For it is not the discovery but the mere search for wisdom which should be preferred even to the discovery of treasures and to ruling over nations and to the physical delights available to me at a nod. But I was an unhappy young man, wretched as at the beginning of my adolescence when I prayed you for chastity and said: ‘Grant me chastity and continence but not yet.’ – Confessions VIII.17

the holleycarbines – st. augustine

Il Voyage En Solitaire

1. A friend, Gabriela Adamesteanu, is featured in the Observatorul Cultural. Her work is nothing short of brilliant, I highly recommend it.

2. Kermode finds Milton’s manifest magical and goes misty-eyed for Paradise Lost (as any person in his or her right mind most certainly would).

3. The Winter 2009 issue of Daedalus turns out to be a full-blown epic of the humanities in present-day academia. (More on specific articles later.)

4. The online version of Apostrof: Revista Uniunii Scriitorilor is up and working again. I still get excited when I see my name alongside the others (shameless self-promotion, I know).

5. Michael Berube expresses GREat doubts in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

6. It is almost Valentine’s Day. Alas, despondency! (For all the wrong reasons.)Perhaps we should rethink our chosen saint and celebrate Aquinas instead. He’s the one who got it right, after all. As he says,  ”minimum quod potest haberi de cognitione rerum altissimarum desiderabilius est quam certissima cognitio quae habetur de minibus rebus.” - Summa Theologica, I, q.1, a.5, ad.1

This morning, I was reminded of that bizarre escapist fantasy of my tween years when I ran across Stanley Fish’s column in the Times. As usual, he was surprised by sin, though this time the fault lay on the side of too little rather than too much knowledge. Fish reviews Frank Donoghue’s new book, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities and sums up Donoghue’s argument very nicely (though you can surmise yourself what the book is about, given its title). He states: ”One vision, rooted in an “ethic of productivity” and efficiency, has, he [Donoghue] tells us, already won the day; and the proof is that in the very colleges and universities where the life of the mind is routinely celebrated, the material conditions of the workplace are configured by the business model that scorns it.” Indeed, this seems to be the case, at least where American institutions are concerned. There are more adjuncts than tenture-track faculty, freshmen classes reach astronomical proportions, assembly-line grading is standard procedure, the classics are hardly ever taught, and graduate students can’t tell the a Greek from a Roman. You will, moreover, often find professors bemoaning that classics majors do not know their Latin, French majors their French, and English majors their Shakespeare. This is not so much the case at Columbia, but every time I have attended a public lecture on reading, or on literature today, or on the liberal arts, these are the sorts of comments that I hear. Honestly, I do not understand how the idea of a ”corporate university” came about, or of what use it may be, unless my friend Ilana is right, and the the university is now the new high school.

Even if this is the case, however, all universities, even the corporate type, cater to their students’ demands. The students are, after all, the ones who are paying. In the late Middle Ages, it became common practice to nail the seats in the lecture hall to the ground, because displeased students were in the habit of picking them up and throwing them at the lecturer if his lecture was not up to par. Not paying for a bad lecture was, after all, the unspoken rule. So, why have we not picked up the chairs too? Why do we not demand to be taught by tenured senior faculty, by experienced connoisseurs of culture, by linguists and scholars and master crafstmen? (That is not to say that I do not appreciate adjuncts; I know some great, and I mean great young professors.) Institutions which are especially concerned with profits (and all modern universities are) generally will pay attention to their students’ demands if they begin to fear loss of revenue. So, it is not unresonable to suppose that if enough students were to demand it, both content and teaching methods would change. The system, as Donoghue points out, is a system that works like a business.

If this is so, then the question should be not what has happened to the professors, but what has happened to the students. Why do the young masters no longer want to learn their Aristotle and demand a good job of it? God knows, after suffering through the Metaphysics with a professor who went through the text argument by argument (“killing me softly”) on the blackboard at 10 am twice a week, spewing Greek every which way, I have an idea of how daunting the prospect of a “liberal education” can be. And yet, that did not seem to dampen the spirits of previous generations, nor did not make the thirty people in my class less appreciative of what the professor was trying to do. 

I have no real point to make here, simply that I think the myth of Castalia has finally been put to rest, at least publicly. The intellectual is no longer the ideal. The researcher has taken his place and has replaced the quest for knowledge with the quest for information. What we are experiencing now is a sort of post-transitional period. Perhaps my bags should just stay packed for good. That is, unless I can make a post out of them. After all, this is the age of the least publishable unit.

The Moldovan poet Grigore Vieru passed away a few hours ago, in Chisinau, from cerebral injuries resulting from a car accident that took place on the 16th of January. A great admirer of Eminescu and a stern if star-struck lover of the Romanian tongue, as well as an advocate for the union of Basarabia and Romania, he was one of the last great writers of Nichita Stanescu’s generation. May his slumber be deep and his rest never again troubled by the flow of the Prut. 

I don’t usually like to post video, but I have always enjoyed this rendition of his poem “Tu,” set to music by Iurie Sadovnic:

More in the way of books and bookends to come after I straighten out my daily existence. In the meantime, though I am sure many have already taken note, I simply must point to this delicious appraisal of Mr. Updike’s latest. It’s too bad Wolcott won’t give up his toasty little cubicle at Vanity Fair and do this sort of thing on a regular basis. I can’t resist posting one particularly tasty quote, because I too had an editorial apprentice fling at the New Yorker and heartily concur with the assessment of both the man and institution (an assessment Wolcott makes by means of others’ assessments, thus managing to avoid biting the hand that feeds him). As I tried to explain to my thesis adviser, who does not understand why I gave up future prospects in publishing, I would much rather wail with the academics than ail with the publishers.

‘The New Yorker and John Updike are both deeply immersed in the image of man as trivia,’ Alfred Chester wrote when panning Updike’s short story collection Pigeon Feathers. ‘Reading Updike, like reading the New Yorker, gives one the impression that the pages would turn to ash at the mere suggestion that life was other than a negative-positive mosquito buzzing in the ear of a total vacuum.’

The manifesto has been floating around online for some time, though from what I understand the original was printed in Convorbiri Literare. The movement is mainly a reaction against the Millenium Poets, both of the l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e variety and of the postmodern-absurdism ilk (recall the Pink-pony-swastika Romanian Cultural Institute scandal last fall). While the document does fail to address certain practical considerations, such as who will produce these great works of literature we all eagerly await, I do think it timely in its way. I’ve been hearing a lot lately about the necessity of reestablishing  ”aristocratic” values in literature.  Rob Riemen’s Nobility of the Spirit lauds the very same Thomas Mann these students seem to have in mind – the ample, well-girthed behemoth who defined German Culture before the world fell apart in 1939.  

Alas, as of yet no Alexander II seems to be forthcoming to speed up the liberation. Until he arrives to pen a new Fratii Jderi or Luntrea lui Charon, you can read the manifesto in the original here or in English translation (with a few inaccuracies) here.

Granted, this involved a laborious move from blogspot, in the process of which my old entries were deleted. The loss is unfortunate not because of my writing, which was never of much interest to begin with, but because of a large number of quotes and factual tidbits that I had accumulated over the years and to which I now no longer have access. This time around, I will be backing everything up on an external hard drive (ideally, I have not – as of yet – mastered the art of the external hard drive). I will try to write mostly in English, though I might occasionally give in and revert to Romanian, if pertinent to the post in question. Some Italian or French would be nice as well, if I can manage it.