I’m hearing that Hillary Clinton will be mentioning the poverty experienced by her mother when the mother was a child in her speech today. She’ll do it to let the voters know she understands what economic hardship is like.

Soon, we’ll have politicians breathlessly inform us that they know all about poverty because they once talked to somebody who once stood next to somebody who had heard of somebody who might have been poor.

I don’t blame Hillary for this pathetic effort to pretend she’s not who she actually is. If people voted on issues and not on soppy “human interest” stories, nobody would have to contort themselves into weird shapes and fake non-existent suffering.

Literary criticism was far from being the only field of study that was created to promote the goals of nationalism. There was also archeology, created to “prove” that nations were eternal in origin. And anthropology was given the task of “demonstrating” that the people of a nation were biologically related to each other and superior to those of other nations.

So Putin went to see the Pope, right? And of course he was an hour late because meeting a human being without humiliating said being is just no fun for Putin.

The Pope gave Putin a medallion with an angel engraved on it. I have no idea what the poor angel ever did to the Pope to make the fellow want to punish him like that, but here you have it, the angel went straight to Putin.

Of course, the Russian propaganda has modified this piece of news ever so slightly. Instead of “the Pope gave Putin a medallion”, the Russian media are saying “the Pope awarded Putin a medal.” I  mean, medal, medallion, it’s almost the same thing, and it’s not like the Pope will mind. If he did mind, he could have evaluated what the consequences might be before having Putin over.

So have you heard about this Nobel – prize winning scientist who said a bunch of stupid things about falling in love with weepy female lab workers?

Obviously, in everything that doesn’t concern his field of knowledge the guy is kind of dumb. But I’m hearing he’s had to resign from his university. And that’s a very bizarre and disturbing development. If we don’t like his gender discourse (and obviously we don’t), let’s not have him over to dinner. Let’s not follow his Twitter and let’s respond with, “Hey that’s really stupid” whenever he opines on gender. There’s no need to get him to terminate his work at his university over this, though.

Let’s also observe that we never hear any stories about doctors, lawyers, or statisticians being policed as a group as much as professors are all the time.

One day after a Pew poll showed only 38 percent of Germans

view Russia as a threat to its neighbors (other than Ukraine), news has broken that Russia hacked the Bundestag.

Objective reality doesn’t go away even if we close our eyes and hide under the sofa.

Writers are, first and foremost, readers. They read a lot and as a result know what has been done so many times that doing it once again would be a horrible cliché.

To give just an example, a contemporary writer starts a famous novel as follows. The main character’s mother died when he was an infant. So there was nobody to “raise him in tenderness” and he grew up wild. Because all women are tender, obviously. And without their civilizing presence men remain wild. But that’s OK because the character had a special talent he discovered at the age of 7. And now let me cover thousands of pages with words to tell you all the details of that special talent.

Without even starting on the artistic qualities, just the plot premise itself is excruciatingly boring. “Orphaned and wild” has been done so many times that one begins to wish for an orphaned and domesticated character just to relieve the tedium. The special gift one discovers all of a sudden serves as a foundation for every TV show featuring children or adolescents.

Everything turns to a parody of itself with repeated use. Wild motherless orphans made sense in the early 19th century. The need for women to civilize men by applying their “softer” influence to them was all the rage in the 1500s. Golden locks and rosebud mouths sounded just fine in the 17th century. Eos of the rosy fingers worked out fantastic for Homer but you just can’t do this shit without a trace of irony in the postmodern era and still be a writer.

This is not to say that the cheap pop psych of dead mothers, softening women, and sudden talents can’t be entertaining as hell. Just like an occasional meal at Wendy’s might be fun and delicious. Yet a person who sees no difference between a dish prepared by a Michelin-star chef and an outing at Applebee’s is missing many exciting experiences that constitute culinary education. And in the same way, the person who believes that literature is Hunger Games and 50 Shades has had an impoverished range of intellectual and artistic experiences.

What I’m expressing here is a point of view that is hugely unpopular in North American academia. We are all so terrified of rating or ranking and so into the idea of total equality that we spent months last year at my department  interviewing people for a job they were not even remotely qualified to do just because it would be unfair not to interview everybody who NEEDED a job.

But hey, when did I care what anybody else thought? The literary canon was created to prop up the nation-state. And now that the nation-state is tottering, preserving the idea of Great Books might offer some support to the nation-state. 

I just discovered that I’m not at all bad at analyzing poetry. If the enjoyment of the activity is any sort of an indicator (and with me it usually is), then I might actually be quite good.

I always thought I’d suck at poetry, so I never tried it. But a book titled Literature of the Crisis would look freaky if it pointedly excluded poetry just because I’m scared of it.

So I started analyzing a poem, and it turns out I have a lot to say about it. And I recognize the poems this poet makes use of because it turns out I have read quite a lot of poetry and am not as unprepared as I thought I was to analyze it. 

I blame my teachers for this terror of poetry that I used to feel. They made me believe that analyzing poetry was too hard and too useless and not to be attempted. It turns out, however, that if you really love a poem (and have had training in literary analysis), you will be able to say quite a lot about it. 

This whole awakening to poetry is a result of my interactions with one of my students. He’s been analyzing poetry in every essay he ever handed in to me and was doing a kick-ass job. And as I was discussing his work with him, I kind of got into the whole thing and decided to continue it on my own. I’m just happy that I didn’t turn out to be one of those professors who imbue students with the fear of poetry. I mean, I almost did but this student resisted me. And I’m very happy he did.

OK, I’ll stop gushing now and go analyze me some more poetry.

In 1902, the great historian Theodor Mommsen was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. At that time, everybody knew that the writing of history is just as creative and fictional as the production of novels or poetry.

OK, why is my Walter Scott post trending all of a sudden?  It has all of six words or so in it. Has there been a new development in the story?