A podcast about books, art & life — not necessarily in that order
In addition to being the Comics Reporter, a smart cultural critic, and official VM Bestest Pal, Tom Spurgeon also knows a little something about horse-racing. Here’s his guide to the Kentucky Derby (and the other Triple Crown races), which I guess is being run in a few minutes.
 People actually buy books when there are so damn many?
People actually bought books when they had covers like these?
Imagine how much better this blog would be if I had time to write about all these stories!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: May 4, 2007”
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.
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:
(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
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.
The Polymath, or The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman is debuting tonight at the Tribeca Film Festival! I once helped produce a documentary about Chip Delany, but it was mainly composed of a reading performance, intercut with short interview segments. I haven’t asked Chip what he thinks of this new movie, but maybe I’ll give him a call today when the conference wraps up (it ends at 3pm for its last day).
More than 4 years ago, my second-ever post on this blog was about the pile of books that was mounting up in my old apartment, shelf space having run out. Since then, I’ve moved into my old house, but I’m still out of shelf space in the library that I tried to put together downstairs. Of course, I could put up shelves in my home office, but it’s got a pretty clean look right now with a minimum of shelves. (I’ll get a nice pic of it sometime.)
So I’ve decided to post a regular photo and list of the books on my nightstand, figuring that, if the same books are sitting there week after week, I’ll be shamed into
Either way, I win!
Now, I’d love to get you, my hyperliterate misfit readers, to e-mail me pix of the books that are piled up on your nightstands (or whatever else is piled up on your nightstands). So get crackin’!
It’s my weekly round up links I didn’t have the time or inclination to write about!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Apr. 13, 2007”
It’s a quiet Sunday here at Chez VM. Well, it was louder earlier in the day, when I was shredding bills and records as part of the process of rearranging my home office. The process started when I bought a new desk on Wednesday, replacing the two tables that occupied a wall of my room. The process continued yesterday, when I picked up a leaning bookcase from C&B, a desk organizer from Pottery Barn (they don’t list it on their site), and a couple of bulletin boards and paper drawers from the Container Store. Today involved figuring out where to put everything (hence the bill-shredding). If there’s good light tomorrow morning, I’ll take some pix and post them for those of you who are obsessed interested in such things.
Before buying up this stuff, Amy & I finally got to the local (within 30 miles) Imax to catch 300. It was
I enjoyed it a bunch, even if it did overplay the “we’re fighting to defend reason and logic” angle. Gerard Butler was fascinating to look at, and this hearkens back to my original post about this flick: I’m more interested in the stylization of the movie, and the filmmakers managed to get the lead to resemble classical Greek art. I’m not talking about the chiseled abs phenomenon, which are major contributors to the “gayest movie ever” trophy, but the angles of his face, his beard, and his hair somehow gestalted into this living representation of a Greek bust, to me.
We had a laugh later in the day, when we noted that Gerard Butler’s filmography includes Beowulf (where I thought he looked a little like Paul Rodgers) and Attila the Hun. Looks like he can’t get away from historic slaughter flicks. Still, he did a great job in this one, making the Spartan king a, um, raging Scot. It’s not a movie to be taken seriously as history, but it was a thrill ride. My biggest problem with it is that it’s success means that the director is going to get the greenlight to make a movie of The Watchmen, which will be a disaster.
This morning, I realized that I’ve had a pretty strange run of Easter-weekend trips to the movies. I don’t tend to go to the movies often, but I guess there’s something about Easter: Hellboy in 2004, Sin City in 2005 and 300 in 2007. Can’t remember if I saw anything last year, and I’m not finding any references in the blog, which as we know is a backup drive for my brain.
Anyway, I hope all my Christian readers have a good Easter today.