Let Me Be Honest

By Standard * Other Standard Posts

I went to a memorial service yesterday. My uncle died in December after suffering from Alzheimer’s for years, but the six month gap between the event and the service allowed us to spend more time remembering his brilliant, charismatic, and wonderful life rather than lamenting the disease that took him from us far too soon.

During the service, the minister said something that stuck with me. “Let us be honest with death,” she said: “it is sorrow, but it is not annihilation.”

My father died on a cold Monday night in December of 1996, and I have never once considered being honest with death. I’ve thought plenty of other things: I’ve been resentful of death; I’ve cursed death; I’ve said impolite things about death’s mother. In my more generous moods I have been indifferent towards death, but mostly—despite the obvious impossibility of such an idea, considering the enormous impact my father’s death has had on my life—I have just tried to ignore death. That’s always difficult to do on Father’s Day, but it’s especially difficult this year.

It strikes me that honesty is a more mature, more grown-up, more politic way to go, so today I would like to try to be honest with death.

First, death is an asshole. My father missed out on so many things in his kids' lives—attending our high school and college graduations, tailgating with me before Bills’ games, walking my sister down the aisle when she gets married this fall—and he missed out on so many things in his own life—sailing, endlessly remodeling our house, retirement.

I’m also terrified of death. Nothing about death seems pleasant. I’m not scared of being dead; non-being doesn’t strike me as any more awful than pre-being. It’s the transition to non-being that’s intimidating. But it’s more than that: I’m so terrified of death that I’m not sure if I’ll have a family. What happens if I too die young? Could I take the risk of putting my family through that?

To say that death is sorrow is like saying that a hurricane is a rainstorm. It’s kind of an understatement.

And I’m never completely sure that death isn’t annihilation. I remember less and less of my father every year. I depend more and more on pictures and home movies. As Paul Auster says, remembered things have a tendency to subvert the things remembered.

But if I’m being honest, I have to say that death has made me appreciate the people in my life in a completely different way than I could have before.

Death also makes me appreciate the type of person my father was when he was still alive. He was funny, generous, loyal, handy, and supportive. He loved his family as much as any man ever has, and he asked for nothing in return. He had a dry sense of humor and an infectious belly laugh. He had an admirable amount of common sense. He was relatively unathletic and had little musical ability of his own, but he was an accomplished chauffeur to music lessons and sporting events, a master of videotaping band concerts, and a pithy motivational speaker. (Here’s an example of the last: when he learned that my sister sang songs in her head while she was swimming, he told her to sing a faster song.)

If I’m being completely honest with death, I have to say I’m glad death waited as long as he did. I learned a lot from my father in the thirteen years I knew him. I learned what it means to be a responsible human being, I learned to think before I speak, and I learned that shit happens.

There’s something, finally, that death can’t touch: my father still makes me want to be a better person. And I'll always love him for that.

In Which the Author Uses "The Arts" Loosely and Inconsistently

By Standard * Other Standard Posts

Several months ago, two members of the Georgia State Legislature created a minor stir when they took to the floor to announce a “ ‘grassroots’ effort to oust professors with expertise in subjects like male prostitution, oral sex, and ‘queer theory.’ ” Their “grassroots” effort of course went nowhere, and, after several Georgia State Professors who had such expertise explained to the House Higher Education Committee that their research included AIDS epidemics and teenage attitudes towards oral sex, the House members claimed the media had blown the whole thing out of proportion. (You can find the article here.)

What interests me is not the media coverage, which was indeed abysmal—the initial article was misleadingly entitled “Steamy Sex Courses Fire GOP’s Ire,” and the reporter had not so much as made an effort to understand what “queer theory” might be—but rather the attitudes about higher education expressed by these House members (restated in the follow-up article).

“Our job is to educate our people in sciences, business, and math,” said Representative Calvin Hill in a time of budget cuts (and here I am quoting the article’s indirect quotation of Hill), “universities should not offer classes that do not help students get jobs.”

The Humanities has always had a difficult time defending its role in higher education, but the current (and ongoing) budget crises of state governments have made matters worse. Alumni donate heavily to athletics, scientific and engineering research, and business schools, but neglect History, Political Science, Philosophy, and English. Taxpayers are generally not interested in Shakespeare. The state of Wisconsin, for example, has provided enough funding for my department to hire fewer than half the number of faculty members we have lost over the past three years.

Those who are critical of the Humanities have a point. Much of what I do as an academic is utterly useless. I spend months carefully crafting arguments about 400-year-old texts in the hopes that the one person who will read it—my professor—will like it. (Good, my professor will say, but not great. And then he or she will point out that someone else has already said more or less what I have said, except better.) The stakes will change as I move up in the ivory tower, but the size of my audience probably will not.

Why should the state pay for this type of research? Why should universities offer courses taught by these types of people—who clearly will not help anyone find a job?

Down with that upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrie!

Yet a number of my fellow Around-the-Couch wordsmiths have attested to the value of their liberal arts educations. (Now may not be the best time to point out that a number of my fellow Around-the-Couch wordsmiths are—or at least were—unemployed.) In order to understand why the liberal arts may be worth saving, it might be helpful to consider the way in which Renaissance humanists—whose ideas were largely responsible for our notion of a “liberal arts” education—thought about the arts.

Unlike Kant, who would later argue that a work of art exists for our detached aesthetic contemplation and moral judgment (it’s much more complicated than that, I know), thinkers like Pico della Mirandola and Desiderius Erasmus thought of art in much more active terms: not only did art have a didactic (generally moral) and amusing purpose, but it actually acted upon its audience. Consider these lines about satire from Joseph Hall’s Virgidemiarum (1598):

The Satyre should be like the Porcupine,
That shoots sharpe quils out in each angry line,
And wounds the blushing cheeke, and fiery eye,
Of him that heares, and readeth guiltily. (5.3.1-4)

What begins as metaphorical effect—the sting of a porcupine—becomes literal affect: reading a satire will make the reader feel ashamed, which is manifested in a physical response (the blush). Or consider Thomas Heywood’s remarks about the power of theater in his Apology for Actors (1612): “so bewitching a thing is lively and well-spirited action, that it hath power to new-mold the harts of the spectators, and fashion them to the shape of any noble and notable attempt.”

Critics of the arts during the Renaissance were the exact opposite of those represented by Representative Hill. Rather than finding the arts ineffective (for helping students get jobs), the arts threatened to be too effective—depictions of vice could lead the audience to emulate vice. In a Sermon at Paul’s Cross in 1577, for example, Thomas White suggested that “the cause of plagues is sinne, if you looke to it well: and the cause of sinne are playes: therefore the cause of plagues are playes.”

We all know the clichés that retain this understanding of the arts—“the pen is mightier than the sword,” for example—but when we think about art, most of us probably still side with Kant: we engage the work of art, not the other way around. But humanities classes demonstrate that the work of art—or the historical narrative, or the philosophical system, or the political argument, or anything that exists in the realm of ideas rather than fact—has the power to engage us: we are forced to think, to recognize that we think, to be critical of the way we think, and to understand that our way of thinking is not the only available way of thinking. These classes taught by experts in male prostitution, oral sex, “queer theory,” or that Upstart Crow Shake-scene can change the way we think—or even make us think for ourselves.

That may not help students find jobs, but somehow it still seems worth defending.

Ask An English 100 Instructor Who is Getting Tired of Grading Portfolios

By Standard * Other Standard Posts

Dear English 100 Instructor,

I have been married for five years, and until about a year ago I thought I was part of a happy couple. Then I began to suspect that something was wrong: my wife started working late several nights a week, she received numerous "work-related" phone calls and text messages at all hours, and she would leave for days at a time (usually on the weekends) for "business trips." She became very defensive when I asked her where she was going or pointed out that she was unemployed. Lately things have gotten worse. She moved out of our bedroom because my snoring kept her up at night, and then she moved all of her belongings to my friend Larry's house because she "needed space." She comes home for food once or twice a week, but she refuses to let me touch her; she says I "disgust [her]," that I "can't please [her] like Larry does," and that she is "definitely having an affair with Larry." I'm beginning to suspect that she is cheating on me. What should I do?

- Concerned About my Wife

Dear CAW,

This is a great letter. You've done a really nice job responding to my feedback on your first draft, especially in terms of your overall organization. In this draft you've given a nice sense of chronology so that you really build to your conclusion, rather than just listing information in an unstructured manner.

I am particularly impressed by the richness and variety of details that you include in this piece. You do a great job of showing me something about your wife instead of just telling me that she's cheating on you. Think about how these details give your piece a sense of what types of things upset her. That's fantastic.

For your next piece, I want you to think more carefully about your paragraph structure. Would you really say that you have a topic sentence here? What does that leave out for your reader? Might you be better off with two paragraphs instead of one? Furthermore, even though you include a great deal of evidence, you are leaving a significant burden on your reader to perform the analytical work. It's your job, not theirs (or mine) to draw conclusions from your evidence, and to demonstrate how the evidence supports the claim you are making in your topic sentence.

Finally, be sure to cite your sources. There are a number of unattributed quotations in your letter - I assume that it is your wife speaking, but I may only know that through our conferences and from previous drafts. You'll also want to include a Works Cited List (but we'll talk more about that in Sequence 2).

* * *

Dear English 100 Instructor,

I lost my job last month, but I can't bring myself to tell my family. My savings have all but evaporated in the stock market, and yesterday my wife surprised me by buying plane tickets to Hawaii for a "second honeymoon." She was shocked when I burst into tears, but I managed to tell her it was because I had always wanted to go to Hawaii, and not because I am about to default on my second mortgage. I know I can no longer afford the Metro tickets I buy every morning when I pretend to go into the office; I know I am going to have to sell my house and move in with my parents; I know I am probably going to have to see my children to the Chinese. I have already sold one of my kidneys on the black market, but my cash is running out and my bookie has become more and more persistent that I pay my outstanding debts (I never should have bet $100K on the Cardinals). Still I can't bring myself to tell my wife. What should I do?

- Down on My Luck

Dear DOML,

This is a solid letter, but I'm not sure you've done a good enough job responding to some of the comments I have made on your previous draft. Although you include enough details to convince your reader of the seriousness of your situation, there is absolutely no sense of organization in this letter. The end of your letter repeats information from the beginning, and there's no reason that you couldn't share the information about your bookie before you told the story about the plane tickets to Hawaii.

Furthermore, you have not provided nearly enough background information here. How did you lose your job? What type of job did you have? What kind of salary did you make? Why will it be necessary to sell your children, and how much do you expect to make?

Your writing is certainly better than it has been in the past, and I applaud the work have done to fix all of your comma splices. Still, though, I think you tend to use one sentence where three would do. How many semicolons have you used here? Might it be better to divide up those unbearably long phrases to give your reader a rest? Look back, specifically, at your third sentence, which has three separate independent clauses. That's the type of thing I expect you to clean up when revising your work.

Ultimately, I don't think you have done a good enough job responding to the question I posed to you at the end of your first draft: so what? Why should I care about any of this?

* * *

Dear English 100 Instructor,

The recent news story about the chimpanzee who mauled his owner's friend has really affected my relationship with my own chimpanzee. I've had Zeke for 8 years, and he's never hurt a fly, but I worry that he too will "go ape s###". I think he can sense that there's something wrong, but I don't want to get rid of him. What should I do?

- Worried About My Monkey

Dear WAMM,

You clearly have not put enough effort into revising this piece. Even if you have a number of good ideas, you don't do enough to flesh them out. You do not even consider some of the most basic questions your reader might ask of you: How can you tell that your chimpanzee can sense that something is wrong? Why don't you want to get rid of him? What would that entail? What would the consequences be? Why do you own a chimpanzee named Zeke in the first place?

You still have not met the length requirement, which is spelled out on the assignment sheet. You have not even addressed any of the typographical errors I pointed out. How many times do I have to tell you to put the period INSIDE the quotation marks? How many times to I have to tell you to spell out "eight"? I can't fix these things for you.

* * *

Dear English 100 Instructor,

I have been accused of a serious crime (which I cannot discuss in this context). The incident in question occurred when I was intoxicated, and I have no memory of it - but I know I am innocent, because I would never do anything like that. The trial is about to begin, and I suspect that my lawyer thinks I'm guilty. What should I do?

- Defendant in Trouble

Dear DIT,

Fine. Keep up the good work.

Contributor Bio: Standard

Eric Vivier, who would like to be (but is not currently and will never be) known as "Standard," is from Buffalo, NY. He now lives in Madison, where he is a graduate student in English Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The End of the Individual

By Standard * Other Standard Posts

If a certain friend of mine had any idea I was writing a column with this title, he would declare that I had abandoned everything I have ever said to him.

He wouldn't be right, of course, because he's never right. (He really isn't ever right, but he knows he isn't right. He argues from whatever position seems convenient for his purposes - which are always to attack and humiliate me. That means he's always outside of the realm of right and wrong. He's a jerk.) I have, however, tended to defend the idea of the individual as such - that is, that an individual can and does exist, at least intellectually.

I don't have much at stake in individualism per se. What concerns me is actually the idea of authorship: because I have spent several years reading, thinking about, and writing about literature - and because I hope, in some small way, someday, if I can find the time, to write the greatest work of literature the world has ever known - I can't, like Barthes, declare the author to be dead. I can't even relegate the author to a faceless function, the way Foucault does.

I have argued against the idea that culture thinks us. I do think that most of what we say, do, believe, etc. is dictated to us by the ideology of the world that surrounds us, but I always want to carve out a tiny bit of space so that someone, somewhere - even if it is a select few favored by coincidences of time and place - can add something. Literature (and thought), I have argued, is ultimately palimpsestual: we are always scratching out and writing over what has been written before, but traces of the past keep bleeding back through.

All that being said, I'd like to suggest that the idea of the individual in society may be coming to an end.

Somewhere in the middle of the 80-page philosophical doctrine that John Galt sets forth in Atlast Shrugged - I am speaking of what might be the worst part of what might be the worst book ever written - he declares that in his political system, "every man will stand or fall, live or die by his rational judgment." This is the essence of Rand's argument: the collective cannot succeed unless the individual is allowed to succeed. The idea isn't originally Rand's; it's at the backbone of freemarket capitalism, and it's representative of the type of thought which has dominated American political thought and fiscal policy over the past generation.

I hope the recent mess on Wall Street demonstrates the weakness of that argument. I am not even referring to the "greed" of Wall Street, which politicians and 24-hour news networks have proclaimed as though they are were all surprised to discover that businesses were all out to make money - as though they had expected selfishness to play no part in self interest. Instead, I am referring to the powerlessness of individuals to sell goods and services without consumers who are successful enough to purchase them.

We are anything but independent or isolated. Whatever successes we have enjoyed have been in large measure due to the communities and institutions in which we have lived and learned. We are each something like a palimpsest: our own hard work builds on top of, but cannot efface, the hard work of those who have come before us. Our decisions and our actions, furthermore, cannot help but affect others around us.

We do not have the luxury of standing by, Galt-like, and watching the world around us fail. Like it or not, we're all in this together. The only way forward is to recognize ourselves for what we are - a body of many, a pluralized one that will live or die, stand or fall by our collective rational judgment.

The hope and unity Ned discovered at the inauguration - the collective spirit he hopes will endure even as he wants to protect the rights of the individual - is certainly a promising first step.