Simple Living Isn’t Always

The retreat of poetry from American public life may be one of the great tragedies of the post-modern era. [I say post-modern, by the way, purely as a chronological marker. I’m thinking generally of the US’s move from an industrial to an information economy. Whew; that’s a can of worms I’ll have to open an0ther time.]

In my quest to read 101 works of literature in a little less than 3 years, I’m reading a lot of poetry. More, in fact, than I’ve read in a while. What I’ve found, interestingly enough, is what poets have always known. Poems have the ability to cut through the defenses we erect against logical argument, and even against story. We don’t build walls and dig trenches and string razor-wire on purpose, I think, but we develop a “standard algorithm,” if you will, for decoding prose that undermines its ability to get to us. Continue Reading »

In her new book, Elizabeth Kantor takes aim at the PC approach to Western literature that’s infected American English departments. As a graduate of an English department at a university (which, thankfully, seemed more balanced than the ones Kantor has in her sights), I can vouch for the weirdness in Lit departments. But in an interview, Kantor says this about Jane Austen, one of my favorite novelists:

Contrary to what you may have heard, Jane Austen’s novels are not “subversive.” They’re funny. Jane Austen made fun of men (and of women, too). But it was human folly and vice, not “patriarchal oppression,” that made her mad. If Jane Austen were living today, we’d call her a conservative Christian. She was quite comfortable with traditional sex roles. The villains in her novels are not jealous, controlling patriarchs. They’re weaklings. The men who cause the real trouble in Austen novels are distant, uninvolved fathers; uxorious husbands who do selfish things to please their awful wives; and lovers who pay too much attention to girls they aren’t ready to marry. Jane Austen clearly thought a lot of men would be improved if they were more patriarchal than they actually are.

Another thing she nails in the interview is postmodernist-speak. Here’s her invented sample:

“As a cultural-studies professor, I interrogate Romantic texts to investigate the foregrounding of the problem of subjectivity in the nineteenth-century imaginary.” Rough translation: Because I’m a Marxist, I spend my time trying to show that Wordsworth’s poems about the imagination and the extraordinary powers of the human mind are the results of impersonal historical forces.

My colleagues and I used to trade silly conference topics, since there appear to be no rules for common sense where the academy is concerned. Feel free to write about feces, or farting, or whatever else excites you about great literature. You think I’m kidding, and I wish I were, but there’s a growing absurdity in the university (or the polyversity, to borrow a phrase from Mark Rutland), and it’s devouring what is great about literature like a tapeworm.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
(Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844-1889)

“We have perhaps lost this sense of literature as a conversation.”

–The Times of London’s literary editor, Erica Wagner, responding to recent accusations of plagiarism against novelist Ian McEwan.

I’ll say, and I’ll go one better: We are increasingly losing any sense of literature at all. It’s as if it’s becoming a secret language, spoken only by chipmunks and literary editors. It’s stunning to me that in Shakespeare’s day, the playwright and his contemporaries could rely on a pretty rich tapestry of knowledge in audiences. These days, the public’s mind is too occupied with–pardon me–Britney’s crotch watch, who’s too skinny, and TomKat’s wedding to care that the Great Conversation is nearly over.

Just a quickie here. Today’s the 75th birthday of comics sleuth Dick Tracy. Cartoonist Chester Gould launched the strip October 4, 1931. He drew the strip until 1977.

Sadly, he couldn’t imagine his creation would come to life in a terrible movie starring Warren Beatty and Madonna. Blecch. Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, etc.–it should have been fantastic.