English Matters

It’s an old-fashioned, an outrageous thing
To believe one has a “destiny”

— a thought often peculiar to those
who possess privilege —

but there is something else:   the faith
of those despised and endangered

that they are not merely the sum
of damages done to them

[Sources (1983)]

No short passage could sum up the vast and various intellectual work of poet/essayist Adrienne Rich, but that short piece from a long poem speaks to two important things about her. She was undeniably privileged, a child of east-coast Establishment ease and Radcliffe education, a Harvard faculty wife by her early 20s, author of tasteful poems that W.H. Auden praised in a pat-on-the-head way for “not telling fibs.” Nobody would have blamed her for hosting Cambridge cocktail parties for the rest of her long life.

Yet the choices she made, in the process of remaking herself personally and professionally again and again, did make her “despised and endangered,” and in no figurative sense. She left the Ivy League and the Seven Sisters behind, taking a teaching job in the radical open-access SEEK program of the City University of New York. She came out as a lesbian. She devoted almost a half-century to speaking out against misogyny, homophobia, racism, militarism, and anti-Semitism. In the process, she forged a kind of free-verse, long-sentence, highly rhetorical poetry that has been hugely influential on American verse. Her poems read like essays and her essays read like poems. All are topical and engagée; she called one of her volumes Leaflets because she saw no essential difference between poems and calls to action.

And, unashamedly, Adrienne Rich believed she had a “destiny”:

When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say: those mountains have a meaning
but further than that I could not say.

To do something very common, in my own way.

["A Valediction Forbidding Mourning," 1971]

Somebody – it’s usually supposed to be Winston Churchill – once said that if you aren’t liberal when young you have no heart; if you aren’t conservative when older, you have no brain. Adrienne Rich, possessed of both, lived that trajectory in reverse. It’s not that her first few volumes of poems are especially reactionary, but they are decorous. Women’s half-lived lives feature in her books from the 1950s. One can imagine a poet retreating into half-silence after writing them, or flowering into madness (like Rich’s contemporaries Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton). Rich instead did “very common” practical things, addressing what needed addressing with directness and sanity.

And as Rich aged, she just got more progressive. All her obituaries cite her 1997 refusal of a National Medal of Arts, when she wrote President Clinton that “the very meaning of art as I understand it is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration.” That’s the Clinton administration, mind you, the one so many progressives now look back on with nostalgia – the administration that Maya Angelou, no closet conservative, had memorably ushered in. But in Rich’s eyes, Clinton failed to pass a healthcare bill, dismantled welfare programs, capitulated on “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” waged drone wars against ill-specified enemies, and made a mess of the Kyoto environmental accords. In fact, one could argue that one of the Clinton Administration’s most progressive positions was its determination to honor Adrienne Rich. She wouldn’t help them out.

Many of Rich’s poems read like essays, I’ve said, and her essays are probably the most vital part of her literary legacy. In “When We Dead Awaken” (1971), she argued that

“Political” poetry by men remains stranded amid the struggles for power among male groups . . . The mood of isolation, self-pity, and self-imitation that pervades “nonpolitical” poetry suggests that a profound change in masculine consciousness will have to precede any new male poetic—or other—inspiration. The creative energy of patriarchy is fast running out; what remains is its self-generating energy for destruction. As women, we have our work cut out for us.

Forty years ago, poetry was seen by academic critics almost entirely in aestheticist terms. If it is now seen almost entirely in rhetorical and political terms, we owe that more to Adrienne Rich than to any other single critic.

English Matters began with a 300th-birthday tribute to Samuel Johnson in 2009, and makes its belated-phoenix reappearance today to mark the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens on Tuesday 7 February.

Like Dr. Johnson, Charles Dickens is a huge figure in English studies, so large and various that it’s practically impossible to sum him up. You know an author is great when other great writers spend so much time dissing him. “Dickens knows Man but not men,” complained Henry James, a subtle distinction: basically, Dickens didn’t get out enough in the social circles that James yearned to dine in. Oscar Wilde snarked at The Old Curiosity Shop: “one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.” And what was Virginia Woolf implying when she said that George Eliot’s Middlemarch was “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people?”

Among great English novelists, George Orwell most admired Dickens, but with qualifications: “Dickens is not a humbug, except in minor matters.” Orwell specifies lots of minor matters. However, he goes on to say that “the strongest single impression one carries away from his books is that of a hatred of tyranny.” Orwell was therefore fascinated and appalled by the images of (literal) class warfare in A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens, who hated injustices perpetrated by the rich and powerful, hated the savagery of the great revolution against the rich and powerful. Of course, one imagines that the leftist-crusading author of Animal Farm would be especially drawn to such a contradiction. But it points to an odd dynamic about Dickens: that his best-known novel is in some ways his least typical, and gives an impression of him as a kind of reactionary.

Is A Tale of Two Cities “written for grown-up people?” I read it in the 8th grade; it followed Silas Marner (7th grade) as the total of my middle-school exposure to Literature. I loved it; it’s all plot, and it offers gorgeous opportunities to read its final sentences in the voice of Ronald Colman. But as Jeff Daniels says in The Squid and the Whale, it’s “minor Dickens.” The major novels are the ones where he refracted the boundless pain and titanic energy of his own personality through a limitless set of characters. “After Shakespeare, God has created most,” said Alexandre Dumas père, but he was too busy creating a lot himself to keep up with the even greater creations of Dickens.

I read David Copperfield on my own even before the 8th grade, struggling through a world so unfamiliar to me as a child of 1960s America that I envisioned almost everything about it wrong, picturing Great Yarmouth as something like the Jersey Shore. (I even thought the Peggottys were black, which actually says a lot about parallels between race in America and class in Britain.) David Copperfield, like the earlier Oliver Twist, is a book about gentility in eclipse. David’s birthright has been lost in the shuffle, and he descends into an urban working class below which there is no obvious safety net. Orwell thought Dickens bourgeois, which he certainly was; Orwell remarks on how “it is questionable whether he really regards [the working class] as equals.”

Yet all of Dickens’s class squeamishnesses have to be seen as relative. In Anna Karenina, written well after Dickens’s death, Vronsky goes to the opera and muses

God knows who they were; the same dirty crowd in the gallery; and in all this crowd, in the boxes and front rows, there were about forty real men and women.

Perhaps Tolstoy is satirizing Vronsky’s own prejudices, but I doubt it. For Tolstoy, the middle class is barely human; society consists of a few aristocratic families and some rustic, idealized muzhiks. For Dickens, despite all the sentimentality, despite Tattycoram and Little Nell and Tiny Tim, every range of the middle class exists, and those trying to hang on and make a living against the odds exist most of all. The poor exist, and the homeless, and the mentally handicapped, and the impossibly pretentious, and the bullies, and the victims, and the ciphers. Everyone, in short, that you never hear about if you’d rather be reading Jane Austen

Great Expectations crystallizes the anxieties of class better than any other Dickens novel. If David is degraded by his time in the bottle warehouse, Pip is degraded by his own desire to leave the working class behind. Blacksmith Joe Gargery may be a caricature of the kind of “men” that Dickens really didn’t know any better than he knew Henry James’s minor nobility. But he’s a damn sight better person than Pip, and Pip knows it, and Pip can’t help despising Joe anyway, despite and because of Joe’s essential decency.

If English novelists have tended to look at Dickens with various attitudes fashioned from envy – disdain, embarrassment, indignation, condescension – writers in other countries have just wallowed in his influence. Mark Twain when young seems to have had a mancrush on Dickens, and it would be evident from his writing if he hadn’t admitted as much. Herman Melville shared Dickens’s histrionics, his panoply of characters, his tendency to lapse into blank verse. And many a European writer looked to Dickens, as earlier generations had looked to Walter Scott, as the pattern of what one could do in fiction. This includes Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (the latter’s range of social reference resembling Dickens’s as much as Tolstoy’s differed), Hugo and Zola, and perhaps most of all Proust. It may seem preposterous to connect Proust to Dickens, but in characterization and satire, Proust was a positive disciple. The “petit noyau” of the Verdurins, in Proust, is an homage to the Veneerings’ circle in Our Mutual Friend, and Proust’s habit of reducing minor characters to verbal or physical tics (think of the narrator’s aunts who talk to M. Swann only in recondite allusions) is a perfection of Dickens’s method.

When I was young, the distinguished Welsh actor Emlyn Williams came to New Jersey and gave a reading, in full dress and character as Charles Dickens, from Dickens’s works – much as the novelist used to do on continual speaking tours himself. Williams was by all accounts a frosty, inaccessible man; Dickens could strike people that way too. They were both larger than life, surrounded by myths and pretenses, anxieties and baggage. Without dropping a smidgen of character or a syllable of prose, Williams read his way through his pieces, leaving an effect of great technical mastery and considerable personal mystery. Dickens was apparently also like that. As a middle-aged celebrity of great wealth and unmatched fame, he would sometimes walk from his estate in Kent all the way to central London and wander the haunts of his childhood by dark, then walk back to Rochester by dawn. It’s impossible to know what drove him to create so much, and hard to empathize with him as a person. That’s OK: all you really have to do is read him with appropriate abandon.

Margaret Wise Brown, one of the most distinguished American writers for very young children, was born on 23 May 1910, making this month her centenary. (She died in 1952.)

I was cruising past the impulse-buy section at a chain-bookstore checkout the other day, and I saw a display full of wallet-sized board-book editions of Brown’s Goodnight Moon and Runaway Bunny. These two books in particular seem so archetypal in our culture that one cannot imagine American childhood without them. Yet their ubiquity may be a recent phenomenon. I don’t remember Brown’s books from my childhood at all, though I remember them vividly from my son’s childhood. I sense that Brown’s restrained, low-key, asymmetrical work didn’t fit the frenetic 1960s and 70s, when highbrow early-reader poetry was strongly associated with the anarchism of Dr Seuss, the histrionics of Shel Silverstein, and the rampant nightmares of Maurice Sendak.

In such company, Brown came to seem staid, perhaps somewhat preppie. In Sendak’s Pierre (1962), a distraught family, trying to recover their possibly-eaten son, begin to hit a lion with a folding chair. Such things don’t happen in Margaret Wise Brown’s world. Her animals don’t get into a wild rumpus, or depose turtles sitting on top of them. In fact, the most famous of them is dead before the children in the story find it.

That was the way animals got when they had been dead for some time — cold dead and stone still with no heart beating. . . . But they were glad they had found it, because now they could dig a grave in the woods and bury it. They could have a funeral and sing to it the way grown-up people did when someone died. (The Dead Bird, 1938)

In Dr Seuss’s Grinch Who Stole Christmas (1957), the story comes to a climax on Christmas morning with singing in the streets of Who-Ville. By contrast, Brown’s On Christmas Eve (1938) ends with singing too, but it’s a disembodied, impersonal caroling that children overhear from a distance.

They went up the stairs almost running, only as quietly still as they could. And they jumped into bed with their clothes on. Their hearts were pounding.

And a page later, the story ends. Not only are Brown’s works devoid of manic energy, but they avoid a big crashing final chord as scrupulously as possible.

Yet her work is hardly without its energies. The implacable mother of The Runaway Bunny (1942) is based on a suitor in a Provençal love ballad, who figures himself as a hunter in pursuit of his beloved prey. And the great beauty of Goodnight Moon (1947) comes from its insistent, nearly obsessive use of the list. Seth Lerer asks, “what is Goodnight Moon but a catalogue of things: a list of properties both real and fanciful that mark the progress of the evening and the passageway to sleep?” (Children’s Literature, Chicago 2008, p. 5) “It is as though the very act of naming . . . belongings has the power to drive out loneliness and fear,” notes Leonard Marcus (Margaret Wise Brown, Boston 1992, p. 188).

And somewhere along the line, during the Reagan years perhaps, when I wasn’t paying attention, those lonelinesses and fears overwhelmed enough American lives to make Brown a classic again, even to elide the years that her work spent overshadowed by a more energetic generation of writers for the very young.

Brown was decidedly patrician in her tastes and the circles she moved in. She dated Rockefellers and royalty, if Wikipedia can be believed. Yet she never married, and her only long-term relationship was with John Barrymore’s ex-wife Michael Strange. “She was reputed to have had a long term affair with a prominent New York attorney and with Michael Strang [sic],” says Brown’s official website, and if by “reputed” they mean “confirmed in her well-documented standard biography by Leonard Marcus,” that’s accurate – though Brown’s relationship with Strange was less an “affair” than what used to be called a “Boston marriage.” Imagine teaching Brown’s work in a Gay & Lesbian Literature course! Yet such is the opening of the American closet in the past half-century that one is hardly surprised to find Brown’s partnership with Strange matter-of-factly described on a website for the parents and teachers of young children.

Unsurprisingly, Brown idolized Gertrude Stein, who was a kind of mentor to her. And when one thinks of the loving repetition in Stein’s works, at once so stylized and so attuned to the spoken rhythms of American speech, one can see why. In Brown’s language, the simplest things take on the incantatory magic that Stein infused into her highbrow poetry for adults.

Goodnight comb
And goodnight brush

Goodnight nobody
Goodnight mush

And goodnight to the old lady whispering “hush”

Goodnight stars
Goodnight air

Goodnight noises everywhere

On that note, I must take my leave of English Matters. It’s been a wonderful year. I am not being dismissed for snark, or retiring, or lighting out for the Territory. But in the words of our blogmeister, Professor Stodnick, doing a biweekly column here is “kicking my butt.” I will remain a faithful reader and Facebook linker of English Matters, and I look forward to posting many a fractious comment

Friday cat-blogging, as an Internet phenomenon, was invented by Kevin Drum, late of Calpundit and Washington Monthly, and currently of Mother Jones.

(As a pre-Internet phenomenon, cat blogging appears to have been invented by cave painters in Stone Age France

though the Romans have a certain claim to being the first cat-bloggers

and by the Middle Ages, the practice was firmly established.)

Anyway, Kevin Drum, a center/left blogger who has long been my favorite for his noninflammatory style and views just to the right of mine (which means I can digest them easily and still feel self-importantly superior to him), abandons his short-form commentary on politics every Friday to post . . . pictures of his cats. With commentary on their lovable peculiarities.

On Fridays, about 98% of the globe’s bandwidth is consumed by cat-bloggers posting photos of Missy, Dropsy, Fandango, Elspeth, and Crinkles. The uninitiated may find this a little off-putting, not to say actively nauseating. Although dogs have pride of place in the literary world (from Albert Payson Terhune and Jack London to J.R. Ackerley and Willie Morris), and there has been the occasional high-verbal dog with a blog, cats are by far the electronic animal of choice.

And I mean, really, what would be the point of a Loldog? They would all look the same. I SEZ WALK ME NOW. This would be even more tiresome than lolcats themselves.

Cats lend themselves to blogging because

• they never do the same thing twice
• they occasionally sit still enough while awake to be photographed
• they are easily anthropomorphized
• they can be ascribed human language in print, as well as given voice by their owners in falsetto broken English when we think there’s nobody else listening

So here goes. Now, I must admit to violating one of the cardinal rules of Friday cat-blogging: you are supposed to stop everything and take pictures of your cats on that very Friday. Well, this cannot be done. I have a job and a life – not much of a job, granted, but I can’t stay at home and snap the cats. I have baseball boxscores to check, Facebook news to ponder, and crossword puzzles to print, so I really have got to get into the office. So I present archival photos of the Cats, in typical poses:

Gemma has no memory, short- or long-term, and is continually surprised to find that people and other cats exist. She is one of the few world cats who will not eat any kind of canned food, even Fancy Feast Appetizers, which frankly look a lot better than most of the stuff I eat. If you have found pawprints on a manuscript I have returned to you in the past year, they belong to Gemma.

Brutie patrols the place from various vantage points, preferably flowerpots or the roofs of automobiles. He will not sit on your lap or come when called; instead he follows a vocation as guard cat.

And Gobsy bats the others out of the way so she can sit on my lap. She can eat anything without throwing up and is anywhere from 10 to 12 years old. I wish to apologize publicly for stepping on her tail last summer “on accident,” as unlike Gemma she has a memory and has never quite forgiven me.

And what does this have to do with the discipline of English? Clearly, if you’re wondering that, you have not internalized the principles of cat-blogging. It is a completely hermetic phenomenon that has nothing to do with anything but itself – not unlike a cat.

I got a phone call this morning from my friend Chaim Knott, Executive Associate Vice Provost for K-20 Initiatives here at UTA.

“Hey Tim,” said Chaim. “I really can’t talk right now.”

“You called me, Chaim. What’s up?” I said.

“Can I tell you something in confidence?” asked Chaim.

“Of course not,” I said. “I’m a blogger. Anything you tell me will be lunchtime reading across the globe later today.”

“Well, I guess I’ll just have to trust you,” said Chaim. “UTA is on the brink of a major new Tier One thrust. But the name is too simple, so I wanted to get some verbiage from you. We’re calling it Improving Education.”

“Way too simple,” I said. “Try Value-Added Intrapersonal Enhancement.”

“Man, you the wordsmith,” said Chaim. “That’s why I call you.”

“But what’s it all about, Chaim?” I asked.

“Well, keep this under your hat,” said Chaim. “But here’s the deal. First, we’re going to require a foreign language for every bachelor’s degree. Not just because of the global economy, but because being multilingual makes you a better world citizen and a more truly cultured human being. We have to pay more than lip service to the liberal arts if we want to be Tier One.”

“L’esprit est prompt, mais la chair est faible, Chaim.”

“Huh? No comprendo, dude-o. Anyway, next, we’re going to make class sizes a lot smaller.”

“What’s up with that, Chaim? Everyone from my Dean to the Chronicle of Higher Education tells me that bigger classes actually improve learning.”

“Uh-huh. Which is why they try to recruit kids to Dartmouth and Reed College and Bryn Mawr by advertising gigantic freshman sections? Listen, Tim. We’re going to cap basic literature, math, government, and history classes at 20 students, so the professor knows every student’s name and can give extra help on everything.”

“Sounds good. But that’s for F2F classes, right? You’ll still offer unlimited on-line sections.”

“No, we’re eliminating distance ed.”

“Eliminating it? But Chaim, distance ed is the vibrant new delivery system for the 21st century. It’s the way Generation Z has learned how to learn.”

“You believe that banana oil, Tim? Distance ed is about cutting costs, not about better instruction. I saw an on-line chemistry course the other day that was made up of Facebook Quizzes. You really think kids learn anything from “What Kind of Hydrocarbon Chain Are You?”

“You’re going to need a lot of new faculty to teach those sections, Chaim.”

“And we’ve got to pay them accordingly. What does UTA pay full-time Lecturers in English right now, Tim?”

“$22,500 a year. But Senior Lecturers with a Ph.D. plus ten years’ experience can make up to $38,000.”

“Let’s see, let’s see . . . Fort Worth ISD pays entry-level kindergarten teachers $46,570. I figure we should top that by 10%. How does $51,227 sound?”

“Sounds like what I was making when I got promoted to Full Professor.”

“Cool.”

“But how are you going to fund this, Chaim?”

“I thought you’d ask that. Number one, we’re going to cancel the annual redesign of the UTA logo. That’ll pick up $83K a year.”

“But there are so many ways to write the letter A that you haven’t tried out yet!”

“Funny. Next, we’re going to realize huge savings from sustainability initiatives.”

“But Chaim, UTA already has a sustainability program. We even have a sustainability blog.”

“Tim, blogs are for whiny, powerless losers. We’re talking actually doing something here. First, we’re going to xeriscape the campus, so we stop pumping water out of 10,000 sprinkler heads when the Shorthorn headline is TOO RAINY TO PLAY OOZEBALL. Then, we’re going to rip up the heat-trapping new blacktop in Lot 49 and replace it with a green-roofed parking garage. And we’re going to plaster the top of the new basketball stadium with solar panels so it can go off the grid.”

“You mean the new Events Center.”

“Events Shmevents. That place is for March Madness, baby. And since Texas Hall won’t be needed for hoops anymore, we’re going to turn it into an art-house movie theater, so you won’t need to drive to Dallas to watch something better than Paul Blart 2. And we are also going to follow up 40 years of empty talk by revitalizing downtown Arlington, maybe even attract a Seven-Eleven.”

“That’s going to need even more cash, Chaim.”

“We’ve got it covered. Jerry Jones is donating a drop of sweat shed by Roger Staubach in Super Bowl VI. Vials of that stuff have been going for seven figures on eBay. Hey, my Droid is freeping at me, sweetheart. TTYL.”

You read it here first.

In a recent essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education, David Alpaugh bewails the proliferation of poetry in America. He notes that, at a conservative estimate, American journals, print or on-line, will publish 100,000 poems this year, and that’s a bit much. Like, about 99,900 poems much.

My first reaction to Alpaugh’s thesis was: OK, let’s also crack down on the millions of Americans who play musical instruments. Some of them really should be stopped. And while we’re at it, there are way more than 100,000 Americans painting in watercolors or tempera or oils. Surely they could do with a little reining in.

But Alpaugh isn’t steamed about people merely practicing an art.

Like golf, poetry is becoming a sport that multitudes pursue and enjoy—and if it were simply a matter of more and more men and women writing poetry, I would be cheering. . . . Exercising language at its highest level is an absolute good, and (Plato be damned) in an ideal society everyone would write poetry.

But there’s a difference between writing and publishing. Golf, after all, has an agreed-upon scoring system that lets every player know his or her standing, stroke by stroke, game by game. Mediocre amateurs cannot deceive themselves (or be assured by pros) that they are contenders.

And that, for Alpaugh, is the rub. Lots of poetry = good. Lots of poetry getting published = very, very bad.

Alpaugh is anxious about bad stuff getting published, good stuff getting lost in the welter of bad stuff, and the impossibility of sorting the good from the bad. At the heart of his anxiety is the notion that getting a poem published should be like breaking 80 from the championship tees. After all, when you pick up a publication, you are reading something published, and “published” implies a certain hallmark of quality, like the gallo nero on a bottle of Chianti.

People take the notion of “being published” very, very seriously indeed. Several times a month, I get a phone call from some prospective graduate student who confides that they “are published.” They suggest an aura somewhere between being “a made guy” and being “washed in the blood of the Lamb.” Personal investment in the mystique of publication is tremendous. Publishing just any old thing, we feel, would be like giving the Congressional Medal of Honor to anybody who shows up at a recruiting office.

It’s easy for me to snark, because, after all, I too am published. It’s true: every morning, I rise, admire the publications on my bookshelf, and then scrape up $1.89 for a Tall Decaf. I don’t mean to mock writers’ ambitions, or editors’ dreams, or readers’ appreciation of published writing. I just think that every writer and reader, from David Alpaugh to the most print-thirsty novice in a neighborhood writers’ group, should get a little perspective on the issue. And so, I’ll propose a principle that might make everyone less anxious:

Publication Does Not Guarantee, and Has Never Guaranteed, That a Piece of Writing Is Any Good. Even aside from the vexed question of telling what’s good from what’s bad. Let’s say we can. Fact is, bad poetry has been published ever since some stonemason gave in to nagging and carved his brother-in-law’s fan-fiction sequel to Gilgamesh onto a temple wall. Bad poetry filled the bookstalls of Elizabethan London and the salons of the Sun King and the chapbooks of Beat-Generation San Francisco.

Take The New Yorker, synonymous in the U.S. with literary “publication,” because it is the only magazine on most newsstands that publishes poetry and stories (as against 50 magazines that advise how to publish poetry and stories). Well, here’s an open secret: the poetry in The New Yorker has always been bad. Not that a good poem has never appeared there – what would be the odds of that – but that nearly every poem there is bad. There have been whole identifiable eras in the badness of New Yorker poetry, from the 1980s/90s “Dull poem that mentions a summer resort that Upper-East-Siders frequent” era to the current “Drab poem that self-consciously mentions something plebian” era.

It is OK to say things like this, by the way. It’s not sourly grapish. Even if you’ve gotten six or eight rejections from The New Yorker. It’s even OK to knock New Yorker poems if you can’t produce a line of poetry yourself. As Samuel Johnson pointed out, “You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table.” You may even scold the magazine that features it as Table of the Year. And you know what? It doesn’t matter. The world is not falling apart because the most prestigious American magazine publishes bad poetry.

If we step back a bit from the fetish of being “published,” we can perhaps be more sanguine about the fact that 100,000 poems are published each year. Very many of them are bad. No appreciably higher percentage of the ones that appear in prestige venues are good than those that appear wherever, and that’s been the case forever. Poems are not chosen for publication because of any replicable standard of quality. Poems get into print because editors, with widely different subjectivities and attention spans, actually like them, or just have pages to fill, or are inveigled by their authors’ names, their provenance, the pretty stamps on their return envelopes, who knows. Some of these poems are good, and due to their sheer volume, perhaps more of them are good today than ever before.

Which brings us to another of Alpaugh’s fears: how can we know which ones are good? The world of American poetry is a lot more decentered than it was 50, 100, or 150 years ago. But that’s another post, perhaps, and another principle to discover.

To follow my colleagues Laura, Desiree, and Jackie, who have lately been exploring myths about English departments, students, and faculty, I thought I would explore three myths about graduate study that I encounter as Graduate Advisor.

Myth #1: You Must Get Your Degrees from Different Places. Not that it’s a bad idea to get degrees from different places. If you get your BA, MA, and PhD from three different schools, or at least from two different schools, then you meet more people, you’re exposed to different ideas, you find different library collections to explore, you enjoy life more and become more cosmopolitan, and dozens of other advantages.

But the myth I’m talking about here is more like “nobody will hire me if my CV shows three degrees from the same place, because that’s an automatic resumé-killer.”

And really, it doesn’t work that way. If you’re applying for a teaching-heavy job, the first thing they look for is how much, how varied, and how strong your teaching experience is. (Unless it’s the 25th of August and the semester starts on the 26th, in which case they look for whether your breath will fog a mirror and you aren’t currently incarcerated.)

If you’re applying for a research-oriented job, they look to see how interesting your dissertation is, and what you’ve published to establish its high quality.

Somewhere down the line, the trivial matter of where you earned all your different degrees (always assuming none of them is from Dr Nick’s All-Nite Research University) might come up over drinks, but really, nobody uses that fact as a quick CV weeder.

Myth #2: I’ll Never Get a Teaching Job Because I’m Too Old / White / Anglo / Male. Because you’re right, there are hardly any old white Anglo males in this business. Hell, there’s only one in my office.

Age: first of all, the ideal job candidate nowadays is probably someone who’s 62 years old and will retire as soon as s/he earns tenure, saving their employer decades of seniority raises. Second, no, you will not go far in the profession if your idea of cutting-edge scholarship is Cleanth Brooks and your dissertation idea is “The Influence of Existentialism on the Beat Generation.” But aside from that, ageism in the academy, from all I can tell, is at a historical low.

The same applies to worries over your various un-PC attributes: your whiteness, your native English, your maleness. The counterpart myth, “All the Jobs go to Young Black Disabled Lesbians,” is equally trite. They strike me as excuses. Yes, if you are an intellectual reactionary, if you come across as tacitly racist or with a chip on your shoulder about how beleaguered you are as a member of a majority group, you might not get much sympathy in a humanities department. If you, by contrast, keep an open mind and seek out new ideas, why wouldn’t you get a fair chance at any jobs that are going?

Myth #3: College Teaching in the Humanities is an Upper-Middle-Class Profession.

It’s not.

College English teachers can expect to make poverty-level salaries as adjuncts, working-class salaries as full-time untenured faculty, and skilled-trades salaries as tenured senior faculty.

Bob Seger had a song back when I was in high school:

I wanna be a lawyer
Doctor or professor
Member of the U.M.C.
I wanna drive a Lincoln,
Spend my evenings drinkin,
Have stock in GM and GE.

Lawyers and doctors, if they survive to senior levels in their professions, yes, they can aspire to such giddy circumstances. English professors? we drive ancient Hondas, spend our evenings grading papers, and the only coupons we clip are the ones that offer 40% off at Half Price Books.

William Pannapacker has recently made waves with a series of increasingly embittered attacks on the hypocrisy of graduate education in the humanities in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The myth of the academic meritocracy powerfully affects students from families that believe in education, that may or may not have attained a few undergraduate degrees, but do not have a lot of experience with how access to the professions is controlled. Their daughter goes to graduate school, earns a doctorate in comparative literature from an Ivy League university, everyone is proud of her, and then they are shocked when she struggles for years to earn more than the minimum wage.

“Graduate school in the humanities,” Pannapacker concludes, “is a trap. It is designed that way. It is structurally based on limiting the options of students and socializing them into believing that it is shameful to abandon ‘the life of the mind.’” Despite his histrionics, I tend to agree with Pannapacker. Not about the “trap” aspect, mind you, but about the myth that lots of advanced degrees will bring you luxury cars, single-malts, and bulging portfolios.

In fact, I very much doubt that teaching English ever entailed such things unless said English teachers had them already. Teaching English is a working-class occupation. We do not control the means of production; we do not possess independent capital. We are ill-paid. Thanks to an economic principle called the Baumol effect, we can’t become more productive over time, so the only way for a school to afford English teaching and its irreducible labor-intensiveness is to keep eroding our salaries in real terms. Basically, society doesn’t value what we do, and we’re paid accordingly.

Pannapacker bemoans the lack of “real jobs” in the humanities, but lots and lots of us have real jobs. We keep them as real as possible by working for what prison guards or truck drivers make. And folks, that’s not as tragic as Pannapacker insists. Lots of prison guards and truck drivers, after all, own their own homes, have hobbies, and get out to see the occasional movie or NASCAR race. If it would mortify you to be seen at the Motor Speedway, well, the Fort Worth Opera has $20 tickets. Culture, precisely because it’s consumed by the underpaid, is often an excellent bargain. Reading is still pretty much free.

The most important thing for people to know about college teaching as they go into it is that it’s a working-class occupation. Some initial myth-busting on that score can save a world of grief later on.

— Tim Morris

Let the record show: on the single snowiest day in the history of Dallas/Ft Worth, the University of Texas at Arlington was open for business as usual.

UTA usually closes at the hint of a flake in the wind, so faculty and staff were perplexed at finding themselves on campus yesterday. It was tough to drive, tougher to walk in from your car, and once you’d walked in, Thursday provided a ghost-town experience, classes and meetings mostly unattended by people who’d had the sense to stay home.

Among those who soldiered in, the questions bubbled up: why are we here? Why isn’t UTA closed? In the universal human struggle to make meaning, people asked themselves: why is this day not like other days? Since it apparently wasn’t Passover, people started scanning the UTA Events Calendar for something out of the ordinary.

Come to find that Earvin “Magic” Johnson was fixing to talk Thursday evening at Texas Hall. His topic was “32 Ways to Be a Champion in Business.” (As one wag put it, the first of the 32 is “Be a basketball Hall of Famer.”)

Critical thinking in the English Department quickly centered on a connection between Magic and the fact that we were tramping through a foot of slush to get to our depopulated classes. Or rather, a connection between somebody and the slush. Certain faculty opined that Michael Jordan was to blame. Others suspected Michael Irvin. But whoever they thought was speaking, suspicions ran high: they’re not closing UTA because they don’t want to cancel the sports guy.

F2F in offices and classrooms, on Facebook and Twitter among those who’d stayed toastily at home, we saw the birth of a meme: yeah, they’ll close this place at the first flurry, but if there’s any schmoozing with the stars scheduled for that evening, they’ll make us all drive in from Waxahachie.

Memes are fascinating things: in moments, they morph from snarky remark to common wisdom, with minimal pause for reflection in between. Because really, the “can’t close, Magic’s here” meme makes no logical sense whatsoever. Classes started at 8am; Magic was going to talk at 6pm. If it was important for Magic to speak at all costs, why not cancel daytime classes and announce that the University would open at 6pm? For that matter, why not announce that everything but Magic would be cancelled?

Worst case, the lecture itself would have to be cancelled. But reflect. Magic’s in town already. His speaker’s fee is a sunk cost. Instead of putting everybody through the ordeal of “32 Ways to Be a Champion in Business,” the great man could have proceeded directly to whatever upmarket watering hole the suits had picked out for his face time with the high rollers, sparing all concerned an hour of their lives and actually increasing the benefit to UTA.

No, I gotta call nonsense on the Magic meme. And I don’t have any very good theory to offer in its place. To invoke Steve McQueen in The Magnificent Seven, “It seemed to be a good idea at the time.” When I got up at 6am on Thursday, there was snow on the lawn, but the paths and streets were clear. By 630, I remarked to my plus-one, “Could that be new snow on the walk?” By 8am, the new snow was ankle-deep, and we were splashing doggedly through it on our way to deliver quality instructional minutes.

No, I probably wouldn’t have closed UTA either. After all, when Magic Johnson and I (and 55,000 other people) were students at Michigan State in the 1970s, eleven inches of wet snow would have been just another school day. It wouldn’t have been one of my brightest decisions, but I’d have kept UTA open, and (as in the actual event) no real harm would have resulted.

But people crave order instead of randomness, key determining factors instead of “whatever,” and sinister motives instead of inertial forces. And always, everywhere, memes represent a collective distrust of authority that is salutary for a community.

UTA – like nearly every school, government, and corporation in the world – is in the business of producing hot air. Our leaders insist on branding us “Mavericks,” when we seem to be indistinguishable from any other large state university in the country. They loudly proclaim that we are moving toward “Tier One” status, when many faculty in the humanities are staggeringly overworked, and paid at near-poverty levels ($12,500 a semester to teach five classes is common). Neighbors of UTA get cheery mailings suggesting that UTA and Arlington are working together to make our city a real “college town,” although, in a city with a downtown so empty that every day seems like a snow day, a city famous for razing neighborhoods to put up stadiums with vast parking lots, UTA’s biggest new community initiative is . . . putting up a stadium with a vast parking lot.

Every institution in the world, I repeat, engages in such hollow rhetoric continuously. UTA is no worse than others, and is a pretty good place to work in lots of ways. But whenever there’s a high volume of white noise from officialdom, people stop listening pretty quickly. As a coping mechanism, they construct memes that cynically find hypocrisy at the heart of random, or even well-intentioned, behavior.

—Tim Morris

Today is the 150th anniversary of the birthday of Anton Chekhov, Russian playwright and fiction writer who died in 1904 of the tuberculosis that afflicted him for much of his adult life. Chekhov followed his own illness with some interest, because his day job was physician. Just as in the case of the attorney Wallace Stevens, a professional training and career didn’t prevent Chekhov from becoming a great literary artist. In fact, in contrast to Stevens, for whom a thrilling career as an insurance lawyer was probably at best a neutral way of paying the bills while he wrote, Chekhov’s medical practice was a positive source of inspiration, giving him a window on psychology, sexuality, illness, and aging. Memo to our new College of Nursing: don’t give up on those literature electives!

Chekhov is known for four major plays (Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, The Sea Gull, and The Three Sisters), a handful of lesser and shorter plays, and innumerable stories. His fictions range from a page or two to almost 200 pages, from flash fiction to novella. He wrote two novels, which are fairly obscure, but his longer stories are longer than some writers’ novels.

As a result it’s hard to pigeonhole any of Chekhov’s stories. He wasn’t interested in the deft turning of a plot back on itself in a few pages (the method of Maupassant, O. Henry, Thomas Hardy, Kate Chopin). Nor was he floridly rhetorical, like H.G. Wells; his stories don’t illustrate big ideas. (Tolstoy accused Chekhov’s famous story “The Darling” of being a failed feminist argument that ended up proving the existence of the eternal feminine, but that critique tells us more about Tolstoy than about Chekhov; Chekhov always seemed interested in individuals, not categories of people.)

In Chekhov stories, things happen, lives are changed, but nothing fits standard narrative formulas – hence their extreme, ad hoc range of size and manner. In this Chekhov resembles Henry James, his somewhat older contemporary, who preferred the expansive concept of the “tale.” Yet even with James one perceives the aesthetic ideal that a story must illustrate a unified effect.

With Chekhov, instead, we get the impression that a prospect opens briefly on a life or few, and then closes behind them – much, perhaps, as a patients’ lives, their very bodies, become excruciatingly open to their physician for a few days or weeks, and then are lost in the welter of humanity again. Take, for instance, his 1898 story called “A Doctor’s Visit.” When a senior physician gets a call for help regarding a factory-owner’s daughter, he sends his assistant Korolyov instead. Korolyov is young, and ignorant of most things non-medical:

He was born and had grown up in Moscow; he did not know the country, and he had never taken any interest in factories, or been inside one.

But Korolyov knows people, and the causes of their pain. He quickly discovers that the heiress Liza suffers not from heart disease but from depression: a depression that he traces to the system of capitalism itself. Exemplifying, perhaps, the old principle that experts on a place are people who have been there either twenty years or twenty minutes, he analyzes the whole scheme of production, and explains the roots of her depression to his patient. He promises that life will be better in 50 years, even if he and Liza don’t live to see it. She cheers up, a little.

And the encounter is over. Set aside for a moment that 1898 + 50 would put Liza and Korolyov in the postwar Stalinist Soviet Union. Chekhov can’t have known that; what’s more important is that Chekhov realizes that Korolyov can’t know anything. The young doctor’s idealism and optimism are directed out into the fog of the larger social world. What we know of other people is largely conjecture. The young imagine they, and the world, will grow wise. Chekhov observes them imagining, and then turns his attention away.

In a sense, Chekhov wrote “novelistic” short stories, but it’s crucial that he stopped short of fleshing them into novels. Virginia Woolf, who greatly admired Chekhov, would call one of her exercises in vignette “An Unwritten Novel,” and that art form – subtle, oblique, and full of “negative capability” – is Chekhov’s great legacy. He didn’t learn how to write his unwritten novels in medical school, but one should acknowledge that he didn’t learn how in creative-writing classes, either. He used his medical training to live life, and he used that life to make his fleeting impressions of life live on in art.

—Tim Morris

Simone Turbeville, who died on 27 December 2009, was a long-time Associate Professor in the English Department at UTA – though it’s a measure both of the ephemerality of life and the huge turnover here in the past decade that few reading this obituary will remember her. It’s important to mark such passings – maybe more important to mark them than those of academics who get awards or professorships or buildings named after them.

Simone Turbeville taught at UTA for over 40 years. It doesn’t violate the principle of nil nisi bonum to say that Simone was a difficult colleague. In fact, if I were to write that her tenure here was one of sweetness and light, she would read that, raise her eyes to the ceiling, and say “Hmnph!” or words to that effect. No, Simone was a difficult colleague. She feuded endlessly with everybody over the most minor issues, leading one of our colleagues to muse that academic disputes are so very bitter because there is so very little at stake. Simone complained incessantly about her working conditions (something I of course would never do). She was easily and monumentally offended, and her character note was how little the world appreciated her. When she won the Gertrude Golladay Award for teaching in 1999, she remarked, “Too little, too late.”

Still, though she spent about ten of our 13 years as colleagues not speaking to me for one reason or another, it was impossible to stay mad at Simone forever. You always had the sense that if she took everything too bitterly, she chose the right things to be bitter about. Simone had a formidable education. She earned a PhD from Bocconi University in her native Milan in 1951 (a date that doesn’t square with her being born in the 1930s, as her obituary claims; much about her will remain mysterious). Upon arriving in the United States, she was told by somebody that a “foreign” doctorate wouldn’t cut it in America. So she set about earning a second doctorate, from Indiana University. Simone was thus one of the few people I’ve ever met to have two earned PhDs – real PhDs from major research universities, not a European summer school where you direct your own dissertation, or the On-Line University of Nowhere, or something like that.

Simone’s field was comparative literature of the Renaissance. She helped edit the journal Allegorica for much of its existence. She taught the high canon from Dante to Thomas Mann. She was fanatically opposed to literary theory of any description. (It was one of Simone’s students who, upon starting one of my theory courses, announced to the class “I don’t want theory. I just want facts.”) If you picture her as a bristling reactionary, you are of course half right. But Simone could surprise you. Her courses in literature and opera were in an interdisciplinary mode that became fashionable again just at the end of her career. She read feverishly, always adding contemporary authors to her syllabuses: when I met her in the late 1980s, she was into Umberto Eco, and made his work the centerpiece of her regular 20th-century comparative literature courses. When I started reading the Sicilian novelist Lara Cardella, who was half my age and a third of Simone’s, Simone sent agents into the bookstores of Europe to bring back the newest Cardella for us both to read. And almost as much as Puccini, she loved Robocop.

While she was intermittently talking to me, Simone always added energy to my day. When I arrived at UTA in 1988, I was given an office across from Simone on the 6th floor of Carlisle Hall. I would be minding my own business when Simone would strut in in a cloud of cigarette smoke and proclaim: “They have just determined the language family that Etruscan belongs to! Do you know what it is?” Beats me, Simone. “FINNO-UGARIC!” And she would pivot on one heel and depart as smokily as she’d arrived.

Simone loved animals, despite her legendary allergies: birds of all kinds, and Scottie dogs, in particular. She was a magnificent Italian cook. She loved students, especially those who loved her, and was savagely devoted to her favorites – and I do not say that as a bad thing; she loved people who loved the art, music, and books that she loved, and at heart there’s nothing wrong with that.

Simone witnessed a swath of Italian history. Her father was persecuted by Mussolini, and Simone would later see Il Duce hanging dead in a Milan plaza. On a lighter note, she once saw the Nobel Literature prize-winner Salvatore Quasimodo in his underwear. The story goes that the great man had become enamored of one of Simone’s schoolfriends. Upon bustling into her friend’s flat one afternoon, she encountered Quasimodo in his BVDs. There are only a few degrees of separation between any of us and unclad Nobel Laureates.

Simone, you were often impossible to get along with, but as I said when you retired in 2001, “ti vogliamo bene” – and now, “ti avremmo voluto bene.” Rest well.

—Tim Morris