Things Academics Like

Here are some things academics (in the Humanities) like. I know because I am one.

1) NPR. Nuff said. Without academics and college towns where they live, there would be no NPR.

2) Being busy. Even if you're not busy on a particular day, it is bad form to say so.

3) The "book-length project." We are always at work on one, by definition. There is always a book waiting in the wings to be written. Even if there's not, we will say there is. Confessing to not being engaged in writing a book is like saying you're not busy.

4) Feeling superior to other people, especially students and people who don't listen to NPR. Face it, we are the best educated segment of society, by definition, but the least well remunerated in proportion to educational level.

5) Feeling at the same time guilty about privileges enjoyed and resentful about privileges not enjoyed. It's an oddly privileged life, since we are payed to think about and teach literature or music or art or philosophy. We can feel guitly about that, or about not being oppress't, while at the same time feeling we really should have more money and get to live where we want, not in some podunk midwestern college town with an NPR station.

6) NPR.

7) Hating Republicans. (No explanation needed.)

8) Tenure, unless we don't have it yet.

9) Ugliness. Ugly clothes, cars. Bad music on Garrison Keillor's show. The execrable prose in our own book length projects.

10) Complaining about things. Maybe that should be first on the list; it's inherent to the job.

I really badly want to use the verb "subtend" today. Like "Romantic ideology subtends the deep image." Or, even better, "The practice of the deep image is subtended by romantic ideology." I probably won't, but I want to. It's good to be able to write like that--and then not do it. Jargon is fine if it is actually part of a technical language, that is, a precise word used as a term of art in a particular field. Jargon serves quite another purpose if it is meant to suggest membership in a particular discursive community. Like "deploy," 'subtend," "imbricate," etc... The lexison is as that conventional as that of a deep image poem, and as artificial. It connotes complexity of thought, but doesn't actually mean that the thought going on is more complex.

My field is a ghetto. There is a good deal of integration between those who study film, culture, and novel of contemporary Spain, between Cultural Studies and studies of the novel. Those who study poetry, however, usually just study poetry, and people who are (otherwise) quite well-read often confess their near total ignorance of poetry, as though that were just some minor insignificant corner of the literary world that could be safely ignored.

Of course, ultimately every academic field is a ghetto. It's just a matter of the size of the particular ghetto.

Anyway, what I often try to do is to publish places where my article will be seen by people who wouldn't normally read an article on "poetry." My favorite in this respect is the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies published in the UK.

Why doesn't "culture" include "poetry"? This is a tricky question that has to do with the way disciplinary boundaries are drawn. My attitude toward all of this is that everyone should study what they want, but just don't leave me out of it.

When did the novel get to be so important? Obviously it's not because Spanish novels are more accomplished than Spanish books-of-poems. The opposite is the case. Cela gets the Nobel prize? That's just ridiculous. Marías is ok, but don't tell me his work has the historical weight of Gamoneda's. Is it as simple a matter of the fact that more people read novels? Or is it because novels talk about the "issues" people want to talk about, and therefore can integrated seamlessly into a certain vision of cultural studies?

If you want to look at the consumption of cultural products, then you'd have to say that dubbed Hollywood movies are an extremely significant part of contemporary Spanish culture. Or translations of books by Michael Crichton or Paul Auster (not to put them in the same category).

Never begin an essay or a talk by quoting the dictionary definition of a word, unless you are a high-school student or want to be mistaken for a high-school student.

Ron had a kind of odd take on the post below... I can't say he's wrong to associate me with Bill Knott's weird sense of third-rate despair. Why was I projecting such negative feelings that particular day? It certainly does not reflect my mood today.

When I think of my Successful Academic Career I can't be too discontented. It wasn't all that hard to be one of the top people in my field, from the very beginning after my PhD. I think the secret was the I actually knew something about poetry and had found a way of translating that into an academically acceptable form. Looking around at people in my field I can't say that all actually know enough about poetry itself to be really first-rate critics. You can master the academic language but without really having anything to say. I've seen the opposite case too, people who can't seem to muster the discipline to write acceptable academic articles. Not that that's the only desirable goal in life, but it is the metric of my particular corner of the world.