March 12
The Valley of Elah as our Heart of Darkness
It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn’t he said he wanted only justice? But I couldn’t. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark—too dark altogether. . . .”
-Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
What’s great about The Valley of Elah is what’s great about the character Tommie Lee Jones plays, that Hank Deerfield is a good man who comes to realize the terrible consequences of his actions, how misguided his most basic impulses have been, and the dark places into which they‘ve guided him and his son. Which is why little details like his subtly obsessive personal grooming habits are so important: in signifying his lifelong adherence to the work of self-fashioning as soldier (and of passing that on to his son), they place him as a man with a deep faith in a code of behavior which he has never doubted (and into which he has cast the destiny of his entire family) but which reveals the neurotic core of those beliefs. He believes in America because he can’t not, the same way he can’t be seen by a woman in his short sleeves, or get out of bed without having painstakingly tucked the sheets under the mattress in the style of a barracks bunk. He’s still at war.
It’s important that he’s sincere. Precisely because he really does believe in these things, his discovery of their hollowness produces a real crisis of faith, as when he cuts himself shaving moments before getting the devastating news of his son’s death. Something is actually at stake, even in stuff like that, and it’s on that basis that the final act of the movie is so devastating: to discover what his son has become is to discover what Hank spent a young lifetime making him, crafting his son in his own image and making him a monster. Which is why it’s just as important that this is not a movie about Iraq itself: it’s about the process of detachment from human life that can make running over an Iraqi pedestrian in the way of your humvee seem natural. Yet we see this process begin and end at home: the point of the David and Goliath story is precisely not what Hank thinks it is, precisely not that a boy can master his fear and be a man. Goliath is a humvee speeding along the roadway, and Hank’s realization is that he has no answer as to why he would send a boy—his own—out to be destroyed by it.
At one point in the movie, a soldier tells Hank that “we shouldn’t send our heroes to Iraq” because of what it does to them, something he quickly demonstrates by advocating we nuke the place and let it go back to a desert. Exterminate all the brutes, you know? And he’s right, in a certain sense; “Iraq” destroyed Hank’s son, in a way that can seem superficially similar to sentiments like this racist garbage from Thomas “suck on this” Friedman:
“…democracy was never going to have a virgin birth in a place like Iraq, which has never known any such thing. Some argue that nothing that happens in Iraq will ever justify the costs. Historians will sort that out.”
The difference is that while an insincere hack like Friedman wants to forget his own role as bloodthirsty war cheerleader back in the day (so as to pretend it was always about the highest of ideals), The Valley of Elah powerfully argues that even Hank’s best of intentions were what made Iraq the kind of place where good boys go bad in the first place. His wife is right. The character played by Charlize Theron is right.* And when the little boy asks “why would they send a boy out to fight Goliath?” he is exactly right: the moral outrage is the warmonger who sends children out to be crushed and then tries to make a glorious story out of it. The character who tries to blame Iraq for destroying “our heroes” is the one who held the knife. And Hank is the one who put it in his hand. Which is exactly the point: fetishizing “Iraq” as the cause of “our” suffering is not only to forget that “they” have endured the majority of the suffering (at “our” hands) but that it’s happened as a consequence of our ability to forget about their existence.
Which leads me to my last point: the problem with The Hurt Locker is that it poses as realism, that it pretends to portray what happens over there. But it doesn’t; like all realism, it’s a subjective fantasy clothed in the appearance of objectivity. But while The Hurt Locker performs the very same techno-philic detachment which enables a man in a humvee to run over a child, making the entire country into a bomb to be defused makes it seem as if the problem starts and originates there. They set the bombs, you see, and they are the ones who would put a child in harm’s way. And while the movie has the courage to admit that the war hasn’t gone well, this is akin to the brave honesty of admitting that the Titanic’s prospects look dim after hitting the iceberg. The Valley of Elah, on the other hand, frames the war as a reality we lack the courage to look at honestly, and in its description of the impossibility of realism is almost Conradian: the cause of what happens to Hank’s son in Iraq is to be found not there, but here. Unlike Marlowe and Friedman, Hank has the terrible courage to admit that his son became Kurtz, and that he’s the one who made it happen. Though it’s still too dark, too dark altogether…
* The most heart of darkness-y moment—which makes me wonder if they were doing it on purpose—comes when Hank self-righteously declares that a soldier would never fight seriously with buddies he lived and fought with in war. “That’s a beautiful world you live in” she says, or something similarly identical to Marlow’s statement on how “...she is out of it--completely. They--the women, I mean-- are out of it--should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse.” But of course the beautiful fantasy land of this movie is that of the men who believe in the unconditional righteousness of war.
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“what-have-you intriguing subject”
Brian Reed divines the profession’s future by reading the tea leaves of his university’s grad program applicant pool:
“Movies and TV seem to trump what we teach in the classroom when it comes to influencing future faculty. We have a sea of applicants wanting to study vampires, zombies, Harry Potter, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narnia, and Jane Austen--singly or in combination. Some of these files are absolutely first rate. Most aren’t. Moreover, you read letter after letter of recommendation praising this or that student’s marvelous facility with 17th century prosody, 18th century travel writing, contemporary Zulu praise poetry, or what-have-you intriguing subject, and then you flip to the writing sample and discover yet another Dracula-and-Twilight essay or Beowulf-and-Frodo MA thesis.”
And:
“You hear a great deal about Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, Homi Bhabha, Walter Benjamin, Gloria Anzaldua, and other thinkers who were already staples of “Introductions to Literary Theory” courses back in the mid-1990s. Otherwise, the name dropping has become quite field specific…There also appears to be a truly remarkable degree of agreement concerning the Great Books of the present day: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Blood Meridian, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Thomas Pynchon, too, is cited over and over as the harbinger and presiding genius of the New Period. I’ve read these books (including all of Pynchon’s novels), but I never expected the emergence of such a matter-of-fact way of narrating the present moment in US literature, and I certainly would never have selected such a narrow, narrow cast of characters to represent the 21st century.”
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March 11
Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas
The Marketplace of Ideas is not as interesting as I thought it would be. One reason may be that it is part of a series intended, as series editor Henry Louis Gates Jr. explains, to “invite the reader to reexamine hand-me-down assumptions and to grapple with powerful trends"--that is, the books are not rigorous analyses aimed at specialists but accessible and deliberately provocative commentaries meant to bring a wider public quickly up to speed on debates about (Gates again) “ideas that matter in the new millenium.” At just over 150 small-scale, large-type pages, The Marketplace of Ideas is not anything like a comprehensive examination of the many issues it addresses, whether the rise of the modern university, the vexed history of the “liberal arts” curriculum, the changing aspect of humanities research, or the causes and consequences of the current appalling academic job market. Rather, it offers a briskly coherent account of some historical contexts of particular relevance to certain elite universities (he shows this narrowness of focus throughout, which, as other reviewers have pointed out, eventually undermines a number of his more general claims and complaints). Then he transitions quite abruptly to consider political homogeneity as a feature of the academy, and then, with another awkward transition, to offer some interesting but often idiosyncratic or, worse, facile suggestions about what ails graduate education in the humanities today and how to fix it.
Of the contextual section of Menand’s book, Anthony Grafton at The New Republic writes, fairly, I think,
Menand’s account is consistently even-tempered, and he resists all temptations to succumb to nostalgia or to launch jeremiads, even when both might be appropriate. He does not portray the university in the age of New Criticism as a paradise of Serious Reading, or denounce the new forms of scholarship that have grown up more recently as one great betrayal of truth and high standards. Instead he sings a song of sclerosis. Through all these changes, he writes, the basic system of disciplines and departments remained intact--a hard and confining carapace that proved impossible to break, however humanists squirmed and pushed.
I appreciated his discussion of the mixed blessing that is professionalism, something addressed from a more discipline-specific angle in Brian McRae’s Addison and Steele are Dead (a book I discussed here at some length). I also found his comments on the unsatisfactory realities of “interdisciplinarity” very interesting: “interdisciplinarity” is a buzzword often invoked as if it represents a panacea to whatever ails our individual, disciplinary, or institutional limitations, but Menand suggests, persuasively, that our obsession with it is a symptom of anxiety about “the formalism and methodological fetishism of the disciplines and about the danger of sliding into an aimless subjectivism or eclecticism.”
Overall, though, this “structural explanation,” as Grafton calls it, wasn’t really what I went to the book for; rather, I was hoping for an elaboration on the provocative excerpt published last fall in the Harvard Magazine, focusing on “the PhD problem.” There, he talked about the dramatic rise in the number of doctoral students even as the number of available tenure track positions (relative to the number of candidates) fell off drastically, the long time to degree for doctoral students in the humanities, and some ideas for unclogging the system by, for instance, making an article the standard for the Ph.D. rather than the book-length thesis. It turns out he gave most of the milk away for free here, and my thoughts on reading that material over in the book version were the same as what I said at the time (if he can make his writing do double-duty, I figure I can do the same with mine):
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March 10
Time’s Arrow in Literary Space
Is literary time directional? In some sense the answer, obviously, is “yes.” There is no doubt that Pride and Prejudice was written before A Passage to India. The issue, however, is whether or not Pride and Prejudice must necessarily, in some sense, have been written before A Passage to India and, if so, in what sense it must have been written first.
Stephen Greenblatt comes close to suggesting what I’m up to early in “The Cultivation of Anxiety: King Lear and His Heirs” (Learning to Curse, Routledge, 1990, pp. 80—98) which opens with a long passage from an early 19th century magazine article on the how the Reverend Francis Wayland broke the will of his 15-month old child. Greenblatt notes that “Wayland’s struggle is a strategy of intense familial love, and it is the sophisticated product of a long historical process whose roots lie at least partly in early modern England, in the England of Shakespeare’s King Lear.” To be sure, one need not read that as any more than a statement of historical contingency, that Shakespeare’s play just happened to have been written before Wayland’s article. But when one considers the larger institutional changes Greenblatt considers – from the public space of the king’s court (and Elizabethan stage) to the privacy of the bourgeois home – one may suspect that Greenblatt is tracking the directionality of literary time, that one text must necessarily have been earlier in the historical process in which both texts exist.
That directionality is what I want to look at, but not primarily on the scale of decades-to-centuries. My principle example involves three early texts by Osamu Tezuka, the great Japanese mangaka. He was born in Nov 1928, which puts him in his early 20s when these texts were written during the American occupation of Japan after World War II. The three texts have become known collectively as his SF trilogy: Lost World (1948), Metropolis (1949), and Next World (1951). Thus, they are early texts; in particular, they are before the Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy) stories that became the centerpiece of his work for almost two-decades.
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Martin Amis’s Pregnant Widow
This novel is not as bad as I expected it to be. It’s bad, certainly; but not that bad. I’d say ‘it’s not as bad as Yellow Dog‘, but that would be redundant. Nothing could be as bad as Yellow Dog. Having Amis personally come to my house to administer a lava enema would hardly be as bad as that novel.
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March 09
Baddest of the Bad
What’s worse than David Horowitz’s brand of right-wing drivel giving yellow journalism a bad name? A ghost-authored Horowitz sequel, padded with over 150 witless, tendentious summaries of courses that the compilers erroneously imagine will frighten middle America into hauling the faculty up the nearest telephone pole.
The current issue of American Book Review highlights their Top 40 Bad Books. Heading the list for me is One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America’s Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine our Democracy, by David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin. Since I often can’t make time to review excellent books, I don’t usually waste pixels on bad ones. But one has to make an exception for the epic badness of Horowitz’s failed hit job.
At least the first book in this series, The Professors, gave the “101 Most Dangerous Academics in America” something to brag about in their red-diaper parent-participation preschools (whilst plotting Trotskyite mayhem from behind piled bookshelves).
This cheesy compilation is too lazy even to attack faculty scholarship. It’s little more than a list of syllabi with a shrill “I see Marxism!” appended to each--150 times. The somnolence it produces is hard to describe.
Evidently they should have credited Google as the third author.
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The “Crisis” in Literary Studies, by Mimi & Eunice
Nina Paley’s been working on a new cartoon strip, Mimi & Eunice, and posting strips on Facebook. She’s posted two that, while of general applicability, seem apt for the current situation in literary studies. Here’s what’s been going on since the French landed in Baltimore:
& that’s pretty much what I think about much of the “oh woe is us” that’s been visible here and there for the past decade, especially as many of the complaints are simply recirculations of complaints I heard back at Hopkins in the late 60s and early 70s. These aren’t complaints seeking new ways of doing things; these complaints are just seeking justification for misery.
Here’s the way out of the hole:
That’s what happened to me over thirty years ago.
Going meta: My use of Nina’s two strips exemplifies an argument Kenneth Burke made in “Literature as Equipment for Living,” Philosophy of Literary Form (UCal Press 1973), pp. 293-307.
EDIT: Nina’s now posted some strips to her blog, along with a discussion about what type of license to use when releasing them to the world-at-large. (I got the strips from Facebook, which is pretty public, but not completely so.)
Mimi & Eunice direct: http://mimiandeunice.com/
EDIT: More cartoon commentary on literary studies. (Not by Nina, but she pointed me to the site.)
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March 06
The Hurt Locker’s Addiction to Detachment, and Ours
I’m less interested in The Hurt Locker than in the kind of problem it faces: how do you make a movie about an event that we have so thoroughly forgotten, ignored, and under-articulated as the Iraq war? The important point to make about media narratives of the Iraq war is not that they are biased—though they are, naturally—but that they are disappearing, that the media isn’t talking about the war very much at all anymore. It has become, for the popular majority of Americans, less a real war about which it is possible to have a real opinion than something vaguely unspeakable and for which no narratives quite apply. Part of it is that the politics are so strange; the war’s original supporters have now mostly given up defending the original broken-kettle reasons while the president who was elected to end it, hasn’t; it is a war we are in, which no one wants us to be in, but for which no one has any idea how not to be in. And there we are, especially as it’s a war that has gone on so long as to have become normal, a permanent state of emergency that has, as such, ceased to be a state of emergency, ceasing to be anything at all.
It may be that this was what, on some level, certain people wanted, of course, but I’m less interested in the pure politics of the event than in the representational conundrum that Kathryn Bigelow’s film is stuck in. I don’t think it’s a great film, first of all; its characters are fairly tired war-movie clichés (another cowboy who gets results? really?), its ticking time-bomb scenarios are suspenseful in almost the cheapest way possible—a literal ticking time-bomb—and the dialogue ranges from the bathetic to the banal (the line “I’m too old for this shit” badly needs to be retired). The overarching plot structure is supremely meh, since it turns out that going home to his wife and kid—which the “x days left” move has given narrative centrality—is going to be boringly and conventionally emasculating; when he tries to tell his wife (described as “not dumb; just loyal”) about the awesome-ness of bomb turning-off, her narrative function is to coldly look away and maybe order him to fetch cereal or chop mushrooms because a woman just can’t understand, you see.
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March 03
Academic Publishing Again (or, Still)
At Perplexed by Narrow Passages, Christopher Vilmar raises some interesting questions about scholarly monographs by way of Cathy Davidson. He quotes from a post of Davidson that points to our own lack of engagement with other academics’ books:
If we believe in what we do (and I happen to be a believer), we should be writing for readers, first of all, and, second, we should be reading one another’s work and, third, we should be teaching it. Right now, a sale of 300 or 400 copies of a monograph is a lot. That’s appalling. The result, materially, is that we do not pay our own way and certainly not that of junior members of our profession. Intellectually, our students never learn the value the genre of the monograph because we teach excerpts in our courses, even our graduate courses. We do not teach the kind of extended, nuanced thinking that goes into the genre that our very graduate students will have to produce for tenure. We say the scholarly monograph represents the epitome of our profession and a hurdle to “lifetime employment” at a research university. So we do not practice what we preach, adding to the crisis in scholarly publishing and the crisis in the profession of English in particular.
Reading both posts and trying to think my own thoughts about these issues (which turn on the problem of which readers we should be writing for and whether it really is “appalling” that highly specialized but often perversely bloated works of micro-scholarship sell “only” 300 or 400 copies), I found myself turning back to John Holbo’s initiating post for The Valve, “Form Follows the Function of the Little Magazine", which addresses a similar set of interlocking problems, including quoting from Stephen Greenblatt’s 2002 MLA Presidential Address:
the problem, according to university presses, is that we are not reading one another as much as we once did - or at least that we are not buying one another’s books and assigning them to our classes. There are, I know, economic factors here: we are reluctant to buy, let alone compel students to buy, expensive books. But judging from the fate of even modestly priced academic books in our field, the problem is not exclusively economic. Somewhere over the past decade, our interest in one another’s work - or, again, at least in owning one another’s work - seems to have declined.
People reflecting on the decline of humanities publishing sometimes say that scholars should write for a larger public. We should, the argument goes, not address other scholars alone but try to reach the mass of nonprofessional readers as well. These readers would buy our books and journals were they written more accessibly and thereby solve the economic problem faced by university presses. Though the task seems to me much more difficult than it is often imagined, I am not averse to trying to reach a larger readership. But I doubt that our specialized scholarly work can be successfully couched in a marketable form for the general reader - assuming such a reader still exists - and I doubt that in most cases we should try to do so. In our profession, as in every profession, there are many things that we should simply address to one another.
Our great failure in recent years is not that we no longer write for a general public - as if every significant literary scholar in the past had been a Lionel Trilling or an Edmund Wilson - but rather that we no longer write for one another, not well enough in any case to inspire one another to buy and assign our books.
Remember these bold declarations of a brave new bloggy future?
A simple normative principle. Every scholarly book published in the humanities should be widely read, discussed and reviewed - should have it’s own lively blog comment box, not to put too fine a point on it. Because any scholarly book incapable of rousing a modest measure of sustained, considerate, intelligent chat from a few dozen souls who specialize in that area shouldn’t have been published as a book - i.e. after several years labor and an average production cost of $25,000. Turning the point around: any book worth that time and expense, that fails to be widely read, discussed and reviewed - that is not given it’s own blog comment box - has been dramatically failed by the academic culture in which it was so unfortunate as to be born. . . .
Why is this really quite low normative standard of healthy discussion not presently met? The technological barriers are non-existent, the financial barriers negligible. It’s cultural dysfunction. Sheer institutional sclerosis.
The Real Circulation Problem - of which low book sales are a symptom - concerns ideas, not paper. The academic humanities have simply never grown hyper-efficient networks for post-publication peer review that are remotely adequate to the excessive volume of peer-reviewed scholarship generated, especially in just the last few decades. This is the real scholarly argument for moving aggressively online, although it is bolstered by many economic arguments. As I have written before, the beast has poor circulation. The only way to get the blood of ideas moving is to rub its sorry limbs vigorously with ... conversations. Intelligent, bloggy bookchat by scholars, to label this crucial ingredient as the essentially unpretentious thing it is. That isn’t scholarship; but - in a world with too much scholarship - it may be an indispensable complement to scholarship.
I guess I’m wondering: 2002, 2010—the conversation sounds about the same, except that, perhaps, the energy that went into Holbo’s visionary post has flagged (or has it?) even as blogging has become (somewhat) more mainstream. I don’t hear one administrator (or colleague) at my own university talking at all about changing the way we evaluate research productivity. If anything, the pressure is going up to generate “book projects” of the kind that can get external grants in order to raise our “research profile.” Nothing “counts” for anything unless it’s peer-reviewed (pre-publication, of course, not post-publication, and certainly not post-self-publication). Perhaps more to the point, I can count on one hand the number of people in my faculty who blog (the number who read blogs might require two hands, but not much more, I’m reasonably certain). O brave new world indeed. I’m wondering if not only do we not read each other, but really, we don’t listen to each other, or, for that matter, to the president of the MLA (it will be interesting to see what kind of leadership Michael Berube provides on this issue, given his long blogging history). But for what it’s worth, here’s another, more recent, comment once again pointing to the need for some kind of paradigm shift, this time from the winner of the 3 Quarks Daily Prize in Philosophy Blogging, Terry Tomkow:
I think competitions like this are going to become increasingly important in future years. After all, the only known defense for the absurd anachronism of hard copy academic journals is that the competition for space on their expensive printed pages is essential to maintaining academic standards. Maybe so. But hardcopy journals are soon going to disappear and, if standards are not to disappear with them, academics had better quickly figure out other ways to sort out what is worth reading.
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March 02
Learning to Remember
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes me work and give up what I have. And I forget.
It began with a handful of direct actions and refusals--bold occupations, sit-ins, a one-day strike and walkout, and a manifesto that fired the imaginations of students planetwide.
Today it is a mass movement, with marches and pickets across the country scheduled for Thursday’s National Day of Action. The hope and the stories will keep coming all weekend. If you jump a bus for Sacramento, you might get a seat next to Etienne Balibar. If you try to enter the UC Santa Cruz campus--the epicenter of the movement--thousands of students and workers will be picketing every gate. Over a hundred major actions are scheduled.
But Tuesday morning, March 8 will begin the next news cycle. Where will the movement be then?
It might look a little bit like this video. Give it ten seconds. I’m pretty sure you’ll watch it to the end.
While there seems to be endless conversation about the violence of smashing windows and the damage to the movement done by spontaneous action, there is a notable absence of discussion about the violence of class division in American society and its relationship with higher education.
Is the movement so fragile that a smashed window destroys it--yet broken bodies don’t bring it to boiling point? We are told that the streets must be policed in order to be safe--that no one will join us--that people who would have supported the cause are now frightened to participate. Yet what we see is laughter, dancing and a freedom that is not possible to describe in the language of everyday capitalism. How, we must ask, is a movement that collapses under the weight of overturned trash cans going to withstand the presence of millions of people challenging their relationship to the economy?
As I listened to this young voice, I could not help but think: “This is Carl Sandburg with a video camera."
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Interesting Talk
I’ve been listening to Craig “Late Late Show” Ferguson on YouTube and find him quite interesting. For example, he did a great interview with Desmond Tutu. Here’s the first part of his recent conversation with Stephen Fry. They did the conversation without (benefit of) a studio audience. Whoaa!
They have an interesting opening conversation kicked off by Craig confessing (at 1:07) that, in the early days, he thought Stephen had it all together when, in fact, though Fry may have been quite successful, but he was a wreck. And so on and so forth. In the second segment there’s a throwaway reference to Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica in a conversation about Twitter. Jeeze! Sounds like these are educated people.
Principia Mathematica!?#! Late night TV in America. Can it be long before hell freezes over?
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Founding the Terror State in Macondo
Years after that founding, after Macondo has become more established and more connections have been built to the outside world, Don Apolinar Moscote shows up in Macondo and declares himself to be the Magistrate—by writing it on a piece of paper—and his “first order was for all the houses to be painted blue in celebration of national independence.” When José Arcadio Buendía, the town’s historic founder and patriarch, demands to know by what right he has given this order, Moscote declares, in a wonderfully productive passive voice, that “I have been named magistrate of this town.”
I love the way you can paint a house blue in celebration of an anniversary, the way an event fixed in time—the day of independence—becomes an ongoing, never ending spectacle (the way it is always September 12th for a certain mindset in the United States). But I’m even more interested in the passive voice construction of that second declaration, the way it asserts an authority, a power to compel, based in the complete elision of that power’s origin. Who has declared him the Magistrate? If he had to say, he would limit his power, give it a temporal and spatial scope, and that kind of power is not the kind he wants. After all, it is the very basis of omnipresent terror-power that it admits no actual existence, as Kafka understood.
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Founding Macondo in Forgetting Rape
To continue the “big famous book Latin America” kick we’re on, I want to take us to the author Bolaño called “a man terribly pleased to have hobnobbed with so many Presidents and Archbishops,” and who just generally represented so much of the literary establishment The Savage Detectives seemed, as far as I could tell, an effort to escape from underneath. Cause it turns out he’s not a bad writer. Who knew?
I’ve been teaching Cien años de soledad/One Hundred Years of Solitude and I’ve been struck this reading, for the first time, how interwoven the founding of Macondo is with a desire not only to forget, but to specifically forget the specter of rape. For example, of the original expedition to found Macondo we read that:
“In his youth, José Arcadio Buendía and his men, with wives and children, animals and all kinds of domestic implements, had crossed the mountains in search of an outlet to the sea, and after twenty-six months they gave up the expedition and founded Macondo, so they would not have to go back. It was, therefore, a route that did not interest him, for it could lead only to the past.”
Immediately before this line, it is mentioned that the ancient city of Riohacha is on the other side of some impenetrable mountains, “where, in times past—according to what had been told by the first Aureliano Buendía, his grandfather—Sir Francis Drake had gone crocodile hunting with cannons and that he repaired them and stuffed them with straw to bring to Queen Elizabeth.”
There’s a connection between these passages, though it isn‘t immediately clear what that connection will be. But about ten pages later, we’ll get a little closer when we learn that “every time Úrsula became exercised over her husband’s mad ideas, she would leap back over three hundred years of fate and curse the day that Sir Francis Drake had attacked Riohacha.”
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March 01
Wellsian Swearword Question
I’m still thinking about 2666; when my thoughts have mulched down a little more I’ll post an overview. But in the interim I’m puzzling over this: the opening paragraph of H G Wells’s Food of the Gods (1904).
In the middle years of the nineteenth century there first became abundant in this strange world of ours a class of men, men tending for the most part to become elderly, who are called, and who are very properly called, but who dislike extremely to be called--"Scientists." They dislike that word so much that from the columns of Nature, which was from the first their distinctive and characteristic paper, it is as carefully excluded as if it were--that other word which is the basis of all really bad language in this country.
I give up. What is that other word which is the basis of all really bad language in this country? Does it rhyme with ‘scientist’? Does is start with the letter? I’m sure I’m being stupidly dense here, but ... does anybody know?
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February 23
Scientific American: Academic ‘Labor Market Gone Seriously Awry’
In a draft article published to its website today, Scientific American blasts some of the junk analysis bedeviling mainstream higher ed coverage and what passes for policy “thought” about academic labor. “The real crisis in American science education,” the article concludes, “is a distorted job market’s inability to provide [young scientists] careers worthy of their abilities.” Bingo.
The piece turns around an apparent contradiction: half the policy analysis decries a “shortage” of US scientists and engineers, and the other half claims an “oversupply” of persons with doctorates in science.
That doesn’t make sense--except when you understand that both camps are wrong.
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