My brother and I grew up with stories, both oral and written. The stories were so compelling to me as a child that I thought, until I was pretty close to adulthood, that I could remember things that happened before I was born. This gave me the sense that I have never lost, of living partly in the past and of loving men and woman that I did not know. I expect, although I can’t know, that many of our stories would have been passed down whether or not we lived in Henry County. But I know that the daily reminders of sight, sounds and smells bring up those stories over and over again and so their power and influence has strengthened in our lives and my brother and I have passed them on to our children.
Even better, our children have heard these stories from their grandfather. If we had not lived here to be reminded and to remember maybe those stories would have been forgotten. If my father and his father had moved away maybe the place would have been lost to me and to my children. Of course, every generation makes its own choices and my children will make theirs but Henry County is a possibility for them with an unbroken line of stories handed down for eight generations.
Mary Berry, who writes a lot like her father—which is to say, beautifully.
Varieties of heirloom tomatoes planted by my mother.
Heirloom tomato names are pure Americana.
My own small garden holds Kellogg’s Breakfast, Pink Brandywine, Carbon, Black Krim, White Tomesol, Black Cherry, Purple Calabash, and Cherokee Purple. My Yellow Riesentraube, alas, died.
“The Significance of Midwestern Personality,” The Mackinaw Valley Institute, which needs to have a RSS or Twitter feed or an email subscription or SOME way of keeping up with them.
But why is the investing in such amenities problematic? Because colleges borrowed heavily to create them at a very bad time to go deeply into debt, and in the naïve belief that their amenities would be uniquely wonderful. But if everyone is doing it, or has already done it, then the amenities cancel each other out, leaving schools with the old problem: how do we distinguish what we have to offer from what everyone else has to offer?
How about this? Maybe someone could have the imagination to say: By the quality of our teaching. I am waiting for some bold college president to come forth and say, “You won’t find especially nice dorms at our college. They’re clean and neat, but there’s nothing fancy about them. We don’t have a climbing wall. Our food services offer simple food, made as often as possible with fresh ingredients, but we couldn’t call it gourmet eating. There are no 55-inch flat-screen TVs in the lounges of our dorms. We don’t have these amenities because we decided instead to invest in full-time, permanent faculty who are genuinely dedicated to teaching and advising you well and preparing you for life after college. So if you want the state-of-the-art rec center, that’s cool, but just remember that the price you’ll pay for that is to have most of your classes taught by graduate students and contingent faculty, the first of whom won’t have the experience and the second of whom won’t have the time to be the kind of teachers you need (even when, as is often the case, they really want to be). Our priorities here are pretty much the reverse of those that dominate many other schools. So think about that, and make a wise decision.”
My two undergraduate alma maters are both well-positioned to make this sort of move if they wanted, because as small, Midwestern religious colleges they will never, ever compete on gleaming amenities. They could even make a related claim about fostering really excellent community, as small colleges. Yet although it’s true that these schools don’t rely on adjuncts nearly as heavily as research universities, I don’t see either making anything like this appeal.
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This whole post is gold, really.
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Timothy Burke on the “humanities crisis.”
I don’t actually agree with him that the academic humanities are “the best show in town,” and therefore support this point all the more fully.
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McSweeny’s (via portraitoftheartistasayoungman)
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I clicked the link and it turned out to be Bart Ehrman. Of course.
“For anyone interested in knowing what the earliest Christians thought about Christ, and God, and many other things, these books are indispensable. On top of that, they can be terrific reading.”
This is what I like to see: Ron Swanson smacks down Bart Ehrman.
(Source: azspot)
66 Most game theory, he noted, treats players as equally “rational” parties sitting across a chessboard. But many situations, Mr. Chwe points out, involve parties with unequal levels of strategic thinking. Sometimes a party may simply lack ability. But sometimes a powerful party faced with a weaker one may not realize it even needs to think strategically.
Take the scene in “Pride and Prejudice” where Lady Catherine de Bourgh demands that Elizabeth Bennet promise not to marry Mr. Darcy. Elizabeth refuses to promise, and Lady Catherine repeats this to Mr. Darcy as an example of her insolence — not realizing that she is helping Elizabeth indirectly signal to Mr. Darcy that she is still interested.
It’s a classic case of cluelessness, which is distinct from garden-variety stupidity, Mr. Chwe argues.
EDIT: I shouldn’t post dismissive comments about a book based on an NYT profile, so *poof.*
It is not possible to come up with an adequate “defense of literature,” because “literature” doesn’t exist: too many wildly different kinds of plays and stories and poems and songs fall under that useless rubric. Defenses of specific works, or specific authors, or even specific ways of reading specific works or authors, might be possible and useful; but nothing broader than that.
And maybe we should remember also these words from George Orwell: “There is no argument by which one can defend a poem. It defends itself by surviving, or it is indefensible.”
Alan Jacobs, “Can Literature Be Defended?”
Cosign.
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