In the context of frequent rhetorical sparring and escalating threats of nuclear destruction, little common ground is said to exist between Israel and Iran. Enmity between the two states is often framed as the product of irreconcilable geopolitical, ideological, and strategic differences. Iran’s support of terrorist organizations that seek Israel’s destruction, the regime’s religious character, and supposedly anti-Semitic leadership all appear to ensure confrontation between the two states. This supposedly self-evident “reality” is commonly invoked by politicians, claims-makers and the media. On the one hand, Israel is often portrayed as an oasis of democracy and shared values in a region supposedly characterized by Muslim extremism. Iran, on the other hand, is generally seen as decidedly “Other.” Governed by a hermetic group of religious radicals, the image most commonly presented of Iran is one of repression, backwardness and a lack of “rationality” with regard to geopolitics. If indeed Israel is seen as the primary exemplar of Western “modernity” in the Middle East, Iran is discursively constructed as a useful binary. It is precisely this seemingly self-evident dichotomy that Haggai Ram seeks to interrogate in Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession, a lucid account of Iran’s place in Israeli society’s social imaginary.

While much scholarly work on Israeli-Iranian relations frames tensions in geopolitical terms, Ram’s innovation is to evaluate the cultural and discursive foundations of those terms. Employing the sociological concept of “moral panic,” Ram takes on the commonly held notion that Iran and Israel are “natural” enemies. Instead, Iranophobia suggests that Israel’s “moral panic” finds its roots in cultural anxieties relating to Israel’s precarious conception of itself as essentially “Western.” Ram’s analysis argues that fear of Iran is in fact deeply connected to tensions generated by the presence of non-Western Jewish immigrants in Israel. These groups are seen as calling into question the state’s Ashkenazi (European) “ethnocracy” and complicating Israeli society’s perception of itself as fundamentally European and “modern.” The conception of Iran and Iranian culture as essentially non-Western, as some kind of “Other,” allows Israeli society to conceive of itself and build an identity in contrast to that country and its people.

Iranophobia begins with a discussion of Israeli-Iranian relations in a historical context, sketching a process of “Othering” that, in Ram’s words, represents the inauguration of Iran’s “radical alterity.” While official diplomatic relations did not exist during the time of the Shah, the regime represented for many Israelis a golden-era in Israeli-Iranian relations. Military cooperation and significant business ties were cemented, while Israeli businessmen frequently spent long vacations indulging in Tehren’s “Western” amenities and nightlife. Ram points out that both the Israeli and Iranian state shared a modernization process that ultimately sought to “transform oriental subjects…into deracinated replicas of Europeans, even while they remained affiliated to their own religious cultures,” later contending that “Israeli-Iranian relations before the revolution therefore rested on mutually constitutive perceptions of each other as carriers of the Western mission in the Middle East.” This point is significant, as it serves to buoy later claims with regard to Israel’s anxiety over Iran in the post-Shah period. If, for a moment, Iran had managed to transform itself into a nation that embodied the “civilizing” effects of Western “progress”—much like Israel—the Iranian Revolution seemed to point to the fact that politics and ideology could transform a country and people “back” into non-Western subjects. Ram explores how the Iranian Revolution seemed to have an important resonance in Israel, where officials and journalists openly despaired that the capitalist modernity and “progress” embodied by the deposed monarch would be replaced by a “regressive,” atavistic revolution. Pointing to the geopolitical shifts of that period, Ram argues that the shared ambition for a united Israeli-Iranian front against their perceived mutual enemies in the Arab world began to shift as Israel made piece with Egypt. Insofar as Ram suggests that Israeli society requires the perception of an existential threat, the concomitant peace with Egypt and unfolding Iranian Revolution witnessed a shift from fear of the “Arab threat” to that of the “Iranian threat.”

In subsequent chapters, Ram sketches the process by which Israel’s perceived “modernity” increasingly requires the amplification of the Iranian threat. This fear allows Israeli society to symbolically exorcize its own “unmodern” elements—which, according to Ram, consist of the increasing number of Middle-Eastern Jewish immigrants (Mizrahim) that are uncomfortably perceived to be questioning the future of secular, Western Zionism. Ram explores the tensions embodied in Israel’s claim to a shared Western culture, consistently undermined both by the possibility of Middle Eastern Jews “assimilating” Israel into the surrounding region, as well as the nascent settlement movement that belies the notion of secular democracy through its state-sanctioned religious mission. Thus, “what lies at the bottom of Israeli anti-Iran phobias is the disheartening feeling that present day Iranian realities are, in effect, actualizations of the Jewish state’s future.”

Later chapters explore post-9/11 relations between the two countries and the treatment of Iranian Jews by Israeli immigration officials and envoys from Jewish organizations. After 9/11, an apparent thawing of relations between the United States and Iran seemed to gain momentum as the countries appeared willing to cooperate in overthrowing the Taliban, a mutual enemy. Ram contends that the prospect of a diplomatic horizon between the United States and Iran was particularly disconcerting to Jerusalem. With somewhat less attention to empirically grounded evidence that for the most part characterizes Iranophobia, Ram suggests that the 2002 Karine-A affair (in which a freighter supposedly bound for the Palestinian territories with Iranian weaponry was intercepted by Israel) may have been an attempt by Israel and her supporters to undermine US-Iranian relations.

Later in the decade, Iran is seen as being used as a cover for Israeli military action. During the 2006 Lebanon War, Israeli leaders frequently invoked Iranian influence as a rationale for the ferocity of the Israeli response to Hezbollah. These invocations of Iranian influence allowed Israel to argue that it was functioning as a bulwark against the supposedly inevitable confrontation between Judeo-Christian values and the dangerous forces of radical Islam. By conflating the war in Lebanon against Hezbollah with the “Iranian threat,” Israeli military and civil leaders sought ideological cover for an extremely destructive war. Ram shows how politicians and commentators sought to associate Iran with the very creation and identity of the forces being fought in Lebanon. Eschewing any reference to political, cultural, and historical factors that might have led to the rise of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the war became seen as a fight between the secular Jewish state and the dark forces of global Islamic extremism. This discourse emphasized the Iranian state’s role in supposedly manipulating its “satellites” in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, while ignoring the historical context in which these groups emerged. As Ram points out, from the point of view of mainstream Israeli public opinion, “Israel’s offensive war on Hezbollah was, in effect, a defensive war against Iran.”

The final chapter of Iranophobia explores the multiple, if somewhat bizarre, attempts by Israeli officials to convince Iranian Jews to immigrate to Israel. Unable to understand the continued presence of Jews in a state supposedly characterized by virulent anti-Semitism, Israeli immigration agencies offer Iranian Jews everything from housing to monetary gifts in order to facilitate their migration. Once again, Ram points out the contradictions that are embodied by Israeli society’s relationship to Iran and its Jews. Ram argues that the Shah’s attempt to “aryanize” Iranians and convince them that they were “really European in their origin” meant that Israelis were willing to lend tacit support and legitimacy to a continued Jewish presence in Iran. After the Shah, bereft of these de-orientalizing forces, Iranian Jews were expected to immigrate to Israel in order to participate in the “civilizing” mission of that state. Though many Iranian Jews have emigrated abroad, a significant number chose not to settle in Israel, but rather in the United States or Europe.

With some 30,000 Jews remaining in Iran today, Ram unpacks the simplistic assumption that their history has been one of unending persecution. Rather, he argues that the trajectory of Iranian Jews has been complex (much like minorities in societies throughout the world), comprising periods of discrimination and violence along with significant periods of cooperation and inclusion into the larger society. While pointing out the unevenness of this trajectory, Iranophobia correctly suggests that recognizing only histories of violence and exclusion appear particularly limiting and are consistently undermined by the historic record.

Though Iranophobia employs Moral Panic Theory in an innovative way through an understudied case, at times the theoretical arguments Ram proposes could benefit from a more sustained engagement. While a fundamental aspect of moral panic is the notion of the social reaction’s disproportionality, Ram does not consistently make the case that the responses are disproportionate to the material threats. This omission reflects Ram’s desire to avoid the danger of sliding into the realm of strategic and security analysis. Iranophobia indeed makes a compelling argument for a reassessment of the basis of Israeli-Iranian enmity; however, Ram elides the geopolitical implications of a nuclear-armed Iran. While his analysis of Israeli responsibility for this threat is quite useful, there are moments when the notion of moral panic does not seem an appropriate metaphor for the possibility of nuclear warfare between two nations. Indeed, Moral Panic Theory—as originally conceived by practitioners at the Birmingham Centre—sought to explain how the social uproar over relatively minor incidents was rooted in deeper cultural anxieties. Thus, Stanley Cohen’s classic work on the social reaction to small-scale disturbances at a British seaside resort is shown to relate more to anxiety over shifting post-war value systems than to the incidents themselves. While in some respects this framework aptly describes the cultural anxiety around the Mizrahim—Israel’s so-called “Others within”—it appears somewhat less analytically robust in describing the reaction to a nation of 65 million.

Whether the threat from Iran is overemphasized or not, it seems somewhat less feasible to assess the relations of two (nearly) nuclear powers within a framework whose very meaning suggests a situation that is not constitutive of a serious threat to society. This is not to say that the threat Iran poses has not been overemphasized by the media and claims-makers (“moral entrepreneurs” in the language of Moral Panic Theory). However, this does not necessarily negate the very real threat of confrontation between the two countries today. In particular, as Ram seeks to analyze the cultural reaction to Iran rather than the geopolitical aspects of this confrontation, it becomes difficult to assert the essential disproportionality of the response without engaging with the geopolitical realities of the relationship. Though Iranophobia covers new ground in articulating the discursive logic of this reaction, at times a more critical engagement with the veracity of Israeli claims would go a long way in proving the disconnect between fears and reality. These challenges aside, Iranophobia presents an innovative approach to studying Israeli-Iranian relations and should be seriously engaged with by anyone interested in the cultural foundations of this relationship. As consent among the local population is essential for any state’s long-term geopolitical strategy, the discursive underpinnings of society’s reaction provides unique analytical insights, as Ram has proved to great effect in Iranophobia.

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Imaginal Machines

At every level, Imaginal Machines is a subversive text. Against the rising tide of complacency, Stephven Shukaitis sketches out new possibilities for political engagement that are at once seditious and savvy. Resolutely anti-disciplinarian (in both senses of the word), he leaps recklessly from philosophy to art criticism to social movement studies. In the book’s opening pages, Shukaitis promises to “connect Surrealism with migrant workers, the Industrial Workers of the World with Dadaism, and back again.” Against all odds, he does so, and with great aplomb. From its non-linear organization to its whimsical typeface, Imaginal Machines courageously defies convention. Throwing caution to the wind, the book explodes the limits of both what can be said and how it might be said.

Stylistically, Imaginal Machines is both entertaining and terrifically complex. The text overflows with prescient metaphors, digressions, in-jokes, and parenthetical observations. But these quips and asides are not merely adjunct to the primary text but rather rival the “main” narrative for attention. The subtext quickly becomes the surface, and in an affront to neo-positivist ways of knowing, Shukaitis bends his lyrical prose sideways and backwards, without ever compromising lucidity. Reflecting the uncertainty of postmodern times, nearly every declarative statement comes paired with a qualifier or a caveat. The result is a text that folds in upon itself with multiple levels of meaning.

The body of the text is centered around a series of case studies (though the notion of a case doesn’t align with the author’s method). Shukaitis takes us on a whirlwind tour of what others have called “alternative institutions” (several of which he was involved in personally) and offers a probing introspective analysis. Yet unlike other recent assessments of the global Left “scene,” which tend to be optimistic to the point of absurdity (for example, We Are Everywhere, NowTopia, Real Utopia), Shukaitis maintains his (self-)critical edge throughout. Indeed, Shukaitis is keenly aware that—by most measures of success—the Left is losing badly. For example, in a chapter on worker self-management (WSM), Shukaitis describes his four-year-long involvement with a worker-owned record label in vivid detail. But ultimately, he concludes that WSM may have limited radical potential (though his argument is significantly more complex), and in the process offers the type of deep self-critique that is painfully absent in most
Left circles.

The term Imaginal Machines merits some explanation. As Shukaitis notes, his title is borrowed from a term coined by Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey), itself a derivative of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s desiring-machine. So the imaginal machine is “a particular arrangement or composition of desires and creativity as territorialized through and by relations between bodies in motion.” The idea of outer space figures prominently here. For Shukaitis, the metaphor of space is relavant precisely because it represents that which cannot be (entirely) known. In science fiction film, the music of Sun-Ra, and the popular imagination, space functions as a zone of limitless possibility. Shukaitis suggests that a politics bounded by the coordinates of the known world is hopelessly constrained. Instead, “an imaginal landscape is a precondition for actually finding a northwest passage in the physical world.” Whether or not space is operating at the level of metaphor here, it is a powerful heuristic device.

Imaginal Machines is often remarkable for what it doesn’t do. Though the concept of “radical imagination” emerges as a dominant theme, Shukaitis self-consciously refuses to mention C. Wright Mills, whose Sociological Imagination is usually considered among the most important contributions to the concept. For a traditional social scientist to write a book on the “imagination” without explicitly invoking Mills would approach blasphemy. But Shukaitis is no traditional social scientist (though he may be a blasphemer). Likewise, Karl Marx appears mainly through his metaphors (the architect and the bee, the old mole, “storming heaven”). Yet Marx lurks in the deep crevices of Imaginal Machines’ pages and his influence is never far from the surface. Though the book is, in part, a critical encounter (rencontre) between autonomist Marxism and poststructuralist theory, this is not Shuakitis’ main intellectual project.

While it adheres to some extent to traditional book-publishing conventions, Imaginal Machines strives to be a rhizomatic text with no beginning and no end—only a boundless middle. Characteristically, most of the book’s conclusions arise from the embedded case studies, while the book’s final chapter (the “actual” conclusion) opens up far more questions than it provides answers to. In the section on work and self-management, Shukaitis at one point recommends a politics based on “the constant immanent shaping and creativity that will not allow itself to ever be totally bound in a fixed form.” There is a sense here that Shukaitis is commenting on the very text he is producing—or better yet, the “work” of book-writing. If there is an enemy in Imaginal Machines, it is the idea of closure—that struggle should at some point cease, that the revolution should be contained, that organizations should seek permanence.
This opens the question of failure, another major theme in the book. For the post-9/11 Left, most of the last decade has been characterized by moods that don’t translate well into English—malaise, ennui, schaedenfreude, and melancholia. Large street protests seem to have quieted down, while, at the same time, the ever-resilient late capitalist state has demonstrated a unique ability to co-opt dissident movements. Of course, as Shukaitis reminds us, this is nothing new. thirty years ago, the threat of worker militancy and factory occupations famously portended the rise of worker participation committees, quality circles, and the team concept—a blow from which most unions have yet to recover. More recently, in continental Europe, widespread protests around (against?) precarious work were “answered” in the form of “flexicurity” (flexible security) regimes—a Phyrric victory at best. Yet accelerated cycles of recuperation—defeat via compromise—may well be a unique feature of post-Fordism. The task then becomes devising a politics that can resist the overarching tendency toward capture—even temporarily.

Here, Shakaitis draws heavily on the notion of infrapolitics, as posited by James Scott and popularized by the cultural historian Robin Kelley. Much like Deleuze’s minor politics, Kelley’s infrapolitics suggest a “hidden transcript of power…or a space that is somewhat encoded or otherwise made less comprehensible to those in power.” Shukaitis argues that in order to avoid recuperation, resistance must operate largely in the sphere of infrapolitics—beyond the watchful gaze of the state—and speak in ways that defy understanding. Perhaps the answer to Guyatri Spivak’s prescient question “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is a definitive “yes”—but not in ways that are universally intelligible.

The audience for Imaginal Machines is sure to be broad. On the one hand, the book is written by a movement insider with extensive knowledge of the contemporary American Left and is grounded in real political struggles. On the other, Imaginal Machines is a sophisticated endeavor, deeply informed by high theory (especially of the Italian autonomist and the French poststructuralist variety). Yet Imaginal Machines is not just another “social movement study” by an academic from the distant perspective of a “neutral” observer. Shukaitis constantly reminds us that actually-existing political practice is already immersed intheoretical presuppositions, just as good theory emerges from real struggles. But Shukaitis transcends and ultimately dispenses with the classic binary between “theory” and “practice” by masterfully weaving both into a seamless narrative. The result is the rare academic book that is certain to appeal to activists and organizers, but does not compromise its scholarly integrity in so doing.

This is a unique and extraordinary text that deserves wide attention. Just as Baruch Spinoza famously posed the question “What can a body do?” Shukaitis seems to ask “What can a book do?” The answer, it appears, is far more than we think.

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In 1851, the same year Moby-Dick was published and the first World’s Fair was held in London, German engraver and printer J.G. Heck published his Pictorial Archive of Nature and Science. The scientific revolution that began in the mid-sixteenth century was over and science had assumed its modern form. His categories, terminology, and methods are as recognizable as our own: Heck’s illustrations cover physics, botany, zoology, mathematics, and technology. Seen side by side, they are startling in that the illustrations all attempt, in one way or another, to reduce the world to discreet categories and essences.

In this new book of poetry, Joshua Poteat uses Heck’s art as a starting point for a work that is both dreamlike and prescient. Illustrating the Machine that Makes the World: From J.G. Heck’s 1851 Pictorial Archive of Nature and Science is comprised of three main sections and two appendices. The second appendix is comprised of seventeen reproductions from Heck’s Archive. These “plates” reflect a broad range of Heck’s concerns: one shows a boar being killed by dogs while another shows a globe divided into meridians, facing a small sun. Both the globe and the light hitting it are mechanically dissected: the lines and angles are precise and still, and intersections are marked with letters and numbers. Heck inscribed the German words for morning, evening, noon, and midnight at the top, bottom, right and left of the globe: the illustration appears as the scientific version of concepts of
earthly time.

Poteat states which poems link to which plates in brackets underneath their titles. In the particular case of the illustrations noted above, both are referenced in a poem entitled “Illustrating the theory of twilight.” Here, Poteat is reinstating the truth of time that lies outside mechanical understating. He unapologetically signals the poetic twilight of the sublime; the twilight that seems to invoke elements of magic, the supernatural, and the places where worlds intersect in profound ways, particularly the worlds of humanity and of nature. It is of the nature of this poetic twilight that it suggests not just endings and death, but also wonderment and visionary experience, and the fascinations and fears of childhood.

Down in the reeds, farthest from God,
where the vultures wash their feet,
is where I slept the night the dogs found
the wild boar, half-dead from a cancer,
and brought its head back to the yards.

The dogs are crazed by the kill, “as if they had seen the one true vision/of light that comes after an animal/is slaughtered in its sickness.” Extreme states of violence and madness are contrasted with the mystical mode of insight. As the light dims, the emphasis in the poem continues to turn away from mechanical reality to visionary experience: the narrator recalls vultures living “in the cupboards, in the walls” of an abandoned house, where nature (and here we must not quibble with semantics—his nature is the nature of the romantics: it stands for those things that are somehow either outside of, or lost by humans: the pure, the terrible, the uncontrolled, the still) has reclaimed the house as her own and trees are growing inside of it.

Along with the question of the poet’s relationship with nature, Poteat shares with Wallace Stevens a concern with the unanswerable question of God:

I refuse to say
I saw God in their faces, the twilight
around me told me this, and I believe it.

The refusal to say is in tension with the statement of belief, but the poet sees this tension as a condition of experience. This tension is heightened at the end of the poem. Poteat makes clear, in the chilling and final lines of the poem, yet another aspect of the poetic twilight: isolation:

what animal
is this that cannot live without a man to tell it, death is close,
stay near, do not leave me, you are all I have.

The answer is, of course, no animal. The poet suffers from a particularly human isolation, and his projection of pity onto the animal world is an expression of his distance from it and its magnetic pull. As this distance and pull are negated in Heck’s cold, motionless, exact illustrations, Poteat has employed the Blakean move of employing contraries so that the truth of the matter does not stand alone, but can be perceived through the partial insights of holistic perception.

Poteat’s epistemological search leads him to the margins. The first poem in the series is called “Illustrating the illustrators” and its subtitle indicates that it corresponds to an anatomical engraving of human hands: “When we wrote the name that we were told/was ours, the name that contained all, we would be given all that would be lost,/there was a pleasure in the small, exact/movements of our hands.” The poet at the outset introduces an aesthetic awareness outside the bounds of conventional science, and reminds us of the waning of religious monopolies on meaning as well as the importance of considering the medium of communication itself. Along with the notion of knowledge as pleasure, Poteat’s voice echoes the religious idiom: searching, meaning, suffering, and loss. The insistent recurrence of the word “all” sets a tone of near despair as absolute truth withdraws. As with other instances in his work, the Big Questions are set against humble images: the physical, actual hands of the illustrators, of those who have gone before in their attempts to somehow map out or explicate some portion of the world.

As humans lost faith in an immutable absolute, an analogue to God emerged: the myth of the underlying girders of the universe, the algorithms that explain the flight of birds if not of human desire. In “Illustrating the theory of interference” (a theory postulating that memory loss occurs when unrelated memories begin to intersect) Heck’s design is of a single, elegant spiral leading to a black, shaded sphere. It could just as well be an illustration of the geometric movement of a planet or, conversely, of a universe centered around the Earth. Poteat states that, “God’s plan cannot restore the decaying groves of fire,/and the gold birch buries sap low and pure/for the deer to salve their throats. These are facts.” The word “facts” is stated assertively, almost aggressively, as if to conclude an argument. What is at stake? The disappearing cultural memories of belief are still lingering, but they are infused with the raw hunger of animal nature. This hunger is among the last of the absolutes. He concludes, “If only I was with her now,/I could be in the world remembering this.” In the light of the poem’s themes, these final lines that might otherwise present an unexpected invocation of a past love, now echo the Psalms with their plaintive music of simple human desires transformed into a deep need for transcendent meaning and connection.

The irony of the title is that Poteat and Heck’s ways of illustrating stand in stark contrast, even if they have been spawned by the same cultural forces of industrialization and social progress. Heck’s drawings are rigid, symmetrical, clean, and clear. Even the previously mentioned plate of enraged dogs devouring a boar has a detached, mechanical, fixed quality to it. All sense of motion and change has been replaced by stillness and exactitude. Poteat’s poems usher in contraries: pleasure, curiosity, love, understanding, growth, and serenity are met with madness, death, decomposition, darkness, blindness, and suffering. The tension between loss and fulfillment operates on the level of language as well: the lines are cyclical, the images elusive, the realizations tentative. Over the course of the book, the themes and images recur, but elliptically, and under the daunting shadow of an ever increasing nothingness. Even language itself exists in decay and twilight. The nature of this nothingness remains obscure, but this attempt and consequent failure to understand is not a meaninglessness act. Always, there is the suggestion of something else, “the brightest last.” We can understand: we just can’t understand “all.”

In keeping with the poet’s concern for totality, the poems in the book stand alone as fully realized works, but also connect with each other and achieve a sort of thematic arc. Over the course of its pages, the poems transition from the lyrically surreal opening lines to those in “Appendix One,” in which blank space becomes the defining structure. The darkness of the images is contrasted with the empty whiteness overcoming the printed pages. All throughout the book, images of rot and ruin have suggested a near religious longing for completion and unity. By the time we get to the first appendix, this contrast begins to find itself figured in the structure of the poems themselves. The words are replaced, by dissolution or by the light of white space: earlier poems are rewritten, or, really, eviscerated. This appendix is made up of the remains of the earlier poems. Passages are erased, revealing entirely new images and new ways of making sense of them. We are prepared to see the growing blank space on the pages as imbued with meaning: decay, sunlight, emptiness, ghosts, and birth. Perhaps the blinding whiteness of Melville. Here is the great negation of Heck: less is shown, but the resulting picture of the world is intended to be more complete than Heck’s compendium of all the sciences.

Of course, one of the stays against a mechanistic model of the world is the imagination itself and the imagination is key because it presents another way to consider the question of religion without collapsing into a rigid or limiting dogma. Poteat suggests what is possible only through creative thought: foxes turn inside out; a slug, “fresh as cinnamon,” arises from the dying embers of a stove; pigs sing to the moon. We occasionally glimpse the looms and locomotives we might associate with nineteenth century technology but bucolic images dominate: sheep, fields, and fireflies. These are all images that highlight the “something else” side of nature: the sense of a peace outside our normal day to day affairs, a sense of meaning that exceeds our grasping. Imagination itself is one of the tools in this search for whatever feels lost or missing and dying.

Another move that stands in contrast with Heck is Poteat’s use of quotes and allusions. The allusive is slippery, reciprocal, and relational. It is inexact. James Joyce and Wallace Stevens are quoted directly, Stevens outside and inside the poems, and Poteat’s lines echo both the latter’s theories of the necessary fiction, as well as his constantly shifting sense of awareness: the fluidity of consciousness.

Perhaps Poteat is open to charges of invoking both a now unpopular Modernism as well as an unpopular Romanticism (not that thinking people would be overly concerned with this). But Illustrating the Machine is very much a book of our time, and the anxieties central to its tensions are not those of Heck’s, even if we see their origins in his engravings. Poteat is no Byronic individual, alone amid the raging storms of alienation and despair. While there is a great deal of isolation within his poetry, he emphasizes his language’s intertextuality. The notes include extensive explanations of who inspired what poems, and the inspirators range from sculptor Alice Aycock to surrealist Mary Ruefle to “the red foxes of Hampstead, North Carolina, if there are any left.” In fact, his notes resemble the liner notes section of a hip-hop album, with their mix of crediting samples and
citing influences.

Poteat recognizes that we must “forgive the pastoral,” and so we must, even if this pastoral vision is hardly one of Arcadian tranquility: it is bloody and antagonist, even as it yields moments of beauty and temporary, anxious insights. He writes, “At the edges of all fields, there is a space/for disorder.” As we continue to push to the edges of the “field,” bucolic or scientific, we enter increasingly into uncertainty. The notion of God shifts; memories seem tenuous. Vultures stir in the cupboards. The hum of a machine blends with the sound of a river.

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A soft, steady rain pockmarks the mud brick foundation of the Citadel—according to some estimates the longest continually inhabited spot on earth, and the dominating feature of metropolitan Erbil in northern Iraq. The view from atop this massive mud mound is impressive: radiating out in all directions from the Citadel, modern-day Erbil spreads into the gloomy mist as far as the eye can see. But more remarkable still are the myriad cranes crowding out ancient minarets as the defining features of the Erbil skyline, and the buzz of jackhammers and other construction tools that even up high in the Citadel drown out the light patter of raindrops landing in puddles
at your feet.

This is the heart of the “other” Iraq, according to local enthusiasts, a Western-friendly enclave marked by peace, security, and the industrious pursuit of prosperity. Throughout the country’s Kurdish-dominated autonomous zone, all the hallmarks of successful state-building are seemingly on display to guests from abroad. From the laying of modern roads to the building of new schools and state-of-the-art skyscrapers, as well as the almost obsessive attentions of ubiquitous security forces, the north of Iraq stands in stark contrast to the chaos and uncertainty plaguing the county’s south. Yet while the gains in the north are impressive, at least on their face, I found while there that the region must still contend with a number of challenges that render its future far from certain. 

I had entered Iraq overland a week earlier through the border town of Zahko which hugs the Turkish frontier, where I hired Mohammed, a chain-smoking taxi driver, to bring me to the country’s northernmost city of prominence, Dohuk. The journey there begins with a chaotic tangle of dusty, dilapidated roads snaking through mountains and farmland drained of their color by the sun and drought. Any feelings of passing through the bleached landscape of an old photograph soon subside, however, on the approach to Dohuk. Here, the countryside gives way to the most extraordinarily emerald pastures—electric greens familiar to northernmost Syria—framed by the gentle slopes of a purple-tinted mountain range to the east. As he tore through at breakneck speed what seemed to be endless waves of lumbering lorries on their way to and from Turkey, Mohammed waved a cigarette out the window, smiling. “Iraq,” he said, clearly
pleased. “Beautiful.”

Dohuk itself offers a glimpse into the Iraq of neo-con wet dreams. The city boasts a rapidly developing infrastructure, street graffiti celebrating Eminem, an American style mega-mall, bustling markets, and the reputation as a safe weekend getaway for vacationing American GIs. Indeed, the groups of troops I saw there were treated like celebrities, unfailingly followed by a paparazzi of young men and women asking for photographs and contact info. Alarmingly, the downtown hotel I checked into featured a large portrait of George W. Bush in its foyer, and the hotel manager—an Adidas tracksuit-wearing, Raul Julia carbon-copy—feigned disappointment to learn I was not a distant relative of the former president.

Similar displays of explicitly pro-American sympathies are not as easily found south of Dohuk, but the trappings of a nascent prosperity have taken hold in urban areas throughout the Kurdish controlled north. The imperial splendor of the main road alone that leads into the regional capital Erbil—miles of magnificently massive, arching light posts hanging over the four-lane highway—its state of the art international airport, and the formidable bomb-blast walls surrounding the fancy, VIP-only Sheraton hotel, unquestionably announce the city’s ambitious pretensions to twenty-first century regional dominance.  

More impressive still, perhaps, the southeastern city of Sulimaniyah—long considered a free-spirited hotbed of liberalism and resistance to outside influence, not to mention a persistent thorn in the side of Saddam Hussein’s regime—has been tamed by the twin influences of Iranian investment and an American University. All over the city, construction teams frame high-rise office buildings, money-lenders hawk impossibly tall piles of Iranian rials, and young people practice their English in cafes advertising wifi, Red Bull, and “Kan Tucky Fried Chiken.”

Yet evidence supporting the arguments that Kurdish Iraq offers a model for the rest of the country to follow in order to achieve peace and stability are largely confined to urban centers, and belied by a number of sobering realities. Chief among them is the violent anarchy destroying any hope for a normal life in the northern cities of Mosul and Kirkuk. Both cities—the most ethnically and religiously diverse spots in the country—feature highly combustible mixtures of Sunni and Shia Arabs, Kurds and Turkomen, and a slew of other religious minorities including Assyrian Christian and Yazidi groups. As it happens, both cities also sit astride massive oil deposits, and therefore, not surprisingly, have served as playgrounds for the sometimes violent power struggles between regional Kurdish authorities and the central government in Baghdad. These contests for control have left power vacuums filled by unbridled sectarian violence and mark the cities as virtual no-go zones for outsiders.

When I told the hotel manager in Dohuk that I planned on traveling to Erbil, he cautioned me that under no circumstances was I to leave the Kurdish-controlled roads as the route between the two cities passes through the Mosul suburbs. “You’ll be killed,” he said with a frightening matter-of-factness. And with reason: a full-blown ethnic cleansing continues apace throughout Mosul, where Assyrian Christian communities have been the most recent victims of death squad violence that some observers suggest may involve Kurdish security forces and police. A Human Rights Watch report from late 2009 warns that firm evidence pointing the finger of responsibility at any particular party is lacking, though the authors outline possible motivations for Kurdish complicity.

“Kurdish-dominated security forces were in charge of security in the area the attacks took place, [leading some to suggest] that the murder campaign was designed to undermine confidence in the central government’s security forces. From this perspective, the attacks created an opportunity for the [Kurdish authorities] to appear benevolent before the Christian community and the world by subsequently providing shelter, security, and financial assistance to those who fled the attacks into Kurdistan, strengthening the Kurdish hand in any upcoming referendum
or election.”

While Kurdish authorities have predictably denied these allegations and pinned blame on Shiite militias with ties to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, it increasingly appears that whomever lies behind the bloodshed serves as a proxy for interest groups situated in Baghdad. This suspicion was reinforced further when the Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella organization with direct links to al-Qaeda—and known for its eager pursuit of publicity—denied any responsibility whatsoever for the recent spate of violence in Mosul.

Christians and other minority groups have also been the targets of choice in Kirkuk of late. While the violence there has not exhibited the same characteristics of systematized execution as in Mosul, the results have been no less horrific. Most recently, insurgent groups have carried out attacks on Christian businessmen, and have continued their practice of assassinating municipal security forces, routine violence which has claimed the lives of hundreds of police officers over the past few years. While the social disintegrations in Kirkuk and Mosul has until recently been confined to the city limits—and therefore has not been much of a concern to regional authorities or the American military—the cancerous destruction has recently spread to surrounding areas. Gangland-style takeovers of nearby villages has prompted fears that Kurdish security forces are losing territorial control to increasingly brazen local mafias and terrorist groups which, if true, casts the entire region’s future security in doubt. The seriousness of the this developing threat was underscored while I was there by the announcement of by General Raymond Odierno, commander of all American forces in Iraq, that he was ordering US troops to the area to help Kurdish security personnel reassert coercive authority
in the area. 

Yet beyond the headline-grabbing violence crippling Mosul and Kirkuk, the dispossession and violence allowed along Iraq’s rural borders with Iran and Turkey more immediately undermines confidence in the country’s future. A teacher working in the northern provinces who I meet in Erbil—who I’ll call Dadyar—dismisses the evident progress enjoyed by Dohuk, Erbil, and Sulimaniyah as nothing more than window dressing obscuring the reality of life for Kurds living far from any of the urban power centers. “All the construction, the tall buildings, the expensive shops, this is all for show,” says Dadyar with disgust. [The Kurdish president of Iraq, Jalal] Talabani knows what investors want to see and he gives it to them. You visit the cities, you see one Iraq. But in the small villages, things are very different. It is bad.”

 Dadyar’s alternative perspective on Kurdish stability is endorsed by Michele Naar-Obed, a peace activist and diligent chronicler of deprivation in the Kurdish north. According to Naar-Obed, whom I meet in Sulimaniyah, life is a shambles. Vulnerable populations there have been largely ignored by Baghdad and regional authorities and forgotten by the West. She notes that nearly one million Kurds have been internally displaced since 1990, a situation that has not been adequately addressed, and with no immediate remedy forthcoming from the powers that be.

“As internally displaced people (IDPs),” Naar-Obed recently wrote, “they are not entitled to the same provisions and services from the United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees as refugees [are afforded]. They are more dependent on their government to protect and provide for them,” a government that is more concerned with political bureaucratic infighting in Baghdad than in serving its most vulnerable citizens along the border, not to mention
hopelessly corrupt.

Naar-Obed acknowledges that in the Kurdish-controlled west, regional authorities have “built collective townships for the IDPs.” But “they have not been able to reclaim their lives and their livelihoods. They live in slums and have become dependent on government subsistence. They describe themselves as spiritually dead.” 

Meanwhile, as Turkish and Iranian entrepreneurs invest heavily in Iraq’s northern cities, their sponsoring governments continue quietly prosecuting low-grade sectarian wars against communities of borderland Iraqi Kurds. Recent months have witnessed repeated incursions into Iraqi territory by Turkish troops to the north (supposedly prompted by tips from American intelligence) and shelling by Iranian forces in the east (reportedly supported by Turkish surveillance aircraft).

The fear motivating Iranian, Turkish, and to a lesser extent, Syrian foreign policy towards Kurdish Iraq centers on the belief that Kurdish leaders are feverishly planning independence. To be sure, the inevitability of Kurdish succession from Iraq—and attendant uprisings by Kurdish populations throughout the region—has become conventional wisdom if not an outright article of faith among decision makers in Tehran, Istanbul, Damascus and Washington.

The haunting specter of an independent Kurdistan triggering not only a redrawing of the Middle Eastern map but also massive bloodshed in the process was provocatively and neatly anatomized by Jeffrey Goldberg in a recent issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Yet while Goldberg is undeniably correct that modern Middle Eastern borders are merely Western fabrications that poorly reflect real lines of political influence, the prospect of a region-wide liberation struggle for a Kurdish state is remote.

“Only fools and liars seriously talk about an independent Kurdistan,” says Hawar Salih as we drive through the gorgeous mountains surrounding the small town of Koyo. A dapper, American-educated scientist—and former bureaucrat in the Ministry of Agriculture during the days of Saddam Hussein—Salih provides me with a brief lesson in the environmental destruction visited upon his country as a consequence of foreign-imposed sanctions on the Hussein regime following the American invasion in 1991. As the scarred and deforested mountain landscape zips by my backseat window, Salih nimbly avoids directly answering my questions about local politics. But when I touch on the subject of succession, he becomes unexpectedly animated.

“If you think about it for even a moment, you can see why it makes no sense. If the Kurds declare the north as their own country, the Turks, Iranians and Syrians would suffocate the economy. Any Kurdistan would be completely landlocked and dependent on [its neighbors] for trade. The way it is now, the Kurds are officially Iraqis and so everyone is happy. And everyone is making money.”

This may be true for the moment, but many people I spoke with fear that any gains made in the north since the American invasion in 2003 could be undone by the rapidly approaching national elections. On March 7, Iraqis will go to the polls to elect local representatives and a new national government. Yet the initial celebration at Iraq’s supposed transition to democracy were quickly muted as the country’s prime minister that over 500 candidates for office nationally would be barred from running for office.

That the vast majority of these candidates are former Sunni Baathists was not lost on local populations, prompting Sunni leaders and informed observers to predict major unrest in the lead-up to election. A State Department official with considerable experience in Iraq spoke to me off the record about his pessimistic assessment of Iraq’s future. “To be honest, I’ve given up on the [Iraqi] Arabs. They haven’t demonstrated the ability or desire to move forward in a meaningful way. The Kurds are a different story. They’re organized and they’re attracting investment. But I don’t see any solutions in sight for the Arabs, and the elections are going to undo the progress that has been made. We’re going to see a lot more violence late in February.” He worried that a new outbreak of sectarian strife would threaten not only the central state, but the northern reaches of Iraq as well. “I’ll tell you one thing: I’m getting the hell out of here. It’s going to be ugly.”

The violence began much sooner than he thought. Two days later, on January 25, a series of coordinated explosions ripped through three hotels in downtown Baghdad. Gunman stormed the Sheraton, Babylon, and Hamra hotels, killing security staff and clearing the way for a second wave of attackers who drove vans packed with explosives into the buildings, leaving nearly forty dead and another seventy people injured. The following afternoon, a car bomb detonated just outside the Interior Ministry’s capital headquarters taking eighteen lives and injuring over eighty Iraqis, most of them neighborhood locals.

Violent episodes continued to mount throughout the first weeks of February. One young woman marked the beginning of a new month by blowing herself up in the middle of a major transportation hub just north of Baghdad, taking the lives of over fifty people, most of them Shi’ite pilgrims on their way to the holy city of Karbala, and leaving another hundred people badly hurt. In an apparent retaliatory attack, a bomb detonated hours later in Baghdad’s mainly Sunni neighborhood of Daura. While the explosion thankfully left behind no dead bodies, it sent over a dozen civilians to the hospital.

Yet despite the steady bursts of violent destruction peppering the Iraqi map, the Kurdish north continues to enjoy relative stability. How long this peaceful status quo remains intact, however, is anyone’s guess. Some Kurds see the election as the most critical moment in Iraq’s history since the 2003 invasion. Numerous people I spoke with—Kurds, Arabs, and Americans alike—expressed fear that the clearly undemocratic nature of the election would give the US government an excuse to abandon their nearly eight year occupation of the country, which might entice unfriendly neighbors at home and abroad to invade and wreak havoc in Kurdish territory. On the flip side, a smooth electoral process may produce similar outcomes if the United States interprets the results as the culminating event in a job well-done shepherding Iraq toward a democratic future. Either way, March brings uncertainty. 

On the next-to-last last day of my time in Iraq, I met with a group of students in the central square of Sulimaniyah’s Grand Bazaar. The students were eager to know about life in the United States, and asked if I had travelled through any of Europe. I told them I had, and asked if any of them had as well. All shook their heads no. As it turned out, none had been beyond the Kurdish line of control within the country. Obtaining foreign visas and permission to leave were near impossible without significant financial means to which none had access. “Here is like a prison,” one student said. “A big, beautiful prison.” The observation initially struck me as a sad admission of the inherent trade-offs for peace in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. But what he said next made me appreciate the metaphor in a slightly different light. “We are forced to stay in, but the guards keep all the bad
stuff out.” 

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—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Last November, as many of you will no doubt remember, students and faculty at the University of California staged a series of protests and building takeovers in response to the UC Regents’ decision on November 19 to increase undergraduate tuition by a whopping 32 percent. After the announcement that the increase had been approved, students and faculty took several actions: some refused to attend or teach classes, others took over campus buildings, while still others rallied outside administrators’ homes and on campuses across the state for several days, demanding that the hikes be repealed and state funding restored. Despite these rallies and the incredible amount of public outcry they helped generate, nothing was done to roll back or even ameliorate the situation. Instead, the administration explained away any responsibility for their actions, claiming simply that their hands were tied. Afterwards, the presidents of the several colleges, rather than rally with their students to take on Sacramento, chose instead to call in the police. In the wake of that decision several hundred students were arrested or suspended and scores more were beaten, detained, maced, or otherwise harassed by local police.

For many ordinary observers, the tuition increases at the University of California were seen as the inevitable result of state cuts to higher education, which were themselves the result of the recent economic crisis that has left both California and New York reeling from lost tax revenues. Although this is certainly part of the equation, there is another, arguably more important and certainly more insidious reason why the UC Regents found it so easy to pass such unprecedented tuition increases at a university that, like CUNY, used to be free. The answer is simple: the tuition increases will not affect them, their future, or their children’s future. The sad truth is that nearly all of the regents at the University of California, like the members of the Board of Trustees at CUNY, have no real stake in what happens to the students or faculty they supposedly represent. Instead, their loyalties are to the ideological whims of the politicians and bureaucrats who appointed or hired them, and upon whom their future employment and professional success is dependent.

Although the regents may have indeed imagined they were responding to an unavoidable crisis, the erosion of funding for state universities, from California to New York, is not merely the result of any one economic disaster, but represents instead an oligarchic, systematic, and ideologically driven attempt to privatize the nation’s several dozen state university systems by starving them of government funding and forcing them to charge more tuition while simultaneously seeking out further forms of corporate sponsorship to stay afloat. This process of corporate transformation is not merely a threat from politicians and ideologues outside the university, however, but is, more often than not, being carried out by those on the very inside, those like UC President Mark Yudof and CUNY Board of Trustees Chair Benno Schmidt who seem dedicated to the idea of drowning their respective universities in the proverbial bathtub.

This structure of de facto corporate and political governance, so indicative of the new university, is nowhere more cynically self-evident than at CUNY, where the Chancellor recently welcomed the idea of radically increasing tuition, and the Chair of the BOT is also the Vice Chairman of an organization (Edison Learning) whose sole mission is the privatization of public education. This disconnect between the needs of the students and the ideological interests of its leaders exists in part because the City University of New York is currently governed by an incredibly hierarchical and dysfunctional structure of organizations and representatives ranging from an extremely powerful Board of Trustees, a moderately influential chancellor, several university presidents who are mostly beholden to the board and the chancellor, and a very loose coalition of faculty and student senates and organizations whose decisions, concerns, and protests are frequently ignored or overlooked. While the Chancellor ostensibly has control over the future direction of the university, his appointment is always contingent upon the approval of the Board of Trustees. Likewise, all of the college presidents, including our own Bill Kelly, are appointed only on the approval of the Board of Trustees. The students and faculty, meanwhile, have practically no formal representation when it comes to the future direction of the university where they work and study.

It is time that all of the stakeholders involved, including the students, staff, and faculty of CUNY, as well as the unions and organizations that represent them, begin to agitate for democratic reforms of the University’s governance structure in an effort to shake the monkey of corporate control off their backs once and for all. It is not enough to merely have the freedom to oversee the academic aspects of our work and to pursue our research and teaching unimpeded; we must also insist that we be directly involved in the larger economic and structural aspects of the university, paying attention to and taking control over the processes and decisions that so profoundly affect our day to day experiences.

The first place to begin this effort would be with a complete restructuring of the Board of Trustees. Currently the board consists of seventeen members, ten of which are appointed by the governor and five by the mayor. The remain­ing two non-appointed mem­bers of the board include the head of the Uni­ver­sity Stu­dent Sen­ate and the chair of the Uni­ver­sity Fac­ulty Sen­ate, the last of whom, because of supposed col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing con­flicts, sits with­out a vote. This means that of the seventeen members only two are actually stakeholders who have any real interest in the well being of the university, and of those two only one is allowed to vote. The fifteen members who make up the rest of the board, as the GC Advocate has reported several times in the past, are almost exclusively composed of persons whose primary experience and interests are in the business sector. The students and faculty of the university, meanwhile have absolutely no say in who is appointed to the board.

It should be obvious to anyone who believes in the idea of democratic self rule that the university belongs as much to the students, staff, and faculty as it does to the residents of the State of New York; and instead of allowing the governor and mayor to stack the deck with friends and political appointees, many of whom are sorely unqualified, we should insist that the size of the board be dramatically increased so that there is at the very least an equal balance between the interests of the state and the several groups of stakeholders of which the university is composed. Although the specifics of such a plan would no doubt involve a significant amount of nuanced legislation, the principle of equal representation is a good place to begin.

Instead of one student and one token, largely powerless faculty member, the board should be expanded to include one elected student representative, one elected faculty member, and one elected staff member from each of the eleven senior colleges, the six community colleges, and the Graduate Center for a total of seventeen students, seventeen faculty members, and seventeen staff members. Each of these members would have a full and equal vote in all decisions made by the Board of Trustees, except for the faculty and staff members, who would be able to vote on all decisions except those directly related to contract negotiations. Add to this an additional two gubernatorial or mayoral appointments, or perhaps two City Council appointments chosen by the City Council Higher Education Committee, and the BOT would be fairly balanced between the interests of the city and state, the staff, the students, and the faculty. Under such a structure, there would no doubt be much more debate, much less rubber stamping, and much more innovation. Most importantly, though, there would be a much greater concern for the interests of those whom the university was originally meant to serve. 

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The money used to fatten Mathew Goldstein’s wallet isn’t going to grow on trees, people, so get ready to pony up some cash! As if David Paterson hasn’t already caused the students at CUNY and SUNY enough grief with his statewide cuts to higher education, Governor Justice is now looking to help the struggling university systems recoup some of those losses by proposing legislation that would allow the Boards of Trustees at SUNY and CUNY to increase and/or adjust tuition rates at will. Paterson’s new bill (euphemistically titled the Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act) would neither empower students nor provide for any greater innovation, but would instead give chancellors at both SUNY and CUNY the ability to significantly raise tuition without state legislative approval, as well as the option of offering differential tuition rates for different programs and campuses. This means more prestigious CUNY or SUNY campuses, such as Hunter and City College, could potentially begin charging higher tuition rates than other schools in the system, making access to those schools out of reach for increasing numbers of poor and working class New Yorkers. Not surprisingly, Matty G. is all in favor of the plan.

According to the Gotham Gazette, the new bill would allow increases in tuition up to to two and a half times the five-year average of the Higher Education Price Index, which measures inflationary increases in operating costs for colleges and universities across the nation. In other words, Mathew Goldstein and his BOT henchmen would essentially be able to increase tuition at a rate at least two and a half times that of inflation.

This kind of power would, once again, place the burden of the current budget crisis onto the backs of our city and state’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens. To make things even worse, Goldstein has made it explicit that he intends to use differential tuition rates at the graduate level, which could mean higher tuition for students in the sciences and those earning professional degrees.

Both the PSC and some state senators argue that this new bill is nothing less than an attempt to further privatize the two state university systems. In January, Barbara Bowen gave formal testimony in Albany that pretty well sums up what the future will look like should this bill actually pass: “It is not difficult to predict the next step, given New York’s sorry history of underinvestment in CUNY and SUNY. Students become the cash machine, legislative control of tuition disappears, and the State cuts back even further on its support. The governor’s proposal says not one word about State investment and offers no guarantee that ever-escalating tuition would not be used to replace existing State support.”

The City University of Phoenix

In a wildly audacious move even by the low standards of our lord and chancellor Matthew Goldstein, the School of Professional Studies (SPS) moved during the middle of January to jettison key provisions of its governance document that threaten the quality and value of CUNY doctoral education.

Initially designed to funnel all of CUNY’s continuing education programs through a centralized bureaucratic institution modeled after NYU’s School for Continuing and Professional Studies, the SPS was founded in 2003 with the twin understandings that portions of the generated revenue would be directed to doctoral support initiatives and that the new school would not offer duplicate degrees that could be obtained through other CUNY colleges.

Not surprisingly, the SPS paid out revenue funds for doctoral support only once, while it was still in its infancy in 2003. Since then, doctoral support monies have not been collected from SPS, with over a half-million dollars sitting in a rainy-day escrow account. The GC Advocate will be reporting in depth on reasons why the allocation of these resources has been refused by the Graduate Center in next month’s issue. But more immediately, and more troubling, is the fact that the SPS board of governors voted to kill any official responsibility it previously had to doctoral support as well as its promise not to issue duplicate degrees.

As the SPS increasingly offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in various subjects, the possibility of correspondence course degrees in, say, political science or biology, at the undergraduate, Master’s and doctoral levels has become increasingly real. Moreover, the fact that the SPS does not distinguish between in-state and out-of-state students for the purposes of tuition payment (everyone gets charged the same tuition regardless of residency) opens the floodgates for University of Phoenix-style online education to take root within CUNY, and suggests a naked business logic of offering for-profit educational opportunities for anyone, anywhere, that can pay.

All of which gets compounded by matters of accreditation. SPS currently enjoys pride of place under the banner of the Graduate School and University Center, a fully-accredited institution within the Middle States accreditation initiative. If oversight or rigor is lax—and current evidence suggests it is—and credits between the school and other degree programs are rendered transferable (which is theoretically possible already), than SPS could essentially free-ride on the accredited strengths of other colleges while simultaneously draining the integrity of the CUNY network’s solid academic reputation. Look for further coverage in these pages on SPS in future issues.

What Good are Rules for If You Can’t Break Them on the Regular

According to the CUNY Board of Trustees Code of Conduct, no member of the board may accept employment with the university within two years of serving as a trustee. Yet this past month, the Board of Trustees voted to “waive” this silly ethical protocol in the name of political expediency and cronyism. The recent passing of Vice Chancellor Ernesto Malave left the board scrambling to find a replacement to fill this “large and unexpected hole in the University’s administration.” But what’s this? A perfect replacement from the board of trustees itself? What are the odds? “Fortunately, the University has a trustee,” the board announced, “whose background and experience make him uniquely qualified to step into the breach under these unique circumstances.”

Unique, indeed. Shaw’s bona fides are apparently so impressive that his fellow trustees simply brushed aside all bureaucratic constraints blocking his appointment as Interim Senior Vice Chancellor for Budget, Finance, and Financial Policy. At the same time, Shaw’s record is not so impressive that he can fill Maleve’s shoes alone. The board also promoted Matthew Sapienza, a career CUNY technocrat, to the position of Associate Vice Chancellor for Budget and Finance. Given the effusive praise heaped upon him by the board in their explanation of promotion—not to mention his close association with Malave—some might question why the board did not simply appoint Sapienza to Malave’s vacant post, and save the extra salary. Others might also question why Shaw’s portfolio includes “financial policy” whereas Sapienza’s does not. Should we expect another appointment of an additional “associate vice chancellor” to help hold Shaw’s hand through the thickets of financial policy? More on this as it develops…

Raise High the Chancellor’s Salary, Trustees

Times are tough—just ask CUNY’s Chancellor Matthew Goldstein. With the recent economic and financial crises, it’s hard to live on a nearly half-million dollar annual salary with an additional $100,000 yearly housing allowance. Good thing the Board of Trustees jumped into action with all the enthusiasm of an Obama administration official bailing out a Goldman Sachs senior executive. Citing his extraordinary—nay, Herculean—efforts to situate the CUNY system in the vanguard of corporatist efforts to smother public education, the band of trustees moved to raise the Heart of Darkness’ annual salary by nearly $40,000 a year. Seemingly without any intended irony, the board noted that such a raise was “richly deserved,” and moreover was “necessary for CUNY to remain competitive and on an upward trajectory.”

Yet despite the soaring rhetoric in honor of Darth Goldstein’s irreplaceably steady hand at CUNY’s helm, a seedling of dissent, a slight rebellion off fifth if you will, could be seen sprouting in the Board of Trustee ranks…kind of: the vote was not unanimous. Apparently concerned that a vote against Matthew Goldstein’s bank account is a vote against America, student senate representative Cory Provost, an MA student in Brooklyn College’s School of Urban Policy and Administration, abstained from casting his ballot. Way to stand up, guy!

Newsflash: You’re Both Ass Clowns!

What should have been a celebratory moment of remembrance and renewal in early December was quickly turned into an episode of Jerry Springer by City Councilmember Charles “the Red” Barron and CUNY’s own loose-cannon goon, trustee Jeffrey “don’t get spontaneous with me” Wiesenfeld.

On December 1^st, city dignitaries and other mega-millionaires gathered in downtown Manhattan to mark the start of construction on a replacement facility for Fiterman Hall, a CUNY-owned campus facility badly damaged during the attacks of September 11. Barron, who had been asked to speak at the event, had not finished delivering his opening salutations before Wiesenfeld shouted “You’re a disgrace!” at the former Black Panther-turned-politico-insider.

What followed was an exchange of machismo idiocy worthy of a middle school playground as each man taunted the other with long-distance finger jabs, threats, and, rumor has it, unspeakable insults to each
other’s mother.

The incident would have been just another example of New York politics run amok had Weisenfeld and Barron let matters rest there. But weeks later, Councilwoman—and chief adjutant to Emperor Michael Bloomberg—Christine Quinn removed Barron from his chairmanship of the Higher Education Committee, an action that Barron insists was carried out on the orders of Jeffrey Weisenfeld. For his part, our lusty trustee has been otherwise engaged, reportedly locked in a political death match with fellow Republican Chris Collins, a rising star within New York State conservative circles, and could not be reached for comment.

In a bizarrely argued response to his ouster and backdoor call to revolutionary arms, Barron compared his fight with Quinn and Weisenfeld to the deadly struggles of the 1968 civil rights movement, and invoked Steve Biko to rally supporters to his defense. It was hard to know if Barron was consoling his constituents or himself when he proclaimed that while he may no longer be the speaker’s chair of the Higher Education Committee, he would always be the “people’s chair” of social struggle. Or perhaps, more fittingly, of political irrelevancy: Barron currently finds himself the only city councilman without a seat on a single committee.

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According to the American Cancer Society, in 2009 approximately 192,000 “cases of invasive (i.e., carcinogenic cells have invaded surrounding tissue) breast cancer will be diagnosed among women” and an additional 62,000 “cases of in situ (carcinogenic cells have not spread to surrounding areas) cancer” will also be discovered. We do not know yet what the actual numbers turned out to be. What is known, of course, is that the earlier cancer is detected and treated, the greater the chances for survival. Which brings me to the topic of detection and some of the methods currently available. For over two decades, women have been told that mammograms are the surest way to detect cancer in its early stages—“early” meaning before one is able to feel a lump via a manual exam (and how many of us do those important monthly self-exams?). Mammographies, in fact, have picked up many Stage 1 cancers, as well as those that have progressed much further. Orthodox medical guidelines state that a woman should get a baseline screening at age forty and then have follow-up mammographies each year. While mammograms continue to be touted by many physicians as the best method for the early detection of breast cancer, the safety and effectiveness of this screening tool are being debated more and more within the medical community. For example, there have been many instances of both false positives and false negatives, which, in turn, have led to unnecessary biopsies—or, in the latter case, led to fatal consequences. Also, if a woman has dense breast tissue, a mammogram might not be able to detect a tumor until it is large.

Mammographies, moreover, are x-rays and x-rays contain radiation, a known carcinogen. But isn’t the risk of supposedly minimal exposure to radiation a small price to pay if disease can be uncovered, you may ask? Each person has to answer that question for herself (preferably in consultation with her doctor, after she has done some of her own research), though I will note some recent findings. In 2002, for instance, the British medical journal, The Lancet, published the results of a Swedish study, which revealed that routine screening (vs. diagnostic) mammograms in women under fifty are overused and overrated. Further studies in Europe and the United States support this claim; indeed, in October 2009, Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society, stated in The New York Times “that American medicine has overpromised when it comes to screening. The advantages to screening have been exaggerated”
(http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911u/mammograms). In Breast Cancer? Breast Health! (for which Dr. Northrup wrote the foreword—think what you may of Northrup’s New Age style, she is still a physician), Susan S. Weed writes, “The American Cancer Society claims that the radiation danger from a screening mammogram is no more than that caused by natural radiation in the environment. Not so. The amount of radiation from even one breast x-ray is 11.9 times the yearly dose absorbed by the entire body, according to Diana Hunt, former saleswoman for an x-ray manufacturing company, UCLA Medical Center graduate, and senior staff x-ray technologist for 20 years.”

Am I denouncing mammograms? Certainly not. The doctor’s daughter in me respects science and is excited about advances in medical technology. However, there appears to be enough peer-reviewed material to suggest that routine mammograms—especially for women in low-risk categories—are not always the safest or most effective screening tool.

Other screening tools include sonograms which gather images using sound waves rather than radiation, and digital mammography, which, like its conventional counterpart, still emits radiation but purportedly is more effective in screening dense breast tissue for abnormalities. There is also a test known as thermography. This FDA-approved test takes a digital infrared image of the breasts and produces a colored “map” of their thermal patterns. Abnormal heat areas (i.e., potentially cancerous or precancerous “hot spots”) can then be further tested via mammograms, sonograms and/or biopsies. While advocates of thermography seldom state that it should supplant more conventional technologies, they do claim that regular thermographies can accurately chart changes in heat patterns and thus help a patient detect problematic areas before a malignant tumor has begun to grow. It should be noted that this technology does not fall under the rubric of naturopathic medicine, but is rooted in science. Moreover, theses images, while taken by thermographers, are interpreted by physicians.

I have been discussing ways of finding disease, but would like to conclude on the more positive subject of trying to promote breast health. We have all heard that cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, kale, and cauliflower should be part of our regular diets and that hormone-fed animals that end up on our plates can raise our estrogen levels. One also should reduce dietary fat intake and reduce or eliminate dairy products (which some studies link to elevated levels of estrogen).

Again, please do some research yourselves, but my own physician advises women to avoid dairy. Exercising regularly also helps the body to reduce fat and expel toxins, not to mention reduce stress, which many scientists argue is a contributing factor to various breast diseases.

And, finally, back to brassieres. A tight-fitting bra that leaves marks not only can make it difficult to absorb the ideas of (the other) Marx, it also impedes the flow of lymphatic fluid, hence the optimum expulsion of the body’s toxins. Underwire—that vestige of corsetry that nonetheless keep things buoyant—is an impediment to lymphatic drainage. Similarly, anti-perspirant—by succeeding in what its name implies—prevents the elimination of toxins. Deodorant does not pose the same problem.

My final bit of advice? Talk to your doctor—talk to several doctors. Be a pest if you have to. Read The Lancet. Google your heart out. Visit Macy’s and Victoria’s Secret and try on every bra. And by all means, keep this conversation going. 

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Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors

A New Literary History of America by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. Belknap Press (2009).

There is an early, instructive moment in A New Literary History of America—Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors’s magnificent collection of short essays on American literature and culture—that reflects the tone and scope of the entire work. Norma E. Cantú is describing a visit to the Alamo and her participation in a healing ceremony, an attempt to exorcise a century and a half of “violence, overt and covert, that was done to Mexicans and blacks in Texas” after the thirteen-day siege in 1836: “The rupture, the terrifying rending of the fabric that was life before 1836, has made me who I am, but it has also rendered many of us Texans blind to our own history. The healing circle that October afternoon taught me that the battle is not yet over.” Cantú’s message, at once recuperative and polemical, is emblematic of the volume as a whole, which reads less as a standard literary history than a “healing circle” of its own, a linked set of disparate moments and actors, drawn together in remembrance, solidarity, even defiance, and pledged to the forging of new histories, new readings of the collectively-shared past that is America. Cantú’s essay on Texas-Mexico border writing is at once a reverie for the dead, an attempt at cathartic closure, and a process of communal rebirth, and so is A New Literary History of America The collection is nothing short of a re-visioning of American literary history and identity in light of the concerns of the twenty-first century, a new set of sightings, soundings, and range findings of once-familiar territories from contemporary perspectives.

A book as long and as rich as A New Literary History of America cannot have justice done to its many individual essays in the space of a single review. Nevertheless, highlights from the volume fairly leap out every twenty or thirty pages or so, begging especial mention: Cantú’s luminous essay, mentioned above; or Mary Gaitskill’s take on Norman Mailer, which pastiches the first-person style of the first part of Mailer’s Armies of the Night, and in so doing offers at once a subtle critique of Mailer’s swaggering authorial voice and a celebration of his personal and literary excesses; or screenwriter Michael Tolkin’s deft pairing of hardboiled noir prose with the drinking stories of Alcoholics Anonymous members; or Marcus’s prophetic reading of Moby Dick against a twentieth-century TV Guide and twenty-first-century reports from the battlefields of Afghanistan. In all of these pieces A New Literary History of America delights as well as instructs, the contributors fashioning their own highly stylized narratives in direct response to the critical challenges posed by the texts and authors under study. In so doing these essays usefully collapse the boundary between critic and subject, reviewer and reviewed, so as to quite efface normative divisions between the arts of fiction and criticism. While not all of the pieces in the anthology reach for these heights, the more standard, encyclopedia-style essays—which constitute the bulk of the volume—are nevertheless almost uniformly successful, short, lucid gems of exposition and erudition: the effect of reading these pieces, a few at a time over the course of a month or so, was that of so many windows opening up onto a shadowy past, be it the coasts of the Americas as first glimpsed by European voyagers, or the reception history of James Fenimore Cooper’s wilderness romances in Europe, or even the professional acting career of Junius Brutus Booth, father of John Wilkes Booth and the introducer of Romantic theater to the United States. Even those authors particularly well-embalmed by the twin desiccants of scholarship and popularity, sawdust-stuffed figures like Emerson and Whitman and Henry James, get a thorough airing, and new light thrown into the unexplored crannies of their well-creased hides. All of these pieces, and so many others—especially those treating subjects and periods in which I’m a proud nonspecialist—are consistently informative and exciting.

But like any list or canon, even the inclusiveness and openness of A New Literary History of America cannot fully encapsulate or encircle the entire terrain of American cultural and literary history, even with the inclusion of chapters on Porgy and Bess, Bob Dylan, and Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial, all of which share space with more traditional subjects like the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Carl Sandburg, and Philip Roth.

Like groundbreaking books on American literature before it, books such as D. H. Lawrence’s iconoclastic Studies in Classic American Literature or Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, the ultimate inconclusiveness of A New Literary History of America is a happy fault of its rare virtues: its plurality and attempt at an all-encompassing sweep; its commitment to the poetics and politics of literary, cultural, and historical criticism; its self-reflexive inquisitiveness of its own and others’ narratives of origin and identity; and its privileging of diversity and hybridity over sameness and rigidity—qualities that the book will be seen to share with America itself, whose always-elusive “more perfect union” is forever receding, like Gatsby’s green light, beyond its grasp. The omissions and imperfections of A New Literary History of America are many: one looks in vain among the contributors for luminaries like Louis Menand, Rebecca Solnit, and Toni Morrison; a few of the contemporary chapters, like Hua Hsu’s on hip hop, are thin on texture and detail; brand-new modes of communication, like LOLspeak and YouTube,
are absent. But even these gaps succeed as provocations to further exploration, lacunae on our historiographical map to be filled in with further literary and cultural cartography. At its best and quirkiest, A New Literary History of America reads like a vast provocative setlist or syllabus compiled by a team of obsessive collectors and enthusiasts—Benjamin’s author-as-producer refashioned as the twenty-first-century’s geek compiler of alternative histories and tragically overlooked moments. As a great literary mixtape, A New Literary History of America looks beyond itself to other, newer literary histories, ones even less finished or closed, open to newer media and newer discoveries. At times I found myself wishing that the book weren’t immured by copyright laws and the solidity of print production, that an open-source weblog or online supplement were busy recording further contributions to this great project—the genesis of slash fiction, the beauties of Andy Warhol’s a: a novel, learned excurses on the lyrics of Jay-Z or the nomadic aesthetics of iPhone photography: the list, as with this compendious list of lists, is long. A New Literary History of America stands strongly, as both example and challenge to the work—spanning periods, genres, languages, ethnicities, and media—that will follow it.

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Author Louis Menand

The Marketplace of Ideas by Louis Menand. W. W. Norton and Company (2010).

The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected by Jonathan R. Cole. Public Affairs (2010).

In Willa Cather’s 1925 novel The Professor’s House, Godfrey St. Peter, a professor of history at a Midwestern university, befriends Dr. Crane, a professor in the physics department at the same school (and mentor to the novel’s tragic hero Tom Outland). These two professors, one from the humanities and one from the sciences, find a common foe in what they see as the encroachment of industry and profit in the educational process, a phenomenon that threatens their goal of producing well-rounded, cultivated students. As Cather describes it: “His friendship with Crane had been a strange one. Out in the world they would almost certainly have kept clear of each other; but in the university they had fought together in a common course. Both, with all their might, had resisted the new commercialism, the aim to ‘show results’ that was undermining and vulgarizing education. The State Legislature and the board of Regents seemed determined to make a trade school of the University.” That this appears in a novel published in 1925 is some indication of how long there has been this persistent anxiety over the aims of higher education, and the fear that market forces were corrupting the values of institutions of higher learning. (In The Professor’s House these forces of profit play a major role in the story, as the scientific discovery of the deceased intellectual prodigy Tom Outland ends up being patented and used to fund the luxurious lifestyle of St. Peter’s unscrupulous son-in-law.)

One wonders what Professors St. Peter and Crane would think of today’s universities with their power rankings, outsized athletic programs, and students who resemble not so much pupils as customers (who are always right!). And that’s not to mention the rise of for-profit conglomerates like the University of Phoenix. Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas and Jonathan R. Cole’s The Great American University, are two recent works on higher education which attempt to make sense of where the nation’s colleges and universities are today, what makes them work or not work, and what challenges lie ahead for American higher education in the coming years.

Before taking his current position as the Bass Professor of English at Harvard, where he has been since 2003, Louis Menand taught here in the Graduate Center’s English department. His newest book, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, is part of W. W. Norton’s Issues of Our Time series edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Menand mentions that he served on a committee to re-develop Harvard College’s General Education curriculum, and this had no small part in inspiring the book, which examines the history of higher education, ideas about appropriate curriculum, and the state of graduate education at the current moment. Coming from a different angle is Jonathan R. Cole’s The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected. Cole is a sociologist by training and served as the Provost and Dean of Faculties at Columbia University from 1989 to 2003. In this book, Cole examines the nation’s largest and most prestigious research universities, shows why the United States is the unequivocal world leader in academic research, and argues that this status could be threatened by limitations on research and inquiry put in place in the past eight years.

As you may have gathered from the literary reference that began this review, my own allegiances are in the humanities. I am a student in the English department here at the Graduate Center, and my dissertation project is on academic novels such as Cather’s The Professor’s House and Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution, examining them in the context of the history of American higher education. All of us in this profession encounter debates around higher education and policy in some form. Though it is impossible to keep up with every article, trend, and debate, we all read our share of pieces from The Chronicle of Higher Education and InsideHigherEd.com. However, my work on this dissertation has led me to dive headfirst into the voluminous field of higher education history. I soon found myself drowning in a sea of monographs full of overlapping information, murky statistical claims, and confusing, convoluted historical narratives about the origins and trajectory of America’s institutions of higher education and all of the administrative personalities that have shaped the field. Complicating matters even more is the fact that the American collegiate system is not really a “system’ at all, but a loose network of degree granting institutions. On the up side, this allows for a wonderful diversity of institutions and approaches. According to Cole, there are roughly 4,300 different institutions of higher learning granting degrees in the United States today. Ultimately, that variety is an asset that allows students of various abilities, backgrounds and interests to choose among a plethora of options. We now have small liberal arts colleges like Berea College in Kentucky, a school known for its innovative financing which does not charge its students tuition. We have massive public state colleges like Ohio State University which, while located in Columbus, functions like a whole city unto itself. And we also have unique institutions with specific historical missions such as my alma mater, Morehouse College, the nation’s only all-male historically black college. Cole’s number of 4,300 also includes the hundreds of community colleges spread out across the country. But how does one begin to document and quantify the outcomes of education given all these disparate institutions and their assorted curricula? How do you compile a history of American higher education in such a way that it gives us a language for assessing the success and failures of education and provides some grounding to make the appropriate changes to ensure that these institutions remain competitive in the 21st century? Some scholars have taken an institutional approach, examining the history of one particular institution and its administrative decisions about curriculum. Other historians have attempted sweeping historical surveys of American higher education as a whole, and the library shelves groan under the weight of these tomes, many clocking in at 500 pages or more.

In The Marketplace of Ideas, Menand narrows his emphasis to a set of particular issues, but in the process provides a useful overview of American higher education. The book is organized into three essays examining three particular issues in higher education: 1) the history of the general education curriculum, 2) the logic of academic disciplines and the allure of “interdisciplinarity” as a buzzword in academia, and 3) the politics of professors and the academic labor market. Menand’s writing style may seem deceptively simple—the book clocks in at a slim 174 pages—but in the course of presenting the background on these topics Menand also does a masterful job of taming and synthesizing over a century’s worth of scholarship on higher education. To boil all that down to an accessible narrative requires some generalizations, and there are many in The Marketplace of Ideas. But Menand has picked his reductionisms wisely and his attempt to fashion a coherent narrative out of all of this history is in itself a useful exercise that will allow scholars to reevaluate some of the central themes in the history of American higher education.

One of the most
striking concepts that jumps out of the book’s second section is his insistence on labeling the years between 1945 and 1975 as the “Golden Age of Academia,” a period during which “the number of American undergraduates increased by almost 500 percent and the number of graduate students increased by nearly 900 percent.” This is a level of growth that will likely never be surpassed. Higher education continued to grow after 1975 but at a much slower rate. The Golden Age began with the end of World War II and the introduction of the G.I. Bill, and lasted until the financial turmoil of the 1970s. The G.I. Bill is perhaps the single most important piece of legislation in the history of American higher education. It extended what was once a privilege reserved for children of the wealthy to thousands of working class veterans. These measures have radically reshaped the look, feel and size of
America’s colleges.

No doubt many of my peers approaching the job market will want to skip ahead to the third section titled “Why Do Professors All Think Alike.” Here Menand confronts the well-worn conservative gripe against a leftist bias in higher education, especially in the humanities where multiculturalism and pop culture have allegedly replaced the sober study of Western Civilization and its greatness. Menand dismantles this argument by citing surveys that show that the academy does in fact lean liberal, but it does so across disciplinary lines, including in the sciences, and that within that umbrella of “liberal” is a variety of political and religious perspectives. However, Menand acknowledges that “the politics of the professoriate is homogenous,” and goes on to argue that this homogeneity is rooted in how academia trains and hires its professors. While I don’t think Menand’s explanation is convincing his discussion of academic labor is worth a look less for its intervention into the culture wars and more for his examination of the “time to degree” which has blown wildly out of proportion. For instance, a typical graduate student in English will spend roughly ten years earning a doctoral degree. Other humanities fields have comparable numbers. This is an unnecessary and sadistic system. Menand proposes that the humanities Ph.D. should be streamlined in the way that programs in medicine, law and business are administered, with a set number of years and clearer program requirements. The length of the Ph.D. program prohibits many students from considering the process at all. Shortening the time to degree would make graduate education seem less daunting for college graduates from modest economic backgrounds who may have already sacrificed greatly just to get an undergraduate degree and who may be interested in earning a Ph.D. but unable and unwilling to endure its length and cost.

As for the labor market itself, Menand writes that “There is a sense in which the system is now designed to produce ABDs.” These ABDs have increasingly served as the cheap labor force for teaching undergraduate students. In recent years we have seen a graduate student unionization movement necessary to counteract universities using graduate students to teach undergraduate courses, even the upper-level ones once reserved for tenured faculty. (I first typed in “full-time faculty,” but many adjuncts are teaching full-time, which is precisely one of the problems.) Menand does not go far enough in indicting the exploitation of the current adjunct teaching system. And one wonders if this system of contingent labor has any chance of being stopped. Now with the rise of for-profit schools and the prevalence of corporate management in higher education becoming the norm, the situation continues to look bleak. Nevertheless, Menand provides some ammunition against the usual narrative of an “overproduction of Ph.D.s.” Marc Bousquet’s book How the University Works and his blog of the same name, also contests the “overproduction” thesis, showing that the demand for teaching is actually higher with more students enrolling in college each year, and that adjuncts are being slammed with larger class sizes. The question of “overproduction” must be seen in light of the growth of adjuncting as the default teaching model for the humanities.

At first glance the hefty 660 pages of Jonathan Cole’s The Great American University appears to be exactly the kind of dense, foreboding book I described earlier that makes up the canon of higher education history. And to some degree it is. But Cole has done an exemplary job of making the narrative relatively accessible despite the voluminous statistical data and flurry of eminent names that bog the book down at times. Cole has spent most of his life at Columbia where he earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees in sociology, and later served as provost for fourteen years until 2003. His focus in the book is, well, universities like Columbia. Cole identifies about 260 institutions that now claim to be research universities and narrows his focus to the 100+ that sit at the top of the list.

The first section of the book chronicles the history of the nation’s earliest institutions of higher learning and examines how these colonial colleges evolved into major research universities over the years. Long story short, by 2001 the United States has produced a third of the world’s science and engineering articles in refereed journals, and in three of the past four years American academics have received a majority of the Nobel prizes for science and economics. The American university system, like the nation itself, has firm roots in England, but Cole also describes how American institutions borrowed from the German model of the 19th century, with its combination of research and teaching. Germany is a key part of Cole’s conclusions in the book. Cole returns to the history of Nazi Germany in the 20^th century to demonstrate how repression of free inquiry damaged Germany’s standing as the site of the world’s most competitive research institutions, driving talented academics in Germany and Austria to American universities where they helped these institutions to flourish. The second part of the book details the specific discoveries and innovations that have originated in American research universities—things such as the bar code, congestion pricing for traffic, and even the Internet itself. The third part outlines what Cole sees as a potential threat to the American research university—the squelching of academic freedom and scientific inquiry—especially that which took place under the eight long years of the Bush presidency.

Cole sounds optimistic that the Barack Obama administration will restore science to its rightful place in our research institutions and restore some of the restrictions put in place by George W. Bush’s flat-earth approach to scientific knowledge. In his most recent State of the Union address, Obama at least mentioned the importance of science education (as well as funding for community colleges). But Cole is leery of the damage done by the recent financial crises, and in this regard the Obama administration has already been a major disappointment (for anyone not on the board of Goldman Sachs that is). This, in fact, raises a looming question about Cole’s own study. He identifies a number of innovations in science and economics as well as the social sciences and humanities, and cheerleads for the goodness of America’s institutions of higher learning. But I was also left wondering as to the extent that these same elite institutions and their departments of economics and business were the breeding grounds for the very policies that have left all of us in financial turmoil and threatened the opportunities for a generation of young Americans whose families may no longer be able to afford college at all. Ultimately, it is this relentless push for profits and a continued faith in corporatization and finance capital to solve all our problems that is changing institutions of higher education, including the way they teach students, and how they train and hire faculty. Neither of these books seems interested in challenging corporatization of higher education at the ideological level (not that they need to do so as several other books and many articles have already tread over that ground). But what they have both done is map out the current terrain of the American university in ways that will help us to understand how to ensure that in the rest of the 21^st century, the nation’s colleges and universities maintain high standards of achievement, and continue to be a force for good.

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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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