Isak

Literary & Media Indulgences - 6/30/2012

 

 

-- America's Other Audobon: Genevieve Jones was a self-taught, self-published, Victorian ornithologist who made a "radical journey of art, science, and entrepreneurship." She wrote and painted the major book on bird nests and eggs. The plate pictured above is her rendering of the Baltimore Oriole's nest.

-- "One major pitfall of this tour guide approach to international literature is that even the most well intentioned readers are often content to read one writer (or just one book) from any given country." Chris Feliciano Arnold writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

-- A lost African classic finally gets its due, according to Slate. This would be Search Sweet Country by Kojo Laing, of Ghana, which is out in a new McSweeney's edition. It's high on my to-read list.

-- Ruth Franklin is writing to magazine editors, including the ones she contributes to, about their lack of female writers and editors. She begins with an open letter to Bookforum, which she encourages you to copy. (And, by the way, here is Franklin's review of W.G. Sebald's Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964–2001.)

-- Seventy-six years ago today, Gone with the Wind was published.

-- The New York Times on poetry's relationship with the Olympics, which is interesting despite leading with a sentence that makes me grit my teeth in irritation.

-- Painting the people of Florence.

-- Hook into Detroit's literary community with the buregoning Write A House project.

-- What exciting stories to mine here: Somaliland as a ghost republic, peacebuilding in the wake of the Ft. Hood massacre, weariness and healing in Kashmir, border wars in Staten Island ... and more. Here is the letter-from-the-editor by Jina Moore.

-- "Something wonderful about almost nothing."

-- Nora Ephron's death has inspired an onslaught of wonderful remembrances of her as a essayist, novelist, journalist, screenwriter, director, and a person who powerfully balanced ambition and generosity. Some favorites include those by Lena Dunham (New Yorker); Katha Pollitt (The Nation); and Rebecca Traister (Salon), as well as the New York Times obituary and the "Fresh Air" interview with Ephron (she knew who Deep Throat was all along, but no one believed her!). This March, I saw what would be Ephron's final play at the Gem Theatre in Detroit: "Love, Loss, and What I Wore," which Ephron described as "the Vagina Monologues with the vaginas." It was charming, more affecting that I expected it to be.

-- Radiolab and On the Media collaborate on a very interesting episode about data.

-- Trouble a-brew at Alabama Public Television.

-- The Library of America has a new exhibit of 88 books that have shaped America, or "books of consequence," if not necessarily quality. Included are works by Benjamin Franklin, Dr. Seuss, Elizabeth Dickinson, and Dr. Spock, as well as the Alcoholics Anonymous book. The Takeaway talks about what they missed. I agree about Hiroshima, Peyton Place, and Roots as notable gaps.

-- The last book that Lauren Alwan loved is Charles D'Ambrosio's Orphans. I'm smitten by it too -- both in the sweet connotation of the word, and in its original meaning of "to smite." I wrote about it here.

-- Poet Reginald Dwayne Betts has a new essay in the Daily Beast: "A Former Teenage Carjacker Reflects on the Supreme Court Ruling in Miller v. Alabama." This affects a lot of guys at the prison where I have a theater workshop, including a man who works with our group and runs the facility's lifer's club. I talked to him about it on Thursday: he's in a strange space of feeling hope, colored by caution, as he and others start talking about future court dates.

-- From the wonderful Ted Conover: "A Snitch's Dilemma."

-- Racialicious loves Grace Lee Boggs, who is rocking 97 years as of this month.

-- Evolving a city: David Sloan Wilson talks about using the ideas of scientific evolution and applying them to urban spaces on the APM show "On Being."

-- "How we died 200 years ago, compared to how we die today."

-- Kenyan writer Stanley Gazemba has some strong remarks for Binyavanga Wainana: "A memoir? Thank you, but where's the novel?"

-- Two important articles: "Score So Far at the University of Missouri: Books 0, Football Coach, $2.7 Million" (The Nation) and "University of Missouri Press on the Chopping Block" (Guernica).

-- "Can Dostoevsky Still Kick You in the Gut?"

-- It basically seems that nobody has ever had much faith in the future of book reviewing. And yet it persists and evolves all the same.

-- The new issue of World Literature Today turns attention to both Ireland and science fiction.

-- A fascinating article in the current issue of Harper's: "The Last Tower: The Decline and Fall of Public Housing." Must-read.

-- Julian Barnes: "My Life as a Bibliophile."

-- Jessa Crispin: "Psyched Out: Love hurts. Who's to blame?" It's a review that ingeniously pairs a biography of Margaret Fuller with Eva Illouz's provoking new treatist.

-- Six questions for Julie Otsuka.

-- Conversational Reading is hosting a Summer 2012 Big Read with Naked Singularity by Sergio de la Pava. Not too late to join in.

-- "A House to Look Smart In." What I find funny about this article is that it pictures a reading room where there aren't actually that many books.

-- The journals of Mavis Gallant will soon be published, which is amazing. Put it in your library and look smart. Better yet, read it.

Practicing My Byline

Roald Dahl's James and The Giant Peach: A Children's Story, inscribed when I was about nine years old. Note the artful inking along the margins.

 

Untranslatable Words

Much hay is made out of how nuances of language are slain through translation. I find the "lost in translation" conversation overblown and imprecise, a meager generalism that serves as a way to talk about translated literature when the actual substance or style or worldview of the text is presumed to be too confounding. I've seen some tiptoe around translated novels and poetry, qualifying each comment with how it may or may not pertain to the original, to the extent that they cannot talk about the text with even a single declarative sentence. In truth, translations can be better or worse (I'm reading a brilliant version of Dante's Inferno right now by Robert Pinsky), but expecting the original version to be word-for-word equivalent to its translation is to miss the point of literature.

That said, of course other cultures have created words and phrases that meet their place and time, and don't have precise English counterparts. Translators use the tools of English to work around them, to communicate the idea or feeling in way that will be understood by the new set of readers with their own cultural assumptions and linguistic habits.

Twenty-two volunteer translators for TEDTalks gathered in Edinburgh, Scotland last week to talk about their work: they've translated more than 3,000 talks among them so far. One of them, Dick Lundgren, collected 21 untranslatable words (yes, one of them is Klingon) and made artful trays that he shared with the other translators (pictured above). Here are my favorites from the words he collected:

Dutch:
pretoogjes: ‘fun-eyes,’ the eyes of a chuckling person 
who is up to
some benign mischief
ˈprɛto:xjəs

Serbian
мерак: pleasure derived from simple joys, such as spending time feasting and merrymaking
mɛ̌raːk

Spanish
sobremesa: the time spent after lunch or dinner, talking to people you shared the meal with
so.bre.mé.sa

Bulgarian
чародей: an arch-Bulgarian wizard, magician, sorcerer, necromancer, enchanter
ˈt∫arodei

Russian
тьмутаракань: the back of beyond, the middle of nowhere, the underdeveloped depths of the country
tjmʊtərəˈkanj

Japanese
いただきます: a phrase to start a meal with gratitude to all: from cooks and farmers to lives to be eaten
itadakimasu

Swedish
mångata: a roadlike reflection of the moon in the water
moːnɡɑːta

Urdu
goya: a contemplative “as-if” which nonetheless feels like reality
goya

 

Elsewhere, in Swahili, there is the word kazuri, which means something small and beautiful (and is the name a bead company), and bado, which means no, but with shades of "not yet, but later." Eight years ago, a group of 1,000 linguists decided that a Tshiluba word (a Bantu language located in southeastern Congo) is the most untranslatable: ilunga, which means " a person who is ready to forgive any abuse the first time, to tolerate it the second time, but never a third time."

And Vladimir Nabokov might also want to nominate the Russian word toska to the list, which he wrote about in the commentary to his translation of Pushkin's novel-in-verse, Eugene Onegin.

No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.

 

Thanks for the TED link to Jacob C., whose music you should be exploring right now. (For free! Also, for joy!)

BOOK REVIEW: Finder: Voice by Carla Speed McNeil

I loved the first volume of the Carla Speed McNeil's Finder series, but that omnibus is remarkably different than Voice, the trim edition that won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize this past May for best graphic novel. The Finder Library: Volume 1 opens with "Sin-Eater" and ends in the revered "Talisman," offering a reading experience imbued with the unintuitive realism that comes from never fully understanding what you see in an expansive story. But, while it comes later in the chronology of the series, it is Voice that is sometimes proffered as the preferred entry point to the story.

Volume 1 is decidedly an ensemble narrative, and a sprawling one at that. But Voice focuses on a single character: Rachel Grosvenor, the eldest daughter in a mixed-clan family who we encounter as she is preparing for a sort of beauty pageant ritual that serves as the competitive initiation to the exclusive Llaverac clan. Rachel needs to win because, in the strange world of Finder, individuals without clans -- culls -- find it much more difficult to survive. They are essentially considered non-entities. Her little sister Marcie doesn't stand a chance to "conform" to any clan, and this is Rachel's best hope for securing a future for the both of them. Or at least, that's what Rachel believes. (Her brother, Lynne, appears quite capable of taking care of himself.)

But a particular heirloom that is critical for Rachel's chances of winning clan acceptance is stolen. That -- and Rachel's deeper search for, well, something that is embodied by Jaeger, the finder who has a ghostlike presence on these pages -- propels the young woman on a dreamlike venture through the underbelly of the domed city-state of Anvard, rich in both secrets and misfits. As Rachel negotiates the outskirts of Anvard, Voice becomes an immersive riot of contradictions and synchronicities: McNeil visually evokes Rachel's dissonant journey to both conformation and outsider-hood with an astonishing range of facial expressions. Rachel reacts; she provokes; she holds hands with the reader and guides her through a story that might feel aimless if she herself weren't such a disarming and fascinating character. Indeed, many of the panels in this book are, literally, obscured. 

McNeil shifts between humor and the grotesque with unnerving dexterity. She plays with our expectations of gender. Class reigns heavily on the story. McNeil collects myth and futuristic technology, and collides them together in a way that dis-locates the reader. Actually, this technique reminded me of the film "Napoleon Dynamite," which communicates contradictory signals about what year, even what decade, it is set in. So too does Voice challenge the reader's instinct to "settle" herself in expectations of an ancient story, or a futuristic one. This dislocation amplifies each detail in the story -- the skull make-up of the dancing Ascian clan, the ball-gown and monocle worn by the Llaverac "queen", the Latin evocation circling the seal that hangs above the bed of a dying leader, the little flying cameras that halo Lynne and reveal what he is and isn't paying attention to, the symbol that eventually rings Rachel's neck. In this conflicting world, no thing goes unquestioned. The reader is wide-eyed and alert.

Rachel does a lot of narration in Voice. (So does McNeil: her famed endnotes give the feel of reading the book with her in the room, making clever jokes and clarifying commentary the whole way through.) Rachel tells stories to unseen characters over the phone line opened simply by holding her hand to her face, her fingers spread between ear and mouth.

But what is striking about Voice is that it doesn't merely carry us through a story where Rachel's empowerment and self-actualization comes through "finding her voice." That is there, but equally powerful for Rachel is the discovery of silence: what she knows and chooses not to say. As Rachel says late in the book, after explaining how, typically, "I talk and I talk and I talk" in a rambling attempt to be wholly honest, understood, and without artifice: "What I mean is that I got what I wanted by shutting up." The doubleness of speaking and silence is also evident in the juxtaposition on the cover: the gesture of hush set against the word "Voice."

Voice and silence become Rachel's two greatest spells. But they are never easy. Uncertainty does not vanish. But the act of seeking is its own power.

Kick It With The Boston Review

During my East Coast traveling earlier this month, I had lunch with Dan Pritchard (pictured above, and the original interviewee on Isak). He works with the Boston Review and tipped me to the magazine's plans to Kickstart an overhaul of their website. Particularly intriguing is that the magazine lined up advance pledges from leading poets to give the campaign a strong start. While The Boston Review is probably best known for its news features, philosophically-tinged forums, global dispatches, and investigative pieces, the magazine is increasingly acclaimed for its fiction and poetry. (Unlike some magazines -- ahem, The Atlantic -- BR hasn't siloed literature and journalism.) Junot Diaz edits fiction for the magazine, which published the story that won NoViolet Bulawayo a Caine Prize last year, and the Discovery poetry contest is a Pretty Big Deal, to say nothing of the solid essays on poetry that BR regularly publishes.

Poets came up big for the Boston Review's next bold move: it has more than half of its $10,000 goal raised with 22 days to go. The campaign caught the eye of the Columbia Journalism Review. Whether you're a poet or not, you might want to pitch in. Here is why, according to the magazine's editorial team:

The decision to provide all of our content on the Web for free is driven by our mission. To improve the tone of public debate, we need to make our content available as widely as possible. Through the Web, we’re able to reach many, many more people than we would in print alone.

In 2010, as part of a major relaunch of the magazine, we decided to fundamentally redesign our Web site. We also moved to a gorgeous new print edition and expanded our editorial staff. The print transition has been a great success; our new Web design is not yet complete.

To achieve our aims, we need to do more than simply make content available on the internet. We need a community. But to build a community online, we need a modern web site that can become a place for our readers to really engage, both with the ideas under scrutiny and with each other.

With this new Web site, we’ll be able to publish more feature essays, reviews, literature, and forums on a regular basis. You’ll be able to navigate the site more easily, find the content that most interests you, and find other readers who share similar concerns. All of this will remain, always, completely free.

Speaking: Ran Ortner

 

"The process is chastening. You have to confront the vast well of loneliness. Another thing I found in my reading was something da Vinci said: that if you're with another person, you're only half of who you are. You're not truly yourself unless you're alone. Jesus goes to the wilderness. Buddha sits under the Bodhi tree. Mohammed goes to the mountain. It's only in solitary moments that your social mask can drop away. You have the opportunity to be all-important, because you are all that is. Your consciousness is the beginning and end. You really are the kingdom of God at that point.

{...}

Art is not a skill contest, nor an innovation contest. Art is an honesty contest. If we can be precisely who we are, in the most intimate and candid and courageous way, we will start to connect to the universal. Our job as artists is to become powerfully personal in our work, and if we touch the source, the most central wound, the deepest of wells, then we actually touch the universal. In the compression of the intensely personal, heat is generated, and at a certain point it becomes expansive."

 

~ Ran Ortner, interviewed in the June 2011 issue of The Sun magazine

 

Ran Ortner is a painter who creates grand-scale canvases of the ocean. He was born near the coast in California and grew up in rural Alaska. He was the first winner of the ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, Michigan, an annual open contest that awards the artist who receives the most public votes with the richest cash prize in the art world. (The next round begins in September.) Ortner, a longtime surfer, now lives in Brooklyn, working from a warehouse in Williamsburg.

 

Image Credit: Xavier Guardians

Everlasting Tucks

 

This is the Tuck family, minus one -- the eldest son, Addison. Maria is the one with long hair in the middle, the third oldest of seven, and the one who died suddenly this week at age seventeen. (Here is a bit more about her.) The others are Andrea, Patrick, Elaina, Rebecca, and Jacob. The family lives at a retreat center in Petoskey, Michigan, where parents Juli and Bryan Tuck are caretakers.

The Maria Rose Tuck Memorial Fund has been established to help the family pay for Maria's funeral and burial. Perhaps you'd like to contribute: it would certainly mean a great deal. If you are moved to help the Tucks out, but don't happen to live in northern Michigan where donations are being delivered to the host credit union, I will send you details about how to connect. Please let me know: annaleighclark-at-gmail-dot-com.

Swing State Stories

Perhaps you have heard of the Craig Fahle Party, which has made an unexpected late-breaking entrance into the political season. Emerging out of Detroit behind a public radio host who champions civility, the party has democratized itself enough to broadcast the advice it receives from political consultants, and has put its campaign song and mascot up for a public vote—which is how the party wound up being represented by the Coney Dog (“Michigan’s bi-partisan food”).

Doesn’t ring a bell? You needn’t worry. This venture from The Craig Fahle Show on WDET is a tongue-and-cheek way for Detroit’s NPR station to bring a light touch to the political news that it has become known for covering with uncommon rationality.

That's the opening of my latest piece for the Columbia Journalism Review: a profile of "The Craig Fahle Show" on WDET 101.9, Detroit's NPR station. In just a few years, the show has established itself as the driver of political discourse in the region, and beyond: WDET is one of few public radio stations that operates on a commercial frequency. At 48,000 watts, show has listeners way down in Toledo and southern Ontario. Fun story: WDET was originally WUAW, the radio outlet of the United Auto Workers. About five decades ago, the station was sold to Wayne State University in Detroit for $1. And public radio on the commercial waves was born.

The Craig Fahle story is, of course, part of my continuing scrutiny of political media for the Columbia Journalism Review. Earlier this month, I wrote about the weird void in the onslaught of stories about a popular Republican congressman's abrupt administrative flame-out.

Poem for Maria Rose

 

My sweet seventeen-year-old cousin died unexpectedly last night. I'm still in shock about it, but all the same, I want to tell you that this bright-eyed girl from the north country was smart and attentive, patient and funny, a softball pitcher and a break wall diver. She was in the middle of a large and lively family, but she gathered about her a sort of profound quiet presence that, in her absence, feels like a vacuum.

Sometimes I get frustrated with people whose only use for poetry is at weddings, funerals, and graduation days. That "occasional" use of the art seems to come with an amount of opportunism, and also rarefies poetry into something colder than it is, something that won't fit into our everyday hours. And yet, when I am thinking more generously, I understand that poetry, even for the skeptics, emerges time and again as the song to help us make our greatest crossings.

Here is a poem for the crossing of Maria Rose Tuck. There may be more.

 

Dirge Without Music
By Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.  Crowned

With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone.  They are gone to feed the roses.  Elegant and curled
Is the blossom.  Fragrant is the blossom.  I know.  But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know.  But I do not approve.  And I am not resigned.

 

Alice Walker Refuses Hebrew Translation of The Color Purple

It is no secret that author Alice Walker has long been a pro-Palestinian activist, and quite critical of Israel's politics. She was part of the "freedom flotilla" that attempted to sail to Gaza last year, and wrote about why. It is nonetheless surprising to learn that she has refused the translation of The Color Purple into Hebrew. The 1983 novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award; my review of it is one of the most popular posts here on Isak (which probably has something to do with latter-day English homework).

Haaretz reports that Walker wrote in a June 9 letter to Yediot Books, an imprint of the daily Yediot Achronot newspaper, that she would not permit them to publish a Hebrew rendition of her novel because “Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories.” She added, in the letter:

I would so like knowing my books are read by the people of your country, especially by the young, and by the brave Israeli activists (Jewish and Palestinian) for justice and peace I have had the joy of working beside. I am hopeful that one day, maybe soon, this may happen. But now is not the time.

... We must continue to work on the issue, and to wait. In faith that a just future can be fashioned from small acts.

The letter was posted Sunday on the website of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. Importantly, Haaretz notes that it is not clear, ”when Yediot Books, an imprint of the daily Yediot Achronot newspaper, made the request, or whether Walker could in fact stop translation of the book. At least one version of the book has already appeared in Hebrew translation, in the 1980s."

I appreciate that Walker is trying to abide by her conscience, and that as an artist, her use of her work is one of the most powerful ways for her to agitate for social change. Goodness knows that this refusal is generating global headlines, offering a new opportunity to make a case for this cause and model nonviolent resistance.

And yet: it is the access and visibility of art that provokes empathy, inspires vision, and disrupts our expectations for living in the world. Censorship -- self-imposed or otherwise -- necessarily denies that power. The headlines about Walker's refusal are an attention-getter -- for now -- but having The Color Purple available to Hebrew readers will be a deeper, longer-lasting contribution to the confrontation and reconciliation that Walker is agitating for in Israel and Palestine. I wish Walker would have greater faith in her own art.

On UVA and the Risk of Humanities at Public Universities

Despite profound backlash on campus and beyond, the abrupt firing of University of Virginia Teresa Sullivan is final. In her stead, Carl Zeithaml has been named interim president after an 11-hour meeting by the Board of Visitors (which is in turn led by the rector who is a hedge fund manager and negotiated behind the scenes for Sullivan's removal). Zeithaml's specialty, it appears, is "strategic management." While the university was egregiously quiet about their reasons for firing Sullivan, who held the post for two years, it now appears they were concerned that she was not bold in her vision and did not sufficiently handle the public university with the efficiency of a business.

From Slate:

In the 19^th century, robber barons started their own private universities when they were not satisfied with those already available. But Leland Stanford never assumed his university should be run like his railroad empire. Andrew Carnegie did not design his institute in Pittsburgh to resemble his steel company. The University of Chicago, John D. Rockefeller’s dream come true, assumed neither his stern Baptist values nor his monopolistic strategies. That’s because for all their faults, Stanford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller knew what they didn’t know.

In the 21^st century, robber barons try to usurp control of established public universities to impose their will via comical management jargon and massive application of ego and hubris. At least that’s what’s been happening at one of the oldest public universities in the United States—Thomas Jefferson’s dream come true, the University of Virginia.

From the Washington Post:

The campaign to remove Sullivan began around October, the sources said. The (group brought together by the UVA rector) coalesced around a consensus that Sullivan was moving too slowly. Besides broad philosophical differences, they had at least one specific quibble: They felt Sullivan lacked the mettle to trim or shut down programs that couldn’t sustain themselves financially, such as obscure (sic) academic departments in classics and German.

Sullivan herself kept quiet even as outrage built around her removal. But she did ask to speak to the Board recently. Her statement to them is available here. She said:

I have been described as an incrementalist. It is true. Sweeping action may be gratifying and may create the aura of strong leadership, but its unintended consequences may lead to costs that are too high to bear. There has been substantial change on Grounds in the past two years, and this change is laying the groundwork for greater change. But it has all been carefully planned and executed in collaboration with Vice Presidents and Deans and representatives of the faculty. This is the best, most constructive, most long lasting, and benefic al way to change a university. Until the last ten days, the change at UVA has not been disruptive change, and it has not been high-risk change.

Corporate-style, top-down leadership does not work in a great university. Sustained change with buy-in does work. UVA is one of the world's greatest universities.

I can't believe UVA hasn't backed down from its ill-considered decision. There seems to be only one lonely note of dissent: the interim president was approved by a vote of 12-1. It is alarming to see the ongoing creep of business management strategies on more and more corners of our culture. To be sure, these strategies aren't inherently evil, but institutions grounded in public life, like universities, are bound by a commitment to serving a diverse citizenry and cultivating practices that have minimal space in a market-driven society: that is, their motives, worth, and therefore their structure, are different than your standard corporation. The UVA story illustrates the weird idea that there is only one worthwhile way of running an institution, discarding other practices of conflict management and democratic leadership. Also, as the Slate piece put it:

At some point in recent American history, we started assuming that if people are rich enough, they must be experts in all things. That’s why we trust Mark Zuckerberg to save Newark schools and Bill Gates to rid the world of malaria. Expertise is so 20th century.

I'm also alarmed by the reports that university departments are being measured by their ability to generate money.. It is not surprising that humanities departments -- classics, German, comparative literature -- are at risk.

I studied art history and creative writing/literature at another major public university, the University of Michigan. I get that it is a less obvious or "practical" career path. Here is the usual conversation I had when people asked what I was majoring in.

"What are you majoring in?"

"Art history and creative writing and literature."

"Will you teach?"

"No, I will write."

(skeptical raise of eyebrows) "Well, good luck with that. You know, I hear there's good money in writing speeches for politicians. And that J.K. Rowling did pretty well for herself. You should write a book like that!"

"Okay."

Concentrations in the humanities don't launch you in an obvious direction. It is unclear who will pay you to know the things you learn, or to think in the wide-open way you've trained your mind to work. With the burden of student loans, this is a big deal. I get that. But while its vocational path is foggy, it is a real path nonetheless. There wasn't a clear flowchart guiding my adult life -- first this step, then this step -- and now, as a self-employed writer, there is a measure of uncertainty haunting every single day of my working life. My whole life is questions, and not just because I'm a reporter. Personally and professionally, studying the humanities has been critical in making it possible, practically, to live a life that I really love, and to offer a contribution to this world that I believe is meaningful.

Said Sullivan in her statement:

Nor can we always predict which kind of knowledge will be of greatest import in the future. Before September 11, few of us understood just how important Arabic and other Middle Eastern and Central Asian languages would become — to our students, to the nation, and to national security. Suppose we had eliminated some of those languages because of low enrollment or other fiscal considerations before 2001. We would be scrambling to recreate them now.

I spoke to art history seniors at University of Michigan recently about how engaging deeply in that small and lively department contributed to my life as a journalist. I had a lot to say (some of which can be found here). A lot of it was slippery stuff about the ability to observe, about joy, about context and color. I also talked about the value of studying history and world culture through art: how a sculpture can come out of 1880s France, or 1910s Ghana, or Greece in fifth century B.C. -- and nowhere else. It is the particularities of a place and time that makes precious both the fact and the aesthetics of these objects.

The value of my classes in, say, African diaspora art and German Romantic art is literally unmeasurable. But it is still real. Their impact is profound and concrete.

One of my peeves these days is newbie journalists (or any journalists) believing that what we do is all about craft: it's all witty words and dramatic ledes, with a healthy dose of multimedia skills. A lot of them lock themselves in a box, mining only the familiar world: their stories are often limited to pop culture and their own life.

In fact, journalists need to know things. There needs to be substance behind our craft. (Dana Goldstein, who specializes in education reporting, has written wisely about this before.) For those of us lucky enough to find our vocation in storytelling, serving as a pivot point for how others understand the world -- this matters so much.

 

UPDATE #1: UVA has just seen the first of what I expect will be many faculty resignations.

UPDATE #2: Wowza: now the university's vice-rector has resigned. Also, let's hand it to the College Republicans: "...the U.Va. College Republicans released a letter they sent to McDonnell asking him to address the issue 'in-depth' and seek increased transparency and communication between the board of visitors and UVA community."