writing

A book review I wrote in 2008 contrasting academic writing with literary essays

ButeContextsSpring08>

A celebration of life for Stillwater blogger Karl Bremer , who died from pancreatic cancer on Jan. 15, will be Feb. 10 from 1-4 p.m. at Stoneridge Golf Course, 13600 N. Hudson Blvd., Stillwater.

Karl was an old friend and, sometimes, comrade in arms. He helped bring down Michelle Bachmann, Frank Vennes, Jr (co-conspirator with Tom Peters), and other scumbags too numerous to count. In tribute, he has been lauded as many things. However, in truth, Karl’s linage is an ancient one–His ancestors were the Chinese xias.

I recently discovered the xia, an ancient social type who predates Karl by over two millennia. Albert A. Dalia, a Sinologist and novelist, devotes several posts to explicating the historical and literary lineage of the xia. Dating from the Warring States (403-221 B.C.E.) and Han Dynasty (206 B.C.E.-220 C.E.) periods of Chinese history, the xia is a venerable ancestor of an anti-authoritarian populist like Karl.

“Relegated to the lower ranks of society, and with many of the options for advancement closed to him, the xia was not held in very high regard by the elite. To the masses of common people however, the xia was frequently a person to look up to. He was a mythic character who opposed the oppressive landlords and corrupt officials. . . . Their parallel code of ethics and behavior represent the flip side of the Chinese establishment, and rather than being antagonistic to tradition, xia behavior is complementary—yin to yang.
Obituary: Stillwater journalist and Michele Bachmann nemesis Karl Bremer dies 

 

 

This post first appeared on the opinion page of the St. Paul Pioneer Press on Thursday, July 15, 2010. I adapted this column from remarks I made upon receiving Metropolitan State University’s 2010 Alumnus Award.

Teaching, learning and hemlock

Creating capacity for dialogue — with one’s self

Gov. Tim Pawlenty used a recent appearance with Jon Stewart on ‘The Daily Show’ to promote his market elixir for the purported ills of higher education. If his idea of an ‘iCollege’ were to become the norm, liberal arts professors like me would have little choice but to join Socrates in drinking the hemlock.

“Can’t I just pull that down on my iPhone or iPad whenever the heck I feel like it, from wherever I feel like?” he said. “And instead of paying thousands of dollars, can I pay $199 for iCollege instead of 99 cents for iTunes?”

Implicit in this sound bite lurks a philosophy of education: College is primarily a consumer transaction. Pawlenty’s business model makes no mention of quality, rigor, or critical thought. In his iCollege, the development of well-educated persons and well-informed citizens would take a back seat to the convenience and cost of buying credentials online.

Gov. Pawlenty: Socrates and I beg to differ. If only teaching and learning were so effortless. Let me assure you, as a college teacher and lifelong learner, they are not.

Education does not occur within the head of a teacher or between the ears of a student. Instruction takes place in that mysterious space between educator and pupil. The teaching-learning process is a dialogue — and nothing demonstrates this truth like its absence in a classroom, or online. The educator speaks and gestures inarticulately; the pupil sits mutely, mystified by the charade. The teacher pretends to teach and the student pretends to learn.

Monologues like this are a perversion of teaching and learning. What is more common in classrooms and online is what the social philosopher Martin Buber calls “technical dialogue.” In this circumstance, the educator transmits knowledge and skills and students receive and utilize these tools. The transaction is only skin-deep. Technical education seeks competence, not the meaning of life.

In genuine dialogue, teachers bring not just knowledge and skills but their deepest selves to the encounter. The purpose of this vulnerability is to reduce the distance between the instructor and the pupil. This dialogical moment creates a sacred space, what Buber calls the “between.” Within this realm — for both the teacher and the learner — intellect encounters heart and soul. “Good teachers,” writes the educator Parker Palmer, “join self and subject and students into the fabric of life.”

Once the student embarks on this journey of self-discovery, the quest for meaning is transcendent. A true educator does not impose but seeks only to further the student’s personal destiny. For Buber, this ends the educational process. I would argue that he neglects a crucial final step in teaching and learning.

Whether it is an introductory course or a senior seminar, I begin each class by telling the students that it is my intention to help them kill their teachers. (Since my demanding nature always rubs a few students the wrong way, I take the precaution of explaining that my meaning is metaphorical, not literal.) This invariably baffles beginning students, as it should. My remark is like a Zen koan, a riddle to ruminate upon until understood. If it still puzzles a senior, I realize I am only one semester away from failing as an educator. What is the point of my tutelage? Pursuing their own counsel, students must leave their teachers behind, no matter how cherished or respected. Teachers, on the other hand, should welcome such autonomy, seeking intellectual peers, not disciples.

Socrates describes this last stage as “a discourse that the mind carries on with itself about any subject it is considering.” Carrying on a dialogue with oneself is the hallmark of becoming one’s own teacher. This capacity for contemplation has always been the ideal outcome of a liberal arts education. The most valuable endowment that any university possesses is a wealth of such graduates — and wise the society that invests in their education.

 

[I violate all the rules for a successful blog. I have occasional pangs of guilt about being an episodic blogger. Defiantly, I sit silently until my conscience leaves the room. I periodically have an impulse to justify my behavior but somehow never find the words to rationalize my sloth. Today a blogger at The New Republic saved me the effort. My only disagreement with his analysis is that I believe his argument applies equally to blog posts. I do hope you still enjoy my occasional essays, even if they may be infrequent and idiosyncratic.]

Writing and Velocity

Damon Linker

Sorry I’ve been silent (again) for so long. In addition to teaching two writing seminars at Penn, I’ve been busy with book revisions. Those are now done, so I should be back (again) to more regular blogging.

Given the glacial pace of my contributions to TNR in recent months, perhaps it makes sense that I’d return with a post about . . . the pace of writing. Back in late September (an eternity ago in Internet time, I know), Ezra Klein—along with Matthew Yglesias, the boy wonder of high-speed blogging—wrote a post about the new partnership between The Daily Beast and the Perseus Books Group that will publish books on a highly accelerated schedule. Here’s the plan:

On a typical publishing schedule, a writer may take a year or more to deliver a manuscript, after which the publisher takes another nine months to a year to put finished books in stores. At Beast Books, writers would be expected to spend one to three months writing a book, and the publisher would take another month to produce an e-book edition.

This inspired Klein to remark on how much easier it’s gotten to write quickly:

Writing doesn’t take very long. Quoting doesn’t take very long. But assembling information used to take an awful long time. It required a lot of phone calls and microfiche and faxes and walking over to Brookings and paging through newspaper archives and begging a source at Gallup. Now it doesn’t take much time at all. That   allows me to be the equivalent of a very fast columnist, and there’s no reason it won’t allow others to become very fast book authors.

“Writing doesn’t take very long.” I suppose not. I mean, I’ve written some long emails in the amount of time it takes me to type. Perhaps the next time I’m starting a book I should open my word processing program, imagine it’s an email, start typing, and keep typing until I’ve gone on for two hundred or so pages, taking momentary breaks to surf the Web so I can gather some needed information along the way. I bet at that rate I could finish it in a couple of months.

But would it be a book? Or at least what, until quite recently, we understood by the word? You know, a lengthy, sustained argument about, interpretation of, or engagement with a topic, one meant to be of lasting value—would my 200 or so pages of typing be that? Would it be worth reading six months—let alone ten or more years—after it was published? Or would it instead be something very different—merely a 55,000-word blog post, as ephemeral as the latest news cycle?

I like blogging. I enjoy its informality and instantaneousness—the way it provides me an opportunity to spout off publicly about this or that outrage of the moment. Opining is fun, and so is ideological combat.

But a book is, or should be, something different: A chance to slow down. An opportunity to raise one’s sights a little higher. To stop focusing so incessantly on the moment and strive, instead, to step back a bit, to take in a wider view, perhaps even to rise above the fray. To reflect instead of react. To ruminate instead of respond.

And what of style? Klein’s statement implies that the only thing that might keep a writer from producing a book in a couple of months is the time it takes to conduct research. As if writing were a process of compiling and arranging lists of facts and figures. Maybe when blogging about public policy, that’s what it mainly is. (Though surely even Klein has paused for five minutes now and then to make sure he nailed a put-down of George W. Bush?) A book can, and should, strive to be more than a list of information. At its best, a book of non-fiction can even aim to be a form of literature.

What Beast Books is proposing, and what Klein is promoting, is (in Truman Capote’s words) the reduction of writing to typing. The typing might be clever, and witty, and informed, and politically useful. But in most cases, it will also be hurried and harried, merely echoing or negating the conventional wisdom of the moment, not placing it in a wider context or viewing it from a broader perspective. And that will be a incalculable loss to our culture.

This post first appeared on the opinion page of the St. Paul Pioneer Press on Friday, September 5, 2008.

If John Stuart Mill were alive, he might well be at the Republican National Convention this week, providing the British with pithy commentary about American politics. What the author of On Liberty would have found most impressive about his visit is the vibrant marketplace of ideas that is playing out in our arenas, parks and streets.

Liberty is the watchword of the week. It is not just Republicans and Democrats who are exercising their freedoms of speech, association and assembly. The Libertarian, Green and Independence parties are passionately promoting their agendas. Supporters of Ron Paul and Ralph Nader are also busy hawking their heroes.

Perhaps most noteworthy, tens of thousands of ordinary citizens have gathered throughout the Twin Cities to peacefully protest the RNC. Oh, and if you hadn’t noticed, there are a few hundred anarchists rioting in the streets.

When it comes to our constitutional liberties, these political parties and activists have very different ideologies and agendas. Nevertheless, there is one liberty that no political group really wants its members taking too seriously — intellectual liberty.

The sociologist Joel Charon argues that liberty of thought is a precondition for those “action” liberties like speech, association and assembly:

To act without thinking is to act without freedom. To act with thinking that is controlled by others is to act without freedom. Without freedom to think, freedom to act is an empty freedom.

Intellectual liberty is not free. On the contrary, freedom of thought is like a sown seed, requiring a citizen to nurture it.

Why is free thinking such a rare commodity? Conservatives and libertarians will assert that the enemy of intellectual liberty is government coercion. Liberals and leftists counter by arguing the real threat to free thought is corporate media manipulation.

I concede that each of these claims has an element of truth. I contend, however, that the most significant obstacle to independent thought is neither governments nor corporations.

No, the danger is closer to home. The Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing disconcertingly suggests that our friends can also be the foes of our free thought:

The hardest thing in the world is to stand out against one’s group, a group of one’s peers. Many agree that among our most shameful memories is this, how often we said black was white because other people were saying it.

A wide variety of experimental studies, ranging from simple sensory perception to judgments about politics and morality, demonstrate that the peer pressure of group membership dramatically alters a person’s private opinions.

When individuals know their conformity or deviance will become public knowledge, they are more likely to conform. In other words, people are prone to suppress contrary perceptions and opinions when they must take a public stance in the presence of fellow group members.

After reviewing this extensive literature, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein concludes that “many people, of all political stripes, go along with political orthodoxies despite their private reservations.”

Why do we silence ourselves? Sunstein suggests several reasons.

·We do not want to risk the wrath of friends and allies.

·We fear that our dissent will weaken the reputation of the group.

·We blindly trust that our group members are right.

Sunstein asserts that groups unified by bonds of affection and solidarity can make serious errors in judgment. What does he see as a solution?

The clear implication is that if a group is embarking on an unfortunate course of action, a single dissenter might be able to turn it around, by energizing ambivalent group members who would otherwise follow the crowd.

As an example he points to “Twelve Angry Men,” a movie about 11 jurors who are hell bent on convicting an innocent man. A single dissenting juror, played by Henry Fonda, persuades his fellow members of their erroneous conclusion.

In closing, I invite you to join an ancient party. This party requires no registration, no dues and no meetings. It does not even ask you to relinquish your other party affiliations. In fact, it encourages dual allegiances.

I’m talking about the party of free thinkers. “Such people, such individuals,” writes Lessing, “will be a most productive yeast and ferment, and lucky the society who has plenty of them.”

The careful writer is an endangered species.

The evidence is all about us: at America’s best newspapers the economic bottom line now trumps journalistic values; bloggers pollute the Internet with unedited, stream-of-consciousness musings; e-mailers and text messengers practice a staccato disregard for spelling, grammar, and punctuation.

No one is immune.

Minneapolis Star Tribune, Oct.19

Kersten rebuked

In her Oct. 15 broadside against bans on sports teams with Indian names, Katherine Kersten manages to both violate principles of sound argument and indirectly denigrate the deceased. As a columnist, she has every right to savage policies with which she disagrees. But in her typical ad hominid style of argument, Kersten gratuitously attacks a nationally respected young sociologist who is only tangentially connected to the story. She does so by mocking the titles of his books and articles, scholarly works that have nothing to do with her topic at hand.

We are all responsible for the consequences of our actions, even unintended ones. It was thus a supreme act of cosmic justice that her column appeared on the same day that the Star Tribune had a front-page obituary of Vernon Bellecourt, the man who initiated the nationwide campaign against Indian mascots.

Given her rigid mindset, she could probably never get her head around the idea that a Christian God had struck her such an ironic blow. OK, perhaps it was Karma? I look forward to a future Kersten column in which she laments the invasion of both South Asians immigrants and their alien religions of Hinduism and Buddhism.

MONTE BUTE, WOODBURY

At 7:30 a.m. on the day that my “Kersten rebuked” letter appeared, I received an e-mail from my university provost: “ad hominid?” Once the visceral flush of shame had passed, I rushed to check the editorial page. Sure enough, I had committed a malapropism.

Given the universal impulse to save face, I first gave thought to claiming intentionality–of course, Kersten’s simple-minded arguments really are ad hominid! Upon further reflection, I decided to be forthright. I contacted the Star Tribune editor so that he might as least correct the on-line version. I also asked why he had not caught and corrected my gaffe with “ad hominem.”

Actually, Monte, I did stop at it and was in the process of changing it when I thought, wait. Monte’s a smart guy. Maybe he knows something I don’t. So I did a quick search and found a couple of dozen uses of it. In hindsight, I should have checked further. But it’s one of those things: If it’s a writer I know and trust, I’m inclined to believe him, even if he’s using a term I’m not personally familiar with. I may not know every word that exists, but I sure as hell don’t know every word that DOESN’T exist.

Alas, you gave me more credit than I was due. Nevertheless, the error was mine, and mine alone. Given the probability that few read the letter, and even fewer recognized my mistake, why don’t I just let this embarrassing lapse lie? Even a parish priest needs confession. As a teacher, I profess that self-editing is the key to writing well. I counsel students that every composition, even an e-mail, deserves careful proofreading and at least a couple of drafts. I must fess up: I was in too much of a rush.

And particularly when using newly-minted prophylactics–spelling and grammar checkers, for instance–realize that these tools are neither infallible, nor do they absolve us of editorial culpability. A highlighted suggestion should not provoke an automatic click on the “change” box. Regrettably, I did not practice what I preach; when prompted, I mindlessly changed a word that I had originally spelled right. Too late, I learned that my computer’s abridged dictionary did not contain that word–and an absent word is a spell checker’s misspelled word.

How can we save this endangered species of careful writers? For my part, I will henceforth distribute this scarlet letter on the first day of every class. Perhaps then, this faux pas will be an edifying moment not just for me but for my students as well. Author, heal thyself.