Kiki Smith's "Silver Bird"

When walking into the Brooklyn Museum’s recent Kiki Smith exhibit, a large panel presents this  brief statement about the exhibit: “The idea of how women found space for creative inspiration in the past is the point of departure for Sojourn, this exhibition by Kiki Smith.” It praises Smith’s “lyrical and highly personal vocabulary of images,” and declares the work a meditation on the “course of a woman’s lifetime marked by struggles unique to female artists and the contemplative exhilaration that defines the moment of creative inspiration.”

The Brooklyn Museum is the home of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. It is also the permanent home of The Dinner Party, a 1979 work by feminist artist Judy Chicago, which features a triangular table with exquisite handmade plates and embroidered place mats displaying the name of famous women throughout history. The Dinner Party was praised by feminist art critic Lucy Lippard, who stated, “My own initial experience was strongly emotional… The longer I spent with the piece, the more I became addicted to its intricate detail and hidden meanings.”

"Singer" (2008)

But The Dinner Party was the source of controversy in the art world. Art critic Hilton Kramer said “The Dinner Party reiterates its theme with an insistence and vulgarity more appropriate, perhaps, to an advertising campaign than to a work of art,” calling it an example of “art so mired in the pieties of a cause that it quite fails to acquire any independent artistic life of its own.” Maureen Mullarkey called the work preachy and untrue to the women it claims to represent. She especially disagreed with the sentiment she labels “turn ‘em upside down and they all look alike,” an essentializing of all women which does not respect the feminist cause (Mullarkey also called the hierarchical aspect of the work into question, claiming that Chicago took advantage of her female volunteers.) Roberta Smith succinctly noted that “its historical import and social significance may be greater than its aesthetic value”.

It is true that Judy Chicago’s feminist politics are essentialist and far from nuanced. Years ago I took a class taught, in part, by Judy Chicago. What I recall of the experience is that Chicago’s insistence on essentialist, “first wave” feminism affected her perspective on second wave, “sex positive” or social deconstructionist feminists (including those important emerging feminist performance artists who engaged in a consideration of sex work—and the ways in which it potentially was or was not empowering—which I was particularly interested in).

The experience left me with a keen and intense understanding of the various battles going on in the feminist art community. I have been surprised to see one theme in the world of feminist art continue since then: it seems a celebration of women’s domestic art is the channel through which contemporary feminist art must pass, in order to be praised as doing the legitimate historical reclaiming necessary to feminist artists. This means turning the spotlight to what had been historically considered “women’s work”—china painting, quilts, sewing, embroidery. Considering the rich and varied tradition in tapestry weaving, samplers, and the like, it is an important tradition to reclaim from the recesses of “low art” categorization. As the Sackler Center website itself notes, “Throughout the history of art, decoration and domestic handicrafts have been regarded as women’s work…. Quilting, embroidery, needlework, china painting, and sewing—none of these have been deemed worthy artistic equivalents to the grand mediums of painting and sculpture. The age-old aesthetic hierarchy that privileges certain forms of art over others based on gender associations has historically devalued ‘women’s work’ specifically because it was associated with the domestic and the ‘feminine.’ That hierarchy was radically challenged in the 1960s by Pop and feminist artists, alike…. In the quest for a ‘female aesthetic’ or artistic style specific to women, many 1970s feminist artists sought to elevate ‘women’s craft’ to the level of ‘high art,’ and away from its derogatory designation as ‘low art’ or ‘kitsch.’”

In keeping with this tradition, Kiki Smith’s Sojourn exhibit is inspired by a late-19th century needlework piece from Prudence Punderson, entitled “The First, Second and Last Scene of Mortality,” included in the exhibit. The piece depicts a room with a woman’s life represented from birth through death. On the far right is an infant in a cradle; the center depicts a woman of middle age, sewing; finally, on the far left is a black coffin, with the initials “P.P.” embroidered on the front. It is a striking work, reminding us of the ways in which “women’s work” incorporated and transcended purely “domestic” subject matter. Interestingly, on the wall in the room is a painting, sewn in fine detail, depicting a woman who seems to be trying to escape or hide from a man with a staff. This image, combined with the coffin, underlines the overall effect of the work, which is a sense of the woman artist in the home, which is simultaneously a place of safety and security, and a place of suffocation.

The rooms of Smith’s exhibit progress roughly according to the “life” of a woman artist. The first room is dominated by a large aluminum sculpture in the center of the room—a woman seated, one hand raised, the other on her lap. The head is disproportionately large for the body, giving it a potentially cartoonish feel; however, the expression on the figure’s face is one of divine and quiet inspiration, and has an eerie quality which pervades the entire exhibit. The piece is called “The Annunciation”—the moment when Mary learns she will become the mother to Jesus. (The Annunciation has long—perhaps too long—been a symbol connecting artistic inspiration to spirituality, particularly for women artists).

Surrounding the figure are various large drawings on Nepal paper (a sort of translucent linen material) with nearly life-size figures drawn in pencil and ink, depicted in various stages of inspiration. Deliberately recalling Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, one piece entitled “Room Enough to Enter” depicts a woman seated, one hand (as with ‘the Annunciation’) raised toward a closed window. Outside is a bird—presumably representing creativity—attempting to enter

The subsequent rooms progress through a woman’s life; drawings of pregnant women, women with children, women whose bodies seem to produce the bodies of other women in a sort of religious transposition. Mirrors of antique glass with flowers, lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling dusted in glitter and gold, cages with birds—all of this has a pretty, delicate quality, quietly undercut by small details which make the items neither wholly innocuous nor peaceful. The lightbulbs are surrounded by broken, sharp wood which hangs above; in one drawing, the ubiquitous chair is knocked to the floor.

Later in the exhibit, the drawings begin to depict women gathered together; no longer romantic,  isolated figures, we see instead real women—women with tattoos and handbags, with bras and trenchcoats and glasses. This move to the real is relieving, giving us the sense that the life of the woman artist in Sojourn is coming into being. Another larger-than-life aluminum sculpture entitled “Singer” depicts a woman standing as though after delivering a great aria—she has her hand raised as though about to bow, and a bouquet of flowers in the other. This sense of triumph and success, of positive reception from the world, is optimistic and lovely. The last rooms include more large drawings of an older woman which seem to represent Smith’s mother’s recent death (one of the pieces is entitled “Mourning”). Finally the visitor enters a room with large drawings of black coffins, identical to the one depicted in the Prudence Punderson piece. In the center of the room a large pine wood coffin rests on a pine wood table; inside are clear glass dandelions, which sprout from the base of the coffin.

Leaving the exhibit one walks through “The Dinner Party.” It is striking to see both the similarities and differences between the two treatments of women and ambition, art, community. Sojourn is exponentially more subtle and interesting, less overtly political—in part because it depicts a life cycle in which one woman leaves (passes away) to make room for another woman’s spirit: “I put aside myself so there was room enough to enter” (as the title of one piece says).

Yet both also root themselves in this archeological dig into “women’s work.” Celebrating domestic art has been a foundational, aspect of feminist art; identifying visionary women artists who did all that they could with the materials available to them is a fine way of demonstrating the triumph of artistic inspiration over political and social oppression. Still, I wondered, as I finished walking through the exhibit, at what point women artists may slough off the perpetual handling of the domestic. Work which centers itself on sewing or embroidery, for example—a dying art, and something I grew up doing—risks romanticizing an art which in actuality, in part, was incredibly stifling. After all, the reality is that women turned to needlework in part because they could not turn to other materials with equal freedom (oil paints, sculpture, etc.).

Like The Dinner Party and its pervasive yonic imagery, Sojourn depicts women artistry as delicate, domestic, life-giving, natural, compassionate, and community-oriented. Yet, as important as it is to celebrate this aspect of female society and history, it seems equally important to avoid essentializing women’s psychology, and to engage more complex representations of being a woman in the world. A forty-five minute documentary on Smith’s exhibit in Venice in 2005, Homespun Tales, screens at the exhibit. It includes interviews with one of Kiki Smith’s assistants. On being asked how to interpret her work, Smith’s assistant used the word “intuitive” four times in about a minute, concluding with the statement, “Kiki’s studio is practically her body.” I cringed at this statement, which seems to center around the idea that women’s art is inseparable from their bodies and (relatedly) their supposed connection to “mother earth.” What does it mean to say her work is “intuitive”? What agency does it take from her, her reason and knowledge of women’s history, to believe that her work comes from animal-spirits (something she herself implies)? 

I became a fan of Smith after seeing her brutal and haunting sculpture “Tale” (1992), which depicts a woman crawling with a “tale” of excrement behind her. It is incredibly disturbing, pulling from motifs of shame of the female body and sexual violence which pervades the Western world and its art. It is unforgettable, and I appreciate the unflinching and yet complex perspective on corporeality which she offers in that piece. In Homespun Tales, Smith hung etched drawings of beautiful flowers, made with ink of her own blood. These pieces, to me, seem a commentary on the history of the “feminine sphere” which have real weight. In retrospect, though, even these two pieces leave me unsatisfied.

 In her book Proofs and Theories, Louise Gluck, former poet laureate, once wrote: “I’m puzzled, not emotionally but logically, by the contemporary determination of women to write as women. Puzzled because this seems an ambition limited by the existing conception of what, exactly, differentiates the sexes. If there are such differences, it seems to me reasonable to suppose that literature reveals them, and that it will do so more interestingly, more subtly, in the absence of intention. In a similar way, all art is historical: in both its confrontations and evasions, it speaks of its period. The dream of art is not to assert what is already known but to illuminate what has been hidden, and the path to the hidden world is not inscribed by will.” I suppose, ultimately, I have a desire for feminist art to move from Woolf’s concept of “a room of one’s own” to a hidden world of one’s own psyche—one which illuminates what has been hidden, one which interestingly, and subtly, depicts what it means to be an individual. Whether one can ever do this with the absence of intention is another question altogether.

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Upcoming Contract Negotiations

The current PSC contract expires in October 2010. The Adjunct Project and CCU (Cuny Contingents Unite) are working together to determine what demands should be included on the agenda at the upcoming union contract negotiations. We’re already planning for the next round of bargaining; the kick-off will be a meeting with the PSC and Barbara Bowen at the Graduate Center (room 9205) at 12:30 pm on Tuesday, April 6, to discuss priorities for the next contract and how GC students can be part of the collective bargaining process. 

Proposed CCU contract demands were circulated by Abe Walker on the CCU-Discussion list on February 5, after they were approved by the Coordinating Committee. If you would like to receive a copy of that posting, please write to cunycontingents@gmail.com.

The next Adjunct Project meeting is March 25, and the monthly CCU meeting will be held on Friday, March 26, from 4:00 to 6:00 pm, in the Political Science Thesis Room, inside Room 5200 at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Barbara Bowen and other officers will visit every campus this semester to begin a union-wide conversation about bargaining the next contract with CUNY. These meetings will be the membership’s chance to hear directly about issues that have already emerged for the upcoming negotiations and to discuss their own concerns and ideas.To find out when and where the meeting is at your home campus, go to: www.psc-cuny.org

Recap: March 4th Day of Action to Defend Education

On March 4, the National Day of Action to Defend Education, students across the nation gathered for mass protests against budget cuts, tuition hikes, increased class sizes, and school closings. In New York, over 1800 students, teachers and advocates gathered together to protest on the steps of City Hall to protest the mayor’s management of the school system; at Governor David Paterson’s office to protest $1.4 billion in cuts to state education funds, including $466 million in cuts to state funding for city education; and over 250 protesters made it all the way to the MTA hearings at FIT to protest the potential loss of free student MetroCards (with 5000 petitions in tow).

Students, parents, and teachers rallied on the steps of New York City Hall to protest the impending closure of nineteen failing city schools and the expansion of charter schools. 400 students at Hunter College staged walkouts and three protesters were arrested after marchers clashed with campus police. About sixty protesters entered the seven-floor main building in a failed attempt to occupy it; two people were arrested by security officers at the college and charged with trespass, criminal mischief and possession of graffiti instruments, and a thirty-seven-year-old man was charged with disorderly conduct. Students also walked out of classes at the New School and New York University.

Nationally, tens of thousands protested. Many were objecting to recent budget cuts and showing solidarity with students in California, who protested a 32 percent increase in tuition. Oakland police arrested about 150 people after protesters climbed onto a San Francisco Bay area freeway during the afternoon commute, shutting it down for about an hour, police said. More than a hundred such events in at least thirty-two states joined the grass-roots campaign, which had been in motion since demonstrations last fall in California.

The protests garnered substantial media attention. In response to student protestors, the chairman of the MTA agreed to meet with them to hear about how the loss of free student MetroCards will impact their lives. As a result, Chairman Jay Walder has agreed to postpone the vote on the MetroCards until June (rather than mid-March, as expected). It was an important victory, demonstrating that New York students will not accept having to sacrifice for an MTA budget crisis not of their own making.

Part-Time Adjunct Faculty Survey

The Spring 2009 Faculty Experience Survey (FES:09) of full-time faculty and part-time adjunct faculty was conducted by the University Faculty Senate of The City University of New York during the Fall of 2009. The following is an excerpt from the report:

“In reviewing the data, very few readers will fail to note that the differences among campuses in the satisfied columns range from 20 to 70 or even 80 percentage points between campuses. These differences merit our attention and concern…. A handful of campuses merit special attention because they consistently perform in the bottom 25th percentile of satisfaction on a number of issues.

“In the current study, faculty voice strong opinions about their campuses. On a substantial number of campuses, faculty are discontented. Full-time faculty are often split on a number of matters and that is predictable given the wide disparities between campuses.

“Across CUNY, on a few issues, faculty are generally content…. similarly to CUNY full-time faculty, part-time faculty expressed considerable satisfaction with many aspects of their jobs and their faculty and staff relationships at CUNY in the University-Wide report.

“… In order to solve problems that faculty have given voice to, a willingness to engage and dialogue with faculty, to advocate for their campuses, to become creative in solving areas of discontent, and also to preserve valued achievements would foster mutual governance. The City University of New York will be well-served if faculty opinions documented in this report are vigorously addressed.”

Some statistics of interest to part-time Adjunct faculty:

• University-wide, 85 percent of part time adjunct faculty are not graduate students, and 71 percent are over the age of forty-six;
• 27 percent said they had no office space;
• Over 10 percent do not receive timely notification of their reappointment;
• 29 percent usually did not, or never, received notification of their schedule for the following  term before the end of the previous term;
• over 30 percent disagree or strongly disagree that they have adequate facilities to meet privately with students;
• 18 percent are dissatisfied with health insurance;

  While 70 percent are satisfied or very satisfied with their position at CUNY, 23 percent are very dissatisfied or dissatisfied with their salary.

As the March 4 protests and media coverage indicate, we have the potential to make important changes in the compensation, job security, health insurance coverage and overall satisfaction of full and part-time faculty at CUNY. If GC students can make the time to attend the meetings for upcoming contract negotiations, and educate themselves on the most important issues of the day, collectively we can—and will—make a difference.

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Poet Louise Glück

A Village Life: Poems by Louise Glück. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2009).

One way to approach a book of poems is to imagine not how the poet speaks, but from what stage. Wordsworth talks out of the woods, on a long walk. Allen Ginsberg shouts to his reader from a crowded bar. Walt Whitman stretches out in the grass in Fort Greene park in the middle of a fair and talks to the sky. Louise Glück’s work, to me, has always felt unearthly and disembodied. In her early collections, the poems remind me of a wedding tent: like a blindingly white, taut canvas ratcheted to steel poles. At first glance her work is impenetrably cold and flat. Underneath, though, is a teeming crowd—a fatally optimistic couple, a weeping ex-lover, a drunk mother; the exchange of gifts, someone stepping on someone’s toes during the dance.

Her more recent books, including her newest collection, A Village Life, puts its speaker on an amphitheater stage, reciting to rows of empty seats. The audience which Glück’s speakers address (which feels spare to begin with) has one by one retired for the evening, to the poet’s great advantage. Her lyricism is now a bare bones echo of previous poems, her subject matter whittled down to mourning the loss of the sensual world. A Village Life abandons any pretense of interest in love, family, or epic betrayal (some of her previous themes). Now everything has given over in service to one question: how does a person watch the body age, how does a person watch death come?

One of America’s most auspicious poets, Glück was born in New York City in 1943. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, including The Seven Ages (2002), Meadowlands (1996), The Wild Iris (1992), and Ararat (1990). The current judge of the Yale Younger Poets Series, she is the recipient of not only the Pulitzer Prize but also the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Bollinger prize, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. A professor at Yale University, Glück produces a new book of poems every five years or so (A Village Life comes just four years after her last book Averno).

Throughout her work, Glück has turned to and from traditional poetic lenses to examine her obsessions with sexuality, hunger, and mortality; using Greek mythology, personal narrative, she is (as the critic Helen Vendler wrote) “a poet of strong and haunting presence. Her poems… have achieved the unusual distinction of being neither ‘confessional’ nor ‘intellectual’ in the usual senses of those words.” The confidence and coldness of her work is refreshing; it creates this sense of speaking to the empty amphitheater I mentioned earlier, and the eerie sense that Glück is speaking out loud to no one, like a voice from beyond the grave. Of course, this feeling is the result of impossible control and brevity, and her glittering scalpel-like technique. Her work also relies greatly on her indulgence in the tradition that the poet bends God’s ear. Glück isn’t much interested in overturning cliché; that doesn’t mean, however, that what she is doing isn’t spectacularly difficult and moving.

Like her more innovative contemporary Anne Carson, she has turned to Greek mythology to frame her preoccupations with betrayal, metamorphosis and fate. Averno revolves around Greek mythology and sorcery (with titles like “Persephone the Wanderer,” “Prism,” “A Myth of Innocence,” “A Myth of Devotion,” and “Omens”).

Her book Meadowlands uses gods and goddesses to heighten to epic levels human grief and disgust; in “Circe’s Power” she writes: “I never turned anyone into a pig. / Some people are pigs; I make them / look like pigs. / I’m sick of your world / that lets the outside disguise the inside.” The poem concludes: “My friend, / every sorceress is / a pragmatist at heart; nobody / sees essence who can’t / face limitation.” It’s a common cliché that every poet is trying, throughout their life, to write one poem. “Circe’s Power,” though addressing sinister desire, magic, and transformation, is really a poem about the impossibility of metamorphosis. Glück’s work is about the excruciating inability to believe in a world beyond the sensual world in which we exist. “Nobody / sees essence who can’t / face limitation”: to rejoice fully in the essence of life requires one to acknowledge death—the limitation of the world, or of our human life on earth. In her spectacular book The Seven Ages, Glück writes a heartbreaking elegy for “The Sensual World”:

I caution you as I was never cautioned:
you will never let go, you will never be satiated.
You will be damaged and scarred, you will continue to
hunger.
Your body will age, you will continue to need.
You will want the earth, then more of the earth—
Sublime, indifferent, it is present, it will
not respond.
It is encompassing, it will not minister.
Meaning, it will feed you, it will ravish you,
it will not keep you alive.

A Village Life is about the disillusionment that spring brings newness, the memory of one’s young body when facing the old, the distance the elderly have from young couples. In this way, it offers little new in terms of subject matter or tone. The reader will encounter Glück’s familiar end-stopped lines; simple imagery; declarative sentences and haunting endings. The book is stripped bare; one way we see this is in the repetition of titles through the book. The reader encounters, for example, two poems called “Bats,” two called “Earthworms,” and three “Burning Leaves”; the recycled titles mimic the book’s preoccupation with the exhausting (as opposed to rejuvenating) cycle of seasons which the characters witness, again and again.

This village, of course, is not a community but rather a sort of otherworldly snow-globe, with people and their quiet steps forward and backward; it is a kind of purgatory on earth, with small grievances and smaller pleasures, with exhaustion, silences, disappointments, and yet the ongoing awe in the simple present day. One speaker remembers her childhood: “we were kids again, sitting on the front steps in the morning, / eating a peach. Just that, but it seemed an honor to have a mouth.” There is no sense that this honor–just to have a mouth—has transformed somehow into a wiser, albeit quieter poem-speak offered to the reader. Instead, the book is leaden with its silences: “No sound except the roar of the wheat”; “We’d get quiet after a while. The night would get quiet. / We had given the night permission to carry us along.” A man goes into a bar, and tells us about the owner and him—“If we’re alone, he turns down the volume of the television…. / If there’s no game, he’ll pick a film. It’s the same thing—the sound stays off, so there’s only images. / When the film’s over, we compare notes, to see if we both saw the
same story.”

In her essay “Against Sincerity” (in Proofs and Theories, 1994) Glück spends some time considering how, for Keats, “That world—this world—was heaven; in the other he could not believe, nor could he see his life as a ritual preparation. So he immersed himself in the momentary splendor of the material world, which led always to the idea of loss.” It is easy to see why Glück would feel kinship with Keats. Keats, of course, was heavily influenced by Wordsworth, who approached his poetry with more anxiety about the “hidden reaches of the mind” than on the experience of death (inasmuch as they can be separate). Glück’s own work is, in some ways, a melding of the two poets; her own emphasis is on the boundaries and limitations of the philosophical / intellectual and sensual, as well as the paradox of community—that it is absolutely necessary to live our lives with others, and yet impossible to understand another’s subjectivity or share our own.

She writes that Keats “was given to describing his methods of composition in terms implying a giving-in: the poet was to be passive, responsive, available to all sensation. His desire was to reveal the soul, but soul, to Keats, had no spiritual draperies. Spirituality manifests the mind’s intimidating claim to independent life. It was this invention Keats rejected. To Keats, the soul was corporeal and vital and frail; it had no life outside the body.” And so with Glück:

Crossroads

My body, now that we will not be traveling together
much longer
I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw
and unfamiliar,
like what I remember of love when I as young—
love that was so often foolish in its objectives
but never it its choices, its intensities.
Too much demanded in advance, too much that could
not be promised—
My soul has been so fearful, so violent:
forgive its brutality.
As though it were that soul, my hand moves over you
cautiously,
not wishing to give offense
but eager, finally, to achieve expression as substance:
it is not the earth I will miss,
it is you I will miss.

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Peter Swirski, Ed. I Sing the Body Politic: History as Prophecy in Contemporary American Literature. McGill University Press, 2009

Author Philip Roth, March, 1962

One December day in 1817, John Keats wrote to his brother the following: “I had not a dispute but a disquisition… on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature… I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” He had, of course, no idea what impact “negative capability” would have on future generations of writers and readers. John Dewey said this letter “contains more of the psychology of productive thought than many treatises.” And indeed, negative capability—when contrasted with the various ideologies of his time and since—holds up impressively well.

It is true that negative capability is a quality we find in all great works of literature: consider John Milton’s sheer awe at the universe in Paradise Lost; the sinners’ inability to comprehend the present in The Inferno; and the brilliant, cyclical Hamlet. That strong authors must be comfortable with “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts” holds no less true for contemporary literature (or art in general): Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, for example, rests on the wavering dock of her sanity.

Keats’ concept of negative capability can help us understand the relative dearth of extraordinary fiction with a more-or-less explicit political aim. First, there is the certainty and conviction required for an author to sustain a “message” or political perspective over the course of a novel or book of poems. In addition, it must be a Sisyphean task to achieve this with characters who are three dimensional and negatively capable (if you will). Poetry or fiction which is rooted in the politics of identity risks becoming at best irrelevant, at worst curious or quaint, when our understanding of such identities inevitably shifts—more appropriate for the study of culture, than the study of literature, for example (inasmuch as they can be separated). Whether or not an author is justified in fearing his or her work will cease to be relevant in future generations, or—more important—whether such a fear is productive, is a conundrum that political authors arguably circumvent, in their investment in documenting what is happening right now.

The exceptions are brilliant, outstanding, and integral to American culture and history—Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl; but the vast majority of literature which takes on political thought as its main topic falters and dissipates into the ether. I Sing the Body Politic: History as Prophecy in Contemporary American Literature offers a keyhole view into recent literature and art that grapples with some of the most painful events in recent American history, including the war in Iraq, George W. Bush’s presidency, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. The book is less interested in the literary style, or artistic success, of the works it considers than it is in revealing the political valences of their content. Instead, the authors present a boook where “in essays by five senior scholars, major works of American literature and film are analyzed in the context of a larger set of arguments about American injustice at home and across the empire.” The book focuses on some predictable artists and authors: Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, Spike Lee, and Michael Moore. It also includes an essay (its strongest) by Michael Zeitlen which compares the memoirs of veterans of the Vietnam and Iraq wars. The tone of the book is no-nonsense, and if you don’t know the authors’ and editors’ politics by the end of the introduction, you’re reading it upside-down. Highly critical and full of moral outrage, the authors attempt to demonstrate how political resistance manifests in the work of some of the nation’s most important writers and film makers.

The first chapter, “Stupidity’s Progress: Philip Roth and Twentieth-Century American History,” considers Roth’s famous trilogy of I Married a Communist (1998), American Pastoral (1997), and The Human Stain (2000). David Rampton details Roth’s own, diluted version of negative capability:

Where there is an American pastoral, there is the American demonic. Where there are blithe assumptions about upward mobility, there are the workers chained to their stations in the factories. Where there is prosperity for the upper half, the other half, down-sized and staring at the poverty line with no medical insurance, loses out to the forces of globalization. The comforts of the suburbs are simultaneously a cover for seething discontent. The ideals of the founding fathers are used to justify the most blatant kind of imperialism.

(Interestingly, Rampton doesn’t address the most oft-cited criticism of Roth’s work, which is his overt and detailed misogyny.)

The ambivalance or uncertainty in Roth’s political maneuvering—for example, equal helpings of disgust for patriotism and the domestic terrorists of the Sixties—is widely undercut by the consistency of his rant: Americans are stupid, and we’re getting worse. His critique of America’s anti-intellectualism, willful naïveté, gluttonous consumerism, and isolationist ideology comes from the gut. It is as though Roth himself, nudged and cajoled by the international fallout from American ignorance, is at the edge of the cliff that is this country—and he’s decided to make the leap a little bit gleeful, for his trouble. What makes his novels so intensely pleasurable to the reader is this glee—the pure, unapologetic hedonism, the adolescent playing hooky—that characterizes his novels. But of course, as an older white American male, Roth is in a position to elide gracefully the sense of indignation which characterizes much of American far-left politics. The pleasurable sense of irony and freedom in futility woven through his novels, in fact, are largely possible because of Roth’s sensibility—observing, as he does, from outside of the fray.

“Spike Lee, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X: The Politics of Domination and Difference,” by Gordon Slethaug, considers and celebrates Lee’s work. His films (focusing mainly on Malcolm X and Do the Right Thing) document the negotiation between militant and nonviolent resistance in the black community over the past fifty years. Unfortunately, much of the essay is an attempt to determine whether the politics of Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, Jr. are most championed in Do the Right Thing—when the success of the film itself is created by the complexity of the community represented toward each other, toward the other, and toward America. The author concludes that “arguably… this film is not about the possibility of integrating black and white or of sitting down at a table together but about creating black manhood… ‘liberating the black man in American society rather than integrating the black man into that society.’”

By far the most moving essay in the collection, “The American Wars: History and Prophecy in Vietnam, the Gulf, and Iraq” by Michael Zeitlin compares the memoirs of veterans from these wars, attempting to discern what differences, if any, the soldiers from these wars have experienced upon returning home. Zeitlin is remarkably deft at corralling the many issues at hand, and comes to a conclusion that, impressively, doesn’t awkwardly squash the men’s experience to create some kind of synthesis. Zeitlin offers a chilling perspective on the role that war films have had on generations of American men: Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket. He quotes one young man: “Vietnam war films are all pro-war, no matter what the supposed message, what Kubrick or Coppola or Stone intended.…We watch the same films and are excited by them, because the magic brutality of the films celebrates the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills.” One soldier told him “The psy-ops bastards continue playing the loud rock-and-roll music. I like rock music, but I don’t think it belongs in my war. It was fine in the movies, on the boat with Martin Sheen going up the fake Vietnamese Congon or with the grunts patrolling Ho Chi Minh as they take a hill and heavy casualties, but I don’t need The Who and The Doors in my war, as I prepare to fight for or lose my life. Teenage wasteland, my ass. This is the other side.” Culling through the interviews, memoirs, films and music of America’s most recent wars, Zeitlin reminds us that America may not be ready for this new generation of soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, with amputated limbs, with broken families. Zeitlin concludes that one difficulty the Iraq veterans face is the cognitive dissonance of coming home to a cheering America. He compares this dynamic to that of the Vietnam vets, who came back to an America that was deeply divided; he concludes that the celebration of the homecoming of our newest generation of veterans is entirely for the media, far from cathartic to those men and women who return exhausted, traumatized, and just glad to be alive.

These three essays—on Roth, Lee, and America’s recent wars—do much to articulate the radically different perspectives on what form liberal criticism might take in the arts (unfortunately, the book ends with an essay on Michael Moore—who could single-handedly destroy Keats’ ideal of negative capability. Admittedly, this is his purpose: “Moore’s oeuvre stands or falls on its ability to tell the truth as he sees it…. Moore’s vision of the American political scene is clear, consistent, and plausible and when he puts his thoughts on paper or edits film as a documentarian must, this vision is not betrayed”). The collection reminds us of the difficulty of writing about politics, but also the importance; we should be grateful to those admirable artists who are able to pull it off.

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Recently, a subcommittee of the Committee on Contingent Faculty and the Profession disseminated a report on the dire state of tenure-track positions in American universities. Considering that by 2007, almost 70 percent of faculty members were employed off the tenure track, it has become crystal clear that the original goal of tenure—established to ensure adequate compensation and encourage research and academic freedom—is applicable to fewer and fewer faculty. American universities must consider how they make use of contingent faculty and reassess not only the compensation and benefits of adjuncts, associate instructors, and the like, but also the status these faculty members are given within their departments. Some universities maintain a standard set of tenured faculty within their departments, only to rely increasingly on contingent employees in satellite campuses, online course offerings, and campuses overseas. The individuals staffing these positions work for low pay with few or no benefits, and they correspondingly have less say in how a department is run and what decisions are made regarding upcoming hires. Relied upon heavily for the majority of labor within these departments, yet with no job security or prestige, contingent faculty are the outcast step-child within their profession.

These issues are familiar to us at CUNY, and the Adjunct Project has consistently worked to bring the concerns of adjuncts to the forefront of conversations about how CUNY will face the 21st century. Yet the country-wide shift toward heavier reliance on contingent faculty goes beyond mere cost cutting. As the American Association of University Professors’ 2009 Report on the Economic Status of the Profession explains, the erosion of tenure-track positions is due in part to the “fundamentally flawed premise” that faculty “represent only a cost, rather than the institution’s primary resource.” The report continues, pointing out that the increasing reliance on contingent faculty who are underpaid and overworked “represents a disinvestment in the nation’s intellectual capital precisely at the time when innovation and insight are most needed.” Too true: that the general quality of American university education has been in sharp and consistent decline over the past few decades has become conventional wisdom. Grade inflation, and a decrease in challenging curricula are frequent topics during the happy hours of university faculty; they are problems we acknowledge with genuine dismay, yet really have no idea how to address.

Part of the issue may be that our attention is in the wrong place. Rather than being only the reflection of the state of ournation’s public schools, or the current consumer-model many universities seem to follow, the problem is also a result of the heavy reliance on graduate students and adjunct employees who—rightfully so—have an ethical obligation to invest only as much in their classes as they are compensated. Of course, many, if not most, contingent faculty put in well over the amount of hours for which they are actually paid. Grading, conferences with students, pedagogical training (formal or informal) means additional hours which we “volunteer” in our departments. Nationwide, it is nearly impossible for contingent faculty to live on the low pay they receive, and many individuals must seek employment outside of their departments; depleting their resources and the time they can offer to students. The committee reports that “a broad and fast growing front of research shows that the system of permanently-temporary faculty appointments has negative consequences for student learning. In many cases this is not due to the quality and professional training of the faculty serving in temporary appointments—they may be highly qualified and superb teachers—but to the terms and conditions under which they are employed.”

As many of you are aware, due to clerical and human error, many GC adjuncts failed to receive paychecks for two pay periods at the beginning of this year. The problem was widespread, and it is not an overstatement to say the economic ramifications for our graduate students—who live paycheck to paycheck as it is—were severe. Increases in credit card APRs because of missed payments, fees from landlords and other financial pressures highlight the tightrope many of us walk day-to-day as we try to survive on our paychecks.

There were many ideas about how to handle the problem, and the Adjunct Project, along with the Professional Staff Congress and Doctoral Students Council, worked around the clock to ensure that the Provost’s Office and President Bill Kelly were taken to task for the inexcusable failure. One suggestion, aimed toward publicity and a desire to use the paycheck debacle as a “teaching moment,” was to encourage adjuncts to make a statement to students about the event (the suggested statement was circulated over email). The idea was that our students benefit from understanding more fully how the university system works and that such knowledge helps them become more active and sophisticated participants in their university; in addition, it was argued that our students deserve to know how the education they pay for is being compromised by overworked and under-paid contingent faculty.

The idea was met with some criticism. Adjuncts were hesitant to subject their students to the discomfort of listening to their teacher “complain” about not being paid. There is obviously room for debate about the strategy; the desire not to discuss with our students the disheartening working conditions we labor under demonstrates our genuine commitment to our classes. Eager to create a professional and top-notch classroom environment, we’re reasonably hesitant to broach the subject. But their ignorance, much like the ignorance of the rest of the country, doesn’t serve them well. Rather than being fully equipped to articulate the kind of education they expect or to participate in the ongoing conversation about the state of the nation’s universities, our students passively run through the system. Their disengagement reflects, in fact, the disengagement of many contingent faculty from their own departments. No one can deny that the system we work under requires, in part, the ignorance of our students to the problem. “Mindful that their working conditions are their students’ learning conditions,” explains the Committee, “many faculty holding contingent appointments struggle to shield students from the consequences of an increasingly unprofessional workplace.… Institutions that serve the economically marginalized and the largest proportion of minority students, such as community colleges, typically employ the largest numbers of nontenurable faculty. We are at a tipping point. In addition to the injuries to students, campuses that overuse contingent [faculty] show higher levels of disengagement and disaffection among [all faculty members], even those with more secure positions.”

It’s difficult to know how to proceed, how to begin to address such a wide-spread and systemic problem in American colleges across the country. The Committee “believes that the best way to stabilize the faculty infrastructure is to bundle the employment and economic securities that activist contingent faculty are already winning for themselves with the rigorous professional peer scrutiny of the tenure system. The ways in which contingent teachers are hired, evaluated and promoted often bypass the faculty entirely and are generally less rigorous than the intense peer scrutiny applied to faculty in tenurable positions.” This makes sense, if the idea that increasing scrutiny for contingent faculty will be accompanied by reward—that is, an increase in compensation, especially those who have worked within the department for some time, the potential for more benefits, and a shift in the marginalized position these individuals feel when it comes to the development of their respective departments.

The Committee concludes its report with a summary of those institutions which have “adopted provisions that fall well short of tenure but that offer contingent faculty some protection and the institution some stability. Often, these take the form of improved job security, protections for academic freedom, or provisions for inclusion of contingent faculty in academic citizenship and governance.” One of the universities they consider is CUNY, and they point out the improvements in job security for contingent employees recently won through collective bargaining by the PSC. It must not escape our attention that these hard-fought victories fall short in one key way: none will result in the increase of tenure-track positions within departments. This is a question we must all consider, a concern we must all have, as graduate students and as contingent faculty. How do we both advocate for improved working conditions, job security, and compensation, and also stop the increasing decline of tenure-track positions available? We can do both—but it’s just one more thing to add to
our plate.

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A recent editorial in the New York Times by Stanley Fish, “What Should Colleges Teach?” generated enough controversy and enthusiasm to merit that he write two follow up pieces. In the first, Stanley Fish argues that the problem with English composition courses is they don’t teach composition at all; rather, they are poorly masked cultural studies courses focusing on history, political thought, and the like. Echoing George Orwell’s famous piece “Politics and the English Language,” Fish criticizes the prioritizing of a general, catch-all “humanities” education in composition courses if it comes at the expense of basic grammar and mechanics.

Fish’s perspective generates in me (an English composition, creative writing and literature instructor), an ambivalent reaction. On one hand, the transformation within academia brought on by waves of queer theory, feminist theory, culture studies, postcolonial studies, etc., was inevitable and has improved scholarly endeavors in ways that are profound and overwhelmingly positive. And importantly, the weaknesses Fish attributes to the focus of these disciplines—in particular, his belief that undergraduates are worse writers because colleges have instead tried to make them “better citizens”—may very well come from any number of reasons, including a general decline in the American public school system (not the use of, say, popular film in the classroom to teach cultural analysis).

But it’s important to note that Fish is not critiquing at its base the importance of these disciplines. Of the composition courses he examined before writing the editorial, he says: “instruction in composition was not their focus. Instead, the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues—racism, sexism, immigration, globalization. These artifacts and topics are surely worthy of serious study, but they should have received it in courses that bore their name, if only as a matter of truth-in-advertising.”

After six years of teaching college English—creative writing, composition, and literature courses—I agree for the most part with his main ideas. The first difficulty, of course, is that no two universities are alike, just as no two communities are alike. My former undergraduate students in the Midwest (Indiana and Missouri) were fair to middling writers, but their critical thinking skills left much to be desired. Much of this was due to a failure in the public education systems in those states (which are notoriously lacking), as well as a general culture which discouraged critique of authority—and by authority, I mean anything ranging from your high school principal to MTV to the National Rifle Association. I was (and continue to be) very fond of my students from these states and feel I can understand as a Midwesterner myself (though not accept) their reticence to question the status quo.

By contrast, I have my students in New York. I am often in awe of their sophistication regarding social issues at such a young ages, yet find they struggle somewhat more with basic mechanics and writing skills. The significant consequence is that, though my students here bring much diversity of experience to the classroom (in terms of age, race / ethnicity, sexual orientation, political orientation, and economic background), as well as a generally sophisticated and complex way of looking at politics, media, and the world around them, they have a very difficult time expressing this in their essays. This leads me to believe that my students do not need assistance learning how to think critically, in particular about their society or about pop culture. Fish notes that the emphasis in composition courses is often on these subjects, and I would agree wholeheartedly that there is something fundamentally misguided (if benevolently intended about such an approach. Instead, my students need help articulating their already interesting, complex, and idiosyncratic ideas about the world, at the most basic level. They need help identifying and using the nuts and bolts of the English language.

Both these groups of students have writing issues which are basic enough to fundamentally impinge on the expression of their arguments: passive voice, subject / verb agreement, spelling and punctuation, etc. I’m not sure in what ways (or why) the secondary education system is failing our students, but because I myself am trained to teach rhetoric, argumentation, and literary interpretation, I frequently find myself at a loss for how to address more basic problems.

Can anyone stomach another sentence diagram? I’m not sure when I last did a sentence diagram—after all, I’m only a bit more than a decade older than my students, and was thus more or less subject to the same public school upbringing. I’d be lying if I said I was entirely comfortable breaking down the more advanced nuances of grammar and sentence structure. Yet Fish acknowledges this, asking: “What good is it to be told, ‘Do not join independent clauses with a comma,’ if you don’t have the slightest idea of what a clause is (and isn’t), never mind an ‘independent’ one? And even if a beginning student were provided with the definition of a clause, the definition itself would hang in mid-air like a random piece of knowledge. It would be like being given a definition of a drop-kick in the absence of any understanding of the game in which it could be deployed.” Instead, he advocates for a slow and steady approach, in which a composition course is more or less a series of lessons that works on the sentence level, breaking down various structures both to see how they function in the English language and as pieces of a larger argument.

There is the issue of how diversity expresses itself in writing. My background and passion is in creative writing and poetry, so my own hesitations arise when I think of teaching a class that bulldozes difference—that attempts to eradicate unique expressions or ways of speaking in formal writing. After all, Flannery O’Connor wouldn’t have become the writer she is if she had abandoned all her Southernisms in favor of a more anesthetized, standard English. But the fact of the matter is I’m not teaching creative writing, and as O’Connor’s own essays make clear, she knew when and how to turn it off (and strongly advocated doing so). Fish addresses this in his third editorial, saying: “… you must clear your mind of the orthodoxies that have taken hold in the composition world…: ‘We affirm the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language — the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style.’” He continues: “The issue is whether students… will prosper in a society where norms of speech and writing are enforced not by law but by institutional decorums. If you’re about to be fired because your memos reflect your “own identity and style,” citing (dialects of nurture) is not going to do you any good.

He in no way disagrees that the prioritizing of “standard English” is wielded unfairly against those who are less formally educated, but points out that while “it may be true that the standard language is an instrument of power and a device for protecting the status quo, that very truth is a reason for teaching it to students who are being prepared for entry into the world as it now is rather than the world as it might be in some utopian imagination—all dialects equal, all  habit of speech and writing equally rewarded. You’re not going to be able to change the world if you are not equipped with the tools that speak to its present condition. You don’t strike a blow against a power structure by making yourself vulnerable to its prejudices…. And if students infected with the facile egalitarianism of soft multiculturalism declare, ‘I have a right to my own language,’ reply, ‘Yes , you do, and I am not here to take that language from you; I’m here to teach you another one.’ (Who could object to learning a second language?) And then get on with it.” Despite the many ways that language changes—being itself a living, breathing, adaptable animal—it is still true that the American workplace has marked a certain writing style as being that which is useful, strong, intelligent, analytical and practical. And that style typically follows standardized sentence structure and grammar rules which, in my experience at least, we are increasingly failing to offer to our young students.

I am one of those English teachers that assigns reading—– and a lot of it. My students read Hemingway, Stein, Updike, O’Connor, Faulkner, Bambara, Tan, and the like; essentially, I assign as many words to them without inciting potential mutiny. And they’re accountable for it, and must write in class spontaneously and often about what they’ve read. This is simply because, like most teachers, I teach the way I learned, and I learned to write by reading, and then reading some more. The knowledge that our public schools and American culture generally is gently but consistently recoiling from the art of reading gives me energy and conviction about my courses.

But Fish’s essay has convinced me that it’s time to face my own demons and come up with some grammar and sentence structure exercises that at least approximate being interesting. I like this idea that teaching students how to write is akin to teaching them a second language—I may make this analogy in class tomorrow, before a lesson on sentence fragments. And then I’ll get on with it.

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Just a week ago, the New York Times featured an article in their “Economix” blog: “Teacher Pay around the World” (Sept. 9, 2009, http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/teacher-pay-around-the-world/). The article presents a mass of statistics collected by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) about education around the world, focusing on how the United States measures up. As it turns out, “compared to other developed countries, in the United States teachers generally spend more time teaching but apparently without an equivalent advantage in pay.” The study tells us that American teachers in primary, lower secondary education and upper secondary education divisions spend, on average, 1,080 hours teaching each year. For this effort, though internationally the public primary-school teacher earns $43,633, America’s teachers receive an average of $39,007.

This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to those of us in academia. Though we’re teaching as adjuncts or fellows at the college level, we must be especially aware of the plight of teachers at all levels. It seems unnecessary to point out that, as college degrees become more ubiquitous, the expectations and compensation of secondary education teachers and graduate students and adjunct faculty become more and more similar. If our colleagues are being expected to teach classes in schools which are over-attended and under-staffed, and to do so with lower pay and longer hours, the inequities are likely to spread to adjuncts.

As the OECD notes, comparing the compensation of teachers in much less wealthy countries to the lesser compensation of American teachers makes this all the more disconcerting. Here in the United States, a seasoned teacher—someone with fifteen years of experience—makes a salary that is 96 percent of the country’s gross domestic product per capita. Across the board, a teacher with identical experience makes 117 percent of GDP per capita (it turns out that the best place to teach, financially anyhow, is Korea: there, the average teacher makes 221 percent).

At the secondary level and below, more American teachers are women: 69.4 percent compared to 65percent across the OECD (at the post-secondary level the numbers change to 41.6 percent compared to 39 percent). This reminds us that inequity in pay is often a symptom of a larger problem of workplace gender discrimination.

In short, “The demographics of teachers in the United States look similar to those of teachers elsewhere in the developed world.” This should concern us not only as adjuncts, but as citizens.

The Tenuous Faculty

About a year ago, Inside Higher Ed (www.insidehighered.com) published an article titled “For Adjuncts, Progresses and Complexities.” The article quoted a lecturer in anthropology at San Jose University who complained that after teaching four or five courses there a semester since 1987, he was still considered part-time faculty: “Higher education, he said, must confront the ‘glaring disparities and inequities between the tenured faculty and the tenuous faculty.’”

There is potential to languish ambivalently in the adjuncting world; particularly in New York City (ironically, considering the cost of living). Many of us will rush from college to college teaching an ever-changing handful of classes as we muddle through our dissertations.  This reality is something for which we must all take responsibility; as graduate students and professionals, it is on us to usher ourselves along the stages of our degree. Still, an individual who is continually re-hired to teach courses, who participates in departmental meetings and has input on curriculum should be treated as more than part-time filler. Unfortunately, there isn’t much in the way of job security for contingent academic labor; so much so, we’re not even quite sure what job security would look like.

The Inside Higher Ed article describes how the University of California lecturers’ union (an American Federation of Teachers affiliate) was able to negotiate a “gold standard” contract for non-tenure track professors. The writing program at UCLA was described by one lecturer “as one in which most decisions are made by a staff composed entirely of lecturers, who evaluate one another, manage the program’s budget, and are given curricular responsibilities based on their expertise.”

Non-tenure track faculty in this category can only be let go for “narrowly specified reasons—criteria the university has yet to use successfully.” Across the board at American universities, adjunct complaints are sloppily handled; the person who made the original complaint is often the same person making the “final decision” about the hiring or firing. The UC grievance system allows for independent decision making, and crucially, “In a provision that responds to the sense that at many campuses a complaining parent or a false rumor on RateMyProfessor.com can ruin an adjunct’s career…lecturers in (the) union cannot be dismissed or punished on the sole basis of student evaluations.” As for job security, if one lectures at the University of California for six years, one has a presumed reappointment.

That’s the good news; here’s the less good news. The union in this case made these gains over twenty-five years of slow, plodding progress. The article quotes Robert Samuels, president of the University of California lecturers’ union, as saying: “A lot of union organizers or academics want all or nothing—the same job security or nothing”; but, the article continues: “….his union’s success wouldn’t have happened that way. ‘You can’t get everything right off the bat,’ he said. But you can come back, with more ambition, time after time.”

Other non-tenure-track professors who were part of progressive universities agreed with the California lecturers on a few main issues. An organizer in British Columbia warned of the importance of “striking while the iron is hot,” and being together enough to act when a union-friendly government is in power.

A president of the non-tenure-track faculty union at Southern Illinois University, Alan Shiller,

described a “process his National Education Association-affiliated union won for adjuncts to be given the status of ‘established’ after teaching thirty-six credit hours. Such faculty members get the rights, among other things, to have seniority on course assignments, and the ‘right of first refusal’ on courses they have taught in the past. He also said that the adjuncts are protected from ‘the power of the department secretary.’ He said that until the union raised the issue, course assignments were routinely being made by secretaries, who if they couldn’t reach someone after one call, just went to someone else. He said that tackling these issues created ‘real job security for members.”

It seems the message of this meeting was three-fold: be creative, be patient, and be organized.

First Things First: Getting Paid

The similarities between American teachers at all levels—what’s required of them and how they’re paid, along with problems with job security—are important to understand on a global level, literally and metaphorically. On one hand, our compensation is revealed as even more paltry when compared to that of other, less wealthy nations (not to mention the fact that shoddier education standards, and more frazzled teachers, is not going to help the United States compete in a global marketplace). On the other hand, these concerns are  systemic, structural, multi-faceted; they exist in the context of labor inequities nationally.
And what about CUNY? First things first: this week, a number of recently appointed or reappointed Grad A, B, or C Assistants failed to receive their first paycheck. It seems to have been an organizational or clerical error, but a consequential number of CUNY’s adjuncts, who had attended orientations and dutifully signed the stacks of paper required to get “in the system” are now scrambling to pay their rents. This is a problem, obviously, and if this has happened to you, the Adjunct Project advises you to take the following steps:

1.  Go to Human Resources (do not call—go) on the 8th floor of the Graduate Center, and explain to them that you were not paid.  Have your appointment letter and any other potentially relevant paperwork. When they tell you that you won’t be paid, calmly ask for a 50 percent advance on your salary.

2.  Write an email to the Associate Provost of your division (Dr. Louise Lennihan for the Social Sciences and Humanities, llenni@gc.cuny.edu and Dr. Ann Henderson for the Sciences, ahender@gc.cuny.edu.)  Explain who you spoke to in payroll, what they told you, and the date you signed your appointment letter.

3.   Let the Adjunct Project know.  We’ve already notified the PSC of this problem but would like to know the number of people this has impacted.

The main message we’d like to send from the Adjunct Project is: you must contact the Associate Provost. It’s imperative that they understand concretely how this issue is impacting adjuncts. Even if you are able to secure an advance, keep in mind this is a problem that is symptomatic of larger issues. It was only last year that our adjuncts were finally able to secure basic health care; now we are fighting to get paid on time!

It’s worth noting that it’s unclear why this problem occurred, and what part of the system failed us. CUNY staff, in Human Resources and elsewhere, are spread too thinly as it is. As adjuncts, we should keep this in mind as we discuss it with the Provost’s Office and elsewhere. We need more staff and better funding at all institutional levels, so that this kind of thing never happens again.

Upcoming Events

The Adjunct Project holds office hours both in the GC Mina Rees Library on Tuesdays from 2:00-4:00 and for the month of September, on Wednesdays from 4:00-5:30, this month (September) in the Art history lounge, 3rd floor. Come see us to discuss any issue you have relating to your adjunct position, including compensation, healthcare, and human resources issues.

Come to the Adjunct Project’s Health Insurance Party on October 15^th, room 5414 at 8 p.m. Refreshments will be provided, as will door prizes! You must present either your NYSHIP card, a union card or a filled out NYSHIP application as your invitation. We look forward to seeing you there.

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Young John Donne

John Donne: The Reformed Soul, a Biography by John Stubbs. W W Norton & Co., 2008. 592 pages.

For every man alone thinks he hath got/ To be a phoenix, and that there can be/ None of that kind, of which he is, but he.

—John Donne, An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary

Psychologically, it seems (despite all evidence to the contrary) that we live in the Age of Reconciliation. Unity and balance are central to our ideals. Lovers stay together, or split only to rejoin; children spend their lives with therapists who reconcile them to their parents’ mistakes; we try to reconcile our passions with the reality of our day jobs and our illicit desires with our values. This spirit is not new, or all-encompassing. Still, there have been times when individuals were defined by the strained conversation between chasms in conscience and community, art and patron, lusts and prayers; a time when psychic conflict was understood as a potentially productive, rather than destructive, energy. Arguably, no poet—perhaps no person—in the history of Western literature embodies the creative and vital nature of personal contradiction more than John Donne. In John Donne: The Reformed Soul, John Stubbs confidently lays out the biographical details (or, as Donne might say, an anatomy) of his life. More to the point, Stubbs offers a convincing psychological portrait, and the effect is a book that is deeply moving and startling in its scope.

In the course of his life, Donne metamorphosed from a libidinous and love-struck poet to the intimidating dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, making it difficult to create a cohesive narrative. He was a poet and priest, but he was also a sailor and captain of a fleet ensnarled in the ongoing diplomatic tiffs between England and Spain, off and on from 1596-1598. He then was appointed the secretary to the Lord Keeper of the Seal, Sir Thomas Egerton. Before both of those occupations, he became well-versed in the law as a scholar at the Inns of Court. Suffice to say, his life was complex enough to deter even the most ambitious biographer. Stubbs wisely resists the urge to offer conjecture as to the biographical intent of those poems for which it would be especially precarious, and the bulk of the biography appropriately hinges on the hundreds of letters Donne sent to various friends and patrons.

Here is what those letters tell us, more or less: his life, which spanned from 1572-1631, was hardly less intricate than a fugue, and remarkable to the point of disbelief. He was forced to leave Oxford some time before he was sixteen, unwilling to sign the requisite Oath of Allegiance to the Queen and the Reformed Church. The son of an ironmonger, he spent much of his life pursuing two related goals: a higher social position than that of his birth, and protection against the martyrdom his family had experienced repeatedly as Catholics in an intolerant Protestant England. Donne came from a long line of Papists; Sir Thomas More was his maternal great-great-grandfather. More, as Chancellor to Henry VIII, had been responsible for the deaths of many Protestants via public burning; he was rewarded for his “protection” of Henry VIII with a beheading. One imagines that it was in part this legacy that made Donne’s mother refuse to relinquish Catholicism, even to the point of exile. Donne’s brother Henry died after being tortured and thrown in prison for harboring a Catholic priest. To give us a sense of the nature of punishments for being a Papist sympathizer, Stubbs relates this gruesome tale: while Henry languished in prison, the priest was condemned to death; upon being brought to the scaffold, one of the men responsible for his sentence cried out “thou didst say the Queen was a tyrant!” To which the priest, using some of his last breaths, shouted back that he had never done so, “but I say you are a tyrant and a bloodsucker.” He was unsuccessfully hanged and then publicly disemboweled and his intestines set on fire while the dying man watched. Decades later Donne would write, as one of the only important men in his time to decry torture as unchristian, “I haue seene at some Executions of Trayterous Priests, some bystanders pray to him whose body lay there dead”; it is not impossible that Donne would have been there to witness the gruesome death of his brother’s friend.

Painful as it may be, the anecdote is useful in understanding the context for Donne’s conversion. He began to waver in his conviction that the Catholic Church was worth dying for, and began to question those who would martyr themselves for (what increasingly seemed) superficial differences in worship. After his brother died, destitute and miserable in London’s oldest and most plague-prone prison, Donne didn’t dig in his heels and retaliate bravely against Protestant England. Instead, he began building a life that would in some ways be defined by an exhausting balance of watchfulness, hard work and capitulation.

His submissiveness to his patrons and the state was exacerbated by what his first biographer would describe as the one “remarkable error of his life”: he married for love. While serving as secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, he met and fell deeply in love with the 16-year-old daughter of his boss. Stubbs writes: “At times [Donne] saw their love as beginning with a gradual coalescence of feeling: at others it stemmed from one decisive moment, their ‘first strange and fatall interview.’ Either way, it was undoable.” They eloped, violating both canon and civil law. Demonstrating how lasting (and widespread) the controversy over their marriage was, Stubbs cites from A Choice Banquet of Witty Jests, Rare Fancies, and Pleasant Novels (1665): “decades later a joke about the furtive couple’s situation was still in circulation. According to one version, it began with Donne himself, at a moment of high exertion or anxiety: ‘Doctor Donne after he was married to a Maid, whose name was Anne, in a frolick (on his Wedding day) chalkt this on the back-side of his Kitchin-door, John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone.” Donne’s anxiety was no paranoia; Ann’s father was influential and furious, and had Donne briefly imprisoned. Donne (not the hearty sort, it seems) soon became ill and was released.

It would take him the rest of his life to pacify Ann’s father, and redeem his reputation with the elite employers of London. In the meantime, he and Ann did much lovemaking—she spent virtually the rest of her own life pregnant, bearing twelve children. Five of these children died, however (three of them in one year, so that Donne, devastated, laments to his friend that he has no money for a proper funeral, but hasn’t it in him to bury them himself). Ann herself died in childbirth at the age of thirty-three. Of the children who lived, Stubbs focuses on three: Constance, who was companion to her father until her marriage; George, the eldest and brightest son, was a solider (and tragically, a hostage in a prison in Spain when Donne died, after unsuccessful attempts to get his son released). Last there is infamous young John Donne, who would become his first and unfortunate editor. Though himself a type of clergyman, the young John seems to have been an “atheistical buffoon,” and cruel: he beat a child who ran in front of his horse so severely that the child died two weeks later. Barely escaping imprisonment, he went on to collect and publish his father’s work, with varying degrees of responsibility, for his own monetary benefit. Lost in this process was a series of essays and commentaries on some 1500 authors.

The relationship between Ann and John seems to be the one relatively comfortable and happy aspect of Donne’s life. Donne’s letters to his best friend and confidante Goodyer seem to indicate that, other than general exhaustion, he and Ann were unusually devoted to each other, a fact made all the more unusual when you consider that marriages at the time were rarely more than financial affairs. In many ways, his sermons after her death seem to be conversations with God intended to replace his conversations and devotion to Ann. As young parents, they scraped by in a number of ways; Donne wrote epithalamions (wedding poems), elegies and occasional commendations for various patrons. It is difficult to understand how a man of his talent could want for work, particularly because London encompassed a virtual constellation of literary greats. Donne was an avid playgoer as a young man, and it is unlikely he was not an acquaintance of Shakespeare; his daughter Constance would eventually marry the actor most favored by Christopher Marlowe, the first man to play Tamburlaine. He worked with philosopher Francis Bacon (a friend married Bacon’s niece); a close friend, Magdalen, was the mother of young poet George Herbert, who would decades later be joined with Donne as one of the so-called Metaphysical poets. He was in an informal literary-drinking-and-merriment club with playwright Ben Jonson, who memorialized the friendship with characteristic snarkiness years later: “Done’s (poetry, in part) was profane and full of blasphemies…(and) for not keeping of accent, (he) deserved hanging.” He was, Jonson conceded, “the first poet in the world in some things” but his work steadily declined in quality after the age of twenty-five. Finally, that “Done himself, for not being understood, would perish.”

Unfortunately, then (as now), the life of a poet didn’t pay so well. As his family grew, they went deeper into poverty. Personally, Donne was a man of infinite insecurities, in constant flux, so much so that he likened this aspect of his psyche to the torture method du jour. In a late sermon he wrote:

It were a strange ambitious patience in any man, to be content to be racked every day, in hope to be an inch or two taller at last: so is it for me, to think to be a dram or two wiser, by hearkening all jealousies, and doubts, and distractions, and perplexities, that arise in my Bosom, or in my Family; which is the rack and torture of the soul. A spirit of contradiction may be of use in the greatest Counsels… But a spirit of contradiction in mine own Bosome, to be able to conclude nothing, determine nothing, not in my Religion, not in my Manners, but occasionally, and upon Emergencies; this is a sickly complexion… a shrew and ill-presaging Crisis.

A man like this needed a few steady things in his life; one of them was consistent employment.

It was a stubborn (and in some ways inconvenient) admirer, King James, who elicited Donne’s eventual ordination by effectively blocking other employment until he acquiesced. Donne felt he had no right to a religious life. He was uneasy about everything—his past, his friendships, familial obligations, lust, ethics, God. It is no wonder: illness and schism shaped everything throughout Donne’s life. London strained against two unceasing tempests in particular: the plague and religious controversy (generally, a widespread conviction that those holding onto their Catholic faith were necessarily traitors to the Court). Donne’s preoccupation with death was not unduly morbid, but rather uncommonly apropos for his day. People were searching for divine explanations for the sickness, war, injustice, bewildering torture, public executions, all of which drenched the city in a stinking bath of infestation and blood. London swarmed with the antics of a grieving, frantic population convinced that any day they would awaken to bubonic sores that signaled their last earthly week.

Donne acknowledged the terror of annihilation, and offered a soothing (if stern) guide to God’s favor. This is presumably what King James had seen in Donne as a potential priest, when he argued that no one would take him seriously as a religious man. He was known as the poet and fool who married for love, he said. This is partly true. His poems were heralded, and censured, as rhetorically virtuosic, wrenchingly romantic, coming from a man who flagrantly disregarded traditional poetic meter and had a spectacular sex life. Like so many, Donne had written to woo, and he really meant it. Consider this sly entreaty in “The Flea”: “And in this flea our two bloods mingled be; / Thou know’st that this cannot be said / A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead, / Yet this enjoys before it woo, / And pampered swells with one blood made of two, / And this, alas, is more than we would do.” More scholarly is “The Canonization”: “We can die by it, if not live by love, / And if unfit for tombs and hearse / Our legend be, it will be fit for verse; / And if not piece of chronicle we prove, / We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms; / As well a well-wrought urn becomes / The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs, / And by these hymns, all shall approve / Us canonized for Love.” The speaker here chastises his mistress for withholding sex in favor of “well-wrought” poetry and the “pretty rooms” of a sonnet. As death would later replace his obsessions with the sensual pleasures of the body, here the sensual pleasures are prioritized over the lyric.

Because the poems were lacerating to his conscience, he had always limited their distribution, circulating them only among friends. Contemporary readers like T.S. Eliot would celebrate his early poems as singularly frank and complex, but they cast a sinful shadow over his life. The one time he came close to publishing them it was decades later, and he divided them into three piles representing the Catholic model of the afterlife. His love poems, he wrote to his close friend Goodyer, would be burned , “condemned by me to Hell.” Others—presumably the most explicitly sexual ones—were “virgins (save that they have been handled by many)’ which would be sent to ‘utter annihilation (a fate with which God does not threaten even the wickedest of sinners).’” By then, Donne had become increasingly fervent in his belief that sex equaled sin; Ann had died in childbirth (the infant girl lived barely minutes) and in his grief he radically dissociated from self-identity as a lover and husband. Around that unfortunate time, he was invited to speak at the wedding of a friend’s daughter. He disconcertingly announced: “Mariage is but a continuall fornication sealed with an oath,” later adding (as if that wasn’t wet blanket enough): “There is not a more uncomely, a poorer thing, then to love a Wife like a Mistresse.” He was reportedly a passionate and unusually vulnerable preacher, who one could find (as Walton reported) “weeping sometimes for his Auditory, sometimes with them: alwayes preaching to himself, like an Angel from a cloud, but in none…” At this stage Donne seems to have been a sort of Orpheus, trying to resist the urge to turn but failing, looking behind to his love and youth, thus eternally severing himself from his past. Eventually he would become more comfortable with his public life.

Due in part to a fear of how he would be remembered (suitor or priest), he prepared for posterity as adroitly as he composed his poems or sermons. His death was preceded by various false-starts and formal acknowledgments. During the heights of the plague, Donne left for the country, fearful of infection. The townspeople speculated that he had passed. When he got word of his own eulogies, he good-naturedly commented: “A man would almost be content to die… to hear of so much sorrow, and so much testimony from good men, as I…did upon the report of my death.” His last sermon is widely regarded as his elegy for himself. Stubbs notes that “there is surely no other poet who orchestrated his death so meticulously” and it seems that the sermon was his last opportunity to define his legacy. Donne wrote in a letter, “…it hath been my desire that I might die in the Pulpit; if not, that I may take my death in the Pulpit; that is, die the sooner by occasion of my former labours.” The sermon was austere and forlorn, rendering transparent his effort to reconcile two dove-tailing emotions: death was annihilation, or death was a joyous reconciliation with God and Ann. He hoped the latter was true, and he experienced a gnawing sense of guilt for his fear of the former.

Donne had an ambivalent relationship to solitude, which likely informed his confused feelings about death. As a brilliant and ambitious scholar working endlessly in a household full of children, he must have craved, even desperately at times, time alone. At the same time, his letters make clear his friendships were very dear to him. He also had a deeply religious conviction that it was sinful to hide from the world, famously writing “No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe…And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.” Donne suffered deeply for his inability to reconcile himself: those “jealousies, and doubts, and distractions, and perplexities,” the vacillations about religion, his hedonistic past turning to a conviction that lust was sin, and finally, the artistic conundrum of wanting to disappear from the world and wanting to be squarely in it, with magnifying glass in hand. Yet it was his very susceptibility to doubt, his inability to unify himself, that made him what he was. Despite his early years as a swaggering suitor and innovative poet, one imagines Donne during his later life as a wincing dog, shrinking from the chaos of the streets and clashes between divinity and loyalty. In Holy Sonnet XIV he cries: “Batter my heart, three-personed God; for You / As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend / Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.” We must be forced to recognize truth, because try as we might, we will always be vacillating, hesitant, and circumspect with God.

Ultimately, Donne secured both a higher social standing and protection for him and his family through unimaginable caution, and by converting. As dean of St. Paul’s, he made a few half-hearted attempts to massage the rift between the Catholic church of his youth and the Protestant one he adopted. But it was his flexibility that allowed him to survive. He reacted to danger not by going boldly forth into the fire of exploding violence and martyring allegiances that plagued the day; instead, Donne leaned a bit back, surveyed the scene, and his meditations on what he saw became his “fatal interview” with God. In the final weeks of his life, Stubbs tells us, he once more turned the chasm within himself into art. His doctor ominously suggested that Donne begin work on a monument of himself for St. Paul’s. Donne responded in characteristically grandiose, yet profoundly self-abnegating fashion: he came up with a design that depicted him—and thus required him to pose as—a corpse wrapped in the traditional funeral shroud, framed within the silhouette of a funereal urn. It was completed before his death on March 31, 1631, and in the interim, he genially requested it be hung above his bed.

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Darby Crash of The Germs

Eric Weisbard. Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. 323 pages.

Henry Rollins, most notably of the hardcore punk band Black Flag, once said, “I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone.” The idea that the definition, the refining of the self, is only possible through the trying on of various personas, is one familiar to philosophers and pop culture theorists alike. The joy of re-imagining one’s self must come partially through the sheer potential of it; if I dye my hair this color and start speaking German, maybe I can escape my Midwestern upbringing. If I convert to this religion, perhaps I can “not be like my parents.”

In the late 1930s, North Dakota native Norma Deloris Egstrom experienced her own personal metamorphosis. Born the seventh of eight children, her mother died when she was 4. She grew up under the tyranny of an abusive stepmother, Min, and the way she escaped was through work—waitressing and singing for low pay on local radio stations. One day, a radio personality in Fargo who was fond of her songs renamed her Peggy Lee, starting off a storm of reinvention that traveled all the way to Los Angeles where she became a legend. In 1942, she had her first hit, “Someone Else is Taking My Place.” Peggy Lee was taking poor Norma Egstrom’s place.

Peggy Lee went on to perform for vast adoring audiences, well into her old age, even wheelchair-bound. She fought for equal compensation for musicians, fueled by a conviction that she’d never be poor again. She used to quote Emerson: “God’s will will not be made manifest by cowards.” The catalyst that allows us to reinvent ourselves may be deceptively superficial, it’s true, but it also takes courage to allow a name, a haircut, a move across the country to be our present identity’s undoing, and to allow a new self to take its place. So a personal revolution from small-town North Dakota victim into artist, into icon, allowed the young Norma Egstrom to resist being overtaken with melancholy, futility, an upbringing surrounded by competing siblings and a frightful stepmother. Being an amazing singer is not enough. She had to transform herself into someone different, someone more powerful, more animal, in order to become the chart-topper who sang “Fever” with the devil-may-care seduction that shot her to stardom.

Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music is a collection of essays from the Experience Music Project Pop Conference “where… academics and other culture-mongers come together to stretch the boundaries of pop music culture, criticism, and scholarship,” and the collection concerns itself mostly with the reinvention not of selfhood, but of narrative and myth through song. Part and parcel of this discussion is the question of how resistance, subversion, and agency (those pervasive culture studies trade words) make themselves apparent in the transformation of one musical narrative into another.

A moment in Peggy Lee’s career serves to illustrate this approach. Those of you familiar with her heart-wrenching, downright existential “Is That All There Is?” will likely be gratified to learn that the origin of the song was not, in fact, a hedonistic desire by the writers to get everyone “to have a ball.” Instead, the songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were prompted to write the song because of an appreciation for Thomas Mann’s 1896 short story, “Disillusionment. “The story features a clergyman’s son whose witnessing of his family’s house catching fire leads to a strange kind of religious disenchantment: “’So this,’ I thought, ‘is a fire. This is what it is like to have the house on fire. Is that all there is to it?’” He presents a litany of other disappointing, apathy-inducing experiences (“the dry agonies of baffled lust”) and finally concludes, “So this is the greatest pain we can suffer. Well, and what then—is this all?”And “so I dream and wait for death. Ah, how well I know it already, death, that last disappointment! At my last moment I shall be saying to myself: ‘So this is the great experience—well, and what of it? What is it after all?’”

A little over a half century later, and Leiber and Stoller have made Mann’s story contemporary in a song, which will soon be transformed again by the detached, half-wilting, half-sung, half-spoken, masterful delivery of Peggy Lee. The chorus of the song is: “Is that all there is? / If that’s all there is, my friends / Let’s keep dancing / Let’s break out the booze / And have a ball / If that’s all… there is.” The chorus is interspersed with dramatic memories—the singer watching her childhood home burn down, the singer at the circus (of this “marvelous spectacle”: “there’s something missing”); the singer left by her first love (“and I thought I’d die, but I didn’t, and when I didn’t I thought to myself ‘Is that all there is?’”—as if the not-dying is itself the disappointment).

Franklin Bruno, the author of the essay “‘Is That All There Is?’ and the Uses of Disenchantment” is uninterested in the reinvention of the Mann story in and of itself. His thesis lies not in the reinvention of the literary in music, but rather, simply, the fascinating history of this great song and what it meant for audiences, and for Peggy Lee and later, Polly Jean Harvey. It is perhaps this that makes it one of the essays which stands out in this collection. Other essays are preoccupied with a theme of the reinvention of identity through musical borrowing, of the transference of power through music—this approach most commonly understood, for example, in the rightful preoccupation of many culture theorists with how white rock and roll co-opted the inestimable heights of African-American music. It is almost as though the main tension in culture studies which focuses on pop music is between a desire to shed a hundred variations of a song to find its “original identity” and an opposing desire, perhaps more theoretical, to articulate the great shell-game of musical attribution as itself a shell game. The latter, more postmodern approach ultimately must determine that all identities—sexual, gender, racial, regional, etc.—are, in fact, persuasive myths of our own making. The tension between seeking the authentic or revealing that the very concept of authenticity is, in fact, a ruse, is productive when it spurs on good scholarship. But reading a collection of essays like these together feels a bit schizophrenic, making a straightforward essay like the one about Peggy Lee’s career and the mystery of “Is That All There Is?” a sort of relief.

Two other essays in the collection, Lavinia Greenlaw’s funny and self-deprecating “On Punk Rock and Not Being a Girl” and Drew Daniel’s memorial to The Germs’ Darby Crash (and her youth), “How to Act Like Darby Crash” escape this cyclical conversation by being articulate and compelling about, simply, “What Rock Music Means to Me.” And it seems that a collection of essays like these may make for a more fluid and purposely celebratory compilation. That is not to say that academics can’t, or shouldn’t, write about pop and rock music. There’s nothing about popular music that might make it less applicable to scholarship, and we enter in a strange space of being nostalgic about the present if we try to isolate pop music from the academy. Still, who was it who said, “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”? We must acknowledge the ways music cannot be read as a literary text; its lineage is less, well, delineated, than what we might find when in a Shakespearean tragedy, where we can cherry-pick the Ovidian references. A singer may manipulate a line a hundred ways in performance; a ragtime pianist like Jelly Roll Morton surely altered key story lines in his “Murder Ballads” differently every time he performed (alone or with an audience) this 80-minute masterpiece. So maybe music is fundamentally more amorphous and living and sloppy and resistant to definition than other kinds of texts.

So it follows that pop music would be less neatly “readable” when it comes to the construction of social identity through song. Griel Marcus powerfully begins his essay “Death Letters” with the 1930s Harlem poet Melvin B. Tolson’s “Sootie Joe” line “Somebody has to black hisself up / For somebody else to stay white,” and goes on to ask why “old music” (by which he means Old-Time music) “seems to be heard, today, as punk. It’s heard as music of values: the values of harshness, cruelty, even sadism…The values of say your piece and get off the stage: get it over with, tell the truth as you see it and then shut up. There’s a sense of affinity, not the smell of a raid on someone else’s culture.” So instead, he tells us, young hipster audiences fetishize Dock Boggs’s “Sugar Baby,” Son House’s “Death Letter Blues” and Skip James’ “Devil Got My Woman” (see the movie Ghost World, which Marcus calls a “modern punk movie”). Marcus swiftly and convincingly defines the “punk reinvention of old American music…[as] people taking the ancient sound as a foreign language in which you could say absolutely anything, mean every word, and pretend you were only kidding.” This may be as good as any definition of the best of pop music.

Some of the essays in this collection strain more with a need to neatly categorize various social identities through song, trying to demonstrate how the metamorphoses of these songs cleanly reflect a changing America. The mildly bewildering “Whittling on Dynamite: The Difference Bert Williams Makes,” attempts to show how Bert Williams’s blackface band “Two Real Coons” legitimizes Spivak’s precarious notion that “subaltern speech may be halting and self-defeating…but subaltern song is different.” To be fair, the author eventually argues that “authenticity is relative,” which is possibly the most important—and certainly most accurate—argument in the collection. “Magic Moments, the Ghost of Folk-Rock, and the Ring of E Major” by David Brackett loses its way when Brackett tries to use E Major to trace a lineage of “magic moments” and “cross-racial ventriloquism” where folk-rock demonstrates its affinity to and separation from African-American hymn and blues groups. An essay by Jason King also stumbles by ill-advisedly taking on the task of defining “vibe.” The title of the article is “The Sound of Velvet Melting: The Power of ‘Vibe’ in the Music of Roberta Flack”; there is, it must be said, something slightly absurd about an academic discussion of what constitutes “vibe” or a “magic moment”—especially when what’s at stake is an attempt to explain racial borrowing (in the case of this article, to show how a singer like Flack can be defended against arguments that she is the African-American version of Olivia Newton John. Of course she shouldn’t have to be defended from such an absurd, essentialist claim; yet rather than making that point, King relies on the awkward assertion that the sole thing Flack and John have in common is their ability to “[produce] getting togetherness”).

There is a way, of course, in which articulating the lineage of American music is useful—that’s why we cherish our musicologists, that’s why we know Elvis became Elvis only because of the history of African-American rhythm and blues in the South—but there’s something discomfiting about the desire to produce clean and articulate racial conversations out of the transference of narrative in song. It may leave someone wondering, is that all there is? It can feel as though there is something paradoxically inauthentic about the forceful prioritizing of identity politics on these songs. The thing that makes Dock Boggs’s masterpiece “Sugar Baby” work is not that the song marks a crucial moment of intersection between African-American and hillbilly music, although that’s key. What really makes the song tick is the moment when the singer cries, “‘Who’ll rock the cradle, who’ll sing the song? Who’ll rock the cradle when you gone?’” and then answers, for the wife he has just killed, “I’ll rock the cradle, I’ll sing the song / I will rock the cradle when you gone.” The creepy pathos here is more complicated, and powerful, than we’re able to attend to if our antennae is only tuned to regionalism, race, and sexuality—in short, the politics of identity.

On the other hand, rock and roll and pop music are about nothing if not finding one’s identity and articulating one’s roots; if only, in the end, to destroy the discovered self. Brackett reminds us of the wonderful scene in Ghost World when the main character—a brilliant geek and an obsessive music collector (played by Steve Buscemi)—goes to a bar and, attempting to explain to a blonde at the bar the difference between blues and ragtime, is interrupted by her exclamation, “‘If you’re into blues, you’ve got to be into Blueshammer!’ which turns out to be the white trio the old man is opening for. They come storming onto the stage, the apotheosis of fake, of cultural theft and blues rape, smashing out their own ‘Pickin’ Cotton Blues.’” The reason the moment in the film is funny is because its cringe-worthy; all music fans—especially fans of “Old-Time” music—negotiate a social contract which stamps a gold star on authenticity. These fans are often as cynical and skeptical as the rest when it comes to the reinvention of identity. Still, there is a need—a deep, nearly patriotic need—to believe in an authentic American musical voice that is constantly co-opted by other American posers, if only because locating and defending the Real Thing gives us all something to do. It’s no crime to romanticize authenticity. The very act may be a way to praise wholeness—the birth of something before it is marred by co-optation, bastardization and confusion. That kind of romanticization bears its heart in articles that try to build themselves around the justification of such a thing as the “magic moment” or “vibe.”

“The Buddy Holocaust Story: A Necromusicology” by Eric Weisbard, reminds us why rock “strikes some as so miraculous and others as an unbearable travesty of privilege impersonating impression.” The subject of his essay is a young man named Bill Tate, who in the late 1970s capitalized on postpunk Americana with such songs as “Give Me Your Love or I’ll Destroy the World” (which included the couplet “Yes you can say no / But earth will have to go”). The legacy of “Buddy Holocaust” ended (or began) when he killed himself by driving into a median on the Corona del Mar Freeway in Los Angeles at the age of 21. A friend called Tate’s version of pragmatic nihilism “a response to the cold war and his inability to find a sexual partner.” The story is a tragedy; it also problematizes a reading that says multiple, swapping non-personas are at the heart of rock and roll (or any kind of compelling, moving art, for that matter). There are real artists behind this music. Yet the identity of one overlaps with the next who covers their song. Of course, the cover will often be mistaken for the original. One author notes this happens every time someone sings Bobby Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe” at a karaoke bar and opens with “Here’s my favorite Reba song…”

Sure, the overlapping identities comprising the history of American music can’t logically lead us to the conclusion that the self in rock and roll is a moot or outdated notion. But a conversation about the meaning of pop music should have other avenues to saunter down than social-identity politics. The actor Shane West, who performed with the remaining members of The Germs well after Darby Jones’s death (in order to promote a documentary about the band), reportedly got permanently tattooed with Jones’s tattoos. When he’s on stage singing Darby Jones’s line, “I am not one I’m two” over and over and over again, doesn’t this encourage us to consider more the idea of the postmodern fragmentation of the self (if not multiple personality disorder) rather than an “authentic,” singular, individual or group experience of the world?

Perhaps rock music is always about the reinvention of the self; this at least complicates the assumption of a real individual lineage. Weisbard argues persuasively that “being sophomoric, partially educated but sure that you know it all, irrationally committed to impossible positions, so full of yourself that you burst, is as much a vital part of the rock masquerade as blackface or drag.” Indeed. And these qualities, one assumes, remain unmarked by culture, and are instead blessedly, stupidly human, purely everyone’s. Maybe nihilism in rock music (from Boggs’s murder ballad to Buddy Holocaust opening a concert with “This is not going to be too mellow. In fact, if you leave during a song you’ll be shot”) is not about whittling down to the “real” self but instead exploding the self in reinvention, a philosophy of multiple personas. This kind of multiplication, the endless potentials for who we might be, perhaps leads us to better understand who we really are even if it scares or disappoints us: a response to the cold war and our inability to find a sexual partner. Yes you can say no but earth will have to go. I will rock the cradle when you’re gone.

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During my first semester at the GC, I’ve been struck by the complicated relationship many of us are negotiating between our responsibilities as academics and as citizens of a troubled city, country, and world. Many of my fellow humanities doctoral students have a latent social worker or justice advocate inside them, and I’ve enjoyed debates where we consider how our political commitments should or could be integrated with our research and writing. I took the longish way around to the PhD, taking several years off to work in the nonprofit sector, and I’ve recently found myself considering what originally compelled me to work in non-profits, when I’ve always felt most at home in academia. Passionate as I am about my politics, they feel, ultimately, less deeply a part of me than my obsessions with poetry and literary criticism (subjects hard to apply, say, in day-to-day work at a women’s health clinic).

Immediately before coming to the Graduate Center, I was a fundraiser for a nonprofit focused on ending the death penalty—at times a Sisyphean task. My involvement in the movement arose, strangely enough, through research I’d undertaken in a graduate class on theories of corporeality. The course nurtured in me a fascination with theorists like Judith Butler and Gilles Deleuze; this, along with reading about executions in early modern England, had me riveted. Theory can do that—the puzzle of the theory enabled me to look politically abhorrent subject matter squarely in the face, and even enjoy doing so. Yet the same year, I visited the classes of a close friend who is the Program Director of the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison, and overheard some of her students discussing the impending execution of Stanley “Tookie” Williams. An early leader of the Crips, he was later credited with negotiating a truce in one of the largest gang wars in the nation, and nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his books to help disenfranchised youth. Though he maintained his innocence in the killings for which he received the death penalty, he was executed at San Quentin on Dec. 13, 2005.

I returned to my program troubled with the implications of considering the death penalty in the context of such esoteric theory. I had really enjoyed asking, and formulating tentative answers to, questions such as “How were public executions related to medical advances in the late 1500s?” Meanwhile, condemned inmates in our own country—economically disadvantaged, subject to the racism and classism of their juries, burdened with incompetent representation—were being executed via state-sanctioned lethal injection. A few books (including Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood) and one documentary (The Execution of Wanda Jean Allen) later, and I left my program, packed up my car and sped away to a job in California. It would be dishonest and self-aggrandizing to pretend it was solely altruism that led me to such a decision. I craved a break from the teaching/non-earning lifestyle, from the loose-at-ends non-schedule of grad school, and the Midwest (it’s easy to trade the bleak winters and conservative politics of Indiana or Missouri for the ocean, redwood forests and anything-goes of San Francisco). In general, taking a break between graduate programs is something I recommend.

Over the next two years I met heroic individuals—appellate lawyers, religious leaders, the families of murder victims who oppose the death penalty, staff who every day brought optimism to their work. But writing copy for direct mail appeals to members, or designing a new t-shirt, I found myself wistful about my life in grad school. Like everything else, graduate school churns out self-deprecating, embarrassing situations (like my first literary seminar when I pronounced Borges with a hard “g”). Still, our primary obligation is to read what we would (hopefully) already read anyway, and then be intimidated but inspired as scholars in the field talk to us about the work. In the 9-to-5 grind at the office, planning some fundraising event, I missed having, say, my weird obsession with 16th century religious sermons encouraged. I missed the jolt of conversing about something absurdly specific with others who are as excited. Then there was the schedule: as a fundraiser, I had to be at work at 9 until 5 or later, and work some weekends; now I do a whole lot of my work in pajamas and I do it whenever I want.

Social justice work, though, does provide a very real sense that your work has an immediate impact. Trying to fight the death penalty in the United States is tough, but we saw measurable progress. At Planned Parenthood, there was satisfaction leaving every day having armed some sixteen year old girl with bilingual safe-sex pamphlets and contraceptive information. But I think the idea of a fundamental difference between social work and academia is, to some extent, a false dichotomy. Coming from a conservative state, I was at college before I learned to be skeptical of politicians and demagogues, to marvel at the power of individual resistance, and to understand the complexity of institutionalized racism and sexism, inadequate distribution of wealth, and the abysmal conditions in our prisons

For the vast majority of us here at the GC, we don’t get the direct satisfaction of seeing how our own activities help to solve the various social problems that concern us (I should note that I’m thinking very much as a person in English lit; it may be easier to visualize a connection to social change coming from the disciplines of history, sociology or the hard sciences). There is no dearth of students here who brilliantly and responsibly integrate their politics into their lives as academics (the upcoming election happily digresses a number of seminars; buttons abound), and we should keep in mind how our work contributes to the “greater good.” Having visited San Quentin, I truly believe that having read Foucault and Bentham allowed me to comprehend what I witnessed in a more meaningful way; that experience has helped me nurture the long view (not to be confused with the “Oh my, it will be fifty years before I pay back my student loans” long view) and to see that our work, which can at times feel absurdly narrow, has implications far beyond our own disciplines. As teachers, for example, asking our students to analyze everything from Legally Blonde to the Canterbury Tales encourages them to wrestle with their environment in a more empowered, complicated way.

While ambivalence about the potential for change through grad school may be natural, the work of universities is to improve our critical faculties and sense of history. What universities contribute isn’t only the result of overtly sociopolitical theoretical stances—queer theory, feminist studies, African-American studies, Chicano studies, etc. But even the very act of posing highly specialized questions has ethical merit with powerful implications. As the world becomes increasingly general and high-speed, we participate in a global consumer culture, reaching for what’s in front of us without discipline or reflection; well, if we don’t exactly resist that—if we, too, participate in it—we at least complicate it by avoiding the split-second reward. I mean, nothing English lit scholars do is fast.

We can’t position ourselves as consistently integrated and relevant to the nonacademic world, not practically, not yet. We want to: there’s a healthy desire to demolish the ivory tower. But it seems important to remember that, as college teachers, researchers and writers, we are somewhat removed from the 9-to-5 world of commerce, government, service industries or (as my radical, social-justice careerist friend called it) the “nonprofit industrial complex.” It’s easy for us to think about what is intimidating and taxing about being a graduate student, and we fetishize a bit the difficulty of the PhD route, in a way that sometimes rings false. Sure, at times reading Hume or prepping for a seminar at the Shakespeare conference makes me want to hole up in my increasingly shrinking living space, watch Almodovar movies and drink inadvisable quantities of red wine. But maybe I bemoan the work to feel a teensy bit less guilty about what I’m not doing—collecting signatures, handing out sandwiches, organizing protests. I’d bet all 35 square feet of my living space that GC students fret more about the problems facing our nation today than your average twenty-something; yet we spend our time on decoding the Romantic ethical imagination or reading 16th century antitheatricalist texts that have seemingly little relevance to the problems of poverty right outside our doors on 5th Ave.

Don’t get me wrong: the work we’re all doing is deeply challenging, sometimes absurdly so. But still, for many of us, we’re here because we have the amazing luxury of pursuing our favorite thing in the whole world. The long view, for me, means reckoning with the fact that, sure, the paper I’m developing on medicine and sacrifice in Donne won’t end the three strikes law, collect those signatures, or get health care to people in need, but my awareness of this disparity reminds me to enjoy what I’ve got, and also motivates me. I may not exclusively do work that privileges a political agenda—I am far from advocating that—but I will continue to consider what’s come historically from this ivory tower, and celebrate how that work was later used as fodder for social revolution. 

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