Hildegarde

I wasn’t going to write a blog post today.  I’m really very aware of the fact that I tend to be crabby and unreasonable during exam weeks, and that there really isn’t a whole lot of point to it.

But it’s very early in the morning, and I woke up to find an e-mail from a student in one of my upper level classes that just floored me.

This is, remember, an upper level class, and the student who wrote me is probably the best one in it.  I suppose that that explains why she wrote, and nobody else did.

Our exam is today, and the questions for that exam are up on a site called Blackboard, where serves as a kind of website for the course while it’s going on.

I have used Blackboard extensively over time, but I’m getting less and less enamored of it.

More and more students seem to think that there’s no point in coming to class or doing the reading, because “it’s all up on Blackboard,” and they can get anything they need from there.

The question concerns a section on the final about how different kinds of mass media are funded–lots of different kinds of mass media (music,  movies, broadcast television, cable television, web sites, etc)?

I spent three days going over this stuff in class, because it’s very complicated, it differs depending on the media type, and it’s often counterintuitive.

(For instance:  first run movie theaters receive NO money at all from ticket sales for the first two weeks a movie is in their theater.  Any money they make for those first two weeks must come out of popcorn and other snacks.  That’s why a small coke in a movie theater costs more than your hernia operation.)

Anyway, I went over and over and over this stuff, and kept telling them on and on and on that it would be on the final–and it just didn’t matter.

Not only did the student who wrote me have no notes, but none of the other students in the class that she’d talked to had notes, either.

Now, this class is not a required course. It’s an elective.  Nobody has to be there.  Nobody requires this and only this for graduation. 

Theoretically, at least, students are there because they want to be there.  They’re interested in the material. 

Or something.

I spend a lot of my time telling myself that the problems I have in Composition courses arise at least partially from the fact that they’re required, that students are not automatically interested, that  they often don’t know why anybody at all would be interested in what they’re required to learn.

I don’t understand people any more. 

I can pick up a stray textbook left behind in a classroom and become totally absorbed it reading through it.  For all the carping I do on this forum, I’ve at least given a shot to most of the things I THINK I’m not interested in when they’ve crossed my path.

I don’t think I ever signed up for a course I then totally ignored for the semester, whether it was required or not.

I don’t know what is going on with my students, but I do know that the more of it I have to put up with, the less pleasant I am as a human being.

And now I have to go make sure we remembered to put the garbage out, because those are the garbage trucks coming down the hill.

Somehow, it seems like a metaphor.

Actually, it’s The Well Wrought Urn, and it’s the title of a book by Cleanth Brooks

All I can say is that it fit something deep inside my head today, which is as good an explanation as you’re ever going to get from me.  I have it–the book, that is–along with F.R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition, on my coffee table.  The Great Tradition is about three of the four English novelists Leavis thought were “great.”  He left out Jane Austen, because he thought she was the greatest, and would take an entire book to explain.  The other three are Hardy, Eliot and James–and James is an American.

This is the kill week, so let me just make a few notes before I get shot out of a canon.

First, Robert says I wouldn’t consider a Ph.D. in biochemistry “educated”–but he’s wrong.

Biology and chemistry are part of the liberal arts.  Given the kind of broad distribution program that was common at any good university before, say, 1975, I would expect a Ph.D. in biochemistry to be fairly solidly educated.   He’d be heavy on the hard sciences and math and lighter on history, philosophy and literature, but he’d still be well educated.

Of course, a PhD in biochemistry who knew nothing at all about the broad scope of the Humanities and social sciences wouldn’t be well-educated–but neither would a Literature or Philosophy major who knew nothing of science or mathematics.

A liberal arts education requires some knowledge of all these things, not just the Humanities, and not just the Sciences.

The kind of person I would not consider educated–given the way the programs I’m familiar with are usually run–is the one with a “degree” in “Resort and Leisure Management”  or “Sports Journalism.”

These are vocational courses meant to fit a student narrowly for some practical career, not foundational areas of knowledge that can be pursued for their own sake.  Neither are they areas of knowledge foundational to the enterprise of Western Civilization across the millennia.

But biologyand chemistry?  The Medieval scholars called them “natural philosophy” and included them in the Liberal Arts from the beginning.

Second, I require no deference from anybody, but I am automatically suspicious of any person who demands that he be told what you can “do” with knowledge. 

I believe very strongly in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake–that it is valuable to know just to know, because you want to know and understand, even if it won’t make you a dime or put you on a career path to “success” or any of the rest of it.

And here I’m with ab–there is very little understanding of or respect for the enterprise of learning just because you want to learn in the US.

The issue isn’t “deference” to the opinons of people with PhDs, but the sneering demand to know “what it’s GOOD for!” when you tell somebody you’re studying Renaissance atchitecture or the history of the concept of evil from Greece to Aquinas.

Everybody here has their own bogeymen, but mine are definitely composed of the echoes of endless contempt when somebody from my childhood–other children, certainly, but also quite a few adults–found me reading Aristotle or Henry James. 

“That’s STUPID,” they’d say.  “What’s it GOOD for?”

And a lifetime of listening to that particular kind of crap explains why, even though I sometimes agree more on policy with some Republicans than I do with most Democrats, I never do vote Republican.

Third, for ab’s information–English was the most popular major in my college in the year I graduated, and of the members of my class who majored in English with me, I know of not one who has ever taught a day in a public high school.

For one thing, you can’t go teach in public schools with a degree in English.  You have to get at the least a further degree in education, and the schools in most states prefer education degrees “with an English focus” rather than straight English degrees.

For what it’s worth–English majors tend to go to law school.  All the way to the year 2000, English was the most common college major of first years entering prestige American law schools (Yale, Harvard, etc).

The second most likely path after graduation is publishing–all those huge publishing houses like Random House and Simon and Schuster, all those magazines and high-end newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post are largely staffed by English majors.  The highest end newspapers won’t even look at resumes from people with “journalism” majors, although they’ll talk to English majors from “good” schools who go on to a Master’s at Columbia Journalism.

The third most common career path was, and I don’t know why, the intelligence agencies and the foreign service.  There was a while there when the CIA seemed to be staffed by nothing but English majors from Yale. 

I don’t know what the history majors did, but my guess is that the categories were similar. 

And I don’t know where things are now.  But looking at my quarterly alumni magazine, they seem to me to be similar, and I can still count on the Vassar Girl connection to get me free books from any publisher in town.

We seem to be wandering back to the LAE thing all on our own.

But right now, I’ve got to go do stuff.

I know this because what I have on the player behind me is Handel, not Bach, and there are no harpsichords. 

And it’s the Christmas season and not the holiday season because it seems silly to me to call the season of listening to Handel’s Messiah the–well, you get what I mean.

But then, that’s why I stopped sending out Christmas cards over a decade ago.  I had Christian friends, Jewish friends, atheist friends, Wiccan friends, and when I looked at cards the only thing that really attracted me was the art.

Mostly Renaissance art. 

And that didn’t even keep me out of trouble with my Christian friends, because those were split between Protestant and Catholics, and the Protestants had some trouble with some of the art, too.

Sometimes I think that people are less “free” of religion than they tell me they are.  The art’s the art.  I don’t have to believe in Zeus to like a lot of Greek statues of him, and I don’t have to believe in the Virgin Birth to like Renaissance Madonnas.

But apparently other people do.

I really am going to go back to the Liberal Arts thing.  It’s just been a little crazy.

But there’s a side note here, so–

I wish, if you’re going to post a link to something, you would also post a little explanation of what it is.  Due to the weirdness of my schedule, I tend to check most comments on my phone, and I do NOT have a “smart phone.” 

Matt has a smart phone, and I have seen it work, and I don’t want one.

But what ends up happening is that I try to access the thing and I crash the phone, or just can’t open it, or whatever, and then I forget to go check later when I’m near a computer.

So, some idea of what I’m looking for would help.

I did manage to open Elf’s link to the Atlantic article, and I’ll admit to rolling my eyes a little here.

First, though, I’d have to say that I largely agree with it.  But because I agree with it, I don’t think it would be possible to implement here, at least for public schools.

Education majors are the least qualified students on any university campus?  You bet, and they’ve got the lowest board scores, the lowest cultural literacy rate, and the worst overall literacy rate, too.

The best American private schools recognize this, and simply refuse to hire “certified” teachers.  They demand real degrees from prestige universities. 

Certainly, if we could demand the same for the teachers in our public schools, we’d be doing better–but how are you going to bring that about?  The teachers’ unions see certification as their lock on the profession.   Change certification requirements to the kind of thing the article is talking about, and you would end up rending nearly 90% of the present public school teaching corps unemployable. 

Do you really think they’re going to go for that?  And if they won’t, how do you think you’re going to get around them?

You’d also end up shutting down most of the present teacher’s colleges and education departments, and rendering most of their faculty unemployable.

Sound possible to you?

But the thing that makes me roll my eyes is this:  there really is a form of American exceptionalism at work here, but not in the way we usually use that term.

There is, first, the simple fact that we have a wildly diverse population, something someplace like Japan or Singapore doesn’t have to worry about. 

And yes, diversity is a problem in educational programs, because education is not a one size fits all proposition.  Teaching ESL to a student whose first language is Korean is different from teaching ESL to a student whose first language is Arabic.

And teaching students from dysfucntional homes (at least in the elementary grades) is different from teaching students whose home lives make some sense.

But I honestly think we could get out from under all that if it weren’t for the real issue of American exceptionalism here–the fact that we are scared to death to actually look at the facts of the situation.

Because we have a tendency to think–without having any way of knowing–that if we ever did have to acknowledge the facts, what we would find is that intellectual and academic ability varies inescapably by…race.

Please note what I did NOT say.

I did NOT say that intellectual and academic ability ACTUALLY varies by race.

I couldn’t know that even if I wanted to, because nobody has ever collected the data–no, not even Murray and Hernstein–and nobody ever will.   You couldn’t get funding to do that kind of study to save your life.

What we actually do is THIS–we secretly believe that if a single high standard were imposed across the board, African Americans and Hispanics would not be able to meet it.  They would then not attain the highest levels of education, and be pretty much locked out of the best jobs and the prestige professions from off.   This would be “racism” because–well, because it would be.  The outcome, after all, would be no different than if we were all the way back at segregation.

Having made such a determination based on no actual evidence whatsoever, we do what we have to do to get the numbers up as far as we dare–we dumb down education in our inner city, poor and minority-majority schools so that more of the students there graduate.

The graduation, of course, is bogus–what the students in these schools have received is not a high school education, but at best a sixth-grade one.  But it doesn’t look like that on the surface.  They have high school diplomas!

We then send these kids on to “college,” which isn’t really college, but sort of high school.  And we proclaim that we’ve given students who never before had a chance to go to college a chance to go.

Except, of course, that these students have not gone to college.  They’ve gone to high school and been allowed to call it “college.”   

And the “colleges” they’ve gone to have dumbed down standards so far, that students who would have been able to use them in times past for a real stab at a college education now no longer can.  Real college level work is no longer on offer there.

While we were doing all this, we were operating on an unstated assumption–that we could keep the dumbing down confined to those students over there.   It wouldn’t affect our own kids, who would go to real school with real standards, or be placed in “gifted” or advanced placement programs where the standards could be kept where they were supposed to be.

This did not, of course, work.  It took no time at all for the pressure to mount to insure “access” to things like gifted and advanced placement programs, even if that meant dumbing down the standards in these so that we could shoehorn in more students in “at risk” groups.”

And it took even less time than that for students from dumbed down school programs to enter the teacher’s colleges. 

And by now, you’ve got a very few places with decent programs, mostly in very rich, high educated upper middle class suburbs where the parents aren’t having any guff. 

And you’ve got other kinds of anomalies–Connecticut, a few years ago, changed its state standards in math away from the highly-abstract, go on to calculus stuff to more “practical” math.  Parents in places like Westport and Wilton had fits, and were told that “not everybody can go on to the analytical math.” So the parents in these places put their kids in tutoring to get the stuff they needed to end up i things like calculus and at places like Yale.

This might seem like a nifty solution, except for this–a kid whose parents are not educated, who comes from a poor background but has the talent, now has NO opportunity to learn advanced mathematics in high school.  His family will not have the money to pay for outside tutoring even if they know what they problem is, and they probably won’t know what the problem is.

For what it’s worth, I’ve had black students and white students.  My black students are, on average, far worse prepared–but I don’t see much in the way of a difference in native intelligence or academic ability. 

I think it’s entirely possible that if we instituted serious standards and stuck to them, we might have about ten years in which the “disparate impact” was glaring–but it would be glaring not because our minority students are stupid, but because so many of them do not actually have access to education at all. 

On the other side of that, though, I’d be willing to bet my house that we’d see significant shrinkage in the “achievement gap.”

But, you know, we’re not going to do that.  It’s to the advantage of too many people to keep that achievement gap wide, and, more importantly, to keep standards like “disparate impact” in place.

And they kids don’t vote.

I’m going off to read a little novel by a woman called Ellery Adams.  It’s title is A Killer Plot, and it’s the first in a series. 

Thanks to Dean James for the heads up.

Reading over the comments this morning, I find Michael suggesting that from certain clues in the excerpts I posted yesterday, my students seem to be speaking…Ebonics.

And since Ebonics is a subdialect with its own language rules, an Ebonics speaker who is trying to learn to speak and write standard English is actually learning an entirely new language.

The reference is then to Stephen Pinker.

I’ve read the Pinker.  I think I probably own everything Pinker has ever written.

On the subject of the Ebonics, thing, though, I’m skeptical, and for several reasons.

They go like this:

1) Virtually every student in every standard (not remedial) Freshman English class I’ve ever had has been, and is, white. 

The students who wrote those two pieces were almost assuredly white.

And, what’s more important–the largely unstated idea we all have that this kind of excruciatingly awful writing product is mostly a “minority” problem is dead on wrong.

My white kids are poor, working class and middle class, and all of them–even the children of doctors and lawyers–write like this.

Of course, the percentages are skewed.  A higher percentage of my classes will be poor and working class.  The middle class children of doctors and lawyers will take up two or three seats in any section.

But they’re still there, and they’re still doing this.

I’d be willing to bet nearly anything that what I’m seeing is not the result of a “subculture” or dialect but of an instuctional philosophy in the high schools that shrinks from teaching  standard English or correcting students who write this way.

The majority of students in my remedial classes are, in fact, minorities–but the way they write makes the things I posted look ready for a Nobel Lit prize.

2)  For a hundred years after the Civil War, African American children who were allowed to go to school at all came out speaking and writing English as standard as any Harvard grad.  They still do, at places like Harvard. 

They issue in minority difficulties with standard English is not about subcultures, learning new languages, or even self esteem.  It’s about an educational system that has decided they aren’t going to teach that, because it’s–what, exactly? 

For both my black students and my white students, reality is inelastic:  private employers in my area are now giving reading and writing tests for applicants for entry level positions, and they’re not declaring substandard (or nonstandard) English just another dialect.

Never mind the obvious:  part of the reason for schools like mine is the idea that even the most disadvantaged kids, even the kids who have made bad life choices, should get one more chance to shoot the moon.

But no first rate law school, no first rate med school, no Fortune 500 company or newly minted Cabinet member is going to hire somebody for a serious job with a serious future who speaks or writes like my students.

Either kind of my students, black or white.

3) I have plenty of students who are actual immigrants, whose first language at home is not English or anything like English.

And they have fewer problems reading and writing English than the students whose excerpts I posted.

Hell, they have fewer gaps in their overall understanding of American history and government than my native-born students.

It seems that elementary schools and high schools in Albania not only teach their kids to speak and write English, they also teach them things like the way the electoral college works, the content of the bill of rights and the general timeline of American history since independence.

Most of my white, working-to-middle-class students have never heard the term “electoral college” and aren’t entirely sure what the Supreme Court is and what it does–and this in a state that mandates a year of civics for public high school graduation.

My students do not know these things because their schools are not teaching them.

My students do not know how to read and write because their schools are not teaching that, either.

Almost all of them come from schools that mandate “holistic grading,” a system by which a teacher reads an essay WITHOUT correcting mistakes in grammar, punctuation and spelling and gives a grade based on the “feeling of the quality of the whole.”

If you can’t figure out how that works, neither can I, and I’ve had a stab at doing it on occassion.

The result, though, is obvious.  And I’ve got a hundred more examples of it lying around my office at the moment.

4) Although private employers around here are increasingly balking at the illiteracy of their job applicants–and increasingly refusing to take the word of local colleges that the applicants have language skills of any kind–there are two places my students can go to get hired:  school systems and government offices and agencies.

Given the nature of what I do and where I do it, I am required to deal, on a regular basis, with parole officers and social workers.

The parole officers are a bit fumbling and incoherent, but there’s another kind of subdialect, and that’s professional jargon, and they know that.  So do I, and since law enforcement tends to have lots of hard and fast rules, it’s possible to learn that jargon and know what they’re saying.

The social workers are breathtaking.

Well, no, not all of them.  The higher-level ones are in pretty good shape.  They’re also virtually all white and culturally upper middle class.

The caseworkers, however, range from on-their-way-to-administration to completely shocking.  I’ve had at least one I am sure could not actually read at all.  She would send me forms to fill out on behalf of a student–students get support through DCF through the age of 18, but can only continue to get support after that if they are enrolled full time in a college program–

Anyway, she would send me these forms to fill out.  I would fill them out and send them to her.  She would call me up and demanded the answers to the questions on the form because I’d “omitted” those.  I started keeping copies for myself.  I never omitted anything, and I frequently send attached letters explaining special circumstances.

If she read any of them, she didn’t understand them.  My guess is that she didn’t read them.

Sometimes my students, indignant at the grades I’m giving them, take their essays back to their favorite English teachers in high school, and these teachers send me notes.  Increasingly, these notes exhibit the same grammar, punctuation and spelling errors my students’ work does, along with the endless problems with homophones (your/you’re, there/they’re/their, its/it’s).

Half of my students will never graduate, but half of them will, and they’re headed to a school district or government office near you.

And yes, it will matter.

The kid whose social worker I thought might not be able to read was in real danger of losing benefits he needed.  He’d clawed his way through an absolute nightmare of a life, a mother on drugs, a father whose answer to everything was to punch through it (literally), six or seven foster homes, getting beaten to a pulp in every schoolyard he’d ever been in.  He had an actual, real chance of clawing his way out if he could get what the state said he had a right to, which was a paid college education in any state school.  If he’d been dumped from that program it would be theorectically possible to get him back on–but in the meantime he’d have lost a semester, been chucked out on his ass with nowhere to live, and all the rest of it.

It will matter if the postal worker you have to deal with next week can’t read the address on your envelope.  It will matter if the guy who processes your forms at the IRS office can’t read those, and can’t write a memo for your file that states the actual content of the meeting you just had.   It will matter if the woman doing HR at your company doesn’t know the difference between a “network provider policy” and a “preferred provider policy.”

5) But the real kicker is this–most of my kids would probably have an actual interest in improving their skills if they had any idea there were actual skills there to be improved.

Most of them have come out of high schools that have convinced them that there is no content (or objectivity) to “language arts,” it’s just some bullshit they have to sit through because they have to. 

The first time I hand back papers in a term, with my red pencil circling and correcting every spelling mistake, tense confusion, vocabulary screw up, fragmented sentence I can find–they’re completely stunned.

They’ve never had papers corrected like that.

And they think it’s just me, and of course that I’m being unfair.

PS.  A note.  Human Resource Departments are almost always the dumping grounds for low-skilled but “college graduate” employees.  The companies figure that that way, the inevitable mess such employees make will only harm other employees, and not the bottom line.

I am sitting at this computer much earlier in the day than I usually would be to write a blog post–fiction gets written this early in the morning, but rarely blog posts–and it is cold in this office.

This is partially my fault.  My office is a sun room, and when the temperatures dip below 35, I usually have to turn on an auxilliary heater to stay warm in here at all.  I haven’t done that, I’m not sure why.  I’m  having one of those floaty days that indicate we’re about to hit exam week with full force.

Over the last few years, I have come to think of exam week as the time when we all have to stop lying to ourselves. 

The beginnings of semesters are always slightly delusional.  I don’t care how long you’ve been doing this, you start every new term with

the buried but insistent belief that this time it will be different, this time you will find the magic formula that will allow you to turn almost illiterate writers who don’t read into competent producers of college work in fifteen weeks.

You believe that even after you ask for a writing sample and get this:

>>The best thing in the word is go hanging out and hang o ut with your guys.  Guys can be girls.  My guys were home today but I be at school.  Going over to a friends house watch a movie have a cold beer.  Her get what the hard ship of like work family.  Laws are wrong because they were hassling us.  Laws were all uptight.  Hanging out is not having hassles. >>>

I am not making that up.  That was the introductory paragraph of an assigned in-class essay called “The Best Thing in the World.” 

If anything, it’s one of the better ones I got in the class–from two years ago–that I assigned it in. 

And it’s better than it actually was written, because when I try to reproduce these things, I find myself fixing the spelling.  And sometimes other things. 

My head simply will not make words do what these kids make them do.

And in the end, I don’t get it.

One of the exercises I use for class is to type these things into a Word document and project the document–without the students’ names–onto a screen so that the class can correct them.

They almost always know that what they are reading is awful, beyond awful, unacceptable. 

And yet they write that way, and seem to be incapable of correcting what I’ve projected. 

They know–somehow–that what they are seeing is wrong.  They often refuse to believe me when I tell them that I’m using their own papers for illustrations. 

They write like this anyway, and they can’t seem to think of a thing to do about it when they do.

Or consider the following, handed in in an advanced class–advanced, as in not Freshman.  Which means this person has been writing like this and passing “college” classes with it for more than a year:

<<<Immanuel Kant was a great philosipher that came up with many philosophical thoughts. He represents philosophy at it’s best. One issue that went against his moral laws was that of people having a lack of honesty or lying. Kant was strongly in favor of the view that when the ethical and moral decision to lie is made by a person, they’re would always be negative consequences of they’re choice. Kant also held the firm belief that lying was wrong at all times. I disagree, my view is that sometimes all lying is not wrong.>>>

 Some of the above, by the way, was cribbed verbatim from the commentary in the book.   The rest of it is–well, what it is.

What it is not is what people mean when they say “college work,” and most of it isn’t what people mean when they say “high school work.” 

And yet I will guarantee you that this student will passed that class, and went on to pass the rest of his classes, and to emerge from the institution with a “bachelor’s degree.” 

Of course, most of my students won’t.  They’ll drop out by the end of freshman year, because even at the debased standards I’m allowed to hold them to–no more than 10 pages of reading a week (and they won’t do that), papers no longer than 2 1/2 pages long (and they’ll hand them in short) the load is so much greater than what they got used to in high school, they won’t be able to cope.

Recently I’ve been reading a little book called In The Basement of the Ivory Tower:  Confessions of an Accidental Academic by “Professor X.”

It’s a nice little book, a memoir written by an adjunct who has published articles on his experiences in various magazines.

And the book is largely familiar to me, for obvious reasons.

There’s only one thing.

As far as I can figure out, from the way this man describes his experiences, he’s nowhere near in the basement of academia.

There are more subbasement levels under his than there are underground floors of the Pentagon.

I’d better go do something. 

Good morning.  I’m running a little late, but that’s not a surprise.  It’s “reading week” and exam week at my place, and that means I’m inundated by e-mails and text messages from students desperate for me to assure them that they can, indeed, pass the course, even though they haven’t been in class since midterms and haven’t turned in any papers at all.

I’m also being inundated by papers, which come in huge, messy stacks that have never been revised by anybody and whose contents have little or no relation to the assignments as they were given.

This is true for papers handed in for courses for which I did not put up a Blackboard site, and for those which I did.  In the latter, details of every assignment are sitting right there for anybody to read. 

And this is the time of arguments, too–when I explain that you can’t pass the course without at least attempting to hand in the work, I get told, indignantly, that they had to be out of class for a week because they had “a family thing” back home, or–

Well, or anything.  The underlying assumption is that anything, anywhere, is of more importance than school, and therefore school must take a back seat to everything from picking your aunt up at the airport to having a hernia operation.

Putting that aside for the moment–

I’ve spent a fair amount of my time for the last few days reading reviews of the reissue of Dwight MacDonald’s book of essays Masscult and Midcult:  Essays Against The American Grain.

MacDonald is not a writer I know very well, or had even read anything of before this.  For what it’s worth, when somebody says MacDonald my head tends to go automatically to “Ross.”

I had, however, heard of Trotsky’s famous putdown of Dwight–“Every man has the right to be stupid, but Comrade MacDonald abuses the privilege.”–and I’d always thought it was one of those things that I’d like to have had said about me, by the right kind of person.

The reviews I’ve been reading, and what little I’d heard about MacDonald before this, made it seem as if McD was something like a not-so-well-known Edmund Wilson,  a professional snob with the mannerisms and attitudes of a Sheridan Whiteside.

I don’t have much interest in the Sheridan Whitesides of this world.   It was never a pose I found attractive or even interesting, and it was never one that much impressed anybody in the world in which I lived. 

Then one day I went to my porch and found a little package with a small book in it, and the book was Masscult and Midcult. 

And I got a surprise.

Let me give a warning here.  This is the only work of MacDonald’s I have ever seen.  For all I know, everything else he wrote was just as Sheridan-Whitesidish as the reviews I read.

But the simple fact is that this book is not, and the essay Masscult and Midcult especially is not.

I am not saying here that I read MacD’s title essay and found that he really loved detective stories and Edgar Rice Borroughs.

I didn’t, and he doesn’t.

MacD’s take on what he calls “pulp fiction” is fairly knee jerk–it’s all a corporate plot, manufactured by corporations in the same way they manufacture soap. 

He actually has an interesting couple of paragraphs comparing Erle Stanley Gardner with Edgar Allan Poe.  For what it’s worth, he thinks Poe is art.

But the more interesting thing is this–he spends very little time on “pulp fiction.”  His ire is directed not to formula murder mysteries of the Whose Body variety, or even at people like Burroughs.

His ire is directed at…what Robert would call “the Required Reading List.”

It was “Midcult,” not “Masscult,” that drove MacD practically insane–the faux-highbrow, faux-intellectual, faux-high culture of high school English classes and women’s society reading groups.

As far as I can tell, “Midcult” seems to encompass most of the books and stories people say they were required to read in high school and college and that I never was–Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea and “Hills Like White Elephants,” for instance.

The idea, according to MacD, was to make it possible for some people to imply that they were better, more intelligent, and more culturally educated than other people without having to do any of the actual work of understanding any great work of art, and especially any great work of art they might actually have to read.

The defining characteristics of Midcult are pseudo-profound language that is often simply incomprehensible, a mania for symbolism and Big Themes, and supposed novels in which…nothing actually happens.

He includes an essay on a publishing project of the 195os called The Great Books Series, in which the Encyclopedia Brittanica produced a more or less unified edition of what its advisory board (including a past President of the University of Chicago) considered to be the Greatest Books Ever Written and the ones everybody should read.

His problem wasn’t so much with the selections themselves–he liked some of them and disliked others, and was left dumbfounded in the face of the scientific ones–but with the idea that Culture with a capital C can be put on like a suit of clothes in order to indicate that you are So Much Superior to the Joneses.

It is, in other words, the use of Culture (capital C) as a class marker that makes MacD crazy, and I have to admit I’m crazy on that point with him.

I’m not trying to say that MacD was a friend to popular culture.  He wasn’t, but my guess is that he wasn’t because he knew little or nothing about it. 

On the actual object of his scorn, however–all those “I read Ann Beattie so I’m superior to you who read Janet Evanovich” people–I think he has a point.

The work used to signal Intelligence and Culture is almost always second rate, and is often downright embarrassing.  It isn’t Culture, and it isn’t Great Art.   It’s just attitude.

And its inclusion in courses anywhere is mostly an attempt to convey attitude. 

But then, with MacD, I’m not sure that courses are the best place to encounter really great novels, or any other kind of art.

I’d better go off and listen to wailing students.

So, sometimes last week, operating on less than 4 hours of sleep, I posted a little snit that then got everybody to land on me, at which point I posted a longer thing that seems to have convinced some of you that I am denigrating what you like in reading material and declaring all science fiction and fantasy to be worthless.

But I did neither of those things.  I just explained what I liked, period, and what I preferred, period, and why I read. 

And, given the amount of text I got saying that what I’m looking for is “travelogues,” my guess is that most of you didn’t get it anyway.

But I do want to clarify something, and so I will.

And that is why I react so strongly when people go, “nothing matters as long as it’s got a good STORY.”

I don’t care that your eighth grade English teacher put you down for wanting plot instead of Seriousness, or whatever it was.

What I do care about is this:  that line–as long as it’s got a good STORY–is the bottom line excuse for every kind of sloppy, badly written, badly edited, inadequately researched piece of crap in existence.

Writer got all his historical dates wrong and had Napoleon fighting Alexander the Great–not on purpose, not as alternative history, but because he didn’t bother to look it up and his editor didn’t care?

Doesn’t matter.  It’s a good STORY.

Got every street in Paris mismarked (wrong one-ways, for instance) and placed in the wrong quatiers? 

Doesn’t matter.  It’s a good STORY.

Can’t recognize a gerund with a GPS and a native guide?  Think Helsinki is one of Dante’s levels of Hell?  Convinced Brussels is in Vietnam? 

What does it matter?  It’s a good STORY.

I am not talking here about a few mistakes.  We all make mistakes. I make a lot of them.

I’m talking about a wholesale, cavalier disregard for anything resembling factual accuracy, even when it really, really matters. 

And, for that matter, a wholesale, cavalier disregard for anything resembling decent writing, which always really, really matters. 

I do understand that some people not only don’t care, but sometimes prefer it, if a book is written in a string of cliches (as dirty as dishwater, fast as a speeding bullet, to the very fiber of her being), but I do. 

Let’s take, for instance, a movie a few years back, the name of which now escapes me.

In it, Denzel Washington plays a man whose child is being refused a transplant because the family does not have insurance.  Denzel righteously invades the hospital and holds everybody hostage until his son is given the care he needs to live.

Want to know what’s wrong with that?

I don’t know what the situation is like now, but back when that movie was made, you could not be refused a place on the transplant list, or a transplant, for inability to pay.

Want to know how I know that?  I was married to a man on the transplant list.  I got the complete rundown from the Harvard Medical School, which included the fact that “insured or not” was not one of the criteria for getting that operation.

In fact, it was illegal even to consider that as a criterion.

But, hey, what the heck?  Why let the facts get in the way of a good story?

And story is all that matters, right?

No.  Wrong.

For better or for worse, I never seem to hear that defense–it’s a good story!–except in cases where the writer has produced something truly embarrassing.  Decently written books (with good stories!) that have a few mistakes in them, or that are badly written in one way or another, are not defended this way. 

People seem perfectly capable of rolling their eyes about the racism in Gone With The Wind or the clunky language in Atlas Shrugged without jumping up defensively to declare that none of it matters since they’re good STORIES.

There are, of course, other people, who honestly don’t care if they read a book set in the reign of King John where the army is using howitzers–and for them, the declaration (I don’t care about any of that–it’s a good story!) is a defense against the assumption that they are, merely by the fact that they’re adult, actually supposed to know something.

These are the same people who are likely to declare that they read “for entertainment” and therefore just put down any book that expects them to learn something or that contains material they might actually have to think about.

And I dare any one of you to try to twist that last paragraph into an assertion of support for “modernism” or “literary novels.” 

That’s not what I’m talking about.  I’m talking about, say, third person multiple viewpoint–that’s too hard!  I’m not going to do all that work!

Or the idea that a character might have a point of view that isn’t that of the author.

Or the fact that the book might use a vocabulary larger than the approved list for Young Readers that got handed to Dr. Seuss.

I don’t like most fantasy and science fiction because I can’t get interested in the settings.  There are still lots of excellent fantasy and science fiction novels.

But they’re not great novels because they’ve got a good STORY.

They’ve got to have a whole lot else.

Going off to read silliness for the day.

Well, operating on more than four hours of sleep this morning, I should be able to do a little better.

But it surprises me that we’ve circled around to this again, and on two counts.

The first is–STORY.

Lymaree asks why I’d give up good STORIES because they contain “future technology.”

But I’ve said before that I DON’T READ FOR STORY.

I don’t mean to shout, but it seems to me that I’ve said this enough times now so that it should be the first thing you know about me. 

I read for character, and I read for a sense of place, but I never read for “story.”  Story doesn’t interest me very much, and it never has, even when I was reading as a child.

What I wanted from Nancy Drew was some sense of what it would be like to grow up to be Nancy Drew, and that sense was only valuable to me to the extent that it was actually possible for me to do that.

You guys get far too technical and philosophical about the “actually possible” thing.

Was it ‘actually possible” for me to be a girl detective solving crimes?  Nope, but that wasn’t the point.

It was actually possible for me to be eighteen, in possession of my own car, with a boyfriend and completely confident in myself.   Hell, I even had a lawyer for a father.

When I read to escape, what I don’t do is bury myself in a fantasy that can never come true on any level, so that I forget about my problems for a few hours and feel more refreshed when I go back to them.

I know people do that, but the very idea of it makes me cringe.  I have a near phobia about what I think of as “false hope,” of not facing facts and dealing with them. 

And I’m very, very bad at forgetting that the problems are there when they’re there.  I find it difficult to read anything at all, or to write, when problems are there.

When I read to escape,  it’s because I actually want to escape. 

I want to pack my bags, get up and go someplace.

Robert asks why I don’t just do that, and the answer is that it’s not always possible.  Sometimes you have family obligations or not enough money.  Sometimes you’re twelve years old and stuck living where and how your parents live until you reach your majority.

Things like travel books are actually very bad at giving you a sense of place. They’re written for tourists, and I suppose you could get, for them, some sense of what it’s like to be a tourist.  And there are some–the Dorling-Kindersley ones–that are wonderful for pictures.

But I don’t want pictures or a guide book, I want a sense of place.  Of what it’s like to be a human being in that atmosphere.  Of the there there.

To get to Gertrude Stein, one of the great writers of place ever to have existed on the planet.

So was Hemingway, by the way. 

But I’m not looking for “grim” when I look for a sense of place, and I virtually never read fiction that is primarily about “social problems,” although I don’t mind characters who have them as long as that’s not the focus.

Stein is never grim, and Heminway wouldn’t know a social problem from a skein of knitting wool.  A Moveable Feast–the faux-memoir of Hemingway’s writing days in Paris–is not grim, contains nothing about social problems and is about as atmospheric as…I don’t know what.

And no, I can’t go to “Heminway’s Paris.”  But I spent a good part of my adolescence reading to escape to Paris, and Hemingway helped. 

And in the end, I got to Paris, and not as a tourist, either.  I plotted my escape, and then I actually escaped.

If real, actual escape is impossible, if the best you can do is some fantasy that can’t come true on any level–why bother thinking about it?  And how could it possibly take your mind off anything, if you always know it’s made up and can never be any true part of your life in the future?

These days my big escape fantasies are London (possible, because I have someplace to be there, and I’ve already lived there for a good long stretch), Lisbon and Greece.  They’re all places I’ve been (and two, again, not as a tourist.)

For Lisbon, the best I’ve got is a Wim Wenders movie called Lisbon Story, nothing grim or serious about it, the best of the novels of Jose Saramago (The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, Blindness, All The Names) and the films of Manoel de  Oliveira. 

Those last I listen to mostly to hear Continental Portuguese spoken. 

For London, the best out there consist largely of things like episodes of As Time Goes By–once again, nothing at all grim–and for Greece I have a lot, including the old Hayley Mills movie of The Moonspinners and Mary Stewart’s This Rough Magic. 

 A sense of place is not achievable in a travelogue, or a guide book.   To do it right, you need fiction or something close to it.

Jane Austen, though, I read for characters, and a sense of how men and women can be with each other.

And yes, I know all about Foyle’s War.  I own the entirety of it on DVD.

But anyway, I’ve never said that “grim” is better than not in fiction–I was talking, yesterday, about light, fluffy, silly cozy sorts of things.

But that’s something else, of course.

For what it’s worth, I’ve said all of the above before, and there has been discussion of it on this blog.

I guess you guys just don’t believe me.

The title of this post was a catch phrase about ten or fifteen years ago.  I never quite nailed down exactly what it meant, but I know the reason for using it.  Sometimes, things get entirely too serious.

And that is, I think, where I am this morning.  This is the beginning of what looks like a long and depressing week, if not something worse, and I am just tired to death of thinking of things seriously.

I look sometimes at all the things we say about–well, everything.  About morality and law and what it means to be human.  I look at it and wonder what it is we think we’re doing.

There are times when all this discussion seems to me to be so completely divorced from reality, it might as well be folktales about fairies and elves. 

Maybe it would be better if it were folktales about fairies and elves, because folktales about fairies and elves at least have the potential to be charming, if not diverting.

Sometimes I just want things to be settled.  Some of the people who comment on this blog have said that they established their personal philosophies early, and once they got past a certain age, that was done.

I had certain inclinations early, but I don’t think my “philosophy of life” is established even now.  I like some things and don’t like others.  There’s a lot about the world that just makes me angry, and I don’t mean just things that people cause and I’ve got some sane reason to be angry about.

When I get like this, I also get to wondering what murder mysteries are for–because in my mind they have to be for something, and “entertainment” is not an answer that makes any sense to me. 

Maybe what I mean by that is that I don’t know what people mean when they say they read “for entertainment,” and seem to imply that they read to stop their minds from working.  I can’t seem to stop mine from working no matter what I do, and the kind of book that would allow me to stop tends to just aggravate me.

And in the end, my literalness is undefeated.  I don’t read science fiction or fantasy because I’m not interested in reading about worlds I can’t visit. 

When I want to escape, I don’t want to escape into my imagination.  I really want to escape.

Today I want to escape, but what I’m going to do is take Matt to the train station and come home and worry about what I have to worry about.

It’s making me very tired.

It is Thanksgiving week-end, and as on all Thanksgiving week-ends, I have become majorly disoriented.  Yesterday felt like Saturday, today feels like Sunday, and I’m going into panic mode because I have a lot to do on Monday.  I also have a lot of papers to correct, the super-duper, extra-long, have-to-be-MLA-documented papers that I do earlier and earlier every term to give the students time to fix. I need to give them time to fix, because the average grade on these things tends to be around 40.  Out of 100.

The grades are that low because nobody ever listens, or maybe because nobody believes it when college teachers say “do it this way or you fail.”  What I get most often from students, even good ones, is the indignant declaration that all the information in the Works Cited is there, so why should it matter if it isn’t in the right order?

 In other words, I’m not looking forward to going back to the fray this coming week, because it will in fact be a fray.

I’d probably be feeling better about it if I could only get it into my head that it isn’t yet Sunday.

Tomorrow is Sunday, but that’s a nervous breakdown for another day.

In the meantime, I’m reading my way through this year’s entry by James Schall, one of my favorite writers and a man who is well into his eighties by now.  I find this depressing, but Schall probably does not.  He’s an old-fashioned Jesuit.  He tends to think of death as part of life and eternal life after this one as an absolute certainty.

The book is called The Modern Age, and the chapter I’m reading at the moment concerns two things that Schall finds related:  the Christian doctrine of the (absolute necessity of) the resurrection of the body, and various modern phenomena such as cloning, sex change operations and in vitro fertilization.

Schall is a philosopher and a theologian, which means he either knows even less than I do about the science of this sort of thing, or that he cares less. 

He’s a big proponent of the idea that the first duty of every human being is to know what is, on the assumption that only when we know what is can we know ourselves.

And that is why, I think, that I’m feeling so frustrated about the fact that he has (at least so far) said nothing about the to issues involved in this kind of thing that interest me the most.

The first is mostly just a perplexity–in some of these cases, we don’t actually do what we’re saying we’re doing. 

There may come a time, for instance, when we can in fact change the sex of human beings at will, but that time is not now.   What we call “sex change operations” at the moment are largely, if radically, cosmetic.  The DNA of a human being who has undergone such an operation remains distinctively male or female as it was at birth, as dows that body’s functioning when it comes to hormones.  That’s why people who have undergone such operations must take hormone supplements for life. 

This is not, in and of itself, a reason not to perform those operations, or undergo them, but it does give me pause on an existential level:  if we are not actually accomplishing a change of sex when we perform or undergo such operations, what are we accomplishing?  And why?  What does one get from such an operation–and the attendant problems of a lifelong regime of hormone therapy–that could not be accomplished simply by living as the sex one preferred to be.

And don’t tell me that just living as the sex one would prefer to be is “living a lie,” because until we have the technological problems of sex change actually worked out, the operation is living a lie, too.   It’s just considerably more expensive and considerably more physically dangerous.

But that is, essentially, a matter of psychology.  What seems more fundamental to me is the other question:

How much can you change the physical human being before that human being no longer possesses “human nature?”

All secular attempts to discover and articulate an objectively based moral code assume that human nature is something largely fixed and inborn.

Note the “largely.”   I am not denying the importance of nurture here.

Still, there are things that are considered to be not only common to all human beings, but common to all human beings in all times and all places regardless of race, creed, upbringing or culture–jealousy, sexual passion, a sense of justice, an awareness of death.

Okay, that wasn’t even pretending to be an exhaustive list.  But the fact that human beings over a vast array of different times, places and cultures all experience at the most basic level the same things is not only the basis for believing that an objective moral code is possible, it’s also the basis for believing that we can understand each other at all. 

We read Homer and the Bhagvad Gita confident that we not only can, but will, “get” them.  Modern filmmakers dig up the epics of lost civilizations and turn them into superhero movies.  We watch Othello working himself up at Iago’s lies and roll our eyes, because Othello is just like our idiot brother in law.

But here’s where the doctrine of the resurrection of the body has a point–if we no longer have the experience of our bodies, we are no longer human.   To be actual, real human beings, we must, first of all, be physical. The promise that we would somehow “survive” death as a ghost, that we would be able to split soul and body and still be ourselves, is false.

And we can see, in one case, how a change in the way we experience our physical bodies has caused an intellectual and emotional disconnect with previous generations.  We’ve talked about it here, in the past:  the fact that we can no longer “understand” death in the same way that an Elizabethan playwright or a classical Greek poet did.

We do not experience death, or the immanence of death, in anything like the same way.   John Donne would have found the death of a child heartbreaking, but perfectly normal.  Children in his era frequently died before their 12th birthdays.   It was part of the reason families had so many children.

For that matter, John Donne would have found it perfectly normal for a wife to die in childbirth.  For centuries, childbirth was the single most common form of death for women under the age of 40.  A first childbirth was a leap into the unknown–no way to tell, until you’d undergone it, whether your body could safely deliver a child at all–but subsequent childbirths remained dangerous for a host of reasons. 

The entire concept of courage is different, I think, for somebody who expects that death can come at any time anyway and someone who thinks “normal” means living to a ripe old age.

I also happen to think that this is part of the disconnect between the West (or the industrialized nations as a whole, to include Japan) and radical Islam–radical Islam is a product of societies where death is still a common thing, commonly experienced and ever-present.

But here’s the thing–if we accept that in changing the physical reality of human beings in any way we also change human nature in at least some way, we are not at the same time saying that we should not make such changes.

As far as I’m concerned, the change in the nature, experience and consequences of childbirth have been largely to the good.  I am, as I’ve noted here before, one of those people who would have simply been dead in any society other than the modern one.

Once we’ve admitted that, however, the question becomes–how do we decide what, if anything, is “too much” change in the human body and therefore “too much” change in what it means to be human?

There has been at least some religious and moral objection, somewhere, to each new medical innovation–to anesthesia in childbirth, to vaccinations, to corrective surgery of things like hare lips, to sex change.

What I keep trying to figure out, without much success, is whether or not there is a logical construct that would provide some kind of guidelines for when what we’re doing is a Good New Thing and when what we’re doing is Completely Unacceptible.

Sometimes it simply seems that Huxley had it right where Orwell had it wrong.  The future isn’t 1984, it’s Brave New World, where the drive to create the New Social Man will no longer stop at reconstructing the mind but go on to reconstructing the body.

But the real thing that nags at me is this:  when I get to thinking about these things, the back of my mind keeps saying:  why the hell not? 

It’s not that I can’t see we’d have something to lose, or that what we’d have to lose would be profound.

It’s just that pain and suffering and death seem to me good things to get rid of, even if getting rid of them would not, and could not, produce that vaunted heaven on earth.

Maybe it’s just that, at this time of year, I get oddly morbid about everything.

Or maybe I just need tea.