Irish Writers

"I know I am in the grip of a true poem when I can hardly bear to read it calmly at first, so all-embracing and far-reaching is its instantaneous effect on me. I realise I am about to meet with psychic turbulence; undergo a vast excitation of mind, soul and body that will turn me outside in. This is not something I can face lightly. I need to adjust and acclimatise - cool down, in short - before I feel capable of responding adequately to the emotional, musical and verbal demands of the poem. I avert my eyes for a while, blink in dazzlement or take a short walk… Robert Frost describes the experience exactly: "The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken a mortal wound. That he will never get over it."

Dennis O'Driscoll inteview

http://www.readysteadybook.com/Article.aspx?page=dennisodriscoll

Dennis O'Driscoll has a great, dead-right description of reading a poem that squeezes the breath out of your lungs because its words so directly and artfully speak what you intuited but never could express.  There are moments in literary history where you similarly run across the article that so deftly brings together ideas that you can hardly stand to look at the page.

And it is not always on the first reading that you feel the delirious potion. Often it takes many tries, before the ax splits your head open, before the bullet finds your brain as you lie in bed 2:38 AM trying to read your way back to sleep, until the frenzy and amazement of the right poem makes you wish you never have to sleep again.  Nothing like a good Irish poet to make me want to clutter my sentences up with ordinary words that describe the extra-ordinary, to make me identify with that ritually broken skull they dug out of a Viking grave near York.

Last time I felt that way was reading the first 100 pages of Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin and then two nights ago reading Dennis O'Driscoll's "The Bottom Line."


O' Driscoll is fond of Brecht's poems but he goes out of his way not to read too much about him so that his admiration for his poetry is not spoiled by Brecht's politics (personal and otherwise).  Poetry is sometimes more compelling, the less we know about the author.  


You can find a fine sample of O'Driscoll and his comrades in an anthology entitled,  Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry 1 

You can hear McCann reading the opening to his novel after a nice five-minute introduction on this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKieCztRyJ8

When are you political, when are you not?

Just imagine that everything you posted on Facebook were evaluated on the standard of a public official.  Can you post pictures of your kids, talk to your old school friends, upload Led Zeppelin videos, without having these judged by some political correctness standard, left or right-wing?  In the blurring age of social media, email is already outdated for its clunky administrative functionality.  The difficulty separating nostalgic photos from politics are only going to get more difficult as communication technology pervades our lives.


So now turn to the ongoing discussion of William Cronon, the University of Wisconsin History professor, who criticized conservative lobbies and is now subject to the Republican Party's request to have his emails scanned for political content unbecoming of a public employee,  Milwaukee conservative columnist, Patrick McIlheran, protests that it is wrong for liberals to object to such Freedom of Information Act requests.  Conservatives are merely holding liberals to the same standards they deploy, so runs his argument, and indeed that is fair enough. 

http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/118800679.html

The Freedom of Information Act serves to allow citizens insight into the operation of government officials and agencies. 

The question remains was the request intended to intimidate Cronon into silence?  For there is a huge difference between requesting that a secretive, powerful government agency reveal information, and combing through one person's emails.  A similar problem arises when prosecutors try to use RICO statutes, originally intended to investigate secretive organizations like the mob, on other organizations, such as businesses.  Corporations can act like mobsters, but the question remains whether it is fair and appropriate to use mob surveillance on businesses.

As my buddy Matt Grant (link at the sidebar) has argued, the lines dividing legitimate and illegitimate political activity become very unclear when you focus on an individual's opinion expressed in email versus fund-raising by a state legislator.  The boundaries between scholarship, administrative planning and budgeting, conversation between friends, and public statements are often interlocking steps in the formulation of an argument.  The tone of a statement to a friend may sound overtly political but that does not make it illegal under Wisconsin state law. You don't even have to reach for the sixties motto, "The personal is political," to understand that a single person can express many different meanings in a single email.  When is his statement political, when is an expression of administrative worry, when is it an act of friendship between colleagues?  In a government agency, these boundaries have to be respected, in the everyday life of a person they are not separated into administrative functions.  

Whose keyboard are you using now?

The arguments surrounding William Cronon, distinguished University of Wisconsin History professor and blogger are important for anyone thinking out loud today.

At the moment the controversy swirls around the request by the Republican party for access to his emails to see if he violated state law and made political statements using his university email account.  Republicans have successfully shifted the focus away from Cronon's original blogs about conservative lobbies.

Cronon's enthusiastic defenders point out that he was very careful in his work and that he did not violate state law because he always used his personal email account to discuss his blogging activities and he wrote the blogs and NY Times essays on his personal computer.

Here is a funny quote to that end:  " Fortunately, if you care about freedom of speech, Cronon didn't get off the turnip truck yesterday. He knows the UW policy and used not only his personal e-mail account but, also, his personal computer, to write his essay."

http://www.channel3000.com/news/27337449/detail.html

Fine and good, but there is some maddening legal hairsplitting in this debate:

The arguments pro and contra are like asking whose pen did Thomas Jefferson use to write the Declaration of Independence? on whose envelop did Lincoln jot down the Gettysburg Address? whose typewriter was used when Kennedy prepared his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech?  Was the envelop personal property or did it belong to the Federal government?  Was it a civilian correspondence or had it been used to send military information?  Kennedy was travelling in Germany when he worked on his speech--did the typewriter belong to the US State department, was it on loan from the Federal Republic of Germany?  Did he receive it from the Berlin mayor's office or was it provided by the hotel? 

These questions are fascinating for archivists and Presidential fetishists, but they are utterly stifling if the author has to first stop writing to make sure he is using the appropriate property.

Anyone working anywhere at a university or business is caught in the following bind:

On the one hand we have forward thinking administrators urging us to use social media and any available technology to communicate with our public, so that at any time and anywhere we can slip another educational data byte past their eyeballs.

On the other extreme are the regulations that limit the manner of thought that can be expressed with what technology.

Before you write down that clever thought, check to see whose pen you are using, what keyboard you have in front of you.

Wisconsin Clamp-Down

Still getting up to speed on the campaigns surrounding University of Wisconsin History professor William Cronon, an eloquent scholar of the American West.  Many of us had not heard of him until this last week, but a quick look around at his work and reading though his essays and blogs shows that he is both passionate and well-balanced in his politics.

Like many in Wisconsin he opposes the governor's law to prevent public-sector workers from engaging in collective bargaining.  But he seems to have broken into his own scandal by publishing a pamphlet on the conservative lobby, American Legislative Exchange Council.  He details the organization and conservative aims of this discreetly powerful lobby .  In response, the Republican Party in Wisconsin made a Freedom of Information Act request for a search of William Cronon's emails.  As a state employee he is prohibited from using his email account for political purposes.  Still, the boundaries of what constitutes an illegitimate use of state offices have hardly been defined.  The fact that he is an historian by trade and there are going to be tons of emails that discuss politics as part of his teaching and research.   From the start, it was clear that this request intended to intimidate and the response has been swift--not to back down.  You can read Cronon's substantial blog:

http://scholarcitizen.williamcronon.net/2011/03/24/open-records-attack-on-academic-freedom/

He starts off giving the link to his compelling op-ed piece in the NY Times,  and the Times has reciprocated with an article on the campaign to squelch academic dissent.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/opinion/28mon3.html

This is a story to follow, because the point is not just to watch a top-tier academic face off against the local political machine, the point is that any one of us could be pushed around for expressing our political views.  With all our integration into the internet, there are a dozen different choke points where regular citizens can be pressured into silence.  This campaign against Cronon, to fish around in his email until his political opponents find something "useful"  could easily be the test case for us all. 

Democracy from above

Two articles,  a long one in the NY Times and a shorter, somewhat less confident one in The Guardian,  take the German government to task for not joining the coalition bombing and enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya.  The papers quote leading German newspapers and former politicians stating that the decision not to participate in the action over Libya was a grand mistake.  The primary reason why Germany should join the action--because everyone else is doing it. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/world/europe/24germany.html?_r=1&hp

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/24/germans-disquiet-absence-libya-action?INTCMP=SRCH

No compelling case is made concerning the Libyan people, the future of democracy, or the humanitarian suffering to be averted.  Instead the argument runs like this:  all your friends are in the coalition, you should join as well, otherwise you won't be invited next time there is a party (or seat on the UN Security Council, permanent or otherwise).  I have gone to parties with the thought "If I don't go this time, I won't get invited back."  Lame excuse to get me out of the house, but sometimes I wind up having fun.   The same reason can not and should not be the basis for armed military intervention. 

Merkel and Westerwelle are spoiling their relations with France, England, Turkey and the US.  Never mind that the French have abstained from participating in any number of NATO endeavors over the life of the alliance.  True, Westerwelle is probably more interesting in giving himself the profile of an independent-minded foreign secretary, one who does not cave in to allied pressure but who weighs the situation for himself.  Yes, Westerwelle is copying Gerhard Schroeder's trick of abstaining from US military actions in the Middle East.  It worked brilliantly for Schroeder when he ran against George Bush in Germany; it probably won't get Westerwelle as many points running against Obama in the upcoming election.

Aside from these tactical calculations, there is the real democratic point that a very large majority of the German population is opposed to German military intervention in Libya.  The Guardian acknowledges that Germans really don't want to go to war again and that the Afghanistan expedition is profoundly unloved in Germany.  The NY Times wants to argue past this fact.  Neither article considers whether British or American popular opinion supports military engagement in Libya.

It is almost as if the two newspapers are advocating that Germany, as well as other governments, should ignore the popular, anti-militarist opinion of their own populace even as NATO is supposedly fighting to defend the democratic will of the Libyan people.   Ignore democratic will in order to defend it.

Help with your Writing

Not that I ever really make commercial endorsements, but here is a superb person who can help you with that knotty manuscript, that baggy grant application and that endlessly revised article.  He has given me invaluable advice on two books, clear, straight-forward and correct (as in he was right).  

Years of experience as an editor at several university presses, editor and author of his own books --if you're in German Studies you have surely held his co-edited tome, The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, in your hands.

Unsolicited--I haven't talk to Ed in years-- and sincere comes my recommendation to check out his consulting services at http://dimendberg.com/index.html

And here is some of his free advice, which I admit to not always living up to:

 Thirty Ways to Flourish in Graduate School 

Edward Dimendberg 

1. Write the best dissertation you can in the shortest possible period of time. Do not be a graduate student longer than necessary. 

2. Recognize your actual intellectual strengths, which may differ from those currently fashionable or possessed by other people. 

3. Decide upon the scholarly contribution you want to make. 

4. Determine your ambition and willingness to work at the level it requires. 

5. Wake up every morning and love being a scholar. Find another career if you discover your heart is no longer in it. 

6. Concede the fact that everyone has bad days. 

7. Find the time of day (or night) that is best for your reading and writing and jealously protect it. 

8. Treat your colleagues (teachers, fellow students, support staff) well. 

9. Learn to give and receive criticism. 

10. Accept rejection gracefully. 

11. Acknowledge and cite the ideas and assistance of others with total scrupulousness. 

12. Share ideas freely. 

13. Avoid appearing arrogant or being needlessly argumentative. 

14. Leverage being a student to the maximum by asking questions and requesting help. 

15. Do not forget about your family, friends, hobbies, and outside interests. 

16. Eschew work habits and schedules injurious to your physical and psychological well being and seek out those best suited to the long haul. 

17. Master all of the technologies necessary to accomplish your research but recognize that technology is never a substitute for thinking. 

18. Perfect your skills in at least two foreign languages well enough to conduct research, exchange ideas, and make friends in them. 

19. Read in periods, areas, and disciplines unrelated to your primary research and seek out people who work in them. 

20. Thank everyone who ever has helped you with your research through direct contact and in written acknowledgments in your work. 

21. Pay careful attention to meeting deadlines and following schedules. 

22. Distinguish between uncertainty and vagueness. Strive for maximum clarity, even while you are still forming your ideas. 

23. Make sure that you can present your research and its importance in a sentence, a paragraph, a page, a twenty-minute conference paper, an article, and your dissertation. 

24. Take the significance of your dissertation as seriously as you wish others to regard it. 

25. Develop sensitivity to the cultures of the institutions in which you work. Always be yourself yet remain mindful of local norms and conditions. 

26. Write grants. 

27. Attend conferences and present your dissertation project. 

28. Publish your work. 

29. Avoid criticizing senior scholars in print early in your career. 

30. Conceptualize the process of writing seminar papers, proposals, and your dissertation as a continuous one. 

Copyright © Edward Dimendberg, Dimendberg Consulting LLC, 2010. All rights reserved. May be circulated and reproduced with proper attribution. 

Land Grant versus Private University

Maybe he felt the need to get out from under his father's shadow.  Maybe he was expressing the secret wish of university insiders.  Maybe he was trying to think for himself.  When Scott Paterno advocated eliminating ALL of Penn State's budgetary allocation from Harrisburg in order to shift the remaining money to public schools, he was really calling for the privatization of higher education in Pennsylvania. 

http://www.rockthecapital.com/03/09/scotts-piece-2/

Paterno argues that surely Penn State will find some way to make up the difference.  Obviously, the administration would manage to "generate" savings, but that would include eliminating many of the public services the university provides Commonwealth citizens.  Tuition would rise much more quickly than under current conditions and, more importantly, admissions would redefined.  The obligation to support students from all corners of the state would disappear.

Penn State has always prided itself on the number of students who are the first members of their family to attend college.  That is the concern of a public university.  With privatization, that idealism would fade in just a few years.  The university's broad commitment to agriculture would drop away quickly as well.  The Ag School is already under serious budgetary pressure and, without a doubt, a private university would confine its agricultural research only to those subfields that generate high federal grants or that have new commercial potential.  There would be little interest in training the children of farmers.

A private university chases an entirely different pool of applicants than a public university.  Penn State would start a much greater recruitment effort in Korea and China than in Erie or York.  Private universities have an entirely different set of peers against which they measure themselves.  This change would not come about immediately, but once the old land grant obligations are cast aside in the name of free market education which always pursues the global elite student and not the local high school kid, Penn State would move in a direction that would completely alter its relationship to the Commonwealth. 

The real losers would be society and the citizens of the state who need to educate their children.  Rural poverty would increase even further as generations would be priced out of quality higher education.  The divide between the classes would grow as Penn State woos the metropolitan elite as opposed to the rural workers.  The loss of public funding would not just end the idealism that made the university Pennsylvania's sole land grant institution in 1863, it would further diminish the quality of life for thousands in this state.

Students Protest Higher Fees

Never a good idea when the university president calls riot police in on student demonstrators.  The general public does not like watching their kids, or their neighbor's kids, get hit in the face by cops.  A simple political lesson for a democratic society. Surely they teach this in academic presidency 101?

If you are like me, you are just getting up to speed on the student strikes in Puerto Rico.  Maybe you want  to read a non-radicalized, recent NY Times article just to get oriented, so check out http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/education/18puertorico.html?pagewanted=1

The key issue at the moment is the government's budget shortfall, which has led the university to increase what it charges students.  The fees at the University of Puerto Rico are much lower than at mainland American universities, in fact they are much closer to what European students pay.  The structure of university education on the island is different from many other US territories and states.  It is not predicated upon the assumption that every family must fend for itself, but instead there seems to be a societal commitment to providing higher education for Puerto Rican students.  At least, that is the larger issue behind the protests.

By announcing that it was doubling the amount to $800, the university was undertaking a move that German universities have tried only to be faced with student strikes as well.  The key difference is that 800 Euros does not price German students out of an education, whereas in Puerto Rico, where up to 75% of students qualify for Pell grants, the fee increases would have been prohibitively high.  Student government leaders claimed that 10,000 out of the systems 65,000 students would have been unable to pay the increase.

Puerto Rico's students responded like Europeans: they went on strike, shut down the university.

http://bicyclebarricade.wordpress.com/2011/01/12/student-strike-in-puerto-rico-met-with-repression/

Things got harsh when the university brought riot police in to remove the students who were blocking buildings and gates.  Tear gas, beaten students, 18 arrests, rough videos on Youtube turned the standoff into a harsh confrontation which has now resulted in the university president's resignation.

The issues are far from resolved as the university rector investigates professors who supported the student strike and considers "pausing" programs. 

As with all contemporary uprisings, Facebook is the medium with the most recent news and actions.  I have to admit, that is where I first learned about the conflict.  The English department of the Rio Piedras campus, University of Puerto Rico, has a Facebook page that keeps you more up to date than newspapers in New York or Los Angeles.  The posts are English.  Most of the news articles online are in Spanish.

This protest belongs in today's news from Wisconsin, with the California student protests, with the many European university strikes last year, and with the demonstration coming to your state soon.  

Global Education Center and Hockey Rink

Just got a tour of the Global Education Center at the University of North Carolina.  You can take a look at it, too.  The building brings together a wide array of institutes and programs dedicated to fostering international studies.  By placing them all in the same building, there are many more opportunities for cooperation and intellectual inspiration.  

At giant universities, it is almost impossible to spread publicity announcements around to all interested parties, which is why it useful to have one location where you know to look for international events.  

Take the virtual tour of the building and you will see how the entrance is designed to hold large receptions, dinners and lectures, while the upper floors house advisors, institute offices and invited international fellows.  From Eastern Europe to China, from the Cold War to the hot and trendy, all sorts of languages, cultures and nationalities are housed in one intellectual exchange.

http://global.unc.edu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=33&Itemid=39

At $44 million, the building took a combination of heavy hitter donors who plunked down the big cash, an army of contributors, corporate sponsors and the state of North Carolina, who paid about half the costs.   Once you have such a building, you are going to want to use it.  That is to say, building a Global Studies Center creates the momentum to continually further international studies.  An upward spiral, you have the building, so you create international programs, which you house in the building that then creates more international events, etc.

Now for twice that amount of money, you can build your university a world-class hockey rink.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10261/1088520-143.stm

They say the hockey rink will be a multi-purpose arena.  Maybe we can turn it into a combination ice palace and global studies center.  When the sky boxes around the rink are not in use, we can let foreign language departments hold seminars in them.