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?
People are so lovely and naive. I love them.
This “free book” plan is a very basic, very primitive corruption scheme. A relative of a grifting bureaucrat quickly puts together a children’s book. The state purchases it at $140 per copy. The author pockets the money and kicks back half to the grifter bureaucrat. Look up the number of children in this age range in the state, and you can imagine what sort of money we’re looking at. Given that the scheme is supposed to be run on a monthly basis, everybody who donated to these politicians can be repaid with interest using taxpayer money.
The value of this plan for any actual children is nil, because in reality you can’t walk 500 ft without coming across a little wooden library filled with completely free books. Children grow out of these books very fast, and parents donate them in enormous quantities. There are also public libraries everywhere.
As much as I love childish naiveté in fully grown people, it might be a good idea to start discerning at least some very basic corruption schemes.
“Look at how much Republicans hate children!” You absolute choo-choo, you’re being robbed openly and shamelessly, and you curtsy and beg for more.
If you look at this news item and your first instinctive reaction is not “this is a corruption scheme”, you are NGMI in neoliberalism.
AI is useless in many Humanities courses. At least 30% of the final grade is class participation, in my case with the added wrinkle of having to be able to participate in it in Spanish. What is AI going to do for you in this situation?
Soon enough, Humanities degrees are going to be the most valuable ones because there will be a certainty that AI didn’t do the entirety of the work for the student.
So far, very few students in my courses even tried to engage in AI cheating. Not because they are unusually honest, but because they discover soon enough that it doesn’t work. Humanities are not about finding one correct answer. They are about the beauty, the enjoyment, and the importance of the process of looking for answers. You can’t short-circuit the process because the process is the whole point. Being in the presence of beauty does not have a purpose. It is the purpose.
What do you call a person who thinks that the world is as right as it’s likely to get? And that we should all leave the world alone and try to better ourselves in the direction of being kinder to the people who share our daily lives?
The idea of “making the world a better place” and the grandiose plans to solve problems that have existed since humans existed are alien to me. My program is to work on my many flaws and spend as much time as I can reading and talking about books. World-improvers seem to be allergic to these activities. They think they are too good to bother about something so seemingly small.
Everybody is quoting Delphine de Vigan. Is anybody on here familiar with her? Is she worth the effort?
My conspiracy theory regarding Lindsay Clancy are that these were Medea murders. I read the findings of online sleuths, and they do demonstrate that it’s highly likely that Lindsay’s husband was cheating on her.
In Greek mythology, Medea murdered her children to spite her husband for preferring another woman to her. Online sleuths found information that Patrick Clancy went on vacation with another woman a couple of weeks after the murders. Of course, if true, the prosecution couldn’t bring that up without tanking the whole case. It explains Lindsay’s motive, but it makes her irresistibly sympathetic to the nine women on the jury. People have been wondering about the motive. Here’s a motive.
AI has improved dramatically. I can ask it, for example, “where did Pierre Bourdieu talk about the embodied state of cultural capital?” and it immediately reminds me of the source. And then pulls up a link to the .pdf. I’d find it myself but it would take longer. I haven’t worked with Bourdieu since my Master’s thesis, so of course my memory is tenuous. Now I’m rediscovering him, and it’s a great joy.
Going back to my point, I’m not hiring any student researchers any more because AI does it faster and with zero drama. Of course, if I came across a student who’d be genuinely interested in the research and would want to have conversations about it, I’d hire in a flash. But that is almost never a thing.
I hired student researchers for almost two decades and it was never worth the trouble, the handholding, and the drama. These were all male students, by the way. Zero female students ever applied.
So I’m now one of the evil employers who uses AI to get rid of human labor.
A conservative literary critic and college professor
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