From “Stalin as Linguist — II”

In 1985, the poet Tom Clark wrote an essay titled “Stalin as Linguist” for the publication Poetry Flash. The essay, about (so-called) language poetry, was thoroughly negative. And it paid particular attention to the work of Barrett Watten. In a follow-up essay, Clark wrote about Watten’s response:

Watten reacted by composing a two-page, single-spaced, indignant, “not-for-publication” communiqué to Poetry Flash. The letter demanded redress of grievances and threatened a boycott by advertisers. Attached was a list of people to receive copies. The list was almost as long as the letter itself. It contained the names of language school sympathizers with influential positions — institutional poetry administrators, reading coordinators, publishers, book distributors, bookstore owners and employees, university teachers, gallery representatives, etc. From these people and from others in the language school’s local rank and file, Poetry Flash received a flood of letters. A selection appeared in subsequent issues of the paper. Several correspondents, such as Robert Gluck of the San Francisco State Poetry Center, charged me with “red-baiting.” Joe McCarthy was evoked more than once, as were the “mau-maus” (by [Ron] Silliman, though that letter never made it to print).

All of this suggests that despite its dedication to the ideal of criticism as equal in importance to creative work, the language school has a very thin skin when it comes to taking criticism.

Tom Clark, “Stalin as Linguist — II.” First published in Partisan Review (1987). In The Poetry Beat: Reviewing the Eighties. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990).

I doubt that 1980s Poetry Wars will be of immediate interest to many OCA readers. I’m sharing this passage as one more bit of the Barrett Watten story, a bit perhaps unknown to present-day faculty and students at Wayne State University, where Watten has filed complaints against two students who have filed complaints against him. The Poetry Flash incident suggests a pattern of retaliation against perceived enemies that goes far back.

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May 15: One of the students has been cleared. And, she says, students have been told to keep mum about Barrett Watten.

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May 30: The story has made it to The Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s behind the paywall, but this link appears to work, at least for now: “‘I Was Sick to My Stomach’: A Scholar’s Bullying Reputation Goes Under the Microscope.” An excerpt:

For decades, faculty members in the English department at Wayne State University knew Barrett Watten had a temper. A tenured professor who specializes in the language school of poetry, Watten is an intense figure with a brooding passion for his work. Standing at over six feet tall, he also possesses an air of natural authority — in classrooms, committee meetings, and personal interactions. When that authority is seemingly questioned, according to current and former colleagues, Watten snaps.

The Chronicle reports that eighteen of Watten’s colleagues in the English department have asked that his graduate faculty status be revoked and that his office be relocated outside the department.

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June 5: Wayne State’s Graduate Employees Organizing Committee has issued a statement about the university’s investigation.

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November 26: Barrett Watten has been removed from teaching and advising at Wayne State.

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December 11: The Chronicle of Higher Education has more. My favorite bit:

Colleagues previously told The Chronicle that [Watten] was known to launch into profanity-laced tirades that were made all the more ominous by his imposing physical stature. Watten sees such critiques as rooted in a misunderstanding of his approach to his discipline. “I teach the avant-garde, and am challenging in class. All supposedly good things,” he wrote in an email to The Chronicle.

Related reading
Barrett Watten Records (Accounts from students, colleagues, poets, scholars)

[The title “Stalin as Linguist” is a phrase borrowed from Watten’s book-length poem Progress.]

Writing at the British Library

An exhibition from the British Library: Writing: Making Your Mark. Scroll all the way down and you’ll see links to four online features, which in turn have links to seven more features.

And: the BBC draws on the exhibit to tell the story of handwriting in twelve objects.

The Barrett Watten story

“This is a collective effort to gather stories of official and unofficial complaints against and accounts of interactions with Barrett Watten”: Barrett Watten Records. Barrett
Watten, poet and academic at Wayne State University, is having a moment.

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November 26: Barrett Watten has been removed from teaching and advising at Wayne State.

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December 11: The Chronicle of Higher Education has more. My favorite bit:

Colleagues previously told The Chronicle that [Watten] was known to launch into profanity-laced tirades that were made all the more ominous by his imposing physical stature. Watten sees such critiques as rooted in a misunderstanding of his approach to his discipline. “I teach the avant-garde, and am challenging in class. All supposedly good things,” he wrote in an email to The Chronicle.

A related post
From “Stalin as Linguist — II” (Watten’s response to a critic of language poetry, 1985)

VDP’s “Tabu”

The Silver Lake Chorus has recorded an unreleased Van Dyke Parks song, “Tabu.”

Related reading
All OCA Van Dyke Parks posts (Pinboard)

“This particular kind of human”

In an Innovation Hub interview, Will Storr, author of Selfie: How the West Became Self-Obsessed (2017), talks about not being the funny, sunny, social person his culture prizes:

I would beat myself up. I’d be like, There’s something wrong with me — I’m broken in some way, that I’m not this person from Friends, you know. And then you discover what psychologists have known for a long time: that this idea of infinite capacity to transform is just not true. And actually what I discovered was that I’m not broken, there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m just low in extroversion, which means I’m an introvert, and I’m also high in neuroticism, which means that this low self-esteem thing is pretty much embedded in my head and there’s not much I’m ever going to be able to do about it.

It’s kind of depressing when you first find that out, but it ends up being very liberating, because it’s like for the first time in my life I feel like I’m not actually broken. It’s just that there are different kinds of humans, and I happen to be this particular kind of human, and now I can finally, after decades of doing so, stop beating myself up for not being the person who I feel my culture wants me to be.

I’m reminded of W.H. Auden’s distinction between “accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.” And I’m reminded of what Peter Drucker says in Managing Oneself (2008): “Do not try to change yourself — you are unlikely to succeed.” Break a bad habit? Develop new skills? Be a better person? Of course. But you have to be the person you are.

I remember telling a friend once, “I used to be a really introverted person.” And she laughed a little, in a sweet way, and said, “Oh, Michael,” because she understood that I still was a really introverted person. Her understanding of me was clearer than my understanding of myself. But now I get it, and I can laugh too.

[Transcription and paragraphing are mine. I’ve removed a few false starts and repeated words.]

Overheard

“We want to be the Silicone Valley of the Midwest.”

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

Foxtrot, Marie Kondo, and the eternal return

Yesterday I found a 2002 Foxtrot strip in a stack of clippings. The strip is a beautiful joke on the conventions that underlie visual representation. I should post a picture, I thought, and scrap the clipping. I mean, the clipping brings joy, but it would continue to do so as a blog post, right? And lo, I discovered that the strip is still available online. I wouldn’t even need to take a photo. So I started writing a post titled “Foxtrot and representation”, bringing in E.H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion and the New Yorker cartoon by Alain that starts off the book, a 1955 joke on the conventions that underlie visual representation. And then I wondered, Have I posted anything else from Foxtrot ?

Yes. In 2013 I made a post about this same Foxtrot strip, with the same title, “Foxtrot and representation.” The only difference: this time around I cited Art and Illusion. In the 2013 post, the Gombrich connection is clear from the link to a reproduction of the cartoon.

The eternal return — an idea I somehow picked up on as a freshman in college — is real. But the life-changing magic of tidying up poses a challenge. Because I don’t think I’ll be rediscovering this clipped strip again, at least not in my house.

Related posts
Joad’s corollary : Stubbs’s corollary

Today’s Saturday Stumper

I will turn, as I did this past December, to cake. Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Lester Ruff, is a piece of cake. Moist? No. Luscious? Not exactly. Light as a feather? Lighter, really, given the weight of pixels. But still a piece of cake, though virtually weightless. And virtually tasty.

Clues that I especially liked: 40-Across, three letters, “Short-range missile.” 60-Across, eight letters, “What many freshmen must enroll in.” (ENGLISHI? No.) 9-Down, four letters, “Floor (as a noun or verb).” 61-Down, three letters, “Strong-connection interjection.” And best of all, 1-Down, six letters, “Carrier bought by Evenflo.”

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Reading or not

Behind the Chronicle of Higher Education paywall, Steven Johnson’s report on “The Fall, and Rise, of Reading” in college courses. A few highlights (quotations from Johnson, not from his sources):

~ The National Assessment of Educational Progress reports that fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores have risen since the 1990s, while twelfth-grade scores have fallen. Only thirty-seven percent of high-school seniors “graduate with ‘‘proficiency’ in reading, meaning they can read a text for both its literal and its inferential meanings.”

~ The National Assessment of Educational Progress reports that the average seventeen-year-old reads less for school than the average nine-year-old.

~ The ACT reports that in 2005, only half of high-school graduates were prepared for college-level reading. Yet sixty-two percent of students were on track to be prepared when they were in eighth and tenth grade.

~ The National Survey of Student Engagement reports than “the average college student in the United States spends six to seven hours a week on assigned reading.” In the mid-twentieth century, it was twenty-four hours a week.

~ A study from 2000 of 910 college students found that twenty percent of students made a habit of doing the reading for their classes. Sixteen years earlier it was eighty percent.

There’s the fall. As for the rise: Johnson examines several strategies to encourage reading, one proprietary, six not. The proprietary: Perusall, an online platform for what might be called collective reading, allowing students to make notes and respond to other students’ notes while reading e-books and online course materials. (E-books must be ordered through Perusall.) The six non-proprietary strategies: Make reading count toward a grade by means of quizzes and journals. Don’t summarize for students. Ask students to do more than recall brute facts. Devote time to “reading” audio and visual media. Go over confusing material in class. And teach students to be better readers.

Any capable teacher of literature has likely already put into practice the last five of these six strategies. The first is probably the point of greatest resistance: everyone hates quizzes. I think I must have been way ahead of some curve, as I began giving brief quizzes at the start of class at least twenty-five years ago. Quizzes usually counted for twenty or twenty-five percent of a semester grade. And because I dropped the two or three lowest quiz grades and offered occasional extra-credit questions, a quiz average could easily rise above 100. (I think 113 was the record high.) And because a quiz average could sink well below the lowest letter grade, students who didn’t do the reading tended to drift away mid-semester. So my classes were filled with students who did the reading.

One thing about quizzes: because there are so many ways not to do the reading in a literature class, quizzes had to be Spark- and Shmoop-proof. I would come in with a handful of questions that could be answered only from having done the reading (or so I hoped). Quizzes were fast: often just one answer to get 100. Notes were permitted. Students could cover their bets too, if they wanted. And if questions didn’t click, I’d happily supply others. Was it tedious to collect all that paper? You bet. I saved further tedium by holding on to quizzes and returning them in stapled bunches.

It occurs to me only now that doing-the-reading is a matter of Rule 7:

The only rule is work. If you work, it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.

The long and short of it is that I was willing to pay my students, so to speak, to do the reading. It was in everyone’s interest to do so.

Sally couldn’t care less

[Peanuts, May 3, 1972.]

Sally Brown knows her usage. Alas, she’s replying to the question “Who was the father of Henry IV?”

Garner’s Modern English Usage:

Although some apologists argue that *could care less is meant to be sarcastic and not to be taken literally, a more plausible explanation is that the -n’t of couldn’t has been garbled in sloppy speech and sloppy writing.

Garner cites an explanation from linguist Atcheson L. Hench: “Couldn’t care has two dental stops practically together, dnt. This is heard only as d and slurring results. The outcome is I c’d care less.”

About “some apologists”: Garner is thinking of Steven Pinker, for one, who insists that “I could care less” is not illogical but sarcastic. I hear not sarcasm but dismissiveness: “I couldn’t care less” and “I could care less” are both dismissive, but one makes sense, while the other is, yes, illogical.

But the answer to the teacher’s question is “John of Gaunt.” Or, “John of Gaunt, though I could not possibly care less.”

Related reading
All OCA Peanuts posts (Pinboard)
Linus, nauseated not nauseous : Lucy’s whom : Woodstock’s wormwise

[Yesteryear’s Peanuts is this year’s Peanuts.]