Category: literature

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Publish and perish

Here’s an article about how Perseus Books Group is closing down two of its imprints: Carroll & Graf and Thunder’s Mouth Press. The further away I get from my indie-publishing days, the less I can understand how any of them stay afloat. This passage summed up how I tried to see things back then:

“When you see the book world conglomeratizing, it can only mean less diversity of voices,” said Johnny Temple, publisher of Akashic Books, a Brooklyn-based imprint distributed by Perseus. “When I sign up a book, it matters more that I love it than that I’ve identified a good marketing niche for it. That’s the real essence of independent publishing — it’s not a deal, it’s supposed to be a labor of love.”

Then I lost the love.

I hope the founders of those presses got a decent purchase price when they joined up with Avalon Publishing (which was later acquired by Perseus), but I have a feeling that I can see where the “labor of love” part collided with the “good marketing niche” part:

“At Carroll & Graf, we bridged the gap between small, lesser-known presses and the larger houses when it comes to gay literature,” said Don Weise, a senior editor who is losing his job. “In the four years that I’ve been here, I’ve acquired more than 100 books, and no one has ever told me no, I couldn’t do that. In the book world, that’s unheard of.”

I probably would’ve moved his attribution, along with the “senior editor who is losing his job” part to the end of the paragraph, to make my point.

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I’m Hyper-Trans-Post-Modern

When I was an undergraduate at Hampshire (1990-1993), I didn’t really understand what “the culture wars” were. I just thought it was a hassle that I had to go over to UMass to take a Shakespeare course, since the only offering we had was “Shakespeare’s Treatment of Women.”

I ended up with plenty of academic horror stories that I share with the incredulous from time to time, especially when they think they went to a far-left, theory-laden school. Trust me: you had nothing on Hampshire.

That’s not to say that the school only churned out jargon-spouters and bitter rejects. My buddy Mark considers his Hampshire experience entirely worthwhile and definitely doesn’t fall into the pomo camp.

Ron Rosenbaum recently posted about a particularly theory-focused Shakespeare professor, whom he called The Relic:

It’s not about him, but about a sadly obsolete, discredited vision of literature he shares with all too many in academia who committed to it without much skepticism when they were graduate students and lack the intellectual independence to question it now. The Relic was the embodiment of two generations of pseudo-scientific sophistry that gave itself the shorthand name Theory in literary studies. It was based on the work of a French theorists, notably Foucault, Derrida and Lacan, whose transmittal by gullible relics continues. Continues even despite the recent revelation that Foucault had, in his recently translated late works, repudiated the sophistry upon which most academic literary criticism is founded (I wrote about this in an earlier blog post citing the distinguished philosopher Richard Wolin writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education last fall).

Now, as long as this stuff “only” affects literary studies, I guess we could recover. After all, I went on to St. John’s, where we throw out the critics and dive into the books themselves. (Early on, most of the graduate students face the moment in seminar when they cite a critic or theorist’s take on one of the books and get asked, “Yes, but what do you think about the book?”)

But according to Ron’s followup post, this trend has walloped the study of physics, too. Ron included a long comment by Professor Frank Tipler of Tulane (coincidentally enough, my other undergraduate institution):

At the overwhelming majority of physics departments at American elite universities, the importance of gravity is denied. I am aware of no American university that requires, for an undergraduate degree in physics, a course in general relativity, which is Einstein’s theory of gravity. At the overwhelming majority of American elite universities, one is not even required to take a course in general relativity even to get a Ph.D. in physics! As a consequence, the overwhelming majority of American Ph.D.’s in physics do notunderstand general relativity. If a problem arises that requires knowledge of Einstein’s theory of gravity, almost all American physicists can only look blank. This is in spite of the fact that general relativity has been known to be the correct theory of gravity for almost a century.

And it gets worse. The greatest achievement of physics since the Second World War has been the discovery of the Standard Model of particle physics, a unified theory of all forces and matter not including gravity. The Standard Model has been experimentally confirmed, and some dozen and more Nobel Prizes in physics have been awarded for the discovery and experimental confirmation of the Standard Model. Yet I am aware of no physics department in the United States that requires a course in the Standard Model for an undergraduate degree in physics. Very few, if any, require a course in the Standard Model even for a Ph.D. in physics.

So one can get an undergraduate degree in physics and even a Ph.D. in physics, without knowing anything at all about the fundamental forces that control the universe at the most basic level. Since our entire civilization requires at least somebody knows basic physics, requires that at least people who have Ph.D.’s in physics know basic physics, this is a disaster.

In the Mathematics and Natural Science segment at St. John’s, some students took issue with the definitions at the beginning of Euclid’s Elements. The first two gave them fits: A point is that which has no part, and a line is breadthless length.

They kept trying to deny the validity of the rest of the geometry by denying the truth of the definitions (when we studied Lobachevsky, things really went off the rails: ha-ha). All of this bickering came to a head on the first day of the semester. My buddy Mitch got up from the table, stormed to the blackboard, hit the chalk against it once, then dragged it across the board, and said, “There! That’s a point! And that’s a line! The only people who really need to get them right are NASA and they can’t and that’s why the Mars Observer vanished!”

This shut everyone up. Except the incoming graduate student who happened to work for NASA.

The moral? Get yer basics down, and worry about denying reality later.

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Monday Morning Montaigne: Of Age

I made two discoveries when I started my Montaigne reading this weekend: the essays are actually divided into three books, and I was about 20 pages from the end of the first book! So my self-imposed project of reading the Essays and writing about them each Monday was actually going to reach some sorta milestone. Yippee.

My other discovery this weekend is that M.’s essays “only” comprise 1,045 pages of the collection, while the remaining 300 are from letters and his travel journal. So the project has become slightly easier, I guess.

Now, I know there are plenty of things that are bizarre about this Monday Morning Montaigne project, but I guess the most bizarre is that I did zero research into Montaigne before starting it. Honestly, I only knew two things about him prior to starting out:

  1. The undergraduates at St. John’s College read some of the essays (but we didn’t in the Graduate Institute).
  2. Harold Bloom included him among the greatest writers in his Western Canon (but I don’t recall reading the chapter on Montaigne, which was combined with Moliere).

So, soon after finishing at St. John’s (c. 1995), I figured I oughtta read them thar essays sometime. Problem is, the paperback edition I bought used a terrible typeface, so I wish-listed the Everyman’s hardcover edition of his complete works, which my in-laws-to-be got for me at the holidays in 2005.

Then the goofy “3M” title of these posts hit me, and I got started. Early on, I would try to read at least one essay and post a quote-of-the-week sorta thing, but eventually I decided I’d try to write a little about these essays. Fortunately for you, you can always just scroll down to the next post.

So, what I know of Montaigne I’m getting from the essays themselves (along with an occasional biographical footnote in the text). I don’t necessarily advise this course, but I feel like I’m learning about him and myself, and that’s making it all worth it for me.

This week I thought I was going to have to write on Of Prayers, in which M. complains about the commonplace of prayer, its overuse, the deceitfulness of those who pray in public, and the problems with translating the holy word into the languages of Jews and Mohammedans:

There is . . . a certain passage in Xenophon where he shows that we should pray to God more rarely, since it is not likely that we can restore our soul so often to that orderly, reformed, and devout state in which it must be for that purpose; otherwise, our prayers are not only vain and useless, but vicious. “Forgive us,” we say, ” as we forgive those who have trespassed against us.” What do we mean by that, if not that we offer him our soul free from vengeance and rancor? However, we call on God and his aid to conspire in our faults, and invite him to our injustice.

Or, to paraphrase Jayson Williams, “I don’t pray before big games. God doesn’t care about basketball till the playoffs anyway.” So sez the guy went on to suffer a monstrous injury that ended his career and ended up drunkenly shooting a limo-driver in the chest.

Of Prayer is a worthy essay, but I felt that writing about it would be too, well, preachy, and I didn’t feel like moralizing this weekend. Fortunately, it turns out that the final essay in Book One interested me more. Of Age discusses the changing conceptions of age, retirement, and what makes for a “natural death”. Writing around 1580, M. laughs off the idea of death from old age as “natural”:

What an idle fancy it is to expect to die of a decay of powers brought on by extreme old age, and to set ourselves this term for our duration, since that is the rarest of all deaths and the least customary! We call it alone natural, as if it were contrary to nature to see a man break his neck by a fall, be drowned in a shipwreck, or be snatched away by the plague or pleurisy, and as if our ordinary condition did not expose us to all these mishaps. Let us not flatter ourselves with these fine words: we ought perhaps rather to call natural what is general, common, and universal.

Which is to say, “Life’s too short,” and this leads to M.’s real point: too much of our time is scheduled for apprenticeship and retirement, and not enough for working in the world:

Augustus . . . declared that it was enough for those assuming the office of judge to be thirty [. . .] Augustus had been universal judge of the world at nineteen, and yet would have a man be thirty in order to pass judgment on the position of a gutter.

“As for me,” he tells us, “I think our souls are as developed at twenty as they are ever to be, and give the promise of all they ever can do.”

Cue cold knife of dread.

“Well,” I thought, “he’s talking about a time when life expectancy was still pretty short. I mean, 40 is the new 20! I’ve still got some great years ahead of me, right?”

I hold it as certain that since that age [thirty] my mind and my body have rather shrunk than grown, and gone backward rather than forward. It is possible that in those who employ their time well, knowledge and experience grow with living; but vivacity, quickness, firmness and other qualities much more our own, more important and essential, wither and languish.

Sigh. It put me in mind of a story I heard from official VM buddy Tom Spurgeon. As the story goes, Tommy Lee Jones was once asked when he decided to focus seriously on acting.

“When I realized I wasn’t going to be the quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys,” he replied.

“How old were you?” the interviewer asked.

“Forty.”

You can’t imagine how happy I was to reach “END OF BOOK ONE” a paragraph or so later.