Hold on to your old cars for dear life:
Enough Republicans joined the Dems in voting for this that the measure passed. It’s very disappointing.
Any Regular Day
I’m a college professor, so yesterday. This is everybody at work and completely unironically.
The Great American Novel of Academia
We are truly spoiled for choice with the great novels of academia in American literature. There are many, and they’re all so good. In this post, however, I want to highlight a novel that I believe to be the absolute best of the genre because it explains so much about academia. The novel in question is not political. And that is fitting because, believe it or not, the main problems of academia are not in the least political. Or rather, academia gets into political trouble because it is incapable of solving its non-political problems.
Stoner by John Williams depicts a college professor who is extremely typical. He is a good person who genuinely loves reading and wants to live the life of the mind. But he has no executive function. He won’t move a millimeter to organize for himself the kind of life that he would enjoy. This is widespread in academia where people routinely refuse to do the very thing that would bring them joy. They end up blaming “society” or “structural injustice” or “capitalism” for what is, in reality, a weakness of character. The politicization of self-imposed weakness is absent from Stoner but is everywhere in our lives today.
Unlike many novels of academia, Stoner is not humorous. It’s sad. I don’t think that the author’s intention was to make his readers angry or frustrated with Stoner. A reader who is not an academia is likely to feel compassion for the character. I am an academic, however. I am surrounded by people who will complain endlessly about the world’s injustice but wouldn’t bother to organize a comfortable writing schedule for themselves or find out what it is the prevents them from getting published. I strongly believe that many academics would have a much more positive view of the society in which we live if, instead of feeling sorry for themselves, they started working on their productivity and fighting their own laziness instead of imaginary power imbalances.
Oikophobia
Roger Scruton on the origins of anti-nationalism:
Another Assassination Attempt
Wait, what? Another assassination attempt on Trump?
Is the shooter another young man with no online presence, does anybody know?
Word Illness
Remember how I kept saying that there’s no such thing as “mental illness”? Because the second you accept that there is, this begins to happen:
You can’t “screen for mental conditions.” You can’t diagnose them. There is no blood work you can run. No X-rays. No CT scans. It’s all words.
This is a terrible government overreach that will do untold harm. But try explaining it to normies. Or don’t because it’s a total waste of time. Many kids will be medicated needlessly. Others will be excluded from public education. All of this will happen because they’ll choose some words on some stupid questionnaire that has zero meaning.
This is worse than COVID, people. It’s an absolute disaster.
Protect your kids. Don’t let these “screenings” anywhere near them.
The Great American Novel List: American Regions, Part 2
The second and the third novels on my list of the Great American novels of the regions have to do with New England / Midwest and Appalachia. And, yes, they are long. But bear with me. I promise there will be very short novels on the list, too.
Also, as promised, these are not going to be modernist novels. These are naturalism, which is a variety of reallist literature, in the first case, and postmodern social realism in the second. They are easy to read but they require a significant time investment.
Without further ado, I present to you the novel that I have read maybe 15 times in spite of it being so incredibly long, and it is:
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser.
I couldn’t begin to imagine when I first read it as a teenager in the USSR that the differences between New England and the Midwest that the novel explores would become so central to my own life.
The novel is shockingly relevant to our reality today. A Midwestern boy from a religious family of a very conservative preacher abandons his traditional upbringing and tries to join the ranks of the coastal New England elite. Tension between sexual immorality and social striving is the main theme of the book. In Dreiser’s times, as in ours, voracious self indulgence was the enemy of success.
Beyond these extremely interesting and important themes, the novel portrays the daily life of the early 20th century America in so much delicious detail that this alone makes it worth reading.
The third novel on the American Regions list is
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver.
I wrote about it fairly recently here, and I won’t repeat myself.
What the three novels have in common is that they all depict striving, determined, fascinating men. This doesn’t mean that these male characters are successful in their striving. Their quests can end in terrible failure. But what is interesting – and very American – is that the cause of their failures is always within themselves.
The next installments in this series will include the great American novels of academia, the great sci-fi and fantasy novels, the great American romance, and others.
The Great American Novel List: American Regions, Part 1
I received an excellent suggestion from one of our readers to make a list of worthwhile American novels. I’m going to group my recommendations according to the reasons for why I recommend them. Of course, the overarching reason is that I absolutely adore all of these books. There are some undisputable classics of American literature that I personally did not fall in love with. I will not recommend them but not because you shouldn’t be reading them There is nothing I can say about them that would be worthwhile, so what’s the point of me talking about them? The best book recommendations come from love, not obligation.
The first group of my recommendations is going to contain the great regional novels. It doesn’t mean, of course, that they’re only relevant for the specific regions where they’re set. But the different regions of America are so fascinating that they have given rise to novels that depict the specifics of the regional culture. The very first novel on my list is:
William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!
It is, in my opinion, the greatest American novel of the 20th century. I use the word “American” here in the broadest sense. Many courses on Latin American literature start with Absalom, Absalom! because this novel is the foundation of the Latin American literature written since then. You can’t really understand anything written between Mississippi and the South Pole without knowing and understanding Faulkner.
Faulkner is the writer of the American South not only as a geographic place but as a way of being, as a manner of life. It’s devastating and beautiful, and once you really get it, you will never be able to leave it completely.
I warn you, though, that Faulkner is a high modernist author. He was a genius, far ahead of his times. He invented much of what today’s literature is. Absalom, Absalom! is not a realist novel. You can’t be a passive consumer of this type of art. You will have to participate actively in its creation. Modernity requires an enormous amount of agency from every human being. Modernist art doesn’t allow you to be a passive consumer because passive consumers get eaten alive in the modern world. Reading modernist literature helps you develop the kind of subjectivity that makes life in the modern world more comfortable for you. Faulkner’s novel disturbs you, confuses you, and makes you work hard to understand it. But it trains you up to be comfortable in modernity.
Please don’t worry, though. The next two novels on the regional list are going to be pure realism.
Movie Turned Reality
“Wouldn’t you know it?” my new secretary said pensively as she studied my outfit du jour. “My favorite movie of all time is The Devil Wears Prada.”
Good Leader
In reality, you don’t need tricks and strategies to be a good leader. Neither do you need leadership workshops. What you do need is to have a certain type of personality. If you are in possession of the three following qualities, you will make a good leader:
- You need to be interested in people and genuinely like them.
- At the same time, you need to not care whether they like you back. High tolerance for conflict and disagreement is a must. Ideally, you would have the kind of personality where you’re not even capable of noticing that somebody dislikes you.
- Another crucial quality for a leader is forgetfulness. You should be incapable of bearing grudges. If you’re the kind of a person who dwells on who said what to whom last month, being in charge of a group of people is going to be very painful.
I’m not a great leader because I don’t have the first of the qualities on this list. I am an okay leader because I have the second and the third. I know people who have all three. My Associate Dean is the epitome of this type of personality, and my admiration for him is deep and sincere. I always admire people who have virtues of which I am not in possession.
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