Samir Chopra's Blog, page 66

Alan Dershowitz: A Hypocrite Grows In Brooklyn

Alan Dershowitz has long perfected the art of throwing a toddler’s tantrum  – especially in his fulminations against the academic freedom that his fellow academics and he himself enjoys. Last year, when Omar Barghouti and Judith Butler spoke at a BDS-themed event at Brooklyn College,  our esteemed academic hygienist threw a particularly epic fit. He held his breath till he turned blue, he wailed, he screamed, he kicked and flailed, he gnashed his teeth, he threatened alternately to call mommy and papa. He demanded that the speakers be ‘balanced’ by opposing counterpoints; he insisted that inviting one speaker, without inviting his or her intellectual and political antithesis, was an act of gross intellectual dishonesty. To use a pair of particularly appropriate Australianisms, he spat the dummy and threw his toys out of the pram. (My apologies to all the little ones who do so much else that justifiably provokes affection and care from us; they are more far more interesting and diverse and I daresay, nuanced, in their personalities.)  A Harvard Law professor was rapidly transformed into something far more undignified: all unsatisfied Id, no Ego, no Superego.

Long-time observers of this torture-advocating, plagiarizing, walking embarrassment to Harvard Law School–whose batting average these days has been particularly stratospheric thanks to the diligent efforts of Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz–thought they immediately detected a certain sadness, a hurt, manifested in this spectacular display of an underdeveloped psyche. Why, oh why, hadn’t Dershowitz’s alma mater, Brooklyn College, or anyone associated with it, invited him to speak at Brooklyn College? Why this rejection of its son? Why this turning away from the door? Indeed, Dershowitz himself said as much, expressing a febrile mix of disappointment and rage in his queries into the lack of a standing invitation from the Political Science department to come speak to their students – and to allow their students to see, at first-hand, how an expensive education and an Ivy League professorship are no guarantee of even a modicum of intelligence or reasoning ability.

The Greeks–or perhaps it was someone else–might have thought the gods pay no attention to our piteous bleating about our misfortunes. But such is not the case with Brooklyn College and Dershowitz. For an invitation was extended to him by a student group–the Brooklyn College Israel Club–to speak here, and so he did this past week. His talk was sponsored by four departments–including Political Science, the department that bore the brunt of his tirades the last time, and mine, Philosophy. (I voted in favor of the sponsorship decision.)

Dershowitz spoke at Brooklyn College and talked about the need for ‘nuance’, for the need for ‘balance’ in campus discussions of the Israel-Palestine conflict; he criticized departments that sponsored events like the ones that so infuriated him last year. He did so alone. His only companion on stage was an empty chair. (There is no indication of whether Dershowitz pulled a Clint Eastwood.) There were no speakers to provide ‘balance’ – like say, Norman Finkelstein, who once said that Dershowitz’s books were not good enough to be used as schmattas, rags to clean windows with.

To paraphrase Nietzsche ever so slightly, “A man far oftener appears to have a decided character from persistently following his temperament than from persistently following his [professed] principles.”

The ‘Trivial’ Roots Of Resentment

Some three decades ago, I went to buy tickets for a major sports event. I was a teenager, eager to see top-class athletes in action; I woke early, caught a bus to the ticket box-office and joined the long queues that had already formed by the time I arrived. The lines grew and grew; tickets were sold slowly and inefficiently; the pushing and shoving began. There were policemen in charge of this mass of disorderly humanity; they decided to restore order by a series of pushes and shoves of their own.

I complied with orders: I moved, keeping my position in the queue. But clearly, I had not moved quickly enough. Suddenly, I received a hard blow to the back of my head. Stunned, my head spinning, I looked around to see what had happened. A policeman stood there, glaring at me, “What are you looking at! Move!” (This translated version sounds considerably milder than the original.) He was bigger than me; he carried a hefty baton that I knew could easily crack my skull open.

I moved.

I hadn’t done anything wrong as far as I could tell; I had complied with instructions; I had been in the wrong time and in the wrong place, in the firing line for an officer of the law, one easily inclined to descend to violence when things didn’t go right, when his easily exhausted patience ran out.  In the space of a few seconds, I had been physically chastised and humiliated; I had been put in my place; I had been reminded I had very little power when it came to confronting these guardians of the peace.

So I smarted and glowered and fumed. For days and weeks and afterwards, every policeman I saw reminded me of that day when I had been abruptly slapped upside the head and told to get my ass in gear. Later, in my university days, I heard a story of how a policeman had made the mistake of harassing two young men–out for a late night smoke and a stroll–who had decided to fight back. He didn’t have backup, and he had thought he could simply bully them the way he usually bullied his usual victims: the homeless, the initerant poor, the cabdrivers on a night-shift. They had grabbed his baton, thrown it away, and then delivered a series of quick blows to his head before running way into the night. When I heard this tale, I grinned and snickered. “Fuck that motherfucker. Serves him right. That’ll teach him a fucking lesson. He’ll think twice before he messed with some kids again.”

I was not a juvenile delinquent. I was not someone was repeatedly accosted by the police (though I had several more edgy encounters with them in my university days, all of them reminders of their ability to swiftly, crudely, bring blunt power to bear.) So I often wonder: if I could, thanks to one violent and disempowering encounter with the police, a humiliating and reductive one, develop such a chip on my shoulder, just how angry and resentful would someone get if such interactions were a daily or weekly occurrence?

I know, I know. I should have moved on. I should have brushed off that chip. I should have matured. But I wasn’t old enough to know better.  And again, I know, that the cop who got beaten by those youngsters probably cracked down a little harder the next time he saw a couple of ‘punks’, and made sure he took some buddies with him to crack heads.

But pushing folks around, rendering them weak and vulnerable, reminding their of their helplessness in the face of those who enjoy a monopoly on coercion and the exercise of state power remains a deadly recipe for the generation of resentment and anger.

The Greek Alphabet: Making The Strange Familiar

In his review of Patrick Leigh Fermor‘s The Broken Road: From The Iron Gates to Mount Athos (eds. Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper, New York Review Books, 2014) Daniel Mendelsohn writes:

His deep affection and admiration for the Greeks are reflected in particularly colorful and suggestive writing. There is a passage in Mani in which the letters of the Greek alphabet become characters in a little drama meant to suggest the intensity of that people’s passion for disputation:

I often have the impression, listening to a Greek argument, that I can actually see the words spin from their mouths like the long balloons in comic strips…:the perverse triple loop of Xi, the twin concavity of Omega,…Phi like a circle transfixed by a spear…. At its climax it is as though these complex shapes were flying from the speaker’s mouth like flung furniture and household goods, from the upper window of a house on fire.

I first encountered Greek letters, like most schoolchildren, in my mathematics and physics and chemistry classes. There was π, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter; ω, the frequency of a harmonic oscillator and later, infinity in set theory; λ, the wavelength of light; θ, ubiquitous in trigonometry; Ψ, the wave function of quantum mechanics; Σ, the summation of arithmetic and geometric series; a whole zoo used to house the esoteric menagerie of subatomic particles; and many, many more. The Greek alphabet was the lens through which the worlds of science and mathematics became visible to me; it provided symbols for the abstract and the concrete, for the infinitely small and the infinitely large.

I never learned to read in Greek but the Greek alphabet feels intimately familiar to me. Perhaps the most familiar after English.

I first saw Greek texts in the best possible way: Greek versions of Aristotle and Plato in my graduate school library, intended for use by those who specialized in ancient philosophy. (These texts were in classical Greek.) I took down the small volumes from the shelf and opened their pages and looked at the text. It was incomprehensible and yet, recognizable. I could see all the letters, those old friends of mine: the α and the β used to denote the atoms of a language for propositional logic, the Γ of the generalized factorial function, the Δ of differences; they were all there. But now they were pressed into different duties.

Now, they spoke of ethics and metaphysics and politics, of generation and corruption; their forms spoke of the Forms. Now they were used to construct elaborate philosophical systems and arguments. But even as they did so, I could not help feeling, as I looked at the pages and pages of words constructed out of those particles, that I was looking at the most abstruse and elaborate mathematical text of all. It was all unknown quantities, an endless series of fantastically complex mathematical expressions, one following the other, carrying on without end. Yes, it was all Greek to me.  And yet, I still felt at home.

A Small Remembrance

Over the weekend, I lost a friend to cancer. It was a rare, aggressive varietal, one that claimed her life all too soon. She was diagnosed in November last year, underwent surgery and adjuvant chemotherapy, but the onward march of the malignant tumors within her could not be halted, and so finally, this past Sunday, in the company of her loved ones, she breathed her last.  A few days before, I had understood that she had, to use the language which is so dreaded in cancer treatment, ‘gone terminal’ but I still expected her to be around for a few months at least. But on that fateful morning, when I awoke from a disturbed sleep, made some coffee and sat down at my computer to check my mail, I read the dreaded news: matters had taken a fatal turn, and she was no more.

I had come to know about her illness in January, and after spending a few weeks trying to set up a Skype meeting–the fifteen hour time difference with Australia considerably complicated matters–we finally spoke in March.  She looked well; there was no hair loss, even though she had lost some weight. Her spirits were high; though her cancer was a deadly one, certain features of her particular case had given her doctor and her hope. My wife tried to join the conversation but our toddler daughter was insistent and demanding and distracting, so she dropped in, said ‘hi’ and promised to write an email to say more. (She did.) We bade each other farewell, with a promise that we’d try to talk again sometime soon.  That never came to be.

My friend was an academic, an accomplished psychologist, who wrote acutely and sensitively on–among other things–emotions, narcissism, and psychoanalytic theory; she was a polymath who could talk comfortably about art, literature, and poetry; she practiced yoga well enough to be a teacher; she made ceramic pieces which bore the imprint of her distinctive style; she was a connoisseur of good food and wine; she was a loving partner and mother.  She lived far away from me, but when we met it always was as if the years would roll away. She gave good hugs, she was interested in what I had to say, and she was unfailingly kind and encouraging. She was, to drag out that dreaded cliché, one of those that prove the bitter truth that only the good die young. There was nothing she could have done to prevent the cancer; it is rare, not hereditary, and has no known causes or indications in physical predispositions. She was, in a word that expresses our ignorance of this terrible world’s secret workings the most acutely, unlucky. As were all of those who loved her and cared for her.

All the verbal consolations I send to her partner and her daughter are of scant comfort; their grief is immense, their loss irreplaceable, and I can only offer bromides from a distance. Her death makes this world into a colder and crueller place. But she lived a good life, and she made those she met and worked with and made a home with happier. Those are not insignificant blessings. May her spirit live on.

Of Broken Windows And Broken Spines

It was a dark and stormy night. But I was not swayed by the forces and the voices that commanded me to turn back from this lonely road I had set out on. For I was righteous, and I knew I was on the right path. Yea, for even though I was midway through life’s journey and in dark woods, I had not lost the right road. I was headed for the mountaintop, where my appointment with fate lay waiting. With head bowed, infected by a spirit of appropriate and comely humility, I pressed on. Far greater rewards than any this material world could promise me would soon be mine.

Soon, the moment was at hand. There was no need for incantations, no call to burn incense or fall on my knees. I had made the journey; I was here; my presence was adequate testimony to my standing as deserved recipient for the revelations that would follow as sure as night follows day.

And then the voice was heard, its sonorous, majestic tones momentarily hushing the peals of thunder that periodically threatened to split the firmament apart:

Speak, my child! I am your deity tonight. Your perplexities are for me to resolve; your darkness is for me to dispel. Speak!

I could not help myself. I fell to my knees, even as I knew that such obeisance was hopelessly old-fashioned, a holdover only required by the archaic gods and not by these egalitarians. When I had composed myself and dared to look up, I spoke, my voice trembling:

I am perplexed my Lord, by the violence that perpetually stalks my land. I am mystified by this scourge that claims the lives of men, women, and children, that turns us into killers and victims, into widows and orphans. How may we be freed from its clammy clutches? How may we reduce its toll? How may we bring the mourning and wailing to an end?

The voice spoke again, calm and measured, even as I thought I detected some thinly disguised impatience coursing through its tones:

You come to me with a seemingly perennial mystery, my child, which is only intractable insofar as you refuse to penetrate to its transparent and accessible core, its clear and limpid solution.

The voice spoke in riddles. What could it mean?  Only an arrogant disciple would ask for a revelation to be repeated and clarified. But I was at my wit’s end. The toll was too great to bear; we could not be pallbearers at funerals any more. I spoke up, trembling with fear.

My Lord, I am foolish and dense, my mind is addled. What is this great simplicity you speak of? Why are we not privy to it as you are?

There was a momentary silence. And then, again, that familiar aural benediction:

My child, the mystery is not great. You must only learn to grieve for broken spines as much as you do for broken windows.

And with that, the voice was gone.

 

Women In Philosophy And Reconceptualizing Philosophical Method

This past Monday, on 20th April, Christia Mercer, the Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, delivered the Philosophy Department’s annual Sprague and Taylor lecture at Brooklyn College. The title of her talk was ‘How Women Changed The Course of Philosophy’. Here is the abstract:

The story we tell about the development of early modern philosophy was invented by German Neo-Kantians about 150 years ago. Created to justify its proponents’ version of philosophy, it is a story that ignores the complications of seventeenth-century philosophy and its sources. In this lecture, Professor Christia Mercer uncovers the real story behind early modern rationalism and shows that many of its most original components have roots in the philosophical contributions made by women. [link added]

At one point during the talk, in referring to the contributions made by Julian of Norwich, Professor Mercer began by saying, “Julian does not offer an argument here, but rather an analysis…”. During the question and answer session, focusing on this remark, I offered some brief comments.

There is at the heart of philosophical practice, a fairly well-established and canonical notion of philosophical method: the construction of arguments, hopefully building up to a ‘system’, which are to be subjected to an examination for weaknesses. The successful arguments emerge from this crucible all the better for their trials. From this conception of philosophical method we may also derive a fundamentally adversarial conception of philosophical activity–when two philosophers meet, they are engaged in a form of intellectual conflict, with each attempting shore up the defenses of their own system and expose the deficits of the other. But perhaps philosophers could do more than just offer and refute arguments. Perhaps they could offer observations and insights that make us view the world in a different light; perhaps they could show how one thing relates to another; perhaps they could analyze a situation or a state of affairs, not in the destructive, decompositional sense, but instead, by way of showing us what has to come together, and how, to make the situation ‘hang together'; perhaps, as Wittgenstein is said to have done, they could ‘point’ and ‘lay things out for us to see.’

If understood in this way, then the business of ‘bringing more women into philosophy’ might not be just a matter of reaching out to women to ‘pull’ them in, but also of expanding our understanding of what philosophy is and how it is to be done so that its ambit will include women and the ways in which they might have been philosophers. (I could imagine, all too easily, responses along the following lines being made to some of Professor Mercer’s examples of philosophical work in the period she was discussing: Why is this philosophy? The reasons for the exclusion of women from philosophy would not just be the denial of educational opportunity or participation in philosophical institutions  but also a straightforward failure to recognize their intellectual contributions as being philosophy in the first place.) Such an understanding of philosophy and its methods and practices would, of course, bring it closer to literature and poetry as well.

Professor Mercer seemed to respond rather favorably to these remarks. I look forward to her forthcoming book on Anne Conway, in which some of the fascinating commentary she offered on reconceptualizing so-called ‘early modern rationalism’–by way of showing its dependence on bodily experience and affect–will surely be recapitulated.

On First And Second Languages V – Nabokov’s Lament

In his famous Afterword to Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov closed with:

My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammelled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses–the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions–which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.

In a post paying tribute a scholarly friend of mine, a close and careful reader of the books he owned and an exacting writer to boot, I had written:

Even more impressive was his attention to elegance and conciseness in both his verbal and mathematical expression; we co-authored a journal paper together and I was–for lack of a better word–blown away by his insistence on getting our written and technical formulations just right. No superfluous words, no bloated definitions, no vague sentences were to be tolerated.

My friend’s writing did not lack flair either, and so I once complimented him on his style. He accepted the praise reluctantly, issuing a lament similar to that of Nabokov’s: He was a native French speaker and writer, and he was painfully aware, as he wrote in English, that he was not writing as well as he could have in French. His distinctive style, his skillful deployment of the resources of the French language were simply not available to him.

I’m bilingual too, but only in a fashion, and so I do not experience the kind of regrets expressed above. As I have noted here on previous occasions, I do not read and write Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani–my supposed first language(s)–with anywhere near the same facility as I do English, my actual first language. Indeed, I do not read or write in Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani at all. I could, but slowly and painfully. And so I don’t. I had intended to read three novels in Hindi by the great Indian novelist Premchand–which I own–to ameliorate this state of affairs (and to evaluate the quality of their translations into English), but they are still sitting on my shelf, unread. I know a struggle awaits me when I open their pages; avoidance seems like a rather perspicuous strategy. (I suspect my reading abilities would trend upward on a sharper slope than my writing in Hindi et al., which was always hopeless.) I am well aware, when I write in English, that this is my chosen medium and vehicle of expression; it is the only one I have.

I say this even as I revel in my bilingual abilities when it comes to the spoken word. I enjoy dipping back into the stores of Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani/Punjabi idioms and expressions when I speak with other speakers of these languages. There are some pungent descriptions of this lunatic world’s state of affairs that I only find available in those linguistic frameworks. And when I do use them, I’m struck, as always, by how the mere utterance of a sentence or two can instantly transport me to a distinctive place and time.

Of Cricket Fans And Memoirs

Last week, I sent in the draft manuscript for my next book–“a memoirish examination of the politics of cricket fandom”–to the editors at Temple University Press. The book, whose description, not title, I have indicated above, will now be reviewed, revised and then finally rolled off the presses as part of the series Sporting, edited by Amy Bass of the College of New Rochelle. By way of providing an introduction to the book, I’ve taken the liberty of excerpting–what else–the book’s introduction below.

Introduction

This is an autobiographical book by a voluntary exile, an immigrant. My cohort is famously supposed to suffer from dissociative identity disorder, “the presence of two or more distinct identities…with at least two of these…recurrently taking control of the person’s behavior.” Inconsistency and flirtations with incoherence have thus been an inevitable feature of my being; I carry within me many unresolved tensions. Migrants tell stories of travel, of transformation both external and internal; this is mine. It marks and documents changes—political, emotional, and perhaps moral too.

I have chosen to tell this tale through cricket: a story about that game’s presence in my life, and how my response to its offerings—sporting, aesthetic, and political—reflected my changing perceptions of myself, and the nations and cultures, those by birth and those adopted, that I called my own. As I grew and was displaced, spatially and psychically, my understanding of the activities of men in white changed. I understood their doings differently; I fitted them into alternate templates of understanding. Most broadly then, this book details the transformation in my thoughts about the cricketing world, its cricketers, its fans, and its peoples. To chart these changes is to contribute to a larger history of how those who leave home and live elsewhere devise identities for themselves.

Why tell such a story of personal change through an autobiographical recounting of the following of ‘a mere game’? Cricket has obsessed and moved me since I was a child; it has remained an invariant, an immovable fixture; it has intersected with every person and event in my life in some fashion. It thus offers an exceedingly good lens through which to conduct an examination, admittedly and unavoidably partial, of myself. Cricket was not a domain in which I found myself transcending politics, a zone of dispassionate, detached, and impartial contemplation. Rather, it allowed for the vociferous expression of my political—and thus personal—sentiments, whether by something as overt as a written opinion on a blog, or as covert as the emotions that surged through me when I saw a scoreboard or a telecast of a game played far away.

So this story is a public accounting of personal change. I went from being a misautogenic Indian, the archetypal diminished post-colonial who took perverse pleasure in the thrashing of the Indian cricket team by its opponents, to becoming a fan of the Indian team, basking in its reflected glory as it embellished a homeward-bound look mounted from my adopted homes and cultures and made its activities the one domain in which I could feel and want to be Indian, and finally, ambiguously, someone with an indeterminate sense of nationality. Such descriptions do not do justice to the complexity of my life’s stations. Writing this book may clarify them for myself and possibly others too.

Like others who attempt to write memoirs, I’m struck by the intractability of this task. It is hard to tell a coherent story about yourself for public consumption. By our actions and our pronouncements we spin one outwardly directed version of our autobiographies; their incompleteness is palpably felt by, and is visible to, their subjects. We are aware we have kept a great deal, the proverbial ninety-percent, artfully concealed. So making this story’s central character more comprehensible, by greater confessional revelation or forensic investigation, is not straightforward. We have forgotten a great deal; we often remember incorrectly; we subject our autobiographies to persistent ongoing revision; we are good at suppressing and embellishing their details—where the devil supposedly lurks. (Though, like all immigrants, I remember the life left behind with greater clarity than the new one I constructed on distant shores.) In an attempt to make more palatable the unvarnished truth, we introduce incoherence; we might construct a too-sanitized picture of ourselves, struck by timidity at the thought of exposure. Our putatively refined exterior surfaces mask considerably less sophisticated interiors; in writing about the past, I must, as Ernest Hemingway once suggested, keep in mind the distinction between what I felt then and what I feel I should have felt then. We have layers of accreted detail in our selves; a coherent story about ourselves, one we take hundreds of hours to recount on a therapist’s couch, might not be for the written page. Writing it is a lifetime’s labor; it would be tedious, of little interest to anyone. I am not close to solving these challenges.

My relationship with Pakistan—a love affair that went bad—constitutes a prominent and significant thread in this account; it illuminates a personal history of cricketing encounters between India and Pakistan. In writing that, I have perforce talked about national self-image and diasporic interactions, especially the ones online. The game of cricket—often, in naïve cricket writing, described as a force unifying nations and peoples and cultures—is all too often a divisive factor. It is not just so because “evil politicians are exploiting it.” The fans can, and very often are able to, exploit the game themselves; they bring their own agendas to their watching of cricket. If the game of cricket is a text, then its fans bring their prejudices and histories to their reading and interpretation of it. The oft-told tale of modern immigration is that of the diaspora bringing together two communities, of access to the other’s cultural productions and the Internet facilitating this process. Sometimes it goes the other way and conventional wisdom is upended; sometimes distance is found to have preserved desirable illusion.

There are other relationships here that changed. There was disillusionment, honeymoons that soured: the world of Anglo-Australian cricket, which established and represented cricketing ideals, standards of excellence, and cricketing rectitude, came to be understood by me as exerting ideological dominion, a mental hierarchy, a hegemonic control of cricketing information and its resultant value systems. India changed too, going from being a weak outsider begging for scraps and attention and respect at the cricketing table, to becoming an arrogant financial dominator of cricket, one that dispensed largesse to those clamoring for it and demanded its pound of flesh in return. Balancing these two perspectives in a stereoscopic vision of the game has often introduced dizziness. Writing about them may induce some much-needed clarity.

It is a philosophical commonplace the most elaborate of intellectual systems and doctrinal commitments is a disguised autobiography, a confession. So too with sporting preferences and hierarchies; these serve as reflections of our inner beings, pointers to events, persons, and inclinations in our lives. To tell a story of lifelong sporting passion is to provide access to our inner selves, to write, as here, an autobiography. I found old loyalties to cricket teams disrupted, and new ones built, purely on the strength of associated personal relations and affiliations. As these changed, so did my ties with cricket.

My relationship with the Indian cricket team remains a complicated one. Its players carry many burdens. Most heavily of all, they bear the brunt of my frustrations with myself, the anger provoked by others but channeled to them, my need for them to wage battles on my behalf. Even those with whom they do not share nationality—in the official passport carrying sense—have aspirational claims to make of them, based on their shared provenance. They do double duty for those Indians who live overseas: not only must they win cricket games but they must also win them in a particular way. They are thus pawns, engaging in disputes pertaining to pride, respect, and the establishment of nationalist credentials. Their treatment by those who are not Indian is no kinder: they are expected to conform to standards selectively applied to them, drawn up and established by strangers from distant lands, caught up in archaic conceptions of them and their cultures. The Indian cricket team might not realize their cricket is a conflict, the parameters of which have been established by their countrymen and those they joust with—whether on the field, or in print or in virtual spaces online. The phrase “proxy war” is sometimes banded about when speaking of sporting contests; it is an appropriate one, for it speaks of the waging of political and cultural conflict by the medium of sport, for the settling of scores on a field. The Indian cricket team often has to play its overspecified role in such battles; it is expected to provide healing balms to wounds inflicted by nations and history. Its task is exceedingly onerous.

Cricket often brought forth unflattering dimensions of my always-under-construction self. I consider myself a political liberal and progressive, but I have been prone to illiberal tendencies and thoughts. In my watching and understanding of cricket I was often vulnerable to an unvarnished, unreconstructed take, an immediate, visceral response clouded by emotion. I was susceptible to nationalist propaganda, to faux patriotism, to prejudice of every sort. In using these terms I am aware I am being more reflective than I ever was, that my writerly self might be considerably removed from my other selves. Cricket was able to bring out the best and the worst in me; my responses to its offerings often offered me clues to understanding which aspect had come to the fore.

My identity is still not determinate. This book is an attempt to make its outlines just a little less blurred.

Charles Simic. ‘What A Beautiful Mess,’ New York Review of Books, 20 February 2014, at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/feb/20/what-beautiful-mess.

Writing And The Hundred Book Summer

Shortly after I have returned my student’s writing assignments to them, I start setting up appointments with those students who want to talk about their grades. In these consultations, as I go over the importance of returning to the reading assignments, preparing an early draft, meeting the writing tutor, revising often, having a friend read drafts, and so on, I sometimes also tell them a little story about how reading more can make you into a better writer.

A couple of years ago, my Brooklyn College colleague Robert Viscusi told me how he had transformed himself from an ‘average’ student into a ‘good’ one, one with some talent for writing. After his freshman year of college, he found himself in the privileged position of having a great deal of time on his hands that summer. I do not remember if summer employment was disdained, not felt necessary or merely part-time, but be that as it may, he had time to read.

And so he read that summer. Prodigiously. At the rate of a book a day. He read novels, short stories, history, the lot. He read and read, clocking in at, I think, a hundred books. Prior to that summer, he had been a B-student. After that summer, he never got less than an A. And he found too, a facility and a talent for writing that had not made itself manifest before.

I tell my students that I don’t expect them to read a book a day. Given the constraints on their time and energy, and their often radically different stations in life, this would be unrealistic. But I do ask them to pay attention to the transformation in a student’s scholarly abilities by this devotion to reading. And more to the point, to the change in writing abilities.

Those who read more write better. They encounter writing in its many different forms; they develop and acquire a taste; they are exposed to examples, good and bad, of the art and craft of writing; they internalize, subconsciously, implicitly and explicitly, crucial elements of style; they see writers explain, persuade, argue, tell stories, complain, mock, ridicule; they notice verbal trickery and subtlety; they witness the deployment of rhetoric; and most ambitiously, they might imagine they would like to get a piece of the action and do it better than those whom they read. Or at least emulate them.

I find grading papers extraordinarily hard and still struggle with providing adequate feedback to my students on their papers. (My comments on papers are brief and synoptic; I do not micro-markup.) It is easier for me to remind students of methodology–‘in most instances you can delete the first paragraph you wrote in your first draft; most likely, it’s just throat clearing’–than it is to tell them what is wrong with a particular piece of writing.

But I can always fall back on a reliable instruction: if you want to write better, start reading more. Way more than you do now. That’s good advice for me too.

 

 

The Clock-Watcher’s Punch In The Gut

Last Monday, as I taught my graduate seminar on The Nature of Law, one of the students in attendance turned to look at the clock: we still had some forty-five minutes to go in a two-hour meeting. As I saw this, I experienced a familiar feeling, one that, as usual, temporarily, if not visibly, incapacitated me, tempting me to call a halt to the proceedings right there and then. I didn’t, of course, but neither did I just get over it. (I’m blogging about it, am I not?)

I taught a university-level class for the first time, as a graduate teaching assistant, almost twenty-seven years ago. Thirteen years ago, I became a full-time member of the teaching faculty at Brooklyn College. All of which is to say: I’ve been teaching a long time. But no matter how old that gets, the clock-watching student always manages to cut through the haze and deliver a punch in my  gut. Some look left and right, some look back over their heads at the clock behind them. Doesn’t matter; they all make me feel the same way.

At that moment, I stand accused of a particularly devastating combination of pedagogical and personal sins: I am boring; I have failed to make the subject matter interesting enough. My pride is buffeted: I am not a riveting performer, entertaining and educating in equal measure; I’m not like those great teachers I keep hearing about who keep their students spell-bound and rapt with attention, sometimes keeping their uncomplaining and adoring brood in class well beyond closing time. Clock watching students seem to inform me, rather unambiguously, that their time could be better utilized elsewhere, that whatever it is I’m selling, it’s not worth their hanging around for it.

Little of what I have written above is ‘rational’, of course. Students are human beings and tire, just like I do. In particular, attending a night-time class is always onerous after a tiring day spent elsewhere, perhaps reading and writing dense material, perhaps working a full-time job. Sometimes clock-watching can be instinctive; we are used to the idea of calibrating our progress through the day with frequent consultation of our time-keepers. Classes are held indoors, and with windows granting access to what might be a more salubrious outside, who wouldn’t want to check on how long it will be before the frolicking begins? (This is especially germane now, here on the East Coast of the US, as we recover from a brutal winter and enjoy a glorious spring that has sent temperatures soaring into the sixties.)  Lastly, it is not as if all my students are so engaged in clock-watching. One or two out of twenty or thirty might do it; is that so bad? You can’t really please all the folks all the time.

And then, of course, there is dirty little secret that many students are well aware of: their teachers also watch clocks. They too want to be done subjecting themselves to this experience, which no matter how inspiring and edifying at its best moments, always carries just a tinge of terror: that unshakeable feeling that your ignorance, instead of your wisdom, will soon be on display.