alexander writing on annie

I enjoyed skimming Alexander Chee's personal essay on writing classes at Wesleyan University. I did not take creative writing classes at Wesleyan as an undergrad, but I did know the names of the somewhat famous writers he speaks of--Annie Dillard, Kit Reed, Phyllis Rose, et al. Follow this link for the essay in full: http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/personal_essays/annie_dillard_and_the_writing_life.php

The closest I ever got to Annie Dillard, discounting selling her books after college while working in a Borders Bookshop, was seven years after graduation, where on a whim, I drove up to Middletown, CT for the Nietzsch Factor Alumni Ultimate Frisbee game. As it turned out, Annie Dillard had become a fan of Ultimate and in fact was the lone fan in attendance at the game. We gave the current undergrad team our best player and then played to fifteen. It was early spring, I had a common cold and was out of shape, but somehow I managed to leap into the air to snag the game-winning goal. If I'm not mistaken, the extra strength sudafed had gotten to my head, and I yelped at the extended defender whose dive had just missed blocking this catch, "Just another a scrub." I think that guy became a star, maybe even a captain, of New York club ultimate, and I more or less retired any dreams I had of playing serious disc. Because Annie was the only fan, and the only woman's voice, I know that her final words on this alumni game were, "At least it was exciting until the end," or something to that effect. I hope Professor Dillard has a chance to one day witness Nietzsch's return to glory and a trip to College Nationals.

As for the writing, it looks like Alexander Chee, Annie's writing student, has done very well. He is a visiting writer in Emily Dickinson land, at none other than Amherst College, and his novels are published or forthcoming.

save the trees?

This article from The New York Times describes how one literary journal is embracing "new media," "social media," and more or less whatever else you would like to term it. To the best of my knowledge, they are not burning books, not even to heat their marginal, "start up" offices, but, yes, why of course, they are "tweeting" stories directly to your iphone and giving you additional options for receiving your content. Er, your short story I meant.

It looks like Rick Moody and Colson Whitehead are already in on the deal. More later on how twitter.com plans to survive any future ice storm or hostile elevator environment. (Let me know if those literary allusions--read "bad puns"--are not so obscure for you.) Peace.

obama, books, and small business

On the same day that President Obama's speech to the nation included plans to help small businesses weather the current economic storm, I read that independent bookstores have sent a letter to the Department of Justice asking for intervention in the price war over bestsellers at amazon.com, Walmart, and Target. From the article--http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/books/23price.html?ref=books--we learn that Sarah Palin's Going Rogue has depreciated two cents to $8.98, down from last Friday's $9 at either amazon.com or Walmart. (If you haven't been following that story, $8.98 is the price for this new hardcover whose original retail is close to thirty dollars.) We also learn that France already has a "prohibition against booksellers’ pricing books below cost." My best guess about Obama's speech is that it was focused more on getting small business groups to accept whatever healthcare overhaul we wind up with, but it'll be interesting to see if a possibly "progressive" President is interested in helping the smaller fries of the book world. Stay tuned.

don delillo in a downturn

I'm back for more White Noise; I'm sure you know what I mean. I'm teaching Don Delillo during our "Great Recession" and am drawn to passages such as this first paragraph of chapter 4:

When times are bad, people feel compelled to overeat. Blacksmith is full of obese adults and children, baggy-pantsed, short-legged, waddling. They struggle to emerge from compact cars; they don sweatsuits and run in families across the landscape; they walk down the street with food in their faces; they eat in stores, cars, parking lots, on bus lines and movie lines, under the stately trees.

(I apologize on behalf of literary Don if you see two places where you might like to add an "and.")

I will confess to my own overeating these days although so far I believe I've avoided "waddling" and am still masking the pounds I could "afford" to lose with shirts tucked in and pants cut close to the thigh and calf. It is funny that the novel is published in the middle of the go-go Reagan 1980s, a time period most of my students have been taught was a very, very good one; if you tell them in fact that not all boats were always lifted during the economic expanse between Carter and Bush I, they may look at you with surprise. I must say that I was surprised to read that unemployment in 1982 (you are welcome to attribute this all to either Reagan or Carter if this is part of your worldview, but other interpretations are also "allowed" here), before Reagan's growth years, was higher than it is now or then it was when I finished undergrad in 1991 (the Bush I/Clinton "tough times"). Although I like Delillo's writing, I suspect our American expansion of the waistline has gone up slowly and steadily and in fact has not carressed the sign-curve waves of our economic ups and downs. It could be that there is a parallel line here one could draw beside the everincreasing numbers of our uninsured. Yes, it is food for thought.

In 2009, during our own troubles but within the context of Delillo's novel, I can't help but wonder if we have greater unemployment lines for Professors of Elvis or Impersonators of Elvis. I'm guessing the bar mitzvah and birthday business catering to celebrity impersonators has pretty much dried up or been replaced by parties with videogame or other high-tech themes. The Professors of Elvis--in other words, recent PhDs in American Studies, Civilization, or "Environments" (as Delillo calls the department at College-on- the-Hill)--can probably at the very least drum up some adjunct work teaching freshman English at a community college and hopefully do much better.

One of my favorite supervisors in academia is in fact a Professor of Magic (PhD in Performance Studies), and in general, solid advanced education in any discipline requiring extensive reading and writing is most likely enough to hold down some sort of employment in these troubled times. There is evidence of a proliferation of online and offline academic journals as well as a small army of small presses and POD shops, so I imagine it is easier than ever before to get one's contribution to the King published. Of course, even more than finding readers for one's words, acquiring the PhD is the hard part, and it could be the case that the hurdles of Heideggar and Habermas are only some of the obstacles in the way of one's diploma in advanced Elvis. I would imagine Nietzsche, Foucault, and Barthes on the deaths of various "gods" and "authors" could also be relevant to such critical work "in the field."

Even within the world of academic Elvis, I imagine some stiff competition, and this New York Times article reminds me that any one of us with employment right now has a lot to be grateful for.
A subtext within the article seems to be that we are somewhat lucky if we felt we could never afford one of the new, expansive homes (and mortgages) offered so freely in the early aughts; several of the seniors reported on are finding it is housing payments that are keeping them looking for work despite social security and even small pensions.

Last, a student told me that there is a television show in which one of the characters plays the literary agent of Don Delillo. This seems even more impressive (or alarming?) than the citing of his name as a reference point for literary success in Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives.

For further reading in the Don, Libra and Underworld are longer and more recent, but I highly recommend his early novels, the first three in fact: Americana, End Zone, and Great Jones Street.

no college student left behind?

Harper's Magazine offers this take on the (in)solvency of Brandeis University: http://harpers.org/media/pages/2009/11/pdf/HarpersMagazine-2009-11-0082722.pdf
I'm sorry you won't be able to read the article (read "diagram") without a subscription to the magazine.

My best hunch is that there are many other schools with similar economic problems, and yet the audacity of expansion straight through a serious downturn is its own way impressive. I imagine college administrators near and far have a tremendous fear of what would happen to the enrollment numbers if their campuses were unable to offer the "cutting edge" or "newest facilities" or "high-tech dorms" or "state-of-the-art gym equipment."

In another article, I read that many Japanese private universities are in danger of going out of business. At an on-campus workshop, I mentioned that even Harvard University had cut jobs (around 500 if I'm not mistaken) this past year, and the glib facilitator of the event replied, "Do you think up at Harvard they ever note that even [add any school South of the Mason-Dixon line] cut jobs?" It sounded funny at the time, but the larger point to me is that recession and downturn are true global phenomena and that if understood in a more honest way, they could encourage more national and global cooperation.

National politicians of course have to be wary of how they embrace any "global" unity or togetherness whether the topic is global warming or higher education, and true to the conditions that get people elected, President Obama has stated he wants the United States to have the largest percentage of college graduates of any developed-world country. I believe this is a nice goal, even an essential one if we hope to maintain our status as a world leader in information, technology, or even information technology.

But perhaps a better goal would be to offer the best ratio of teachers to students at the institutions who will be doing the educating? By teachers, we could focus on access and class size; in other words, we could offer our young-adult citizens the greatest number of professors who actually teach our undergrads. In an age when lofty rhetoric and representation so often trump reality, we will most likely continue the trend of increasing the number of students while we decrease the number of undergraduate teachers, and I suspect as a nation, we will pretend we are doing the opposite. And this will most likely be both a national and global trend. As long as President Obama doesn't call his stated goal "No College Student Left Behind," I think the votership will give him the benefit of the doubt. I suppose we could try to get the k-12 teacher-student ratios down first.

thinking globally

Wild and crazy Kudera'll push the envelope here and state that women in their mid-fifties should not be forced to sleep in their cars in the freezing cold of Cleveland, Ohio or any other region of the country. Heck, I'll show my hand and state that the woman in this article has a right to lodging. Call me crazy, but I'm thinking a just society would be one that houses its residents.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/business/economy/19foreclosed.html?em

The woman in the article grew up in a housing project in Neptune, NJ, and it is sad to say that her life is basically back to where she started, only this time her current shelter bedroom comes with a 3-month time limit. So you could say the pull-out couch she slept on while being raised by a single mother was much better becuase she could come home everyday knowing she had a place to sleep.

The economic crisis is also negatively impacting children of divorce as men are disproportionately losing their jobs (the decline of domestic manufacturing et al) and no longer able to pay child support. Family court remains focused on what's best for children, but based upon another article, some of the judges in such courts are either ignorant of economic particulars or outright lying to these men reporting reduced income.

According to http://www.philly.com/philly/business/personal_finance/55404262.html, the Department of Children and Families in Florida told a divorced man his support would not be lowered because his industry will bounce back. Do we need economists (Krugman more than Bernanke) as expert witnesses to verify the claims of lost work? Is it possible the judges and attorneys need assigned reading--a sort of pre-class work--from the Business news or government statistics on employment?

We should note that according to an op-ed piece in the New York Times, things are much worse in Russian monotowns: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/17/opinion/17aron.html?sq=Russia%20monotowns&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=all. According to the article, Russians in these remote towns report that they are eating potato peels, roots, berries, and grass.

Please don't tell me this means the woman sleeping in the cold in her car should feel grateful.