Literary history, The Wire, and soup

Yesterday and today were typical start-of-term days, when the brain bounces from one thing to another with reason but without much rhyme.  Along with working on my chapter on political judgment in Horatian satire, I've been gathering my thoughts for the opening week of my graduate course, a survey of imperial Latin literature.  When did Rome's literary history begin?  When did it end?  What do we mean when we speak of the end of a literature?  The claim can be made that Roman literature exists today, and not only because there are still a few thousand people in the world who read it.  The genres we treasure--the family sit-com, satire, political oratory, epic war stories--are Greco-Roman in flavor.

One text I've had to cut from my survey for reasons of time is Petronius' Satyricon, a marvelous prose satire that (unusually for classical literature) features a character who's worked and cheated and fought his way up in the world, who began from slavery and now lives a rich man, vulgar and boastful, full of meaty life, obsessed with death.  Sheer violence doesn't play the leading role in Trimalchio's life that it does in Stringer Bell's--though Trimalchio suffered from a daily grind of sexual exploitation whose humiliations his self-satisfied jokes don't quite mask--but because I finished the third season of The Wire last night, the two stories of men pushing their way from poverty into luxurious legitimacy resonate.  There are classical references in each tale--Trimalchio quotes epic, McNulty finds a leather-bound copy of The Wealth of Nations in Stringer's elegant apartment.  Both fear betrayal from friends.  Both insist on obedience from younger men and women who resemble them in their days of powerlessness.

The day is freezing, the coldest of the year, and ends with the comforts of hot winter vegetable soup and a friend's voice over the telephone.  As Pepys would say: and so to bed. 

 

Postwar, continued

Reading Mulgan has led me back to the accounts of Greece and the Balkans (and the Brigate Rosse and the Baader-Meinhof Group)in Postwar by Tony Judt (a much missed colleague).  Instead of rereading some of the war writing I already know very well, say Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers or Wilfrid Owen, I've started Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins.  This arrived under the Christmas tree, literally, fulfilling a wish to try out her fiction that I've had since I heard Toril Moi speak a couple of months ago about Stanley Cavell and Beauvoir's She Came To Stay.
 

Anatomy of a party

Greetings--groans, talk of my wrenched back--back injuries in general, why they feel particularly debilitating--holiday travels--hearing from an old penpal after a break of many years--the difficulty of keeping up with old friends.  Greetings--from reading John Mulgan's memoirs to this festive party not an easy transition--more greetings--congratulations on the new book!--a glass of wine--chat about holiday doings--greetings by guests on their way out, forced to leave early for a grandchild's birthday party.  Greetings to colleagues, shop talk: the mood at the APA in San Antonio happier than last year?--the ongoing parlous state of hiring in Classics--job interviews--the rules prescribing inquiries into one's personal life during a campus visit--questions about children--questions about religion--story of a Jew asked by a Catholic whether she thinks she'll fit into the small rural Catholic college she's visiting--a happy ending to the story--Catholic education and Jesuits--what does the S.J. stands for?  Refill.  Try Mulgan story again.  An affectionate, nicely put together speech by the host: the work that goes into a book--the difference between architecture and book-writing--his wife's book, brilliant--congratulations--laughter, applause.  Good speech by a happy author: an account of the book and the thinking behind it--smiles, nods, applause.  Back to Mulgan for a third try--despairing, depressive books that we love anyway--the appeal of memoirs about war very difficult to describe--the disillusionment wreaked by war--the disillusionment of post-war intellectuals on the left--why disillusionment is now an always-already state, if it exists at all--memoirs, still politically acute these days?--the memoir-style short fiction of the South--trying to understand the American South--memorializing civil wars different from memorializing other types of war--fiction that tries to say the unsayable--Holocaust fiction--Holocaust memorials--Germany coming to terms with the Holocaust--the social impact of sentimental and melodramatic TV in the 1960s--the Eichmann trial.  Greetings from a new arrival--introductions--Kantian ethics not only in the second Critique--ancient medical writing: how one enters that field of study--the influence of early Greek medical writing on philosophy--the discovery of nerves in the third century BCE--the limits of describing ancient philosophy as a battle between teleology and mechanics--Tim Lenoir's work on 19th century Germany--visions of the body/mind relation in Leibniz.  Interruption: comparing calendars.  Refill.  Greetings--the work of the new semester--a seminar on the novel--Lukacs, Bakhtin--the task of choosing novels to read alongside the theory very difficult--David Foster Wallace---how to juggle the demands of work--relief that Tino Sehgal's Guggenheim piece is not running this winter, mixed with regret.  Time to go?  Time for a bite of cheese.  Now time to go.

Getting my head back in my administrative job

I write and teach, but I also work as an administrator: I direct the MAP, or Morse Academic Plan, NYU's general education program.  My office runs the courses that must be taken before graduation by every NYU College of Arts and Science student, as well as students in the schools of business (Stern), the arts (Tisch), education (Steinhardt), and other units.  It's an enormous endeavor: we mount about one hundred courses a year across nearly thirty departments, and that's counting just the core courses, not the foreign language and the expository writing courses that constitute part of the MAP.

As administrative jobs go, it's interesting, varied work: I work with departmental chairs ensuring that good faculty teach our courses; I maintain the curriculum in close contact with our instructors and the faculty committees that oversee new courses, check in on current offerings, and plan for the future; I work on graduate student pedagogy, because our courses rely on grad students to teach labs and recitations; I do PR for gen ed across the university, which involves raising the profile of the program among students and faculty and reminding the higher administration what resources we need to keep things moving; and I put out the occasional metaphorical fire.  I've got two terrific Associate Directors who do all manner of work to keep our courses up and running, and faculty and students happy.

But it *is* administration, and there are frequent moments when I need to take a step back, take a breath, clear my head, and think hard about how and why universities work the way they do.  Since I spend more than enough time in front of a screen every day, I turn to books rather than blogs.

At the top of my list on universities is Bill Readings' The University in Ruins.  I don't agree with every argument Readings makes, but I find its dark vision of education and its purpose provocative.  When I'm full to the brim with talk about "academic excellence" and "outcomes" -- Readings is especially good on the meaninglessness of the first term as it's currently brandished in academe -- I turn to this book.  The author died young in a plane crash, and I'm sorry I'll never meet him.

Also on my shelf is Jennifer Washburn's University Inc.  I first read it when I realized that I'd agreed to  direct a program in FAS (the Faculty of Arts and Sciences) without knowing much at all about the S.  Washburn concentrates on the relationship between commercial and foundational research funding and the sciences in American academe, but it includes food for thought for all of us, especially around pp. 218, on the move to put humanities and science courses on-line.  This is a complex issue, and one we need to discuss collectively as faculty now before we find ourselves unhappily forced to lecture to cameras and "talk" to students by IMing them -- or unhappily forbidden to do so -- depending on how you look at it.  

More on this topic soon.  I've got some letters of Cicero to read, and a Wire episode to watch later tonight.



 

Back from travels

Spent January 4-9 in San Antonio, soaking in the stuff of academic novels, that is, the Annual Meeting of the American Philological Association.  At the APA, especially if your calendar is crammed with committees, it's difficult to focus on reading at a much higher level than space opera, so it was Iain Banks on the iPhone for me: his new book, Surface Tensions.  Then a few days of skiing in Utah, including a glorious time on the steep upper cirque of Snowbird.

Now back home, I'm reading John Mulgan's Report on Experience (1947) -- a marvelous work, mailed off from Athens in the spring of 1945 to his wife in New Zealand just six weeks before Mulgan shot himself up with a fatal dose of morphine in a Cairo hotel room.  At times the book slips into Hemingway overload -- "bright streams running down the sharp green hills to the clean sea" -- but when Mulgan is reflecting on the pleasures men derive from going to war, the tragic dilemma that binds New Zealanders who want both to stay in the most beautiful land on earth and to escape its narrow, narrow bounds, and on the harsh friendliness of Greek villagers, his prose compels.  Mix the Ford Maddox Ford of A Good Soldier with a less self-indulgent Siegfried Sassoon; add C.K. Stead for local color and Jill Lepore for sharp wit and Martin Amis for brushes of humor that add surprising lightness to an otherwise dark and grieving work.



"This was an odd period, the beginning of World War 2.  It is not a time that the English talk about a great deal now.  It's passed now into the family annals, the volume that you keep in the cupboard and hope your executors will destroy.  Everything that occurred in that long eight months was like an ugly caricature of what had gone before.  It had elements of humour, but you needed to be an American to laugh at it."

Reading for the New Year

So far:
begun last month, finished New Year's Day: Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip.  A teenager on Bougainville Island in Papua New Guinea in the early 1990s hears, then reconstructs, and finally reads Great Expectations, while her village community is corroded by civil war and her mother and a white neighbor who has stepped in to run the local school debate the question: whose existence is more plausible, Pip's or the devil's?
David Simon's non-fiction Homicide, a follow-up to Richard Price's Clockers, which I came to via Simon's HBO series The Wire -- I don't own a television, but thanks to Netflix I'm in the middle of the third season and deeply worried about the future of Stringer Bell and Omar.
Bob Hariman's edited collection Prudence, with stand-out articles by Bob himself, John Nelson, and Maurice Charland.    
An article by Linda Zerilli in a 2005 issue of Political Theory, "'We feel our freedom': imagination and judgment in the thought of Hannah Arendt".
Horace's Satires book 1.
Some Gadamer, on Google books.
Associative thoughts on reading books on Google Preview (copied from Google Preview, of course, because I can't locate the book on my shelves where it's supposed to be): "Yet the most classical narrative (a novel by Zola or Balzac or Dickens or Tolstoy) bears within it a sort of diluted tmesis: we do not read everything with the same intensity of reading; a rhythm is established, casual, unconcerned with the integrity of the text; our very avidity for knowledge impels us to skim or to skip certain passages (anticipated as 'boring') in order to get more quickly to the warmer parts of the anecdote (which are always its articulations: whatever furthers the solution of the riddle, the revelation of fate): we boldly skip (no one is watching) descriptions, explanations, analyses, conversations; doing so, we resemble a spectator in a nightclub who climbs onto the stage and speeds up the dancer's striptease, tearing off her clothing, but in the same order, that is: on the one hand respecting and on the other hastening the episodes of the ritual (like a priest gulping down his Mass)... [The author] cannot choose to write what will not be read.  And yet, it is the very rhythm of what is read and what is not read that creates the pleasure of the great narratives: has anyone ever read Proust, Balzac, War and Peace, word for word?  (Proust's good fortune: from one reading to the next, we never skip the same passages.)"  
I omit the sentences on tmesis, which I read recently, too recently to bother to reread, let alone to retype.

The new year

My work these days revolves around a few big ideas and a cluster of questions that arise from them.  First: I define political thought as how we experience and imagine ourselves living with others, and I believe that a significant part of political action consists in how each of us makes our experiences and the offspring of our imagination comprehensible and valuable to others who may or may not share them.  I think that at least some work in the field academics call "political thought" (which I distinguish from "political philosophy"; the relation to "political theory" is more complicated) should be devoted to understanding how people accumulate experiences of the political, which is to say, how they accumulate experiences of living with others on different levels: the block, the neighborhood, the city, the state, the nation, other parts of the globe, and in their heads, in artworks, books, and movies; and how people imagine politics, in ideal terms and otherwise.  Understanding how images of living together with others are motivated by hatred and fear and desire is just as important to me as understanding normative ideas about justice.  

Since people tend to view relations with others in terms that blend the moral and the aesthetic (I like/don't like her; he seems like a good/indifferent/bad person; she's interesting/boring/intolerable) I think it's important to understand how people's assessments of surfaces relate to their moral judgments, because -- to pursue a metaphor a little too far -- the resulting mix is like a schist, part of the bedrock of the political, with mica-like gleams of hope and pleasure juxtaposed with grey streaks of fear and ignorance.

One of the most interesting aspects of aesthetic experience is that it has the power both to affect you in your current state and to change you out of that state into another state, temporarily or permanently.  This is true of a painting, a concerto, a movie, or a political speech.  I've chosen to spend a lot of time in the last couple of decades concentrating on how literary texts work because I believe that this analysis offers insight into how states of belief are formed and how they change.   I do this work, that is, I ask and think over these questions at my desk, in my office on campus, at bars and dinner parties where I talk with other academics, architects, bankers, writers, and other people in the information world.  I do it at the cinema and the opera and the symphony, where I am led to think about collective experiences of art and many more finer-grained questions of form and content.  For a few hammer-hit-exhausting months early last year, I did it in the Guggenheim museum, as a trained "player" in Tino Sehgal's large conversation-installation, "This Progress."   

And I do it in the classroom.  This blog is named after a course I developed last summer and taught last fall, and which (as usual) I'm reworking in light of its first run.  I'm no stranger to over-commitment and excessively high self-expectations -- you don't succeed unless you try for too much, is my general take on work -- but I hope it will combine brief journal-style notes of what I'm reading and thinking about with occasional longer, more thoughtful posts.