraph”): A multiplatform twitter client that pounds out received tweets like an oldtimey telegraph/teletype machine. Morse code optional. Also sheds punctuation formats in telegram style & replaces period with STOP

Good-looking people enjoy what economists/sociologists call a “beauty premium.” They get paid more and are seen as better at their jobs than people of average attractiveness. It works for men and for women. Men, for example, get a premium for being taller, in shape, handsome, and with a nice head of hair.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. A new Israeli study suggests that male professors get a beauty bump, but female professors don’t. The researchers guess that this is rooted in a “contradiction between… role images and gender images”: somehow, female attractiveness is seen as incongruous with the paternal, traditional scholar/educator role of the professor, where male attractiveness isn’t — particularly, it seems, for female students. That’s the idea, anyways.

I don’t endorse this conclusion, but there’s definitely something going on here. A couple of things that came to my mind on reading this:

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Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings is so perceptive, it transcends any artifact of professional training and reveals a purity of attention to and sympathy with the human universe. Consider her long post on abusive relationships:

So imagine yourself, in love with someone, on your honeymoon or pregnant, when suddenly this guy just goes ballistic, often for very little reason, and hits you. For a lot of women, this is profoundly shocking and disorienting. There are things that are comprehensible parts of the world, even if they’re rare, like having your car stolen; and then there are things that are unexpected in a completely different sense, like having your car turn into an elephant before your eyes: things that make you wonder whether you’re completely

Bob Dylan on what intrigues him about Barack Obama:

He’s got an interesting background. He’s like a fictional character, but he’s real. First off, his mother was a Kansas girl. Never lived in Kansas though, but with deep roots. You know, like Kansas bloody Kansas. John Brown the insurrectionist. Jesse James and Quantrill. Bushwhackers, Guerillas. Wizard of Oz Kansas. I think Barack has Jefferson Davis back there in his ancestry someplace. And then his father. An African intellectual. Bantu, Masai, Griot type heritage — cattle raiders, lion killers. I mean it’s just so incongruous that these two people would meet and fall in love. You kind of get past that though. And then you’re into his story. Like an odyssey except in reverse.

Dylan obviously knows a thing or two about 1) being a fictional character and 2) being on an odyssey. He was drawn to Obama early after reading his memoir, Dreams From My Father. “His writing style hits you on more than one level. It makes you feel and think at the same time and that is hard to do. He says profoundly outrageous things. He’s looking at a shrunken head inside of a glass case in some museum with a bunch of other people and he’s wondering if any of these people realize that they could be looking at one of their ancestors.” This also sounds like Dylan to me.

(PS: Link to the Times of London interview fixed.)

More good stuff on the journalism beat. Nicolas Lemann’s “Paper Tigers” reviews new biographies of media moguls past and present, including a marvelous pivot between the flashy Hearst and Pulitzer to the double-breasted world of The Wall Street Journal’s Barney Kilgore:

Kilgore and his colleagues did figure out how to publish a home-and office-delivered daily newspaper nationally, something that was far more difficult to accomplish in the nineteen-forties and fifties than people who have grown up with the Internet can imagine. The Journal’s circulation, which was thirty-two thousand when Kilgore became its managing editor, in 1941, rose to just above a hundred and fifty thousand in 1950, eight hundred and twenty-five thousand in 1962, and almost a million when Kilgore died, of cancer, at the age of fifty-nine, in 1967.

When Kilgore started out at the Journal, reporters sometimes sold advertising, and Kilgore’s own early work as a reporter entailed experimentation with forms carried over from the nineteenth century, such as articles written as letters to an imaginary friend. By the time the Journal had come to full maturity, it had helped establish the journalistic norms of reportorial nonpartisanship and of independence from advertiser pressure. As Tofel observes, it was less a standard newspaper than a news-and-business magazine published daily on newsprint, closer to Fortune and Business Week than to either Hearst’s New York Journal or the Times, both of which were edited on the assumption that they would be their readers’ sole source of news.

Still, Kilgore did much more than develop the manners and mores of modern

Last week, Jack Shafer called out the idea that newspapers are essential to enlightened democracy as a big bunch of self-deluded hooey:

Until the current newspaper crisis, you rarely heard politicians or activists bleating about how important newspapers were to self-government. They mostly bitched about what awful failures newspapers were at uncovering vital data. The only group that holds a consistently high opinion of newspapers is newspaper people. They’re the ones who do the bragging about how newspapers enrich democracy by uncovering pollution, malfeasance in office, abuses of power, and unsafe consumer goods…

The insistence on coupling newspapering to democracy irritates me not just because it overstates the quality and urgency of most of the work done by newspapers but because it inflates the capacity of newspapers to make us better citizens, wiser voters, and more enlightened taxpayers. I love news on newsprint, believe me, I do. But I hate seeing newspapers reduced to a compulsory cheat sheet for democracy. All this lovey-dovey about how essential newspapers are to civic life and the political process makes me nostalgic for the days, not all that long ago, when everybody hated them.

Me, I think journalism is (among other things) good for democracy, and newspapers are a pretty good way to read things in print. So I took Shafer’s rant as half a useful corrective and half an enjoyable self-contained bit of contrarian crankiness.

But then I read this striking juxtaposition in LISNews, and I thought — hmm: maybe something less wholesome is going on with all this hymn-to-democracy talk:

At the end of last week, the New York Times Company threatened to close down the Boston Globe unless the employee unions agreed to $20 million in cuts. This comes on the heels of comments by NYT executive editor Bill Keller speaking to an audience at Stanford in which he stated “saving the New York Times now ranks with saving Darfur as a high-minded cause.” (He clarifies his statement to relate it to the relative level of interest in the survival of the Times, not as a human rights intervention. This doesn’t change the extraordinarily poor choice of comparative terms.)

Ouch.

See also Brian Tierney, publisher of the now-bankrupt Philadelphia Inquirer/Daily News, who made a whole lot of noise about the virtues of a locally-owned paper while taking on a ton of debt, extracting pound-of-flesh concessions from labor, and awarding himself raises and bonuses before it all kinda fell apart.

So to review:

1. Sometimes when people are going on-and-on about how virtuous and essential their industry is, they’re actually trying to Mickey-Finn you into letting them do whatever they want;
2. A lot of people who really like the idea of good local journalism and even really like newsprint in their hands really don’t like their local newspaper — either because of what they read (or don’t read) or because of what they know the paper is doing or has done, in many cases to people they know. We can’t lose sight of that.