The Soul's Blood

Obviously, I am being terribly negligent toward this blog.  I’d plead that I have been actively engaged in a host of other activities, but I know in advance that such pleas of Being Busy will be unpersuasive to 1) those who Believe that the Present Blog should be one’s highest priority (a null set) or 2) those who have read the Annual Christmas letter and know that Your Humble Narrator never actually is Busy (a small set) or 3) those who really don’t care one way or the other (vast multitudes).  So, I will offer no excuses.

In the previous entry, I discussed the book I read on the way back from California.  As every attentive reader of this blog noted, this left open the question of which book I read on the way to California.  It was like a Reverse Cliffhanger—what happens Before?

Philip and Carol Zaleski, Prayer: A History

An amazing book.  Seriously amazing.  First off, the Zaleskis write with a remarkably fluidity and an incredible ear for a great anecdote.  For a book which sets out to detail every aspect of prayer, it was an extraordinarily smooth read.  Most religious books are either dense academic jargon or insipid feel-good exercises.  This is as good as writing about religion gets.

For the most part (the most part being about 90% of the book), the content was fascinating.  I’ve been rather devout ever since I can remember, and I have never learned as much about the nature of prayer as I did reading this book on a plane trip from the East to West Coast.  This was one of those books which opens up whole new vistas—it is very much akin to cutting down a bunch of trees which were obstructing a magnificent view.

The book is, as the title would suggest, a Grand Tour of Prayer.  Reading it, I was struck by how scientific the whole enterprise seemed.  Humanities types are not know for offering up scientific evidence, and scientists have great disdain of Proof by Anecdote.  But, after seeing the evidence marshaled in this manner, it was striking:  prayer exists is so many forms, in so many cultures, over so much time as a real experience of so many people that it would take a bizarre view of the world to say that there is nothing there.  Once you see the broad historical scope, there is a remarkable body of evidence that prayer is something fundamental and universal to the human condition.  Now why should that be?  Perhaps, prayer is actually something real?

Yet, the Zaleskis are also wonderfully quick to note, all prayer is not the same.  Buddhists and Christians are not doing the same thing when they pray.  Yet both do pray.  So, prayer is vastly more complicated than we tend to think.  Similarly, the heart of the book is a marvelous taxonomy of prayer: the refugee, the devotee, the ecstatic and the contemplative.  I’d never really thought about the types of prayer, but seeing it broken out like this revealed not just the omnipresence of prayer, but the complexity of prayer.

Now the quibble;  the only part of the book I thought was weak was two chapters in the last section, discussing prayer and healing and the efficacy of prayer.  It’s a foray into social science, and alas, it’s not great social science. There is a big difference between noting that prayer is something real by setting forth a wide array of anecdotal evidence for its existence, and thinking about whether prayer works by looking at a seemingly random small set of studies.

But, don’t let the quibble be anything other than a quibble.  This is a marvelous book for anyone who is at all interested in the nature of prayer.  And, much to my surprise, while it is clearly an academic book—I can easily imagine a class using this as a text—I have found myself praying vastly more often after reading it.  An academic book with practical effect.  Who knew such a thing existed?

When a True Genius Appears in the World

A few weeks back I had to take a trip out to California.  As I have noted here before, I carefully pick my Plane Books—books that look long and not necessarily all that thrilling, but which I really wish I had read.  Planes are the perfect place to read such books. 

This trip I made a horrible mistake in picking a book for the plane trip back.  It doesn’t seem all that hard to pick books which will meet the above criterion, but this time, I was way off.  In fact, I don’t think I have ever made a bigger mistake.

The book:  John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces

The problem:  It was a fantastic book.  I would have ripped right through it even if I wasn’t on a plane.  I wasted a whole plane trip reading a book I would have devoured had I ever read the first page before now.  Indeed, my foremost thought when reading it was, “How in the world is it possible that I have never read this book before?”  That was coupled with, “Where in the world did I ever get the idea that this was one of those dreary, but potentially worthwhile, bits of literature?”  The answers to those two questions are undoubtedly linked, but I have no idea what those answers might be.

This book is funny, very funny.  And thought-provoking.  It is interesting, well written, and has some of the most memorable characters you’ll ever meet.  The main character, Ignatius J Reilly is a modern day Falstaff.  Take Shakespeare’s character, put him amongst the working (or non-working as the case may be) classes of New Orleans in the 1960s and you would have this book.  Brilliantly done.  The cast of supporting characters are also worthy of Henry IV—no small feat, that. 

It’s a sprawling book, with, I suppose, something akin to a plot line, but really a series of minor plot lines weaving in and out.  Uniting the plots is Ignatius’ attempts to navigate a word in which he doesn’t quite belong.  A slothful holder of a Master’s degree in English, holed up in a room in his mother’s house, we see Ignatius simultaneously trying to write the grand philosophical work to end all philosophical works—he runs out of steam every time he gets a paragraph or two or random musings down on paper—and looking for a job to help pay the bills so his mother doesn’t lose the house in which he resides.  Reilly is unsuitable for work—in exactly the same way the Falstaff would have been unsuited for a desk job.  Reilly is larger than work, he is larger than life, there is simply a vast Too Muchness about him.  You would not want to know Ignatius J Reilly; you would think he was an Absolute Loser because, well, he is one.  He Dreams Big, can’t muster the energy for even the most mundane tasks, and yet, despite being everything you would not want your kid to become, it is hard not to secretly, very secretly (you wouldn’t want anyone to hear you think this), admire him a bit because he just doesn’t care that the world does not fit him.  He chalks his misfortunes up to Fortuna, and…well, I was going to say moves through life, but “moves” conveys a bit more purpose than Ignatius is wont to display.

Throughout the book, the other characters serve as a foil for the problems of Reilly—we watch others struggling or giving up the struggle to fit into the world, none of them terribly successful at it.  As Reilly muses toward the end of the novel:

Once a person was asked to step into this brutal century, anything could happen.  Everywhere there lurked pitfalls like Abelman [a customer of the factory in which Reilly briefly worked], the insipid Crusaders for Moorish Dignity, the Mancuso cretin [a policeman], Dorian Greene [a rather campy homosexual], newspaper reporters, strip-teasers, birds, photography, juvenile delinquents, Nazi pornographers. And especially Myrna Minkoff [a wannabe 60s radical].  The consumer products.  And especially Myrna Minkoff [yes, he repeats that sentence—Myrna is a real problem for Ignatius].

It is interesting to think at the end of a novel like this:  how much do I try to fit into the world?  How much of what I do is a deliberate attempt to shape my life so that I seem at home here?  What would be different if I simply woke up every morning, firmly convinced, that the world should fit me, that world should modify itself so that it was at home with me?  Imagine that you really believed that, that you really did wander through life unaware that there was something odd about your attitude toward the world, that it was singularly odd that you actually didn’t understand why you should adapt yourself to the world.  It’s a strange thought experiment.

From there, one gets to wondering why the world is the way it is.  And reading this coming off a semester reading Southern literature in my tutorial, it’s easy to see how there is a logical progression from Faulkner and Agee to Toole. 

And yet…is the world really all that bad?  Is fitting into a world of work and polite social interactions really all that bad?  Are we really living lives of quiet desperation (OK, that’s a Northerner’s line, but even still, it fits)?  I’m not so sure.  I like my computer and my iPod and the easy ability to buy books.  I like microwave ovens and cordless drills.  And is modern industrial life really such a high price to pay for the marvel of being able to read news about the Raiders on the internet while living on the East Coast?

At Least I know what Dexterity and Charisma are...

Charmides by Plato

This is the first dialogue in my collected works of Plato, so I have now officially embarked on my Life Quest (mentioned in an earlier post) to read the Collected Works of Plato.  Fare forward, and all that.

The subject of this dialogue is a Greek word (which I cannot read (it’s all Greek to me)), which, according to Benjamin Jowett, translator of Plato par excellence, can be translated as Temperance, Moderation, Modesty, Discretion or Wisdom.  In this dialogue, Socrates has a merry time (doesn’t he always?) asking people to define the term, and then watching as all the attempts at definition end up circular or absurd.

Obviously the people to whom Socrates is talk never played Dungeons and Dragons.  If they had, then they would have never attempted to define “Wisdom.”  When I was a lad and enamored of the game, I never did understand “Wisdom.”  For those not in The Know—in that most intricate game, every character is defined by scores on 6 attributes: strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution and charisma.  Five of those are easy to define; wisdom is not.  I never did figure out what wisdom was.  Clerics have to have a lot of it, but they don’t have to be intelligent.  Magicians have to be intelligent, but don’t have to be wise.  So, wisdom is that thing which people to whom you might go to for advice have.  And a person who has wisdom will be the sort of person of whom others ask advice.  So, wisdom is what wise people have.  Which is circular.  And I realized this when I was 12.

Thus by the time I hit my teenage years, I would have never played Socrates’ game in this dialogue.

Now, however, I want to play it.  It seems to me now that I do know what wisdom is.  But, I still can’t come up with a decent definition of it.  My dear friend, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, give this as the connotation of “wise”:  “suggests great understanding of people and of situations and unusual discernment and judgment in dealing with them.”  That sounds good.  But, then I ask:  how does one know if one has discerned and judged correctly?  Who can evaluate wisdom?  And the answer is obvious: wisdom is the ability to discern wisdom.  And suddenly I am playing both Socrates and Charmides in my own mind.

I flip the question a bit.  Suppose I wanted to become more wise.  What would I do?  If I read more, I can become more knowledgeable, but knowledge is not the same as wisdom.  If I practice giving advice, that does not make me more wise unless I have the ability to discern whether my advice is wise or not, and I would have to be wise to know his.  Solomon had to pray for wisdom, was given more wisdom than anyone in the land, and then went out and made some really stupid decisions.  Socrates was declared to be the wisest man alive by the Oracle (in a dialogue I will get to eventually in my tour of Plato), but concluded that the only thing that made him wise was that he knew he wasn’t wise. 

So here we have a desirable characteristic, something to which it seems everyone should aspire, and we can’t define it or figure out a way to acquire it.  Puzzling to say the least.

The Storyteller

Over the break, I read Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa.  This is the seventh novel by Llosa I have read—and I already own an eighth novel by him which I assume I will read sometime.  I have also read a collection of his non-fiction work.  I am thus reasonably certain that I enjoy reading Llosa.  (Well, it’s either a) I enjoy reading his work or b) I am supremely masochistic when it comes to reading.  I am reasonably confident that it is the former, but would entertain arguments that the latter is more accurate.)  So, having now finished eight books by Llosa, it seems reasonable that I would be able to answer a rather simple question:  What makes Llosa (a Nobel Laureate, no less) someone whose work is a pleasure to read?

And now the problem for the day.  I have no idea why I like Llosa.  None.  I have read eight books he wrote, but to the best of my recollection, I have never once recommended his work to anyone.  Part of the reason that I have never recommended him is that I would have a very hard time picking which book of his to recommend.  I’ve liked every one of them enough to think I should read another book.  Yet, they all have this quality about them, this undefined quality, which makes me think, “Well, I liked that book, but I am not really sure who else would like that book.” 

Consider the novel I just finished.  Young Peruvian author—who currently writes news blurbs, but wants to write novels—hooks up with his older, divorced, Bolivian Aunt.  (Don’t worry too much: there is no blood relation between the Young Peruvian and the Aunt.)  Meanwhile, the young Peruvian novelist regularly interacts with a scriptwriter for radio serials.  The Aunt and the Scriptwriter meet once, but otherwise the stories do not overlap.  Every other chapter in the novel is a short story which is the storyline from one of the radio serials written by the scriptwriter.  The main story meanders along in the odd numbered chapters.  Eventually young Peruvian and Aunt get married much to the distaste of the larger family.  The scriptwriter goes insane.  In the epilogue, we find out the marriage does not last.  End of story.

Now, I have a hard time imagining that anyone read the preceding paragraph and thought, “That is a book I simply must read.”  So, is it the prose style which makes the book sing?  It can’t be—the book was written in Spanish, so this is a translation, and his novels, all of which I have enjoyed, have different translators.

So, it must be something about the way the stories are told which makes him so compelling.  And that is what puzzles me—after seven novels, it seems like I should have some ability to describe what it is that makes Llosa novel so good, and yet I cannot.  It also seems like after seven novels, I should be able to tell someone, “you really ought to read book X.  It’s really good—I think you’ll like it.”  Not that I should be able to tell everyone that—but I should be able to tell someone that, right?

At this point, my inclination is to conclude with a recommendation that you, The Reader, should read Book X.  But then I think about the novels I have read, and I cannot figure out which title to substitute for X. 

After a lengthy pause, staring out my window, I arrived at the following, thoroughly unsatisfying conclusion the present post:

Dear Reader, Mario Vargas Llosa is a Nobel-prize Winning Peruvian novelist.  I have enjoyed every novel of his I have read.  You should try reading him.  A good place to start is (select one) [Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Death in the Andes, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, In Praise of the Stepmother, The Storyteller, The War of the End of the World, Who Killed Palomino Molero?]

And right after finishing that conclusion I realized, that all books are not equal.  So, really, start with The Storyteller if you like the idea of reading Peruvian short stories; The War of the End of the World if you like long Victorian British novels; In Praise of the Stepmother followed by The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (the latter is the sequel to the former, though I stumbled upon the latter before I realized it was the second in the series) if you like erotica; Death in the Andes if you like vaguely disturbing endings; or Aunt Julia if you like clever short stories which feel like they just continue after the story is done.

Next up on my Llosa reading list, by the way:  The Feast of the Goat.

A Tour of the Academy

I’m out in Davis, CA today, finishing up some details from my grandfather’s estate.  I had the afternoon free, so I wandered around the UC Davis campus.  I spent 10 years here, but I left in 1994.  So, it’s a bit strange.  The Economics department, for example, is in a new building, and a look at the faculty roster shows that there is only one professor still teaching from whom I took a class (in graduate school—none of my undergrad profs are still teaching).  There are two others for whom I was a TA.  And few others who were around when I was in grad school.  My old office is now a computer lab for Political Science (shudder).  I think they painted my old undergraduate dorm.  And the place I used to work when I was an undergrad is now a locked room with a mirrored window in the door—who knows what Top Secret activities take place where I used to run the VCRs for the campus.  (Note for young’ins—VCRs were like DVDs, but bigger and more awkward.)  The whole campus felt like that—eerily familiar, yet strikingly different.

So, thinking about colleges, it seems like a good time to review Riley’s The Faculty Lounges.  The subtitle tells all:  The Faculty Lounges and Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid For.  There are two problems with that title: 1) It ends in a preposition—a grammatical failing which always causes me pain, and 2) it is terribly misleading.  The Book should really be called:  The Faculty Lounge: Why Tenure Should be Abolished.   That title is honest, but wouldn’t sell as many books as the title the book actually has.  Such is capitalism.

This book, predictably enough, is not well liked by academics.  I decided to read it now rather than waiting for it to come out in paperback because I kept hearing people castigate it.  I don’t think the people castigating it have read it.

On the whole, there isn’t really all that much shocking in it; it’s not a terribly polemical book at all.  It takes a long and critical look at the rise of adjuncts (visiting faculty) and the problems of the tenure system.  I really have a hard time imagining anyone disagreeing with Riley’s assessment of the situation.  The debate is thus not whether there is a two-tiered system in the academy with a Select Few getting Lifetime Jobs and the Masses ending up in low-paid, low-prestige jobs with absolutely no job stability at best and a guarantee that the job won’t last more than 5 years as the norm.  The debate is what to do about it.  On the one side the well-meaning liberal academics think the solution is just to tenure more faculty.  Such an answer shows a rather shocking ignorance about the cost of such a plan.  On the other side is Riley and people like her, who argue that Tenure should be abolished.  After all, nobody else gets permanent jobs, so why should academics?  Abolishing tenure, Riley argues, would free up the academy, making it more flexible and responsive to students.  Not surprisingly, when you say to faculty that maybe tenure should be abolished, faculty get really agitated and make disparaging remarks about your book even if they haven’t read it.

I’ve read the book now.  It’s pretty good—not earth-shattering, and I didn’t learn all that much, but Riley organizes the facts in a nice way and she writes well.  If you want to read a book about the state of the modern academy, I have no hesitancy in recommending this book to you.

Am I persuaded?  Nope.  And neither, I suspect, are many other conservative academics.  You see, in the modern academy, tenure protects not just deadwood (the technical term for faculty who have retired on the job), but people with opinions which are really unpopular in academic circles.  That would be people like me.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I honestly don’t think I would get fired from Mount Holyoke because of my views.  Indeed, I think Mount Holyoke as an Institution likes having me around—it’s like at the zoo when they have one of those prehistoric-looking birds and everyone can say, “Oh, look at the strange bird over there.”  Having one religious conservative on campus is kinda cute.  And it shows how committed to diversity Mount Holyoke really, truly is—they even have a member of the Religious Right in the Economics Department.

So, the reason that I would argue strongly in favor of keeping tenure at MHC is not that I am worried about losing my job.  It is the other side of the coin—if I was wrong about that and I did lose my job, finding another job would not be as easy as it should.  The problem is the way the academic job market works.  Because schools cannot have a mandatory retirement age for tenured faculty, when schools go out to hire, they want to hire young faculty.  If you don’t hire young faculty at every chance you get, then you run a real danger of having a very old faculty down the road.  So, the market for 45 year old professors, let alone those in their 50s, is very, very thin.

This problem is what economists call a coordination failure.  Now if every school abolished tenure simultaneously, then the market would free up and there would be a market for 45 year old profs.  Perhaps a big one.  Indeed, I could probably get a raise in that new world.  But, now we are living in Fantasyland.  And that is where Riley missed the point—even if she is right that it would be better if there was no tenure, as a policy prescription it is DOA.  How is anyone going to coordinate a massive simultaneous abolition of tenure?

Moreover, Riley spends too little time thinking about what that new world would be like.  I have no idea how things would change in that new world, but it is not obvious that things will get better in any way that Riley or I would like.  The problem is that the academy, unlike most industries, has no real measure of productivity.  So, in the new post-tenure world, schools may scramble to adopt productivity measures to decide when to keep faculty, And it is quite possible that the productivity measures many schools will adopt will be counter-productive.  Class sizes?  Student teaching evaluations?  Performance on standardized tests? 

And (another) moreover, I am not at all persuaded that tenure is really the biggest problem facing the Academy these days.  The bigger problem is the very real question:  What exactly am I getting for $50,000 a year?  To that question, schools have no good answer.  We need a new articulation of the benefits of a 4-year undergraduate education, but the Powers that Be have not yet developed a language to describe it, partly, I suspect, because they don’t really know the answer themselves.  It’s a shame.  It’s not hard to articulate a reason why an expensive undergraduate education is the best thing you can do for yourself or your child, but I think many schools no longer believe in themselves, deep down they think they are frauds, so they buy off the students with nice dining halls and hope nobody notices.  Tenure is irrelevant to that larger problem.  Indeed a school which could forcefully articulate why it exists and charges so much and then put together a curriculum to back up that claim would do very well, even with a bunch of tenured professors.