Statius is a Roman poet who wrote several fascinating panegyrics of the Roman emperor Domitian. The one I know best opens a collection of poems called Silvae, occasional pieces Statius wrote for patrons and friends. Dedicated to praising an enormous new equestrian sculpture of the emperor, it sews references to the statue's enormous, almost monstrous, size together with admiring commentary on the gentle grace of Domitian's expression and gesture. The effect is sensual, slightly comical, and (for a poem about an autocrat) oddly humanizing.
I thought of Silvae 1.1 when I read this erotic panegyric by Jonathan Galassi on the plane to Amsterdam last month. It appeared in the New York Review of Books under the title "Tom in Rome." Its tone of rueful infatuation rings truer than most.
Bolder than Antonio Canova
outdoing the Apollo Belvedere,
you demolish every Red Guide reader’s
half-baked callow notion of an
adequate response to what we see:
forensically investigating Daphne,
how she limb by limb becomes a tree,
you scant the art, stern sage who’s always known
what matters in a figure is the stone.
You are toffee, you are sand in sunlight,
you are handsome, winsome, bright, and lithe:
chaste Carrara, blue-veined Parian,
hand-warmed Pentelic when you buck and writhe
more contorted than Laocoön,
diminutive fine subtle lordship, master-
work surpassing alabaster,
as I am tufa to your travertine.
Go ahead and shame us in the Forum
with your ironic fine decorum, do:
Antinous with glasses and umbrella,
deus ex machina of the novella
whose story was that my roads led to you.
Friday, March 2, 2012
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Sallust's appeal
The Roman historian Sallust never ceases to fascinate. His tale of the north African king Jugurtha, who makes war against Rome in the late second century BCE, the Bellum Jugurthinum, constantly strays from its own narrative line and undercuts the oppositions it sets up at the start. He cuts off thoughts before they are fully articulated, jumps forward and backward in time, and makes a show out of silencing himself ("Now I return to my story," he says more than once).
Contrast Sallust to Walter Benjamin’s ideal storyteller, who has the ability to recount the whole life, not only of another, but of himself: he is the man who, letting his life “be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story,” becomes a sage for the multitudes. But Sallust, to borrow a phrase from Ronald Syme, is “cut short” both in his brief careers as politician and writer and in his choice of a startlingly choppy style.
Perhaps the strangest story in the BJ is the digression prompted by Sallust's reference to the town of Lepcis, which finds itself caught between Rome and Numidia. "Now that we've reached this region, it seems not unworthy to recall the outstanding, amazing deed of two Carthaginians," he says by way of bare introduction.
Once upon a time, back before the last Punic War, the powerful states of Carthage and Cyrene disagreed over the exact location of the boundary between them, which lay on a totally featureless sandy plain. After a long struggle on land and sea, the two city-states finally agree to a settlement. Each will send out envoys from their capitals, and the border will be established on the spot where the two groups meet. Two Carthaginians and two Cyrenians are chosen and the date of their simultaneous departure is set. The Carthaginians make excellent time, but the Cyrenians are delayed, whether by laziness or sandstorms, Sallust says, is impossible to say. When they finally meet well into Cyrenian-claimed territory, the Cyrenians (terrified of returning home to explain their failure) accuse the Carthaginians of cheating by leaving their capital early. Preferring to bargain rather than go home and start the war all over again (or maybe they're suffering from guilty consciences?), the two Carthaginians demand a new agreement, so long as it's fair ("tantum modo aequam"). The cunning Greeks -- Sallust suddenly starts referring to them at this point as "Graeci" rather than "Cyrenenses" -- devise an awful choice: either the border will be set on the spot where they met, but the two Carthaginians will be buried alive there; or the Carthaginians will allow the Cyrenians to advance the line as far as they wish, with the same capital condition applying to them. The Carthaginians accept these terms as fair, and they are buried alive (79.2-10). The city of Carthage sets up altars in their memory on the spot. And that is it. Nunc ad rem redeo, Sallust says: "now I return to my story."
What's the point of this story that literally comes out of nowhere, geographically as well as narratologically? It exposes the mortal investment men make in political conflict; it turns conflict into a game of sorts, where virtue contends with cunning; it asks us to balance the value of lived life against eternal memory and civic greatness. It is typically Sallustian.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Brilliant civic vision
Rick Santorum's empty-headed comments on JFK's speech on the separation of church and state, as well as his dismissal of university education, call to mind John Adams on education:
“Before any great things are accomplished, a memorable change must be made in the system of education and knowledge must become so general as to raise the lower ranks of society nearer to the higher. The education of a nation instead of being confined to a few schools and universities for the instruction of the few, must become the national care and expense for the formation of the many.”
That's a private letter, but in his draft of the constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Adams writes:
"Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them, especially the university at Cambridge, public schools, and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings, sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people."
“Before any great things are accomplished, a memorable change must be made in the system of education and knowledge must become so general as to raise the lower ranks of society nearer to the higher. The education of a nation instead of being confined to a few schools and universities for the instruction of the few, must become the national care and expense for the formation of the many.”
That's a private letter, but in his draft of the constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Adams writes:
"Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them, especially the university at Cambridge, public schools, and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings, sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people."
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Look Homeward, Angel
Reactions to Thomas Wolfe are severely divided these days. Elizabeth Hardwick, writing on the occasion of the centennial of his birth in 2000: "He is too much, too many rhapsodies, an inundation. Not a man you'd want to deal with. Drunken pages and drunken he often was as he prowled the midnight city. And yet the mystery of the books is that they are written with a rich, fertile vocabulary, sudden, blooming images, a murderous concentration that will turn everyone he meets into words."
I have always loved Walt Whitman, who if he has written perhaps some of the worst lines of English poetry has also written some of the best. So I'm well prepared to take on Wolfe's linguistic exuberance and fascination with his own powers of perception. Knowing his reputation, I expected the repetitiveness, the snobbery, the offhand racism, the inconsistent characterizations masquerading as something more under a load of narrative and descriptive detail (Gant's mother Eliza suffers the most in this respect).
What I didn't expect was the bitter comic self-consciousness that expresses itself in terms of national identity. Just two examples. First:
Then, for the first time, he thought of the lonely earth he dwelt on. Suddenly, it was strange to him that he should read Euripides in the wilderness.
Around him lay the village; beyond, the ugly rolling land, sparse with cheap farmhouses; beyond all this, America -- more land, more wooden houses, more towns, hard and raw and ugly. He was reading Euripides, and all around him a world of white and black was eating fried food. He was reading of ancient sorceriers and old ghosts, but did an old ghost ever come to haunt this land? The ghost of Hamlet's father, in Connecticut:
'......I am thy father's spirit,
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night
Between Bloomington and Portland, Maine.'
He felt suddenly the devastating impermanence of the nation. Only the earth endured -- the gigantic American earth, bearing upon its awful breast a world of flimsy rickets. Only the earth endured -- this broad terrific earth that had no ghosts to haunt it.... Nothing had been done in stone. Only this earth endured, upon whose lonely breast he read Euripides. Within its hills he had been held a prisoner; upon its plain he walked, alone, a stranger.
O God! O God! We have been an exile in another land and a stranger in our own. The mountains were our masters: they went home to our eye and our heart before we came to five. Whatever we can do or say must be forever hillbound. Our senses have been fed by our terrific land; our blood has learned to run to the imperial pulse of America which, leaving, we can never lose and never forget. We walked along a road in Cumberland, and stooped, because the sky hung down so low; and when we ran away from London, we went by little rivers in a land just big enough. And nowhere that we went was far: the earth and the sky were close and near. And the old hunger returned -- the terrible and obscure hunger that haunts and hurts Americans, and that makes us exiles at home and strangers wherever we go.
Later, Wolfe describes Gant (modeled on himself): for me, a portrait of the Tea Party voter in an especially depressing election year. Watch the movement from contentment, which first appears to excuse Gant's political ignorance and apathy, to discontent to fantasy to -- the most brilliant move -- fantasy that "found extension in reality":
Yet, Eugene was no rebel. He had no greater need for rebellion than have most Americans, which is none at all. He was quite content with any system which might give him comfort, security, enough money to do as he liked, and freedom to think, eat, drink, love, read, and write what he chose. And he did not care under what form of government he lived -- Republican, Democrat, Tory, Socialist, or Bolshevist -- if it could assure him these things. He did not want to reform the world, or to make it a better place to live in: his whole conviction was that the world was full of pleasant places, enchanted places, if only he could find them. The life around him was beginning to fetter and annoy him: he wanted to escape from it. He felt sure things would be better elsewhere. He always felt sure things would be better elsewhere.
It was not his quality as a romantic to escape out of life, but into it. He wanted no land of Make-believe: his fantasies found extension in reality, and he saw no reason to doubt that there really were 1,200 gods in Egypt, and that the centaur, the hippogriff, and the winged bull might all be found in their proper places. He believed that there was magic in Byzantium, and genii stoppered up in wizards' bottles.
I stayed up late to finish the book, and I'm glad I did: another sleet storm hit around midnight, short but intense, just like the one that caught me today as I biked back home to the NIAS from Leiden. On my slanted skylight window, the noise of the sleet is thunderously beautiful.
I have always loved Walt Whitman, who if he has written perhaps some of the worst lines of English poetry has also written some of the best. So I'm well prepared to take on Wolfe's linguistic exuberance and fascination with his own powers of perception. Knowing his reputation, I expected the repetitiveness, the snobbery, the offhand racism, the inconsistent characterizations masquerading as something more under a load of narrative and descriptive detail (Gant's mother Eliza suffers the most in this respect).
What I didn't expect was the bitter comic self-consciousness that expresses itself in terms of national identity. Just two examples. First:
Then, for the first time, he thought of the lonely earth he dwelt on. Suddenly, it was strange to him that he should read Euripides in the wilderness.
Around him lay the village; beyond, the ugly rolling land, sparse with cheap farmhouses; beyond all this, America -- more land, more wooden houses, more towns, hard and raw and ugly. He was reading Euripides, and all around him a world of white and black was eating fried food. He was reading of ancient sorceriers and old ghosts, but did an old ghost ever come to haunt this land? The ghost of Hamlet's father, in Connecticut:
'......I am thy father's spirit,
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night
Between Bloomington and Portland, Maine.'
He felt suddenly the devastating impermanence of the nation. Only the earth endured -- the gigantic American earth, bearing upon its awful breast a world of flimsy rickets. Only the earth endured -- this broad terrific earth that had no ghosts to haunt it.... Nothing had been done in stone. Only this earth endured, upon whose lonely breast he read Euripides. Within its hills he had been held a prisoner; upon its plain he walked, alone, a stranger.
O God! O God! We have been an exile in another land and a stranger in our own. The mountains were our masters: they went home to our eye and our heart before we came to five. Whatever we can do or say must be forever hillbound. Our senses have been fed by our terrific land; our blood has learned to run to the imperial pulse of America which, leaving, we can never lose and never forget. We walked along a road in Cumberland, and stooped, because the sky hung down so low; and when we ran away from London, we went by little rivers in a land just big enough. And nowhere that we went was far: the earth and the sky were close and near. And the old hunger returned -- the terrible and obscure hunger that haunts and hurts Americans, and that makes us exiles at home and strangers wherever we go.
Later, Wolfe describes Gant (modeled on himself): for me, a portrait of the Tea Party voter in an especially depressing election year. Watch the movement from contentment, which first appears to excuse Gant's political ignorance and apathy, to discontent to fantasy to -- the most brilliant move -- fantasy that "found extension in reality":
Yet, Eugene was no rebel. He had no greater need for rebellion than have most Americans, which is none at all. He was quite content with any system which might give him comfort, security, enough money to do as he liked, and freedom to think, eat, drink, love, read, and write what he chose. And he did not care under what form of government he lived -- Republican, Democrat, Tory, Socialist, or Bolshevist -- if it could assure him these things. He did not want to reform the world, or to make it a better place to live in: his whole conviction was that the world was full of pleasant places, enchanted places, if only he could find them. The life around him was beginning to fetter and annoy him: he wanted to escape from it. He felt sure things would be better elsewhere. He always felt sure things would be better elsewhere.
It was not his quality as a romantic to escape out of life, but into it. He wanted no land of Make-believe: his fantasies found extension in reality, and he saw no reason to doubt that there really were 1,200 gods in Egypt, and that the centaur, the hippogriff, and the winged bull might all be found in their proper places. He believed that there was magic in Byzantium, and genii stoppered up in wizards' bottles.
I stayed up late to finish the book, and I'm glad I did: another sleet storm hit around midnight, short but intense, just like the one that caught me today as I biked back home to the NIAS from Leiden. On my slanted skylight window, the noise of the sleet is thunderously beautiful.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Settled in and thinking
So what was the nature of my Rembrandt revelation? Svetlana Alpers, in her famous book The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, argued that Dutch painting should be understood as describing the world as it is seen, rather than as imitating or alluding to the world (or texts, or language, or traditions). She put together the northern European interest in seeing the world more clearly through telescope or microscope with the close attention to detail that appears in the earliest Dutch Madonnas and landscapes, and then lets the concern with seeing guide her through the paintings. She was able to notice new details about the experience of seeing -- how, for instance, landscape artists like Ruisdael played with the placement of the viewer. As the viewer of a Ruisdael landscape, where exactly are you standing? It's not clear: perhaps a neighboring hilltop? A low-hovering helicopter? And she puts into words the marvelous feeling that many Dutch landscapes convey, the sense that there's a world beyond the picture frame, that the frame of the painting exists almost by accident, that it doesn't act so much as a window as it does a surface.
And with the surface is where I started to see Rembrandt afresh at the Mauritshuis. I've never had much patience with Rembrandt's meditative studies, especially the self-portraits. (Dramatic corporate pictures like Nightwatch captivate me.) There are too many of these studies, they seem gimmicky, they're burdened with the weight of too many pretentious scholarly claims (the invention of the individual, etc.), they often convey a sense of self-pity that gets on my nerves (though not as much as the complacency of your standard Rubens portrait). This 1669 example above, in fact, fit all these categories, and when I first entered the room I walked by it without stopping. I went instead toward his Homerus, kitty-corner to the self-portrait.
For many minutes (was it Robert Hughes who said you need to look at a painting for an hour to get a sense of it?) I just couldn't find my way in. Homerus is a brown study, "rich with pathos" you might say. I was about to give up: and then I caught something that doesn't show up on the tiny copy above, a sheen of almost sheer paint in broad vertical stripes on the right-hand side, almost invisible unless you look very closely. I couldn't identify the color: brownish-black? But immediately it struck me as a much subtler version of the dramatic stripy effects in Francis Bacon's Innocent X -- to the degree that I began to wonder whether Bacon's Study was as much a reaction to Rembrandt as to Velasquez. There was something happening on that surface that, I thought, had nothing to do with the clichéd questing blind gaze of the figure. But then (I thought in the next moment), the effect relates somehow to the subject of the painting: it's inches away, one can only ignore the figure by doing experiential violence to the work. Perhaps simply virtuoso texture-creation? Or something else: not the veil before the poet's blind eyes, exactly -- the near-evanescence of the effect made it impossible for me to interpret it as in representational terms -- but a gesture toward the cloudy distance that separates us from Homer, a gesture toward the impossibility of representing the distant past.
Re-energized and now curious, I turned to the self-portrait. Again it eluded me: I felt impatient and bored. Then I began to notice the red and ochre threads of paint in Rembrandt's grey hair--or rather, since I'd noticed them earlier, this time I started to think about them. Ghosts of color, they rusted his head, combining with the black and grey patches in the pinkish face to create the effect of fleshy corrosion. The theme is extended in the bloody scrapings of vermilion over the black waistcoat. And here the astonishing mastery of paint, which never ceases to astonish, did the work stylization nearly always does: it distanced the pathos, made the painting a matter of surfaces rather than depth (the false depth that tends to self-dramatize both the subject and the viewer of the painting), re-made the work as something not to fall into but to reflect on, in the deepest sense of the word "reflect".
I still have more to see in Rembrandt, but this was a major step. Today I travel to the Franz Hals museum in Haarlem with the other NIAS fellows. I hope to see more Ruisdaels and -- something I wouldn't have said before Saturday -- more Rembrandts.
Monday, February 13, 2012
Gerhard Richter
After a week of freezing cold and several inches of snow, it's raining today, and the serene view of trees outside my slanted office window, very slightly fogged from the heating unit just below it, recalls Gerhard Richter's blurred landscapes, like Troisdorf (1985):
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I got a chance to see Vermeer's View of Delft at the Mauritshuis on Saturday, my favorite Vermeer, along with everything else in that famous collection. It was about 22 or 24 degrees, too cold for your average tourist, I gather, because the galleries were nearly empty.
As happened to me most memorably in the MOMA Dada show, I had a revelation at the Mauritshuis, regarding Rembrandt. More after the Five Minute Lecture downstairs.
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I got a chance to see Vermeer's View of Delft at the Mauritshuis on Saturday, my favorite Vermeer, along with everything else in that famous collection. It was about 22 or 24 degrees, too cold for your average tourist, I gather, because the galleries were nearly empty.
As happened to me most memorably in the MOMA Dada show, I had a revelation at the Mauritshuis, regarding Rembrandt. More after the Five Minute Lecture downstairs.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
In the Netherlands
Blog silence is due to transition to the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study, where I'm basking in the literal glow of the sun setting over the North Sea coast and the metaphorical one of having time to myself to think and write. They look after us very well here, and my colleagues are a fascinating, friendly bunch.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
SOTUS 2012
Opening: celebrating leaving Iraq, daring the Republicans not to cheer, not to call leaving Iraq a "victory."
Now there are "no Americans fighting in Iraq." [Not in the armed forces, perhaps, but we're still indirectly paying for mercenaries there.] "Courage, selflessness..."
Reminder a couple minutes in: Osama bin Laden is dead.
The armed forces win because they work together. "Imagine what we could accomplish if we worked together." [But we're not an army: we're a diverse collection of individuals, boisterously so. Unfortunately, he'll come back to this at the end. Ring composition.]
Education; high-tech manufacturing. [Manufacturing? Yep, this is a key theme of the speech. Wonder if Obama read this terrific article in the Atlantic about the challenges of change on the manufacturing front in this country?]
Yes to energy "that we can control."
Yes to "an economy built to last." [Unfortunate auto industry associations.]
Rewarding responsibility, rewarding hard work. [A missed opportunity. Surely an orator as good as Obama could find some way to talk about why the economy has changed, why blue-collar jobs don't pay like they used to, why corporate ethos has changed to allow for late-career lay-offs and gigantic pay raises for successful -- and failing -- CEOs. But no. Rather --]
"We can do this." Grandfather made it on the GI Bill, grandmother on the assembly line.
"This is the defining issue of our time": how to keep mid-20th century opportunities alive.
Restore an economy "where everyone who works hard gets a fair shot."
"Bankers made bets and bonuses while everyone looked the other way." [Did I write too soon? Is the big-picture critique on its way?]
Finally: "The state of our union is getting stronger."
Manufacturing, again. [Scratch comment above. The laundry list of tax credits and spending programs begins. Shades of Bill Clinton.]
I saved the auto industry. GM is top of the world, ma!
Stop tax deductions for companies that outsource jobs. Lower taxes for companies hiring in-country.
Support community colleges and partnerships with business.
A jab at teacher unions. A call for merit pay and firing bad teachers fast.
Raise the minimum school age to 18?
Colleges and universities had better keep costs down! [But why have they gone up?]
Let illegals who go to college become citizens; let foreigners who earn college degrees here in the US stay here.
Expand tax relief for small business.
Spend more on research.
Spend more on energy research.
Spend more on clean energy subsidies.
Open more domestic oil fields and gas resources.
The Department of Defense is going green! [What a relief.]
Responsible homeowners need to be able to re-finance easily.
Regulation is good. [The base knows this: and he doesn't really make an effort to convince the unbelievers. Another missed opportunity.]
The Deficit. "We need to make choices." We need to tax millionaires. This is not "class warfare"; it's "common sense".
Americans are cynical about Washington. So let's "ban insider trading" for members of Congress. [Insider trading? That came out of nowhere. But the real problem is: not a whiff of real reform of lobbying (a missed anti-Newt opportunity); not a breath of campaign finance reform. But then again, the pig doesn't set the trough on fire.]
We need Consensus. Let's Stop Fighting. Or rather, let's Keep Fighting, but Together, like members of the team that assassinated Obama. [What did he just say?]
As real bloggers like to say: Reax. As I listened to the speech -- and this is sad proof of the sharp recent decline in American political oratory -- it struck me as fairly well-constructed, effectively if not brilliantly delivered, statesmanlike without pomposity, a bit laundry-listish but a reasonable balance between concrete proposals and the typical platitudes. A safe election-year speech, as opposed to a riskier visionary one.
Yet as I type my notes, I can't help being discomfited by just how squarely conventional the speech was: how Clintonesque, how compromised, how different from the promise and the vision of his speeches during the 2008 campaign. This isn't a deep surprise to me -- I'm used to being disappointed by this president, though I'm not half as bitter as Andrew Sullivan or many New York liberals -- but I remain unsettled by Obama's choice to avoid taking the big issues. He repeatedly told his audience tonight, "we can do this." But he, it seems, cannot do this -- when "this" means hard-hitting, thoughtful, accessible analysis that grounds a powerful call for justice. Nor can he recover the freshness, the sense that here was someone thinking new thoughts, that he brought to those early election-year speeches.
And the ring composition about the military, which ended with a call for Americans to imitate the military and "watch each other's backs," was awful. What are we supposed to be fighting against? This is a good example of pro-warrior republicanist rhetoric gone bad. It leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
Now there are "no Americans fighting in Iraq." [Not in the armed forces, perhaps, but we're still indirectly paying for mercenaries there.] "Courage, selflessness..."
Reminder a couple minutes in: Osama bin Laden is dead.
The armed forces win because they work together. "Imagine what we could accomplish if we worked together." [But we're not an army: we're a diverse collection of individuals, boisterously so. Unfortunately, he'll come back to this at the end. Ring composition.]
Education; high-tech manufacturing. [Manufacturing? Yep, this is a key theme of the speech. Wonder if Obama read this terrific article in the Atlantic about the challenges of change on the manufacturing front in this country?]
Yes to energy "that we can control."
Yes to "an economy built to last." [Unfortunate auto industry associations.]
Rewarding responsibility, rewarding hard work. [A missed opportunity. Surely an orator as good as Obama could find some way to talk about why the economy has changed, why blue-collar jobs don't pay like they used to, why corporate ethos has changed to allow for late-career lay-offs and gigantic pay raises for successful -- and failing -- CEOs. But no. Rather --]
"We can do this." Grandfather made it on the GI Bill, grandmother on the assembly line.
"This is the defining issue of our time": how to keep mid-20th century opportunities alive.
Restore an economy "where everyone who works hard gets a fair shot."
"Bankers made bets and bonuses while everyone looked the other way." [Did I write too soon? Is the big-picture critique on its way?]
Finally: "The state of our union is getting stronger."
Manufacturing, again. [Scratch comment above. The laundry list of tax credits and spending programs begins. Shades of Bill Clinton.]
I saved the auto industry. GM is top of the world, ma!
Stop tax deductions for companies that outsource jobs. Lower taxes for companies hiring in-country.
Support community colleges and partnerships with business.
A jab at teacher unions. A call for merit pay and firing bad teachers fast.
Raise the minimum school age to 18?
Colleges and universities had better keep costs down! [But why have they gone up?]
Let illegals who go to college become citizens; let foreigners who earn college degrees here in the US stay here.
Expand tax relief for small business.
Spend more on research.
Spend more on energy research.
Spend more on clean energy subsidies.
Open more domestic oil fields and gas resources.
The Department of Defense is going green! [What a relief.]
Responsible homeowners need to be able to re-finance easily.
Regulation is good. [The base knows this: and he doesn't really make an effort to convince the unbelievers. Another missed opportunity.]
The Deficit. "We need to make choices." We need to tax millionaires. This is not "class warfare"; it's "common sense".
Americans are cynical about Washington. So let's "ban insider trading" for members of Congress. [Insider trading? That came out of nowhere. But the real problem is: not a whiff of real reform of lobbying (a missed anti-Newt opportunity); not a breath of campaign finance reform. But then again, the pig doesn't set the trough on fire.]
We need Consensus. Let's Stop Fighting. Or rather, let's Keep Fighting, but Together, like members of the team that assassinated Obama. [What did he just say?]
As real bloggers like to say: Reax. As I listened to the speech -- and this is sad proof of the sharp recent decline in American political oratory -- it struck me as fairly well-constructed, effectively if not brilliantly delivered, statesmanlike without pomposity, a bit laundry-listish but a reasonable balance between concrete proposals and the typical platitudes. A safe election-year speech, as opposed to a riskier visionary one.
Yet as I type my notes, I can't help being discomfited by just how squarely conventional the speech was: how Clintonesque, how compromised, how different from the promise and the vision of his speeches during the 2008 campaign. This isn't a deep surprise to me -- I'm used to being disappointed by this president, though I'm not half as bitter as Andrew Sullivan or many New York liberals -- but I remain unsettled by Obama's choice to avoid taking the big issues. He repeatedly told his audience tonight, "we can do this." But he, it seems, cannot do this -- when "this" means hard-hitting, thoughtful, accessible analysis that grounds a powerful call for justice. Nor can he recover the freshness, the sense that here was someone thinking new thoughts, that he brought to those early election-year speeches.
And the ring composition about the military, which ended with a call for Americans to imitate the military and "watch each other's backs," was awful. What are we supposed to be fighting against? This is a good example of pro-warrior republicanist rhetoric gone bad. It leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
SOTUS blast from the past
For over a decade, just about every year, I've taken running notes on the State of the Union speech. Some flashes of yesteryear: guess the year!
"We will answer every danger and every enemy that threaten the American people."
"Our faith is sure."
"...excessive litigation..."
"...faith-based programs...transform America one heart and one soul at a time."
"God does miracles in people's lives."
"End partial-birth abortion." "No life should begin or end for an experiment."
"Our calling as a blessed country..."
"...scattered network of killers..."
"Many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: they're no longer a problem to the United States...One by one the terrorists are learning the meaning of justice."
And here's another:
"We love our freedom and will fight to keep it."
"Radical Islam is a perversion by the few of a noble faith."
"We will not retreat from the world and never surrender to evil."
"We accept the call of history to aid the oppression...We have a clear plan for victory in Iraq."
"I am confident." (repeated at least twice more)
"We are in this fight to win, and we are winning."
And just before everything falls apart:
"Unemployment is low."
"...school choice...vouchers..."
"We see a future of hope and opportunity."
Handle illegal immigration "without animosity, without amnesty."
And here's a kicker: he actually mentioned "global climate change" (which Obama did not do tonight)
Answers: 2003, 2006, 2007
"We will answer every danger and every enemy that threaten the American people."
"Our faith is sure."
"...excessive litigation..."
"...faith-based programs...transform America one heart and one soul at a time."
"God does miracles in people's lives."
"End partial-birth abortion." "No life should begin or end for an experiment."
"Our calling as a blessed country..."
"...scattered network of killers..."
"Many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: they're no longer a problem to the United States...One by one the terrorists are learning the meaning of justice."
And here's another:
"We love our freedom and will fight to keep it."
"Radical Islam is a perversion by the few of a noble faith."
"We will not retreat from the world and never surrender to evil."
"We accept the call of history to aid the oppression...We have a clear plan for victory in Iraq."
"I am confident." (repeated at least twice more)
"We are in this fight to win, and we are winning."
And just before everything falls apart:
"Unemployment is low."
"...school choice...vouchers..."
"We see a future of hope and opportunity."
Handle illegal immigration "without animosity, without amnesty."
And here's a kicker: he actually mentioned "global climate change" (which Obama did not do tonight)
Answers: 2003, 2006, 2007
Monday, January 23, 2012
Face-to-face vs Facebook
You've had enough of students checking Facebook and online shopping in lecture. Can you ban laptops and smartphones and tablets? Yes you can! Won't the students revolt? You can expect some push-back, but if you explain yourself clearly, firmly, and with a sense of humor, it'll dissipate fast -- and even if there are a few holdouts, you're certainly not obliged to give into them. (The exception is students with learning disabilities, which requires a note from the Moses Center.) Some students may even tell you how glad they are to be free from their cybernetic overlords.
Since many students, even sophomores and juniors, still don't know how to learn effectively in the lecture setting, the first week of class is a perfect chance to ask them what they expect to get out of the lecture and what kinds of notes they're taking -- and explain what *you* want them to take away from lecture and what you advise them to write down. Along the way, you can lay out your policy on machines and the reasons for it.
I present my no-laptops/tablets/phones rule not as a ban (though if pressed I make it clear that it is in fact a ban), but as an opportunity -- an opportunity for the students to exist for a brief time in space free from the internet, to meet and chat with seatmates instead of staring into a screen, to engage with me. As the teacher, I tell my students, I want to look them in the eye, I want to connect with them, I want to be able to ask them questions, I want some energy in the room. If they're staring at their screens, all that is impossible. Yes, of course, students doodle, doze, space out, stare out the window. But just as we work hard to develop interesting material and well-structured lectures to keep students' attention, we can keep the machines that distract them outside the classroom doors. The addiction to email and Facebook affects even the soundest students, and this policy takes the burden of choice, which is itself distracting ("is he about to say something really important or can I check my friends' status?"), off the students.
Most importantly, I tell them, if they're trying to write down everything I say -- typical of those who beg the most passionately to take notes on their laptops -- they're almost surely not *thinking* about what I'm saying, and so they won't be able to track whether they understand my points, and they will have a very tough time asking or answering questions. But lecture isn't a movie: it's an opportunity to engage and think, and students should aim to be active listeners. What does this mean in terms of concrete note-taking? I tell students to jot down my main points, the main examples supporting the points and the reasons why. I tell them to listen for the signs that reveal the structure or arc of my lecture, because part of getting the most out of it -- a skill that will help them in meetings and strategy sessions their whole lives -- is learning how to follow the verbal expression of complex ideas. There is value in training the brain to concentrate for longer than five minutes at a time. (For all these reasons, I don't hand out lecture outlines unless a lecture has been so chopped up by questions -- mine and the students' -- that it feels impossible to follow: then I post my lecture notes online.)
I've found that opening up these issues in the first week creates a healthier dynamic in the room, a sense that the lecture is a collaborative enterprise, even though (despite occasional questions from me or the students) I am the one doing nearly all the talking for nearly 75 minutes. It makes the classroom not quite a "student-centered" classroom, as the education gurus call it, but an idea-centered classroom. It also helps me monitor myself more responsibly throughout the term. Having demanded their attention and engagement, I have to live up to my side of the bargain: I make more of an effort to pause to underline the most important points in lecture, to sum up at the end of lecture consistently, and so on. When I break the news about laptops, and whenever I have to remind someone who unthinkingly lifts her computer out of her pack that she needs to put it away, I tell the class that my main reason for doing this is to use the time in the lecture hall as effectively as possible. I remind them that I'm always working on making lecture clearer and more interesting, and I ask them what arguments have been hardest to follow, what kind of information helps make points stick. (Keep these evaluative questions as specific as you can. If you ask, "What bores you in class?" you're guaranteed to get some joker who says "Everything: this class sucks", etc.)
Suggest that they take notes in a notebook. Tell them that the lecture form developed in a handwriting culture and there are good reasons to think that the typing culture isn't well suited to the lecture scene. You might also tell your TAs to ask to see their students' lecture notes in an early recitation, so that they can see what students are writing (in a non-judgmental way) and give them advice on note-taking.
Since many students, even sophomores and juniors, still don't know how to learn effectively in the lecture setting, the first week of class is a perfect chance to ask them what they expect to get out of the lecture and what kinds of notes they're taking -- and explain what *you* want them to take away from lecture and what you advise them to write down. Along the way, you can lay out your policy on machines and the reasons for it.
I present my no-laptops/tablets/phones rule not as a ban (though if pressed I make it clear that it is in fact a ban), but as an opportunity -- an opportunity for the students to exist for a brief time in space free from the internet, to meet and chat with seatmates instead of staring into a screen, to engage with me. As the teacher, I tell my students, I want to look them in the eye, I want to connect with them, I want to be able to ask them questions, I want some energy in the room. If they're staring at their screens, all that is impossible. Yes, of course, students doodle, doze, space out, stare out the window. But just as we work hard to develop interesting material and well-structured lectures to keep students' attention, we can keep the machines that distract them outside the classroom doors. The addiction to email and Facebook affects even the soundest students, and this policy takes the burden of choice, which is itself distracting ("is he about to say something really important or can I check my friends' status?"), off the students.
Most importantly, I tell them, if they're trying to write down everything I say -- typical of those who beg the most passionately to take notes on their laptops -- they're almost surely not *thinking* about what I'm saying, and so they won't be able to track whether they understand my points, and they will have a very tough time asking or answering questions. But lecture isn't a movie: it's an opportunity to engage and think, and students should aim to be active listeners. What does this mean in terms of concrete note-taking? I tell students to jot down my main points, the main examples supporting the points and the reasons why. I tell them to listen for the signs that reveal the structure or arc of my lecture, because part of getting the most out of it -- a skill that will help them in meetings and strategy sessions their whole lives -- is learning how to follow the verbal expression of complex ideas. There is value in training the brain to concentrate for longer than five minutes at a time. (For all these reasons, I don't hand out lecture outlines unless a lecture has been so chopped up by questions -- mine and the students' -- that it feels impossible to follow: then I post my lecture notes online.)
I've found that opening up these issues in the first week creates a healthier dynamic in the room, a sense that the lecture is a collaborative enterprise, even though (despite occasional questions from me or the students) I am the one doing nearly all the talking for nearly 75 minutes. It makes the classroom not quite a "student-centered" classroom, as the education gurus call it, but an idea-centered classroom. It also helps me monitor myself more responsibly throughout the term. Having demanded their attention and engagement, I have to live up to my side of the bargain: I make more of an effort to pause to underline the most important points in lecture, to sum up at the end of lecture consistently, and so on. When I break the news about laptops, and whenever I have to remind someone who unthinkingly lifts her computer out of her pack that she needs to put it away, I tell the class that my main reason for doing this is to use the time in the lecture hall as effectively as possible. I remind them that I'm always working on making lecture clearer and more interesting, and I ask them what arguments have been hardest to follow, what kind of information helps make points stick. (Keep these evaluative questions as specific as you can. If you ask, "What bores you in class?" you're guaranteed to get some joker who says "Everything: this class sucks", etc.)
Suggest that they take notes in a notebook. Tell them that the lecture form developed in a handwriting culture and there are good reasons to think that the typing culture isn't well suited to the lecture scene. You might also tell your TAs to ask to see their students' lecture notes in an early recitation, so that they can see what students are writing (in a non-judgmental way) and give them advice on note-taking.
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