Stanley Fish and “partisan politics”

From a Chronicle of Higher Education interview with Stanley Fish, “The Unbearable Virtue-Mongering of Academics”:

Let’s talk about your views on academe and social justice. One of the topics you address [in a new book] is university disinvestment in fossil fuels, a step that you object to.

My position has become a minority one; perhaps it was always a minority one. Both students and some faculty feel more and more that colleges and universities should stand for values and policies that are thought to be progressive, rather than sitting on the political sideline. That’s a prevailing sentiment, and it’s one I don’t share. Once you go in that direction, for example by declining to invest in fossil-fuel stock, you’ve transformed yourself from an educational institution into a political institution. Once you do that, there’s, in effect, no place to stop — the university becomes an extension of partisan politics, just another place where partisan politics occurs.

But to invest in fossil fuels is not to remain neutral, to sit “on the political sideline”; to invest is to take a position, however longheld or unexamined that position might be. And notice how Fish stacks the deck with his reference to “partisan politics”: to divest might better be described not as a gesture toward “partisan politics” but as a moral choice that can serve the cause of education. But while I’m taking apart Fish’s argument, I’ll add that a university is always already a political institution: who gets in, who’s kept out, what gets taught, and how. Those who seek to reduce public universities to centers for vocational training know that well.

The interviewer for The Chronicle calls Fish “one of the besieged humanities’ most prominent voices.” But see also Russell Jacoby: “With friends like him, the humanities needs no enemies.”

If you’re wondering about the interview’s title: the conversation devolves into a consideration of cars, with Fish throwing shade on Prius and Subaru owners and extolling his own recent vehicles of choice, a Mercedes and a Thunderbird.

Related posts
A review of How to Write a Sentence : Fish on Strunk and White : Russell Jacoby on Stanley Fish

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, is quite stumperrific. A very difficult puzzle. I started out down the right side with some help from L. Frank Baum: 13-D, six letters, “Auntie Em, for instance.” And then some help from Thomas Hardy: 44-D, six letters, “Ruler from a tree.” The right half of the puzzle went pretty quickly. The left, much less so. And the bottom left corner probably took me as long as the rest of the puzzle.

I know: “Who cares?” I mean, I know who cares. That’s 35-D, three letters, “Who cares?” — one of several very clever clues.

My favorites:

25-D, eight letters, “Stop being square.”

37-A, eleven letters, “Online header of a sort.”

37-D, eight letters, “Booster unit.”

38-D, seven letters, “Occasional catcher.”

45-A, three letters, “Main menu openers.” Really, I hate this kind of clue, but I respect it.

59-A, four letters, “Release a crew.” Uncle!

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Happy birthday, Willa Cather

Willa Cather was born on this day in 1873. In a letter to her brother Roscoe Cather, January 8, 1940, Cather writes about Alfred A. Knopf, who became her publisher in 1920:

Somewhere I still have a letter from him, dated “Christmas morning, 4 oclock.” I had been at his house for a Christmas Eve party (awful English, excuse!) and I took with me the ms. of “A Lost Lady” thinking he might read it over the holiday. He sat up after the party that night and read it, and wrote me that night at 4 a.m. The letter reached me by special messenger on Christmas morning. So it began:

                                 “Christmas morning,
                                               four oclock.

My dear Miss Cather.
    I think you are a very great writer.————

The story struck him hard; and he was there at the bat when I pitched him a ball. (This figure is bad baseball, I know, but it expresses the relation between a writer and a live publisher, who isn't afraid.)

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather , ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout (New York: Knopf, 2013).

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

[Re: “Christmas morning: there’s no closing quotation mark in the text.]

“A perfect summary of this whole scheme”

Susan Glasser of The New Yorker asked Adam Schiff what he considered the most memorable moments of testimony from the House Intelligence Committee impeachment hearings:

One was from the former special envoy to Ukraine, Kurt Volker, who, in a conversation with one of Zelensky’s advisers, in September, urged the new Ukrainian administration not to enact victor’s justice and investigate his defeated predecessor. The Zelensky adviser responded, in effect, “Oh, you mean like you want us to do with the Bidens and the Clintons?” To Schiff, it was a moment “pointing out the utter hypocrisy” of Trump’s scheme, in which America was now “urging other countries not to engage in politically motivated investigations, while asking for politically motivated investigations.”

The other conversation that Schiff cited was Sondland’s memorable encounter with David Holmes, a diplomat in the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv. Holmes overheard Sondland talking on the phone with Trump, who asked if Zelensky would pursue the investigations he wanted. After the call, Holmes asked Sondland, “Does the President give a shit about Ukraine?” As Holmes testified, the answer was no, he only cares about “the big stuff.” Well, Holmes pointed out, there is big stuff happening in Ukraine, like a war with Russia, but Sondland said no, that was not what he meant. Trump only cared about matters that concerned him, like the investigations. “That says it all,” Schiff told me. “The President doesn’t give a shit about what’s good for our country, what’s good for Ukraine. It’s all about what’s in it for him personally and for his reëlection campaign.” In that small moment in an obscure diplomat’s testimony, Schiff reflected, was the impeachment case in all its brazen simplicity. “That is a perfect summary,” he said, “of this whole scheme.”

Post titles sometimes show up in other bloggers’ sidebars. If that weren’t the case, I would’ve titled this post “The President doesn’t give a shit about what’s good for our country.”

Wuthering Heights, tonight

I saw the TCM listing: Wuthering Heights. From 1958? The New Yorker explains: it’s a version made for television, with Richard Burton and Rosemary Harris, lost and now found. It airs tonight on TCM, 8:00 Eastern.

Kids and garbage trucks

In The Atlantic, Ashley Fetters works toward “a unifying theory of why kids are so wild about garbage trucks.”

Thanks, Ben.

Search Google Books with Alfred

[For Mac users with Alfred and the Alfred Powerpack.]

Alfred is an app launcher and boon companion that performs a dazzling array of tasks. A post from the Alfred blog inspired me, at last, to create a shortcut to search Google Books. Simple, as it turns out. The trick is figuring out the URL that will work.

In Alfred (with Powerpack), go to Features, then Web Search. Add a custom search URL like so:

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q={query}

For Title, I used the blindingly obvious Google Books. For Keyword, gob, not likely to be confused with anything else in might type. To use the shortcut, I call up Alfred, type gob, add a space, and type whatever I want to look for in Google Books, with or without quotation marks.

So here’s one everyday task made a lot simpler. Better living through automation, at least sometimes.

[My only connection to the app is that of a happy, paid-up user.]

Subway ways

From Gothamist : “A Brief History Of NYC Subway Vending Machines.” And from The New York Times : “The New York City Subway Map as You’ve Never Seen It Before.”

Ben Leddy hosts The Rewind

Here’s the latest installment of WGBH’s The Rewind, “The Pearl Harbor Radio Logs,” hosted by our son Ben. You can find all episodes of The Rewind at YouTube.

“Close enough for jazz”

I missed this bit yesterday, Jonathan Turley revealing his ignorance of jazz:

“You can’t accuse a president of bribery and then when some of us note that the Supreme Court has rejected your type of boundless interpretation, say, ‘Well, it’s just impeachment. We really don’t have to prove the elements.’ That’s a favorite mantra. That it’s sort of close enough for jazz. Well, this isn’t improvisational jazz. Close enough is not good enough.”

I have no idea what Turley means.

“Close enough” is never “good enough,” not in jazz, not in any art. And what is “improvisational jazz”? Some subset of jazz?

And what does “close enough” mean anyway? Close enough to what? If Turley is talking about, say, faking a tune, that’s not “improvisational jazz” — that’s faking a tune, something countless musicians have done in trying to honor a request. (See piano bar.)

But faking one’s way through a piece of music is not what jazz musicians do. The notion that jazz musicians are content to toss off sloppy approximations of ideal musical forms is sad, misleading, and dumb, an insult to the improviser’s art. Jonathan Turley should play with his Goldendoodle and leave music to the musicians.

*

4:17 p.m.: In a comment, Chris at Dreamers Rise identified the likely inspiration for Turley’s comment: the expression “close enough for rock and roll.” New to me, but it’s the title of a 1976 album by Nazareth. The idea: it doesn’t matter if your guitar is in tune, as long as it’s close enough, &c. So as Turley would have it, jazz musicians, or “improvisatory jazz” musicians, don’t care enough to tune up before playing. Sheesh.

*

4:53 p.m.: But there’s also a 1969 album by Johnny Lytle, Close Enough for Jazz. So there’s a pretty well-established tradition of dissing vernacular musics, in seriousness or in self-deprecating jest.

*

6:10 p.m.: But wait, there’s more: in 1956, Stan Freberg made a parody recording of “Heartbreak Hotel.” He interrupts a going-out-of-tune guitar solo with the words “That’s good, that’s good, that’s close enough for jazz.” And it turns out that “close enough for jazz” is a well-established expression. Alan Axelrod’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Jazz (Indianapolis, Alpha Books, 1999) glosses it:

Close Enough for Jazz

The prejudice classical musicians once felt against jazz musicians has pretty well died, but it died hard. For much of the 20th century, many classical musicians looked down on jazz musicians as sloppy and undisciplined.

I’ve been listening to jazz for almost my entire life, having entered the novitiate by the age of three. That might be why I’ve never imagined jazz musicians as sloppy and undisciplined.

*

January 17, 2020: My friend Stefan Hagemann passes along this passage, from a Harper’s article about Liz LeCompte and the Wooster Group, by David Gordon:

I am not surprised when Liz tells me that her father played jazz. One of her mottoes, repeated constantly, is “close enough for jazz.” Ari [Fliakos] laughs at the thought of how often he hears this, but notes the paradox it contains: jazz is a loose form that requires total precision; it is improvisation by people who practice obsessively.

Thanks, Stefan.