Author Archives: Dan

Strange Bedfellows

Posted on by under education, in the news, Life of the Mind, The Moronic Inferno, the polis

As Ryan has pointed out, it’s hard for us to not comment a lot about the state of higher education because we both have a vested interest in seeing it not completely destroy itself. It’s a topic that makes for strange bedfellows and challenges the political categories we all too easily apply to ourselves and others. For instance, Bob Samuels is the president of UC-AFT (the union that represents non-tenured faculty in the University of California system), while Alan Jacobs teaches at Baylor University and writes for The American Conservative. By conventional metrics, one is a progressive and one is a traditionalist Christian conservative, but both have written a lot about how the push toward eliminating small classes in favor of MOOCs is a terrible idea for students. Both Samuels and Jacobs are educational conservationists. These aren’t people opposed to making meaningful changes to the way universities are run (everyone but administrators admit that administrative bloat must be reversed), but rather people who want to conserve what higher education does best:  introducing students to new ideas and people through lectures, personal instruction, debates, and meaningful face-to-face social interaction. Having to share space with someone and their ideas is a really powerful thing. As anyone who reads internet comment boards knows, the web specializes in letting us (and training us to) talk past one another because the other person isn’t actually there to respond. This is one of the reasons why segregation, whether written into the law, de facto, by choice, or via technology is so awful: it prevents us from doing the messy work of having to argue with others, defend our own positions, and think on the fly. There is no lag-time in real life, and no substitute for having to look someone in the eye and treat him as a real, valid human being, even as he says things that challenge your sense of how the world works. That’s an education, and the kind that will benefit one in almost any career.

Similarly, the folks running down traditional educational models and/or pimping MOOCmania are also an eclectic bunch. From Ivy League-educated “libertarians,” to the virtuous conservative Bill Bennett, to the mostly Democratic mandarins of Silicon Valley, the crew trying to tell us how traditional models of education are outdated is hard to pin down politically. So, to borrow a term from one of our favorites here at TRG, Evgeny Morozov, these folks can best be understood as “solutionists.” They see a problem (and as Ryan and I have made clear, there are tons of problems in higher ed that have nothing to do with MOOCs), and their first instinct is to blow things up. They also love blaming professors, as if professors run universities (or even university systems) anymore. There are reformers who aren’t “solutionists,” like Vance Fried, and while I don’t agree with some of his ideas (consolidating all of the humanities into one major is dumb, and he seemingly thinks teaching 5 writing-intensive classes is the same as teaching 5 sections of algebra), I at least get the sense that he understands that education is about much more than the transmission of information. People of good faith can disagree about how to fix things, but they must sincerely be interested in fixing things in order for the conversations to be productive.

The latest smart take from the “hey, maybe we should be a bit more critical of MOOCs and the people who are pushing them” camp comes from Scott L. Newstok, a professor at Rhodes College. His basic thesis is so simple and obvious that I am amazed that it hadn’t occurred to me:

The corporate world recognizes the virtues of proximity in its own human resource management. Witness, for example, Yahoo’s recent decision to eliminate telecommuting and require employees to be present in the office. CEO Marissa Mayer’s memo reads as a mini-manifesto for close learning:

“To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.”

Why do boards of directors still go through the effort of convening in person? Why, in spite of all the fantasies about “working from anywhere,” are “creative classes” still concentrating in proximity to one another: the entertainment industry in LA, information technology in the Bay Area, financial capital in New York City? The powerful and the wealthy are well aware that computers can accelerate the exchange of information, and facilitate low-level “training.” But not the development of knowledge, much less wisdom.

Newstok’s entire piece is worth reading, as is Alan Jacobs’ response, wherein he reminds us to spend less time listening to the solutionists, and more time observing them:

If physical presence is as important in education as the technologists’s actions say it is, then perhaps their energies are misapplied. Instead of looking for ways to eliminate or bypass brick-and-mortar schools — and, not incidentally, making a hefty profit for themselves in doing so — maybe they should bend their considerable intellectual powers to the more challenging, less destructive, and far more meaningful challenge of making college education more affordable for everyone who can truly benefit from it.

And lest you think that conservationists are simply trying to prop up traditional learning models in order to line their own pockets, and are therefore no different from the Silicon Valley folks trying to tear these models down, keep this in mind: 75% of people teaching at American universities aren’t tenure-track, will never make salaries comparable to what people in the tech sector make at mid-career, and could actually probably make a lot more money by jumping on the MOOC train now.

On Jim Daniels and Writing

Posted on by under Authors, Book Recommendations, Pooms/Poetry, Reviews

Jim Daniels’s poetry was recommended to me about a decade ago, but I’ve only just now gotten around to reading it. This is one of the nasty side effects of getting an advanced degree in literature; you become not only one kind of writer, but one kind of reader. Or, rather, you become a reader reading to write academic criticism, not to produce (or really even enjoy) art. You’re told you must present at conferences and roundtables (some of the least useful exercises known to man) simply because you must. You’re also encouraged to publish tortured and genuflective articles no one will read in outlets no one has heard of. And be very, very careful about who you tell that you’d rather write poetry than play video games. Trust me.

But now I’m done with all of that, and I’m once again, to borrow a phrase from a future colleague, Mike Bunn, “reading like a writer.” Jim Daniels’s Show and Tell: New and Selected Poems (Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2003) is the kind of book of poetry that 21-year-old me would have gone nuts over, and I can see why the person who recommended it then did so. Like a lot of creative writing students at a certain extremely crunchy Northern California university, I was obsessed with the working class narratives of Raymond Carver, Philip Levine, and Richard Hugo. The poems I was turning out under their influence weren’t metrical, didn’t rhyme, and told vague stories about love lost (I was in a happy relationship), hard work (I had worked shitty jobs, but not in factories), and bars (these I knew). The stuff I read was awesome, the stuff I wrote wasn’t. Jim Daniels’s work is in the tradition of the poets I admired then and continue to admire today, but reading his poetry ten years later makes me realize that the things that attract us to good writing at various stages in our lives (particularly in youth) aren’t necessarily what actually makes the writing good.

If you would have asked me then why Carver, Levine, and Hugo appealed to me, I probably would have said something about narrative and mood. And indeed, these are important elements of all poems I tend to enjoy. Poetry that lacks any sort of narrative arc bores the shit out of me, but then again I think that William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” is a dripping with narrative (the word “red” is the denouement). So, like a lot of things then, what constitutes a narrative is subjective. What reading Jim Daniels now reveals is that I was and am drawn to poetry that uses narrative in a distinct way: to work through but never resolve the frustration that comes from knowing that our interpretations of and reactions to joy and sorrow are both unique to the point of being painfully inexpressible (something Joan Didion calls “the burden of ‘home’”) and also really, really generic.

In one of the many portraits in Show and Tell, Daniels writes of “Crazy Eddy,” a “drunk/garbage man with a bad temper,”:

We didn’t know then
he picked up trash for a living
and drank twelve beers a night.
Maybe all he wanted was a green lawn
and a peaceful drunk.

The simplicity of both the phrasing and the sentiment here makes the critique all the more potent: we don’t know much about what others desire, what motivates them, and the assumptions we make usually lead us further from understanding. I can’t tell you how many times I have tried to express this idea in verse only to miss it, usually by a lot. Or take these couplets from “Shedding the Vestments”:

I was inside her for the first time
when her parents pulled up the driveway.

Her father’s brain was the size of a small stone
dug up by an idiot pig. He greeted me cordially.

This is one way to react to this event, and one particularly common to young men: smugness. However, there’s another reaction that’s equally plausible: pants-shitting panic. By giving us one possibility in such a dense couplet, the poem almost forces us to imagine its inverse as well, thus making the quality of the speaker’s youthful hubris even more stunning. As you might be able to imagine, this doesn’t bode well for the speaker, and when it all falls apart and the girl gets impregnated by someone else, the final line of the poem (“go to hell”) leaves us understanding how smugness and terror can both lead us to loneliness.

There are other great poems in Daniels’s collection, including “Time, Temperature,” which is about how the racial animus of a community can infect even people who consciously try to place themselves above it. Fittingly, this poem is dedicated to James Baldwin, and it is easily the most ambitious and cinematic in the collection. As with any book of poetry though, there are some duds in here. I am not a huge fan of the “[Insert Color] Jesus” poems, or the meandering “Niagra Falls,” as these start to veer into the realm of bad impressionistic art—all impressions, no firm connections or boundaries to give them even a loose shape. But duds aside, Show and Tell is well worth your time. Personally, I am happy to have more of that to devote to reading like a writer again.

Can You Fly, Higher Ed?

Posted on by under education, Other Critics, sports

We’ve written a lot in this space about both higher education and sports, but there’s a great new article up at the Chronicle that brings the two together in a pretty unexpected way. No, I am not talking about the amazing story of Ohio State President and football booster extraordinaire Gordon Gee’s rapid fall from semi-respectability. Any chump who spends $64,000 of public funds on bow ties (and bow-tie-related goodies) deserves this kind of humiliation. Pieces that highlight the arrogance and corruption of athletic departments at many of America’s top universities (usually aided by college administrators with alumni dollar signs for irises) are a dime a gross. What’s less talked about is how the academic division of labor at most universities tends to replicate itself in athletic departments.

Meet Elwyn McRoy, the visiting adjunct lecturer of college basketball coaches. After I read Brad Wolverton’s account of McRoy’s journey up to this point, I realized that I hadn’t thought much about all those guys on the sidelines or benches who aren’t head coaches. Like the thousands of freshly minted (or long since chewed up) PhD’s who wander the country lusting after the tenure that they’ll never get, coaches without high-level connections drift back and forth across the country, and sometimes across the globe, chasing a ring that only appears to be made of brass. More often than not it’s thin air. The few that get lucky and latch onto the right coattails at the right time might become head coaches, but even this is tenuous, as small schools that have no business demanding that their teams compete with the big boys think that they are just the right coaching staff away from being the next Gonzaga basketball or Boise State football. And so most coaches just drift.

Like a lot of adjuncts, McRoy gets tastes of success, even the big time, that keep him coming back for more when it’s probably in his best interest (to say nothing of the best interest of his family) to give up the ghost. I won’t recap Wolverton’s whole piece because I think you should read it for yourself. I do have to quibble with one thing he writes though:

The NCAA limits Division I programs to three assistant coaches, which means that there are roughly 1,000 positions at the top level. Few professions have such a scarcity of jobs, and with so little staying power.

The rest of higher education is hardly so volatile. The history department doesn’t turn over every two years, nor do librarians. Even presidents, whose positions are some of the most transient, usually get five or 10 years to prove themselves.

A guy writing a piece in the Chronicle should know that the rest of higher education is this volatile. His own publication reports that 70% of the people teaching at American universities could be in different positions next year. While some schools treat their non-tenure-track faculty better than others do (I’ve been lucky to work at such places), the fact remains that there are thousands of Elwyn McRoy’s who teach math, composition, French, and physics. A lot of them do it at five schools at a time (if they’re lucky to find that many gigs), not knowing if any of those schools will rehire them at the end of the term. And most of their students have no idea that the people standing in front of them aren’t well compensated members of academia every bit a part of their campuses as department chairs. So while I completely sympathize with McRoy, and wish him luck at his latest gig, his story should make us think about what can be done to fix all facets of higher education before it races off the cliff it’s rapidly approaching.

Hate, Hate, Hate

Posted on by under guides and nudges, in the news, mainly rap music

This is just a quick one: Carl Wilson (no, not that Carl Wilson) has penned a wonderful (and at times wonderfully pretentious) essay about why it is okay to hate certain bands (insert any type of artist here) even when you know that they are pretty good and have a lot in common with other bands (or artists) you like. We all have these irrational hatreds. Wilson’s advice? Give in to the Dark Side…

Frances Ha

Posted on by under guides and nudges, Other Critics, Visual

I’m not going to pretend that I’m some OG Noah Baumbach fan. The first time someone told me about Kicking and Screaming, I assumed she was talking about the youth soccer movie starring Will Farrell. I believe I even spent the next day thinking that said youth soccer film was some secret gem that I needed to see ASAP. I am glad the internet was able to clear that up for me. So no, I don’t have anything particularly deep to say about how Baumbach’s latest film, Frances Ha, represents an organic outgrowth of his previous work. I’ve liked the three of his films that I’ve seen, but none as much as Frances Ha.

It’s hard for me to describe why this movie is so good. It’s not, as many first-year composition students would say, “really relatable” (cue sound of me crying). I’ve never lived in Brooklyn or Manhattan, and have never been close enough with folks who do to go out and have a typical alt experience. I went to New York once for a wedding during a hurricane, and that’s it. And while I know what it’s like to be broke as hell at 27 while chasing some ultimately pointless dream (Frances wants to be a touring dancer, perhaps the only thing more unlikely than becoming an English professor), I didn’t see much of myself in Frances.

And maybe that’s just it. Baumbach and Greta Gerwig (his co-writer, lover, and the star of the film) have produced a character study of someone who reminds me of bits and pieces of folks I’ve met in my life without her being reduced to a “type.” Frances feels very much like her own complete person, which is rare in both the film and real worlds. I certainly am not the first person to say this, but Gerwig’s Frances works for the same reasons Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall and Jason Schwartzman’s Max Fischer do: she reads as authentic, so you find yourself interested in what happens to her, even if it isn’t much. I suppose that’s another way of saying that I’d watch Frances do just about anything, and since the film gives us a chance to do just that, I loved it.

There are many other reasons to see the film beyond the central character. It’s one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in a long time. It’s shot well. There are a couple great music cues (but not too many). The film’s secondary characters all serve purposes realized by the actors’ performances. And it’s weirdly about what the financial crisis has done to people of my generation (cogent film analysis from the National Review?!?!).

But finally it all comes back to Frances, who Greta Gerwig just nails. I suppose the best praise I can give this movie is that I plan on buying a physical copy of it when it becomes available because I want re-watch it a lot. I can’t remember the last movie I said that about.

Saturday Links

Posted on by under Authors, guides and nudges, mainly rap music, sports

It’s Saturday and the weather here in LA is weird, so here are some ways to avoid having to go outside if you simply can’t bear it.

  • This short but sweet piece by Christopher Hitchens about the tyranny of waiters insisting on pouring your wine for you in restaurants is always worth revisiting.
  • Every year Bill Simmons ranks the top 50 assets in the NBA using a simple, but sensible metric: how likely the player’s current team would be to trade him. This year’s list is broken up into three installments, so prepare to lose  at least half an hour of your life.
  • Are you convinced that there’s no way someone could make a movie that successfully twins a meditation on the cosmos with testimonials about the atrocities committed by the Pinochet regime? You’re wrong. Nostalgia for the Light is a gorgeous documentary about just that, and it’s streaming on Netflix. I swear, it won’t make you feel nearly as bad as you’re assuming it will.
  • Kathryn Schulz has written a piece worth reading on why she hates The Great Gatsby. Not Luhrmann’s trite film version, mind you, but Fitzgerald’s novel. Obviously, I don’t agree with her assessment of the novel’s value. Virtually all of the reasons she gives for disliking the book are the precise reasons I love it. If there’s one excerpt from this article that sums up Schulz’s failure to actually engage the book on its own terms, it’s this one: “As readers, we revel in the glamorous dissipation of the rich, and then we revel in the cheap satisfaction of seeing them fall. At no point are we made to feel uncomfortable about either pleasure, let alone their conjunction. At no point are we given cause, or room, to feel complicit.” If you don’t feel uncomfortable or complicit (as Nick does) when reading about a culture that encourages people to use others up like natural resources, you have led a very moral, cloistered life that includes never having seen a rap video. Kudos to you for that, Ms. Schulz.

Gatsby? What Gatsby?

Posted on by under American Masculinity, Authors, Visual

What Gatsby indeed, Carey Mulligan. As you could probably tell from my post about Fitzgerald’s ledger, I am a little bit nutty for the bard of the Jazz Age. Perhaps because I live in LA, or just because I feel prematurely old, I identify with the washed-up Hollywood Scott more the cocky young playboy of the early 1920’s, but it goes without saying that the work Fitzgerald produced from 1920 to 1934 was a whole hell of a lot better than what he wrote once he relocated to the west coast. Fitzgerald’s best work came out during a stretch when Americans were churning out poetry and fiction that changed literature forever. Here’s a partial list:

  • Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (192o)
  • T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1921-1922)
  • Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923)
  • Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925)
  • Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House (1925)
  • Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926)
  • Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1926)
  • Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
  • William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929)
  • Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not (1929)
  • Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930)
  • Faulkner’s Sanctuary (1931)
  • Faulkner’s Light in August (1932)

There was a bunch of other amazing stuff written by Americans during this period, and obviously my own prejudices inform the above list (I’ll cut a man who tries to tell me Faulkner didn’t pwn 1929-1936). But missing from this list is the best novel ever written by an American: The Great Gatsby. Smart people disagree with me about this, and that’s fine. If you want to say Absalom, Absalom! is the tops, I won’t argue. If you try to tell me Moby Dick is, I’ll take you seriously. But come on. The Great Gatsby does more in 200 pages than most writers accomplish in entire careers. Just read this:

For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes. All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the Beale Street Blues while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the gray tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor.

Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed. And all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately — and the decision must be made by some force — of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality — that was close at hand.

That force took shape in the middle of spring with the arrival of Tom Buchanan. There was a wholesome bulkiness about his person and his position, and Daisy was flattered. Doubtless there was a certain struggle and a certain relief. The letter reached Gatsby while he was still at Oxford.

I have probably taught The Great Gatsby more than any other novel in my teaching career, and every time I try to impress upon my students just how little the novel has to do with love. It’s a story about horny, ambitious young people who use other people like drugs. For Gatsby, Daisy is merely a necessary part of the dream of himself he made up as he rowed out to Dan Cody’s yacht. For Tom, she’s a necessary part of the maintenance of his position in the Social Darwinist order. And for Daisy, Gatsby, Tom, and the other half dozen men are just ways to feel desired, secure, and valuable.  The image of the “beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids” on Daisy’s floor captures it all, and I think that image might be my favorite in all of American literature.

The less that can be said of Baz Luhrmann’s new adaptation, the better. Others have already panned it, so I will simply add this: while Luhrmann’s Gatsby predictably features some nice party scenes, it doesn’t think enough of its viewers to let them figure out what the “beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids” mean. The film is like Sparknotes come to life, as the characters mouth awful bits of invented dialogue that tell us what we should be taking away from each scene. And don’t get me started on Nick. In Luhrmann and Tobey Maguire’s incapable hands, Nick Carraway is transformed from one of the great mysteries of American literature into a simpering, sycophantic pud. Read or reread the book instead of seeing this triviality.