The Salt-Box

First:

Him: “So, the New Yorker has Hermione Lee’s interview with Philip Roth.  She’s the biographer of . . . ”

Her: “Um, I know who Hermione Lee is, jerk . . .”

Later:

Her: “I think you’ve misquoted Wordsworth in your column.  You’re actually quoting a Blood, Sweat, and Tears song. . . ”

Him: “I’m pretty sure the line is right — but, no matter what, I am NOT quoting BST.  Hell, no.”

Apparently a major presidential candidate is backing the “baby bond” concept (via Matthew Yglesias), wherein children are given $5000 (or some amount) at birth, which would accumulate interest until they were 18. The idea here is to build a culture of saving, to spread the benefits of capital ownership, and to let teenagers buy a really sweet ride when they go off to college.

I’m in favor of this policy, without regard to its merits, because it gives me a chance to trot out once again one of my favorite quotations of all time, from Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh:

Why should the generations overlap one another at all? Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped round us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the sphex wasp does, to find that its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow, but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before it began to live consciously on its own account?

When I’m writing for PopMatters or Bookslut, I usually use my Gmail account to communicate with editors, publishers, and possible interview subjects.  This week, though, I was writing my former dissertation director to set up an interview about his new book, and so I used my .edu account, since that’s how we keep in touch.

There’s a formula for these e-mails: I wrote to say that I wanted to do a feature interview for Bookslut, and sent him a link to one I’d done in the spring about neuro-psychoanalysis.  I figured this was a slam-dunk, and since he’s famously fast at e-mail, I thought it would all be arranged in a day.

But . . . a day went by, and then another, and then a third.  Just as I was starting to doubt the legitimacy of my interviews and book reviewing and such, I happened to check my spam folder.  (Well, not my spam folder–I read the e-mail of blocked messages that our school’s spam filter held in quarantine.)

Sure enough–there was a response!  All was well in the world.  But wait!  This was a response to a personal e-mail–why would it have been flagged as spam?  When I logged into the spam product to unjunk the message, the program said that the e-mail was flagged as “likely spam” because it was “sexual in nature.”  Sexual.  Because of the word Bookslut?

Now, we can laugh at the clumsiness of the implementation, but there’s surely a broader point: There’s not, at present, a reliable way to make judgments about the content of the message by the presence of specific words.  It might be the case that most messages with the word “slut” are offensive, but not all will be.  (I think I teach at least 3 or 4 poems or novels each semester that have this word–heaven help the students who write with questions about them.)  As Saul Bellow puts it, “Everybody knows there is no finesse or accuracy in of suppression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.”*

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* I got this quotation from Mark Edmundson’s The Death of Sigmund Freud, about which more next week.

Via Acephalous, I see that the lunatic wing* of conservatism  still loves to thrash academics & their “six figure incomes.”

It’s a good thing the Chronicle offers actual data, more or less freely available.  For the vast majority of academics, of course, a six-figure income isn’t possible.  (The money’s fine.  But it’s not “six figures.”  And for most assistant and associate professors, it’s well off six figures–frequently below $45K.  And if you break it down by discipline, I suspect that most of the crowd pulling in six figures or more is in the sciences/health area.  The hateful, lazy humanities types scorned by the Phi Beta Cons crowd aren’t making anything comparable.)

Anecdotally, I can offer David French the comforting news that my promotion–one of only 2 I’ll ever get–netted me a grand total of . . . $61 per paycheck.   At this rate, I’ll get to six figures . . . well, probably never.

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*”Lunatic” because an essay about middle school teachers becomes an occasion to bash college professors.  Acephalous has the details.

Next Wednesday (10/3/07), the Connecticut Forum opens its season with a panel on “The Tech Revolution: Geeks & Visionaries Plug Us In.”  Ok, it’s not the best title, but look at the lineup:

• Craig Newmark
• Jimmy Wales
• danah boyd, and
• Jonathan Zittrain

Not bad for a Wednesday night in Hartford.  $25 and up.

As I say, I’m back in the mix at PopMatters, and this morning on the Re:Print blog I discuss Janice Harayda’s use of Word’s “readability” statistics to evaluate a Booker Prize finalist, Mister Pip.  (Harayda is the former books editor at the Cleveland Plain Dealer and a vice-president at the National Book Critics’ Circle.)

Comments are more appropriate there.

Al Filreis reminisces about a seminar on literature & the 1950s that collectively decided to value dissensus.  One of the students was moved by the experience to write an “undergraduate bill of rights,” which he reprints in part:

You have the right to conduct undergraduate research, and have its intellectual content taken seriously.

You have the right to prioritize teaching in the tenure process. You have a right to protest that lack. You have a right to expect that your concerns matter.

You have the right to organize class dinners and parties, and to invite the professor to attend without feeling you’ve overstepped the boundaries of propriety by mingling social and academic pursuits.

Under “Responsibilities”:

This contract is in danger of being dissolved by the “University” at all times. You have not just a right, but a responsibility, to see that the academic community includes you at all times, and a responsibility to fight like hell when a Provost or Undergraduate Chair or tenured professor defines that community without you in it.

It’s Miriam’s turf to say so, but Ivy League models don’t export to regional comprehensive schools.   Nevertheless, it is interestingto contemplate what such a bill of rights would look like, and the modes of engagement its authors would envision.

One of the hardest things to do is to entice large numbers students to embrace different pedagogical models, models wherein the primary responsibility for the course content lies with them, rather than with their Teacher.  They’re comfortable with the latter, which is of course why it needs to die.

Apparently my long drought at PopMatters was the result of technical glitches at both ends.  So, there’ll probably be several reviews there in relatively quick succession.  The first is Brock Clarke’s An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England:

Sam’s got a lot of time to think about relationships and their discontents, and so he loads up his narratives with twee aphorisms about human nature: “Why do we hurt our parents the way we do?  There’s no way to make sense of it except as practice for then hurting our children the way we do.” Or: “maybe misunderstanding is what makes it possible to be a family in the first place.” Or, best of all: “we all know that to be a son is to lie to yourself about your father.” Clarke’s humor at these moments is somehow both delicate and complex.  There’s straight satire of the memoirist’s impulse to tell us what life is, of course.  More than this, any time Sam promulgates one of these aphorisms, it’s a sign he’s misconstrued the situation—the “insight” is just a screen for Sam’s delusions. They’re never earned insights.

Read the whole thing!

Like many 4-yr-olds, the Little Man has rapidly developed a fascination with all things excremental.  As you can see above, if you ask him to list who lives at our house, “poop” beats out “dad.”  Which is great.

This week, he asked me to explain that age-old conundrum, “How does your bottom know when to close after you’re done pooping?”  I explained about sphincter muscles,  and he said, “Mom said that too, but I don’t know about it.”  So, I thought, “demo time!”

I got down a snack trap (from when he was much younger), and showed him how the lid stays closed when your finger’s not reaching in, but it opens up when your finger pushes against it.  He promptly said, “so my finger’s like poop?”  “Yes!”  He was perfectly happy with that explanation, and was confident again in his body’s ability to keep things in their place.

But.  All week since, I’ve seen him pointing randomly around with his finger, and saying “My finger’s poop!”  He also has reverted back to asking for snacks in his snack trap, except he asks for his “poop trap.”

It turns out only *one* of his parents thinks this is funny.

Just want to observe here, so that I can stop ranting about this in class, that “wordiness” doesn’t just mean “has long sentences,” or even, necessarily, “goes around one’s ass to get one’s elbow.” Or, at least it doesn’t when one’s speaking about novels.
Rather, “wordiness” names a defect in writing wherein that excess of words has no point.  If a sentence is verbose, but there’s a conceptual or aesthetic payoff from all those words–then you can’t really complain that it’s “wordy.”  You can object to the payoff, and certainly you can observe that the game isn’t worth the candle, but you can’t dismiss the style as “wordy.”  (By these lights, for example, I would not consider Dickens or Eliot to be “wordy.”)

When professors object to wordiness in student papers–and when good readers object to wordiness in academic writing–the complaint isn’t just that there are a lot of words, but rather that the words are empty where they should be full.