"The problem is, everyone seems to discuss the fact that universities have too little money as if it actually were a matter of climate."

—Siva Vaidhyanathan on the mess at UVa

This is so entirely unacceptable. From the "sometimes I am ashamed of my alma mater" files.

Anti-intellectualism, déjà vu.

I don't really want to dwell further on the madness that is the Church of Higher Efficiency's* response to Naomi Schaefer Riley's anti-intellectual blog post dismissing all of Black Studies basically on the grounds that Schaefer Riley does not understand the titles of some dissertations. [background]

But I do want to note Amy Alexander's suggestion that cuts at UC and CSU should be the real target of outrage, as if there couldn't ever at any one time be more than one issue deserving of outrage.

As Gautam Premnath rightly pointed out, it's not as though the two issues are unrelated. "The crisis of public higher ed," Gautam observes, "has its roots in the contempt for scholarship you condone."

Schaefer Riley's MO—"check out these titles; aren't they obviously ridiculous? This entire discipline is clearly worthless!" is a very familiar one. Various mainstream publications trot out the ritual mocking of the MLA program every winter, as if a journalist's inability to understand the titles of talks in a specialized field proved something. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes how such tactics were taken up against (the title of a talk from) her work in her 1993 essay "Queer and Now." Anyone who knows scholarship knows that Sedgwick was a true thinker—careful, erudite, inventive, insightful. But you don't have to know anything to mock a title.

We're used to seeing such unrigorous hit jobs in the mainstream press, because the mainstream press is anti-intellectual. Amy Alexander has been defending the Church of Higher Efficiency's dubious decision to give NSR a blog (and, as Brian Leiter points out, this has been dubious for a very long time) on the basis that "CHE is a NewsOrg, not part of Academe." True enough. But if a paper purports to be the Chronicle of Higher Education, shouldn't it have a specialized knowledge of higher ed, or at least not be actively hostile to higher ed? Shouldn't ye olde MLA-season title-snarking be plain out of bounds for any higher-ed-related publication?

My sense is that a lot of academics feel ambivalent about the Church of Higher Efficiency—"it's a dreadful rag, but it's our dreadful rag." CHE is quite adamantly saying, "no, no, we're not your dreadful rag at all; we have no obligations to higher ed whatsoever." The Church of Higher Efficiency is thus taking the stance on scholarship that Amazon takes on books: you read it; it's a major part of your intellectual and personal life; it contains ideas? Great; whatever; to us it's a widget that we ship out of a warehouse in Tacoma. We are happy to ship you a coffeemaker as well; makes no difference to us. Pageviews, plz.

That's unfortunate, although I can't exactly weep over the Church of Higher Efficiency getting explicit about just how little it cares about higher ed per se. I mean, it's a dreadful rag (exception: the excellent Jen Howard). Rather, I want us all to make the connection that Gautam made, between these routine pot-shots at scholarship by journalists who proudly announce that they are not in a position to know what they are talking about and the kinds of sweeping policy changes that are currently leading to the effective dismantling of public higher ed in California and elsewhere. "Is college WORTH IT?" they ask. Not if you can make a career of announcing your lack of education and taking pot-shots at the educated, under the auspices of a periodical allegedly meant to serve the higher ed community, no less.

More public scholarship. Less Church of Higher Efficiency.

***

UPDATE 5/7: The Church of Higher Efficiency has apologized for its editorial oversights and dismissed NSR. Tressie McMillen Cottom deserves the internet equivalent of a standing ovation.

*"Church of Higher Efficiency": h/t Mark Sample.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. "Queer and Now." Tendencies. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. Print.

Read, weep. Brava, Tressie.

I recently heard the following piped into a supermarket (no audio link because the song is really pretty terrible):

Cause she's so hiiiiiii-eeee-iiiigh,
High above me,
She's so lovely.
She's so hiiiiiii-eeee-iiiigh,
Like Cleopatra,
Joan of Arc or Aphrodite.

And I thought, you know dude, I think you may be onto something. Joan of Arc probably wouldn't give you the time of day.

Against this view it is urged that we underestimate the automatic powers of the normal subject. We are told that many of the acts which we usually do quite consciously might really be done without consciousness. In support of this assertion such facts are pointed out, as men completely undressing without knowing it, when their attention is distracted by other matters.

—Leon Solomons and Gertrude Stein, "Normal Motor Automatism" (1896)

Yes, you know how it is when that happens. (By the way, Solomons did the write-up.)

Children dressed as animals dressed as children (or, The Meaning of Christmas)

Cuteness, I have argued, often rests on a double mimesis. It's not that the child is dressed as an animal so much as that the child is dressed as an already anthropomorphized animal.

Lee Edelman's No Future famously repudiates the politics of "for the children," a politics that imagines a capital-C Child that "marks the fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity: an erotically charged investment in the rigid sameness of identity that is central to the compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism" (21). In what Heather Love has called Edelman's "star turn as Milton's Satan" (an absolutely right-on description), the unthinkable call to arms is absolute:

Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we're collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop. (29)

Against the Child and reproductive futurism, Edelman counterposes a sinthomosexual figure, which he describes first of all in the character of Charles Dickens's unrepentant Ebenezer Scrooge. The sinthomosexual is not quite gay, although he (usually he)* is certainly queer. Sinthomosexuality is not an identity but a function, the kernel of unreasoning negativity without which we have no Symbolic order. In A Christmas Carol, Christmas is a festival of reproductivity in the name of the Child, in which all children (innocent Victorian ones) are subsumed under the sign of the Christ-child.

[It will surprise no one that the processional for the King's College Advent service, the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols,** is always "Once in Royal David's City." The first verse is sung by a soprano choirboy (never a woman, of course!), and it is itself a Victorian children's hymn, first published in the 1848 Hymns for Little Children. The third verse is especially pointed in this regard:

And through all his wondrous childhood
He would honor and obey,
Love, and watch the lowly maiden
In whose gentle arms he lay.
Christian children all must be
Mild, obedient, good as he.

Theologically, the song is rather remarkable. But I digress.]

Scrooge's rejection of Christmas is merely a particularly recognizable subset of a broader rejection of reproductive futurism, and is for that reason depicted as monstrous. Who could hate Christmas? It's queer, unthinkable, and must be corrected—at least in the novel.

Thus, as Edelman writes, Scrooge is "converted to futurism through his life-changing vision of a futureless future," and thus "is granted the very gift of life he gives to Tiny Tim. But granted it only insofar as he gives that life to Tiny Tim, becoming a 'second father' to the boy by renouncing the intolerable narcissism that futurism projects onto those who will not mirror back its own Imaginary form" (50).

As early as 1993, Eve Sedgwick had already sketched out some of the consequences for queer theory of the ideology surrounding American Christmas, in which religion, capital, state, and "family" merge in a unison chorus of "'tis the season."***

What’s “queer?” Here’s one train of thought about it. The depressing thing about the Christmas season—isn’t it?—is that it’s the time when all the institutions are speaking with one voice. The Church says what the Church says. But the State says the same thing: maybe not (in some ways it hardly matters) in the language of theology, but in the language the State talks: legal holidays, long school hiatus, special postage stamps, and all. And the language of commerce more than chimes in, as consumer purchasing is organized ever more narrowly around the final weeks of the calendar year, the Dow Jones aquiver over Americans’ “holiday mood.” The media, in turn, fall in triumphally behind the Christmas phalanx: ad-swollen magazines have oozing turkeys on the cover, while for the news industry every question turns into the Christmas question—Will hostages be free for Christmas? What did that flash flood or mass murder (umpty-ump people killed and maimed) do to those families’ Christmas? And meanwhile, the pairing “families/Christmas” becomes increasingly tautological, as families more and more constitute themselves according to the schedule, and in the endlessly iterated image, of the holiday itself constituted in the image of ‘the’ family.

The thing hasn’t, finally, so much to do with propaganda for Christianity as with propaganda for Christmas itself. They all—religion, state, capital, ideology, domesticity, the discourses of power and legitimacy—line up with each other so neatly once a year, and the monolith so created is a thing one can come to view with unhappy eyes. What if instead there were a practice of valuing the ways in which meanings and institutions can be at loose ends with each other? What if the richest junctures weren’t the ones where everything means the same thing? (5-6)

Christmas is about capitalism—of course; everyone knows that, albeit usually in the context of bemoaning it. Sedgwick's insight is that Christmas's univocality allows each of these sites of power—capital, the state, "the" (heteronormative, reproductive) family, religion—to stand in as a metonym for all the rest. You buy Christmas presents because you love your family because the Christ-child loves you because you love the Child because the Child is the future of the nation, and round and round. Christmas has meaning, we are continually assured, and it is all the same meaning—the single, univocal meaning that the unmeaning sinthome both opposes and makes possible. If Christmas is about "meaning," then a purely negative Scrooge is the reason for the season.

What's missing from Edelman's account, of course, is any serious consideration of the actual child— not Annie or the waif from Les Mis or Tiny Tim, but the real children whose debt-burdened future is illogically invoked as a reason to cut public school funding, for instance.**** This is a perspective that Kathryn Bond Stockton takes up in The Queer Child (2009), and a place where the relation between children and animals returns.*****

Why are children so cute when dressed up as animals? I keep returning to this question. Here is Ralphie in A Christmas Story (1983), dressed as an animal as part of the same ritual of gift-giving that will eventually unite him with the toy gun he so desires.



Ralphie's abject, miserable cuteness is inseparable from the ritual of gift-giving; indeed, it assures that the queerly gender-bending aunt who sends him the bunny suit (she believes that he is "perpetually four years old [and] also a girl") is domesticated into "the" family. With Ralphie's appearance on the stairs, the aunt's failure to respect gender norms and her likely spinsterhood are recuperated by the forces of Family and Christmas present. Cuteness overcomes queerness, and must do so at any cost to the child's dignity, for example.

Of course, you know what's coming after all this queer theory is a YouTube clip of an Old Navy commercial.

This is one of those tiny artifacts that one comes across, that's so overdetermined it leaves one nearly speechless. My first reaction was really "CHILDREN DRESSED AS ANIMALS DRESSED AS CHILDREN. SCROOGES." And I can't say I've progressed much beyond that. The ad is for something you are supposed to buy for a child, presumably as a Christmas present: "critter hats," which deck the child in bits of an anthropomorphized animal. We are meant to buy them for Christmas in more than one sense: they make great presents, but they also convert "the holiday's Scroogiest Scrooges" with their cuteness. Scrooge here is not a literary reference, not a character, not a person. A "Scrooge" is a function—the sinthomosexual who poses a threat to Christmas and to the child, who must be converted in order for Christmas to be saved.

This ad, which scores a point for capitalism (buy our hats!) by mobilizing child/animal cuteness against queer Scrooginess, seems indeed to belong to a broader genre of the Christmas conversion of the sinthomosexual. There is the text it literally cites, of course—A Christmas Carol. But where does the double animal/child mimesis of cuteness come from?

Exhibit C: How the Grinch Stole Christmas. The Grinch is the quintessential sinthomosexual; indeed, the song from the cartoon special that describes just how repulsive the Grinch is has become something of a holiday standard.

The Grinch himself is not cute; he can't be, despite being a cartoon figure. Comical, sometimes, yes, but not cute.

He is, however, accompanied by a long-suffering cute companion, his dog, made cuter in his more intense suffering when the Grinch straps some antlers to his head—an instance of animals dressed as other animals, which amounts to animals dressed as children dressed as animals. Before we ever encounter Whoville, the cute dog is the yardstick against which we may measure just how dreadful the Christmas-hating Grinch is; each of the Grinch's schemes is met with more of the dog's cute suffering.

But in the end it is Cindy Lou Who, an antennaed child, whose cute innocence is revealed as what is at stake.

This animal-child is not the direct cause of the Grinch's change of heart (just as Tiny Tim does not directly cause Scrooge's conversion), but she is of course the beneficiary. In a final scene, a reformed Grinch in a Santa suit carves the roast beast and paternally hands a slice to the antennaed girl, who in turn hands it to the antlered dog. The outsider Grinch is now part of the family, a family of innocents and cute animal-children in whose interest he must now think, and in contrast with his earlier abuse of the dog.

This is one way that animals are part of "the meaning of Christmas": they mobilize that apotheosis of Child-hood, cuteness—four out of five Scrooges agree.



This post and the Connelly citation are very much indebted to my sister Maria Cecire's dissertation chapter on the medieval "Christmas challenge," its adaptation in twentieth-century children's literature, and the Victorian construction of Christmas as a children's holiday.

[Added 12/29:] Thanks to Aaron, Gerry, Adam Kotsko, Mark Wood, and blckdgrd for links.

*Edelman rather pulls back on the question of the female sinthomosexual, seeing it as a complication that might dilute the force of his argument. Disgruntled as I am to see femininity once again treated as the deviant exception to the rule instead of half of humanity and therefore central to the question of what the rule really is, I must concede that I am swayed by No Future's formal brilliance (Edelman 165-6n10).

**And also the Emory University Lessons and Carols.

***See also this post at A Map of the Country, from which I cut and pasted the same Eve Sedgwick quotation (thanks!). The post addresses the pitting of gay people against Christmas in a campaign ad by Rick Perry. While to the average viewer, "gays in the military" and "war on Christmas" seem like a complete non-sequitur, Sedgwick observes that the national ritual of Christmas demands, above all else, affective uniformity, in which we all go shopping, we all "get in the spirit," and we all spend time with the heteronormative (and, as the my generation's bitter joke has it, homophobic) families that we all have and are exhorted to value above all other relationships. Queerness itself is a serious challenge to those univocal silver bells.

****Generally speaking, the language of what children owe and are owed is exceedingly strange.

*****Despite thinking that The Queer Child is overall a terribly compelling and smart book, I'm almost entirely unpersuaded by Stockton's account of "the interval of animal." The argument hinges on the fact that metaphor always includes a moment's delay, and that, I think, is too broad a phenomenon (not to mention difficult to document except by appeals to intuition) to account for the specific associations we see between animals and children.

Connelly, Mark. Christmas: A Social History. London: I.B. Tauris, 1999. Print.

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004. Print.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. "Queer and Now." Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993. Print.

Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child: Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009. Print.

Joe Díaz, an Emory philosophy grad student, was arrested outside the Woodruff Library the other night. Read his account.

“It was important for the organization to be aware of the comments their students were making.” Jones-Sontag says. “It’s also important for students to recognize the power of social media, how lasting it is. It is on the Internet.”

N.b. the reasoning advanced by the KS governor's office—"it's important to be aware of the potential adverse consequences of doing things on the internet, so we will personally rain those consequences upon you in full"—is exactly the same reasoning advanced by trolls.

Via Anne Boyer.

Staying informed: a bridge too far

Naomi Schaefer Riley mentions Philip Nel's "what do professors do all day?" blog series in her recent Chronicle article. And again I ask myself: why do I ever read the Chronicle?

I am willing to believe that children’s literature is a legitimate field of study. But the idea that in order to teach Kansas State undergraduates about it effectively, one needs to “keep up with the literature” seems to me a bridge too far. And I bet you it’s a bridge too far for many state legislators as well.

Staying abreast of the field is "a bridge too far"? What?

Classic.

from: Robert J. Birgeneau, Chancellor
to: "Staff, All Academic Titles, Academic Senate Faculty, Students,
date: Thu, Mar 3, 2011 at 4:06 PM
subject: Wheeler Hall closed

The campus is dealing with a health and safety issue in Wheeler Hall and the building is closed. All classes and events scheduled in Wheeler Hall for this afternoon/evening are cancelled until further notice.

This is the aforementioned "health and safety issue": eight students on the front balcony of Wheeler Hall. [Daily Cal]

Quite honestly, I'd been working in my office on the fourth floor all day and had no idea the students were there until the surprising cop presence in my place of work prompted me to check Twitter.

You know what's unpleasant? Having cops give you the fish-eye in your place of work. Likewise, having UCPD come in and "secure the building" by making sure your window's locked on a perfectly gorgeous, warm, sunny day (of course we promptly opened the window and walked out on the balcony as soon as said cops left). Having to leave your own damn office in the middle of a Thursday afternoon (you know, your writing time) because UC admin has decided to shut down the whole building on account of a few protesters whom you can neither see nor hear.

As usual, protesters caused me no problems, UCPD caused me a lot. (Operational) Excellence Without Money reigns.

A chilling detail in the Daily Cal article:

Dean of Students Jonathan Poullard said around 4:15 p.m. that the protesters on the ledge had been visited by Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Harry LeGrande, Director of Counseling and Psychological Services Jeff Prince and Associate Chancellor for Government, Community and Campus Liaison Linda Williams.

Nice pathologizing of political speech there. Well played, UC admin.

I've been familiar with this book for a long time, but it wasn't until I bought my own copy that I saw the rather unfortunate dust jacket:



Turns out I really don't want to see Gertrude Stein's head sectioned like meat.

Critical gestures like this are irritating to endure:

These tortured writhings are irritating to endure. But they constituted part of what Gertrude Stein had to experience in order to reach full subjectivity in her writing. (83-4)

Don't even get me started on the idea that Stein "gestat[ed]" her characters.

Bridgman, Richard. Gertrude Stein in Pieces. New York: Oxford UP, 1970. Print.

FYI.

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty." Taken inside the pharmacy next to the Rockridge Trader Joe's.

Best inappropriate literary reference since the Shakespearean sugar cookies.

Dear Letter Service,

That letter from the Graduate Chair wasn't for your internal use. Really. Please send it where I tell you to send it. Thanks.

Yours sincerely,

Natalia

Still getting the Duns Scotus google hits. For serious.

Three cute things to use as decoration

1. Birds.


2. Butterflies.


3. Asian women.


(Source: Elmwood Stationers.)

Non-plagiarized essays for your plagiarizing pleasure

Found in my spam folder:



Subject line: "Outstanding Quality & Professional Custom ESSAYS for only $7.9 -- Non-Plagiarized."


Yes, it appears that these quality essays that are available to you for $7.9x are "non-plagiarized."

That is, they haven't been plagiarized yet.

A technicality.

A simian nativity

I go into the Valley Life Sciences Building quite often to use the biology library, which is filled with treasures. Outside the library is an exhibit space, where I once heard a couple of eight-year-olds disdainfully denying the aura of a mere cast of a Tyrannosaurus rex skull. I quote: "That's fake." (It was excellent.)

Owing to the Darwin bicentennial, I think, there is currently an exhibit on evolution in that space. As the photograph above indicates, it is a rather odd arrangement. Various primate skeletons (one of them human) crowd around a grave-manger where lie casts of Australopithicus afarensis bones, as if to pay tribute to the newborn/long dead missing link. The chimpanzee skeleton crouches like a sheep; a gracile ape (I don't remember the name) hovers overhead like an angel -- or like a crucified, er, ape.

"Syllabics"

I would like to say that if I hear this one more time I will scream:

"Oh, Marianne Moore's precision. So you're talking about her syllabics, right?"

Syllabics.

A poet uses meter.

Wow, amazing. I am amazed. Let's reduce that poet's entire poetics to the fact that she uses quantitative meter. Yep, that is what her poetry is all about. Syllables: you can count them! Oh, and did you know she was a spinster?

To borrow an idiom or two, this particular baloney really gets the Cecire goat.

And yet, I know I must not scream when I hear it, because I will keep hearing it for as long as I work on Marianne Moore, which I hope will be a long time.

It is obvious that Moore did not always write in syllabics. It would not even be accurate to say that most of her poems use syllabics. Looking at multiple versions of her poems reveals a tendency to draft in syllabics and revise into free verse. People who think that syllabics are the defining quality of Moore's verse are wrong.

* * *

Unrelatedly: Sociological Images has a great post on pants.