publish or perish
Definitely don’t want to be glib about or otherwise make light of a terrible story, but there’s probably not a junior academic out there who didn’t drop an underbreath No shit… or some variant upon hearing about the murders at Alabama-Huntsville.
The shootings opened a window into the pressure-cooker world of biotechnology start-ups, where scientists often depend on their association with academia for a leg up. Ms. Bishop was part of a start-up that had won an early round of financing in a highly competitive environment, but people who knew her said she had learned shortly before the shooting that she had been denied tenure at the university.
On Friday, Ms. Bishop presided over her regular neuroscience class before going to a biology faculty meeting, where she sat quietly for about 30 or 40 minutes, said one University of Alabama faculty member who had spoken to people who were in the room. Then she pulled out a gun and began shooting, firing several rounds before her gun either jammed or ran out of bullets, the faculty member said.
[...]
Mr. Garner said Ms. Bishop was first been told last spring that she had been denied tenure. Generally, the university does not allow professors to stay on after six years if they have not been granted tenure, and this would have been the final semester of Ms. Bishop’s sixth year.
The university does have an appeals process, and people who knew Ms. Bishop said she had appealed the decision.
Ms. Bishop was quick to talk about her tenure worries, even to people she had just met. A businessman who met her at a technology open house in January, and who asked not to be named because of the close-knit nature of the science community in Huntsville, said, “She began to talk about her problems getting tenure in a very forceful and animated way, saying it was unfair.”
Believe me, I know it sucks to complain about the business when I’ve got (for now anyway) a really good job at a really good place, but the truth of the matter is that the stress only gets worse the further along you make it. Any line of work that can leave a 42-year old Harvard PhD basically completely out of the game after a six years of apparently solid teaching is bound to make people go mad. It’s clearly getting worse on the tenure front, as university administrations cynically use the “tenure hurdle” to keep costs down.
If only this story would make university administrations take pause to consider their policies on promotion. What they’ll do instead, I’m sure, is dump a ton of cash into the coffers of “career transition” consultants and campus security forces.
public transport – beginning, middle, end
He feels three things on his way home, late Friday night.
First he feels menaced at the bus stop because there are packs of drunken youths around and for some reason (because he is big, something else – because he looks like the sort of guy that it would be worth fucking up – little do they know how worthlessly with the grain of things it would be) is absolutely sure they’re going to come over to where he is and start something. He has learned not to smoke at bus stops at night – it only draws the attention of kids like these.
Later, he feels frustrated when another group of youths board his bus and argue with the bus driver about Oyster Cards and fares for about ten minutes, delaying the journey. Something in him has always made him feel like it’s his duty to intervene in situations like this – but again, he seems to be the right sort to fight it out with, and four on one is no good. Thankfully, a middle-aged woman with a strong West Indian accent shouts them down for having no respect for their elders and they leave. One of them spits on his window as the bus pulls away.
Finally, he feels disgust with England mixed with a overwhelming sense of fear when, as the bus nears his stop, the driver slows down because a man has fallen over dead drunk, legs on the sidewalk, head on the street right where the bus is meant to go. Some kids – themselves drunk – run up and lift the guy onto the bus stop bench. He does fucking nothing, walks home.
the nyt continues its campaign against low testosterone levels in male writing
Interesting: Joel Agee’s roiphes Peter Handke’s new Don Juan: In His Own Words in the NYT this weekend:
For all its engaging and delicate ruminations, and despite its bold, humorous claim to be “the definitive and true story of Don Juan,” the book left me wanting to hear again Mozart’s treatment of the same theme. That music has everything Handke’s prose lacks: brio, verve, declarative intensity, a vast range of emotion and, last but not least, brilliant, joyful virility.
It’s starting to look like a concerted, and very strange, campaign that the NYT is conducting against all manner of literary flaccidity and impotence. Odd. Just ordered the novel anyway. Why isn’t it being published in the UK?
in print, then…
Huh. A revised version of this post was just accepted for publication in a decent academic journal. First time I’ve ever done that, “properly” published something from on here…
Bittersweet stupidity… Nice to get things published, but if they aren’t REF acceptable (and this isn’t, as it’s too short) I just get in trouble for writing unpurposefully…
repetition, repression, modernism
The first story in Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives, “The Good Anna,” is a something like a translation of Flaubert’s “Un coeur simple” adjusted for the advent of the discipline of psychology. Instead of saying once “Elle avait eu, comme une autre, son histoire d’amour,” it says it again and again and again and again, establishing its version of the phrase (“The widow Mrs. Lehntman was the romance in Anna’s life” and variations thereupon) as an index of psychological blockage rather than literary irony. In Flaubert’s case, it follows, the phrase registers low bovarisme - the pathetic or bathetic implication of life in literary models. In Stein’s case, the phrase registers tautological euphemism, when we keep saying the same thing for lack of ability to say the next thing, the true thing.
après
He was a strange and complex man. He had peculiar tastes. He was never at peace with the world.
The only way to know that you were his intimate was if he treated you as roughly as he treated himself. If, at certain pitched moments, he savaged himself and you at the same time and to the same degree, then you knew you were in, for better or worse.
This, you knew, has how love, or whatever it was, worked with him. The fact was that he was at once incredibly tolerant of and incredibly impatient with human nature. His optimism was abyssally pessimistic, and vice versa. At privileged moments, his speech would take on the dark lyricism that comes of such cross-wiring, such implicit contradiction. At other moments, he would remain silent, which amounted almost to the same thing.
You would have stopped, if you knew then what you know now, and said “But when and where did I sign on for that? Can you produce a contract? A duly notarized document?”
“Certain processes and functions,” he would have responded, “are as implicit in human relations as the tree is implicit in this garden, the squirrels in these trees, the train on those tracks.”
“This is a cross to bear,” he would have said. “But haven’t we all got to have one?” he would have asked.
sublimation
Sinking back into a wine-induced, near-constant stupor, he reads the review and wonders whether the joke was on him or he is the joke on all of it.
His wife, well sort of, tells him to quit, move back to Brooklyn, and scratch the itch that’s been itching, that he’s not been scratching, since at least 1995. All of it comes back to that, all of it, she says when she’s in the mood to say such things.
Once, at a conference, drunk, he expounded upon the literature of the no. But now he has a hard time reading it. He is embarrassed about it, years later. It was in Chicago, or was in Long Beach, that he did that?
His wife says We’ll open a bookstore and then you will have some time. In return, he wonders aloud, pessimistically. Still, the food would be better.
He wonders, not aloud, later, about turning the screws tight, stripping them in fact, and then never being able to unscrew them.
His wife, well sort of, tells him to do an hour a day on it, that that is him at his best. But he simply can’t
He wonders whether the joke was on him or he is the joke on all of it, and then he writes this post.
our orwell, ourselves (i)
- No end to his impatience, he sometimes fills the time as he makes his way from place to place with the subvocal, always incomplete, composition of poems. But reading Keep the Aspidistra Flying has made this impossible, would make him feel like a massive douchebag if he did.
- Keep the Aspidistra Flying is 1984 without the excess governmentally. Literally, almost exactly the same novel for most of the run. So what to make of the anti-totalitarianism of the latter? Or was the message from the start simply that Britain is a bloody grim place to live.
- No line captures the psychopathology that drives Orwell’s writing like “How right the lower classes are! Hats off to the factory lad who with fourpence in the world puts his girl in the family way! At least he’s got blood and not money in his veins.”
- He wonders what it means that this whole thing started for him with Orwell. He used to think that meant one sort of thing; now it clearly means another.
- Fabian inversionism, the birth of Ballardianism? No line captures the psychopathology that drives Orwell’s writing like “He never felt any pity for the genuine poor. It is the black-coated poor, the middle-middle class, who need pitying.”
- Do all the middle class British believe that the lower orders are having more fun (having better sex), just as white Americans believe on some level about black Americans?
- Early on in the newly released Diaries, Orwell is floored to see one of the authentic homeless whom he befriends while doing his touristic overnights on Trafalgar Square receive a small sum of money and then instantly blow the whole sum on booze. Haven’t these people any money sense? That could have lasted for weeks!
- One wants to say that the libidinal unconscious of his works is driven by an extreme form of persistent adolescent frustration at not having anywhere to have sexual encounters – parental prohibition, parental surveillance. But he went to Eton, where assuredly things at least worked a bit differently.
- Why wasn’t Orwell a modernist? Because he seems to have utterly lacked capacity for self-reflection. Interestingly, this gives modernist reflexivity a better name than he thought possible at this late date. Someone interjects But he was, in large part, a leftist! Yes, a leftist whose works became a if not the primarily tool for anti-communist interpellation via literature-instruction over the past sixty years! In every high school in America, the novels stacked to the ceiling! And look what’s come of that!
- Orwellian post-lapsarianism: poverty is bearable, even enjoyable, as long as you haven’t any experience of the other side (which is even more, somehow, unbearable).
stein query
If you had to teach a seminar on Gertrude Stein, and the seminar was to be focused on “queerness” however construed, which text would you discuss?
Filling in a bit of a glaring gap here, as it were. I’ll admit it.
irish fordism:
A sizable percentage of the patrons one night are working behind the bar the next night. And vice versa.
“no water but only rock”
He dreams of getting mugged, missing appointments, fighting with someone and hurting them quite badly at first but by the end getting severely injured himself, being told off by both adults and children, getting caught in compromising positions, walking around with his fly open, and forgetting what he was going to say at a key moment.
Secular society’s lack of any viable purification rituals leaves everything up to the dream, and dreams don’t really work, not like that.
kitchen table
Full force, he suddenly sees it: the animal strangeness of spending an entire Saturday sitting at the kitchen table, typing revisions into a piece that was begun in 2000. Others are walking and looking, soon they’ll be eating and drinking. He, on the other hand, is in keystroke dialogue with a younger version of himself at once cleaner and less intelligent but somehow braver for it.
A cat drips from a bush out back and scatters towards home. Back at the table, state-sponsored classical music trickles out of his laptop’s speakers.
The structural stress of his line of work is abstract but profound – at once ridiculous and, unfortunately, utterly real. Everything else follows, as if fatally, when one takes it too seriously. That is to say, when one takes it at all.
style indirect occupé
Another word for confession is anti-theodicy. Justify the ways of man to God. But then there’s the problem of prepositioning, of answers without questions, and ultimately of authorship.
He thinks of Satan and his real thoughts after the Fall. But who put the thought in my head? Who made the drive that drove the thought? Did He who made the lamb make me?
intensity
A realist in the fullest sense of the word, he knows that the real reason Satan’s story starts, if it were real, is not because non serviam ex nihilo’d itself into his horny head, but because he was the sort of guy who wanted something absolutely fucking amazing to happen every single night. Only this time it did.
more flight
The conceit of this virtual world is that you fly from place to place. There are resorts and shopping malls, sectors devoted to polymorphous sex and others where you can worship the god (or gods) of your choice. Condominium complexes range around amusement parks and zoos full of dinosaurs – a entire world where adult infantility reigns supreme beyond the darkest (brightest?) dreams of Houllebecq.
At first the flying goes fine – he is soaring about a zone of chain restaurants, then a meticulously reconstructed Mayan temple. But soon enough, as he heads out over a beach where thousands of volleyball teams are holding a massive double-elimination tournament in the nude, he starts to slow down. He slows down… or the frame rate of the world he is in slows down. He seems to hang in place for seconds at a time and then lurch a few meters forward. Eventually he comes to a complete halt, his eyes locked on nothing but the sun and the deep blue sky.
He hasn’t the bandwidth for this sort of thing, he lives too far from the central servers.
