Matter Notes: A lawyer's private notes on a legal matter; considered inviolate and nondisclosable. By metaphor and game, my occasional blog posts on literary matters. In both cases, a form of work product.

The War on the Humanities has Three Fronts (Part 2: Higher Education)

Christianity started out in Palestine as a fellowship; it moved to Greece and became a philosophy; it moved to Italy and became an institution; it moved to Europe and became a culture; it came to America and became an enterprise.
       – Richard Halverson, former chaplain of the United States Senate
       (sometimes erroneously attributed to Sam Pascoe)

Something similar can be said of higher education.  What was once, in its best and purest form, a fellowship, a culture, a utopian state governed by the life of the mind, Apollo’s gift to Akademos of a protected space where he could speak freely, even against the gods, without fear of punishment, is now, like everything else in America, a business.

I don’t mean to romanticize academia here.  I am, however, deferring to an ideal that has infused higher learning since Plato walked the groves.  Sure, some have tarnished and dishonored this ideal.  Scholars behave like everyone else does in intensely competitive environments, sometimes worse.  Mother Academia can be a cruel mistress.  Her children know her early, learn to love her through books and art and youthful science experiments, often understand themselves as having been born to this life of the mind, as belonging to it almost as a birthright.  They petition for her favor, sacrifice their youth to her demands, and frequently end up suffering the life-long consequences of her rejection and ill-use. 

Some become adjunct professors for pay that would make a beggar blush, or independent scholars desperately trying to do original research without resources or a university to call home.  Of course, they still love learning.  But now they curse the day they were born to this polity, which demands all and returns less each year.  Their pain is haunting and exquisite and an utter indictment of what higher education has become.  It is simply awful.

Seventy-six percent of all college and university teachers are adjuncts; the median pay is $2,700 per three-month course.  Which works out to an average of $900/month per three-month course.  That’s about $30/day, when you consider that college teachers work every day.  That’s less than the federal minimum wage.  Without health care or retirement benefits. 

So, yes, you are worth more to society pushing fast food across a counter than teaching the next generation about western civilization and its discontents.  I had to get that out of the way.

And that life of the mind?  The course load needed to scrape together something resembling survival makes it impossible to devote the necessary time to research and publishing to get a dice throw at a stable position.  It’s ghastly.  Are there compensations in the teaching itself?  Nobody likes to say this, but hardly. According to The New York Times, “Nearly half of all undergraduates in the United States arrive on campus needing remedial work before they can begin regular credit-bearing classes.”

It wasn’t always like that.  Sorry, but there’s really no polite way to put this: Mother Academia has been made into a whore. 

Who did this?  Who’s buying?

Let’s start with basics.  The right wing (see previous post) is part of the problem, but it is not the whole story.  It isn’t even most of the story.  The bigger story is the corporate culture which colonizes everything it comes into contact with.

Corporate culture has now taken over academic culture and destroyed it.  The Chinese did something similar with Tibet.  European colonists accomplished this in North America.  Overwhelm an area with a population that adheres to a different culture and language than the original inhabitants and watch the original culture die, or at least become so weak and marginal you have to squint to see it.

In America, everything is an enterprise, so why should our universities escape that fate?  Everything is thought of in terms of a business, and anything that resists that thought category is carved and distorted until it does – albeit freakishly – pass for one.  The model is all.  The only way to measure value is money.  If it doesn’t make money it doesn’t have the right to exist. 

But some things have no business being businesses.  Just because the capitalist model of competition and free markets sometimes results in better consumer products doesn’t mean it results in better higher education. 

I say “sometimes” because contrary to the received narrative, free market competition doesn’t reliably create better products.  Sometimes it does.  Sometimes it creates the shoddiest, cheapest-to-produce products that people will tolerate having to pay for.  Capitalism is utterly neutral on quality.  Profit matters over quality, and quality only matters to the extent that it generates profit.  That’s why you can now buy a 13 oz. can of vegetables for the same price you used to pay for a 16 oz. can.  That’s why competent customer service is largely a thing of the past.  You got a problem?  Talk to the automated phone tree and hope your particular issue happens to fit a preselect.  Or email the black hole.

The goal of business is to create profit; the goal of higher education is to create an educated population capable of critical thinking.  And no, you can’t use the same tool to do both, because teaching people to think critically produces value, not profit.  When money doesn’t measure value it distorts it beyond recognition.  Or it’s meaningless, like using a ruler to measure heat.  The problem is, higher education wants to have it both ways, which is unsustainable, and has only encouraged the population think of higher education as an expensive vocational program.  The result is corporate culture attempting to profit from this demand by pressuring universities (particularly public universities) to whore themselves out as glorified jobs programs. 

To the corporate class, if you have a hammer, everything not only looks like a nail, but like the same nail.  Unfortunately, those areas of human experience that can’t be transmogrified into a nail get shattered beyond recognition when the hammer hits.   That’s what we have with the present state of humanities education, and by extension, with higher education generally.  

How did the life of the mind become a corporate subsidiary?

The short answer is, state and federal government defunded the universities and the universities made a Faustian pact with private funding sources to stay afloat.  There’s more to it than that, but that’s the gist, as Debra Leigh Scott points out in “How the American University was Killed, in Five Easy Steps”.  Her piece is worth reading.  According to Scott, those five steps are:

1.  defund public higher education
2.  deprofessionalize and impoverish the professors (turn them into low wage earners while creating more PhDs than can find work in their fields)
3.  move in a managerial/administrative class who take over governance of the university
4.  move in corporate culture and corporate money
5.  destroy the students
           a) dumb down the curriculum
           b) make college unaffordable, creating a generation of debt slaves

Scott writes:

Within one generation, in five easy steps, not only have the scholars and intellectuals of the country been silenced and nearly wiped out, but the entire institution has been hijacked, and recreated as a machine through which future generations will ALL be impoverished, indebted and silenced. Now, low wage migrant professors teach repetitive courses they did not design to students who travel through on a kind of conveyor belt, only to be spit out, indebted and desperate into a jobless economy. 

She’s right.

It wasn’t the students or the scholars who did this (nor does Scott imply that it was).  I don’t know of anyone who completes a Ph.D. in the humanities (or sciences) who didn’t start that long, arduous path with a love of learning and intellectual excitement, with respect for the centuries-old tradition of scholars handing down the torch to new scholars – keeping the fire alive.

But before step one, before the rash of budget cuts began, it was everybody else.  It still is.  You see, once upon a time, in the early to mid-twentieth century, a college education really was a proxy for intelligence and critical thinking ability because the standards were high.  Colleges and universities attracted capable, intelligent people.  Employers therefore liked to hire college graduates.  Then everybody decided that if they went to college and “got a degree” they’d get jobs, too.  The GI bill and government made college affordable, the perceived status of getting a degree made it desirable, and those who wanted to pursue higher learning for its own sake, particularly in the humanities, slowly got marginalized and trampled by job seekers who saw the degree as a ticket to employment rather than as a marker for having acquired the level of critical thought that certain employers found attractive.  And so the demand for universities as job factories was created. 

This demand has resulted in a tragedy of the commons.  Now that everyone feels they must “get a degree” – including the 50% of entering students who need remedial work – the four year degree has become devalued to the point where in many cases it is viewed by employers as equivalent to a high school diploma from thirty years ago.  It’s also a Ponzi scheme. Where the first rush of government funded students to “get a degree” received something of value, those down the line now often get degrees with dummied down programs designed to attract the 50% who need remedial work.

Higher education is now a business, but it’s a business that devalues its own product in order to make money while using that product’s former prestige as a marketing hook.

For example, to attract students, humanities programs sell out with courses like “Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame” (University of South Carolina, Columbia) or “DJ History, Culture and Technique” (New York University) or “Arguing with Judge Judy” (UC Berkeley) or “Philosophy and Star Trek” (Georgetown University) or “Learning from YouTube” (Pitzer College).

Yes, I understand that the content of such courses can sometimes address serious topics.  The “Philosophy and Star Trek” course is “basically an introduction to certain topics in metaphysics and epistemology philosophy” and involves reading real philosophers.

But why must philosophical study be gussied up in pop culture trappings and made to sound easy to attract students?  And derision?  What purpose does it serve to pander to students looking for something that sounds easy?  Do STEM courses do this?  Isn’t philosophy fascinating enough in its own right? 

Partly as a result of this crap, the humanities now enjoy the reputation of being where people end up who aren’t smart enough to study engineering.  Go to any forum on recent college graduates and the job market and you’ll see humanities majors mocked and demonized and blamed for the unemployment rate, or told that humanities isn’t a real major because you can learn it on your own time by watching the Discovery Channel, or that it basically consists of useless fluff courses.  What the humanities don’t enjoy, and once had a near-monopoly on, was the reputation for fostering critical thinking.  They have also become a dumping ground for people who need something “easy” where “it’s all opinion anyway.”  And it’s higher education that’s allowed this to happen, by allowing corporate culture to redefine it as a product competing to attract customers.  That is why the fluffiest sounding courses are offered with a straight face, and it’s hard going to find a recent college graduate conversant with American history, the constitution, how government works, fluency in a foreign language, or with more than a superficial acquaintance with the Anglo-American literary tradition, or world history.

There is an impulse in higher education among scholars and serious humanities students to privilege and preserve the Platonic ideal.  There is an increasingly stronger impulse coming from market forces to destroy it.  Not because the humanities are threatening (that’s the right wing’s motive), but because, from the standpoint of profit, they are useless.   And because critical thought doesn’t sell, courses like “DJ History” get created purely to attract numbers.

There was a time when employers who wanted to profit off the labor of their employees invested in training those employees; that was a legitimate cost of doing business.  Some employers still do that, particularly in the legal field.  New lawyers at a law firm spend a year or two apprenticing with the senior lawyers to become useful.  Nobody expects recent law school graduates to know how to practice law, because law school is spent learning how to think like lawyer so the graduate can go out with the skills to learn any area of law.  There are so many areas, and so many varying state and federal laws, it simply isn’t practical for a law school to teach any one of them, or to predict where any particular student’s first position might be.

However, most employers have figured out that they can offload the cost of that training onto the universities.  Donate some software tools, encourage the professors to teach the complexities of their use, and hopefully produce job-ready (but not necessarily educated) graduates.  It saves corporations a ton of money.  And the universities have been happy to oblige.  This has helped create a vocational school-like university culture in which humanities studies are viewed as irrelevant at best and a career killer at worst.

I have occasionally met parents in the last few years waxing hysterical that their college-bound child wants to study the humanities.  When they learn of my English background, they always feel obligated to tell me that they will force the issue by only paying for “something practical.”  They don’t care if junior can’t write or think or even likes his major as long as he gets a job, and the sooner he gets out of college and into that job the better.

The problem is, they’re not serious about the jobs part.  If their only concern above all else was making sure their child gets a job, the jobs are over here.  And here.  And here.  And here.   Problem solved.  With the added bonus of escaping crushing student loan debt.

Except it isn’t.  Society goes begging for skilled artisans.  Work is plentiful, unlikely to be outsourced, and pays well – often better than what many college graduates make.  You can save enough money in a few years to study any “useless” humanities subject you like, as much as you like.  But the suggestion that a young person should learn a trade is usually met with great parental offense.  Some consider it an insult.  Parents want the “prestige” of a college degree and the guarantee of a job.  They want both dammit and will not settle for less! 

You see, large numbers of supposedly egalitarian Americans still look down on the trades.   They don’t want their children to practice them, because there’s a perception that it somehow means they “weren’t smart enough” for college.  So they’d prefer that universities bestow degrees that are guaranteed to lead to jobs, like trade schools do  – so long as they don’t have to call them that.  And they’d also prefer to send young people to college who are hopelessly unprepared and badly in need of remedial work and have the university teach them what they should have learned in high school, so long as they get a degree.

So on some level – and I really hope I’m not naïve here – parents see value in higher education, or at least – which is probably more accurate – in the appearance of having an education.    And appearance is often what they’re buying.   They don’t care about quality any more than capitalism does – they care that junior has a paper certifying that he’s “got a degree.”   In this sense, the schizophrenia in universities trying to have it both ways, trying to be jobs centers and institutions of higher learning, is mirrored in the parents.

By the way, one excellent use for MOOCs would be to provide remedial education to individuals who were shortchanged of a basic education in high school.  Rather than offer MOOCs for credit, universities could accept certain applicants contingent upon demonstrating a certain level of competence in subjects they are deficient in by passing MOOCs.  Once they demonstrate competence they can matriculate and start earning credit for college-level courses.  Truly dedicated students would benefit, slackers would get weeded out.

The idea of working at a trade, saving, and then going to university purely for the intellectual experience, which is what universities are supposed to be for, is a no go.  Why is this a difficult concept for so many people? 

We lack Great Britain’s tradition of working men’s colleges, and France’s overall respect for the humanities. We like the outward forms of prestige but have no understanding or respect for what supports those forms.  And so higher education, which, being a business, is no longer primarily concerned with educating, rushes to pander to these impulses.  It has to justify the investments it depends on.  So there are now degrees in just about every permutation of business (corporate communications, health care administration, hospitality administration, risk management, human resources management, general management) and credit courses in fluff parading as humanities study so nobody has to read and wrestle with the hard stuff.  And, yes, properly taught and approached, the humanities are hard stuff – they are the messy stuff of life.

There is an old story that there was a sign on the original academic groves that said “Let no one who is not a geometer enter.” (Let no one who cannot think geometrically enter).  It’s not a bad policy.  You had to demonstrate a certain intellectual competence before they’d let you into the party.  The groves were for higher thought and everybody knew it.  But such a policy would mean honoring the dignity of work as well as the value of higher education, because that’s what happens what you stop confusing them.  You respect both for what they are instead of trying to turn them into each other.  At least, that’s what should happen in a society that recognizes the worth of each individual as separate from how much profit they generate for somebody.  But we fail miserably there, too, as I’ll take up in Part 3.

Next: Part 3: Artists Themselves

 

The War on the Humanities Has Three Fronts (Part 1: The Right Wing)

OK, maybe more than three. Maybe a lot more.  But these three sola are doing a fantastic job without any help:

  1. The right wing generally (see, for example, its latest obsession with MOOCs)
  2. Higher education (which is basically a quisling for Corporate America)
  3. Artists themselves (this one merits its own blog, let alone a blog post)

So what are MOOCs and why are right wing governors obsessed with them?

MOOC stands for Massive Open On-line Course.  A MOOC is an on-line course that offers no college credit and no individual interaction with the instructor.  Many MOOCs are free.  If you have a burning desire to learn about life sciences, you can go to edX and, in seconds, sign up for “Introduction to Biology” from MIT.  Interested in ways of thinking about the last century?  Check out “Ideas of the 20th Century” from UTAustin and learn how “philosophy, art, literature and history shaped the last century and the world today.” 

MOOCs aren’t going away.  According to a New York Times piece by Laura Pappano that appeared on November 2, 2012, “edX, the nonprofit start-up from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has 370,000 students this fall in its first official courses. That’s nothing. Coursera, founded just last January, has reached more than 1.7 million . . . .” Udacity, another MOOC provider, attracted 150,000 students for a single course, “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.”

MOOCs are “massive” because each course is designed to reach a massive number of students.  Like mass-produced entertainment or fast food.  If you want to get exposure to a topic but don’t want or need the credential of a university degree, MOOCs provide an affordable, convenient way to do just that.  Some of them are terrific for just that.

So what’s not to like?

Notice I said “exposure to” not “education in.”  MOOCs do not provide the one to one Socratic interaction between student and professor that is so essential to developing the critical mindset necessary for serious humanities study, or the hands-on laboratory experience that is essential for students pursuing serious scientific study.  You can hear all about ideas but you can’t engage in live one on one debate and discussion of those ideas with the scholar teaching the course.  If it is a scholar teaching the course.  Udacity does not choose its instructors based on their academic research.  Oh, and most MOOCs are peer-graded, which has obvious problems.  Cheating is pandemic.

MOOCs have their uses, but like anything else, they have their limits.

In his recent Salon pieces, “The Internet Will Not Ruin College” and “Conservatives Declare War on College,” Andrew Leonard both embraces and warns about MOOCs.  Leonard is excited at the idea of having access to low or no cost education with a mouse click.  He also tips his hat to the backlash: what happens to the demand for university courses when millions of people can access the same course on-line for free?  What quality assurance is there from the venture capitalists who see this as a purely for profit venture?

I would add, what happens to diversity of thought and the marketplace of ideas when millions of people start learning about the Enlightenment and the French Revolution from the same single MOOC instructor, who is hired to generate profit?  That’s not an idle question. Udacity’s founder, Sebastian Thrun, recently told The Economist that “in 50 years there will be only ten universities left in the world.”  Is this a good thing?  What happens to the humanities when students might hear about a topic but no longer participate in critical analysis of that topic with an experienced scholar?  What happens then to the idea of having an educated citizenry? (Quaint, I know.)

Leonard doesn’t seem completely convinced of the doom scenarios, but he takes them seriously enough to say that MOOCs bear watching.  Higher Education is now being disrupted, like music and book publishing, and who knows how things will settle?

The one thing Leonard is wary of, though, is that unlike music and book publishing, this particular technological disruption is occurring in an entirely political context.  A right wing one.

That ought to bother anyone who values humanities studies.  You see, there’s a reason Texas governor Rick Perry, Florida governor Rick Scott, and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker are MOOC boosters.  They really really want public universities to offer MOOCs for credit.  Scott would like on-line degree-granting MOOC-centered universities.  One concern is, as Leonard notes, that MOOCs may be good at teaching basic algebra, but they do not teach critical thinking very well.  MOOCs inform much better than they educate.

Substituting MOOCs for public university courses would help make critical thought more inaccessible to more people, particularly people of modest means.  A cynic might suggest that would help more Republicans get elected.  And that’s why, although I’m intrigued by MOOCs qua MOOCs, and see value in them in some circumstances, I’m highly suspicious of the right’s sudden obsession with them.  When the right wing starts pushing MOOCs as an equivalent for higher education instead of as a sometimes useful adjunct to higher education, we need to pay attention, because the right has always been anti-education.  We humanities types understand that context matters.

I don’t know if right wing leaders like Rick Perry are stupid.  Perhaps they are.  Or perhaps, one should just diplomatically say that, like epic heroes, they embody their supporters’ most cherished values.  On the other hand, maybe they’re just weirdly gifted with the sort of sociopathic cleverness that allows them to collar the stupid vote.  Perry supposedly topped out with an unimpressive 2.5 GPA at college, leaving some to speculate that is the real reason he hates universities.  I’d be horrified if that were true, because that means, at some level, Perry actually does understand what a liberal arts education is, and values what he’s incapable of achieving so much that he wants to destroy it.  Didn’t Shakespeare write a play about that?

You see, Perry doesn’t just support MOOCs for college credit.  He governs the state whose Republican Party Platform seeks to eliminate critical thinking in the public schools:

Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

Outcome-Based Education (OBE) privileges learning to analyze over learning to memorize.  There’s a handy description here which quotes OBE founder William Spady explaining whether an acceptable OBE outcome would be the ability to list “the five causes of the Civil War.”  Spady responded, “No, sorry; that is not an exit outcome. But, ‘Identify and explain the fundamental causes and consequences of the Civil War’ would be an enabling outcome worth pursuing en route to some larger exit outcome.”

Apparently, learning to analyze fundamental causes and consequences of major American historical events is anathema to the Texas Republican Party, which helps explain why Perry just loves him some MOOCs.  A MOOC may provide a handy lecture on “the five causes of the Civil War,” which can be a starting point for discussion in a live classroom, but it doesn’t provide a way for its thousands of students to have that discussion with the instructor or to make their own attempts at analysis.  Watching somebody else’s presentation of facts or critical thinking is not the same as doing your own analysis and receiving responses in real time.  Watching lectures on the scientific method is not the same as going to a lab and actually doing science.

Some MOOCs provide a social media type platform that encourages users to communicate with each other, but it isn’t clear how much that approximates classroom give and take, and the instructor can’t be available individually to hundreds of thousands of students.  Is peer-to-peer on-line discussion likely to raise anybody’s understanding of a subject more effectively than teacher-student discussion?  At those numbers and at that level of instructor (non)interaction, wouldn’t it be just as effective and far more efficient to skip the MOOC and read a good textbook?  Students have been complaining for years about classes in which they might as well “just read the book” because the professor is inept.  If the value of the classroom is in the quality of interaction between teacher and student, and MOOCs don’t provide this, then what do MOOCs offer that books don’t?

Perry, however, may occupy exactly the sort of market niche that would benefit from a MOOC-saturated “education.”  After all, Perry believes that the American Revolution happened in the 16th century, that the voting age is 21, that creationism is science, and that Juarez is an American city.  There’s probably a MOOC for that.

But Perry isn’t alone in his MOOCs-for-credit obsession.  Florida governor Rick Scott and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker are also MOOC boosters.  Rick Scott, who pretty much hates the humanities, and has gone on record saying that the state of Florida doesn’t need anthropologists, received a proposal last November from a gubernatorial task force that included charging humanities majors higher tuition than STEM majors. (See section 22).

Florida faculty organized a petition against this proposal, which in part reads:

The central idea du jour emerging from the task force is a “differentiated tuition structure to support degree programs in strategic areas of emphasis.” The state, the task force argues, “should move away from uniform tuition rates … among all degree programs within a university.” Programs with no tuition increase would be those deemed “high skill, high demand, and high wage.” Liberal arts and social science topics (English, History, Political Science, Psychology, etc.) would cost students more, on the assumption that no one with such a degree has high skills, would ever be in high demand, and would ever earn a high wage, however “high” is defined. As Proctor [Representative William Proctor (R-St. Augustine), a task force member who also chairs the State Universities Appropriations Committee in Tallahassee] himself put it on October 29, “English is not a strategic discipline.” As tuition for such non-strategic disciplines increases, these programs would be slowly phased out, or at least severely diminished, as more students seek “strategic degrees.” This new thinking will supposedly solve the financial problems of Florida’s universities while somehow improving the economy of the state.

You can read more here.  And here.  

Awesome!  If your major has been vilified as leading to a hopeless life of poverty and emotional wreckage – I mean as “non-strategic” – you should absolutely be penalized by being forced to subsidize those students in majors perceived to lead to high paying jobs and satisfaction.  Particularly those engineering majors about to join firms facing layoffs, and those nursing majors who can’t find jobs.  Makes perfect sense!  That will teach those art history majors for not getting STEM degrees. 

To sweeten the deal, Scott decimated public higher education funding for five years straight, because, presumably as a matter of faith, he “doesn’t believe in tuition increases.” What he does apparently believe in is a society in which the ability to analyze skew ball policy for what it is and call out politicians like him on the profound social and cultural disconnects pervading American life as a result of such policies has been – if not eliminated – at least made more inaccessible to those of modest economic means.  By adding the burden of being economically penalized and psychologically shamed by being encouraged to see yourself as a drain on society for studying Chaucer, he’s fashioned a powerful one-two punch against humanities studies in Florida, the fourth most populous state in the USA. 

Because everyone knows we totally need lots of engineers and medical specialists who have absolutely no aptitude or interest in STEM fields, but got butt-kicked into that path by hysterical right wing demagogues, clueless parents manipulated by hysterical right wing demagogues, and smug Corporate America cretins who insist that everything in human experience can and must be distorted, “disrupted” and if necessary, destroyed, to fit the business model of the week.   That is absolutely who I want to design the bridges I drive on, the planes I fly on, and the medical technology used to save the lives of people I care about.   Somebody bullied and shamed into studying a STEM field, or who is in a STEM field solely because she can’t afford the tuition for philosophy.

Remember, Scott is also pushing MOOCs for college credit.

Do we want our institutions of higher education to function primarily as vocational schools? Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker does.  Walker would like to tie the funding of technical colleges to whether they grant the kinds of degrees industry wants.  “In higher education, that means not only degrees, but are young people getting degrees in jobs that are open and needed today, not just the jobs that the universities want to give us, or degrees that people want to give us?”

Because no Wisconsin student or university should dare expect funding for studying or doing research in a discipline that industry has no use for.  The state will decide what you can and cannot study based on current economic needs, Comrade!  Shades of the Soviet Union!

Naturally, Walker is also pushing the use of MOOCs for college credit.   They are perfect if you want to create a trained society rather than an educated one.

Anyone else see a pattern here?

The obvious problem is that techno-savvy venture capitalists, who have no idea what a humanities education is and ideally should be, have unwittingly taken on the conservative anti-education crowd as free riders, and now nobody has any incentive to stop the bus.  There’s market demand, there’s money to be made, there’s money to be saved in education budgets – who cares what it costs in education quality or cultural and intellectual capital?  What is that, anyway?  American capitalism isn’t about quality; it’s about getting the populace to confuse quality with whatever product happens to be making money for somebody at the moment.  The right wing agenda has always been anti-intellectual, and would prefer to see fewer people exposed to critical thinking. So dumbing down humanities courses with MOOCs is heady stuff.  Here there’s a match of convenience.

The close analysis of language, the mastery of critical thinking, the ability to clearly convey complex ideas in writing and to understand complex ideas in reading, the knowledge of the past, of languages and cultures, the ability to partake in “the best that has been thought and said” and to preserve culture from anarchy cannot be measured.  In our “pics or it didn’t happen” society, that’s fatal.  This is the stuff of civilization, the currency one needs to be an informed citizen in a participatory democracy.  Would people whose only exposure to higher education is through a series of MOOCs, people who attend public universities because they can’t afford tuition at elite schools, get handed debased currency?  I don’t know yet, it’s too early to tell, because the technology is sure to evolve.  But for now I’m troubled by who’s printing the money.

Next: Part 2: Higher Education

 

 

Hey, Karen – whatever happened to Point Of Ares?

This is kind of cool.  It’s also kind of uncool humblebraggy stuff.  I know that.  I don’t care, but I thought I’d give those who object to that sort of thing an opportunity to stop reading.  I’m fair like that.

This week I learned that Point Of Ares is still getting airplay, or rather, Internet play.  Smiles, charms, dark blessings and blackened pennies for all.  My band mates and I humbly thank you, well, well, well for such remembrances redelivered.  (Don’t ask me why poor mad Hamlet comes jumbling to mind.  He just does.)

Anyway, how I learned about it is cooler.

Bill (POA’s guitarist and my long-suffering spouse) entered our practice space the other night with a tall tale of his own.  He announced that while he was absorbed with some arcane, heavy-duty robotics research, or something equally magical and attention-demanding, he had an Internet radio station playing in the background. “Pandora or iHeart or something.”  He then heard “something familiar” but wasn’t paying much attention until the end of the song when he realized – “That’s us! They’re playing ‘Threle’.”  And then they played Rush’s “Limelight.” 

As we are all Rush fans, we were of course all smiles.

Bill missed the irony of being so consumed with academic work that he didn’t immediately recognize his own guitar solo, or that he’d “entered Threle.”  But readers of Enemy Glory know that is exactly how one crosses into Threle – you don’t really know you’re there until you are.  Like when a dream suddenly goes lucid.

For the interested, Ryan (POA’s more pragmatic drummer) found the source.  It was iHeart Radio’s progressive rock station.  Ryan then posted this on my Facebook wall:

iHeartRadio  prog rock RushVery strange and cool when you hear a song you wrote pop up on iHeartRadio on the Prog Rock channel (especially since its over 10 years old!) and then have the next song on the playlist be “Limelight” from Rush . . . not bad company to have!

Someone owes me a nickel in royalties!

You can listen to “Threle” here.

Point Of Ares has become such a private, internalized, closed circle affair that it was odd and cool to find out somebody is still listening.  We always had a steady indie following of Pagans, fantasy aficionados, Enemy Glory readers, and progressive/theatrical rock fans.  I know we still sell CDs.  Thanks for remembering.

So what’s new?  We’ve written a set of new, thematically related songs tentatively called Afternoon Hero that all in some way explore the exquisite tension between self-image and what’s left of that image after a healthy dose of societal scarring. You see yourself one way, society bitch slaps you into pretending to be something so foreign you no longer know yourself.  Sometimes you get music out of that awful dissonance.  Sometimes you just go mad.  The songs are funny and odd and angry and sad and sweet and rock as hard as anybody has a right to rock.

Recording is done.  Mixing is in progress.  No release date yet, but we plan to make them available soon.

 

Easter Morning

Girl grasped light in her wounded palms
and blackened eyes.

Sun rained like coins on an open cross
through the stained saint in the window.

She’s learning to lean on the sun’s secret colors,
to wash her feet in the invisible places
that no one can pierce.

Somewhere, years from now,
in another life,
she’ll gird herself with better blessings.

What Was the First English Word?

I’m feeling liminal and whimsical.  Not an obvious pairing.  Unless you feel like teasing out the thread of hardened whimsy that marks most borders.  Anyway, here’s what keeps coming.  (And this time it’s not a surreal Dutch image.  By the way, nobody’s claimed it, but that one appears to have returned to wherever it came from.)

It’s this.

What was the first English word?  Who said it?  Who heard it?  When?  What was it understood to mean? 

I don’t mean in the sense that responsible historians must answer this question.  It’s not the kind of question responsible historians are likely to take up.  But if I’m wrong, and there is a respectable academic answer to this, I’d love to know it. 

I mean it in the sense that John Ruskin impossibly dated the beginning of the fall of Venice:

I date the commencement of the Fall of Venice from the death of Carlo Zeno, 8th May, 1418; the _visible_ commencement from that of another of her noblest and wisest children, the Doge Tomaso Mocenigo, who expired five years later.  — The Stones of Venice (1851)

If that isn’t liminal and (unintentionally) whimsical, I don’t know what is.  It may even be accurate.  Depends who you ask.

The formation of English was gradual.  It evolved without troubling itself to be born.  There was no first word.  At various times in the 5th century, the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and other northern Europeans show up in what is now England.  They’re speaking various North Sea Germanic dialects that might or might not have been mutually understandable.  Some of the original inhabitants of this area spoke Latin, and, because of the Church, the educated classes continued to speak Latin long after the newcomers settled in.  Old Norse gets mixed in when the Vikings come to call in the 9th and 10th centuries. Out of this hodgepodge of languages Old English, or rather different forms of Old English, (Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish, West Saxon) emerge in various places at various times.  Everything is in flux for centuries until – well, there is still no one standard version of English.  It’s still in flux.  I get that.

So there are no absolute borders here.  I get that, too.  I’m making one up because I’m a Victorian at heart and I’m obsessed with creating useless categories.  So I’m imagining (pretending?) that way back sometime, somebody, or several somebodies, somewhere in the British Isles (let’s make geography a marker, even though the words most likely arrived from elsewhere) was talking to somebody else.

And that person was using a language that, due to the percentage of words and phrases in  his speech that will become recognizably used in some version of Old English, one can reasonably say – this person is speaking early early early English, and no longer – I don’t know – speaking Old Frisian or Old Saxon or some other Ingvaeonic language.  And maybe that proto proto English only showed up in certain situations – like trade – and this person reverted to speaking the precursor most of the time, but there’s something in his speech, had it been recorded at that moment, that would support us saying, “That’s English!  That’s mother!”  Right there, hear it?  When he yelled at his horse?  Or bargained with a Northumbrian merchant?  Or complained to his wife?  Or got drunk and started a fight?

And of course that speech would have happened at a particular time on a particular day.  Seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, months before anybody else in the world happened to break into something that is arguably English and no longer a precursor language.  Somebody had to do it first.

If such an event did happen it’s lost to us.  It probably happened a lot.  It’s not linear.  I don’t mean one guy spoke English and everybody followed.  I mean – wouldn’t you just love to know where the first guy was and what he said when for however long – a minute? 30 seconds?  – his language crossed that border? 

Such things are sacred.  We cannot know them. 

Why We Read Strangers

Elizabeth Gumport knows her stuff.  That’s obvious from her piece in n + 1, “Against Reviews.”

But that’s not why I printed a copy (yes, I am a Luddite) and carried it around to think about.  It’s because Gumport asks a brilliant and necessary question.  Why must we read strangers?  I seriously love this question – and I seriously hate that I can’t answer it.

Gumport tells us how the rise of literacy and book production in the 17th and 18th centuries was accompanied by a rise in book reviews, profoundly changing the relationship of artist to audience:

This unprecedented outpouring of reviews meant that for the first time an author’s fortune was determined by the general public rather than by a private patron. This comparatively vast new audience was perceived by many as a serious threat to social stability. No longer could an author identify or anticipate her audience’s reaction. Her readers were too many, and they were strangers to her.

This feels right to me, this shift in audience.  Also, I’m weirdly nostalgic for the pre-shift state of affairs. Gumport reminds us that those one on one patronage relationships were often erotic as well as artistic, but that only underscores her point.  Before the rise of book production writers knew their readers personally, sometimes very personally.  Writing and reading existed as a facet of intimate, personal relationships. 

I kept remembering the first time I read Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron and how beguiled I was by the frame, by the young men and women telling stories to each other in Fiesole while Florence writhed with plague.  What could be more intimate than telling stories while escaping death?  Telling stories to your friends, about your friends, with your friends, making alternate imaginative lives for escaping a reality that’s become another kind of death?  This is sacred stuff.  Survival stuff.  We lost some of our humanity when we ceded the cultural spaces in which such stories and intimacies happen.

Now, in a real sense, writers write for nobody in particular and for everybody in general, or at least for everybody in general in a corporate-defined marketing group. The rite of passage to get to write for your marketing group of choice, particularly if your group is literary fiction, is to write pointless reviews that nobody reads. “Like hazing, reviewing is inflicted by the old and popular on the young and weak, who are told that before they can succeed at their chosen pursuit they must endure certain traditional trials.”  Exactly.  I would add to those trials surviving the typical MFA program with one’s creativity intact. 

Gumport understands what a crock book reviewing is and so does everybody else who’s honest about it. She knows that reviews are essentially ineffectual advertising.  They serve no real purpose.  They don’t sell books, and Gumport reminds us that most of the time only the author and her friends read them. Also, there are too damn many reviews, sometimes so many that, as Virginia Woolf pointed out, “the clash of completely contradictory opinions cancel each other out.”

Yes.  Yes.  Sure.  But here’s why I’ve been carrying her piece around.  This:

Imagine a literary culture in which the relationship between reader and writer was as intimate and direct as the relationship between poet and patron. This would not be, and never was, a recipe for health or contentment—most marriages are unhappy. But the “passion” that Arnold thought needed to be neutralized could proudly speak its name. Why should a writer be ashamed to write for someone she knows? Why should her friends and enemies feign a lack of interest in her work? Affection, attraction, admiration, rivalry, resentment: all are aphrodisiacs, and heighten our interest in what’s before us. Nobody insists we fuck strangers—why must we read them?

Here’s why.  To quote Linds Redding, “The creative industry operates largely by holding ‘creative’ people ransom to their own self-image, [and] precarious sense of self-worth.”   The machine wants reviews, although the machine hasn’t the dimmest notion of whether reviews sell books, or will sell a particular book.  Not to mention that reviews are bought and sold.   Also, it is so well known that writers are praised by their sock puppets and dissed by their rivals that serious readers don’t take reviews seriously.  Amazon is trying to crack down on reviews by friends and enemies of the writer to avoid the many recent embarrassments like this one, but it doesn exactly care whether its reviewers read strangers.  Amazon doesn’t even care if you’ve actually read the book you are reviewing.  It really doesn’t.  As long as you don’t actually know or aren’t in competition with the writer, you can make up anything you like. 

Technology has made reviews irrelevant.  Any serious reader who checks out a reading sample on line – and what writer doesn’t put reading samples on line – will know if a book is for her or not.  And there’s an end.  It’s really that simple.

But godammit, if your ego needs to consider yourself a “real writer” you better get reviewed because  . . . well, because that’s what you do.   So everybody chases the damn things.  The other side of this is that writing for people you know doesn’t work very well if the people you know don’t enjoy reading books.  And in our increasingly illiterate, media-driven culture, that happens to be the norm. The people you know may be perfectly lovely, but damn few are going to devote hours to reading your book (unless they think it’s about them, then you won’t be able to pry them off).  Same goes if they hope it’s about them and isn’t.  Then you won’t be able to stop the “reviews.”

One reason so many writers anonymously praise themselves and ask their friends to do it too is that friends aren’t naturally going to read and comment unless begged, and strangers usually aren’t going to bother either.  But the machine wants those comments, because well, it does.  So there’s always room for young writers to waste themselves writing reviews.  It’s like that meme about the monkeys and the ladder that started life as an illustration of why businesses keep doing things that don’t work.  The newcomer who sees things differently doesn’t get the fruit – she gets mauled.

Was it Byron that wanted a woman who was clever enough to appreciate his genius but not clever enough to compete with him?  Good luck with that one.   It was somebody, and I’m sure anyone still reading this post is more than capable of tracking down the source.  But that desire is so 19th century.  Let’s update it.  Don’t we all want friends who appreciate us but aren’t competing with us, who are excellent at what they do but not at what we do?  Friends who will read us?  Good luck with that one, too.

Between the exploding atheist/secular subculture that worships the ghost of Mr. Gradgrind and takes pride in disrespecting anything that isn’t based on observable facts (which often includes fantasy, myth, disruptive literary works), religious fundamentalists who aren’t supposed to enjoy anything non-Biblical (which often includes fantasy, myth, disruptive literary works), corporate America which has convinced everyone else that only corporate-produced art (including fiction) is “good” (i.e. if it makes money for a corporation it’s “good”), a decaying intelligentsia that could appreciate challenging books and navigate the culture’s gaps but is too busy playing survival at minimum wage jobs and too burdened with student loans to care – well, there aren’t too many strangers out there to fuck anyway.  Or friends.  Anyone left is your competition.  Get used to it.

Anyone who is smart enough to appreciate you is competing with you.  None of us chose this state of affairs.  Telling tales to each other in Fiesole is much more compelling, and god I wish we – us so-called “creatives” – were doing that.  To be spinning tales calculated to entertain an intimate circle of friends, to joyfully inhabit each other’s worlds!  My god how intense, Romantic, fulfilling, enhanced would that circle of friends be?  What emotions would get rediscovered that our culture has obliterated?  How would that affect the wider culture?  The workplace?  The voting booth?  The law? The way we are with each other?

Boccaccio’s youths were merely avoiding death with their shared fiction.  But hold their self-images hostage to remaining in the heart of Florence’s raging plague and every last man jack of them would risk death, because that’s what humans do for vanity, for their self-images.  Do you think I’m overstating the power of self-image?  Athletes said in a well-known survey they would dope even if it would kill them; their self-images as renowned athletes were of more value than their lives.  It’s no different for any endeavor that carries the potential of public recognition – humans go nuts to the point of destroying themselves to get some of that.   Unfortunately, the arts are no exception.  It sucks.  I know.

So if your self-image is hostage to getting reviews you get reviews even if you have to write them yourself.  Or you write reviews for strangers that nobody reads because you’re told it’s the only path to one day being allowed to validate your self-image as a writer.  Or, like some authors, you diss your rivals and praise yourself.  Whatever it takes to get strangers to fuck you affirm your desperate self-image.  It’s ghastly.

There are always exceptions.  In a country of 315 million, there have to be.   But I’m not writing about exceptions.  I’m writing about the general rule.  We are all writing for ourselves, but god help anyone who’s honest about it.  So the question becomes – are you going to write reviews of strangers that nobody reads, or your own goddamned beautiful passionate work that nobody reads?  I mean the latter only as a working assumption.  Any given writer may or may not attract readers.  But if the writing doesn’t matter to the writer solely for its own sake, without hope of external validation, then it doesn’t matter.

If you can’t write for yourself, if you can’t write for those shadows creeping along a silent wall and measuring out your time on this earth in increments of everything else you could be doing, if you can’t write while knowing you are destroying your time on a beautiful madness that nobody will ever validate and many will mock – then please don’t call yourself a writer.  Real writing isn’t for sissies. It’s more than putting words on the page.  It’s denying everything else to be able to put those words on the page while knowing that the mess of language you’ve created is all you’ll ever get out of it.

It’s a state of almost Buddhist-like nondesire for validation coupled with an Apollonian drive for excellence for its own sake.   It’s a way of being in which having friends would be cool, friends with whom you could share stories and create private fictional worlds and languages – an almost spiritual bonding – but the last ticket to Fiesole sold out centuries ago.  Perhaps you can get there in your dreams.  But we do have empty seats on Facebook where you can swap Grumpy Cat memes with fake friends.  Even the occupied seats there are empty.

Ms. Gumport (or is it Dr. Gumport now? – if so, congratulations!) we both come from fairly educated circles.  But I don’t know too many educated people who spend their time reading novels or reviews, unless they work in an English department and have to.  It’s bigger than us.  It isn’t 1832, and as I wrote elsewhere, novel reading is essentially a 19th century activity.  

It’s lovely if you can do it.  Unfortunately most people can’t.   And that’s why, as you elegantly put it, we’re supposed to “fuck strangers.”  A lot of writers simply don’t have a circle of friends with literary inclinations, and most people can’t make peace with the monkish solitude I described above. 

This is from Laura Miller’s “The Case for Positive Book Reviews” which was published in Salon:

Today, the average work of literary fiction appears and vanishes from the scene largely unnoticed and unremarked. Even the novelists you may think of as “hyped” are in fact relatively obscure; I’ve got a battalion of perfectly intelligent cousins who have never heard of either Jonathan Franzen or Dave Eggers. Sure, they know who James Patterson is, but they also know he’s no artist. They’ve never read a book because it was praised as a work of genius on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, and they are oblivious to the existence of James Wood.

As for those people who have heard of today’s best-known literary novelists, the vast majority haven’t read their books.

And you think that people you know are likely to read yours?  Really?  “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” wrote Hemingway.  Damn.

And the winner is . . .

Nobody.  No one entered the MBD contest.  But I did get a few complaints about the contest’s “real name rule.”

Per my posting guidelines, I tolerate anonymous posts unless the poster is dissing another writer or dissing me.  The “real name rule” for the contest was solely to discourage multiple entries by sock puppets, but perhaps it discouraged all entries.

So let’s open it up.  The contest was a bust, but if you’d like to post here, anonymously or not, on contradictory comments and advice you’ve experienced as a creative person, feel free.  For “what is a Donkey for but to ride upon?” 

 

The Man, the Boy, and the Donkey; and A Most Pleasant and Diverting Contest

Do you know this fable?  It’s attributed to Aesop.  Here’s the Harvard Classics version:

A Man and his son were once going with their Donkey to market. As they were walking along by its side a countryman passed them and said: “You fools, what is a Donkey for but to ride upon?”  

So the Man put the Boy on the Donkey and they went on their way. But soon they passed a group of men, one of whom said: “See that lazy youngster, he lets his father walk while he rides.”  

So the Man ordered his Boy to get off, and got on himself. But they hadn’t gone far when they passed two women, one of whom said to the other: “Shame on that lazy lout to let his poor little son trudge along.”  

Well, the Man didn’t know what to do, but at last he took his Boy up before him on the Donkey. By this time they had come to the town, and the passers-by began to jeer and point at them. The Man stopped and asked what they were scoffing at. The men said: “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself for overloading that poor Donkey of yours—you and your hulking son?” 

The Man and Boy got off and tried to think what to do. They thought and they thought, till at last they cut down a pole, tied the Donkey’s feet to it, and raised the pole and the Donkey to their shoulders. They went along amid the laughter of all who met them till they came to Market Bridge, when the Donkey, getting one of his feet loose, kicked out and caused the Boy to drop his end of the pole. In the struggle the Donkey fell over the bridge, and his fore-feet being tied together he was drowned.

“That will teach you,” said an old man who had followed them:  “Please all and you will please none.”

I was going to call this website, “The Man, the Boy, and the Donkey” until somebody objected that the title sounds like the beginning of a dirty joke.  So I humbly sought to please by calling it something else and thought that “Matter Notes” was a good go.  This title has brought two hortatory emails from an anonymous self-described “attorney” helpfully informing me that “matter notes” refers specifically to a lawyer’s work product and that unless I am a lawyer I should be careful about using that particular phrase.  I could be using fiction to mislead people!  Somebody could mistake my literary posts for legal advice!  (Say what???)  God, I love the Internet!  You get to meet so many impossibly fascinating people!

Seriously.  Here’s the thing. 

I like the title.  (Oh yeah, not that it matters, but I’m also an attorney).  This website is for my other matter notes: my notes on writing, literature, imagination, the humanities, and anything that else that interests me.

So, along comes, wait for it – another anonymous somebody who wants to set me straight.  Apparently, I’m not supposed to have a photo of a writing desk on my website! You see, the photo suggests that I actually write once in a while, and he’s never heard of me, so how dare I call myself a writer.  Especially when I’m also a lawyer!  You see, apparently there’s some memo I missed that says that as long as I make my living at one thing I can’t be both, because everyone knows you can’t be a “real writer” (whatever that means) unless you make a living at it.  So, I “should just be happy to be a lawyer” because, according to this person, that is like totally what I am, and there’s “nothing wrong with that.”

Per my guidelines, I don’t post anonymous attacks.  But I am referencing these because they’ve inspired the following contest.  I’m calling it the MBD (Man, Boy, Donkey) contest, after the fable.

Gentle readers, it’s not that I can’t tell the difference between an Aesop’s fable and real life, but real life makes it really really hard.  So how’s this?  I’m holding a contest for the comments with the most inconsistent advice vis-à-vis other comments.

Here’s how it works. 

  1. I will not post any submissions until the end of the contest, because then it would be too easy to create something that contradicts the others.  The contest closes at 12 AM EST on February 24, 2013.  I will post all submissions and announce the winners sometime later that day. 
  1. Submissions must include a real, verifiable name and/or a link to the commenter’s website.  
  1. I am not looking for comments on my blog title, header photo, what have you – because, well, I basically don’t care.
  1. I am looking for comments that concern writers, musicians, and other creative folk in general, because creatives live in a “man, boy, donkey” world.  It’s good to laugh at these things.  Submissions can be advice you’ve received from somebody else or advice you’d like to give other creatives or advice you’ve seen repeated in a lot of forums.  Here’s a literary example of what winning comments might look like:

Sir, nobody but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. — Samuel Johnson
I should think it extremely improbable that anyone ever wrote simply for money.— P. G. Wodehouse

The two commenters that happen to really laugh-out-loud contradict each other each get a FREE signed book or CD (your choice) from me.  Perhaps there will be more than one pair of winners, we’ll see.  And – to show this is not done purely as a promotion gimmick (which of course it is, but what’s a writer’s blog for?) I’ll freely plug any book, CD, or other artistic product of the winners’ creation so long as it isn’t illegal or offensive to my generally tolerant sensibilities.  If you don’t have an artistic product I’ll plug something else of your choice (a charity, university, cool idea, local business, your favorite pet, whatever you desire), so long as it meets the same standards.

The Groundhog’s Epiphany

The Groundhog’s Epiphany

The groundhog takes his flowers raw.
Suspiciously he dreams.
So when his sunshine comes to call;
His shadow does he see.

And screams.

What does it feel like to see the world as a materialist, to believe (sorry, to “know”) that you are always, at every second of your single random lucky dice existence, one breath away from nonexistence?  Sometimes, in the spirit of play, I try this on for a day or two.  I’m never able to move in, but I do enjoy an occasional visit.  It sharpens things.

Anyway, that’s what this doggerel describes, this one that’s been spitting animal grins at me and daring me to post it.  It’s Groundhog’s Day, it’s the day for doggerel (just ask the Inner Circle), so why not?  By the way, Phil didn’t see his shadow this year – either spring is coming, or old Phil is also playing. 

Or, if you prefer, on February 2, 2013, on Gobbler’s Knob, near Punxsutawney, PA, located at 40 56.6′ N, 78 58.6′ W, the sun appeared over the horizon at 7:25 AM EST.  Some sources say it was 7:26 AM.  I have it on good authority that the temperature was 8° F, but that on human skin it felt like -6° F.  Humidity was 68%.  Dew point was 1° F.  Air pressure?  Sure, it was 30.10 inches and falling.  I don’t know how fast it was falling.  Wind was SW at 10 MPH.  Visibility was 10 miles.  The sky was cloudy.  The clouds obscured the sun.  There was not enough light differential between the ground areas on each side of a Marmota monax (average length 16 to 26 inches; weight 4 to 9 lbs.) for the human eye to distinguish a shadow.

There is nothing to see here.  Go home.

A Spell to Attract Attention

I have no idea if this still works, or why anyone would want to make use of it, but here it is.  If you are really, truly lonely or bored, and just want someone, anyone to talk to you – and aren’t particular – this used to be foolproof.  I know from personal experience that it even used to work for young bluestocking introverts who couldn’t get a rote “good morning, may I help you?” out of a bored salesclerk if they handed out cash for the favor.  Women who feel themselves turning invisible once they hit middle age might also consider trying it.

However, given the nature of the spell, and the energies you will be playing with, it’s a fairly sad, unsatisfying way to assure yourself that you too merit occasional human contact.  But – that’s the culture.  No spell can fix that.

It’s an odd spell.  Odd in its simplicity.  Nobody ever taught it to me.  I can’t remember when I learned it.  I’m sure I just ended up somehow taking it in over time without understanding what I was doing or why I kept getting the same results.  But once I recognized what was going on in the deep structure of the thing, I stopped doing it.  It felt too much like wearing a cloak of honey in an ants nest.

Anyway, here’s how it works.

Take one book.  The book must be a good thick serious-looking heavy-read type book, not a lightweight commercial bestseller.  Hardcovers are best, but not strictly necessary.  The air of high seriousness is what matters.   Any Complete Works of William Shakespeare will do if the cover is a dull single color, but John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (ed. Merrit Y. Hughes, Indianapolis, Indiana: The Odyssey Press, Inc., a division of The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1957) is better, if you can find a copy.  Mine is the twenty-second printing (1981) and it has a dull blue and black cover – perfection!  Even better is Criticism: The Major Texts (ed. Walter Jackson Bate, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970) which sports a splendid dull blue-grey cover.  I’ve also had success with various Norton anthologies, due to their size.

Do not use an ereader or ipad for this because folks will generally assume you’re just playing or texting and then the spell won’t work.  Oh, and it won’t work as well in Europe.  In Paris I can promise you it won’t work at all.  It used to work reliably in most parts of the USA.  I assume it still does.

Now, bring the book anywhere outside your home where there are other people around.  A bench designated for public use on a busy street.  A restaurant while you are waiting for your meal.  Your desk at work while you are on a mandated break.  Sometimes it works in public parks, but only if your book looks extremely serious.  The spell is sketchy in public parks and commuter trains and airlines.  If you must use one of those spaces, make up for it with something really hard and heavy and frightfully academic-looking in your hands.  Think 800 page hardcover tome.  Or several.

Now read.  Just read.  Don’t bother anybody.  Don’t make a production out of reading; appearing as if you want attention will absolutely work against you.  Just make sure your book is visible to casual observers. Watch what happens.  As soon as you appear to be engrossed in the page, people you’ve never met before will approach you and talk to you and disrupt your thoughts.  It’s like magic! 

Mostly they’ll have the sole purpose of setting you straight.  Often they’ll want to disrupt your peaceful, solitary activity because they feel threatened.  You see, they won’t be friendly (but they might pretend to be), and they’re likely to use discomfiting tones of disbelief and rebuke, but they will initiate contact with you. “You reading?” “You reading that?” “Izzat for school?” I mean, why would an adult spend her free time reading anything that looks like something for school?  Or, worse, looks like it might require serious thought and concentration.  And why wouldn’t she want to justify herself to weirdly hostile strangers?  My personal favorite?  “My wife likes to read, she’s always reading.” This one is usually spoken by way of unasked for introduction in a tone of weird self-justification, as if the speaker feels he needs to defend himself. 

You would think this spell would fail miserably in English departments, among educated readers, but I once accidentally hit a bull’s eye with it in my graduate English department’s Writing Program.  I was sitting alone in my teaching assistant office and reading a hefty political science textbook (the title I now forget, but it must have interested me at the time).  One of the Writing Program administrators, who never had cause to say anything to me for the previous half semester, happened to glance through my open door, noticed the topic, entered my office, and grabbed the top of my book, demanding to know what I was reading!  Yes, she spoke to me!   She squawked all kinds of commentary on my choice to read a political study and what purpose that had for the Writing Program and whether I was going to teach it to freshmen!  It attracted attention from her I never had from anybody in the Writing Program before or since.  I swear this is true. 

You would also think it wouldn’t work in a law school, either, but I got results without really trying by being caught – I mean seen – reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to kill time before a torts class started (this was an unobtrusive 900+ page paperback version).  A fellow in my class who never had much to say to me previously couldn’t stop commenting on how could I read a book like that for enjoyment, was I really seriously reading that, and how he couldn’t stand reading something like that. Nobody asked him, of course, but it was that damned spell – my act of serious reading for enjoyment – that drew his attention and caused him to talk to me.  At length!

So what is it about serious reading that threatens people so much that they make it their mission to get you to stop doing it in front of them?  It’s not simply because it’s unusual to see someone quietly reading a serious book and minding their own business.  OK, it is unusual, but folks tend to keep their distance from the unusual.  Or, now that everybody has a cell phone and a heavy dose of media-induced paranoia, folks tend to keep their distance while calling the cops.

No, they will approach you because there is a long, deep anti-intellectualism in America.  And therefore, seeing an individual reading a thick scholarly or literary book and daring to enjoy it gets interpreted as an unforgivable trespass against the social order.  So there will always be some good citizen who will not let you get away with it.  Essentially, you’re throwing a stone in the culture and receiving the ripples and fits that return.

That is why the spell works.  But knowing where that impulse to disrupt that higher impulse for thought comes from, you probably won’t want to use it either.