Hope y’all are having a good weekend. Whether you empathize in a literal or figurative sense with the concept of “blow[ing] big blunts on the way to brunch,” I hope that, on a poetic level, you can dig a man, one Danny Brown, who enjoys the possibilities of alliteration and assonance.
Peyton Manning’s 7 TD, 450-yard passing performance the other night leads me to believe that this NFL season will be one of the best yet, as the league’s talent level among both players and coaches has never been higher. That’s a statement that could get me hissed at by some old people who think the game peaked with Johnny Unitas or Dan Marino, but I stand by it. But the recent massive settlement the NFL reached with former players about the still-not-totally understood ramifications of football-related concussions reveals that all’s not well in the NFL, and watching the first game the other night was enough to make me queasy: heads snapping back and forth after guys took massive hits; knees bending the wrong way as three-hundred-pound men undercut other three-hundred-pound men; and subtler blows on every play that could be stripping these men of the ability to function later in life. Football is a nasty, awful sport that no kid of mine will play. And, of course, I’ll watch every game I can this year. Call me a hypocrite. It fits.
I have no time for people who hate on sports or act like they aren’t a significant part of what constitutes a culture. You’re allowed to be uninterested, but not dismissive. In general, Americans love sports, and in this way we’re not unlike people in other countries. However, our relationship with sports is uniquely screwed up. In a short and smart “Daily Comment” over at The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert thinks about the ramifications of the fact that sports play such a central role at many American high schools. She writes:
…I was watching my fourteen-year-old twins play soccer. It was the day before school began, but they had already been going to J.V. soccer practice two hours a day for nearly two weeks. I wondered what would have happened if their math teacher had tried to call them in two weeks before school started to hold two-hour drill sessions. My sons would have been livid, as would every other kid in their class. Perhaps even more significant, I suspect that parents would have complained. What was the math teacher doing, trying to ruin the kids’ summer? And why should they have to make a special trip to the high school so their kids could study trig identities?
As she makes clear, we miss the point when we worry about or praise the effect of playing sports on a kid’s academic performance. What we should be concerned about is the messages we send when we make sports seem like a stitch that holds the fabric of education together. It isn’t true. In other countries, people who are excellent at sports are paid from young ages to train and entertain. And other kids either throw pickup games together. In the U.S., kids are taught to do it for their schools. For free. Who cares if the schools they’re doing it for aren’t giving them rigorous educations? FOOTBALL!
Obviously, this problem continues on past high school into higher education, where it gets even smarmier. Major college football and basketball programs serve as de facto minor leagues for the NFL and NBA, and small college programs exist to entice alums to donate money. There’s nothing essential to the educational mission of a university about a football program sending hundreds of people on chartered flights to go give concussions to kids at another school. And yet today I’m sure I will find myself watching several college football games . Again, hypocrite. Meanwhile:
Poland is a surprising educational success story: in the course of less than a decade, the country raised students’ test scores from significantly below average for the developed world to significantly above it; Polish kids now outscore American kids in math and science, even though Poland spends, on average, less than half as much per student as the United States does. One of the most striking differences between the high school Tom attended in Gettysburg and the one he ends up at in Wroclaw is that the latter has no football team, or, for that matter, teams of any kind.
Nothing to see here, folks. Enjoy the games.
To all the hipsters in Brooklyn, Silver Lake, and the Mission. These dudes were and are still cooler than you’ll ever be. Happy Labor Day!
It’s disgusting in LA right now. We’re just a sweaty mess. Temps in the 90s, regionally inappropriate humidity, and not a breath of wind. At least the Santa Anas move the detritus of the city around. This past week has just cooked it deeper into the pavement. So here you go, folks. Hot music for hot weather. Eddie Murphy, Glenn Frey, Glenn Frey’s stubble, a vaguely androgynous lady playing a saxophone. As a kid I had this song on a Pocket Rocker cassette. I’d blast it (as loud as one could blast a Pocket Rocker) while eating Doritos and reading the World Book Encyclopedia. Thus academia. Stay cool, kids.
Seamus Heaney was the first famous poet I ever saw read, which was a serious stroke of luck, because the man’s careful, confident, mellow delivery (in that Northern Irish accent which some writers unfairly get to have) of his poems matched how great those texts are on the page. I was twenty, I bought Opened Ground (his first major Selected volume) that night, and I have creased the hell out of it ever since; there are few books I open more, and I imagine that goes for a lot of people.
Heaney’s best work is at once intensely, almost fanatically, taken by the grubby human round of love, heartbreak, death, and all that good personal stuff; rooted in a scholar’s grasp of other texts, whether we’re talking Greek bards, Modernist fiction, or Irish folklore; and tempered with a grown-up willingness to write contemporary history into one’s work without ignoring the personal. In terms of pure musical care and pleasure, his lyrics, which often obscure their structural rigor, are magnificent on a level that Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Auden, and maybe (maybe) a dozen other poets have attained. Heaney spent a half-century spitting fire, son.
He died yesterday at the age of 74. Over the next week or so the Anglophone world’s pop-highbrow outlets will publish tributes and assessments. Reading a couple will be enough. A few cheap contrarian blasts aside, these will correctly note that people will be reading the guy on Mars someday. But the encomiums will also be critically shallow (too many comparisons to Yeats, because DURR they were both Irish), politically tendentious (overemphasizing the admittedly great poems he wrote about The Troubles and ignoring texts set in California and elsewhere, or which aren’t geopolitically defined), and not especially interested in the words themselves so much as what cultural role he played as Famous Writer Who Taught At StanHarvardford.
The best way to send off a poet is to cite his poems. Since this probably shouldn’t be a 5-million-word post, I had to focus. It took a while to pick something, which ended up being “The Skunk,” from Field Work (1979), one of his best collections. Enjoy.
Up, black, striped and damasked like the chasuble
At a funeral Mass, the skunk’s tail
Paraded the skunk. Night after night
I expected her like a visitor.The refrigerator whinnied into silence.
My desk light softened beyond the verandah.
Small oranges loomed in the orange tree.
I began to be tense as a voyeur.After eleven years I was composing
Love-letters again, broaching the word ‘wife’
Like a stored cask, as if its slender vowel
Had mutated into the night earth and airOf California. The beautiful, useless
Tang of eucalyptus spelt your absence.
The aftermath of a mouthful of wine
Was like inhaling you off a cold pillow.And there she was, the intent and glamorous,
Ordinary, mysterious skunk,
Mythologized, demythologized,
Snuffing the boards five feet beyond me.It call came back to me last night, stirred
By the sootfall of your things at bedtime,
Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer
For the black plunge-line nightdress.
As is usually the case in these matters, I agree with everything Ryan wrote the other day about President Obama’s farcical plan to “win the future” by devising a federal rating system for colleges and universities. No doubt the President and his mandarins will be able to create a totally ungameable system that will not encourage waste, fraud, and abuse, the holy trinity of government cliches. University administrators will definitely see it as an opportunity to invest in high quality undergraduate education, right? What could possibly go wrong?
Obama’s doubling down on the kind of systematic education policies of the Bush administration is right up there on his list of follies with his failure to close Guantanamo and his fulsome embrace of the surveillance state. And, like Ryan, I say this as someone who voted for the guy twice, and who thinks he’s done some helpful things in the face of unprecedented opposition. But good grief, whenever he opens his mouth and talks about higher education, I cringe. Like Jonathan Chait, Obama appears to think universities should be like factories where “skills” are fastened onto students like lasers onto toy robots. I doubt his own college career at Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard bore much resemblance to the melange of MOOCs, huge classes taught by adjuncts, and standardized tests his new gold-plated system will inspire. We’re well on our way there already.
I know we’ve said it a thousand times, you guys, but if the politicians and pundits who profess to care about college and college students so much actually did, they would sit back and think about what made their own college experiences so helpful: difficult, small courses taught by secure faculty members; a focus on cultivating critical thinking skills by making students read and write about hard texts, some even written a long time ago; universities that actually thought of themselves as universities, not mini-hedge funds; and an administrative class that didn’t wag the dog, or at least that was staffed by people who cared about undergraduates.
The President should work on fixing our broken economy so that people who don’t actually have any interest in going to college don’t feel like they have to take out huge loans to enroll in online classes that are basically just cut and pasted from Wikipedia and a few out of date textbooks. If our choices in life are college or McDonald’s, we’re no superpower. Or he could start pressuring states to fix our criminally mismanaged K-12 systems. Or (here comes the pipe dream), he could start talking about the virtues of higher education being difficult and not for everyone. He could use the bully pulpit to make Plato, trigonometry, James Baldwin, coding, and Spanish, seem like things worth working hard to understand because they will help you lead a more interesting life and figure out a way to make decent money because you’re a well-rounded, savvy, likable person. He could talk about these things. But he won’t.
It’s way too hot here in Los Angeles this weekend. We live on the second floor, so our apartment is just gross today. Still, we have a marginally functional air conditioner, which makes staying in better than going out, giving me a lot of time to pore over Grantland‘s “Battle for the Best Song of the Millennium” feature. It’s an utterly pointless exercise, but they admit as much. Songs are given seeds and pitted against one another in an NCAA-style bracket, and readers vote to determine the “winner.” Some of the results have been disheartening. That “Stay Fly” by Three 6 Mafia was given a 15 seed, and that people with ears think “Drop It Like It’s Hot” is a better song by almost a 3 to 1 margin really shake my faith in humanity. But M83 and Phoenix upsetting Taylor Swift and Katy Perry, respectively, are reasons for hope. In any event, you should follow the action.
In a follow-up feature discussing the bubble songs that just missed the cut, the NIT songs, if you will, the always insightful Steven Hyden diagnoses what is wrong with the bracket’s composition: very few mid-major songs made the field. He writes:
Let’s acknowledge a few of the biases inherent in the creation of this bracket. There is no metal. There is only a smattering of country. Rock music is consistently relegated to the lowest seeds. Pretty much anything played on an acoustic stringed instrument is apparently verboten. Bands you might like — Spoon, the National, the Hold Steady, Queens of the Stone Age, the Flaming Lips, Modest Mouse, Drive-By Truckers, Bon Iver, Mastodon, Fucked Up, TV on the Radio, Muse — are nowhere to be found. This is a list where “great song” is synonymous with “rap and pop bangers that were popular on the radio once.” That doesn’t mean the bracket is terrible, necessarily — just that if you happen to be among the troglodytes for whom “rap and pop bangers that were popular on the radio once” does not constitute quality listening, sorry, you are left out.
He says this before recommending the Shins’ “New Slang,” a song that most of the folks who read this blog probably listened to on repeat in their college bedrooms while pining away after people who weren’t in fact as cool, smart, or attractive as they seemed. It’s the perfect song for that sort of thing, and as such deserved to be included in the field over something like Britney Spears’ “Toxic,” which is just another serviceable, and frankly boring, pop song. It’s like when a 19-12 Illinois team with a .500 record in Big Ten play gets invited to the tournament over a 26-6 Long Beach State squad from the Big West. Both teams are likely to lose in the first round, but I’d rather see how the team from the small conference and that runs an unorthodox system fares against a tough opponent. We’ve all watched enough middling Big Ten basketball and heard enough middling pop music.
So here’s a mid-major gem some of you might know, and some of you might not. It’s from 2011 and merits a Parental Advisory sticker for its adult content: lyrics acknowledging that there are some things in life you can’t come back from. Not kids’s stuff. Then again, Gillian Welch was no Mouseketeer.
A couple of days ago, President Obama rolled up to the University of Buffalo to do something that presidents love to do: unveil Big New Plans for education.
He wore a cool blue robe, he spoke in that soothing voice, the students cheered a lot, and everybody took smartphone pics to put on Instagram, but among teachers and scholars who actually work in higher ed, the response has been overwhelmingly negative, as it should be, because the plan is a salad of PowerPoint-ready ideas that will get praised by Thomas Friedman without doing much to help American students. In fact, Mr. Obama’s plan is likely to damage public colleges.
I don’t think Obama is a cynical man. If I did, I wouldn’t have voted for him twice. Further, he is right about many facts on the ground. College is too expensive; the student-loan system (which his administration has done little to improve long-term) is an economically debilitating scandal; graduation rates are too low, especially at two-year schools and non-flagship state universities; and it is unclear how to actually determine the fundamental utility of mass college education within the current cultural and institutional environment.
The problem is, Obama’s grand gesture fails to address the present situation’s core problems. Here are some of those.
1. Obama shows little sign of doing anything concrete about the main reason tuition is so high: the collapse of state support for university education. (Thanks, Governor Reagan!) He also fails to offer any solutions to the problem of administrative bloat or the fact that too many schools spend too much money on football stadiums and flowerbeds.
2. He has nothing to say about the appalling reliance on part-time instructors and enormous lecture-hall classes, especially at public schools. Both of these trends seriously degrade the quality of undergraduate instruction.
3. As one blogger has already pointed out, the fetish for Big Data behind Obama’s plan is similar to the reasoning that gave us the No Child Left Behind catastrophe. Rating scales are rating scales; how do you quantify the value of a seminar on Latin American history? Of an ethics class? Of a first-year writing course?
4. These Whither Higher Ed? debates are pointless if the public K-12 system keeps wheezing along, pumping out students with underdeveloped critical-thinking skills. Obama’s concern about graduation rates is worrisome, because it could pressure schools to pass undergraduates who aren’t ready to be in college. We already do plenty of that.
5. Again with the MOOCs! Teachers may despise them, but if you’re a powerful person whose daughters’ education will continue to consist of small classes taught by expert teachers at wealthy schools (just like your own was), this reality might be hard to see.
The awful irony is that while these grand, splashy efforts to rationalize the market within which consumers make choices about education make for great speeches and flatter America’s sense of itself as a meritocracy that just needs some technocratic intervention to get back on track, they are actually examples of small-bore, short-term, cowardly thinking. They don’t require us to consider our culture’s underlying values or the long-term budget picture in a debt-ridden nation with a dying middle class.
What would require real ambition, courage, and commitment is putting college students into intimate, challenging classes taught by full-time professionals who aren’t treated like drones on the Subway line. But that doesn’t sound cutting-edge and cool. It sounds downright old-fashioned. It would cost lots of money, money that could just as easily be spent on a new deanship or used to subsidize the F-22. It would ask Americans to stop freaking out about how college isn’t worth anything unless it consists of career prep that leads to a job three hours after graduation.
And it would mean our President, who often played a populist on TV in 2008 and 2012, mounting something besides a bus tour where he goes around scolding those bad colleges.
Now to go chill on my oceanfront property in Kansas while I await this renaissance.
The General Reader 