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Monday, May 01, 2006
You know, speaking of well-known people I knew… …I’ve been pondering, since he died, saying something here about the writer Charles Newman. You probably haven’t heard of Newman, but he did rate a New York Times obituary, and some of the literary blogs noted his death. I barely knew him. I shared a few dinners with him in the ‘seventies, at Northwestern University, where I was an undergraduate, and where he was editing the literary journal TriQuarterly. The photo in the Times obit is ridiculous. Newman was a handsome, charismatic man, part preppie, part hippie. He came across as intellectually, socially, and sexually aggressive. Ready for mental fight, a fist fight, a pillow fight. He looked you over. Were you interesting? Worth his time? Little bourgeois pissing in your pants or fearless contrarian? Newman had that peculiar ‘sixties thing -- he was both a snob and contemptuous of snobbery. His over-elaborated novels went mostly unread. But his essay on postmodernism -- one of the first, and one of the best -- is rightly acclaimed. Here’s an excerpt from it, on universities and creative writing: Our culture has chosen to subsidize writers by employing them to teach the young, hardly an ignoble or anti humanistic impulse. And the proper question is not whether this has affected writers, but whether this is the best way to make use of writers. How does their academic involvement relate, for example, to the historically unprecedented decline in general literary and educational proficiency? The fact remains that writers have been included in faculties only since general education standards were chucked. The issue is not whether writers have somehow been circumscribed, but whether society can afford to have its most literate (if hardly its most wise) in the service of protracted adolescence? … The only charge that can be fairly brought against the modern university is also the severest -- a genuine lack of curiosity and purpose as regards the reintegration of knowledge, and a professional structure which makes intellectual reform impossible. It will remain notable primarily for producing the first generation in American history less skilled than their parents. |