Month: November 2014

Nonsense, asserts Zoë Heller, who declares that “[n]othing in my experience suggests that literary taste is a reliable guide to a person’s character, or that shared literary passions bespeak deeper spiritual kinship”:

I can see how disagreements about certain works of nonfiction might matter. If I were to come across a dear friend scribbling approving comments in the margins of “The Bell Curve,” that could be a game changer. And there are a few explicitly ideological novels (anything in the Ayn Rand oeuvre, for example) that I would be dismayed to find on a friend’s Favorite Books list. But the revelation in both these instances would be one of politics, of worldview, not of literary sensibility. Were a friend to tell me that he hated Jane Austen, my view of him and of our friendship would suffer not at all. I’ve known lots of fine men who did not “get” Austen and quite a few Janeites who were brutes. Besides which, my love of Austen is between Austen and me; it doesn’t need cheerleaders. …

Insisting that your loved one’s literary judgments be in harmony with your own suggests to me a rather dull and narcissistic notion of what constitutes intimacy. Do you really want to be one of those dreary couples who are always delivering their identical cultural opinions in the first person plural? (“Oh, we’re loving the latest volume of Knausgaard!”) One of the happiest romances I ever had was with a man who regarded George MacDonald Fraser’s “Quartered Safe Out Here” as the pinnacle of literary excellence. He also believed that Saul Bellow was a second-rate writer because “nothing ever happened” in his books. I thought he was mistaken in these matters, but I can’t say it bothered me much. Love is not love which alters when a man fails to appreciate “Herzog.”

Meanwhile, in another essay exploring literary intimacy, Helen Rosner suggests that “for a certain sort of person, sharing a book can be as intimate and exhilarating as sharing a kiss”:

Like a kiss, like a crush, like love itself, opening a book at someone else’s suggestion is simultaneously a solitary act and a shared one: We may travel these paths alone, but we visit common territory. When someone you love tells you about a book that he loves, it’s an act of revelation – intentional or not – that’s as intimate and vulnerable as being handed the keys to his childhood home. He’s telling you where he’s been, but even more than that, he’s trusting you to explore it on your own, knowing your steps will fall where his once did. (And oh, the thrilling signs and wonders that attend reading his own copy of the book: There’s a strange and profound power to holding the very same object in your hands that he once held and – by the same portkey – reaching, separately but identically, the same destination.)

 

Dwight Garner is fascinated by Jill Lepore’s complex, well-researched history of the comic-book icon:

On the one hand, the story it relates has more uplift than Wonder Woman’s invisible airplane or her eagle-encrusted red bustier. It’s a yea-saying tale about how this comic book character, created in 1941, remade American feminism and had her roots in the ideas and activism of Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood.

On the other hand, The Secret History of Wonder Woman is fundamentally a biography of Wonder Woman’s larger-than-life and vaguely creepy male creator, William Moulton Marston (1893-1947). He was a Harvard graduate, a feminist and a psychologist who invented the lie detector test. He was also a huckster, a polyamorist (one and sometimes two other women lived with him and his wife), a serial liar, and a bondage super-enthusiast.

Etelka Lehoczky shares the juicy details:

It turns out that decades of rumors were true: The red-white-and-blue heroine, conceived during World War II, had a decidedly bohemian progenitor. For one thing, it was no accident that Wonder Woman got chained up in every episode. Creator William Moulton Marston actually fought to depict her that way. He also led a highly unusual lifestyle, living with and fathering children by two women at once. And the sex parties? Yep. In the mid-1920s he, his wife and two of his lovers participated in a “cult of female sexual power” organized by his aunt.

Meanwhile, Sarah Kerr considers the icon’s cultural significance:

The superheroine, Lepore argues, has all along been a kind of “missing link” in American feminism – an imperfect but undeniable bridge between vastly distinct generations. Hiding in her kitschy story lines and scant costume were allusions to and visual tropes from old struggles for women’s freedom, and an occasional framing of battles like the right to a living wage and basic equality that have yet to be decisively won.

Wonder Woman stories showed women shackled in endless yards of ropes and chains – a constant theme in art from decades earlier demanding the right to vote. The traditional allegory of an island of Amazon princesses appears in feminist science fiction early in the twentieth century; the rhetoric of a nurturing, morally evolved strongwoman opposed to the war god Mars goes back even further. At the same time, the early comics often included a special insert, edited by a young female tennis champion and highlighting women heroes. Those chosen ranged from white suffragettes to Sojourner Truth to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, professional and sports pioneers, and a founder of the NAACP. It’s unlikely that any platform for American girls’ role models was as popular as this one until three decades later.

Damon Linker praises Arthur Melzer’s Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing, calling it “the most compelling, surprising, and persuasive defense of [Leo] Strauss’s thought” he’s ever read:

Staying far away from questions of foreign (or any other kind of) policy, Melzer has chosen as his subject Strauss’ notorious assertion that virtually all philosophers up until the early 19th century wrote their books “esoterically” — that is, using a rhetoric of concealment, with a surface teaching meant for general readers and a hidden teaching for those who were intelligent, clever, and tenacious enough to uncover it. This contention has been dismissed by most non-Straussian scholars, who have tended to suggest that Strauss projected the phenomenon onto most of the canonical authors he discussed in his many learned books and essays.

Melzer supplies a mountain of evidence in support of Strauss’ claims — quotes from just about every major philosopher (and many other writers) from ancient Greece to 19th-century Germany testifying to the reality of esotericism. … It seems that up until roughly two centuries ago, almost every culturally educated person took for granted that books of philosophy (and sometimes also works of scripture and literature) were written in a style of deliberate obscurity.

Why the recovery of this way of writing – and reading – matters:

Toward the end of his book, Melzer urges scholars and other interested readers to undertake esoteric interpretations of the entire Western philosophical tradition, at least up through the end of the 18th century. If he merely meant to encourage careful, creative readings of old texts, the suggestion would be a little banal. But of course that isn’t all that Melzer has in mind. After all, his invitation follows an elaborate (and remarkably persuasive) effort to establish not only that pre-modern writers wrote esoterically but also why they did so — in part to shield society from truths that puncture the ersatz nobility of politics and point beyond it altogether, toward the fully examined life of philosophy.

A world in which readers regularly produced revisionist esoteric interpretations that exposed these truths to the light of day would be one in which our understanding of the Western philosophical tradition was radically transformed. It would, for one thing, look far more deeply skeptical, profoundly anti-utopian, and brutally realistic about the permanent problems of political and moral life than it is usually presumed to be.

Last weekend, we highlighted Heidi Tworek’s proposed fix for grade inflation – adopting a three-tiered grading system. A high school history teacher nods along:

I think a move to a British-style system with only three grades, as advocated by Tworek, would be easier than it seems. We would just call our grades A, B, and C, rather than 1, 2, and 3. In fact, we’re already using a version of that system.

I teach high school history at a high-achieving public school in Massachusetts. Whenever I see grade inflation in the news, frankly, I’m a little baffled. The problem would disappear if we redefined what each grade represents. Traditionally, an F represents failing, a D represents below average, a C represents average, a B represents above average, and an A represents excellent. What if, as a society, we agreed that a C represents needs improvement, a B represents satisfactory, and an A represents excellent? In that scenario, we would ditch the D, and anything below a C- would be failing. This would simplify the system for everyone involved.

The reality is that today, a grade of a D is meant to be a warning – turn things around or you will fail. It is rarely given. Students who receive Cs are not average – they are students who struggle with the material or are students who are lazy and need to work harder. To recalibrate my grading scale to a traditional bell curve, where the majority of students received Cs, would result in serious pushback from my administration and from parents, and honestly, would be confusing to my students.

It’s time we made the de facto grading system de jure – B is the new C. Accept that, and the grade inflation problem, at the high school level anyway, ceases to be a problem.

That teacher offers a caveat: “I don’t mean this as a response to grade inflation in certain courses at certain colleges and universities where every student receives an A or an A-.” And another reader, who teaches history at the college level, dismisses Tworek’s proposal:

Heidi Tworek writes: “There are also fewer incentives for professors to assign higher grades if students recognize that the majority of them will receive the same mark.” Perhaps. But students respond to incentives (or the lack thereof), too. If there’s effectively no difference between a B and a D (which is how I’m defining that second tier), then the student capable of B work is probably only going to do C or D work, because it’s all the same to them. That’s a rational response. Under the current system, I have students earning a C or C+ at mid-semester who will work harder and learn more to get that B. That’s also a rational response.

Grade inflation is a recipe for mediocrity. So is this proposal.

My solution is simple. I pay no attention to any alleged “incentives” for grade inflation. An A grade goes to an exceptional student, not the norm. Sure, there’s a price to be paid. Students don’t rush to sign up first for my classes. They don’t barrage me with ego-inflating requests for overrides to get into my classes should they fill. I am not beloved the way some of my colleagues – the ones who hand out As like candy on Halloween – are. But I have, I suspect, the respect of at least some of my students (especially the ones who truly deserve As who bristle at the way their less committed peers get the same grade for far less work). And most importantly, I have some self-respect.

With the exception of adjuncts (which is a whole other problem), professors could easily solve the “problem” of grade inflation without any systemic change: show some backbone and enforce some standards. Stop caring about being loved and start caring about truly educating.

On a related note, philosophy professor Emrys Westacott is concerned that a constant focus on grading and assessment in general “chokes out healthier, more idealistic, more creative attitudes among both teachers and students, especially in our high schools”:

On one occasion I asked my daughter’s AP biology teacher if she would be taking the students outside at all during the year to examine nature in the raw. Her answer: she’d love to, but she couldn’t spare the time given the need to cover everything on the AP syllabus. Inevitably, the AP exam would be the guiding star that the class steered by: not love of nature, appreciation of natural forms, or delight in fathoming how living things function, but whatever needs to be known to do well on the test. Success on the test is the “measurable outcome” by which students are judged—and teachers, and principals, and schools, and, ultimately, entire education systems.

Students naturally soak up this message. … Most teachers dislike students trying to haggle over grades, but this behavior is a predictable response to the educational environment students find themselves in. If appearances seem to matter more than reality—grades on a transcript more than less easily measured values like holistic grasp of a subject, appreciation of beauty, intellectual excitement, insight, or wisdom—we shouldn’t be surprised to encounter such strategizing.

John Brewer looks at a brief history of the French grin in a review of Colin Jones’ The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris:

[Jones] begins with the stiff, courtly smile of supercilious superiority that emanated from the court of Louis XIV and which was associated with succeeding Bourbon monarchs – a look predicated on gross inequality, but also the result of appalling dental hygiene and care. … Courtly smiles were rare – La Rochefoucauld claimed to ration himself to one laugh a year – and could be treacherous when they cracked the facade of imperturbability. Tight-lipped smiles were part of a system of bodily control needed to survive in the duplicitous world of the royal court. They were also a social marker: no courtier wished to be seen (much less portrayed) as open-mouthed, which was at best a sure sign of demotic credulity, levity and bad manners, and at worst a feature of madness.

The 18th-century cult of sensibility, spread through performances on the Parisian stage and nurtured by novels of deep emotional intensity by the likes of Samuel Richardson and Rousseau, loosened the grip of the costive, courtly smile. Charming and tender smiles – transparent expressions of feeling intended to be shared by all men and women, though, in practice, chiefly enjoyed by the Parisian cultural and social elite – became fashionable. Teeth and smiles were chic – and so were dentists.

On a related note, Sarah Smarsh recently considered the psychological cost of living without dental care in 21st-century America:

My family’s distress over our teeth – what food might hurt or save them, whether having them pulled was a mistake – reveals the psychological hell of having poor teeth in a rich, capitalist country: the underprivileged are priced out of the dental-treatment system yet perversely held responsible for their dental condition. It’s a familiar trick in the privatization-happy US – like, say, underfunding public education and then criticizing the institution for struggling. Often, bad teeth are blamed solely on the habits and choices of their owners, and for the poor therein lies an undue shaming.

‘Don’t get fooled by those mangled teeth she sports on camera!’ says the ABC News host introducing the woman who plays [Orange Is The New Black‘s] Pennsatucky. ‘Taryn Manning is one beautiful and talented actress.’ This suggestion that bad teeth and talent, in particular, are mutually exclusive betrays our broad, unexamined bigotry toward those long known, tellingly, as ‘white trash.’

(Image: Portrait of Louis XVI of France, 1785, via Wikimedia Commons)