Semester's End
A crowded mass of electrical impulses that worked their way through my brain and found their way out here
[Albert Maignan, Le Réveil de Juliette, 1886]
The academic year is all over including the shouting. Had to wade through a big pile of hand-written in-class finals to get to the finish line, but here I am.
[(May I note on the exam thing—given that this is the first term in which I did a long in-class final exam as a general rule in all classes—that I am surprised how few students stay to the end of a three-hour exam? I don’t know how new to this game they are, so maybe it’s unfamiliarity. And maybe I’m misremembering how these things went when I was young, and nearly every college course ended this way. But I seem to recollect seeing many other people there writing in the last minutes along with me. I never once in my life left a several hour long exam earlier than ten minutes before the timed end. My view was that I had an overabundance of relevant information in my head and I was going to pour as much of it as feasible out onto the paper in the time given. I don’t think I could have gotten up and left halfway through if you’d given me a million dollars to do it, and probably close to half of all my students were finished by the 1.5 hour mark on a three hour test.]
My fall schedule got upended. I had intended to teach my course on religion and the one on intellectuals. But I had not remembered that this past semester was our last one under our old distribution requirements and starting in fall only the new ones apply to all remaining students. This meant that neither of those two course had any of the requirements that students are seeking to fulfill as part of graduation quotas.
[As an aside, I am planning to write something about the particulars of that rearrangement by my colleagues of topical distribution requirements. It might just as well have been done specifically with the goal of making my courses less popular.
The idea of these requirements is that there are some topical areas so important that all students, regardless of major, should take a few courses that focus on them. The old requirements included two that my courses routinely filled: Global Perspectives (any course that had something of an international comparative perspective—and since the religion course looked at the origins of both Christianity and Islam, it met it) and Diversity in the US (any course that simply showed how some aspect of populational diversity has affected some parts of American life, and since I did some stuff on race and religion in the US, and specifically on the Nation of Islam, it met this one too). In the heat of the BLM/George Floyd Revolution of a few years back, my colleagues decided we needed to change these requirements to reflect “current realities.”
Try to guess what two requirements replaced these two.
Did you guess a Show How America is White Supremacist/Structurally Racist requirement and a Show How Climate Change Is Going to Kill Us All if We Don’t Do Something Radical Now requirement? Those were the correct answers. More on this soon.]
I suspect that some of my courses would fill even without those requirements just because the topics are interesting to some significant number of students, but the religion course has had steadily shrinking enrollment over the years and the intellectuals course (which is already a sufficiently esoteric topic to limit interest) is offered as a seminar for juniors and seniors so the pool is much lower than for many of my other courses, which are offered to students of any year.
The summary here is that neither of the two course got enough enrollment to run and I’ve had to plug in two freshman-heavy courses instead.
I’m going to see it as an opportunity rather than a disappointment, or rather as both.
One of the new courses is a seminar for first-term first years, and I’m going to do it on technology and AI. The other is a section of introduction to sociology, and it will be tuned as “Introduction to Sociology from the perspective of someone who has been around long enough to know how promising this discipline once was and who hates most of what it is currently doing as intellectually vapid and so he is going to take a semester with you to give you the good stuff and to tell you why the current stuff is mostly intellectual rubbish.” Maybe I’ll put both syllabi up here when they’re ready.
I’m also going to do some writing on the religion course, I think. I believe this is the end for that course, much as I hate to admit it. Students just do not care about this topic all that much any longer. I looked around at enrollments in our Religious Studies department and it does not appear they are going gangbusters in terms of course enrollments either, and despite filling out their roster of courses with the kind of not-really-focused-on-religion stuff you’d expect in today’s university (Islamophobia, Religion and Food, Environmental Ethics).
I greatly enjoyed teaching that course over the years (decades, in fact), and I will miss it. But I will miss everything I teach at some point soon enough. Maybe I’ll do the religion course here in a class-by-class format to approximate it, just to have a record of it. Maybe I’ll do the same thing with other courses as they get put into the mothballs. Maybe I’ll have the energy and time for that. Maybe.
If you’re interested in seeing the religion course here, please let me know. I’ll certainly do it if I see some interest. Might just do it anyway.
Here’s some stuff on the intellectuals course I put up here previously. Maybe I should do that one too:
Latest in crazy from academia:
Someone named Beans Velocci—yes, this person has named xieself after something edible and we’re supposed to take xie seriously—has written a new book. Sex Isn’t Real is the title.
Here are a few things I found from Beans online.
From an article on the discovery of an intersex right whale: “Every time [researchers] are in the field or looking at specimens, they just keep finding these exceptions,” Velocci says. Scientists “have seen over, and over, and over, and over, that sex is clearly not binary.”
But, Velocci says, scientific education has not adapted. “XX and XY are [taught as] the foundation that everything else might deviate from, rather than one possible variation among many.”
For reference, intersex in our species is about 0.02% of the population, and there is no reason to expect it to be much greater than that in cetaceans.
Here is the Beanser talking about the new book.
That talk ends with “It’s actually terfs who are obsessed with something that doesn’t exist.”
Elsewhere, Beansy has proffered similar words of wisdom: “Sex works as a classification system because it doesn’t make any sense”; “There is far more evidence that sex is not binary than evidence that it is binary.” And the conclusion explicitly admits the goal is the demolition of the very categories of sex and gender.
The liberal arts are in freefall. Enrollments crashing, all of higher ed facing major structural problems. And this empty insanity is what some elite schools are foisting on students. It’s almost impossible to believe that smart people could be this stupid. But here we are.
The young atheist when asked about his morality: “I just try to be good.”
But good in what terms? According to what moral system? Where do you get the definition of good and your moral rules from? And why would you want to do this, if, as I suspect, you are going to say that you alone invented your sense of good? Why not just take advantage of other people, since there’s no objective source for your morality to require your submission to it? Where does that motivation come from?
Actual NYTimes headline: Trump Says He Will ‘Try and Make’ Son’s Wedding, but Timing ‘Not Good’
And this would have been their option if he’d said he was definitely going: Trump Abandoning Essential Tasks of Negotiation with Iran and Exposing Country to Massive Risk to Attend Son’s Wedding
From the perspective of young people in a culture like this one, you can fully understand the contempt for the old.
The only possible thing the elderly can contribute is the wisdom of experience (which, it must be said, is invaluable, if only you are clever enough to recognize its value).
But if that knowledge is rejected outright in the culture, which it is in ours, what is left?
Only the objectively unappealing phenomena of sagging skin and weak muscles. The sun-battered face and the blackened teeth.
Of course young people should hate the old in this culture. We’ve trashed the aspect of age that merits respect and taught the young that only the attributes that define youth (strength, vigor, beauty) are worth valuing. How could it be otherwise?
The number of certifiably insane people running around free in the world is a dreadful thing to contemplate.
The beauty of traditional male culture.
It is certainty of ego that gets you where you are, and you are proud, and you know what you can do, but this does not stop you from admiring the talents of those who were close to you and above you.
The great male athletes saying awed things about their compatriots. They all know they have excelled, so there’s nothing lost in recognizing the rank order of the colleagues. My confidence in my own competence gives me the ability to easily recognize and praise those objectively above me. I do not hate or envy them. I admire and aspire to be like them.
I have made my thoughts on the death penalty clear numerous times here.
The NYTimes (surprise!) thinks differently.
I would suggest the opinions of women and effeminate men on this matter will, if they win the day, produce a world in which we will see more innocent victims of crime, because they are incapable of recognizing that some crimes require the liquidation of the authors of those crimes, and they require too that those authors be made to understand at least something of the suffering they brought to others.
I am ardently against the electric chair and lethal injection and all the other methods that sought to make the death penalty “less brutal” and more painless. It is not clear to me that we have advanced morally over the periods in human history when we were sufficiently clear about the danger of transgressing of certain moral rules that we knew you had to rip those transgressors asunder.
Does Kristoff know that Hitler would have asked himself why he had not been sufficiently clever to invent a lie as astoundingly impossible as “Israeli rape dogs”? (How deviously ingenious those Jews are, to be able to teach dogs to rape!)
Among other things, such as the level of their antisemitism, the NYTimes is here telling you what the standard of their “reporting” is: Just go and ask random Palestinians, who hate Jews at 90%+, to tell you stories of how awful Jews are, and then report the insanity they spew as undisputed fact.
Why I despise the technologists and their political apologists (“All technological advance is to be embraced!”)
They bombarded us with lead because it improved auto engine performance cheaply, increasing profits for automakers. In my generation (those born in the ‘60s and ‘70s), we were exposed to levels of lead so high that we were robbed of several IQ points per person and we will be handicapped in our final years with increased rates of cognitive decline and cardiovascular disease caused by that exposure. All to put some more dollars in the pockets of those making and selling cars.
Thomas Midgely Jr. came up with this idea. He also invented chlorofluorocarbons, which burned a hole in the ozone layer before they were banned.
In 1924, Midgely propagandized his invention for gasoline, tetraethyllead, claiming it was completely safe and pouring it on his hands and breathing the vapors. Shortly afterward, he was hospitalized for lead poisoning. Large numbers of employees at the General Motors plant that manufactured the product were hospitalized or killed by lead exposure, leading to the closure of the facility. The danger of lead were well-known from history, but production of the product resumed in short order and continued for the next half century, poisoning generations of people.
Midgely was a mechanical and chemical engineer, very knowledgeable about how to manipulate the physical world, and utterly without any moral center or ability to reason in light of the unquantifiable and unmonetizable value of human health and life. The engineering sciences produce a fair amount of people like this.
He is buried in Worthington, Ohio, just north of the city in which I grew up, breathing tons of the toxic product he invented. It’s about a six hour drive from here, a bit of a haul. I wish it were closer, just so that I might make an annual pilgrimage to his grave to urinate and defecate on it.
My daughter introduced me a while back to Lana Del Rey.
Overall, I have to say, I find most of her music unremarkable, and too frequently nihilist in a “die young” kind of way that I remember from rock songs of my youth but am not in the slightest sympathetic to these days, but I do quite like this one (though not the video—I told my daughter “I want to tell her to stay away from that asshole, who you can tell is garbage at a glance!”).
I discovered after picking out the chords on piano that it has much the same structure as another song with a female vocalist that I like (see below).
I heard recently that Bob Dylan called this the greatest song ever written, or something like that. I don’t know if I’d go that far, but it is certainly splendid.
“And I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time.” That’s a line. And the tailoring of the chords and the vocal melody of “Searchin’ in the sun for another overload”…every songwriter aspires to write one thing like that in his whole life, and then he can die happy.
It’s not being an old curmudgeon out of touch with the hipness of youth. It’s called KNOWING STUFF. As opposed to being completely ignorant about everything that happened before yesterday.
You cannot hate the 50 year old child with the beard and the teenager’s t-shirt on enough.
Beato’s summary of his view is perfectly accurate: “Songwriting is not the best example of songwriting.” No more men with guitars or pianos, no singer-songwriters! In fact, nobody who actually knows the slightest thing about how to play music! We need the next thing!
Young Thug! Bad Bunny! Now that’s songwriting! (Yes, these people made their top 30).
Do you know as little about these “musicians” as I did? Well, here’s a randomly selected line from Young Thug’s “Ball on Yall”:
Hey, I’m a product, you can order me
It’s Audemars, Gucci, and Louie V
Them hoes used to throw up, now them bitches swallow
I used to drink shots, now it’s out the bottle
And this is from Bad Bunny’s “Tití me preguntó”:
Ey, Tití me preguntó si tengo muchas novias [Aunti asked me if I have a lot of girlfriends]
Muchas novias [A lot of girlfriends]
Hoy tengo a una, mañana otra, ey [Today I have one, tomorrow another]
Pero no hay boda [But there’s no wedding]
One of the others on the NYTimes panel tells us that Outkast are particularly important songwriters on their list of the 30 greatest. Maybe some of you will remember the brilliant lyricism of their biggest hit:
My baby don’t mess around
Because she loves me so, and this I know for sure (Uh)
But does she really wanna
But can’t stand to see me walk out the door? (Ah)
Don’t try to fight the feeling
‘Cause the thought alone is killing me right now (Uh)
Thank God for Mom and Dad
For sticking two together ‘cause we don’t know how (C’mon)
Hey ya! Hey ya!
Hey ya! Hey ya!
Hey ya! Hey ya!
Hey ya! Hey ya!
You think you’ve got it, oh, you think you’ve got it
But “got it” just don’t get it ‘til there’s nothing at all (Ah!)
We get together, oh, we get together
But separate’s always better when there’s feelings involved (Ah)
If what they say is, “Nothing is forever”
Then what makes, then what makes, then what makes
Then what makes, what makes, what makes love the exception?
So why oh, why oh, why oh, why oh, why oh
Are we so in denial when we know we’re not happy here?
Y’all don’t wanna hear me, you just wanna dance
Hey ya! (Uh-oh) Hey ya! (Uh-oh)
Don’t want to meet your daddy
Hey ya! (Uh-oh)
Just want you in my Caddy (Uh-oh)
Hey ya! (Uh-oh)
Don’t want to meet your mama (Uh-oh)
Hey ya! (Uh-oh)
Just want to make you cum-a’ (Uh-oh)
Hey ya! (Uh-oh)
I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m just being honest (Uh-oh)
Hey ya!
I’m just being honest
So far as I can tell, none of these “musicians” plays any instruments or knows anything remotely technical about how music is made. They just say vulgar things that sometimes rhyme (but often really don’t, as they seem not to understand rhyme very well either). Indeed, if there is anything these idiots understand well beyond how to make the kind of gutter-level “music” that equally illiterate and depraved-minded fans want to hear flooding through their ear buds as they sit sullenly in public places and look menacingly at the world, it is not evident what it might be. The most musically half-witted members of the punk generation, who endlessly played the same two chords in every song, are like Beethoven in comparison to these “artists.”
Caramanica and his buddies don’t like Billy Joel, they tell us, and this garbage is better in their view. What can you even say about an aesthetic like this? The most vulgar street horseshit. That’s what they consider great songwriting.
Of course this Caramanica idiot hates “heroic white men” doing things competently. Look at his puffy, soft little self. He’s been upstaged by heroic, competent white boys and men his whole life.
Now, he’s been given a platform, and he’ll use it to attack those he knows are his betters in every way. No more competency! How boring! We need new kinds of songwriting that don’t require any knowledge of song or instruments or any of the rest of it. And what does that mean? Well, mostly hip hop, of course! And what better way as an incompetent and grievance-stricken white man to stick it to the competent white men than to embrace the left’s favorite form of multiculti popular culture?
Barf. And not just the Caramanica dude. All the others on the panel too. As Beato points out, nobody with any expert knowledge of music anywhere near this group. The three emasculated men are particularly odious, though. A culture that will see men like this as worth listening to on any topic is a culture fit for the wastebasket. “This fuckin’ guy,” exactly.
It is itself a stunning fact about our culture’s failure that we are even led to talk about the opinions of these people, which should legitimately only be shared among themselves as they sit in a squalid bar somewhere, because the corrupt institutions that purport to be our cultural beacons give them an audience.
I listened to just enough of the whole discussion among these morons to find them admitting they were explicitly endeavoring to keep white male musicians off the list in favor of minorities. They don’t even mask it. It’s a DEI-driven “greatest songwriters” list.
To hell in a handbasket with these people.
Here’s the whole thing with these four losers.
More Beato, with memories from my time listening to southern California radio in the ‘90s. Some wonderful songs on this list (but you could have left Vanilla Ice off, Rick).
My Amazon bio:
Alexander Tristan Riley
I have done some writing. I am doing more at present. Unless I am dead, in which case I have stopped writing.
Zero high school band directors were doing this when I was a kid. I doubt any of them even knew what a Van Halen was.
It was a better culture when we were ashamed of being on welfare.
I tell my students this every chance I get, and I have great confidence that they have never before met a professor who knows what food stamps looked and felt like.
I remember going to the store with those things, hating my mother for sending me and hating the world for putting me in the situation in which this could happen. I swore to myself as I looked murderously at the grocery store clerk that I would never be in that kind of situation as an adult.
It was a powerful lesson. I am at once grateful that I had the opportunity to learn this so viscerally and furiously determined that my own kids will never have to go through it.
How many of those who go into academia are deeply broken?
It’s a high number. I teach an article in my death course by a female philosopher who actually argues that pregnancy should be reformulated as a disease so that we can “treat” it properly. This is someone who got a PhD and tenure in a university somewhere. Maybe I’ll favor her and her kind with an article at some point.
It’s true. Don’t listen to “Iron Man” in the daytime, or you will get yourself into serious trouble.
Just a reminder: My new book is out and it is available here. Just $9.99 for the Kindle, if you’re a Kindle kinda person (and even if you’re not but you’re on the fence, you can download a free sample for a look before taking the plunge). Please consider picking up a copy or two (surely there are birthdays coming up which require gifts…).
And I would be greatly appreciative if you’d also consider becoming a paid subscriber here. Every little bit helps me to carve out more time for writing.
cheers,
ATR