Her name is Nora Rowland.
Her dad was Robert Rowland, 75 years old and a vulnerable man living with Parkinson’s and a brain injury.
Nora and her father were incredibly close. A “daddy’s girl,” she said. They FaceTimed every single week.
I’m weeping. “Incredibly close.”
I was on the phone with my elderly mom today twice for a total of 96 minutes. Yesterday, twice, for a total of 72 minutes. It’s like that every day.
My mom and I are not close.
Finally, I found an account on X that posts exactly the kind of class-based observations that I enjoy reading. Then I researched it and discovered that it’s an Africa-based AI slop account.
Lovely. I have the interests and the sensibilities of an African AI bot.
Yes, little private colleges that are humongously overpriced because they sell “experience” are massively losing enrollments. But state universities that offer a college degree for free for everybody who is not wealthy and very cheaply for everybody else are experiencing an influx of students. My university has record enrollments this year. We had to open a crapton of new sections to accommodate everybody.
The situation that is shaping up is the one where we will have the Ivies and the free or extremely cheap state schools. Everything in between will die. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. There are many people who don’t need to be in college and who will not even be able to graduate, racking up gigantic student loans to buy a class-tinged “experience.” They never manage to pay off these humongous loans and turn into a perennially resentful underclass. This is a blight and should end.
There’s a famous scene in an old Soviet movie. A fancy, snobby woman rolls her eyes and says condescendingly, “Even the most backwards strata of the population now wear jeans.”
Jeans were hard to come by in the USSR, and that made them somewhat of a class marker.
I have no interest in jeans but the novel Based on a True Story by Delphine de Vigan awakened a chi-chi fru-fru woman in me. De Vigan is like Emmanuel Carrère. I’m starting to think it’s now a thing among French writers. They rewrite highbrow literature for the masses. It’s not a bad thing. I’m a literary critic, so it’s kind of entertaining to see an airport novel version of the writers I study professionally.
Based on a True Story offers a somewhat plodding retelling of the issue that was of great interest to highbrow writers of 60 years ago. Who is the real author of a text? Is biography always fiction? Is fiction always biography? What is the relationship between the writer and the text? Does the author fully or even partially understand their own text? Do the author’s different personas know each other? Or can they communicate like completely different people?
It’s good that the masses are catching up. I guess. I’m not the kind of a literary critic who cares much about any of this stuff. I’m into neoliberalism and the nation-state and social class. I’ve been criticized from here to the Moon for it. I’m thinking, enough with this navel-gazing. Let’s do something real. But even the popular literature today is going in the direction of navel gazing and “who’s the real author?”
De Vigan uses the fussy, highly neurotic narrative voice that has been with us since Dostoevsky. She doesn’t seem to understand that in order to be able to do it in the 21st century, you can’t be painfully earnest about it. It’s been done 5 trillion times, so you can’t act like you invented it five seconds ago. You have to be humorous about it. Use some irony. Thomas Bernhard and Horacio Castellanos Moya do this perfectly.
Constitution, patriotism and rights only have meaning in a nation-state. They come together with citizenship as a package deal. You can’t ditch the idea of citizenship and retain Constitution, patriotism, and rights. This is such a basic, obvious thing, and people are still not getting it.
I will be more disturbed if she doesn’t go through this phase than if she does. In order to become her own person, she’ll have to reject my path in some fashion. It might manifest in her political positioning. Or in her becoming an online influencer. Or becoming a health fanatic. Or having six children in her twenties.
Going through the stage of “my parents are morons who did everything wrong” and doing so early is great. Being unhappy about it is like being upset that your child no longer needs a diaper because he learned to use the toilet.
It’s very curious that often what people think is a failure of parenting is evidence of success. They suffer and blame themselves when they should be celebrating.
Have you seen grown children who never dared to criticize mommy because “mom is my best friend”? They almost invariably fail to start their own families, their work life is miserable, and they have no friends. It’s very convenient to mommy until the “best friend” child hits 40 and mommy realizes that it will continue like this after she dies.
We have a lot of these situations in my community that has traditionally very pushy, controlling parents. Am I willing to bear some political disagreements to avoid all this? You bet.
By the way, my Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Feuchtwanger traveled with me all the way from Ukraine. They’re on my shelves right next to what people call genre literature, which I also love.
Feuchtwanger is another author I read in his entirety in my teens. In translation, of course, but those were translations of outstanding quality.
I don’t have any Tolstoy at home because I simply do not like this writer.
This whole discussion about the reading culture reminds me of a funny story from Rafael Chirbes’s diaries.
Chirbes was a Marxist and a Maoist. He went on and on about how he always felt like one of the working classes and despised fancy people and the bourgeoisie. Right after saying something like that, he would explain how he had avoided reading Faulkner because he always considered him to be at the level of literature for common people. And of course Chirbes would never lower himself to reading something like that.
I respect Chirbes for confessing this snobby mistake a lot more than I respect college professors who think it’s cute to pretend that they can’t read. And it most certainly was a mistake. Faulkner is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. He is the founding father of the entire contemporary Latin American literature.
By the time I graduated from high school, I had read the entire collected works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Kuprin, and Chekhov. I had some difficulties with the parts of Brothers Karamazov that had to do with religion. My father had to explain them to me.
Other than that, I had no problem understanding and massively enjoying these books. That a Harvard professor would be so defeated by a novel by Toni Morrison is strange.
It’s become fashionable to pretend to be a moron who comes from a family of utter illiterates. Jason Arday is the perfect example. He didn’t pretend that he was more well-read than he truly was. To the contrary, he pretended that he couldn’t even read until age 18.
If you haven’t read anything until that age, you’re hopelessly behind. You will never be an intellectual because you have no foundation in the reading culture. It’s a very bad sign that Arday bragged about reading nothing and not about reading everything and it worked.
There is a big problem with creating falsely democratic and anti-hierarchical environments. The reality doesn’t care about our feelings. We can pretend all we want that it doesn’t matter who your parents are and whether they created a culture of reading, thinking, and enjoying art in the home. We can pretend that it’s possible to read nothing until adulthood and still catch up, but this pretence doesn’t change reality.
It’s possible that this person is being a DEI poseur in the statement. It’s also possible that these words are sincere.
I have no problem whatsoever with recognizing when a book is too hard for me to read. But Beloved? I found a copy of this novel back in Ukraine in 1994. That was before I ever lived in an English-speaking country. It’s a good novel. I enjoyed it. I remember I chose it as the text for a presentation I did in one of my college courses. A nice novel, but difficult to read? For anybody who never read anything beyond airport fiction, yes, but for a person who has read actual literature, it makes no sense. A tenured full professor of English literature at Harvard finds Beloved an impossibly difficult text that requires several readings for even a basic understanding?
It’s Oprah’s favorite novel, for Pete’s sake. How hard can it be?
We read Morrison in class when I was in graduate school. Once again, I don’t remember anybody among the students, let alone the professor, expressing any difficulty with the reading.
I believe that Morrison is very talented, a great writer, but extremely complex? What else is this Harvard professor reading if Morrison is such a challenge?
The author of this quote is hamming it up for ideological reasons, right?
A conservative literary critic and college professor
What’s the account?
This is one of those comprehension problems that arise from the fact that there are a lot of people on…
Kid, the problems in both of our nations are very similar, and both are worsened by unwise immigration levels.
Canada is a great example of how the concept of citizenship is made meaningless by a tsunami of migration and…
Kid, while detesting anonymous commentary that does not at least have the courtesy to append ID, the info is correct…
I’ve been studying this issue since 2002. Yes, I’ve thought about it deeply. It is my job to do so.
You’re either overthinking it or you did not provide the context for the original quote. I responded based on the…
I’m planning to teach whole course entirely on the nation-state and its demise in the spring. At least I’ll feel…
This is how we end up with local governments who are embezzling the heck out of everything, un-usable public parks…
It starts kind of slow but it definitely picks up after the first 20% of the book.
Yeah, I read it. Good but boring. Try Yasmina Khadra.
This insanity is fueled by the need to post on social media. What’s the point of even getting married if…
People start getting really pissy when one points out all of this “boring” stuff about institutions and forms of statehood.…
The notion that you need to have a wedding that costs more than people a generation ago paid for their…
When I was young, physical punishment was generally more of a threat/warning than a reality, and largely restricted to more…
It’s the Magic Stuff philosophy: anything nice that we already have is some kind of God-given right (except without God).…
I assume this is a paid talking point. I have seen it robotically repeated so many times now.
IKR? Like YOU DID GREAT! Your kids, who grew up with you, think that marriage and family life are something…
Are you pranking me right now? Or are you a new reader, in which case, OK, I’ll repeat myself for…
A colleague got snippy with me when I asked her if her 26-year-old daughter is planning to get married to…
You either do not understand the message you quote or you manipulate it. Constitution, patriotism, and rights do not come…
A colleague got snippy with me when I asked her if her 26-year-old daughter is planning to get married to…
Mom will never be a grandmother since all of us are single, my older brother and I are lifelong celibates…
Dude, looking at the truly scary numbers of people who are failing to get married and start families, this mother…
I’m actually not surprised at all, to a lot of middle class normies, getting married young and having kids is…
Madam, you are a lot more open-minded than my family. Being the child of right wing Cuban exiles, my parents…
I know a family whose kids are just reaching adulthood, handsome, smart, put-together, and… getting married. Their mom is freaking…
Same here. I’ve been doing quizzes at the beginning of every class to test if the students have done the…
It is possible to do in class assessment for advanced STEM courses as well. I completely switched to having pop-…
Hmmm, do downvoters understand that two out of every three feminists are simply as historically ignorant as the other one…
It is possible that this professor uses the word “basic” in the way that pre-teen TikTokers do it. This doesn’t…
This is precisely it. People are terrified of coming off as classist, and this ridiculous fear creates endless dysfunction.
I should probably take this post back, given the recent discussion about a Harvard literature professor who claims not to…
This attitude is very alien to me, I’d be embarrassed if I barely read and I’d at least try to…
Of course, it’s not unusual but completely normal to do multiple readings as a literary critic to advance your understanding…
“Soon enough, Humanities degrees are going to be the most valuable ones because there will be a certainty that AI…
“You are a simpleton if you don’t see the complexity, layers, and artistry in this seemingly straightforward thing.”” That was…
I read it the same way at first. The text is very easy to comprehend – on the surface. But…
This excerpt was published in a book. This person willingly disclosed it about themselves. It has become fashionable to be…
It’s the standard academic airs of, “You are a simpleton if you don’t see the complexity, layers, and artistry in…
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