Moral Quandary of the Day; or, Toward a Why I Live and a What I Live For

This evening, I learned that we can add another name to the list of queer teenagers who have killed themselves in recent months—and that today’s name hails from very close to home. Tyler Clementi jumped off the George Washington Bridge last week after two of his fellow Rutgers students illicitly filmed him having sex with a guy and put the video online. It was a cruel thing for two people to do to a third person, and it drove that third person to take his own life. It speaks to how easy it is for humans to be horrible to each other, to how hard it can be to be different, and to how scary it can be to have one’s private life exposed to the public. It was a real, serious thing. A kid died.

Just a few minutes after reading that story, I put on a jacket and loaded up my bookbag and walked across campus to sit around a seminar table with 21 other very academically serious students and a couple professors and talk about novels. To be frank (and I feel obliged to be, in context) it was a pretentious conversation. It was a frustrating conversation. It was a conversation of people who can feel very strongly about issues of canon and literary merit but who would perhaps (I speak only for myself) rather shout at each other about canon and literary merit than they would think seriously about how to keep more kids from dying before they get to be adults. I came home, intellectually exhausted, not willing to face more schoolwork, and wondered whether what I had done was excusable. For nearly four hours I forgot that a kid who was two years younger than me and lived half an hour away jumped off the George Washington Bridge because of the fact that our society thinks it shameful to be seen on the internet having sex, and homosex at that. Is it not my moral responsibility (and mine in particular, as a Professional Gay) to devote every fiber of my being to making sure the kids who kill themselves are not forgotten, their private tragedies not swept under the rug, and that more kids are not driven to the same awful recourse?

Yes. It is. It is all of our responsibility to keep hope, beauty, peace, and love alive; to keep life alive. Which is why I went to my seminar tonight and talked about novels. Because right now, when I am a college student like the college student who was driven to jump off the George Washington Bridge, I am practicing how to talk about novels (or about any other kind of text). And then if I can get it right, if I can get talking about texts down, if I can learn how to inspire in others the desire to read texts and to talk about them, then those whom I spur to do so will have something to live for.

For generations now—since there has been such a thing as homosexuality, at least, and perhaps longer—those who find their sexualities out of step with a perceived norm have sought recourse in literature. The history of literature and literary figures which grapple with sexual identities is replete with life-changing moments when a writer or hir character finds validation and comfort and self-understanding within texts. Maybe this text is something baldly obvious in its relevance to sexual identity, as when J.A. Symonds discovered Plato; maybe it’s a little less so, as in those I know whom George Eliot taught about a more subtle paradigm of love; maybe it falls somewhere in between, as when reading Cather spurred me to think more critically about my own sexuality. But so often it is texts, and how they intersect with the teaching and learning processes, which offer us forms of validation and salvation: they give us the words to describe what and who we are, and they give us the sensation that we are not alone in humanity, even if we may find ourselves alone in the small slices of humanity we’ve experienced.

I grew defensively passionate yesterday when I happened to be explaining to a friend (who had asked if I feel guilty for making my life in academia instead of in, say, humanitarian non-profit work) that I am a teacher every minute of my life now, I will be a teacher every minute of my life when I have a Ph.D., I will be a teacher every minute of my life if and when I am able to achieve tenure, I will be a teacher every minute of my life when I retire, and I will be a teacher every minute of the day on which my life ends. I said something more-or-less word-for-word like this because I care so deeply about, and believe so deeply in, the power of texts to save lives, and to give meaning to lives in danger. I am a small, deeply flawed, not always high-functioning, quiet and locally-minded person. I am not going to change the world. But I am going to change lives. I am going to—whether consciously and deliberately or not—direct my students towards finding their own Platos and Eliots and Cathers. I already do so now, even as I attend seminars and learn how I might do this when I am able to lead seminars of my own.

And so I have not forgotten to mourn the death of my peer and relative neighbor Tyler Clementi, nor of the other many, many young people who were troubled enough not to want to live to see 20, much less adulthood. But mourning must be accompanied by resolve to do better; otherwise we won’t get anywhere. So no, I have no guilt about doing what it takes to learn to be the best teacher, and the best person, I can be: we help ourselves, and then we use what we have done for ourselves to help others, and we give of ourselves as selflessly as we can such that others might have a chance at life. We may do this by going to far-flung places across the globe and working in literal trenches filled with mud to fight poverty and wars and greed and hatred, or we can do intellectual labor in the metaphorical trenches, and do life-saving and life-giving work all the same. Without a life of the mind, the life of the body can sometimes mean frighteningly little—and sometimes, oh God, sometimes, someone will jump off the George Washington Bridge because of it.

“better”; or, A Brief (Rather Cryptic) Meditation on Human Flourishing

It was a long, full weekend between first and second weeks. As I make a to-do list just now, at the end of Sunday night, and reflect on all the pages I haven’t yet read for this week’s classes, I think about all the things I have done in the past three days: all the hours I’ve spent talking that I might have spent reading; all the hours I spent reading that I wish I could have spent talking, had my academic demands not presented themselves so pointedly; and the strange little pieces of insight and accomplishment I snatched out of an ordinary weekend of anxiety and mounting lists as I find myself confronted by the enormity of a semester’s worth of work still to come. But this weekend I had some rewarding conversations, to be sure; and I discovered that I seem to have some sort of bizarrely unexpected talent for improvisational vegan baking (I’ve certainly never been good at anything to do with kitchens before); and I helped someone in what seemed to me to be a very small way, just with a short list of technology-related questions to which I happened to know the answers, but which in answering I came to realize stood for far greater points to be made about human nature, about human flourishing, and about how to stay strong amidst deadlines and the endless pressure that is aspiring to academic perfection.

I was there to be of technical use because I was doing my usual routine in the dining hall, eating my unhealthy food and drinking my shitty coffee and talking to everyone, and thus I was in the reach of someone who needed someone to accost in order to have his need for small technical answers gratified. And it was a joy to me to spend some Saturday afternoon in so gratifying, because for the service I rendered him he repaid me in the most heartwarming and caring grateful conversation I am sure I have ever encountered from someone to whom I’m not closely blood-related. In more hours than the ones I spent on this small task, it is this someone more than any other who has instilled in me a sense of belonging and a sense of purpose. It would certainly be indiscreet to elaborate further, but perhaps the title of this post will give at least some readers a clue. Suffice to say that the task I was able to complete reminded me what I have learned in the past two years about doing one’s best, being one’s best, and using both these strivings to overcome the crippling insecurity of a neurotic life on the margins of the Ivy League. Suffice to say that when I feel as if I belong at Princeton, I know whom I ought to begin by thanking.

I lay out the story of my Saturday in the vaguest of terms so that I can go on to suggest that my Saturday is entwined inextricably with Princeton itself, and with the idea of Princeton, beyond the connections which the actors in this story, its setting, or indeed any psychological drama so superficial as my “legacy complex” would suggest. I cannot help but think that no other of the places I might have gone to university would have given me a dining hall where such an encounter of social democracy could occur; I cannot help but think that the culture of no other university would permit questions of “bettering” to be the takeaway from an afternoon playing at tech support, no matter the predispositions of my anecdote’s characters to considering such questions (and reader, those predispositions: they are many).

I have been thinking recently—particularly as I completed a survey about opportunities for women’s leadership at Princeton—about this university’s struggle to remake itself. Today Princeton is an institution profoundly concerned with the desire to right its past wrongs: to bring those it previously cast to the margins into the middle, to open its ranks to all who are entitled to enter, to make all its students feel as if they are welcome and valued. I know from my experiences and those of my friends that our ivory-towered four-year home is not always so very successful at fulfilling its promise of a clean break with a reprehensibly old-boys’-club past, but to look around the university today is to see those who would not have been allowed through its gates in the past; to walk through campus today is to feel as if one no longer has to fight quite so fiercely to belong; to be involved (even as an observer) in campus politics is to become closely acquainted with and invested in the desire to be better, to transcend past sins and poor judgment calls. I feel as if it is only here—in a place preoccupied with its own history, self-regarding and self-referential enough to make the call to progressive improvement into a kind of whig-history call to prayer—that Saturday afternoon tech support could become so clearly a call to arms in the war of careful self-improvement.

For reasons not entirely related to the train of thought running through my mind while I wrestled with network settings that Saturday, I came home once all was resolved and looked up the Greek word εὐδαιμονία. Transliterated “eudaimonia,” it’s a concept central to most of the ancient philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics. It could be translated as “happiness,” or, in a formulation I really happen to enjoy, “human flourishing.” The thing is that most of the canonical ancient philosophers disagreed as to what, precisely, εὐδαιμονία entailed; most of them disagreed as to how virtuous your life need be to be εὐδαιμον. But most, it seems to me (of course, I could be entirely wrong; all I did was read a few articles online), agreed on one thing: εὐδαιμονία was an end, a moral end, an aspirational end. Nirvana, but less absolute and more subjective and as secular as you want it to be. It’s a promise, and a call. And, for me, it’s what is at the end of a life of learning and teaching: a life of the deep interpersonal relationships only pedagogy can form, wherein perhaps attaining εὐδαιμονία rests upon listening to the words of your teachers as best as you can to make yourself better, and then taking careful notes and preparing your own lectures and doing as well by your students as your teachers have done for you.

I said to someone last night—in a conversation which began with my mentioning, briefly, my role as tech support in the course of my day—that I may eat with my friends, spread out across the campus, but I couldn’t imagine, for as long as my time at Princeton lasts, living anywhere else but the college that is my home. The weight of this declaration is only just sinking in 24 hours later, as two things occur to me. The first is that this must be because I cannot think of leaving this college until I have given back to it and its students all the spirit-sustaining goodness that it has given me. The second is that if Princeton’s administration should ever need proof that it is succeeding in its efforts to right its previous iterations’ wrongs, it need look no further than my testimony. I could fail my thesis two Junes hence; I could barely pass my way to commencement and kiss an academic career goodbye, and yet my undergraduate education would still have taught me the most important thing of all: that we all, universities and their teachers and students alike, must seek to be better, to be εὐδαιμον, and to our own selves to be true.

QOTD (2010-09-24), A Nerd’s Nostalgia Edition

Picture the scene I’ve laid out here so many times before: an Emily reclined on a couch under an early-20th-century Princeton window, drinking tea out of the ceramic mug she decorated with her first-grade art skills, reading for class by the sunlight that cuts across what she, after the Oxonian fashion, persists in calling a “quad,” torn between the necessity of pushing through pages in order to get done the work that needs to be done, and stopping to enjoy the picture of academic life which would be recorded if someone came along to take a snapshot of this moment, a snapshot that says, How cool is it that this is Emily’s life? How lucky she is!

I wandered off on this self-regarding train of thought because I am reading Macaulay’s History of England today: a book which is not precisely great at holding one’s attention rapt, and that seems so classically historical that it’s impossible not to sit there laughing so much at yourself that you forget to turn the pages. I mean, really: how crazy is it that right now my purpose in life is to read and be able to talk in seminar about things like this, from the fifth chapter of Macaulay’s work:

At sunrise the next morning the search recommenced, and Buyse was found. He owned that he had parted from the Duke only a few hours before. The corn and copsewood were now beaten with more care than ever. At length a gaunt figure was discovered hidden in a ditch. The pursuers sprang on their prey. Some of them were about to fire: but Portman forbade all violence. The prisoner’s dress was that of a shepherd; his beard, prematurely grey, was of several day’s growth. He trembled greatly, and was unable to speak. even those who had often seen him were at first in doubt whether this were truly the brilliant and graceful Monmouth. His pockets were searched by Portman, and in them were found, among some raw pease gathered in the rage of hunger, a watch, a purse of gold, a small treatise on fortification, and album filled with songs, receipts, prayers, and charms, and the George with which, many years before, King Charles the Second had decorated his favourite son. Messengers were instantly despatched to Whitehall with the good news, and with the George as a token that the news was true. The prisoner was conveyed under a strong guard to Ringwood.

Macaulay’s style is obviously pretty novelistic, but the novelist it particularly puts me in mind of is Robert Louis Stevenson, whose Kidnapped I read at least a dozen times in academic year 2002-03. When you hear a song you haven’t heard in years on someone else’s playlist, you suddenly find your mind transported back to the time you first heard it, and what you were thinking and feeling then; I am the same way about stories of 17th- and 18th-century British politics, and the above passage from Macaulay reminds me of an encounter in the Scottish wilderness when Stevenson’s protagonist, David, sees the villainous “Red Fox” assassinated. Macaulay is of course writing about a different century, elaborating upon a different facet of the Stuart story, but here we are nevertheless back searching out rebels from the British countryside! Here we are back with Whigs and Tories and the trouble caused by Scotland and by France as if nothing had ever happened since the first time I heard the Jacobite anthem “Will Ye No’ Come Back Again?” and found myself converted to the sentimentality of a long-dead political cause.

I suppose early modern British politics will always mean my troubled early teenage years, to me. I suppose that reading about them will always seem to me to be as strange a theatrical role as when I strolled down school corridors in petticoats. And I wonder if, then, I might have suspect that after all that’s happened in seven or eight years of adolescence, I might have come back to the Jacobites again. Reader, I cannot tell you how strange it feels.

Status Update; or, In Which I Am My Own Cheerleader and Remind Myself of a Purpose in Life

The past week has been the most difficult and most reluctant back-to-school perhaps since I started preschool eighteen years ago. Despite sleep-deprivedly lugging my bags up the hill from the train station early last Saturday and feeling as if returning to college was returning home after too long away, I’ve spent the past week feeling alienated and sort of dazed. I’ve let the internet and my reading and my sleep fall by the wayside while I dash around seeing people I haven’t seen in months, only to return home too late and find myself unable to sleep out of nervousness that my friends think I’m idiotic and uninteresting; only to pace my little bedroom (now on a tiny quad, not over an archway) and beat myself up for continuing to think it a good idea to socialize so very much instead of working. But after spending all summer grappling with the problems of motivation and doing Good Enough work as I struggled to pull some major-research-project thoughts together, I feel exhausted from the effort, and reluctant to dive into the school year. I emptied my bank account on textbooks but am sort of terrified at the thought of opening any of them. I walked away from my first class hating my stupidity; the other night, I had a meltdown—and it’s still only been a few hours more than seven days since I first set foot back on campus. I feel very tired, very fragile, and very concerned about the months of classes and extracurricular activities and social life ahead that it will take to get me through to January, when I leave for England. I feel as if I’m in a holding pattern here, waiting to leave—but I also feel as if it’s going to be a difficult four months.

I treat you to this self-pitying confessionality, however, and break my blogging silence to do so, because I think it’s useful: I know how helpful it can be to read on the internet the first-person narrative of someone struggling with the same things I do, and I am sure I can’t be the only one whose summer burnout is making the transition into term-time difficult. And, furthermore, I use it here to set up a transition, to demonstrate how one can rise above morose self-loathing to dedicate oneself and one’s energies to better things. It’s actually surprisingly simple, or at least I’ve found it so: all you have to do is remind yourself of what’s important, and what you do that is important to others and to the world at large.

This summer I didn’t live on my own in the big and weird city that is our nation’s capital. I lived at home with my family, but in a mode so very different from that which I’d adopted during high school, and so this summer was not without its own brand of personal growth and self-discovery. Some late night in July, when I’d driven my mother’s bumper-stickered station wagon full of younger friends to a 24-hour coffeeshop downtown, and we sat over espresso and half a dozen 18-year-olds were letting me Socratically question them about identity politics, I realized that while I may dream someday of being a tenured professor at a fancy-pants university, I already have a vocation and a purpose in life: I am already a teacher, I already convince by my presence, and I already have a calling which I believe it would be immoral to ignore. At twenty years old, I’m still figuring out who I am, what I want, what I need to make me content with myself, what my thesis is going to be about, whether I would make a good grad student. But all these limitations on my sense of my own adulthood (despite the fact that I live 3,000 miles away from my parents and am fast learning how to cook) needn’t limit my sense of my purpose, my value, my calling, my self- and others-worth. No matter how intimidating my seminar classmates seem, or how lonely I can feel when I come home at night, I am still a teacher. And that sense of identity isn’t going anywhere.

Last night after over two hours of dining-hall dinner-time conversation, I invited a set of kids who, when trying to think of a single adjective to describe me, settled on “pedagogical,” upstairs to my little room. They squeezed themselves onto my secondhand couch and my bed and my desk chair and my floor, and following the good example set me by my own teachers (a big part of teaching, I think, is intergenerational transfer!) I offered them tea and let my knowledge of my own work inform a freewheeling discussion about ethics. One of my kids stayed on after all the others had left, and we psychoanalyzed our friends and talked about books and art and I found myself thinking how, if the context were just slightly different, it would be me talking like this with my elders. This kid is perhaps more confident than I am, but I could see myself naming the books I wish I’d read, anxious to please my elders, my teachers. And I impressed myself with how easily the tables turn, now, as I grow older and a little smarter, and how when you’re in your second half of university you can invite the kids to your room and feed them tea and know, more or less, where you stand.

This morning I made coffee for myself with my new press-pot and sat down on my new secondhand couch and blearily worked my way through the internet. This morning I happened upon a blog post whose ideas I felt demanded that I spend twenty minutes writing a rigorous defense of the humanities, of my own identity as a humanist, and of the work that I do. As I summarized my defense in a Facebook status:

Building a more beautiful world requires scholars who love what they study and study what they love as much as it does the people who build things and the people who fix things which are broken and the people who make the trains run on time. We can’t teach people physics or statistics or life skills, but we can marshal our rhetorical and pedagogical skills and teach people to care.

Those of us who seem to have dedicated the next several years to learning to study the humanities must also dedicate ourselves to marshalling our rhetorical and pedagogical skills and teaching people to care. We must, as we learn how to think, how to read, how to write, how to speak, consider how we will tell the next undergraduate class, the next young generation, to do the same. If we are not to be the people who solve the scientific and medical and public-policy problems of the 21st century, we must be the people who remind those people that our goal, our route towards happiness, is not a wealthier world or a faster world or a more powerful world, it is a more peaceful world and a more beautiful world. It is we who must read the books so that we can tell the world what a wonderful thing it is to read books. It is we who must understand the work of writing history so that we can tell the world what a dangerous process it is to construct a narrative, and still how essential those narratives are to knowing where to find the beautiful things when you want them. It is we who must collect postcards from far-flung museums to put up as conversation pieces on our walls; it is we who must ask our parents to send us good tea from the imported-foods store; it is we who must open up our little undergraduate bedrooms to all those who come and want to talk about books and about ideas.

What I tell myself, as I prepare to embark upon a new semester’s course reading on this beautiful Saturday afternoon, is that those of us who know we are teachers need not worry about whether we are clever or successful or impressive enough. We need not feel lonely or unwanted or alienated. For even those of us teachers too young and uneducated to have our own classrooms can find students anywhere and everywhere, and every day there are people to teach, by whatever means we can find, that building a better world, a more beautiful world, is an object worth fighting for.

QOTD (2010-09-09), Pedagogical Hope-Making Edition

I just (finally) watched the film of Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys. I laughed, I cried, I felt a little emotionally richer at the end, and I was particularly moved by this line, spoken by the pathetic (in the sense of pathos) “general studies” teacher Hector:

The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—that you’d thought special, particular, to you; and here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met—maybe even someone long-dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out and taken yours.

The context of the play makes clear what is so arresting about this line: it’s not giving much away to say that Hector has at the time he delivers this line been told that he’s being fired for fondling one of his students; the boy to whom he delivers it, Posner, is starting to realize that he’s not just going through the proverbial phase. I sit here and think that there is little but the fashions and the language of the 1980s (when the play is set) to distinguish Hector’s sentiment from that of J.A. Symonds, who wrote so movingly of how, when a pupil at Harrow, he discovered Plato; who wrote so movingly to Whitman asking confirmation of the passion he saw reflected back at him from Leaves of Grass because he himself had been tortured by its intensity. It is the story of nearly every literary gay memoir in the history of literary gay memoir—and it’s why I read literary gay memoir. For whatever reasons, perhaps more reasons than I can fully identify, this sentiment is as important to me as it was to the men whom I study.

But I think it’s The History Boys, more than Symonds or Whitman or Wilde or Isherwood or Edmund White or even (though I certainly wouldn’t put him in a class with the others) Stephen Fry, which makes the point that you don’t need to be a gay man to know that literature can speak to you in a private, personal way that no other sort of encounter can manage. The play, and the film it’s become, is saturated with homoeroticism and (dare I say it) paiderastia, but it speaks to a more universal desire for knowledge, a more universal desire to teach, a more universal caring for literature, than what a gay boy’s bildungsroman of an autobiography can give those of us who have not had the very same experience, similar though our trajectories of self-doubt and growing self-awareness may be. The Special Relationship one has with the writers with whom one grew up is not a Uranian or an Arcadian thing, it’s a human thing: I too came to know myself before friends, before professors, when books were all I had. I too, when I was alone, learned through literature the words for my thoughts and emotions: Love. Fear. Anger. Sadness. Longing. Hope. And I, too, have gone off to university—an American playacting at the Oxford of Symonds, and of history boys and history girls—and while I hope I don’t end up like Hector, I do hope I shall like him thank my books for what they’ve done.

Last night I had another meltdown of fear and self-doubt, feeling unable to fulfill the requirements of becoming what I think I must become. But after watching The History Boys I feel quite inclined to consign to the trash heap of sleep-deprived nighttime insecurities my rantings and ravings about my thesis and graduate school and the job market. You don’t need all those things, or even any of those things, to be a teacher. You just need to believe that books can speak to you, and to your students, in a way that material concerns can and will not; and you need further to believe in your students and care for them at least as much as you do for your books and your sad and lonely gay men who write them. And I don’t know whether I can write a thesis or write a dissertation or write a book. I don’t know whether, if I set out to do so, I’d have anything worth saying. But I know that I love my books and that if I were allowed to talk about them for just a few hours a week, my students would love them too, would know what it is to feel a special connection with writing which has touched them.

Happy Labor Day To All, And To All A Good Night

(Update: Some related Labor Day reading is here, here, here, and especially here.)

I am not a holiday sort of person, so much. I don’t have a religion, I’m wary of clichés, and my work schedule tends not to take notice of when the banks and post offices are shut. However, if there’s one thing which can move me to celebration or solemn observance, it’s an old-fashioned leftist’s sentimental patriotism. That sentiment has found me the words to observe the Fourth of July in years past, and it always gives me the motivation to pay my respects to the people who have served this country by working for it, and who have fought for the right to do so with dignity. Labor Day is one of my very favorite days in America—and Labour Day one of my very favourites in Canada. You, dear reader, may or may not know that I was raised on the songs of the American labor movement; it was the IWW Little Red Songbook which instilled in me the basic sense of social justice, love and respect for each other, and conviction that we are more than our jobs and our wages, which I am proud to consider my creed. I have made a mixtape or a playlist nearly every first Monday in September of the songs and their history which taught me to adhere to the courage of my convictions—and this Labor Day I shared that playlist with Facebook over about twelve hours. I thought I might as well reproduce it here.

“Solidarity Forever,” written by Ralph Chaplin, is the song which stopped my crying when I was an infant. Here is the Weavers’ version.

The great organizer and songwriter Joe Hill’s “There is Power in a Union,” here performed by the venerable IWW folksinger Utah Phillips.

Joe Hill was executed on a framed murder charge in 1915, following a highly controversial trial which seems largely to have convicted him due to his political affiliations. A martyr to the cause of organized labor, several songs have been written in his honor. This, with words by Alfred Hayes and music by Earl Robinson, in versions sung by Paul Robeson and then by Joan Baez, is the most famous.

My sister and I learned fearless dissidence from the following song. I don’t know its author, and it’s not in my well-worn 1973 edition of the IWW songbook, but here is a version sung at a 1980s IWW convention by Faith Petric and Mark Ross. This is required listening for you, dear reader—and if I had the power to compel every elected Democrat in the United States to listen to this song, it would be required listening for them, too.

My early childhood feminism came from Woody Guthrie’s classic “Union Maid,” here well-updated with solid, modern verses by Woody’s son and granddaughter.

In 1931, the United Mine Workers in Harlan County, Kentucky were engaged in a bitter, violent, scary, and courageous strike. Florence Reece was the wife of a UMW leader, and the mine bosses broke into her home and terrorized her and her children in an attempt to intimidate her husband and the UMW into capitulating. It didn’t work, and Reece wrote this beautiful, haunting song. Here is Pete Seeger singing “Which Side Are You On?”

The Republican candidate for the Senate in Kentucky, Rand Paul, professed not to know why Harlan County is famous. Someone should tell him that “They say in Harlan County, there are no neutrals there/You’ll either be a union man, or a thug for J.H. Blair,” the sheriff who attempted to intimidate Florence Reece.

We conclude with the poignant “We Have Fed You All for a Thousand Years,” by an anonymous author, first printed in 1908. Here’s Utah Phillips, and here are the lyrics, which are worth typing up in full out of the IWW songbook.

We have fed you all for a thousand years
And you hail us still unfed,
Though there’s never a dollar of all your wealth
But marks the workers dead.
We have yielded our best to give you rest
And you lie on a crimson wool,
Then if blood be the price of all your wealth,
Good God! We have paid it in full!

There’s never a mine blown skyward now
But we’re buried alive for you.
And there’s never a wreck drifts shoreward now
But we are its ghastly crew.
Go reckon our dead by the forges red
And the factories where we spin.
If blood be the price of your cursed wealth,
Good God! We have paid it in!

We have fed you all for a thousand years—
For that was our doom, you know,
From the days when you chained us in your fields
To the strike a week ago.
You have taken our lives, and our husbands and wives,
And we’re told it’s your legal share,
But if blood be the price of your lawful wealth,
Good God! We have bought it fair!

I’m not a praying woman, but let us all send thoughts of some kind today to the workers who have fought for the right to organize and who have fed their families and served their countries with honor and dignity, no matter how much the bosses try to keep them down and out. As “Solidarity Forever” says, “It is we who plowed the prairies, built the cities where they trade/Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid.” It is working folk—whatever “working” means—who have built this country, and they deserve the thanks of its government and its people for all they have done and how hard they have fought to do it on fair and humane terms.

When we talk about Labor Day, and labor unions, we must necessarily talk about the right to organize, and the actions of the people who do organize unions, who do come together to work cooperatively in the fight for fair treatment, a living wage, safe working conditions, and the right not to be treated like shit. Now, “organizing” means many things, but above all it means working together and caring for each other, and no rhetoric about “efficiency” or “accountability,” no smearing of the good name of socialism, will change that. What makes us human is that we care for each other, but what we don’t often consider is that caring for each other does not just mean loving our families and being friendly enough to attend our neighbors’ cookouts on the National Day Off. It also means—and perhaps even more so than those other things—that we spend some time on Labor Day being grateful to the people who don’t have the day off, or the people who have made great personal sacrifices in the course of their efforts to build a world in which it is possible for some to have the day off. We have organizing to thank for that. We have organizing to thank for the fact that These States are still, after all, One Big Union Strong. I wonder if perhaps it might make sense for someone to tell the bosses who run this country—elected officials or simply the powerful—that organizing is more, so much more, than an industrial inconvenience.

Every morning before I have a shower or have a cup of coffee or start to read books about 19th-century intellectual history, I read the newspapers. Sometimes I am so demoralized by what I see, so convinced that we live in an insane and deranged simulacrum of the world as it should be, so certain that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, that it is hard, so terribly hard, to have a shower or have a cup of coffee or start to read books about 19th-century intellectual history or do any of the many small tasks we all set about to make daily life better for ourselves, for the people around us, and for the people who will come after us. But: though the story is apocryphal, it is still said (and worth saying) that Joe Hill’s bold last words before the firing squad were “Don’t mourn: organize!”

Happy Labor Day (and, we should not forget, Labour Day) to all, and to all a good night. May you all wake up tomorrow ready not to mourn, but to organize—whatever form of cooperation and comradeship that word may mean to you.

QOTD (2010-09-01)

In honor of the advent of September and the encroaching end of summer, here is an opinion column by “Mc.” in The Princetonian (then biweekly, not daily), June 21, 1877, entitled “Summer Vacation”:

The realization of freedom from all College discipline, from recitations and lectures, is indeed pleasant. But how can we spend our vacation, while refraining from any severe course of study, yet not absolutely wasting our time? The question comes home to each one of us. We err just as much in pursuing a laborious course of study as in passing the Summer in idleness, else vacation would not be vacation. Hence we see that a medium is desirable. Perhaps we can attain that medium no better than in a study of Nature. If we are in the mountains or at the sea shore, the great beauties of Nature, in animal or vegetable life, are exposed to our gaze and invite our closer attention. If we have been studying Botany, in rather a theoretical manner here, supplement it in a practical way there. The satisfaction will be great, and what has seemed nothing but dry nomenclature, will there become a living science.
Most of us content ourselves with admiring a beautiful sunset, or a pleasing landscape, while a deeper scrutiny of Nature would bring to light objects less grand, it may be, but more beautiful in their minuteness and perfection of arangement.
As we choose food that is palatable, so let us take exercise that is pleasant and at the same time instructive.
Again, all expect to do some reading, but care should be taken in our selections. It is doubtful if a Summer given up to a perusal, or rather study, of History, is beneficial. The hot days are not conducive to the proper reading of such heavy matter, and careless reading insures no long remembrance of what is read. Of course, some Histories are exceptions, as those of Macaulay or Motley, for in these the events are not mere facts of the past, but living actualities. We think, however, that we could profitably devote our Summer to the lighter literature and our best fiction. A method is necessary, and if we read Geo. Eliot or Thackeray, we must do it intelligently and comparatively. A good test of our reading is our ability to express our opinion on the success or failure of the author’s character-drawing; and to this end, it is well, after having read a series or volume of an author, to write out our opinion of the work. This aids our faculties of reasoning, of perception and of memory. A Summer well spent will repay us, and we will return with a consciousness of not having wasted three months.

In my defense, I would like to note that it’s been rather cool in the place where I’ve spent the bulk of the summer, thus rendering the point about reading history moot. But “a consciousness of not having wasted three months”? Definitely still looking for that.

The Prince have recently digitized their archives, which hare a total joy to pore over—the rest of the June 21, 1877 issue is filled with questions about how much Princeton should aim to imitate Oxford and Cambridge, and about whether the university culture is sufficiently religious and whether having a religious culture is a good thing. The prose seems more similar to the work of Oxford undergrads from the same period which I’ve been reading than it does to the modern Princeton literary/journalistic scene. (This is probably not all that surprising, but I sometimes forget how strikingly Anglo 19th-century American university culture was.) Definitely worth a look if you have a few minutes—or hours.

The Trauma of Theory: A Cautionary Tale

I had my first run-in with literary theory in the spring of my freshman year. I was halfway through my first college English class and thought I knew everything; I figured that because I’d read Paradise Lost and was increasingly able to follow along when I heard graduate students talk about their work, I’d be able to listen to a faculty member I knew give a paper on a panel concerning a topic in which I was interested, and know when to smile and nod. I let some people talk me into attending this panel, and I knocked off my work-study job to stand in the back of an overflowing auditorium, full of optimism and full of myself.

And boy, was I sure mistaken. Not only did I not understand the poem the speaker was discussing when she passed around photocopies of it; I didn’t understand a single word she said about it. I don’t remember, today, what the title of the talk was, or what argument she might have said she was intending to make; I only remember blank incomprehension, and confusion, and shame. I remember becoming increasingly worried and upset as I failed to grasp anything, failed to understand why what the speaker was saying was important to an understanding of the poem, failed to nod or chuckle with the rest of the audience. I ducked out before the end of the panel, too ashamed of my lack of understanding to drink the coffee, pick over the fruit tray, and say hi to the people in the audience whom I knew. I went home and cried. Though surely no one in the audience even noticed me, much less knew how confused I was, I felt as if I’d been exposed as a pretentious fool, and I realized how ridiculous I’d been to think that half a semester of intro lit could have prepared me for the rigors of professional literary criticism, or indeed the realities of the professional academic world. A few English classes and theory talks later, I have learned enough to watch the people in the audience whom I think are clever and nod when they nod; I have learned to stay for the fruit tray and let myself be introduced to people no doubt wondering what this awkward undergrad was doing at their talk; every so often I can grab hold of a sentence out of the paper which relates to something I’ve read or learned from a class, something which reminds me that the speaker isn’t talking in a foreign language after all. And I have come to accept that, as an undergrad, as not even an English major, as someone of merely average intellect who hasn’t read the theorists the academics make use of in their talks, there is no reason why I should understand the strange language they speak, their inscrutable methods of making sense out of a text which to the uninitiated sound quite all Greek (or perhaps all French, given the context, except that I actually do understand French, and what they say doesn’t sound like any of the French I know). Even if I can cope, now, with this incomprehension—enough to keep masochistically putting myself through the routine, in the hopes that someday I will understand—that afternoon at that first panel remains one of the most frightening and embarrassing moments of the first half of my undergraduate career. For someone such as me whose sense of self-worth is rooted nearly entirely in the degree to which she’s taken seriously by professional academics, there is nothing quite so awful as it being so matter-of-factly demonstrated to you what an outsider you are.

I was reminded of this episode today not only because, with twelve days to go until I’m back on campus, I can think of nothing other than the academic world; but because I read Adam Kirsch’s brief obit of Frank Kermode in Slate. Kermode is one of the people whose name has entered my sphere of awareness through the academic conversations on which I habitually eavesdrop; like so many such names, I’ve never actually read his work, a fact which, like it does with so many other such names, never fails to produce a distinct feeling of shame. The point, however, is that I can’t comment on Kermode’s views of the state of literary criticism today except through Kirsch’s interpretation of them, which will no doubt expose me as a charlatan far more obviously than my failure to understand theory talks does; however, what Kirsch says does have some bearing on that very problem of failure to understand theory talks. According to Kirsch, Kermode expressed considerable concern about the inaccessibility and hyperspecialization of literary theory, and the modern habit of scholars of literature of keeping the public (like me) unable to understand what it is they do—due, I suppose, to their reliance on a particularly inscrutable and difficult set of secondary literature. Kirsch pays tribute to Kermode’s status as a consummate generalist and a popular critic in the London Review of Books (which he helped to found) and other publications, labeling this manner of practicing lit crit a dying breed in favorable contrast to the theorists.

And, well, it’s difficult not to sympathize with this perspective. As cognizant as I am that my failure to understand theory is probably due either to my own stupidity or my lack of initiative at studying on my own the fundamental theory texts which would help my understanding of that world, I must to some extent think that the sense of alienation I feel isn’t entirely my fault. I’ve taken a number of English classes for someone who isn’t a major, have dabbled in theory, have done my best to understand what it is my friends and my colleagues in my sister department do. And I have come to believe in the relevance of theory to understanding our world: when it’s explained in a simplistic way for undergrads to understand, I’ve gotten excited by it; I’ve seen firsthand the transformative power of, for example, queer theory on a queer person’s understanding of hirself and the world, and that’s a good thing. But I do find myself agreeing with Kirsch (and perhaps Kermode, though as I said, I don’t have a good sense of how much Kirsch is quoting Kermode, and how much he’s offering his own take) that what the academic practice of literary criticism and theory so insulates itself from the world of people who don’t have advanced degrees in the subject, we have a serious cultural problem which matters a great deal.

But why does it matter so much? After all, one Ivy-League-brat-with-self-esteem-issues’ self-absorbed feelings of alienation are probably not that important in the scheme of things. Recasting the language of literary criticism such that someone who hasn’t read a single post-structuralist could still engage with the process of thinking about literature won’t help to eliminate world poverty and hunger or stop global warming or bring relief to the flood victims in Pakistan. But a citizenry which sees the practice of humanistic inquiry as part of its time could restore reason and civility to the political sphere. It could find in itself a desire to reinvest in education and the arts in the name of the next generation. It could, regardless of whether there is such a thing as narrative or such a thing as reality or such a thing as authorial intent, become interested in scrutinizing the claims of politicians and pundits who take even more fast-and-furious approaches to Truth than do literary critics. Because, see, the fact is that we need the humanities. The practice of the close study of texts makes us better citizens, better thinkers, perhaps even better people. But if that study is not just hidden in an ivory tower, but hidden behind a wall of words, it’s going to be very difficult indeed to make the case for its survival to a public which cannot understand what it is that humanists do.

Of course, it would be lovely if we lived in a world in which people said, “I do not have the knowledge or cultural capital to understand your work or the culture in which it exists, and yet I will take your word for its importance.” But, as we all know by reading daily news which attests to the systematic defunding and vocationalizing of higher education, this is not the world in which we live. We live in a world in which intellectual culture must be rigorously defended as a good in itself, and in which a discourse which can bridge the gap between the closed circle of the academic conference panel and the larger western culture of anti-intellectualism is yet to be outlined. In order to do this, it seems to me as if it is necessary to rethink academic culture into something which is not dedicated to separating insiders from outsiders, and to rethink literary studies in particular into something which does not reward mere inscrutability and punish and induce shame in those who are not members of the club. This is not to say that theory has no place in the practice of understanding the world and its texts (or films, or music, or art, or culture), but rather simply to point out how difficult it will be to make a case for the humanities going forward, if the Frank Kermodes of this world really are such a dying breed. We have our work cut out for us—and I especially. Not only do I feel as if I need to begin to consider what it means to belong to the next generation of humanists still in the process of learning what it means to be engaged in this project of understanding the world through its texts; I need also, I feel, to do the reading and listening necessary such that I can loiter unseen in the back of an auditorium, listen to a scholar speak, and not feel quite so hopelessly, shamefully left out of a culture in which I want so desperately to be taken seriously and to belong. Once I feel I have moved beyond the stage of twenty-year-old charlatan, perhaps I can start to articulate a humanism I can call my own—but is it too much to ask that the theorists should meet me halfway?

QOTD (2010-08-25)

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s speech at the Gracie Mansion iftar brought tears to my eyes:

A few quotes worth highlighting:

Islam did not attack the World Trade Center. Al-Qaeda did. To implicate all Islam for the actions of a few who twisted a great religion is unfair and un-American. Today, we are not at war with Islam. We are at war with Al-Qaeda and other extremists who hate freedom.

Freedom and tolerance will always defeat tyranny and terrorism. And that’s the great lesson of the 20th century, and we must not abandon it here in the 21st.

This is a test of our commitment to American values, and we have to have the courage of our convictions. We must do what is right, not what is easy. We must put our faith in the freedoms that have sustained our great country for more than two hundred years.

There is nowhere in the five boroughs of New York City that is off-limit to any religion. And by affirming that basic idea, we will honor America’s values, and we will keep New York the most open, diverse, tolerant, and free city in the world.

This weekend is the anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the August 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Mayor Bloomberg’s remarks are in the best tradition of spiritually compassionate calls for tolerance, equality, and civil liberties which Dr. King epitomized in 1963. This is an American rhetorical and ideological tradition stretching back through the abolitionists, through Jefferson, and across the continent, though there is an argument to be made that it is New York City which best represents this spirit of freedom and inclusion:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

I have devoted a lot of Facebook time these past couple weeks to promoting the voices of American freedom and acceptance which seek to put right the voices of misunderstanding which misguidedly believe that lower Manhattan is not the place for a Muslim community center. But you don’t have to be a politician whose words make it into a newspaper or onto YouTube to dispel intolerance—all you need to do is to remember that, from some vantage points in lower Manhattan—perhaps the top of the new Freedom Tower will be one of them—you can see the Statue of Liberty.

Daddy, What Did You Do in the Age of Late-Capitalist Decadence? or, Some Thoughts on Cultural Criticism for a New Generation of Mad Men

A few weeks ago, my former Campus Progress colleague Ned wrote a blog post which he titled, “The Left’s Poverty of Good Cultural Criticism.” I commented on the post in a state of some bemusement: after all, I waste vast quantities of time reading a lot of very good cultural criticism coming more-or-less from the left on a weekly basis. What do the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the Observer, Harper’s, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, the Village Voice, the Paris Review and countless other publications do, after all, if not showcase the best of popular left-leaning criticism in the U.S. and Britain today?

It seemed to turn out, however, that Ned and I were disagreeing at cross-purposes. Ned’s post was spurred by his dissatisfaction with criticism of the TV show Mad Men, which he and others of my generation of writers/journalists find narrowly focused on the show’s historical accuracy at the expense of more literary criticism of its narrative, its character development, etc. Now, Mad Men is not a show which interests me; I stopped following it partway through the first season, and so haven’t read much of the discussion of the show which proliferates on the Internet. But Ned’s and others’ objections to that discussion, irrespective of the rest of the state of modern general-audience cultural criticism, leads me to wonder if there might possibly be a generation gap at work here. Sean Wilentz’s forthcoming book on Bob Dylan, for example, while promising to be a masterful piece of cultural, musical, and historical writing, seems as if it will speak primarily to those who have inhabited a certain set of historical moments beyond the ken of those of us in our early twenties. Prof. Wilentz’s book will serve an educative purpose to we GenY-ers, not entirely dissimilar to what we might get out of the late Tony Judt’s series of memoirs for the NYRB, or a Paris Review author interview. I can’t speak for my colleagues, but these are the sorts of writing I will read for their specifically educative purpose: they inform me about a middle-to-highbrow intellectual culture in which I am neither old enough nor educated enough nor sophisticated enough to participate, and they stand apart from, say, the Guardian’s attempt to explain Katy Perry to its readers, or particularly last week’s NYT Magazine article about “emerging adults”—that is, us. Those of us who are still in college or have recently graduated from it, who don’t have the critical soapboxes our elders do, turn to the culture pages of newspapers and magazines to find our elders helpfully explaining to us the cultural world of their youth and young adulthood, or striving to explain the lifestyles and cultural touchstones of a new generation of young adults in ways which can unfortunately wind up merely alienating those very same young adults, so sure are we that those of our parents’ generation have fatally misunderstood our world.

I am inclined to think that these generational gaps are at times overstated, because I am firmly wedded to the belief that culture moves in cycles; I also believe that by striving to understand the cultural context of previous generations, we can help them to understand ours. I am also pretentious, and a bit retro, and perhaps I myself live in too much of a bubble to really engage with the cultural context of my generation and see why members of our parents’ generation might not be getting it. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to see why the perspective of someone who lived through the era which Mad Men aims and claims to depict might have a very different reaction to it than someone slightly younger who grew up when identity politics and the culture wars were at their height; and that someone my age, reaching adulthood in a cultural context which aims both to synthesize and to reject entirely these two preceding milieux might find frustrating a reading of Mad Men which focuses predominantly, say, on the show as a concretized version of memory; or on the race, class, gender, and sexuality politics of the show’s world; or even on the classical Marxist critique which I think the show most desperately demands. It’s not difficult to see, I think, that any of these frameworks might be unwelcome in the eyes of a younger generation of critics—a generation which learned historicist, Marxist, feminist, queer, etc. critical methodologies in its English or philosophy or gender studies or cultural studies classes in college, and is understandably looking to find its own critical stamp to leave on the popular culture—the online meritocracy making this a more urgent task, since none of us require entrée into academe to need or to want to do this.

What, however, would such a critical stamp look like? I have to confess that I’ve no idea—perhaps I am too much of a historian-in-training, and too much of a traditionalist, to be the person to consider this. My attempts to engage with criticism of the popular culture have not really departed dramatically from the techniques I’ve learned in my classes; my own ideas for an article to submit to my Journal of Popular Gaga Studies don’t particularly deviate from the much-trodden ground of a standard queer-theory framework. I know, as I lightly said to a friend when ze told me that ze was confused about hir sexual orientation (gender-neutral pronouns to preserve confidentiality ftw!), that we’re all supposed to be post-labels nowadays. But I’m not sure what that means, actually—other than an apparent lack of interest in devoting one’s discussion of Mad Men entirely to its gender politics.

Whatever form this post-labels, forward-thinking criticism takes, however, I hope that it will only shape itself after due consideration of its predecessors, of history, and of the culture highbrow as well as popular. I hope that it will be shaped by young critics who read, in addition to blogs and Twitter, the NYRB as well as Rolling Stone, and I hope that it will prove capable of engaging with written as well as visual media. I also, as always, hope that it will do its work both inside and outside the academy. My generation presently bears the burden of forging a new intellectual left which can grapple with the problems which presently plague our states, our communities, and our cultures, and it can do that neither solely from within the ivory tower nor without the ivory tower’s help at all. I hope, too, that out of the hundreds, possibly thousands, of undereducated idiots like me writing blog posts about Criticism as if we know what we are talking about (news flash: we don’t), the media circus will find it within itself to highlight views considered and informed rather than sensationalist and needlessly polemic.

Yesterday, I finished reading Tony Judt’s valedictory book, Ill Fares the Land, and so I find myself thinking about these matters of generational succession, and of the task now set before we “emerging adults” to create not just the political, social, and economic, but also the cultural and intellectual world we want to live in. Perhaps this was not at all the intended takeaway of Ned’s post about Mad Men, but I find myself thinking, this morning, that we can and should listen to the advice of our elders—about how to rebuild social democracy, or about how to watch a television show. Before too long, however, this will be our world, and so more importantly we must begin to build the intellectual framework which will best allow us to take our place in running it. As to how to do this? Well, I certainly hope the strategies will evolve organically, because I don’t think it’s a question any number of years of higher education, or any number of vote-with-your-mouse pageviews, could answer.