Dear Montaigne

Dear Montaigne,

It's your fault. You wrote those first essais, and made them really cool, and somehow some professor got the brilliant idea to make the students write essays too. Doubtless it was meant to inculcate them in a brilliant mixture of classical culture, French style, and skeptical philosophy. And here I am, grading endless essays on a topic I bloody assigned, but still bores me to tears on the Nth repetition. Yes, I assigned them. Yes, I think they're a good idea, but that's because of your persuasive skills, you self-absorbed bastard. Think you're so interesting? Huh? Huh? I bet you couldn't get tenure. You don't have the social moxie. You never got peer-reviewed, boyo. You're dull. Dull, dull, dull. Almost as dull as those essays I assigned.

Love and kisses,
Withywindle

Dear Students

Dear Students,

I am sorry the grading of your essays is not everything it could be. I am weak.

Dear Twentieth Student, I graded your essay after two in the morning; perhaps my comments were less forthcoming than they should have been. I did not correct every one of your grammatical errors, or spend enough time explaining the difference between a collection of sentences and an analytical essay composed of coherent paragraphs. Now, it is also possible that you did not put enough time into writing the essay--and perhaps you also wrote it after two in the morning--but I know that is no excuse. Deepest apologies.

Dear Smart Students, you get very few comments on your papers other than "Rather good." This is a compliment, but I know it is a frustrating one. You want specific compliments, and help on how to make your papers even better. I should do better--but I have been spending all my time providing comments for students who make more errors, and you are punished for your virtue. It is so satisfying to leave whole paragraphs unmarked! Deepest apologies.

Dear Students to Whom I Make Snarky Comments, sometimes I need the mental relief. When someone tells me there are "nationalistic allusions" in the text, sometimes I just have to ask "By jingo, are there?" You don't know how many snarks I have left unwritten. But I suppose that is no excuse either. Deepest apologies.

Dear Smart Students, I give out very few As -- A minuses, but few As. I am searching for the platonic ideal of the five-page essay, and few of you achieve it. I know this is an unfair standard, and I will make it up to you as I curve the final grade, but I know how disappointed you are when your quite nice essay gets an A minus. Deepest apologies.

Dear Students, I am not always consistent about whether to give a C or a C plus, a B or a B plus. Grading's an art, and sometimes you make errors. I like to think they even out--but obviously it must drive you insane when my grading wobbles around, with Lord knows what effect on your future. If it's any comfort, my finals have no essays, and your grades are very precise and scientific there. Of course, your grades are also lower--my inconsistency grading essays is more generous than the cold equations of short answer. Still, inconsistency aggravates. Deepest apologies.

Dear Students, some of my essay questions are appallingly dumb. I know. Deeperest apologies.

Dear Grammar-Challenged Students, I do not give such close comments on mistakes in language when they occur on every line. It would take hours to grade your papers if I did that, there are a lot of you, and there aren't enough hours in the day. If I were properly saintly, I would, but I am not Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, or Richard Dreyfuss in Whatzitcalled. I'm not like the teacher in History Boys either, or Dolores Umbridge in the Harry Potter books, so things could be worse for you. Still, deepest apologies.

Dear Students Whose Essays I Wrote Were Bad, they were. Nevertheless, no-one wants to read that. I should figure out how to say something nice or constructive in each essay--but I haven't. Deepest apologies.

Yours,
Withywindle

[Format of this post stolen from the open letters on Nobody Sasses a Girl in Glasses.]

Sacrebleu!

I've been intrigued by story of the alleged billet-doux that French President Nicholas Sarkozy was carrying as he left a cabinet meeting a couple of weeks ago. ("Intrigued," by the way, is le mot juste, stolen from the headline of this précis in The Daily Telegraph.) Mostly I've been interested because this is a news story that really drives home the importance of grammar and spelling: how much can we read into the absence of an e on the word vu in the phrase ne pas t'avoir vu? Does it conclusively prove that the letter in question was written to a man and not, as a friend of Sarkozy and his wife has claimed, to Mrs. Sarkozy? Given that I spend a fair amount of time trying to convince undergraduates that Greek and Latin words that begin with the same letter don't necessarily mean the same thing, it's nice to see Paris in the grip of a cause célèbre that hinges on a missing silent letter in a participle that apparently isn't comme il faut.

Actually, cause célèbre is too strong. The game of cherchez la femme going on in Paris is really no more than a titillating divertissement. If Sarkozy is having an affair, he would only be doing something that has long been de rigeur among France's haut monde. The last two presidents have acted quite sans souci about their extracurricular amours, and no one dreams that the discovery that Sarkozy has been fooling around would render him hors-concours in French politics. The French are all much too blasés to be shocked by quelque chose comme ça. I doubt even an American presidency could be shaken by such revelations nowadays.

Provincial American boy that I am, though, I was a little shocked by some background information that I read in several of the articles that dealt with the mystery letter. Apparently, as recently as 2005, Sarkozy’s very attractive wife Cécilia had a long, very public affair with this fellow, Richard Attias, only to return to her husband the year before his campaign for the French presidency. I gather this was already known to everybody who paid much attention to the news from the French elections, but it was, as I said, new to me.

And shocking. Shocking because, while I can imagine Americans being willing to elect a president who had cheated on his wife, I find it hard to wrap my head around the possibility of Americans supporting a president who had allowed his wife to cheat on him. The nation ultimately stood behind Bill Clinton, once his dissembling had given them enough time to digest the idea of fun and games with Monica in the Oval Office. Likewise, not even most social conservatives – with the notable exception of Withywindle -- seem deeply bothered by Giuliani’s rather cavalier, not to say caddish, attitude toward the sacred institution of matrimony. But if we found out that a president, or a presidential candidate, had quietly taken back a wife who had run off with another man, what would we think? Admittedly, it would be the decent, Christian thing for an injured husband to do with a repentant wife. But as for the American electorate – wouldn’t they conclude that such a man was, well, a wimp? I think for a candidate, certainly, it would be – here I go again – the coup de grâce.

And the fact that the French are apparently willing to overlook not only men who cheat on their wives but also men who get cheated on makes me wonder if they aren’t, in some sense, actually a little more sophisticated than us in this one respect. Perhaps they really don’t just believe that adultery is fine and dandy. Maybe they really do think that one’s love life has no direct bearing on fitness for office. (Or maybe, in the case of French men, they just found it hard to blame Sarkozy for letting a woman like Cécilia get away with a few things.)

Of course, Hillary Clinton seems poised to secure the nomination of the Democratic party sometime very early next year, and no one is suggesting that she should suffer for having overlooked Bill’s indiscretions (which were surely not limited to a single eager intern). But there’s still a strong double standard in these matters: a woman who forgives a man is much less likely to be looked down upon, and in any event Hillary had to at least pretend to be angry about Monica, swatting away his outstretched hand for the cameras on the White House lawn. Besides, Bill didn’t run off with Monica for a year and get shown with her on a magazine cover (even if there was that embarrassing video with the hug and the black beret). And then there was partisanship, which clouded the whole issue at the time. Many people were willing to forgive Hillary her tolerance for Bill’s behavior because they hated the Clintons’ enemies. And, finally, some women were so enamored with Bill that they could sympathize with Hillary’s forgiveness in exactly the way I suggested some Frenchmen might have sympathized with Sarkozy’s.

And yet, in the case of Hillary, I wonder whether we’ve heard the last of Bill’s sex life. In a few months, she’s going to be not just a candidate, but the candidate of the Democratic party. There’s a good chance she’ll become president. And, somewhere along the way, I have the feeling that Bill is going to do something to really, really embarrass her – that the old dog will get up to his old tricks (if he hasn’t already). But even if this doesn’t happen, I think that in a Hillary Clinton administration we’ll still be hearing about Bill’s antics. The late-night comics and other wags won’t be able to refrain from recycling all the old jokes, and many of us won’t be able to refrain from laughing at them. I guess we’ll have to get used to the return of an older world, a world in which powerful figures are frequently seen to be somewhat less powerful in relation to vis-à-vis their better halves.

The Better Side of Academia

At an event today, with a main speaker inspired by Marxism, but not in a dogmatic way--preferring the more sophisticated passages of Marx, using him as a way to get to complex meditations on history that need not jar anyone of a different political persuasion, generally at play in the fields of humanist reflection. What the academic life should be. It does exist out there.

Teaching and its Discontents

The new semester no longer so new, and I've been doing (or trying to do) some serious reflecting on the nature of teaching. Specifically, I'm trying to answer a personal question: is it worth it to me to try to keep doing this? When teaching is rewarding, it's tremendously so -- a true joy. But more often it's not; more often the experience is one of frustration and a constant fight against despair.

Why? I think I've boiled it down to a basic problem (which others have experienced before me). Being a really good teacher, I think, has to involve being unusually attentive to one's students -- to their personal needs, to their maturity and emotional states, to the atmosphere in the classroom as a whole. And this is not only surprisingly taxing (many teachers seem to find an hour of classroom time more exhausting than an hour of physical labor); it also creates a dangerous asymmetry in the impacts that good and bad students have on the progress of a class.

Conscientious, committed students are like Tolstoy's happy families: they're all similar to one another in most respects -- at least from a teacher's point of view. They conduct themselves politely; they listen to the instructor and to one another. If they ask questions, the questions are pertinent or at least useful. They do the homework, or try to. They want the enterprise for which the class has assembled to succeed. In every classroom I've ever been in, these people are a clear majority.

Arrayed against them, though, are always a small number of students (often a mere handful) who seem determined to subvert the progress of the class. These people are all distinct, and they have distinct ways of interfering with teaching and learning. Some engage in behavior which is disruptive to everyone's concentration -- constant lateness, theatrical sighs, loud whispering and inappropriate giggles. Some ask pointless questions or attempt to bullshit their way through discussions even when they obviously haven't been paying attention or obviously haven't read the material. Some are determined to prove that they're smarter than everyone else. Some always want special treatment of the sort that, if extended to more than a very few students, would make the class impossible to conduct in any productive way. I could go on and on. But I've already said more about the small minority of the bad students than I have about the majority of good ones.

And actually I even have a little more to say about the bad students -- specifically, about those who are bad students without being, to that extent, bad people. Some students would like to be good students, but despite their pure intentions and sometimes valiant efforts, they're just not. Maybe they're just in over their head, and can't handle the material in a particular class. Maybe they have learning disabilities or health problems. Maybe they're grappling with serious emotional issues or personal crises. It seems harsh to lump such people in with those I mentioned in the previous paragraph, but their effect on the class is often the same -- frustrating, disconcerting, dispiriting, demoralizing.

The frustration and demoralization induced by bad students affects everyone in the class, but their most direct effects are often upon the instructor. Almost inevitably, it's the bad students -- the sighers and liars, the straggling and struggling -- that the teacher gets to know first and in the sharpest detail. This is true for written work as well as for class participation: a terrible paper or exam is much less common than a solid piece of A or B quality work, but it takes much, much, much longer to grade. The natural reaction of the conscientious teacher is to try to understand why a piece of work is wretched, to look for hidden virtues, and to explain to the student exactly why something is wrong and how it might be made right. The mental effort involved in this process can often be wearying. And, unfortunately, such efforts usually seem to have -- from the instructor's point of view -- a minimal effect on subsequent performance for the really bad students.

I actually haven't been teaching all that long (at least not full time) but I think it's probably clear to the reader that I already have a sense of why there's such a thing as "teacher burnout." The bad students tend to loom so large in one's consciousness, and demand so much of one's time, energy, and intelligence, that one can easily experience very high levels of stress and frustration. Of course, these sensations are part of any job and part of life itself. But in most jobs, power and responsibility go hand in hand to an extent that is not true in teaching. A teacher (particularly one without tenure) has tremendous responsibility, but relatively little corresponding power. A disruptive student cannot be "fired" or denied anything besides a good grade. And giving a bad grade is something that happens only at the end of the semester. Many deliberately disruptive students seem to believe that it's not something that could actually happen to them. And many "inadvertently disruptive" students are so worried about the prospect of a bad grade that they become even more disruptive.

So what to do? One solution is to harden oneself against the influence of difficult students, to decide (quite rationally and appropriately) that one has to concentrate on the good students, even if this means being rather harsh to the others. This doesn't come very naturally to me, but it seems to be where I'm headed -- I suddenly find myself sympathizing with all those famously crusty teachers in movies and real life who didn't hesitate to embarrass someone in class or mark most of a paper wrong without further explanation. Most likely, that crustiness came from years of frustration. The downside of this approach is fairly obvious: emotional detachment may create an unpleasant atmosphere in the classroom and discourage borderline students who might otherwise be persuaded to learn and capable of doing so. But perhaps it's certain people's only alternative to burnout.

Ideally, there should be a happy medium between relentless emotional strain and deliberate disengagement. One should be able to engage emotionally while knowing how much of the self has to be held in reserve. Maybe this wisdom comes with time. All I can say for now is that the line seems finer than I had imagined.

Meanwhile....

...at Overcoming Bias, Eliezer Yudowski celebrates Petrov Day. One of my established principles (reflected, for example, in this post) is that almost no one is indepensible. But one shudders to think what would have happened -- had anyone else been in Colonel Petrov's place.

Blogging elsewhere

I've been a busy bee at the comments over at Tim Burke's Easily Distracted. Most lately, an extended critique of an article of his on academic freedom. The blogroll will get you there. Nothing else interesting to say right now.

"The United States Will Not Accept This"

A line Pres. Bush uses from time to time, and one I think is misunderstood by both left and right. While "will not accept" leaves the door open to, say, military intervention, the more correct interpretation would seem to be "will not accept as legitimate." The correct parallel, therefore, is the United States refusal to accept the legitimacy of the Soviet annexation of the Baltics--it did not mean that we acted to prevent it, it was of minimal real-world effect for decades, but it did contribute to the eventual reestablishment of Baltic independence. So when Pres. Bush says a North Korean or an Iranian nuclear program, nuclear weapon possession, etc., will not be accepted, he keeps air strikes on the table, but basically he is saying that the United States will not accept the legitimacy of such programs, nothing more or less. This is of nontrivial importance--aside from the Baltic example, note that the importance of the current US-Indian deal is precisely because we are legitimating Indian nuclear weapons. (A variety of real-world deals between the US and India follow from this recognition; legitimation has short-term practical effects as well.) Liberals and conservatives both seem to think he is threatening direct action--the former oppose him for making threats, the latter are disappointed when he fails to carry through, both see some hypocritical disconnect between words and reality. If they understood what the words really meant, they would understand that his policy is more cautious than generally realized, that his words and actions are in close alignment, and that the success of such a policy (on the Baltic model) will be measured in decades, not years.

Japanese Music, Ken Burns

The Ken Burns World War II documentary includes a bit on the internment of the Japanese Americans. The background music is some Japanese instrument--can't identify it by name, but the sound is distinctive. This is an interesting choice--the subject is a moment where the identity of Japanese Americans as primarily Japanese or American, and the musical background chosen is Japanese. This creates for me some cognitive dissonance between the presumed message--"why, of course they were American!"--and the message of the medium--why, they are Japanese. But then ... oh, we can all be American, no matter what our cultural background, yadda, yadda. But that is more an attitude of 2007 than of 1942, where most Japanese-Americans, I rather think, would have preferred to have American music in the background, to support the contention of their Americanness. So this is a moment fit for an audience in 2007, but one a little untrue to the spirit of the war.

When I Become President, There Will be a Vat Tax

Not a VAT tax, a vat tax. Vats of beer will be taxed. Also vats of chemicals. Vats in which mad scientists attempt to create dinosaurs, chimeras, and cyborgs will be taxed at an especially high rate. This will be done solely so as to confuse pundits specializing in tax policy.

Who to Support for President?

It is a conundrum. First I ruled out Giuliani, for multiple divorces, and attempting to get himself a third term as mayor of New York without benefit of election. So I was a McCain man—strong on Iraq, strong on fighting terror, despite his other flaws. Then I ruled out McCain, because he was a die-hard for amnestying illegal immigrants. Which left Romney, a man of elastic principle, and Thompson, an excessively laid-back candidate of minimal experience. Which left me—back with Giuliani? For his experience as mayor, and tough-as-nails personality? But then he makes statements revealing him almost as squishy on illegal immigrants as McCain. And it becomes unpleasantly clear that McCain and Giuliani, whom I consider most reliable on persevering on Iraq and the Terror War, are also the ones most unreliable on illegal immigration, which I take to be second only to the fighting war as a danger to the Republic. And then there’s electability—which of these flawed warriors has the most of that? Oy and argh – is a puzzlement. I suppose right now I find myself favoring Giuliani by a feather, but that could change tomorrow. After all, I ruled him out once before, and with good reason. With any luck, my choices will be winnowed by the time primary day rolls around.

International Academia

I just heard an anthropologist who said there’s interesting work coming out of the Netherlands and Scandinavia—who knew? So now I wonder—what actually is the reputation and influence of different foreign countries in the different disciplines of the humanities and social sciences? It’s difficult enough getting a sense of that in one’s own discipline, but what about others? I get the feeling that in all of them, America is one of the largest players, if not the largest player—I think France has declined in overall influence, with the aging and death of Braudel, Derrida, and Foucault. I would hazily guess that after America, Britain and France are always solid hitters—France perhaps having the most academic superstars in the world, or having had them until recently—Germany and Italy coming up behind them—and after that, no clue. I don’t get a sense much has come out of Russia lately, I’m not sure much ever came out of Japan and China, and the smaller countries of the OECD seem, well, small. India has world-class economists—but they do their work abroad, no? This isn’t an entirely idle question—I wish I had a better map of the international distribution of academic prestige and influence for all the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences.

Models for Conservative Scholars

There aren’t many recently. Or perhaps I should say, models who are conservative, striking thinkers, and members of academe. There are, I think, a fair number of conservatives who are good teachers, good professors, without being too widely influential in their writings—I’m told Jeffrey Hart at Dartmouth is one. (Yes, I know he writes, but I’ve read accounts that make it sound as if his example as a teacher was more influential.) There are notable conservative thinkers who provide a model from outside of academe—Whittaker Chambers, Russell Kirk. But the combination? Harvey Mansfield at Harvard. Allan Bloom and Leo Strauss, if they can properly be called conservative. Victor Davis Hanson does have rightful influence in military history, but his Johnny-One-Note political writings diminish his appeal. (I’m not sure he’d call himself a conservative either.) Doubtless I am suffering from ignorance and amnesia, but I run out of names pretty rapidly after that. (There must be some conservative Catholic scholars I’m blanking on.) And only Strauss, who I think would object most to being labeled conservative, has something like world-wide influence.

Not having read him yet, I begin to think Carl Schmitt may be one. A writer of talent, a thinker of note, a member of academia, a Foucault or a Derrida of the right—but, of course, tainted by his unrepentant Nazism and anti-Semitism. One would prefer someone less noxious—Michael Oakeshott? Only read one essay by him. He does sound an attractive figure, but I confess the fact that Andrew Sullivan is fond of him makes me pre-emptively cool to him. Doubtless unfair on my part—still, I could wish Oakeshott had inspired a writer of higher caliber. Anyone else out there?

One can, of course, appropriate the Sensible Liberal Tradition—Lionel Trilling—and the Oddball Leftist tradition—Christopher Lasch—but somehow that seems like cheating. I’d like to locate myself in a tradition of self-conscious, self-aware, explicitly conservative academia, to build on that, and not flail around trying to invent a tradition on my own. I’m sure it’s out there, somewhere, but it’s somewhat elusive.

Anti-Social Behavior

CNN just asked if eating junk food leads to anti-social behavior. I don't know, but they'll only take my Doritos from my cold, dead fingers.

Yeats, Achebe

Over at Easily Distracted some discussion in the comments section on which is more read/assigned nowadays on college campuses, William Butler Yeats' "The Second Coming" or Chinua Achebe's novel "Things Fall Apart"--title taken from Yeats' poem, and which should be more assigned. There's some apples and oranges here--one's a poem of dense imagery, the other a clearly written, realist novel, short enough and with enough historical description to make a good book to assign. Insert usual arguments about canons, multi-culti, PC, etc. But then--which should take precedence?

One question is of influence on the later tradition. Here I am uncertain about Yeats. He helps found an Irish national poetic tradition--but what of his influence on the English-language poetic tradition writ large? As I recollect, his shift from lush romanticism to bleak modernity to wild incantation is not only indicative of his age, but helps shape what his successors do--but he's not the most influential poet of his time. That's usually taken to be T. S. Eliot, and I don't believe that this critical estimation has changed. Even if one says that Yeats inspired Eliot, that doesn't change Eliot's centrality. This estimation may change with the passage of time--but Yeats' influence so far is still a little short of Eliot's summit. And Achebe? O, Lord, I am ignorant. I surely can't speak to his influence on the Nigerian novel tradition, which I imagine must be comparable to Yeats' influence on the Irish poetic tradition. I have no sense at all that he has had any influence on the form of the novel. As to whether he has a larger influence on an "African" tradition or an "African Diaspora" tradition--I fancy that to the extent such traditions exist, he must, but this is still an influence not formal, but political (broadly speaking) in nature. For both Yeats and Achebe, of course, both are far too recent for any estimation of effect on tradition to be more than a first-draft estimate--we won't really have a good sense for at least a few centuries. The traditional argument weighs on the side of Yeats, I should say, on the grounds that his experiments in poetic form had some influence--but it's not an argument overwhelmingly on Yeats' side.

What then of intrinsic excellence?--which is not the same thing as influence, and (pacethe traditionary arguments I've used in the past) ought to be of great weight in such judgments. I should say first where my judgment comes from. I've read all of Yeats' poetry, a few of his plays, I think few or none of his essays. I believe I've only read Achebe's Thing's Fall Apart and No Longer At Ease. I've read far more of Yeats--not unrelated to the fact that, after rather liking Things Fall Apart, I read No Longer At Ease, and liked it little enough that I didn't read any more Achebe. (Although, looking at the plot summary on Wikipedia just now to confirm I actually had read it, I discover that what I thought was the plot of Things Fall Apart was actually the plot of No Longer At Ease, so it seems it was the more memorable of the two novels, if not the better written of them!) What can I say? Yeats was so frequently compelling that I read his entire poetic corpus with great attention; Achebe pleasant enough, but nowhere near so compelling. (Perhaps the most compelling novel I ever read was Henry James' What Maisie Knew. If we are speaking of novels within the African Diaspora, Toni Morrison's Beloved struck me as a finer and more compelling work than Achebe's.) The tradition of critical judgment (as distinct from influence on the creative tradition) I think generally makes a similar distinction between Yeats and Achebe--the one excellent, the other good.

So, I do think Yeats should have higher priority than Achebe in the canon--and if Achebe is more taught nowadays, as has been claimed, I do think this is evidence of some PC distortion in the curriculum, even granted the greater accessibility of the novel genre. But I don't say that meaning to moon over Yeats or to bad-mouth Achebe, and I don't think of it as more than a tentative judgment, these being early days yet. I'd be perfectly happy to have both be taught--and if political subject matter is the prism, their varying reactions to the British empire, Irish and Nigerian, would make it interesting to teach both of them together. If one were to remove Achebe from a syllabus, it would not be because he is bad, but because there are even better modern novels out there--Beloved not least among them.

Henri Pirenne and the Death of Belgium

Jeff Sypeck at Quid Plura has a nice elegaic post on Henri Pirenne and the possible death-throws of Belgium.

Evolution, Mutability

A while ago, someone asked me on Tim Burke's blog about ties between Aristotelian thought and Darwinian thought. Mulling ensued. Something which occurs to me: that Darwinian thought, although sometimes taken as evolutionary, progressive, etc., also contains elements of radical mutability--that whole species, as much as states or nations, have their beginning and their end in secular time, that evolutionary progress is of no comfort to the out-evolved, that our mere survival is an act of virtu that must come to an end. There is, then, a streak of rhetorical thought at the heart of nineteenth-century science--a streak of fear and darkness. Social darwinism, then, and Nazism, are dark virtus of biology--Borgian manoeuvers to establish racial survival in blood. The Habermasian accusation that rhetoric is linked to fascism, then, has some truth. As always, I think rhetoric has greater virtues than vices--but this connection needs more study.

UPDATE: This is probably a totally unoriginal thought. But I like to think it's on the way to something original.

Across the Universe

My wife and I just saw Julie Taymor's Across the Universe. Underwhelming. She has ambition--but she fails to fulfil it. So: a series of tableaux of scenes from the Sixties Narrative--sweet liberalism curdling into violent leftism--Vietnam, drugs, rock n' roll, art--Beatles songs, a vague personal narrative stitched together. I had expected the point of view to be Hollywood lefty, but I was surprised that it had no original ideas at all. In fact, Hair had about everything political this has--this adds virtually nothing. (The Weathermen manque, but that isn't much.) I was more disappointed by the lack of aesthetic ideas. Taymor has tableaux, striking images, fancy choreography, some film shots that struck my wife (a professional) as inspired. Yet they were generally second-rate. Bleeding strawberries look like blood, geddit? Induction-center soldiers wear crude masks--the military is dehumanizing, geddit? Psychedelic colors simulate the effects of acid--lordy, there's a new thought! Crowds break into dance moves in the street--again and again. Taymor uses the Bread and Puppets puppets again--look, puppets! I wondered for a while if she was being deliberately unoriginal, trying to show her virtuosity in her reuse of familiar imagery. At the end, I'm unconvinced--she jsut seemed unimaginative. Part of the trouble, I think, is that Taymor is more theatrical than cinematic--she doesn't quite realize how the film medium distances and lessens some of her effects. But leave that to the side, and she's still unimaginative. Meanwhile, the Beatles songs--as my wife says, it makes it like a cinematic Mamma Mia, a jukebox musical connecting songs around a tissue of plot. It's so much the songs, and so little original plot or dialogue, that the effect is to flatten the characters into one-dimensionality, to make it almost impossible to care about them. The actors do their best, but they have little to work with. And, musically, the covers just don't compare to the originals. I wanted to like this movie. I was willing to put the politics to one side, and enjoy it as a purely aesthetic experience. And in the end, for the sake of its ambition, I'm glad I saw it--but I can't recommend it.

By way of comparison, I believe Moulin Rouge--another movie combining recycled pop songs and fantastic visual imagery--has similar ambitions, but is a much, much better movie, in fact a wonderful movie. The fact that both movies used "All You Need Is Love," underscored their similarity--and their difference, for Moulin Rouge used that song to far better effect.

What's John Galt's Problem?

Not long ago on this blog, Withywindle published the lyrics of a song against whiners. Whining is indeed an annoying behavior. And how much more annoying is whining when the whining comes not from bearers of "hard luck stories" but from those who have achieved conspicuous success?

Today, the New York Times has a story on the fiftieth anniversary of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, a long epic about a "revolution" in which the successful of the world (the smart and creative masters of capital) achieve what might be called a "secession of the patricians" and thereby force the "moochers" and "looters" (the proponents of statism and redistributionism) to acknowledge that they have no rights in the achievements of their betters and, instead, ought to humbly profess their gratitude. Famously, the book was a failure with the critics but a runaway success with readers. It has not gone out of print in fifty years. A film adaptation, with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, is said to be forthcoming.

There have been many criticisms of Rand's book over the years (one of the most famous and entertaining of the hostile reviews came from Whittaker Chambers in National Review), but my own biggest problem with Rand's philosophy is that it has always seemed to me to represent the whinging of the overdogs -- the petulant demand that success, for the successful, ought to be even sweeter and more trouble-free than it already is. In Atlas Shrugged, the argument runs that society has no right to demand anything from talent and achievement: progressive taxation and popular criticism are apparently all too much to ask life's winners to bear. For Rand, it is not enough to say that life is a Darwinist struggle in which the weak perish; the weak ought also to acknowledge that this is only their proper fate. And this seems, to me, a little too much to ask.

No doubt Rand has a point that social and political obstacles to beneficial innovation do exist, and that, all else being equal, these ought to be eliminated. No doubt some great talents are deterred by these obstacles, and the world is thereby deprived of their genius. But it's also true that the brilliant and strong depend on the "dull" and "weak" as much as the "dull" and "weak" depend on the brilliant and strong. The world has not yet been able to dispense with the need for cheap labor. Perhaps it will do so in some future age of automation, but it is difficult to envision a society in which some men and women do not follow orders for the sake of earning their bread. Or rather, one can envision an anarchic society of small independent households -- but it would be no true civilization at all. Aristotle, in Book I of his Politics argues that masters and slaves constitute two distinct species of humanity, a position Rand's books seem to endorse. But Aristotle at least recognizes that "masters" and "slaves" are mutually dependent. He does not imagine that the masters could do just as well on their own, off in some ancient Greek version of Galt's Gulch.

And, of course, humanity does not divide neatly into the productive and unproductive, into masters and slaves. There are merely different degrees of talent. If a leader or innovator or entrepreneur should decide to secede from society, then there will certainly be someone else to replace him. Perhaps that person will be a little less talented or motivated, but then again, maybe not. If we think realistically, we must acknowledge that most success -- even success as an innovator or entrepreneur -- involves an element of luck, and a successful person has often edged out someone slightly more talented but slightly less lucky. If Dagny Taggart had not obtained her job as a railroad executive, would the person who got it instead have been markedly less competent? There have been great minds over the centuries, but few people are clearly indispensible to the progress of mankind. Remove from the world ten thousand or a hundred thousand great minds and spirits. There will be a small bump, and the world will go on much as before.

This being so, successful people in all reason ought to feel grateful for their success, and grateful (as the cliche has it) to all the little people who have made that success possible. Instead, however, the successful often feel entitled. This is true often enough that one suspects that the belief that might belong to an entitled minority was somehow a critical element in their success: it may have motivated them -- just as Weber speculated that Protestantism's belief in an elect motivated economic success among its converts. So it is not surprising to read the testimonials to Rand by accomplished people in the New York Times article.

These people, however -- with the exception of a youthful Alan Greenspan -- do not come off as obnoxious: they have absorbed the useful lessons of Randism, that one is responsible for one's own happiness and that success in life demands guts and effort. If only Rand had seen fit to stop there. But she didn't: she went on to claim, again and again in a succession of books, that the world was just too darn hard on achievers. Look how they treated poor Mr. Roark, who had every right to blow up that housing project: why, it wouldn't have existed but for him, and without him all that rabble of joiners and masons and plumbers and electricians and so forth would have counted for nothing!

No: poor Mr. Roark contributed only a small part of a larger effort. It was a very important part, requiring great ability, but Mr. Roark was well compensated in money and status and it is too much to demand that the world ought to coddle Mr. Roark, or John Galt, or any of Rand's other Uebermenschen. If they are truly great, then they will be able to endure the trials of greatness without whining. And if not, someone else will be happy to step in, without whining, and take their place.

Job Applications

Choosing classes back in college always created a world of tantalizing possibility. I strummed through the catalog, looked at what was fascinating, tried out the combinations--tried out alternate versions of myself, what I might become. (And to make sure I could sleep late in the meanwhile.) I miss that sense of possibility--but I actually get a version of that again as I prepare my job applications. Will I specialize in early modern Europe or early modern Britain? Will I teach medieval courses on the side, British Atlantic courses, or modern European ones? Will I be a liberal arts teacher or a research university scholar? Will I be a Midwesterner, Southerner, or Northeasterner? Now, the sober answer is that I may be unchosen and unemployed--but that's a thought for a later moment! Right now, I am awash in possibility.

The President's Speech

As always, he knows what rhetoric is--that words should be shaped with an eye to all audiences. As always, he is a flat orator. I think his speechwriters make his words plain because they know he cannot convey eloquence. I think the Democratic response was off-key--ungracious, unwelcoming. My wife, no conservative, didn't entirely care for it either. I don't know if the president's speech made a difference one way or the other.

Science's Stepchildren

So another group of pseudo-scientists has produced research purporting to show that liberals and conservatives think in fundamentally different ways. Or, to put it more accurately, liberals and conservatives respond in fundamentally different ways to seeing a W rather than an M flashed on a computer screen. And now, of course, everyone is talking about it. And once again, I'm wondering whether I could somehow survive alone in the wilderness for the rest of my life, away from the stupid, stupid things of men.

What really bothers me about these studies (and I use the term loosely) is the fact that otherwise intelligent people feel they need to take them seriously. Here's Jonah Goldberg wasting a G-file (not for the first time) in trying to interpret the results of the latest perversion of science in a way that looks better for conservatives. But why, dear God? Why bother? On its face, this study is ideologically driven nonsense. The L.A. Times story that got all the attention says nothing about sample sizes (a minuscule 43 students, it turns out), very little about methodology, and hardly anything about the "scientists" themselves. If we were all calm, intelligent people who lived in a society of calm, intelligent people, our only response to such "news" as this study would be to ask why it's in the newspaper at all.

But we take this sort of thing seriously. We take it seriously in part because it carries the imprimatur of science, and because we suspect everyone else is going to do the same. Nowadays, saying "scientists have found such and such" is like saying "the Bible says such and such" used to be -- an automatic claim to cogency. And this borders on crazy.

Look, at this moment there are tens of thousands of studies in the soft sciences going on in the United States alone. (By soft sciences, I mean disciplines that can claim the mantle of science but whose methodology makes it difficult to get hard-and-fast results unclouded by a haze of statistics. This includes not only sociology and psychology but medicine as well.) Many of these studies are driven by the ambition and biases of the researchers. Many have the direct financial backing of rich and powerful groups who take a strong interest in the results of the research. Even if one dismisses these factors, consider this: do enough research and you'll get apparently "statistically significant" results just by chance. Do tens of thousands of studies, and you'll get hundreds in which you erroneously find statistical significance. (You'll also get many more in which a real difference isn't caught by the study, but these results will go into a wastebasket. The false positives will go into a journal.) Besides, "statistically significant" is a far more elastic concept than most people realize -- and results reported as scientific findings are often make no claim to statistical significance at all.

Peer review, you say? Largely meaningless. Peer review is like "statistical significance;" it's just another type of filter that in some substantial number of cases will fail. And, as all academics know, the quality of the filter changes dramatically depending on where the research was published. If the research was delivered at a conference, then odds are that there was no meaningful "peer review" at all. My general point is this: in a research-intensive society like ours, quite a lot of crappy science will end up getting a hearing.

And when it does, there will be a breathless reporter with a notebook -- a notebook computer, I mean -- waiting nearby. Bad results make it into print either because of reporters' own biases or because of what sells newspapers. Obviously, given that most journalists lean leftward, a story about how liberals are more mentally agile than conservatives scores highly on both counts, and the question of the basic credibility of the research will probably not get asked. Other subjects on which journalists credulously or cynically report nonsense on a regular basis include anything having to do with sex, anything that makes people worry about their health, anything that makes people worry about the environment, and anything relating to children or pets. Stories that make people worry about how the environment is affecting their children's health are very popular indeed. This is, of course, only a partial list.

So, when the news media bombards us with a headline like "Brains of Liberals, Conservatives Work Differently, Say Scientists," I wish we could all just respond by rolling our eyes, because the research in question is almost certainly bunk. I wish we could learn to say, in the words of Eliezer Yudowski at Overcoming Bias, "I defy the data!" Sometimes, this is far and away the most rational response. But no -- we feel obliged to reckon with nonsense, to assimilate it into our worldviews.

And in arguing, do we really do any good? Recent research (by scientists!) suggests that trying to refute bad information will often merely reinforce it. What we should be trying to refute is a process -- the whole way in which our popular culture processes the putative products of science.

Russia, Japan

Both countries lost a prime minister today. Shinzo Abe was supposed to make Japan more self-confidently nationalist; it'll be interesting to see what happens to that trend line now. And in Russia - quite nationalist, if perhaps too brittle to be called self-confident - Putin's dismissal of his government and prime minister (much like what Yeltsin did when he selected Putin, as I recollect matters) highlights the - is arbitrary the right word? - brutal? - factional? - mysterious? - autocratic? - nature of Russian politics nowaday, though it doesn't particularly change the trend line toward KGB boyardom.

No great thoughts. Just making a note.

Hard-Luck Stories

Russell Arben Fox over at In Medias Res (see the blogroll) has been posting the lyrics of songs he likes. I am nothing if not imitative. I like so many, it's hard to choose, but I think I'll put up a conservative song. Not in the sense of high politics--in personal attitude. This is a song by the Australian folk group, The Bushwhackers, called (you guessed it) "Hard-Luck Stories." It's a song against whiners. It is remarkably pitiless and brutal on a gut emotional level. It also has catchy music. This is a song Newt Gingrich hummed as he implemented workfare. My transcription:

Hard-Luck Stories

They say running into you is like running into trouble;
You bend my ear and I see double,
You’re everybody’s idea of a waste of time.

You still come around cause I used to listen,
But I run a stage-ship, I don’t run a mission,
Don’t be mistaken in thinking you’re a friend of mine.

Those hard-luck stories, it’s all I ever hear from you,
Those hard-luck stories are going to drive me out of my mind.

And the boss won’t give you change of a penny,
Everybody else got money but you haven’t any,
They forget about you and I’d say it’s a crying shame

That your wife ran away, she left on a Sunday,
She was crying when she left and laughing on Monday,
She should have known better and she never should have changed her name.

Those hard-luck stories, it’s all I ever hear from you,
Your hard-luck stories are going to drive me out of my mind.

Yes, all of your hard-luck stories, it’s all I ever hear from you,
Those hard-luck stories are going to drive me out of my mind.

So why don’t you grow up, why don’t you settle down,
Why don’t you get a job and why don’t you leave town,
Even a bum has to do what he has to do.

And you don’t like one thing, you don’t like another,
You don’t like anything that looks like bother,
Everybody don’t like something, and we all don’t like you.

Beause of your hard-luck stories, it’s all we ever hear from you,
Your hard-luck stories are going to drive us out of our minds.

Because of your hard-luck stories, it’s all I ever hear from you,
And your hard-luck stories are going to drive me out of my mind.

Disgusting and Disgraceful

Roy Jenkins' biography of Churchill, apropos a Lloyd George scandal circa 1910, quotes Prime Minister Asquith as making a distinction in the behavior of politicians between the disgusting and the the disgraceful--between what one disapproves of and what one considers grounds for resignation. I think this is an elegant distinction to make, and a fine analytical framework for political scandal. Also, it highlights perennial controversy--what is merely disgusting, and what is disgraceful. The sinner and his party friends are likely to see disgust; his party opponents to see disgrace. I think I'd like to see this vocabulary of disgust and disgrace widespread in modern political discussion--it would be useful.

British Historical Fictions

It would be fun to teach a course on British Historical Fiction—literary representations of (mainly) British history, by (mainly) British authors, in a variety of genres, over the course of centuries. The point would be to illustrate the evolving conceptions of the nature of history, refracted through fiction—and simply to have fun. A tentative syllabus:

William Shakespeare, Richard II
Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year
Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped
George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan
T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral
Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
George MacDonald Fraser, Black Ajax

Any other suggestions? I’d like something written by a woman—not to diversity-monger, but I do think there’s some value to having both male and female authors on a syllabus—George Eliot’s Adam Bede comes to mind, but frankly I didn’t much like it. I’m not sure I want Orlando, though “Shakespeare’s Sister” would make an amusing counterpoint. If movies, perhaps Mrs. Brown or The Queen. A strictly historical poem, of literary merit, would be good too—Robert Browning’s tend to be about Italian painters, as I recollect, which is a bit off-target. And, I think, not another medieval subject—I’d like the syllabus to cover as broad a span of subject-periods as possible. Also, not Arthur or Lear or Ossian—stuff once thought historical, but now considered complete invention. Perhaps it’s arbitrary, but I’d like to stick to material we still consider history.

Why I Turned Righter

I’ve now read most of Why I Turned Right. It isn’t terribly impressive—short, shallow essays by a variety of conservative pundits, unlikely to convince the unconverted, too heavy on a recapitulation of the politics of the 1970s and 1980s, and too light on illuminating personal insight. With the best will in the world, I can’t say that it much exceeds the mediocre reviews it has received outside the conservative press.

One thing of note: one of the reviews—perhaps the one in the The New York Times argued that the disaffection of the essayists was particularly from the excesses of academia, and that where the essayists went wrong was in generalizing their recoil to liberalism/Democrats in general. It is true that there is a focus on academia in the book. I think this is warranted—as various essayists note, what academics think today, liberals and Democrats think tomorrow. Still, it inspires me to a bit of autobiography: I would not have become a conservative simply because of the excesses of academia. What made me part from the Democrats was …

William Jefferson Clinton. And Monica Lewinsky. And the willingness not just of academics, not just of liberals, but of virtually every Democrat (and Democrat-leaning independent) not just to minimize the gravity of his offense, not merely to argue that he should not be convicted, but to say there was no impeachable offense at all, that he had not lied under oath. And then, to compound this disregard of plain truth, to engage in the slur that the only reason people cared about this was sex, when I cared about lying under oath, every conservative I knew personally cared about lying under oath, every conservative I read cared about lying under oath. And this, to repeat, not the conduct of a small minority on the left, but of the entire party in its millions. I had until that time a remnant conviction that the Democrats were slightly more the party of truth, of decency, of virtue. I expected them to defend their own at first, as all partisan men should, but to abandon a criminal at the end—as the Republicans abandoned Nixon at the end. But they did not, in their millions. And that is why I could not continue as a Democrat, as a man of the left in any sense. The taint was general. And since then—let us say I do not presume virtue on the part of Republicans, but I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt in all disputes both of policy and of morals. I will believe nothing simply because a Democrat says it is so.

And since then, a variety of things have made me an enthusiastic conservative. But, no, it was not academia that made me abandon the left. It was the tens of millions of Democrats who stuck with Pres. Clinton, to their perpetual disgrace.

Why I Turned Right

No, not a personal expose as yet--I've started looking at the collection of essays of that name. (To vary my Sybiline reading.) The first one and a half essays, by P. J. O'Rourke and Richard Starr, are a bit disappointing. Since my standard is Whittaker Chambers, I suppose that's unfair, but still, they're not great yet.

The Campaign: T Minus 14 Months and Counting

Amid my busy schedule (which has kept me from blogging for a while) I somehow found time to watch yet another in the interminable series of candidate debates last night. This time it was the Republicans, on Fox. My curmudgeonly reactions:

(1) I'm already bored with these people, including the ones I like. The only possible interest is in watching slight modifications of positions and strategies. Otherwise, we probably have as good an idea of who these men are as we're going to get. I don't need any more "straight talk" from McCain, any more smooth talk from Huckabee, any more resume-citing from Giuliani, any more robotic platitudes from Romney, any more lonely passion from Tancredo, any more quiet wisdom from Hunter, any more utter blandness from Brownback. The only interesting one is Ron Paul, and he's only interesting because he disagrees with everyone else and comes across like he might be slightly crazy. Likewise, Mike Gravel and Joe Biden are the only interesting Democrats -- although I can usually muster up some interest in John Edwards, the guy I love to hate. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way. Even the politically tuned-in are zoning out because there's nothing new to learn. That's why I don't expect the polls one either side to move very much until someone big drops out, or someone commits a major gaffe. (Myself, I'm sort of hoping Giuliani will use the next debate to announce he's getting divorced again.)

(2) Debates among presidential candidates have always been a little sensationalistic, but the process was never this degraded before. Brit Hume is a top-flight journalist, one of my favorite newsmen, but he opened last night's debate by asking all the candidates what they thought of Fred Thompson not being there. Who the *$@% cares? This question is totally irrelevant to what kinds of president any of these men would make, and almost as irrelevant to how they'd be as candidates for their party. It's not as if there's any shortage of issues to stick to. Meanwhile, Fox kept cutting away to a grinning-and-bearing-it Carl Cameron as he solicited opinions from "just plain folks" in some New Hampshire diner. Many of these weren't even questions, but they were posed to the candidates as if they were. Here's my question, Carl: Can I just finish my pie and go home, please?

(3) Back to topic (1). Even the candidates' verbal tics are beginning to get to me. The worst is probably Giuliani's incessant use of the phrase "the reality is...." He hardly gets through a single sentence without it. I think he's the guy I'd like to see as president, but I need him to mix it up a little. Maybe try out "the fact is" or "the truth is" or -- and here's a crazy idea, coming up here-- just say what you want to say, Rudy, without feeling the need to stress that you believe it reflects reality (and not, say, your private delusion).

Okay, I guess that's it. Maybe I just needed to vent. Something tells me I can skip the debates from now until the nominees are chosen. I suppose Thompson will start showing up at some point, but I don't feel any less bored with him just because he's not a formal candidate. I think he may be the candidate of Republicans who still hope that their candidate will be exciting. I suspect they'll be disappointed. By the time the GOP picks a nominee, all these guys will be old hat. Aesop said that familiarity breeds contempt. Familiarity with politicians breeds even more.

Disraeli's Sibyl, or the Two Nations

The first 100 pages are rollicking reading. I think my students will enjoy this. There's a wonderfully dyspeptic Tory history of Whig England in the first few chapters--no radical historian was ever more withering.

Well, maybe some were. But it's pretty barbed.

Off for a few days.

DeBaathification

Everybody and their uncle seems to think that disbanding the Iraqi army and deBaathifying the government was a bad idea. Are they crazy? Just substitute "Nazi" or "SS" for "Baath," and "Wehrmacht" for "Iraqi army," and the moral and prudential imperatives for disbanding and deBaathifying become crystal clear. I very strongly believe that if we had left the Baath power structure in place, military and civilian, we would have faced a far more formidable foe, one used to the levers of power, sabotaging all attempts to rebuild Iraq, lending itself to a neo-Baathist resurgence, providing the spectre of a Baathist military coup, and rendering pointless our invasion from Day One. Also, as Fouad Ajami has noted, we would have alienated the Sh'ia from day one--and there is a great deal to be said for choosing to alienate the minority Sunni rather than the majority Sh'ia, if a choice had to be made. (Which seems to have been the case.) Yes, disbanding and deBaathifying have their costs--but less, I believe, than the alternative. This isn't to say that no better options existed--a pension scheme for the disbanded officers and soldiers of the Iraqi army might have been helpful. (ALthough it might just have funneled more money to the terrorists.) Nor is it to say that we shouldn't relax deBaathification now, when the Iraqi government has been reconstituted on a much less Baathist pattern. (Although, frankly, I'm still dubious about doing so--I think the Sh'ia are right to be leary of deBaathification.) But, basically, the original decision was overwhelmingly right, and the sniping against it profoundly wrong-headed.

Book of the Day

Christopher Fry, The Dark is Light Enough. Set in Austria during the 1848-49 revolution. The first ten pages are good.

What’s So Bad About the Current Presidential Nominating System?

It seems to me that it does a reasonable job of producing nominees who are roughly at the center of their parties, able to appeal marginally both to the party extremists who would otherwise vote for third parties or not vote at all and to moderates who would otherwise vote for the other party. George Bush, as far as I can tell, mildly irritated all sorts of Republicans in 2000 and 2004 in different ways, mildly pleased them in other ones, and was a reasonable consensus choice. Ditto John Kerry, who struck me as both a Democratic consensus choice and a reasonably strong candidate. (He did come close to winning—and we’ll never tell, but I’m not sure anybody else could have done better.) We can then wangle back all the years to the shift from the smoke-filled rooms—but it seems to me the critique of the system presupposes an assumption that a technical fix to the system would produce radically different, radically better results. I’m not sure I buy that—I think the results in good measure reflect the genuine wishes of the American people, and, in any case, the results seem reasonable to me. Oh, this is something one should argue for many pages to substantiate properly. But count me as one person who’s content with the way things are now.

A corollary of this assumption: the jiggerings of the nomination system this year and in 2012 won’t produce radically different results.

Reading Assignments

I’m now more sympathetic to student complaints about reading workload—it’s hard work to read everything I’ve assigned to them! (And, ahem, I actually do all the reading.) I confess I shudder at the thought of doing three separate class preparations in one semester—doable, clearly, but equally clearly it will be an exhausting experience. But I also begin to understand, in my bones, the rationale for keeping a fair bit of the syllabus each time around, but with small variations—I clearly need to keep a fair bit of material the same, so as to keep my head above water, but with some variation, to keep me awake and thinking, not teaching on autopilot. I also begin to understand why I wasn’t so attractive a prospect on the job market before, on resume grounds alone. I can tell that the teaching experience I now have makes me a better teacher; I can imagine how more teaching will make me better still. The fact that I grew up in an academic family helped me to have some idea of the nature of teaching—but actual experience helps much more.

I think I can teach at an OK institution now. I haven’t taught at a Swarthmore or a Yale, though, and I can imagine now just how much more intense that would be. Terrifying—challenging—I’ll live if I don’t get the chance, but it would still be nice.

Novel Pedagogy

I used to think that it was an uncomplicatedly good idea to assign fiction in history classes—a way to use literature to gain insight into history, an entertaining change of pace from historical documents, an excuse to assign good novels to students. Now I’m less sure. Some students don’t care for fiction, and have trouble understanding old prose. Others harp on the unavoidable problem—fiction is an uncertain mirror for real life. I begin to think that if good novels require an excuse, maybe I shouldn’t assign them. So now I’m trying harder to assign literary non-fiction in my classes—Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier, for example. I’m still assigning a novel this upcoming term—Disraeli’s Sibyl (or is it Sybil?), which I trust should be illuminating as to Chartism, plus the frame of mind of a future prime minister. But if I get negative results, I may eliminate fiction entirely from future syllabi.