Kazin on Magazine Writing

"One of the reasons why so many academic scholars find it impossible to write effectively for general magazines is that they are not used to listening to their own voices as poets are. They find their happiness in approbation, not in the English language."

~Alfred Kazin, "Writing for Magazines," in Contemporaries, p. 473.

Book Launch Event at Literary Life Bookstore, June 18, 7pm

The Devil Reads Derrida: and Other Essays on the University, the Church, Politics and the Arts is due to the Eerdmans warehouse this week. I'm very excited that the good folks at Literary Life Bookstore will host a "Third Thursday" event on June 18, 7pm as a sort of "launch" event. I will be doing some readings from the new book and talking a bit about the writing process. The event will also include music by the Kilpatricks (about whose music I've raved before). And, of course, Literary Life will have that wonderful Harney & Sons tea on offer. The book will be available for purchase (and I'll be doing book signings afterwards).


If you're not able to visit Literary Life, you can also order the book through their website. They'll be happy to ship it to you.

Hope to see you there!

On Being a "Popularizer"

In academia, one of the most derogatory comments one can make about a colleague is to label them a "popularizer." This is pretty much akin to being labeled a Democrat on FOX News. The irony, of course, is that almost all scholars are engaged in the profession of teaching which is, by its very nature, the art of a certain kind of popularization.

I was reminded of this recently while reading Saul Bellow's Ravelstein, his very thinly-veiled take on Allan Bloom. (I still hope to post some notes on this over at What I'm Reading.) In the story, Ravelstein (the Bloom-ish character) finally writes a "popular" book which encapsulates the core of the philosophical vision he's been disseminating to students for 30 years. The narrator observes:

To his own surprise, Abe Ravelstein then found himself writing the book he had signed up to do. The surprise was general among his friends and the three or four generations of students he had trained. Some of these disapproved. They opposed what they saw as the popularization, or cheapening, of his ideas. But teaching, even if you are teaching Plato or Lucretius or Machiavelli or Bacon, is a kind of popularization (p. 22).

Poetry Reading at Literary Life

FYI for locals: I'll be reading my first-ever published poem ("The Temptation of Icicles") as part of the Literary Life Chapbook Celebration, an event to launch the chapbook of select poems from their First Annual Poetry Contest. Here are the details:

LITERARY LIFE CHAPBOOK CELEBRATION

Wednesday, May 27th, at 7pm

As you may remember, we recently announced the winners of the First Annual Literary Life Bookstore Poetry Contest, judged by Heather Sellers. Now, you can read the award-winning poems, along with a few select poetry contest entries, in our new chapbook, available for purchase in the bookstore. Enjoy a bit of bubbly (and breads + spreads!) as we listen to a few of the poets read their works, mingle with like-minded literary peers, and peruse the bookstore shelves. For more information, call us at 616.458.8418, or email us at info@literarylifebookstore.com.

The book will include cover art by local artist Rick Beerhorst. (Some Fors Clavigera readers might recognize Beerhorst's work from the etchings that appear in Stanley Hauerwas' Cross-Shattered Christ.) In fact, the Beerhorsts live just around the corner from us and kindly loaned us spigots to tap our maple trees this spring. This is yet another taste of how delightfully local and rooted this whole project is, spawned by the hospitality of Literary Life.

What's Right with the Prosperity Gospel?

Some Fors Clavigera readers might be interested in a new little article of mine just published by the good folks at Catapult magazine: "Abundance for All: What's Right with the Prosperity Gospel?." It's part of an issue devoted to "Life Abundant."

This piece began it's life as a chapel talk at Calvin College in a sermon series on "God's Economy." It grows out of my continued interest in looking for points of intersection between the pentecostal and Reformed traditions.

Catholic Republicans?: Brooks on Ford

David Brooks meditation today on filmmaker, John Ford, is worth a read. As he rightly notes, Ford's "westerns" are not about the rugged individualism that has captured the Ayn-Randish imaginations of the Republican party. As Brooks comments,

the greatest of all Western directors, John Ford, actually used Westerns to tell a different story. Ford’s movies didn’t really celebrate the rugged individual. They celebrated civic order.

For example, in Ford’s 1946 movie, “My Darling Clementine,” Henry Fonda plays Wyatt Earp, the marshal who tamed Tombstone. But the movie isn’t really about the gunfight and the lone bravery of a heroic man. It’s about how decent people build a town. Much of the movie is about how the townsfolk put up a church, hire a teacher, enjoy Shakespeare, get a surgeon and work to improve their manners.

The movie, in other words, is really about religion, education, science, culture, etiquette and rule of law — the pillars of community. In Ford’s movie, as in real life, the story of Western settlement is the story of community-building.

There's an important explanation of this that Brooks doesn't cite: Ford was a Catholic. The lone cowboy that characterizes most other westerns is a distinctly Protestant, and therefore deeply American, phenomenon. Ford's western cinematic imagination stands out, I would suggest, because it is implicitly informed by the communitarianism of the the Catholic tradition. For a lucid and insightful exploration of this thesis, see Richard Blake's marvelous book, Afterimage: The Indelible Catholic Imagination of Six American Filmmakers (chapter 5).

The Death of Philosophers

Since we've been thinking about the end of philosophy (and the end of the university), it might be appropriate to note a book about the end of philosophers: Simon Critchley's The Book of Dead Philosophers--a compendium of the deaths (and lives) of 190 philosophers, from the Pre-Socratics to relative contemporaries like Jacques Derrida and Dominique Janicaud.

It's one of those books that just about any adequate philosopher could pull off, given the concept--any philosopher, that is, with a year off at the Getty, granting the leisure to browse Wikipedia and an array of philosophical biographies. There's nothing particularly profound or brilliant about Critchley's execution of the concept. And given that it's appearing from Vintage, I was expecting some kind of literary heft, some sort of creative punch. But that never materialized. Indeed, I think the book is a bit like a Will Ferrell movie: the trailer is much better than the movie. In this case, the book's project (and dark humor) is better appreciated in the brief visual distillation that appeared in the February issue of The Believer.

And yet we have the book. So I suppose, in addition to the concept and the leisure to do a bunch of legwork, you'd need a third element: to be a philosopher in Manhattan who cleary has friends in New York literary circles.

That said, it is also undeniably just the sort of book that you can't put down: the plethora of brief entries grants immediate satisfaction. Curious little tidbits show up on each page in an easy-to-digest format. I don't deny that Critchley has done his homework, and I could see this book making for entertaining reading in an Intro to Philosophy class. But when Critchley does get down to being somewhat philosophical, I find he is a bit sloppy. His rejection of Christian conceptions of death (and afterlife), for instance, are simplistic, naive, and rejected with such animated disdain that methinks he doth protest too much. Or consider his plea at the end of the book for a recovery of "creatureliness"--though he wants "a less theistic variant of this thought," which simply amounts to saying "human existence is limited." Well, first, I'm not sure what "less" theistic could mean. Is there a sliding scale of "theistic-ness?" Is there a similar one for pregancy? Second, why invoke the theological capital loaded in the term "creatureliness" if all you're after is "limits?" Is that the best Critchley's non-theistic imagination can come up with? If you don't want the theology, then get your own lexicon. Otherwise, own up to the fact that you're living on borrowed capital.

Finally, while I have no interest in stoking the fires of animosity between "analytic" and "continental" philosophy, I do find myself sympathetic to a diagnosis and claim that Critchley offers near the end of the book, in an entry on A.J. Ayer:

When one considers influential analytic philosophers like Quine, Donald Davidson or John Rawls, it is clear that they led wonderfully successful and influential professional lives and died in an undramatic manner which has absolutely no bearing on their philosophical views. By contrast, if one considers Continental philosophers like Arendt, Foucault or Derrida, it's not so much the case that they led more complex and interesting lives and had more dramatic deaths, but rather that the line between philosophy and life is much harder to draw.

I often--at least lately--find myself disenchanted with my "profession," which tends to reduce philosophy to puzzle-solving. Then--even worse--it convinces some of our best and brightest that philosophy is puzzle-solving, a game we play which has little bearing on either wisdom or a way of life. As a result, "serious" students of philosophy retreat into narrow logical enclaves to parse the Getttier problem and then pride themselves on their syllogisms.

So I find myself sympathetic when Critchley writes:

The idea that philosophy is something transformative or disruptive of a self is...a commonplace in and after antiquity. To this extent, sentences of death, exile or punishment imposed on philosophers seem to respond to a deep need that philosophy and life should fit together, but that its transformative power can come at the cost of one's life. To this extent, Alasdair MacIntyre is surely justified when he writes, "Imprisoning philosophy within the professionalizations and specializations of an institutionalized curriculum, after the manner of our contemporary European and North American culture, is arguably a good deal more effective in neutralizing its effects than either religious censorship or political terror." The effect of the professionalization of philosophy is the sense that it does not and should not matter to the conduct of one's life.

While teaching Plato's Apology this semester--which recounts Socrates' (unsuccessful) defense of his vocation--I was uncomfortably reminded that nobody is going to be executed for improperly exegeting Husserl's Krisis texts or for failures in modal logic. Despite my quibbles with Critchley's book, it has got me thinking that any philosophy worth pursuing should be one worth dying for--and that should be especially true of that scandalous notion of a Christian philosophy, a cruciform philosophy for which martyrdom should, ironically, "make sense."

The End of the University?

The New York Times op-ed page is becoming rather apocalyptic. First we had David Brooks' pontificating on the "End of Philosophy;" now the NYT offers an op-ed from Mark C. Taylor on "The End of the University As We Know It." Any undergraduate contemplating graduate education shouldn't be surprised by Taylor's sobering take on the state of graduate education--unless your undergraduate professors have had their head in the sand. (My default stance is to generally discourage students from going to grad school.) As Taylor rightly notes,

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.

But Taylor's prescription for re-tooled graduate training also spills over into a prescribed reconfiguration of undergraduate education as well. His first agenda item for reform is to:

Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.

I'm very sympathetic to trying to move beyond the department-as-fortress model which currently dominates higher education, despite all of our talk of interdisciplinarity. While we might have a veneer of cross-disciplinary collaboration, the department-as-fortress rears its ugly head whenever we start talking about curricular reform (say, revising the core curriculum of a college)--very quickly principled discussion of what constitutes a good education devolves into a matter of protecting faculty "lines" in "our" department. Thus Taylor recognizes that such a revision of the curriculum would also require his second prescription:

Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic challenges. These vexing practical problems cannot be adequately addressed without also considering important philosophical, religious and ethical issues. After all, beliefs shape practices as much as practices shape beliefs.

This all sounds well and good and provocative and intriguing and exciting (indeed, something like this is exactly what Derrida was trying to encourage at the College Internationale de Philosophie in Paris). However, when you start poking this idea just a bit, some questions emerge.

Let's say we have a cross-disciplinary faculty group that constitutes "the Water Program." We've brought these faculty together from a range of disciplines in order to tackle this "problem" from a number of different perspectives, yet collaboratively (rather than holed up in different corners of the university). So one scholar will be considering biological issues, another political issues, another aesthetic questions, another ethical and philosophical issues and so. Sounds fabulous. But where did these scholars receive their training in biology, political science, and philosophy? In the "Drought" program that existed seven years ago? Or the "Oil" program from 14 years ago? Or that ancient program in "Security" from 21 years ago? While Taylor's vision of collaboration is welcomed, it still remains parasitic: it needs and presumes some kind of rigorous disciplinary formation that will produce the scholars who can then bring such expertise to the "problem" at hand.

I'm very sympathetic to Taylor's re-imagining of the shape of the university, but I don't think abolishing (something like) disciplinary departments will solve the problem. We're going to have to get just a little more creative than that.

The End of Which Philosophy? On David Brooks

David Brooks' column today, "The End of Philosophy," is a tad over-billed. I think he's right to highlight that recent work in neuroscience, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology has increasingly made us appreciate that we human animals make our way in the world not primarily as "thinking things;" rather, our conscious, intentional choices and actions are just the tip of an unconscious iceberg of pre-cognitive intentionality of a different sort. (In fact, it's more like a snowball on the tip of the iceberg.) As Timothy Wilson, John Bargh and others have noted, we are oriented to the world in all sorts of ways that are pre-conscious--what Bargh and Chartrand refer to as the "unbearable automaticity of being." Indeed, Brooks himself is familiar with this literature as seen in an old column on baseball. I think this is right on the money.

But Brooks over-reaches when he bills this as "the end of philosophy." Whose philosophy? Which ethics? Brooks is absolutely right that this comes as a challenge to overly "intellectualist" models of the human person and human action--pictures of our being-in-the-world that construe us as always and only thinking, deliberating machines. But that is an increasingly small school of philosophy. Indeed, it's philosophers (from Heidegger to Merleau-Ponty) who have challenged just such an "intellectualist," cognitivist, top-heavy picture of the human person. In fact, one can find philosopher Charles Taylor articulate just such a critique of "intellectualism" in an important essay on Pierre Bourdieu, "To Follow a Rule."

So Brooks eulogy for philosophy is a little premature. And the philosophy that "ends" with these insights is well lost.

"I feel the need--the need for speed"

It's almost disturbing how many times in a day I find quotes from Top Gun making their way to the tip of my tongue. (This is one of the aspects I recall from The Reluctant Fundamentalist: how young financial analysts spoke in Top-Gun-ese to one another with such fluency and understanding, like a secret language insulated from generations ahead and behind.)

Sadly (why "sadly?"), I don't think any movie seeped into my conciousness (and unconscious) like Top Gun. Even now, I can't resist the allure when it's playing on TBS. A couple of years ago I made a pilgrimmage to the bar in San Diego which was home to the famous "carnal knowledge" scene. Indeed, it was a treat for me to introduce my two older boys to the movie about a year ago--though I think they remain puzzled my its special spell on me (what's their Top Gun?).

What is it about the movie? How is it that Tom Cruise still seems to just ooze cool when I watch it (leaving Kelly McGillis hanging in that elevator scene)? That Goose seems like a friend to die for, whose own death is heartbreaking? Or is it the fact that this was the first silhouette of a kiss I saw that involved a tongue (!)? I confess I lack any critical capacity on these questions. It's too close to me--too tightly woven into the warp-and-woof of my memory and self-understanding.

Indeed, it shapes my language. The quips and tropes of the movie come to me like the cadences of the Book of Common Prayer. Whereas my younger brother, fascinated with weapons and war, could quote every bit of dialogue from First Blood, I absorbed the dialogue of Top Gun like a second language. What a treat, then, for me to find this page at IMDB.com which, in archiving "memorable quotes" from the movie, seems to pretty much cover the entire film. It's hard to select any particular favorites, but who can forget:

Charlie: Excuse me, Lieutenant. Is there something wrong?
Maverick: Yes ma'am, the data on the MiG is inaccurate.
Charlie: How's that, Lieutenant?
Maverick: Well, I just happened to see a MiG 28 do a...
Goose: We!
Maverick: Uh, sorry Goose. WE happened to see a MiG 28 do a 4g negative dive.
Charlie: Where did you see this?
Maverick: Uh, that's classified.
Charlie: It's what?
Maverick: It's classified. I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.

or this exhcange (followed by Val Kilmer's weird jaw clench):

Iceman: You two really are cowboys.
Maverick: What's your problem, Kazanski?
Iceman: You're everyone's problem. That's because every time you go up in the air, you're unsafe. I don't like you because you're dangerous.
Maverick: That's right! Ice... man. I am dangerous.

These and a hundred others could roll off my tongue without thinking about it. I suppose the only thing that's "sad" about this is that the Psalms don't come to my lips nearly as easily.

Wolterstorff Redux: An Update

As I noted earlier, I made several contributions to the Immanent Frame symposium on Wolterstorff's Justice: Rights and Wrongs. Wolterstorff generously wrote a response to those three pieces entitled "The Fine Texture: A Response to Smith." And Immanent Frame has now posted my reply to Wolterstorff, "'Bob and Weave': A Response to Wolterstorff." Here's a snippet:

Nicholas Wolterstorff’s calm, careful, humble response to my posts might make me look like an overly pugilistic polemicist. But I think he’s just from a different school of pugilism. (As a Canadian and long-time hockey player, I think pugilism is a great way to spend a Friday night, with beers afterward.) Wolterstorff is a careful student of the “bob and weave” school of philosophical polemics, turning ill-advised haymakers into merely glancing blows. I, on the other hand, tend to be a student of the George Foreman school of philosophical polemics (and frequent user of his grills to boot!): I’m easily sucked in by rope-a-dopes. Why stop now?

Read the rest of "'Bob and Weave': A Response to Wolterstorff."

Post-Secular Conference at Yale

Folks on the East Coast might be interested in attending an upcoming conference at the MacMillan Center at Yale University, "Exploring the Post-Secular," April 3-4, 2009. It's free and open to the public.

It's a working conference, bringing together an interdisciplinary collection of scholars to share drafts of what will eventually be chapters of a book. I'll be presenting a paper on the Friday afternoon, entitled "Secular Liturgies and the Prospects for a 'Post-Secular' Social Science." (I don't know if I'll have time to discuss it--my draft is 40 pp. long--but a long section of the paper explores the "secular liturgies" found in the so-called 'postmodern' literature of David Foster Wallace, Nicholson Baker, and Cormac McCarthy.)

The context or rationale for the conference is described this way:

There has been a great deal of talk in recent years suggesting that we have entered a “post-secular” age. Much of this is a response to the resurgence of politicized religion on the world scene. But what, if anything, does the term “post-secular” even mean? Have we really entered into a post-secular age? And if so, what implications, if any, does this have for the social sciences? Do these developments imply a new approach to the study of religion? A wholesale reconstruction of social science? A shift towards social philosophy? Is there such a thing as “post-secular social science”?

This conference brings together a number of analysts of religion and its entanglements with the world in an attempt to assess these questions. We will address the possible meanings of religion and of the various terms with roots in the term “secular”: secularism, secularity, secularization. Without some grappling with the question of what religion is, it is very difficult to say what secularity or secularization might entail. We will explore the extent to which the “return of religion” is a product of an actual upsurge of religiosity around the world as opposed to greater scholarly attention to religion. We will also examine the ways in which the global religious situation may compel us to reconsider how we think about both religion and social science.

A pdf of the program and schedule is available here. It includes a contact for registration and further information.

The meeting is co-sponsored by the MacMillan Center Initiative on Religion, Politics, and Society, the Center for Comparative Research at Yale University, the Social Science Research Council, and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

A-Political Science?

NPR commentators this morning seem positively giddy about the news that today President Obama will sign an order overturning the Bush administration's restrictions on embryonic stem cell research. They seemed particularly fond of the mantra that this administration would be guided by "science, not politics"--and that Obama's administration would further "separate" science and politics.

This, of course, is taken to be the "enlightened" position, in contrast to the neanderthal policies of the Bush administration which let science be controlled by political ideology. In other words, according to this line, science under Bush was governed and controlled by politics. Instead, we need to liberate science from such unscientific controls--we need to liberate science to be a-political. Indeed, it seems that Obama will suggest the inverse: that our politics and policy needs to be governed by science. The paragons of the Enlightenment couldn't have put it any better.

But methinks this Enlightenment could use a little further enlightenment. Perhaps Obama's address will be more nuanced than the NPR buzz about it, but to suggest the liberation of science from politics is a naive conceit. There is no a-political science. (I might suggest that David Axelrod add a couple of books to the Air Force One library: Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern and Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy). That's not to say, of course, that science can't be hijacked by ideology; clearly it can. But the alternative to ideological science is not pure, a-political science. The best we can hope for is an honest, attentive science driven by "good" politics--and the latter, of course, is the source of much debate. The NPR/Democratic ruse about a pure, a-political science indicates a naive politics at best.

Proof(s) of Happiness, Books of Sadness

I've just finished correcting the page proofs for The Devil Reads Derrida--and the proofs for Desiring the Kingdom are now staring at me from the desk with an accusatory glare.

This is my favorite stage of book production. The manuscripts were sent off months ago with a "Good riddance!" of exhaustion and frustration, cast out into the world with an angst and insecurity that masks itself in temerity. By that time, the manuscript--usually overdue--has been hanging around like a smelly uncle who wore out his welcome months ago. During the final stages, all of its blemishes and failures and irritating ticks swell and overwhelm your perception of the book, so you tell yourself that you're just "too close" to it and look forward to seeing it with fresh eyes upon its return to your desk.

By the time a marked-up, copy-edited version of the manuscript is returned, it's just a more blemished, disheartening version of what you sent off. Except now an editor--sometimes with red pencil--has seen all the same failures and pockmarks. Your worst fears are confirmed and now you're mired in attention to these details, struggling to still find that "distance" you were hoping for. It still reeks of that unwelcome uncle. It even still looks the same--it looks like a document you generated from your printer, or it's simply a photocopied version of your manuscript. This doesn't feel any closer to being a book; it feels even further away.

But then a few months pass. You're quite glad to have sort of forgotten about the thing. And then a box arrives: crisp, taped, with a distinct shape, the publisher's address emblazoned on the top of the label. You know what's inside: the page proofs.

It's hard to articulate the transformation that takes place. For me, it recalls the experience of moving from dot matrix printers to the crisp Times New Roman of laser printers. My academic career tracked this development. I've gone from having an electric typewriter, to an amped-up version of an electric typewriter that actually had a kind of disk system, to a dot matrix printer that rattled its high-speed labor across reams of paper connected by a perforated fold. Dot matrix already wowed me a bit: here was my introduction to fonts. But then I saw someone printing with a laser printer in a Times New Roman that looked like a book! This seemed like the grail itself: the work spit out from the laser printer seemed to come with the imprimatur of "publishing."

When I finally finished my master's thesis, I felt like this was a sort of coming of age because it was printed on a laser printer in Times New Roman. It will seem crazy, but this was a gift to me, in a very tangible way. At the time (indeed, during the entirety of my master's degree), I was working the night shift at a feedmill in Cambridge, Ontario. The business manager was incredibly kind to me, and offered to let me print my thesis from his laser printer. I was thrilled and grateful. I had never seen the words in crisp Times New Roman during the whole process, and here at the end, it emerged from the printer with the shape of what felt like "a book." (It would later be published as The Fall of Interpretation.)

Now we're used to the banality of Times New Roman. That's the mundane shape of the manuscripts that leave our desk. But I'll never tire of cracking open the page proofs. This "thing" that's been hanging around your neck like a millstone, sometimes for years, now looks like a book. I even love the marginal cut lines and marks for the printer. It's always made me feel like "a writer."

And so I relish page proofs. Though I also enjoy it while I can, because I know what's coming: that inevitable, post-partum-like depression when the actual book is in your hands.

On Wolterstorff's "Justice" @ Immanent Frame

The Immanent Frame is staging an interdisciplinary symposium on Nicholas Wolterstorff's magnum opus, Justice: Rights and Wrongs--in part, no doubt, because Wolterstorff argues that there can be no sufficient secular grounding of rights.

I'll be contributing several posts to the symposium. The first--"The Paucity of Secularism?"--is online today. The next couple will appear throughout this week. The ensuing posts will begin to articulate a critique of the project--or at least some of the readings that undergird the project.

OK, You're Offended. And...?

As yet another sign that I'm getting old, crotchety, and increasingly conservative, I resonated with Mark Bauerlein's reflections on David Horowitz's recent visit to Emory. Horowitz is an itinerant conservative provocateur who just loves to raise the hackles of soppy liberals. But Bauerlein's observations resonate with what I've seen, too:

Most of them [attendees] were young, probably undergraduates, and they seemed bright and engaged. Somehow or some way in their education they seem to have assimilated the notion that being offended (or not being offended) forms a significant part of intellectual exchange. If someone says something you don’t like, something that distresses you personally, you should say so. If someone knocks your religion, tell them that you are, precisely, offended. If someone’s words cause you discomfort, that inner reaction itself is worth reciting.

Is this a new forensic among college students? Back in the early-80s, I can’t remember anybody my age giving the “I’m offended” response. If it were an event like this one, people would shoot back with substance and evidence. And if they didn’t have the goods, they might just mumble under their breath, “Kiss my —-” and walk out. The “I’m offended” reply would have been understood as a capitulation, not a valid rejoinder.

Needless to say, this is a poor educational outcome. Students need thicker skins, and they need to get past their offense feelings. Don’t fetishize them — let them go, and then pose sharp questions and make better arguments. Make yourself skilled in the heat of verbal battle. That’s hard to do, though, if you’re caught up in your sensitivities.

[Compare the response of these "offended" undergraduates to the response of Daniel Dennett to Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga at a recent meeting of the APA, as recounted in "An Opinionated Play-by-Play of Plantinga-Dennett Exchange."]

Philosopher in Residence at ...?

A colleague pointed me to this obituary for Gerald Myers, who held what sounds like a delightful post: Philosopher in Residence at the American Dance Festival. Sounds like a sweet gig. This got me thinking about some other creative possibilities I could imagine taking up with joy:

• Philosopher in Residence at the Franciscan Winery
• Philosopher in Residence at the Culinary Institute of America
• Philosopher in Residence at the Paris Review
• Philosopher in Residence at the Biltmore Estate

But if I'm honest with myself, given my class and station in life, it's more likely I'd be appointed:

• Philosopher in Residence at Talladega Superspeedway
  

The End of (Poetic) Greatness?

When Stanley Hauerwas was told that Time magazine, in 2001, had chosen him as "America's best theologian," he quickly retorted: "'Best' is not a theological category."

That 'category' discomfiture came to mind as I was reading David Orr's provocative piece, "The Great(ness) Game," in this weekend NYTBR. Orr raises the carrot that teases the aspiring poet: proverbial, elusive "greatness." He well notes the vagaries of the term, the fickleness of peer evaluation, and how the vicissitudes of time can play havoc with such ranking. But in particular, he's concerned with present greatness--the fate of greatness in American poetry which, he worries, might be going the way of the dodo. Not unsurprisingly, he lays the blame at the feet of "postmodernism":

The problem is that over the course of the 20th century, greatness has turned out to be an increasingly blurry business. In part, that’s a reflection of the standard narrative of postmodernism, according to which all uppercase ideals — Truth, Beauty, Justice — must come in for questioning. But the difficulty with poetic greatness has to do with more than the talking points of the contemporary culture wars. Greatness is — and indeed, has always been — a tangle of occasionally incompatible concepts, most of which depend upon placing the burden of “greatness” on different parts of the artistic process. Does being “great” simply mean writing poems that are “great”? If so, how many? Or does “greatness” mean having a sufficiently “great” project? If you have such a project, can you be “great” while writing poems that are only “good” (and maybe even a little “boring”)? Is being a “great” poet the same as being a “major” poet? Are “great” poets necessarily “serious” poets? These are all good questions to which nobody has had very convincing answers.

But postmodernism is not the enemy of Truth, Beauty, Justice, and the American Way that Orr makes it out to be. However, what has happened is that we now appreciate that the criterion for what counts as truth, beauty, and justice is not some natural kind, not an objective given. What's true and beautiful and good is recognized as such only against a background of a shared narrative or story. The situation isn't necessarily nihilistic; it's just pluralistic. The loss that Orr laments is the loss of a dominant, WASPy set of criteria that dominated American letters in times past (Updike's death might signal the end of a regime in this regard). Its dissolution might entail the end of unanimous "greats," but not greatness as such.

More on Updike, with Nicholson Baker

There have been some wonderful tributes to Updike around the horn, but I think my favorite feature so far has been the Guardian's moving montage, "John Updike: A Life in Pictures," a chronological journey that well captures Updike's charm and humanity.

But I thought Nicholson Baker's terse, profound comment on NPR best captured the sense of what we've lost: "It's just shocking when a very intelligent person is no longer looking out at the same world that you are."

That took me back to Baker's U and I (1991), his hilarious, self-absorbed-yet-generous, back-handed homage that chronicles a young writer's obsession with the elder statesmen ("U" being Updike, and "I" being Baker). Reading the opening chapters on the day of Updike's death was eerie, as Baker is struggling with whether to write an essay on Updike while he's still alive. Startled and prompted by the death of Donald Barthleme, Baker comes to a realization:

I suddenly got a glimpse of how disassembled and undirected and simply bereft I would feel if I were to learn suddenly through the Associated Press of Updike's death.

I remember that sensation. It was exactly how I felt upon learning of the death of Jacques Derrida, while engaged in finishing a book entitled Jacques Derrida: Live Theory. And it was exactly as Baker commented: what one couldn't quite get used to was the fact that one would no longer hear from this writer, no longer get their take on the world we shared. The spigot had been turned off (and goodness knows both Updike and Derrida has voluminous wells and unrestricted spigots). Sure, the archives will for years yield hitherto unseen materials, but these would never be new observations of the world continuing to unfold. And one would have to learn to write of them in a different tense: every present would have to be turned into a past.

Baker's U and I attests to this in a long meditation on a curious phrase of criticism:

That phrase which reviewers take such pains to include when delivering their judgments--when they say that among living writers so-and-so is or isn't of the first rank--had once seemed to me unnecessary: the writing, I had thought, was good or bad, no matter whether the writer was here or not. But now, after the news of Barthleme's death, this simple fact of presense or absence, which I had beun to recognize in a small way already, now became the single most important supplemental piece of information I felt I could know about a writer: more important than his age when he wrote a particular work, or his nationality, or his sex (forgive the pronoun), political leanings, even whether he did or did not have, in someone's opinion, any talent. Is he dead or alive?--just tell me that. [...] The living are always potentially thinking about and doing just what we are doing: being pulled through a touchless car wash, watching a pony chew a carrot, noticing that orange scaffolding has gone up around some prominent church. The conclusions they draw we know to be conclusions drawn from how things are now. Indeed, for me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo. The dead can be helpful, needless to say, but we can only guess sloppily about how they would react to this emergent particle of time, which is all the time we have.

So while Baker was contemplating a posthumous piece on Barthelme, his thoughts turn to Updike: "How fortunate I was to be alive when he was alive!" And the drive to produce U and I stems from an urgency and a hope: "All I wanted, all I counted on, was Updike's immortality."

John Updike, RIP

I could only respond in a gasp of surprise upon seeing the news of John Updike's death. He was, without question, one of America's great "men of letters," if you'll forgive the cliche. I appreciated his fiction and stories (I notice one of my earliest blog posts was on Updike's Early Stories), some his poetry, and even more so his criticism (just last night I was reading from his latest collection, Due Considerations). But his work for me always had a feel of an older generation without being old enough to seem exotic or distant enough to be a glimpse into foreign worlds--and yet, it also didn't feel like he was unveiling the world I inhabit. James Wolcott, while recently reviewing The Widows of Eastwick, provided an insightful analysis of how younger generations of writers related to Updike's towering presence, casting a long shadow over the American literary scene.

And yet I have always appreciated that Updike valued literature as a means of delight. Updike believed in fiction. As he noted in a late piece for "This I Believe" on NPR (included in Due Considerations):

A person believes various things at various times, even on the same day. At the age of 73, I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness. The special value of these indirect methods of communication -- as opposed to the value of factual reporting and analysis -- is one of precision. Oddly enough, the story or poem brings us closer to the actual texture and intricacy of experience.

In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity. I find in my own writing that only fiction -- and rarely, a poem -- fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel. In composing even such a frank and simple account as this profession of belief, I must fight against the sensation that I am simplifying and exploiting my own voice.

In a way, I'm still reeling from this news. It's surprising how the loss of such a figure can make one feel lonelier, that somehow a conversation has been shrunk, cut short, while there was still much more to say.