CULTURES HIGH AND LOW: I'm tempted to disagree with Norm about the opening paragraph to this:

Allan Bloom, in his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, argued that listening to rock music destroyed a young person's ability to appreciate high culture. Could it also be true that an appreciation of high culture destroys a person's ability to appreciate popular culture?

Norm's answer is that no, in fact, it's possible to appreciate both in the right way. That's true of Norm, so far as I can tell: he enjoys all things as they are--this is the man who once wrote in praise of the McDonald's hamburger. I should add that I try to hold the same attitude: life is a little boring when it's nothing but high culture: a little variety makes life more interesting (several years ago I took a chance on either The Power and the Glory or The Painted Veil, and much of my reading habits changed as a result).

Nevertheless, I think the author of the review in question has a point: high culture, in popular conception, is not supposed to be fun. It is also intended to be criticized--it might be better to say that people recognize the ability to criticize as a sign one has engaged a work in a meaningful way. So it comes to be the case quite often that things a person just enjoys come to be first separated from 'art' or what is high-brow, and then accorded a lower (not just different) status. Nor does that link appear to be accidental: the cultural pressure to separate in this way is widespread. An individual is led to term one thing 'art' and so worthy, and the other thing lesser and so a 'guilty pleasure.' That some people do not succumb to this pressure is a different question from whether it exists.

LINK: On Obama's smoking habits:

The TV journalist Tom Brokaw recently closed an interview with Mr Obama by asking him if he had quit smoking. Mr Brokaw wanted to know, since “the White House is a no-smoking zone”. Whether it is or is not is a tricky constitutional question. The White House has two functions. On one hand it is a government building. Mr Brokaw may well be right that it is, as such, covered by some intemperate smoking regulation. But it is also the living quarters of Mr Obama, citizen, during the time he is president. There is no reason that getting elected president should make one less entitled to privacy in one’s home. It is not always easy to delineate clearly between personal and governmental activities, but smoking is unambiguously a personal one. The rules ought to be whatever Mr Obama says they are. Once you mix up the body personal and the body politic the way Mr Brokaw does, you lose sight of why the president should enjoy any right to privacy, or any personal freedom, whatsoever. If the people feel reassured by seeing their president grovel before taking power, then grovel he must. This was the attitude in some of the negative letters the Washington Post received when columnist Michael Kinsley dared to suggest that anti-smokers should leave the president-elect alone. “He needs to make this sacrifice,” wrote one correspondent unhappy with Mr Obama. What odd language. Did the US elect a president or a priest?

(via Norm)

NITPICKING: Fear and Loathing in Georgetown edition. First up:

The choices made regarding what books are part of the canon obviously contain normative value. If I say the Iliad is part of the canon and that a feminist, lesbian, Latina migrant worker's story is not, then that attributes more value to the Iliad than the other. And one could, and many have, argued that this is a problem because it gives more value to the work of a dead white man than a living, lesbian, Latina woman author, but that's a stupid argument. The Iliad has more value because it has demonstrated its worth by remaining relevant for thousands of years. It contains themes and messages that are universal in the human condition.

This comes very close to getting the causality backward, or, one might say, mistaking the effect for the cause. It's because a work speaks to the human condition that it lasts beyond its immediate moment (and that's not to say that the things that didn't make it failed to speak to the human condition--just in a more local and particular way. Maugham has a good passage on this in Cakes and Ale).

Now, certainly, one ought to put weight on the collected judgment of generations, and recognize that the longstanding importance attributed to a work means something. However, having a critical spirit that's open to the new is a vital part of interacting with the canon: the critical spirit allows one to order works in a way that makes sense to oneself (thus, for me: more Dante, less Tolstoy), and it keeps the canon from being something dead by allowing it to draw from new, worthwhile things.

Shorter version of this argument: see "Tradition and the Individual Talent."


Next up: I think this betrays a misunderstanding of what it means to read literally, on the part of the survey respondents and FLG. No one who spends much time with the Bible would argue the historical parts are meant to be read apart from a consideration of the ethics involved: Lot's one of the bad examples, as the narrative itself makes clear.

EVERYTHING IS A METAPHOR: Via Alan Jacobs at TAS, I came across a review of Marilynne Robinson's latest book in the Times Literary Supplement:

“The assumptions of realism as it has been practised are simply wrong. People bring a great deal of memory and also a sense of present experience to everything that they do. If you see someone doing a simple action like hanging sheets on a line, there is absolutely no reason in that person’s perception that there is anything simple about it at all. I have all the respect in the world for reality, but I think the general assumptions about it are wrong.”

She thinks in metaphors because everything is a metaphor. This is her faith - the world, not as a factual cul-de-sac, but as an unfolding revelation. In her essays, this extends to inspiring attacks on the reduced view of humanity offered by contemporary science - in particular, the culturally illiterate view of religious imagery. “For heaven’s sake, the idea the dome of the sky is the skull of a murdered god. What is being described there? A very great deal. The idea that that is the kind of statement that could be displaced by something about gravity or the atmosphere - that’s a bizarre assumption. At a certain point in cultural history, there appeared this idea people are biological automatons, and everything to do with perception and emotion and birth and death is some sort of epiphenomenal thing that should be excluded from the definition of the real. This, to me, is very bizarre.”

I'm not sure I'm with her on metaphor (the point of figurative language has always seemed to me to be that it never quite fits, and it's the gap between descriptor and thing described that's most interesting), though I certainly agree that reducing everything to a physicalist description is not quite so interesting. Gilead is on the pile, anyway, and will likely move up.

LINK: Culture11 is right on the threshold of too many blogs, but Alan Jacob's Text Patterns has been quite good. Recommended if you like discussions on reading, writing, and the role technology plays in facilitating each.

LINK: Being a fan of dissenting voices, as I am, I found "Baldy"'s comment on your typical Crunchy Cons post to hit some good notes (it should be the second comments):

He (not Rod, the person Rod is quoting)'s indoctrinating his child in the political myths of the day, not even giving his child a chance to learn how to think and analyze and understand, but instead, has chosen to indoctrinate in the foregone conclusions of a certain popular bit of political angst.

[...stuff I think goes too far omitted...]

I don't want to build fallacious linkages to x and y phenomenon that may not truly exist. While knowledge and history and what we think today is important, it even more important for our children to start WITHOUT presumptions that could turn out to be false. To give our children a background woven with things we don't REALLY know, pretending it is psychic truth or something, we're destroying the things they can count on, when those things are proven false in the future.

Part of the appeal of conservatism, as I understand it, is that it guards against precisely this line of thinking. The way things are now is not always the way things must be: it's left to revolutionaries and radicals to argue that we have entered a new historical moment that requires significant change in our understanding of how to live. Conservatism gives some resources to resist credulity, and the idea that the proper solution happily lines up with one's favored policies. The dangerous consequence of this line of thinking is to hear only those pieces of evidence that confirm one's way of thinking, and never those that would suggest some other understanding. Rod was mocked, a few posts below this, for having claimed several times that he was going to "lay in" extra supplies of rice and beans, etc, for the coming crisis, and rightly so: conservatives should know better than to buy in so quickly to a convenient disaster scenario.

(though I do think, here as elsewhere, what gets blamed for our current decline is revealing, but more about this later, perhaps)

1 In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. 2 (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) 3 And everyone went to his own town to register. 4 So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. 5 He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. 6 While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, 7 and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

There's something important to be said about Luke's account, and the way it emphasizes the timeliness of the nativity, as opposed to its timelessness, but that's a point for another time. The next part goes to Linus:



And, on a personal note:

LINK: Like all former Michigan residents, I have something of a love-hate relationship with my state (an attitude picked up, at least somewhat, in Grosse Pointe Blank, though the Michigan references are somewhat minimal): on the one hand, beautiful (I like to think our sand dunes are bigger than the Outer Banks, and they probably are), with an interesting and proud history. When it comes to music (very important to me) I think Michigan easily surpasses every place in the U.S. that's not New York or Los Angeles, and probably spans more genres: the MC5, the Stooges, ? and the Mysterians, and everything Motown has to offer--right there Michigan is top-5, at least.

However, no one who lived in or has cared at all for Michigan can be blind to its weaknesses, exemplified by Flint, the first of the automotive cities to fail. A man I knew from central Michigan was returning with his wife to Saginaw (she had a post-MD job up there), which has apparently declined rapidly since I was last there. And Detroit, well, Detroit is a tragedy. First because there was so much beautiful and vibrant there once, and its hard not to still see that; also because it often seems so close to coming back, but never quite makes it. As much as I rag on my home state (and think the auto bailout is a horrible idea), I want it to do as well as it deserves.

So this story from the Weekly Standard hit all the right notes. I sent the link to Becky, who complained about the factual inaccuracies on the first page, but by the second we were both engrossed. It's a hard city to love sometimes (it doesn't make it easy), but you love it anyway.

LINK: The Theological Declaration of Barmen. Re-reading, I found significant depth where I hadn't before. The Declaration contains, for example, a description of the conditions under which it should be rejected:

8.04 Try the spirits whether they are of God! Prove also the words of the Confessional Synod of the German Evangelical Church to see whether they agree with Holy Scripture and with the Confessions of the Fathers. If you find that we are speaking contrary to Scripture, then do not listen to us! But if you find that we are taking our stand upon Scripture, then let no fear or temptation keep you from treading with us the path of faith and obedience to the Word of God, in order that God's people be of one mind upon earth and that we in faith experience what he himself has said: "I will never leave you, nor forsake you." Therefore, "Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom."

"Here is where you should look to see if what we say is true. If those sources do not confirm what we say, you should reject us." The boldness and certainty there is quite amazing.

(and an explanation of the banner)

LINK: An amusing post with a serious point at Crooked Timber, which demonstrates, among other things, that it's more dangerous to be President or Pope than, say, a Pacific crab fisherman or a logger. The post then goes on to make some worthwhile points on our own biases about good research and the difference between historical and statistical modes of inquiry:

I think the real source of philosophical unease at comparing death rates between heads of state and timber cutters as if it were an apples-to-apples basis[12] is not the small sample in and of itself, but the difference between a historical and a statistical mode of thinking. We’re tempted to think of the deaths of Popes, Presidents and kings as unique historical events, each with an individual set of causes. We know about them through their individual details, and in many cases we speculate and investigate to get a fuller picture of how they came about, whether we’re looking at the minutiae of the Texas Book Depository, or the grand sweep of the Hundred Years’ War.

The occupational deaths of fishermen and lumberjacks, on the other hand, for the most part appear to us mediated through lists of statistics[13], as risks which are part of the job. And in these occupations particularly, because the main sources of risk are such things as the pattern of storms and the direction of a falling tree, it’s even easier to fall into thinking of them in the whole, as stochastic processes, with the individual outcomes as the natural results of a stable distribution.

The best method, here and elsewhere, is to hold both thoughts in one's head at the same time, to think statistically and historically. One of my proposals for APSA this year concerns Grotius and the means by which we make or verify claims about how the moral world is structured: what counts as evidence, or argument, or anything else. The key to his approach and, I would argue, ours as well, is to be conversant in all these approaches and be able to apply them when necessary, and use each to check the excesses of the others. Doing this is hard but necessary, if one's concern is to arrive at what is true.

HUMANITY AND MORAL RESPONSIBILITY: Norm Geras, talking sense:

To attempt to show the humanity of perpetrators of great wrong, indeed of the kinds of crimes for which we still have no adequate substitute characterization than that provided by the word 'evil', is a thoroughly worthwhile enterprise. To humanize them in this sense is to remind anyone who needs reminding that such is what human beings are capable of. It is not an aberrant behaviour pattern of humankind that people betray one another, exhibit cruelty, accustom themselves to killing the innocent, and so forth. More - even those who do this are capable of love, can admire natural beauty and good music, be kind, generous, self-sacrificing. The vicious, the killers, the torturers, are of our kind. Do not ever forget it.

But if to humanize means to lighten the moral burden of such people, to draw attention away from what they make themselves the agents of, that is something else. Their human qualities, both the good ones and the bad, do not exonerate. On the contrary, their very humanity shows, by way of a million and more counter-examples, that they could have acted otherwise, need not have tormented and wrecked the lives of others.

SHOULD I GO TO GRAD SCHOOL?**: A few days ago, I had a conversation on this topic, specifically concerning someone to whom I had given some less-than-encouraging advice about grad school and its prospects. I do occasionally get asked about this by students as well. It occurred to me that my own particular answer is a little unusual: it's the best use I can get out of the abilities I have and, when it goes well, I could hardly imagine doing anything else. But it's not for everyone. It's not for most people. Even if you have abilities far beyond the norm for an undergraduate student, it still might not be for you. At some point very early on (I think winter break of my first year), I was talking to my aunt who had asked me about school, and said something like "it's very odd to think of what you love becoming your job." Like any job, there are some moments of intense misery, which it's sometimes easy to forget.

I looked up a few resources that were helpful to me when I was applying to grad schools:

* Tim Burke's Should I Go to Grad School?

* A Chronicle of Higher Ed article on Invisible Adjunct, who was still writing when I applied to grad school. Her site seems to be gone now, but perhaps the Wayback Machine can find it.

* For political theorists specifically, Jacob Levy's 20 Questions from the much-lamented Crescat Sententia (it's all interesting, but the most relevant question is #6)

Which will hopefully prove useful to those who come here by accident and not-quite accident.


**For the record, my standard answer to that question is "no," in the absence of a strong and clear vocation.

LINK: I am linking to this wikipedia page, but not for any particular reason.

SUMMERTIME ROLLS/WAKE UP BOO!

Let's return to the strychnine, to your imminent death. You've got three minutes to live. Tell us what it is that you're actually and endlessly trying to convey to us.
"If I've got just three minutes... I'll say something that you won't accept... but which I want people to believe... oh stop being so boring Morrissey... I want people to know that almost everything that concerns them in their daily lives is of no consequence whatsoever. Nothing and nobody is really important.
"Oh, this is so negative..."
You've been quite positive so far, this will just reassure people.
"... nothing is important so people, realising that, should get on with their lives, go mad, take their clothes off, jump in the canal, jump into one of those supermarket trolleys, race 'round the supermarket and steal Mars bars and, y'know, kiss kittens and sit on the back of bread vans.
"Whatever makes people happy they should just do it, 'cos time is a mere scratch and life is nothing..."
-Morrissey, The Further Thoughts of Chairman Mo, NME

(I like the pre-song banter on this one: Perry Farrell can be quite amusing, if unintentionally. I'd also like to suggest "I like computers, but I like people better" as a motto for someone.)





(see also "Lazarus")

FOR MY FAMILY MEMBERS: I'm pretty sure we've spent the last two Christmases going to see Will Smith movies. None of us liked The Pursuit of Happyness (exercise in sadism) or I Am Legend ("What did you think of the movie?" "I think I Am Adequate would've been a more accurate title"). Let's agree beforehand to not see this one.

WHAT DID JOHN LOCKE EVER DO TO YOU? I have to wonder:

Now, nothing seems more Lockean, in the run-amok way with which readers of this blog are becoming familiar, than the face transplant: a "triumph" of science that enables us to freely take on the risk of death on the operating table in order to pursue our freely-chosen desire for a new face. (The mug is to be taken from "a corpse", of course; waste not, want not, or no hoarding and no spoilage.)

Never mind the slippage between 'Locke' and 'Lockean,' two terms that generally bear no relation to each other (see also 'Hegel' and 'Hegelian' or 'Kant' and 'Kantian'). The suffix '-ian' or '-ean' usually means the author is going to take as a starting point some passage from the figure named (usually read in isolation from others) and see what entailments one can read out of it. All of which is perfectly fine: there's much interesting philosophy that uses Kant as a starting point without substantively engaging him. But the postmodern conservative movement seems quite happy to trash Locke ('nothing seems more Lockean'? Really?) on the basis of what 'everyone understands' Locke to be up to, or else that the uses to which he has been put are perfectly natural outcomes of what he writes, and so no one needs to explain it.

Locke is not Nozick, nor is he who Strauss or MacPherson claim him to be (though all tell us something useful about politics, if not always about Locke), and the casual way Locke become responsible for or attached to whatever is wrong with the world today is deeply annoying to me as a political theorist.

LINK: Quite possibly the most interesting thing I've read all week: Why I Am Advising Radovan Karadzic. Excerpt:

It hasn’t been a pleasant response — so why do I do it?
There are many answers. The first is the one that defense attorneys always use, which is no less true for that fact: every defendant, even one accused of committing horrific international crimes, needs a good defense. Indeed, the more horrific the accusations, the greater that need. Everyone involved in the criminal justice system knows that the presumption of innocence is an illusion — defendants always begin a trial with the jurors and/or judge suspecting, if not actually believing, that they are guilty. And that is particularly true of defendants accused of serious international crimes like genocide. I can’t tell you how many of my friends, lawyers and otherwise, educated and cosmopolitan all, assume that an international tribunal would never prosecute a genuinely innocent person. Indeed, most assume that defendants who are acquitted by an international tribunal are still guilty. It is thus imperative that a defendant accused of serious international crimes have at least one person (if not more) who is willing to advocate on his behalf.

The post is an interesting reflection on the status of international criminal law, and I think goes a long way to diagnosing some of what is wrong with it. Much is made of the analogy (or lack thereof) between international and municipal law: this is one area where the analogy breaks down in a severe way. International criminal law is a weak institution, that tends to go after only the lowest-level offenders (who are least able to protect themselves) and the highest. The natural assumption is that if one of those high-level people is brought in, they must be guilty--if not of specifically what they are charged with, then something equally bad for which we should give some penalty. Why do we make that assumption? Because everybody knows bad things happened in Bosnia, or the Sudan, and so Karadzic or Bashir must be guily in some sense. But if that 'some sense' is not a strict legal sense, or if they're not guilty at all, there is no institutional mechanism to rectify this.

THERE'S NO TRADITION LIKE A NEW TRADITION: Orson at EDSBS brings along the right amount of Christmas cheer.

LINK: As a counterpoint to Michael Walzer's "Reasons to Vote for Obama," which heavily implied that Obama's foreign policy would look a lot like Walzer's, a list of policy areas which would be hallmarks of real change.

FILE UNDER 'THINGS THAT DON'T MAKE SENSE:'

Morrissey will be playing in Durham this spring.

ARE YOU A POEM OR A NOVEL? Asks a very random newspaper column (link from The Elegant Variation). I can only dispute with the terms in which he describes each.

A poem:

is generally short and compact, and therefore complex. If I were a poem, I wouldn’t be talking much — but everything I say would or should be meaningful and precise. Like much of modern poetry there’ll be a certain raggedness and restlessness about me, but don’t be fooled, because all that’s a pose; everything — from the cut of my hair to the color of my socks — will be absolutely deliberate and will accept no substitute.

Now, the connection between short/compact and complex is far from clear to me. One might say, as he does, that a poem which is short must touch directly on its meanings in a short space, and so represent only a portion of what the poem is about--that would be its depth, and its complexity comes in reassembling each part in all its resonances. I had a conversation a few weeks ago about an Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnet which was conducted, primarily, around what the metaphors were supposed to mean and why, exactly, they were all connected. And perhaps this is a phenomenon that happens whenever poetry is discussed or reflected on, though I'd suggest it's rather the logical result of a close-text reading. Anyone who has spent time pulling apart the use of a word in a text knows something of this process. (and, one should note, that the poem in mind is a contemporary form of poem--there are lots of poems that are neither short nor compact)

A novel, by way of contrast:

But where I am and how I am — too late for Oxford and for fevered, furtive clutches beneath the blankets of strangers — I might resign myself to the novel’s slow shuffle to often predictable endings, delighting now in recognizing the familiar more than in heart-stopping surprises. Novels are much more prone yet also kinder to mistakes; they can survive bad chapters, immemorable characters, narrative dead ends, and silly dialogue. Like life.

The comparison is unfair because he is comparing (so far as I can tell: he names no novels) good or excellent poems to any old run-of-the-mill novel. Now, there's some truth to what he says: I like Lost Illusions in spite of the hundreds of pages that explain printing techniques in the 19th century, not because of it (though some of these distinctions are of critical importance to the plot), but a good novel is rich--it contains a lot, more than one can possibly get in one reading, and so rewards patience over time, and also changes with the reader, who notices new connections, and can invest things with an emotional significance they may have missed earlier. As an example, I got around to reading David Copperfield over the summer last year. The scene that was most striking to me, that retains the most vividness, is the one in which David finally sees about his wife what the narrator has been suggesting about her all along (or what the reader is plainly meant to see)--that she retains a crucial immaturity that will prevent her from ever quite being what he wants. In a modern novel, this would be the point of David's life crisis, where he leaves her and tries to figure out how to be happy. But that's not what he does: he loves her anyway. Now I know that they give this book to children to read sometimes, and I can't imagine what on earth they do with that part (probably nothing), because it relies so heavily for its effect on having some idea of what marriage is or can be like (I feel the same way about Huck Finn, among other books). There are poems that can do this, too, but I take this to be an argument that the gap between the two is not so wide as it's here made out to be.

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING: From Manhattan:

You know what you are? You're God's answer to Job, y'know? You would have ended all argument between them. I mean, He would have pointed to you and said, y'know, "I do a lot of terrible things, but I can still make one of these." You know? And then Job would have said, "Eh. Yeah, well, you win."

UPDATE: One more day of work, and then I'm done.

A THOUGHT ON TEACHING AND THE MODELS ONE TAKES:

Pedagogy is a fascinating subject, and discussing it the academic equivalent of writers talking about writing. Since I am, in theory at least, here for office hours, it seems like a good time to write down some thoughts. We had a dinner for the graduate colloquium of the ethics institute here at Duke a few days ago, where the subject of blogging came up. I gave the usual defenses of it (doesn't occupy any more time than seriously reading the paper, allows me to connect with people doing interesting work in related areas (what would I do without International Law Reports?), etc), and the post below which discusses grading came up.

My interlocutors were unsympathetic to the general argument about grade inflation. We did agree, however, that there are two classes of students who may, properly speaking, deserve the highest grades that can be given. The first are those who meet all the terms of the assignment, who tend to be smart students who work hard, but don't have a natural facility with the subject matter they are expected to employ. The second are students who exceed the terms of the assignment, who produce work that indicates deep familiarity with the subject area and, quite possibly, the ability to do graduate-level work in the area.

For both, I insisted, the grade's not the thing. Students who meet the terms of the assignment and do good work never, ever mind being told that's exactly what they've done, all the moreso if they don't think of themselves as the sort of person who can or does work at that level. Students who are functioning at a higher level often value a real critique of their work more than just the grade, or appreciate being told they are capable of doing work at a higher level, should they so choose.

One of my interlocutors disagreed rather strenuously, arguing that a professor should reserve his highest grade for people who produce exceptional work, and make it known beforehand that the grade will only be given out under those circumstances. The professor who first introduced this approach to him is well-known (you've heard of him) for being curmudgeonly and very, very hesitant to write letters or say nice things about anyone. And this experience has framed, for him, how professors ought to relate to their students.

Looking at my experience, though, I think that all the really important stuff happens outside the classroom. So the professors and TAs who had an impact on me had it during office hours, or in email contact, or in comments on papers rather than grades (I remember some TAs I had as a freshman who first suggested grad school to me). Consequently, when I teach or TA, those are the things I put the big emphasis on: not that the classroom is unimportant, but that there are lots of possibilities outside of it to speak more directly to students and their needs.

This does lead me to think that there are lots of things in teaching style that aren't arbitrary, that are handed down or learnt whether or not one recognizes that's what is happening.

LINK: I cannot possibly express how excited the existence of this book makes me.

BECAUSE THE NIGHT/DANCING BAREFOOT:

Patti Smith is another of those formative musical experiences of mine. I bought my copy of Horses at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, for $5.99, spring break of 8th grade, and listened to it, approximately twice a day for the next year (and with frequency since). Smith was one of those fascinating interviews--she had interests in poetry, and art, and literature, and recommended (frequently) the music of people who she liked and inspired her (she was a great font of things I would come to like); she wrote interesting songs about religion, and what it was like to be an artist.

Then there was her relationship with Fred "Sonic" Smith, formerly of the MC5 (one of Detroit's great bands; you can hear later-period Sonic Smith being awesome here). She met him, so the story goes, outside a hot dog stand somewhere in New York, and their first meeting was a much bigger deal to her longtime guitarist Lenny Kaye, for whom the late-60s Detroit scene was a big influence.

At the point I became a Patti Smith fan, which would've been 1995 or 1996, her career had an odd coda. She met Fred in '77 or '78, and in '79, she gave up her music career (as much for reasons internal to that career as anything). They got married, and lived, more or less privately, outside Detroit until Fred died. What impressed me at the time was how punk that decision was: it's what she was happy doing and so she did it, even if it didn't precisely fit in with feminist categories of the time.

But in that period after they met, before they were married, she wrote songs about him, of which I think the best is this:



Because it's a love song, from a distinctly female perspective (or so it always seemed to me), that acknowledges what's overwhelming about falling in love, in its good, bad, and complicated ways. There's a real joy to it, even if it's not quite happy in the way one expects love songs to be.

And then there's "Because the Night", which is more famous. The words seem so perfectly chosen, in the way only a Bruce Springsteen/Patti Smith collaboration in 1977 could possibly be (this is, for a certain kind of music fan, the equivalent of Batman and Superman teaming up)--too verbal, and still not saying enough, expressing the real difficulty of expressing these things.

4000TH POST!

And to mark the solemnity of the occasion, a proposed syllabus revision, borrowed from a gchat conversation. On participation:

"Good preparation is vital to discussion, and discussion is a central part of any classroom experience. To ensure proper student participation, students will be required to submit a one-page reading response at the beginning of each class session. Failure to submit these papers or participate in discussion will result in a lower participation grade and may result in objects (pieces of chalk, books, rocks) being thrown at students by the instructor."

TOP ELEVEN NOVELS: (see here and here) The first three one can think of as each of a type, that is, each is a response to a different meaning of 'top.' The rest are not ordered in any particular fashion. NB: American literature only in its early-20th century variety, lots of mid-20th English, and more reading in 19th century French and Russian than this list indicates. No wonder I'm not postmodern.

1. The Great Gatsby (if 'top' is read as 'has meant the most to me personally.' I was sent a podcast Slate did on the book, which I should find the link for. The people who discussed it began by remarking how much more they found in their most recent reading than in their first. And that's the key, I think: it has an easy surface meaning that becomes deeper the more time one logs in life.)

2. A Hero of Our Time (if 'top' is read as 'most impressive technical feat.' The double-narrator that slowly introduces Pechorin is a very remarkable effect, and the ability to layer narrative styles and genres is impressive, all the moreso for how concise it is. It's not unlike other Russian novels--The Master and Margarita or Dead Souls, except that it makes a virtue of simple complexity.)

3. The Brothers Karamazov (if 'top' is read as 'the deepest well from which to draw.' Everyone believes Ivan is the main character, but I think that's a serious mis-reading of Dostoevsky's intention. Once I finish re-reading it, I'll explain why.)

4. The Sun Also Rises (if I could write in this style, I would.)

5. Mansfield Park

6. The End of the Affair

7. Blaming

8. Netherland (Conservatives have a sometimes-hostility towards technology, and for some reason, but the use of google maps in this is quite affecting--really.)

9. Crime and Punishment

10. Cakes and Ale

11. Lost Illusions (marred by many of the things that mar 19th-century French literature, but unlike Sentimental Education or The Red and the Black, this one gets stronger as it goes on.)

LINK: This, Chris Lawrence, is just brilliant. Sample:

2. Your professor, Louise Johnson, is apparently a single female. Which of the following is a proper form of address for her, absent specific instructions to the contrary? (Circle as many as appropriate.)
a. Mrs. Johnson
b. Miss Johnson
c. Dr. Johnson
d. Prof. Johnson
e. Louise
f. Hot Lips

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING: From N.T. Wright's Surprised By Hope, which I find to be in all ways a remarkable book. It's somewhere, so far as I can tell, between his short, non-technical books and his very technical ones. His hermeneutic is rich: philology, philosophy, history, a strong reading of the text, the relevant context. What I like most about him is his ability to turn from very analytic discussion (his philology on 1 Corinthians 15 dismantles a lot of bad thinking about the passage) to the real, this-worldly implications of that more abstract discussion. Thus, on the too-well-known 1 Corinthians 13:

It is this future emphasis, the stress that what we are at the moment is incomplete, that turns Paul's poem on love away from being mere moralism ("please try harder to behave like this!") and into something altogether stronger and more powerful. We all know that it's no good simply telling people to love one another. One more exhortation to love, to patience, to forgiveness, may remind us of our duty. But as long as we think of it as duty we aren't very likely to do it.

[two excised paragraphs on the interrelation between forgiveness of sins and forgiving others]

Of course, in our incomplete world God's gentle offer and demand press upon us as fearful things, almost threatening. But God's offer and demand are neither fearful nor threatening. God in his gentle love longs to set us free from the prison we have stumbled into--the loveless prison where we refuse both the offer and the demand of forgiveness. We are like a frightened bird before him, shrinking away lest this demand crush us completely. But when we eventually yield--when he corners us and finally takes us in his hand--we find to our astonishment that he is infinitely gentle and that his only aim is to release us from our prison, to set us free to be the people he made us to be. But when we fly out into the sunshine, how can we not then offer the same gentle gift of freedom, of forgiveness, to those around us? That is the truth of the resurrection, turned into prayer, turned into forgiveness and remission of debts, turned into love. It is constantly surprising, constantly full of hope, constantly coming to us from God's future to shape us into the people through whom God can carry out his work in the world.

ALSO: On the topic of a Christian's relationship to the political world, it's important to disagree with this:

The only valid justification for disobeying civil government would be in the case of laws which require disobedience to God, to whom we owe our ultimate allegiance. The most often cited example of this is the story of Daniel in the Lion’s Den found in Daniel 6:6-22.

This view is incorrect because it confuses the unanimity of Scripture on one view--that when forced to choose between God and Caesar, one must choose God--with the idea that Scripture exhaustively rules out other possibilities. Again, Grotius discusses this at great length. In Locke's Paraphrase of Romans 13, he suggests that the point of the Romans passage is to say something about Christian liberty, and its limits. What we know, according to the New Testament, about human relations is that Christianity radically transforms them, and in some important way effaces distinctions that had been held to matter (one thinks immediately of Galatians 3, but there are other passages that cover this subject).

But it's "in some important way," not "altogether." If one looks at Romans, the upshot of that section on civil government is "just because you're a Christian doesn't mean you can avoid paying taxes." Yes, it's true that Jesus has replaced Caesar (or any other claimant) as Lord, and with that comes true freedom, but that's not an excuse for license (as the 1 Peter 2 passage indicates) nor anarchy. All those orders have been instituted for a reason.

To return to Locke, he says all that Romans is meant to demonstrate is that a Christian does not have more freedom than the average citizen. To say that he cannot rebel when a theory of government would say other citizens can rebel is to (in fact) argue that the Christian has less political freedom than the average citizen, which would be paradoxical, to say the least. I am not fully persuaded Locke's position is the right one, but it seems (so far as it goes) to be within orthodoxy.

LINK: Pointed out to me by one of my Kansas City friends: Dance Your Ph.D., with video!

LINK: Very interesting post on grade inflation at Crooked Timber. In particular I liked:

I now think that is just a wrongheaded view about what grades are for. For two reasons. First, in nearly 20 years of teaching in research universities I regularly—in just about every class—come across students who are smarter than I am and more promising than I was at their age, but there have only been 4 or 5 students whose work placed them unambiguously well above the rest of the top quarter, and only one whose work stunned me. Reserving an A (or A+ or A++) for them takes grades too seriously. How could the one stunning student know that he was being rewarded with a stunning grade? And why should he care? The student in question, I know, would have found the very idea of reserving a grade for him absurd, laughable, arrogant, and vain. A professor can reward, or ‘mark’, those students’ work much more effectively with verbal or written praise, or with a request to meet to discuss the paper, or with frank admiration of a thought in the public forum of the classroom. Only a student unhealthily obsessed with their grades would be more motivated by a special grade than by alternative forms of recognition. I have not yet come across a student whose work is extremely good and who is sufficiently grade-obsessed that adding a reserved high grade would motivate or reward them at all in the presence of any of the alternatives I have mentioned.

In my more limited teaching experience, I've found this to be true. Very good students, or students who do very good work, are often not very motivated by the grade. This past semester I had one student (my best) ask me to give a more thorough critique of what they had written: the student recognized that they had met the tasks the paper demanded, but expected of themselves something even better than that. And students who work very hard (I've had a few) and write something notably better than their past work, or else just very good, it's less the grade than what it symbolizes that matters--they like getting the good grade, sure, but they especially like that their work has been noted as very good, especially if I take time to tell them so.

I would also tend to agree with Harry's point about the pedagogical function of grades, especially for students who are used to doing well--a slightly lower grade on an assignment where it is obvious they have not put in their best work will often elicit better future results than giving them the grade that, by virtue of their paper-against-everyone-else's, they "deserve."

IT'S AXE-GRINDIN' TIME:

James Polous counterposes a Rick Warren quote and one of Jesus' parables, thus:

Well, actually, the Bible says that evil cannot be negotiated with. It has to just be stopped […]. In fact, that is the legitimate role of government. The Bible says that God puts government on earth to punish evildoers. Not good-doers. Evildoers. — Rick Warren
Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field: but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way. But when the blade was sprung up and brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also. So the servants of the householder came and said unto him, Sir, didst thou not sow good seed in thy field? From whence then has it tares? He said unto them, An enemy hath done this. The servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up? But he said, Nay: lest while ye gather up the tares ye root up also the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn. — Matt. 13:24-30

I assume, perhaps incorrectly, that people are familiar with the Scriptural basis for what Warren says. Romans 13 in the NIV:

1 Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. 2 Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. 3 For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you. 4 For he is God's servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God's servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. 5 Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience. 6 This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God's servants, who give their full time to governing.

One may also want to reference 1 Peter 2:

13 Submit yourselves for the Lord's sake to every authority instituted among men: whether to the king, as the supreme authority, 14 or to governors, who are sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to commend those who do right. 15 For it is God's will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men. 16 Live as free men, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil; live as servants of God. 17 Show proper respect to everyone: Love the brotherhood of believers, fear God, honor the king.

The language Warren uses is more contemporary, but the idea is substantially the same, and in any event a very orthodox Christian idea of long historical standing: I need only gesture at City of God. Of course, this does not settle the thorny question of what exactly the Christian's relationship to civil authority ought to be. Grotius does, however, offer a full explanation of the relevant biblical texts (in addition to the history of commentaries on those texts) in Chapters 2-4 of The Rights of War and Peace. And I should hardly need to point out that one can separate his religious point, which is so orthodox to be banal, from his specific policy application.

What I really want to object to is the use of the parable, which, so far as I can tell, bears absolutely not at all on the question of civil government. First of all, it's a parable, so everything stands in symbolically for something else--one can't note the use of the concept 'enemy' in both and think they're referring to the same thing. Second, we are told the parable is about the kingdom of heaven. It's a parable, moreover, about earthly life and God's judgment, and more specifically, the servants of the household (and who are the servants in the parable if not the members of the church?), who are told in that capacity not to separate the wheat from the tares. This may raise a question as to whether the servants of the household can also be a part of government, but it doesn't so much as raise the implication that Warren's theological point might be wrong (again, I should hardly need to point out that his policy conclusion in no way necessarily follows).

(Also, if one doesn't find this compelling, the use of governments as a scourge for evil is one of the constant themes of Old Testament prophetic literature, though I will bracket that for now)

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: N.T. Wright, in Surprised by Hope, settling a question I had wondered about for some time:

Third, therefore, I do not believe in purgatory as a place, a time, or a state. It was in any case a late Western innovation, without biblical support, and its supposed theological foundations are now questioned, as we saw, by leading Roman Catholic theologians themselves [he earlier references the work of Karl Rahner and Ratzinger/Benedict's Eschatology to this effect]. As the reformers insisted, bodily death itself is the destruction of the sinful person. Someone once accused me of suggesting that God was a magician if he could wonderfully make a still-sinful person into a no-longer-sinful person just like that. But that's not the point. Death itself gets rid of all that is still sinful; this isn't magic but good theology. There is nothing left to purge. Some older teachers suggested that purgatory would still be necessary because one would still need to bear punishment for one's sins, but any such suggestion is of course abhorrent to anyone with even a faint understanding of Paul, who teaches that "there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ."

The last great paragraph of Romans 8, so often and so appropriately read at funerals, leaves no room for purgatory in any form. "Who shall lay any charge against us...? Who shall condemn us...? Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Neither death nor life nor anything in all creation shall be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." And if you still want to say that Paul really meant "though of course you'll probably have to go through purgatory first," I think with great respect that you ought to see not a theologian but a therapist.

In fact, Paul makes it clear here and elsewhere that it's the present life that is meant to function as purgatory. The sufferings of the present time, not of some postmortem state, are the valley through which we have to pass in order to reach the glorious future. I think I know why purgatory became so popular, why Dante's middle volume is the one people most easily relate to. The myth of purgatory is an allegory, a projection from the present onto the future. This is why purgatory appeals to the imagination. It is our story, here and now. If we are Christians, if we believe in the risen Jesus as Lord, if we are baptized members of his body, then we are passing right now through the sufferings that form the gateway to life. Of course, this means that for millions of our theological and spiritual ancestors death brought a pleasant surprise. They had been gearing themselves up for a long struggle ahead, only to find that it was already over.

TO ZION/EVERYTHING IS EVERYTHING/KILLING ME SOFTLY: The last was a feature of the psuedo-karaoke that was the last four hours of the drive back from Kansas City, with that great Roberta Flack hook in the chorus, and myself adding Wyclef's "one time!" "two times!" in the background. Then there's this:



Many of these posts begin with "it's easy to forget..." but it is easy to forget that The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was the album of 1998, and one of those that made people believe in the transcendent possibilities of hip-hop. Tragic, then, that the promise was lost, and hip-hop is now a collection of novelties that has largely given up on substance. Generally, there are two streams within hip-hop, the one that emphasizes the hook, and the other that emphasizes the lyrics; usually the two are quite separate (think "Rapper's Delight" versus "The Jungle") though when they come together (see about half of ...It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back) it's powerful. And in 1998, I was as close to steeped as I ever got in evangelical youth culture, always holding out the place non-Christian music held for me, so it was nice that Lauryn wore her faith on her sleeve and worked it into everything (as I recall, she accepted one of her Grammys by reading a Psalm). She never quite got it together again, which is a shame, but all these songs sound just as good after 10 years as they did when they were new--and that's something.

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING, or THE CLOSEST I WILL COME TO A 'WHY I AM A PROTESTANT' POST: Class tomorrow will be the Cathedral scene from Kafka's The Trial. I chose it initially because it contains both a text and the interpretations of that text, and so makes for a nice model of the work we do in theorizing law. Reading it again this morning, the emphasis of the text shifted:

..."That is well argued," said K., after repeating to himself in a low voice several passages from the priest's exposition. "It is well argued, and I am inclined to agree that the doorkeeper is deceived. But that has not made me abandon my former opinion, since both conclusions are to some extent compatible. Whether the doorkeeper is clear-sighted or deceived does not dispose of the matter. I said the man is deceived. If the doorkeeper is clear-sighted, one might have doubts about that, but if the doorkeeper is himself deceived, then his description must of necessity be communicated to the man. That makes the doorkeeper not, indeed, a deceiver, but a creature so simple-minded he ought to be dismissed at once from his office. You mustn't forget that the doorkeeper's deceptions do himself no harm but do infinite harm to the man." "There are objections to that," said the priest. "Many aver that the story confers no right on anyone to pass judgment on the doorkeeper. Whatever he may seem to us, he is yet a servant of the Law; that is, he belongs to the Law and as such is beyond human judgment. In that case one must not believe that the doorkeeper is subordinate to the man. Bound as he is by his service, even only at the door of the Law, he is incomparably greater than anyone in the world at large in the world. The man is only seeking the Law, the doorkeeper is already attached to it. It is the Law that has placed him at his post; to doubt his dignity is to doubt the law itself." "I don't agree with that point of view," said K., shaking his head, "for if one accepts it, one must accept as true everything the doorkeeper says. But you yourself have sufficiently proved how impossible it is to do that." "No," said the priest, "it is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary." "A melancholy conclusion," said K. "It turns lying into a universal principle."

I see my mistake on reading this chapter the first time was taking the priest at his word that his tale concerned the Law. On re-reading, I notice the tale begins and ends with the priest's assertion of his position as part of the Court:

"You must first see who I am," said the priest. "You are the prison chaplain," said K., groping his way nearer to the priest again; his immediate return to the Bank was not so necessary as he had made out, he could quite well stay longer. "That means I belong to the Court," said the priest. "So why should I want anything from you? The Court wants nothing from you. It receives you when you come and it dismisses you when you go."

(The last is the end of the chapter). I first read The Trial in February or March, and I had my insight into it sometime over the summer. I noticed that the man who finds himself at the doorway to the Law never tries to enter: he sees the doorkeeper and interacts with him, takes him at his word when he is told that the first moment is not the one for him to enter, anticipates a threat of violence that is never made, and engages in a series of actions to get through the door by swaying the doorman, through bribes or persuasion. I thought it was curious that neither K. nor the priest mention that the man fails to ever attempt to walk through the door. But, as I said, I came to realize the tale is about the Court, not the Law: the emphasis placed on the doorkeeper's status with respect to the Law is paralleled by the priest's status with respect to the Court, and what is the book of the Law (the tale is the first preface to the book of the Law) if not the Court's version of the Law? So it's not surprising that the tale omits it and the commentators do not address this possibility (nor does the priest commit himself to any particular interpretation, transmitting only the collected interpretations in response to K.'s objections, until K. will have no more of it): what interest could they have in denying the power of the doorkeeper? So one heaps on interpretations until the plainest meaning becomes the most hidden and obscure. The man dies at the threshold of the Law, the testament to the power of the Law (which is to say, the Court), and one hardly notices the tragedy at all.

LINK: I have no particular feelings about Martin Buber, so agree with the thrust of Helen's post, but will take issue with the following:

4. Ritual is unhelpful and hollow. Again with the Like Hell. Buber says that the man who possesses that special feeling of religiosity is more praiseworthy than the man who goes through the motions of religion (i.e. religiosity is authentic, religion is mere performance), but how do we achieve that feeling of religiosity if not through ritual? A recipe book is not the same thing as a meal, but no beginner can produce the latter without the aid of the former.

Well, I'm not convinced a meal is the right simile for religiosity; it certainly fits the point Helen wants to make, but there is a universe of 'religiosity is like x's, why this one?

I'm also not convinced the simile works on its own terms, either at the beginning or the end: at the end, because eventually the beginner will have less need of the book, unless they retain the status of beginner perpetually ('a melancholy thought,' as Josef K. says in the snippet of The Trial I am re-reading for class tomorrow)--otherwise, there would be neither chefs nor innovation. Nor does it seem to work at the beginning, because where did all those recipes come from in the first place?

That's not really an argument against ritual as such, which I like as well as any conservative. And certainly, as a Christian, I'd argue one should keep up certain practices even though one doesn't always feel them (though always in the hope one will feel them again), but it seems pretty clear that we do the rituals to get to the feeling, which suggests to me the importance of the feeling over the ritual (I'm not really comfortable with either of those terms, 'feeling' or 'ritual,' but adopt them since that's the language of what I'm replying to); but at any rate, it seems like the claims we make for ritual shouldn't outstrip what it can do.

I would like to have something (anything) to say that I could put here, but I have nothing. Nor has an afternoon and evening of looking for something helped. This has never happened before.

[I did, for the record, find something, but it's from a friend, who wrote something to me about myself, and so not fit to share on the blog.]

A BRIEF DEFENSE OF ECUMENISM, LARGELY FOR MY OWN BENEFIT: It's an awkward, awkward position to hold, for any number of reasons, but in large part because no one is ever happy with it. Ecumenism in my mind consists of two strands. Paul will often speak of particular behaviors which divided churches and attempt to heal the breaches by saying (in regard to feast days, or the use of meat sacrificed on pagan altars, etc) that it's an indifferent matter, but one should have a reason for choosing as one does. Ecumenism, I think, should respect both ends of that kind of statement: choices aren't random (that is, they aren't pure exercises of will), and so have reasons or an apologetic that can be given in their defense. On the other hand, one should recognize that people differ, and can differ reasonably. So the ecumenist is always (perpetually) caught in the middle: never enough 'at home' to please the other members of one's tradition, never close enough to the other to consider all those matters indifferent. But, but:

The second triad--blossoming in this
Eternal sprngtime that the nightly Ram
does not despoil--perpetually sings

'Hosanna' with three melodies that sound
in the three ranks of bliss that form this triad;
within this hierarchy there are three

kinds of divinities: first, the Dominions,
and then the Virtues; and the final order
contains the Powers. The two penultimate

groups of rejoicing ones within the next
triad are wheeling Principalities
and the Archangels; last, the playful Angels.

These orders all direct--ecstatically--
their eyes on high; and downward, they exert
suchforce that all are drawn and draw to God.

And Dionysius, with much longing, set
himself to contemplate these orders: he
named them and distinguished them just as I do.

Though, later, Gregory disputed him,
when Gregory came here--when he could see
with opened eyes--he smiled at his mistake.

This was, as I remember, Dara's favorite part of the Paradiso--Gregory smiling at his mistake. It's also a nice commentary on the limits of disputation--we disagree but there will come a point where the disagreements won't matter, and when dealing with each other (always with charity, always in love), it's best to keep in mind that we may pour our best efforts into mistakes we will smile away when the time comes.


(The kicker, if you like, is that Dante is wrong: he claims Dionysius' opinion is correct (in the last of Canto XXVIII, which I omitted) because he received in directly from Paul, who (according to the end of 2 Corinthians) had a vision of heaven. Except this only works if the Dionysius who wrote the work on the angels was also Dionysius the Aeropagite, who is mentioned in Acts. Dante thought he was, but we now know the works are by someone else, usually called psuedo-Dionysius. So p-D may still be right (if there is a right), but not for the reasons Dante thought. But it's a beautiful passage, and the thought stands in spite of that, works of art being lovely that way.)