Two on Literature in the Academy

Patrick Gillespie:  Let Poetry Die:

The best thing that could happen to poetry is to drive it out of the universities with burning pitch forks.  Starve the lavish grants.  Strangle them all in a barrel of water.  Cast them out.  The current culture, in which poetry is written for and supported by poets has created a kind of state-sanctioned poetry that resists innovation.  When and if poetry is ever made to answer to the broader public, then we may begin to see some great poetry again – the greatness that is the collaboration between audience and artist.

Ted Genoways:  The Death of Fiction?:

[T]he less commercially viable fiction became, the less it seemed to concern itself with its audience, which in turn made it less commercial, until, like a dying star, it seems on the verge of implosion.  Indeed, most American writers seem to have forgotten how to write about big issues—as if giving two shits about the world has gotten crushed under the boot sole of postmodernism.

Most fledgling writers and poets require another source of income.  And teaching is clearly a legitimate route.  However, the insular world of the academy provides university-affiliated writers and poets with long term income and publication, with or without readership.  The academic-publishing-complex produces an almost infinite supply which is totally indifferent to demand.  To make this possible, this excess supply is funded by someone else, that is, the tax and tuition payers.  I can think of no other field where we see so great an imbalance in supply and demand.  This situation is finally receiving the attention it deserves.

To writers I would ask, which is preferable:  Publication in an obscure literary journal (readership, maybe, a few thousand) or on a Google-searchable website?  I suppose it's a question of prestige versus availability.  Make that incestuous prestige versus the risk that no one will want to read your easily-available work.

To readers:  If you want to be intellectually stimulated, or God forbid, entertained, look for poetry and fiction produced by writers who are not part of the academy's infrastructure.
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Attention Writers: Plot Trumps All

In a follow-up to Fiction Need Not Be Boring, it is interesting to note all the pompous criticism of popular fiction.

Look, this highbrow distaste for plot produces a never-ending series of novels that:  A. Don't live up to the authors' literary aspirations, and B.  No one wants to read. Sure, you can legitimately criticize Dan Brown's writing.  But I choose to criticize the lack of plot in modern literature.

The lesson here is that great writing is a distant second to having a great story to tell.

And, let's take it a step further:  Writing is a teachable skill.  There are creative writing classes on every college campus.  They may not make you a great writer, but they certainly inculcate an academic sense of what is great writing.

Personally, I'm not at all convinced this is a good thing.  These classes surely cannot give you an imagination.  The best writer I know, by far, has a comfort with the English language which I envy, but more important, she has a story to tell.  Truly great writers always have a story to tell.  Pretenders wax lyrically about the wallpaper.  And endlessly develop psychologically complex characters who never get around to doing too much.

Bottom line:  Having something to say is infinitely more important than how you say it.
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Fiction Need Not Be Boring

I remember an old Lev Grossman piece in The Wall Street Journal which was headlined:  Good Books Don't Have to Be Hard (archive).  But his somewhat condescending article should have been entitled: Fiction Need Not Be Boring.  Here's Grossman:

If there's a key to what the 21st-century novel is going to look like, this is it:  The ongoing exoneration and rehabilitation of plot. 

[The Modernists] trained us, Pavlovianly, to associate a crisp, dynamic, exciting plot with supermarket fiction, and cheap thrills, and embarrassment.  Plot was the coward's way out, for people who can't deal with the real world.  If you're having too much fun, you're doing it wrong.  

The novel is finally waking up from its 100-year carbonite nap. Lyricism is on the wane, and suspense and humor and pacing are shedding their stigmas and taking their place as the core literary technologies of the 21st century. 

These books require a different set of tools, and a basic belief that plot and literary intelligence aren't mutually exclusive.

Emphasis mine.  I would agree that it's not so much that modern literary fiction is difficult.  It's just boring.  One reason Grossman left out is the modern affiliation of literary writers with academic institutions which, in their own self-interest, value pretentious "literary" obfuscation.
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The Graceless

I have a friend and colleague who occasionally reminds me that, with other people, we have to take the good with the bad.  We have to make allowances and accept that people, no matter how much we may like them, will have some traits that we do not like.  And we all know this is true.

But when I turned 50, I looked around, and I was not happy with the people surrounding me.  Friends and family, colleagues and co-workers, clients and vendors, even acquaintances.  Many of these people are not chosen, certainly not family.  Others just sort of drift into our lives and, well, stay.  Somehow.

These people, I came to realize, enjoyed our relationship on their own terms.  Terms that I had long tolerated, but never accepted.  And I always knew that if I changed these terms, then the relationship would wither and likely die.

A relationship, especially a friendship, is an honor.  We should be honored to have someone as a friend.  And grateful.  But at the same time, the reverse is true.  Others should be honored to have us as a friend.  And grateful.  There should be a certain reciprocal grace to it all.

Is this really such a high bar?  Apparently so.

So I decided, enough.  I ended my relationships with two close friends.  And I had another friend who did the ending with me; which was fine.  I stopped returning calls and messages of some others.  I severely limited new relationships of any kind.  Total house cleaning.

I never really tolerated toxic people.  But I found that avoiding toxic people was not enough for me.  I needed to rid myself of the graceless.  And the noise and clutter of the graceless.  With less noise comes more clarity.  And more focus.  On who and what is important.

Now I know what you are thinking:  Be careful, you will end up a lonely old man.  Relationships are messy by nature and we should be grateful for any of them.  But surely we, all of us, can expect some minimum level of goodwill and behavior.  Surely we owe this to ourselves.
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The Catholic Church in 2019

The Catholic Church is morally bankrupt and the time has come to ask about the people who continue to support it.

In the year 2019, after seventeen years of reported abuse cases, if you are still supporting the Catholic Church, financially or otherwise, I think you should ask yourself a simple question:  Am I a good person?

You supported the church for all these years.  But, you claim, you did not know the horrors of priestly behavior.  Okay.  Okay, but now you do know.  Now that these issues, these sins, have been brought into the light, that is no longer a legitimate excuse.

Another argument seems to be:  But the church does so much good.  Why withhold support just because of a few bad apples?  Well for one thing, no one can seriously argue, any longer, that it is only a few.  And for another, this, these problems, and certainly how they have been dealt with, stretch right up to the top of the church hierarchy.

We now know that it has not only been the priests who have sinned.  But some of the good sisters as well.  The way they handled unwed mothers for a start.  And now we learn of rape in their quarters as well.

And the problem goes beyond the Catholic clergy and extends into the Catholic community at large.  Those who knew what was going on but kept quiet about it or facilitated it, or even helped cover it up.  Doctors, nurses, police, prosecutors, social workers, teachers, other influential & important members of the laity, and yes, even some of the parents.

If you are religious and if you need the support of an organized church, why not find an alternative?  If you are a priest or a nun, that is those of you who are truly good-hearted individuals, why continue to associate yourself with such behavior?  Are you not repelled by it?  Your continued support, congregant, nun, and priest alike, implies tacit approval of this behavior AND the manner in which it has been handled by the church hierarchy.  I urge you to disassociate yourself from both.

I'll leave you with this thought:  What percentage of Nazi's were actual decision makers or participants in the atrocities?  And whatever the answer to that question, what do we think about those who were not decision makers or participants?  Some knew, some suspected, some tolerated.  Some stuck their heads in the sand.  All did nothing.

What do we think of them?
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Balm and Benison

*** Click if not crisp ***

From:  Charles Spurgeon, Autobiography, 1898.

Though I first encountered this term in The Jewel That Was Ours, 1991, by Colin Dexter (Inspector Morse Series).

From the Oxford English Dictionary:
balm (noun):  6. A healing, soothing, or softly restorative, agency or influence.
benison (noun):  1. A blessing.

I have included a full definition of balm and benison in the lexicon.
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Definition of Sequacious

Author's note:  The original title of this weblog was Non-Sequacious.  But as my friend, Sherry Shaw, pointed out, that title was pretentious and unspellable.

sequacious, adjective

I suppose my favorite definition is from Merriam-Webster:

2 : Intellectually servile.

And from the Oxford Dictionary (no longer available online):

Of a person:  Lacking independence or originality of thought.

Finally, the definitive definition from the Oxford English Dictionary:
(Login required)

a. Of a free agent or his attributes:  Given to following another or others, especially a leader.

b. Given to slavish or unreasoning following of others (especially in matters of thought or opinion).

I have included a full definition of sequacious in the lexicon.
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Searching for Alice

Perhaps you know the work of one of my favorite authors, Calvin Trillin.  He is often described as a journalist.  But I think of him as a master essayist.

He frequently included his wife, Alice, in his work.  He wrote about their adventures big and small, and about their life together.  Alice and I this, and Alice and I that.  He not only writes about their adventures, but delights in writing about Alice’s reactions and opinions and responses.  As one reads Trillin, a careful observer comes to discover that, in fact, she is the central character.  It’s all about Alice.  All of it.  He is either writing about her or not, but he is always writing for Alice.

He admits this in one of his later books on the dedication page.  I cannot quote it verbatim, but it was something like:
I wrote this for Alice.  In fact, I write everything for Alice.

Personally, I like to believe this is true.  He wrote everything for Alice.  And, if anyone else was interested in what he had to say, well, that was a bonus.

Anyway, a few years ago, Alice died.  You can imagine the response from his loyal readers.  He quoted from some of their condolence letters in a subsequent book, called About Alice.  I found one comment particularly memorable.  A woman wrote to Trillin and said that she asks herself:  Does my boyfriend love me?  And, will he love me like Calvin loves Alice?

A high bar indeed.

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What Happened to my Newspaper?

I woke up this morning, put the coffee on, and like every morning for the last 20 years, went outside to get the newspaper.  Alas, there was no paper to be found.  Of course it might have something to do with the unpaid renewal bill still sitting here on my desk.  For $183.  For another year of the Raleigh News & Observer.  Let me look at it again; yes, my subscription expired a week ago.  No doubt my carrier was hoping I’d get around to paying it and gave me a week’s grace.

But I am not going to pay it.  In fact, I decided not to renew it months ago.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the ritual of sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the paper.  Tangible news.  Well tangible newsprint anyway.  It’s a comfortable ritual and it used to be the very first thing I did in the morning.  But in recent years, its become the second.  These days, the first thing I do is, well, read the news…on the internet.  Okay I confess, email first, then news.

Sure, reading news articles on the internet takes a little getting used to.  But just like the printed newspaper, most articles are not very long.  I used to print out long articles from the internet and read them on paper.  And, I still do that occasionally – a recent New York Times Magazine cover story comes to mind.  But over time, I have come to read longer and longer articles online.

Now, we all know newspapers are in trouble.  Their problems are real:  An outdated business model, diminished advertising, and falling subscriber base.  But, I have long resented paying for the newspaper.  For me, it is a quality issue.  They just do not do a very good job.  Simple as that.  And objective journalism is an oxymoron.  The only people in the world who do not recognize this fact seem to be the so-called journalists themselves.  But I paid anyway.  I wanted to know what the heck was going on, and regardless of what I thought about their competence or fairness, they were able to inform me who won the election yesterday.

But I no longer need them for that.  Consequently, I no longer feel compelled to give money to the undeserving.

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Andrew McCarthy: The Grand Jihad

I have just started reading Andrew McCarthy's The Grand Jihad.  I was almost immediately disappointed:

So is it wrong, then, to shrink from the conclusion that the real problem is Islam?...Hair-splitting between "Islamism" and "Islam" runs the risk of doing exactly what we must avoid doing:  minimizing the challenge confronting us and suggesting that there is a vibrant, preponderant "Islam," markedly different from purportedly aberrant "Islamism," that somehow does not see sharia-imposition as obligatory.  In my heart of hearts, I don't believe this is true.

Yet, that is exactly what McCarthy immediately goes on to do:

The stubborn fact remains that there are hundreds of millions of Muslims who either do not wish to live under the tyranny of sharia or are so indifferent that, even if they would abide by sharia in a Muslim country where it applies, they do not support converting non-Muslim societies into sharia enclaves.  What are we to do about them?  Are we to tell them they are wrong, that their only alternative is to renounce Islam--even those who live in fundamentalist societies where the penalty for apostasy is death?  Are we to give those people no place to go?

McCarthy acknowledges that what he labels Islamists, "may substantially outnumber our potential allies in the umma."  And he goes on:

We should reserve the designation "Islam" in the hope that tolerant voices can redeem it, but our defense must never be hostage to that hope, which may, after all, be futile.

As he seems to acknowledge, this is purely wishful thinking.  So why does he insist on making the distinction?  Well, I think to incentivize or encourage or allow for some type of Islamic reformation.  Which perhaps, he views as more likely if the adherents can continue to think of themselves as Muslims.

While I think I understand his rational, I find it unrealistically optimistic and even counterproductive.  We will never defeat that which we are afraid to name.  Let's be clear, while there may well be moderate Muslims, there is certainly no moderate Islam.  We cannot wish it into existence.  So to answer McCarthy's question:  Are we to give those people no place to go?

Well, word games will not suffice.  The problem is not Islamism.  The problem is Islam.  Of course those people should renounce Islam.

By not rejecting Islam, so-called moderate Muslims give tacit approval to Islamic doctrine and to their co-religionists who are less reticent to follow it.  With his semantic construct, McCarthy lets them off the hook for this.  It is a mistake.  If we do not imbue Islam with the negative connotation it so richly deserves, Muslims will have no incentive to decamp.  The problem, of course, is that there are 1.4 billion Muslims of varying stripes and the overwhelming majority of them will never abandon their ideology.  It is a problem without a recognized solution.  (I advocate containment a la George Kennan)  But in any case, it does us no good whatsoever to sweep it under Orwell's rug.

For much more sober views on moderate Islam, see Bruce Bawer, Hugh Fitzgerald, and Sam Harris.

I'm eleven chapters into The Grand Jihad, and other than the semantic confusion, I have found it quite illuminating.  But I would be far more sympathetic to his above premise if McCarthy drew distinctions between his two degrees of Islam.  So far, he does not.  He talks exclusively about Islamism and Islamists.  But to my ear, it sure sounds like just plain Islam.  So every time McCarthy uses the terms Islamism or Islamist, I have to replace them with Islam or Muslim.  It's annoying.

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Finally, at the end of chapter twelve, on page 212, McCarthy, for the first time, does make a distinction between the views of (moderate) Muslims and Islamists.  He contrasts their attitudes on Obama's Muslim heritage:  Moderates "figure being born a Muslim should be irrelevant if one never makes an adult choice to embrace the religion."  As opposed to Islamists who "believe that all humans, regardless of parentage, are called to Islam at birth."  While statistics or polling on the prevailing Muslim attitude on this question would be appreciated, I will welcome more such distinctions reading forward.

At the end of chapter fifteen, McCarthy finally addresses what is to my mind the real problem, mainstream Islam:

First, while Obama is living proof that it is possible to ignore Islamic doctrine's causative connection to terrorism, it is not possible credibly to deny that connection.  Therefore, the need to deal with Islam is unavoidable--not because it is an asset, but because it's a liability that can't be written off.

Second, there can be no peace unless Islam reforms.  For there to be peace, Islam must purge its savage elements...and it must compellingly condemn the violence committed in its name.  This cannot be done, as Obama and others would like to do it, by telling Muslims everything is fine, that their religion is just peachy as is....This approach does nothing to discredit Islamists and Islamist terrorists in the eyes of other Muslims.  In fact, it enhances their credibility because it ignores their doctrinal justifications of terror rather than offering a credible counter-construction.

Worse, as we've observed, it may well be that there is no credible counter-construction of Islam.  In that case, there is a gargantuan amount of reform to be done by Muslims.  They are the ones who believe that there is something in Islam so worth preserving that it's better to fight than switch.  We cannot rouse them to the task by telling them, as American presidents have been wont to tell them, that we think Islam, as it currently exists, is promoting peace.

But the question is:  Do vast majorities of Muslims have the will, or even the inclination, to accept such "counter-constructions" or reform?  Again, this is ignoring reality.  This is holding ourselves hostage to hope.
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