is literature dangerous?
I sure hope so.
I sure hope so.
“If you know what you are going to write when you’re writing a poem, it’s going to be average."
-Derek Walcott
I’m thinking of a possible new topic for a seminar in literature next fall. I’d call it “Bethel Favorites” and have a dozen different faculty, staff, and recent alumni pick a favorite literary work. The seminar members would read and discuss the work, but the faculty, staff, or alumni would come and present a guest lecture on how and why they “love” the piece of literature, how it speaks to them, how it has enchanted or mentored them over the years.
The implicit thesis of a course like this would be that our favorite works say something about what we are. “Tell me what you read, and I will tell you what you are.”
The kind of sleddding/tubing–ours are neither sleds nor tubes but more like the things you see in the picture–that produces the most ecstatic laughter in my four year old daughter involves great crashes at the bottom of the hill. Sydney lies on her inflated “Rudolph the Reindeer” sled and I plow into her full bore, sending her and Rudolph hurtling, powdery snow showering us both.
Her riotous laughter, contagious.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKL4WxTqHzw?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0&w=640&h=385]
“By the pricking of my thumbs,
something wicked this way comes."
-2nd Witch, Macbeth, Shakespeare
Today was the…
1. First MERT meeting of the semester.
2. First class of the semester: “Sermon on the Mount & Story."
3. First office hour of the semester.
4. First time sledding this year.
5. First day of the rest of my life.
“Papa, I just had to come in and say I love you."
I guess it couldn’t wait until I finished my shower. That’s okay; I’ll let it slide. This time.
Number of of posts on this site in 2008: 47
Number of posts on this site in 2009: 107
Number of posts on this site in 2010: 96
Number of posts on this site so far in 2011: 3
Number of posts the author of this site has set for himself as a goal this year: 300
Number of days this year the author of this site will likely have absolutely nothing to say: 365
Number of entries this year in which the author will reference p90x: 93
Percentage of entries in the history of this blog that have been fictional or semi-fictional: 89
Percentage of entries in 2010 that were simply quotations from other authors: 62
Percentage of entries in the history of blog that have been true: 99.44
Number of times the author of this entry has fabricated a statistic: 5
Percentage of Bethel College students who should faithfully read this blog: 0
Number of walks in the woods author of blog has taken with his dog this year: 1
Percentage of those walks in which he accidentally trespassed onto private property: 100
Number of other human beings encountered during those walks: 0
Perfect temperature in Celsius for walking in the woods during January: -3
Favorite number: 33
Number of homeruns by author during 2010 fastpitch season: 11
Year of career high in homeruns (18): 2008
Number of times author has been runner-up in the World Series of Wiffleball: 2
Number times author has been world champion in the World Series of Wiffleball: 0
Most free throws author has ever made in a row: 125
Next best: 89
Most three pointers author has ever made in a row: 37
Shoe size: 11
Number of books read cover to cover in 2010: 49
Number of episodes of the Wonder Years author watched today while working out: 4
Age as of today: 40
Age as of tomorrow: 41
Reason #1:
Because if I don’t workout hard on a regular basis, it becomes painful to play basketball and nearly impossible to concentrate while trying to read and comment on essays.
Reason #2:
Because I like being able to do more than five pullups without feeling like I want to pass out.
Reason #3:
Because I can’t help myself; it’s a habit now.
Reason #4:
Because I like bringing two guns and a six pack to the party.
Reason #5:
Because if those people on the commercial can do it, why can’t I?
Reason #6:
Because I like sweet baby ray’s barbecue sauce way too much, and if I didn’t burn A LOT of calories virtually every day I might be ginormously fat.
…. to be continued….
Today, Sydney hit the longest homerun of her relatively short wiffleball career, a towering bomb to left-center field. I tossed one to her at the knees and out over the plate and she let go with the smoothest left-handed swing I’ve seen her make, head perfectly to ball. Crack! Papa laughs.
Not just because it’s January and we’re playing wiffleball, not just because Sydney is four and requested wiffleball, but because his daughter cackled as she raced around the imaginary bases in our frozen backyard.
“Good pitch, Papa!” she said, as she picked up the bat. “If we played for the Cubbies, we’d be stars.”
In Defense of the Liberal Arts: The therapeutic Left and the utilitarian Right both do disservice to the humanities.
Victor Davis Hanson
December 16, 2010 12:00 A.M.
The liberal arts face a perfect storm. The economy is struggling with obscenely high unemployment and is mired in massive federal and state deficits. Budget cutting won’t spare education.
The public is already angry over fraud, waste, and incompetence in our schools and universities. And in these tough times, taxpayers rightly question everything about traditional education — from teachers’ unions and faculty tenure to the secrecy of university admissions policies to which courses really need to be taught.
Opportunistic private trade schools have sprouted in every community, offering online certification in practical skills without the frills and costs of so-called liberal-arts “electives.”
In response to these challenges, the therapeutic academic Left proved incapable of defending the traditional liberal arts. With three decades of defining the study of literature and history as a melodrama of race, class, and gender oppression, it managed to turn off college students and the general reading public. And, cheek by jowl, the utilitarian Right succeeded in reclassifying business and finance not just as undergraduate majors, but also as core elements in general-education requirements.
In such a climate, it is unsurprising that once again we hear talk of cutting the “non-essentials” in our colleges, such as Latin, Renaissance history, Shakespeare, Plato, Rembrandt, and Chopin. Why do we cling to the arts and humanities in a high-tech world in which we have instant recall at our fingertips through a Google search and such studies do not guarantee sure 21st-century careers?
But the liberal arts train students to write, think, and argue inductively, while drawing upon evidence from a shared body of knowledge. Without that foundation, it is harder to make — or demand from others — logical, informed decisions about managing our supercharged society as it speeds on by.
Citizens — shocked and awed by technological change — become overwhelmed by the Internet chatter, cable news, talk radio, video games, and popular culture of the moment. Without links to our heritage, we in ignorance begin to think that our own modern challenges — the war in Afghanistan, gay marriage, cloning, or massive deficits — are unique and not comparable to those solved in the past.
And without citizens broadly informed by the humanities, we descend into a pyramidal society. A tiny technocratic elite on top crafts everything from cell phones and search engines to foreign policy and economic strategy. A growing mass below has neither understanding of the present complexity nor the basic skills to question what they are told.
During the 1960s and 1970s, committed liberals thought we could short-circuit the process of liberal education by creating advocacy courses with the word “studies” in their names. Black studies, Chicano studies, community studies, environmental studies, leisure studies, peace studies, women’s studies, and hundreds more were designed to turn out more socially responsible young people. Instead, universities have too often graduated zealous advocates who lacked the broad education necessary to achieve their predetermined politicized ends.
On the other hand, pragmatists argued that our 20-year-old future CEOs needed to learn spreadsheets rather than why Homer’s Achilles did not receive the honors he deserved, or how civilization was lost in fifth-century Rome and 1930s Germany. But Latin or a course in rhetoric might better teach a would-be captain of industry how to dazzle his audience than a class in Microsoft PowerPoint.
The more instantaneous our technology, the more we are losing the ability to communicate. Twitter and text-messaging result in economy of expression, not in clarity or beauty. Millions are becoming premodern — communicating in electronic grunts that substitute for effective and dignified expression. Indeed, by inventing new abbreviations and linguistic shortcuts, we are losing a shared written language altogether, in a way analogous to the fragmentation of Latin as the Roman Empire imploded into tribal provinces. No wonder the public is drawn to stories like The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, in which characters speak beautifully and believe in age-old values.
Life is not just acquisition and consumption. Engaging English prose uplifts the spirit in a way Twittering cannot. The anti-Christ video shown by the Smithsonian at the National Portrait Gallery will fade when the Delphic Charioteer or Michelangelo’s David does not. Appreciation of the history of great art and music fortifies the soul, and recognizes beauty that does not fade with the passing fad.
America has lots of problems. A population immersed in and informed by literature, history, art, and music is not one of them.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXLHUThBib8?fs=1]
Quite possibly, the best song of the 1980s.
One finds it hard to decide what Gradus alias Grey wanted more at that minute: discharge his gun or rid himself of the inexhaustible lava in his bowels.
Charles Kinbote, in Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
God help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of two other characters in this work. I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, haealthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art. I may join forces with Odon in a new motion picture: Escape from Zembla (ball in the palace, bomb in the palace square). I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned melodrama with three principles: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguised old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between two figments. Oh, I may do many things!
“My sweet little blue-eyed girl,” he said in a half-sung sigh that had nothing to do with her brown eyes but was taken up just the same by the vast sunlit reaches of the land behind him and on all sides of him—so much land that Connie had never seen before and did not recognize except to know that she was going to it.
Joyce Carol Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been”