“The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever,” writes Don DeLillo, in Point Omega. A Guardian writer quotes this line by way of explaining DeLillo’s modernist commitment to difficulty and complexity in his novels. “As a champion of ‘difficulty’, albeit in an American mode, [DeLillo] is an heir of modernism and says that he sees himself as ‘part of a long modernist line starting with James Joyce’. …Readers who want neat plots and tidy endings should leave now,” warns the Guardian writer, who goes on to describe a recent afternoon spent interviewing DeLillo in Manhattan.
Like Joyce, DeLillo takes up the stark and daunting task of rendering consciousness as it ceaselessly expresses itself to itself over the length of a human life. But he does this, as his interviewer notes, “in an American mode.” Indeed DeLillo says to him: “When I get a French translation of one of my books that says ‘translated from the American’, I think, ‘Yes, that’s exactly right.'”
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I don’t know if it’s because I spent a year in England when I was eight, but I’ve always leaned toward the British mode. I think I’m a very American person, but many of the writers I love – Robert Graves, T.S. Eliot, Orwell, Larkin, Auden, Hitchens, and now, having read his short essays about dying of ALS, Tony Judt – are British.
Is it possible to distinguish a British mode of essay writing, or, in the case of Eliot and Larkin and Auden, poetry? Is there a British writerly dialect, as it were? A modern one, since we’re talking here about twentieth and twenty-first century British writers?
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In their obituaries for Tony Judt, many people are quoting this line from his New York Review series about his disease:
[T]here I lie: trussed, myopic, and motionless like a modern-day mummy, alone in my corporeal prison, accompanied for the rest of the night only by my thoughts.
I think that sentence, like these from Hitchens about his chemotherapy, displays the British inflection I have in mind:
I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don’t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.
Aside from the obvious marks of careful writing both men exhibit — going to the trouble of finding a spectacularly good simile (like a modern-day mummy; like a sugar lump in water); using alliteration as if it were the most natural thing in the world (myopic motionless modern mummy; people poison plug passivity impotence powerlessness); using unusual words and phrases, some of which feel uncomfortably multiple or medieval in meaning (trussed, gravely, myopic, venom sack) — there’s the stoic attitude to be noticed here, a mental position at some distance from the self, watching the self as it suffers, watching it with a grim and wry intelligence whose absolute fidelity to reality and candor gets us as close to what DeLillo calls “the true life” as words are liable to get us.
Although when we are with these men we are
In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,
The silent listening to the undeniable
Clamour of the bell of the last annunciation.
we are nonetheless oddly buoyed by their writing, for it is after all muscular, finely rippled.
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“[The act of writing my first] novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking,” says DeLillo. “That’s really what writing is – an intense form of thought.”
Strong writing is the intensest form of strong thought, and strong thought in a condition of entropy feels to us heroic, cutting edge, thrilling. This is humanity resisting to the last its reduction to an object by powering up subjectivity to a sort of hyper-controlled shriek. “[W]hile the world moves / In appetency, on its metalled ways,” the en-graved or gravely endangered writer, immobilized, fights that much more fiercely for consciousness, for the words to encompass consciousness.
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Will not stay still.
At the point of greatest tension, under the heaviest burden of fear and despair, the writer, with courage, gathers his wits about him and continues, even now, to get the better of words.
“I get satisfaction out of understanding what I’m going through, which I can only achieve by describing it with an almost externalised dispassion,” said Tony Judt. “It makes me feel like I’m not dead yet.”
… when funding university sports.
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Here’s an article along the same lines, about the University of Virginia.
… Bad publicity about the program also hurt, including football player arrests, basketball players leaving school, and the UVA lacrosse murder. [The athletics director] says the department is hoping to teach student athletes leadership skills to help avoid trouble off the field.
… at the University of Oregon, comments on the new, astoundingly expensive student athlete center there:
… The Jaqua Center, dubbed the “jock box” by critics, has spurred controversy because of its opulence and exclusivity. Although it sits at a prominent entrance to campus, most of the building is off limits to non-athletes.
“Forty million dollars buys a lot of new faculty, reduced class sizes, better facilities for the rest of campus,” UO senate president Nathan Tublitz said. “It is a travesty to spend so much money for the benefit of such a small subset of students who already receive enormous perks.”…
The university didn’t spend the money; Phil Knight of Nike did. Implicit in Nathan’s comment, though, is the point that this does not matter. Choices were made about how to spend immense sums of money on an important public university suffering from serious budget cutbacks.
A university spokesman says what they always say under circumstances like these: Universities have no sway over donors. If they want to donate only for athletics, what can we do?
Nonsense. Universities can turn down gifts. They can attempt to alter, expand, and differentiate, gifts… Where, after all, is UO’s president in stories like this? Did he attempt convey to Knight the symbolic significance of a serious university spending this sort of money on athletes, many of whom will not graduate?
… comes out swinging on the Huffington Post, and then mixes it up with readers in his article’s comment thread. Very heady stuff.
His attack on for-profit universities is sharp and angry. He’s angry not only because these schools rip off students and taxpayers; he’s especially angry because their ethos has infected a lot of non-profit schools.
… Senator Harkin and the GAO’s work has exposed once and for all how utterly corrupt these for-profit “universities” and “colleges” really are.
At a time when the faculties of public colleges and universities are being told by their administrators how they should imitate the for-profits like the “University” of Phoenix because they represent some sort of idealized “private sector” efficiency model, Senator Harkin’s and the GAO’s revelations are all the more stunning. In California, the community college brass recently tried to ram through a transfer of credit deal with Kaplan as a way to stretch its budget. Luckily, the faculty senate refused to go along.
Sure, his sarcastic quotation marks should go; but his anger seems to UD justified. For years she’s chronicled the onlining and general cheapening of American university education, but there’s no stronger argument against the degradation of our degrees than a good look at the burgeoning, squalid for-profit sector. Aggressive recruitment of tons of students in order to make lots of money from them; overwhelmingly online offerings taught to people whose identity you cannot even verify; low standards of instruction and little expectation of serious work; not even an effort to offer face-to-face classroom instruction; the replacement of the higher thought implicit in the phrase higher education with information-bullets — we have seen the future, and it is us.
Doug Fields said this last May when he resigned as president of the University of New Mexico faculty senate. He, like many other UNM professors, was protesting the wretched management of the university by its president, David Schmidly (long history here).
And he meant that thing about leaving. This article describes graduate students taking over much of the teaching, especially in math and physics, which have recently lost 25 professors “to higher salaries at other universities,” says the deputy provost. He doesn’t mention the no-confidence vote against Schmidly, the many sports scandals over which he has presided, his effort to give his son a high-paying job at UNM, etc., etc.
Several classes are being canceled as well.
Although it’s hard to confirm this from where UD‘s sitting, it does look as though an exodus of UNM faculty is underway. They’ve still got Mike Locksley, though.
UD leaves tomorrow for her house in upstate New York. I’m not kidding when I tell you that this house is back of beyond. No internet connection, for instance.
I will therefore probably post every other day. Maybe more often, but probably around every other day.
Means of connection: Mr UD and I will drive down a series of steep dirt roads to a hot spot in Cobleskill, the closest town.
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Meanwhile, as we say farewell to Garrett Park, here’s a poem about what we’re leaving. A poem about a typical morning around these parts, late summer.
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AUGUST, ‘THESDA
Morning starts with the sound of a train.
I open my bedside laptop to see
If, after last night’s stupendous rain,
We’ve been reconnected to electricity.
Yes! New comments, new mail…
I glance beyond the sliding doors
To gauge how badly the gale
Has shaken the trees. More
Branches, limbs, and twigs to gather.
I sigh, get up, let out the dog, and go
To the kitchen to microwave a rather
Agèd cup of tea, and also
A plate of olive oil.
I toast tandoori naan
And dip it, soft and hot, into the oil.
Now I catch sight of a white-spotted fawn
Which stares at me and seems to linger.
I give it the finger.
… these farcically conflicted groups receive money from the entities they’re supposed to oversee.
Which is why accreditors accredit almost everything, corporate boards at places as outrageous as Goldman Sachs do nothing, and auditors rarely meet a Ponzi scheme putrid enough to catch their eye.
Here are excerpts from conversations between US senators and a representative of the accreditors who accredit all those for-profit colleges you’ve been reading about. (Lynn O’Shaughnessy, CBS: “Until the industry is cleaned up — if it ever is — I’d stay away from these schools. You can start by avoiding any school that advertises on television.”)
“Do you think maybe your rigorous standards aren’t rigorous enough?”
“I believe the standards themselves are rigorous…”
I’m sure they are, honey, I’m sure they are. But you are not a standards-writing organization. You are an accrediting organization.
… “If your process doesn’t detect readily apparent fraud, who is protecting students and taxpayers?… We rely on accreditation.”
Mr. McComis replied that it that was up to state and federal regulators, “the other parts of the triad,” to root out fraud.
“Accreditation is designed to evaluate the quality of education, not to detect fraud,” he said, adding, “Certainly, if we find fraud in the process, we’re going to act on it.”
“But your on-site evaluations didn’t detect it,” Senator Harkin said. “It seems like you accept the schools’ word on what they’re doing.”
Quality involves not merely how well taught courses are (and there’s reams of evidence that many courses are taught poorly at these schools); quality involves institutional controls, hiring and recruiting practices, etc. — Things accreditors are supposed to review and approve.
Mr. Harkin said he planned to “look into” the financing structure of the accrediting system, saying it “seems to be a situation that is rife with conflict.”
That plan has implications for nonprofit colleges as well, since all accreditors are financed by the institutions they accredit…
Yes. Which is why vanishingly few schools fail to be accredited. They may get warnings, yadda yadda. But everyone outside of obvious diploma mills (and they’re still fooling lots of people by using their own bogus accrediting jobbies) gets to operate.
During the trial of a fraudster in Annapolis:
In court, [US Attorney P. Michael] Cunningham argued that Barefoot was a “serious” flight risk, noting an “overarching assessment” of her conduct and character. He said that while Barefoot has repeatedly claimed to have a doctorate in childhood trauma from Lexington University, he doesn’t believe she ever attended college.
[Her attorney] countered that Lexington University was an online college. But a 2002 report on “diploma mills” by the U.S. General Accounting Office described it as a “nonexistent institution.”
