A new old Kinks song

“Suddenly it’s too late”: a line from “Time Song,” a previously unreleased Kinks song, no doubt written by Ray Davies. Backstory here.



As a kid, I had time for just one great group. But as I wrote in a 2016 post, “I’m now convinced that there were three great pop groups in the 1960s: the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and the Kinks.” I wish that I knew what I know now when I was younger.

Ray, Dave, Mick, it’s not too late to get the band back together.

Then again, it is, really. A reunion would be a sad shadow of its original.

Thanks, Elaine.

The Avital Ronell story

Avital Ronell, professor of German and comp lit at New York University, has been found responsible for sexually harassing a student and has been suspended for the 2018–2019 academic year. Reading the newly available details of this story makes clear (at least to me) that Ronell’s behavior toward her student Nimrod Reitman was an abuse of power — utterly, wildly inappropriate. Says one of Ronell’s defenders, “Avital definitely is a type of her own.” Yep, that’s true.

Read more from The Advocate, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The New York Times.

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August 18: Reitman is suing Ronell and NYU. There’s now a press release on behalf on Ronell. And there’s more reportage from the Chronicle (1, 2), Salon, and the Times.

A thought after reading Reitman’s complaint: Ronell’s conduct warrants more than a suspension. NYU should have fired Ronell for conduct unbecoming. Unbelievably, appallingly unbecoming.

A thought after reading the press release: it’s surprising to see Ronell identified as an “educator.” See Paul Fussell’s Class (1983):

The next time you meet a distinguished university professor, especially one who fancies himself well known nationally for his ideas and writings, tell him it’s an honor to meet such a famous educator, and watch: first he will look down for a while, then up, but not at you, then away. And very soon he will detach himself from your company. He will be smiling all the time, but inside he will be in torment.

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August 31: Andrea Long Chu, a graduate student at NYU, writes about working with Avital Ronell. An excerpt:

A culture of critics in name only, where genuine criticism is undertaken at the risk of ostracism, marginalization, retribution — this is where abuses like Avital’s grow like moss, or mold. Graduate students know this intuitively; it is written on their bones.

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September 9: Bernd Hüppauf, former chair of the NYU German department, has written an account of department life under Avital Ronell. It’s now available in English translation at Salon. Hüppauf returned from a semester abroad to find that Ronell had displaced him as department chair:

She pursued one goal: The work of Avital Ronell and Jacques Derrida must be at the center of all teaching and research. Instead of an academic program, we were left with boundless narcissism. Once she’d become the head of the German department, she had her secretary announce in a departmental meeting that in the German department no student’s written work would any longer be acceptable unless it cited Derrida and Ronell.

There are, of course, elements of the Avital Ronell story — cult of personality, abuse of power, anointed ones and exiles — everywhere in academia. But I think it’s rare that those elements come together as horribly as they have in the NYU German department.

One especially useful minor aspect of Hüppauf’s account: its response to characterizations of Ronell as a feminist and leftist. No, and no.

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April 30, 2019: Ronell be returning to the classroom in the fall.

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Prestigious signatures

On Academia

“Perry? Paul. I just spoke with Tragg. They found a body — in the canyon, a man, probably in his fifties, looks like he was strangled with a bow tie. That’s right. Yeah, a philologist of some kind. Tragg said the wife identified him from his clothes — said he was wearing his second-best tweed jacket. And get this: there was a pipe in the jacket pocket, but the wife says it wasn’t his briar. Can you meet me in about twenty minutes? At the last house on Academia Drive.”

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[We passed Academia Drive while taking an avoid-the-freeway route to the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles last month. I immediately thought of Paul and Perry and invented this bit of dialogue. “The canyon”? I think it sounds like something from the Mason world. In real life Academia Drive is a dead-end street — I mean, a cul-de-sac.]

Words from Nineteen Eighty-Four

This week at A.Word.A.Day, words from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four that have entered the English language. Today’s entry: Big Brother. Under His Eye.

Previously: newspeak, doublethink.

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Recently updated

Small town, car, screen More to this story of small-town life.

Some rock

[Nancy, November 7, 1954. Click for a larger rock.]

That’s some rock.

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Words from Nineteen Eighty-Four

This week at A.Word.A.Day, words from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four that have entered the English language. Today’s word: doublethink. Yesterday’s: newspeak.

From Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949):



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Avenatti, sheesh

Michael Avenatti, on CNN just now: “The president and me have the ability to work with the media.”

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Not on a first-name basis

One sign of the reality-TV-ification of everything these days is the reduction of persons in political life to first names: Chuck and Nancy, Jared and Ivanka. I think all the way back to the first season of Big Brother: George, Eddie, Jordan. (Those names, I am surprised to discover, have stuck in my head.) “Omarosa,” too, is a character from the world of reality-TV. The woman who worked in the White House is Omarosa Manigault Newman. Newscasters should refer to her by her name: Manigault Newman, or Ms. Manigault Newman.

But the less time cable news spends on Manigault Newman, the better. She offers a form of reality-TV spectacle that distracts from urgent issues of the real: tariffs, Helsinki, North Korea, Russian hacking, emoluments, conspiracy and obstruction, congressional inaction, the firing of Peter Strzok, refugee children separated from their parents, and the incurious, ill-informed, misogynist, racist president at the heart of it all. “Trump at war with Omarosa!” said someone on MSNBC this afternoon. No, that’s entertainment posing as news — which leaves less time for news.

See also this moment when reality and fiction merged: “Omarosa was fired three times on The Apprentice, and this is the fourth time we let her go.”

[My list of issues is incomplete: I had to stop somewhere.]

Words from Nineteen Eighty-Four

This week at A.Word.A.Day, words from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four that have entered the English language. Today’s word: newspeak. (In the novel, it’s capitalized.)

Two quotations accompany today’s word. One from the U.S. president: “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” And one from Orwell’s novel: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

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