Month: July 2010

Of God and Poems

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

From Christian Wiman’s “Hive of Nerves” (via Ross Douthat):

“In the Gospels Jesus is always talking to the crowds in parables, which he later ‘explains’ to his disciples. The dynamic is odd in a couple of ways: either the parables are obvious, and the explanations seem almost patronizing, or they are opaque, and the explanations only compound their opacity. (Or could it be—and I confess to relishing this possibility—that the explanations illustrate Christ’s wry sense of humor, which is nowhere else evident?) In any case, the notable point is just how little the explanations amount to, how completely the ultimate truths of the parables—just like dreams and poems—remain within their own occurrence … ‘If that’s what he means,’ says the student to the poetry teacher, ‘why doesn’t he just say it?’ ‘If God is real,’ says the parishioner to the preacher, ‘why doesn’t he simply storm into our lives and convince us?’ The questions are vastly different in scale and relative importance, but their answers are similar. A poem, if it’s a real one, in some fundamental sense means no more and no less than the moment of its singular music and lightning insight; it is its own code to its own absolute and irreducible clarity. A god, if it’s a living one, is not outside of reality but in it, of it (though in ways it takes patience and imagination to perceive). Thus the uses and necessities of metaphor, which can flash us past our plodding resistance and habits into strange new truths. Thus the very practical effects of music, myth, image, which tease us not out of reality but deeper and more completely into it.”

I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

I had to come across this in a somewhat obscure scholarly journal, so assuming you may not come across it there, I’ll put in your way here, an even more obscure blog.

“I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” by Bob Dylan:

I dreamed I saw St. Augustine
Alive as you or me
Tearing through these quarters
In the utmost misery
With a blanket underneath his arm
And a coat of solid gold
Searching for the very souls
Whom already have been sold

“Arise, arise,” he cried so loud
In a voice without restraint
“Come out, ye gifted kings and queens
And hear my sad complaint
No martyr is among ye now
Whom you can call your own
So go on your way accordingly
But know you’re not alone”

I dreamed I saw St. Augustine
Alive with fiery breath
And I dreamed I was amongst the ones
That put him out to death
Oh, I awoke in anger
So alone and terrified
I put my fingers against the glass
And bowed my head and cried

Copyright © 1968 by Dwarf Music; renewed 1996 by Dwarf Music

There is a version on YouTube by Joan Baez, no slouch to be sure, but not quite the inimitable voice and feel of Bob Dylan.  If you want to hear Dylan, you’ll have to find the song elsewhere.

Wine and Economics

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

The following observations from Freakonomics following on a story about a particularly brazen case of mid-level wine fraud in a British supermarket:

This last phenomenon [little incentive for any individual to sue for fraud over small amounts] is the same sort of collective action dilemma that mobile phone companies, credit-card companies, and the like have been trading on for years: they upcharge customers a few cents here and there—rounding the length of a dropped call up to the nearest minute, for instance, or playing with the spread on exchange rates on foreign transactions—but it’s below the radar screen of anyone but the most obsessively litigious or penny-pinching customer. It adds up to a lot of money for the company, but not enough is taken from any individual to incite a lawsuit. It’s thus a highly effective form of fraud . . .

It might seem, then, that the optimal opportunity for fraud is where (1) the damages to each individual are relatively low; (2) the number of instances is fewer than would make the case worth a plaintiff firm’s time; and yet (3) the business is large enough to make good money for the counterfeiter.

And while we’re approaching the subject of economics through wine, here’s another item from Freakonomics:

In American restaurants, I have always seen a glass of wine (perhaps 6 to 7.5 ounces) sold for at least 1/3 of the price of a bottle of wine (750 milliliters=29.6 ounces), so that the per-unit price of a glass is typically at least 1/3 more than a bottle.  In the U.S., it’s always cheaper to buy a bottle of wine than buy glasses if you are having 3 glasses or more.  In the Parisian restaurant we visited, the per-ounce price was the same whether you bought a glass (150 milliliters) or a bottle (750 milliliters).  Indeed, even a carafe (pichet) of 500 milliters was sold at the same per-unit price.  Why did the restaurant do this, given the costs of fetching the bottle each time and pouring glasses (as opposed to uncorking once and leaving the bottle on the table)?  Also, given the mark-up on wines at restaurants, the owner should have an incentive to get customers to buy more wine—to buy a full bottle.  I don’t understand what seems to be a pricing anomaly.

Two take-aways there:  First, if you’re going to have more than three glasses, just buy the bottle.  Secondly, is it possible that something other than the profit motive might have been in play and are we so conditioned to its ubiquitous operation in our society that we are truly befuddled when it appears to be supplanted by other motivations?

Marilynne Robinson on The Daily Show, Mark Twain on Interviews

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 3 Comments

Marilynne Robinson is one of those authors whose name I keep running into and each time I do I make one of those mental notes that never quite materializes to read one of her books.  Mostly I’m interested in reading her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Gilead: A Novel, and her most recent work, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self.  The latter collects Robinson’s Dwight H. Terry Lectures at Yale University on the topic of religion, science, and consciousness.  No lack of ambition there.

Robinson recently appeared on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show.  Typical Stewart, a little bit serious, a little bit funny.  You can watch the five minute clip here.

Update:  Let me take an opportunity to embellish this post a little bit with another item I just came across.  Let’s begin by recognizing that this is not the most enthralling interview.  Robinson was not exactly inspiring and Stewart’s fan base, which seems for the most part to be a bit hostile to religion, is apoplectic (see the comments below the video clip).  There are probably a number of reasons why this interview doesn’t quite soar when on paper it probably looked like a good idea, but would anyone consider that the format itself is to blame?  In other words, are interviews inherently flawed?

The Mark Twain Foundation has just released for the first time in print a 10-page hand written essay on the subject of interviews written by Twain in 1889 or 1890.  You can see the whole essay at the Newhour’s web site including scans of the handwritten pages.  Here is an excerpt (sections of which brilliantly match form to content) that expresses Twain’s dissatisfaction with the interview:

The Interview was not a happy invention. It is perhaps the poorest of all ways of getting at what is in a man. In the first place, the interviewer is the reverse of an inspiration, because you are afraid of him. You know by experience that there is no choice between these disasters. No matter which he puts in, you will see at a glance that it would have been better if he had put in the other: not that the other would have been better than this, but merely that it wouldn’t have been this; and any change must be, and would be, an improvement, though in reality you know very well it wouldn’t. I may not make myself clear: if that is so, then I have made myself clear–a thing which could not be done except by not making myself clear, since what I am trying to show is what you feel at such a time, not what you think–for you don’t think; it is not an intellectual operation; it is only a going around in a confused circle with your head off. You only wish in a dumb way that you hadn’t done it, though really you don’t know which it is you wish you hadn’t done, and moreover you don’t care: that is not the point; you simply wish you hadn’t done it, whichever it is; done what, is a matter of minor importance and hasn’t anything to do with the case. You get at what I mean? You have felt that way? Well, that is the way one feels over his interview in print.

Yes, you are afraid of the interviewer, and that is not an inspiration. You close your shell; you put yourself on your guard; you try to be colorless; you try to be crafty, and talk all around a matter without saying anything: and when you see it in print, it makes you sick to see how well you succeeded. All the time, at every new change of question, you are alert to detect what it is the interviewer is driving at now, and circumvent him. Especially if you catch him trying to trick you into saying humorous things. And in truth that is what he is always trying to do. He shows it so plainly, works for it so openly and shamelessly, that his very first effort closes up that reservoir, and his next one caulks it tight. I do not suppose that a really humorous thing was ever said to an interviewer since the invention of his uncanny trade. Yet he must have something “characteristic;” so he invents the humorisms himself, and interlards them when he writes up his interview. They are always extravagant, often too wordy, and generally framed in “dialect”–a non-existent and impossible dialect at that. This treatment has destroyed many a humorist. But that is no merit in the interviewer, because he didn’t intend to do it.

There are plenty of reasons why the Interview is a mistake. One is, that the interviewer never seems to reflect that the wise thing to do, after he has turned on this and that and the other tap, by a multitude of questions, till he has found one that flows freely and with interest, would be to confine himself to that one, and make the best of it, and throw away the emptyings he had secured before. He doesn’t think of that. He is sure to shut off that stream with a question about some other matter; and straightway his one poor little chance of getting something worth the trouble of carrying home is gone, and gone for good. It would have been better to stick to the thing his man was interested in talking about, but you would never be able to make him understand that. He doesn’t know when you are delivering metal from when you are shoveling out slag, he can’t tell dirt from ducats; it’s all one to him, he puts in everything you say; then he sees, himself, that it is but green stuff and wasn’t worth saying, so he tries to mend it by putting in something of his own which he thinks is ripe, but in fact is rotten. True, he means well, but so does the cyclone.

Studying Optional

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 3 Comments

From Keith O’Brien’s “What happened to studying?” in The Boston Globe:

According to time-use surveys analyzed by professors Philip Babcock, at the University of California Santa Barbara, and Mindy Marks, at the University of California Riverside, the average student at a four-year college in 1961 studied about 24 hours a week. Today’s average student hits the books for just 14 hours.

This probably didn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone, the question is, Why?  The suggested answer is perhaps more troubling than the data.

The easy culprits — the allure of the Internet (Facebook!), the advent of new technologies (dude, what’s a card catalog?), and the changing demographics of college campuses — don’t appear to be driving the change, Babcock and Marks found. What might be causing it, they suggest, is the growing power of students and professors’ unwillingness to challenge them.

And …

One theory, offered by Babcock and Marks, suggests that the cause, or at least one of them, is a breakdown in the professor-student relationship. Instead of a dynamic where a professor sets standards and students try to meet them, the more common scenario these days, they suggest, is one in which both sides hope to do as little as possible.

“No one really has an incentive to make a demanding class,” Marks said. “To make a tough assignment, you have to write it, grade it. Kids come into office hours and want help on it. If you make it too hard, they complain. Other than the sheer love for knowledge and the desire to pass it on to the next generation, there is no incentive in the system to encourage effort.”

The problem dates back to the 1960s, said Murray Sperber, a visiting professor in the graduate school of education at the University of California Berkeley. Sperber, at the time, was a graduate student at Berkeley and was part of an upstart movement pushing for students to rate their professors. The idea, Sperber said, was to give students a chance to express their opinions about their classes — a noble thought, but one that has backfired, according to many professors. Course evaluations have created a sort of “nonaggression pact,” Sperber said, where professors — especially ones seeking tenure — go easy on the homework and students, in turn, give glowing course evaluations.

If there is a bright spot in the story it might be this:  At least students are self-aware of the problem.

In a 2008 survey of more than 160,000 undergraduates enrolled in the University of California system, students were asked to list what interferes most with their academic success. Some blamed family responsibilities, some blamed jobs. The second most common obstacle to success, according to the students, was that they were depressed, stressed, or upset. And then came the number one reason, agreed upon by 33 percent of students, who said they struggled with one particular problem “frequently” or “all the time”: They simply did not know how to sit down and study.

This also suggests that the problem cannot be blamed entirely on the breakdown of the teacher-student relationship cited above, although I suspect that bears a good bit of the responsibility.