Weekend Odds and Ends
[Mexican license plate tourist art]
I just found an article from earlier in the year in The Chronicle of Higher Education. They’re apparently worrying about the demographic cliff of higher education enrollment that is coming.
All the causes—all of them—of this phenomenon are things for which the Chronicle and the professoriate as a body have long advocated:
Ideological denunciation of the populations (the disproportionately white upper classes) that have long made up the lion’s share of families paying full tuition;
Stupidification of curricula (to ensure that the large quantity of underqualified students you’ve been admitting don’t flunk out in a semester and cause you to lose their tuition money) to the point that just about anyone can do college work in many disciplines and so many people start wondering why they’re paying so much to have their children come out after four years knowing little of practical use;
Celebration and promotion through direct advocacy of social and cultural practices (families with both parents full-time in the workplace and fewer children per family) that have shrunk the youth demographic;
Transformation of faculty professional responsibilities from learning and teaching an expert body of knowledge—and that’s it, full stop—to the professor as cheerleader/mental health therapist/counselor/entertainment facilitator/social worker/pseudo-parent/friend and confidante.
Suddenly, after preaching all of this endlessly, the Chronicle recognizes a crisis and is concerned. And they won’t stop the preaching of the destructive message, of that you may be certain, even while they weep over the consequences of that preaching.
Higher education is going to get just what it deserves for having so totally failed to sustain the traditional mission of these institutions.
In the spring of 2019, I invited Glenn Loury to come to Bucknell and participate in a series of public interviews I conducted for an edited book on the legacy of the social and cultural movements of the 1960s. Glenn graciously accepted and he was, as usual, scintillating. His chapter is a highlight of the book. You can see the table of contents at the link attached to the picture of the cover above.
Glenn posted the interview to his Substack account recently, so I want to pass along the link and encourage you to take a look. Good stuff.
Pascal, loosely translated from the Pensées: “That something is incomprehensible does not mean it does not exist. An infinite number, an infinite space are equal to the finite.”
That is to say, an infinite space is composed of an infinite number of parts, but a finite space can also be divided into an infinite number of parts. The finite equals the infinite.
Makes no sense, but believe it because it is true.
The most profound and succinct confidence-restorer when faith is difficult.
The spirit of sport: Brothers until the whistle blows and the ball goes up, and then it’s on.
This 2008 Olympics is one of my cherished sports memories. What a splendid American team, and Kobe’s performance in the final game against Spain was mythological.
LeBron’s account here is priceless: “We was like…Holy Shit!…Oh, he did that to his teammate?! Ain’t no way we’re losin’ this game.”
I have recently lost all patience with professional sport because of its endless Woke political grandstanding. This kind of moment from KB is why I once admired some professional athletes.
One morning, on the Paris metro, I was drawn to another passenger, sitting in the seat just facing mine in the section of the train next to the doors.
A woman, perhaps in her mid-60s to guess from visual evidence, her hands amply sun-spotted, her upper lip bearing clear wrinkle lines, her eyes melancholy. She was dressed, in the way older Parisian women often do, considerably younger than her apparent age, tight black stretch pants in the mode of teen girls.
She was clutching what I recognized from my own adventures in French medical establishments as the plastic bag in which are deposited medical scans. She was close enough to me that I could, with a glance, easily read a few large words on the front of the bag: “radiologie” and “mammaire.”
She sent a text message to someone. The look on her face was grim, but then this is true of just about everyone on public transport in Paris, and probably globally.
Beyond my conscious intention, I began inventing her story, or the various versions of the story as it might work itself out.
The scan reveals her breast cancer and she is going to meet with the oncologist to learn how many more birthdays she is likely to see. Or she does not yet know what information the scan contains about her future, and it is that terrible anxiety (“Am I still in the sun-lit world of the well, or have I entered the gloomy shadow land of the sick?”) that weighs on her. Or she knows that what she holds in her hand shows that her previous anxiety has been cured, as it proves there is no disease, and she is in ecstatic thumb-typed words telling her new lover the wonderful news, and all while guarding the inscrutable public face that big city life trains into you.
The entirety of the literary project is that moment and its vista.
I wanted to speak to her, to offer a kind word about some mundane thing, to communicate some compassion just in case that might be called for, but the space we were in crushed me back into conformity with its rules of social indifference.
So I reserved my compassion for the telling of her tale that I was working out in my head.
The great novelist Emile Zola, many of whose books touch on social problems of one variety or another, was encouraged by friends to enter the arena of politics directly, but he deferred, claiming that his oratory skills were greatly inferior to those he wielded when armed with a pen.
I think most writers, even those who are competent public speakers, would acknowledge that speaking presents difficulties never faced in writing. There is great comfort behind the pen/keyboard in the knowledge that one can always revise, even after sending off the text, whereas once the awkward phrase is blurted out in front of a crowd, it is forever beyond repair.
Perfectionism is a tempting mirage in writing, while the good orator sees through this illusion every time he speaks.
The story of him bombing at 17 and his father having to come pick him up at the club later is both hysterically funny (“Oh, you a comedian, huh?…Comedian, my ass!”) and transcendently inspiring.
To hear a great one tell a tale of failure while he’s laughing at it—laughing at his own failure, precisely because it did not defeat him—is a master class in Overcoming.
An American, 23 year old Henry Gunther of Baltimore, was probably the last man killed in the fighting of World War I. The story is a microcosm of the absurdity of much of what happens in war.
Gunther had been demoted to private for writing a letter home that was critical of the war and was obsessed with regaining his previous rank. On the French front, in Meuse, on November 11th, 1918, only minutes before the armistice was to take effect at 11 am, Gunther’s unit encountered a German roadblock. Ignoring the orders of his superior officer, he ran toward the enemy and fired shots.
The Germans manning the machine gun, aware that the armistice was to take effect momentarily, tried to wave him off, but he would not stop.
They shot him dead at 10:59 am.
Loretta Lynn passed on Tuesday. Her voice will be in my head until I am gone too.
I tried hard as a young person not to like her music, as I was a rock kid at heart and there was little room in the circles in which I ran for eclectic tastes. You liked X, you also had to dislike Y. This included not only bands and types of rock, but entire genres of music outside of rock music. One didn’t know why it worked that way, but that’s how it worked. Taste, which is sociologically speaking a covert means of recognizing and hierarchically ranking social groups attached to the tastes, generally works like this.
But she insinuated herself into my heart anyway.
I can recall one particular moment, when I was still too young to acknowledge its full truth, at which it became apparent to me how deeply she had done so.
I was sitting in a 24 hour diner somewhere in the early morning hours with close friends. My band had played at some bar somewhere the previous night, and then we’d spent the rest of the night and early morning carousing here and there, at this unknown person’s house and then that one’s, and also briefly in somebody’s crowded and filthy Ford Econoline van.
I was with unbounded anticipation awaiting my order of French toast and eggs, still a bit under the effect of the night’s imbibing but exceedingly hungry. We were looking at the jukebox (an endangered species even then, but not yet fully extinct in the wild), trying to find something loud and obnoxious to put on.
We made our pick, confident by the silence as we chose it that our music would be coming up just as our food arrived. But someone had gotten into the queue before us and picked a Loretta Lynn song.
As my friends groaned, realizing we’d have to suffer through this before we could hear Bad Company or AC/DC or whatever we’d decided on, I put on the front of commiserating with their pain.
Silently, though, I was singing along with her tough but tender country girl lyric about prevailing over suffering, and I was feeling just fine.
God bless you, Miss Loretta Lynn.
Here are some gems she made with Conway Twitty, one of my mother’s favorite singers and the possessor of one of the greatest male pompadours in human history.
Hi all,
I’ve been at this project now for a little more than six months. Hardly seems possible, but I just checked the calendar and I believe that is the right math.
So, this is a note to you: Thank you.
I’m tremendously flattered by your interest in what I have to say about life, art, politics, death and I’m grateful that you read my ramblings. Every writer desires to be read (Lovecraft’s letter accompanying his submission to an editor notwithstanding) and thus owes a debt that cannot really be repaid to readers, however much the writer sometimes pretends not to recognize this (it’s part of the persona, you see…).
So that’s something I want to be sure to say and say again: THANK YOU.
Now, the other reason for this little note.
I finally got around to doing the technical stuff necessary to provide a paid subscription option, and so that’s the “phase II” in the subtitle above.
What does a paid option mean?
It means it’s an option. At present, everything on this account remains open to all subscribers, paid or free. Even if I move at some currently unforeseen point to separating material here into paid and unpaid categories, I still plan to always make the great bulk of it available when it’s produced without cost to everyone interested in seeing it. I’m tremendously appreciative that you read this site and want to do everything I can to ensure you continue to be interested in doing so.
I am hopeful though, and I make so bold as to ask, that if you have a few extra dollars rattling around, you’ll consider kicking some of them my way to help make it more feasible for me to spend more time on this project.
Inevitably, and despite my deepest feelings about writing, I think at least a bit about possible material returns when I am allocating time to writing projects. I have two kids who eat and are in constant need of new clothes and a house in which things are constantly breaking down. Add to that the fact that, to my great regret, I do not have infinite time to dedicate to writing, and it emerges necessarily that sometimes the possibility of writing things for pay trumps writing things here. This is so even though I much prefer writing here precisely because it allows me more freedom to engage with the topics I find most interesting.
If I can generate some paid subscriptions, then, I can spend more time doing this writing, the writing I most care about, and the writing that I hope you find valuable. If I generate enough, I may even finally find enough time and energy to get around to dipping my toes into Podcast World, which is professionally speaking probably the last thing I should do, given my tendency to say things that get me into trouble, but YOLO, as I’ve heard they say.
I hope you’ll consider a paid subscription and, whatever your decision on that, I look forward to writing more for you as Phase II gets underway. Should you decide to “go paid,” you need only click the button below and it should lead you in the right direction.
Cheers, and thanks again! And very special thanks to those who have already switched to a paid subscription!
ATR