|
 |
Board
of Directors:
John
R. Harris, Ph.D.
Executive
Director
Thomas
F. Bertonneau, Ph.D.
Secretary
Helen
R. Andretta, Ph.D.
York
College-CUNY
Ralph
S. Carlson, Ph.D.
Azusa
Pacific University
Kelly
Ann Hampton
Michael
H. Lythgoe
Lt.
Col. USAF (Retd.)
|
 |
Praesidium 8.3
(Summer 2008)
CONTENTS
A
Few Words from the Editor
Carrying
literacy's banner forward into e-space continues to be a mildly
contradictory adventure whose tensions can sometimes drive its
footsoldiers to despair.
The Vanishing Cultivated Girl and her Replacement:
From
Reading
Novels to Talking Trash on Campus
Thomas F. Bertonneau
Professor Bertonneau, a veteran of many
classroom campaigns, laments that the coed undergraduate, far from being
the English teacher’s joy to instruct that she once was, has become
frequently downright adversarial thanks to feminism’s having applied
rough edges liberally.
Literacy’s
Mystic Moon: The Flow and Ebb
of
the Sublime Through the English Classics
John R. Harris
In a rather routine presentation of a
literary survey class, this professor was struck by the prominent—but
largely unremarked—presence of the sublime in English literature since
the Renaissance. Why did
English theorists like Edmund Burke themselves appear to disparage the
sublime experience?
Traditional
Social Philosophy: A Sketch of an Idea
Mark
Wegierski
Words
and notions are brutally abused in today’s raging political disputes:
some essential definitions and elementary distinctions would go far
toward making such exchanges more responsible.
Internal Bickering Nixes Establishment of Private
Neo-Conservative
Liberal
Arts
College
(Thomas
F. Bertonneau)
A previous issue had some fun with Ivory
Tower culture and “liberal chic”.
It seems only fair now to report on what neo-conservatives are up
to—or would be, if they were given free reign to create their own
campus.
Summer
Storm (poem)
Alan
McGinnis
Next
Door Burned Ucalegon (short story)
Ivor Davies
In addition to regular classroom duties
and committee work, the college professor will occasionally be called
upon to perform such incidental pedagogical chores as… judging an
essay contest saturated with miserable entries.
To make a donation, address your check or money order to The
Center for Literate Values or to John
Harris (NOT to Praesidium) and
post to:
Praesidium
c/o John Harris, Editor
2707 Patriot Drive
Tyler
TX,
75701
Or use the PayPal option at our "Make
a Donation" link
*****
A
Few Words from the Editor
I wrote several of you toward the end of June that The Center’s
last days may have come. Our
Web site had inexplicably vanished from cyberspace, replaced by a pretty
young blonde carrying a backpack but otherwise not even implicitly
affiliated with matters academic, intellectual, or cultural.
A few phrases had randomly been snatched and posted on the
“home page”, rather as the entrails of a huge Cretaceous raptor’s
victim might be sprinkled upon a lawn… a fingertip here, a shorn
spleen there. Most of the
phrases did not coalesce into any sense from any angle.
All too abundant and comprehensible, however, were two menus of
invitations to engage in financial activity—buy a plane ticket, sign
up for online dating—which would involve the release of delicate
personal information.
I panicked, quite honestly—not only because I hadn’t the
slightest idea what had happened, but because the dozen of dignitaries I
had lately invited to visit the site would never take me seriously again
if their eyes should light upon such rubbish.
I assumed that we had been “hijacked”, and proceeded to
notify my Web hosting service (which answered none of my Priority One
messages until after the weekend) and the FBI (which has yet to send me
so much as a standardized auto-response).
It turns out that the exotic
port
of
Shanghai
should not have stirred in my
imagination: the heist was entirely home-grown.
My Web host, having divided technical assistance and billing into
two distinct departments, could not seem to pass the word from one to
the other that I had properly renewed my domain name (“literatevalues.org”).
I learned that a certain species of vulture swoops down upon
these names the instant they become available, purchases them for
pennies, and then offers them at a re-sell price of thousands of dollars
in the event that some hapless outfit like The Center is facing a
massive loss of clientele. Of
course, just in case the domain name’s quondam owner really does not
care to keep it, these dusky operators set several snares for any
visitor so foolish as to divulge credit card information.
The Web host did right by me on the Monday morning in question
(though only two weeks later was my card finally
charged for the domain name’s renewal).
I did not walk away from this adventure chirping, “All’s well
that ends well,” however. Though
our site was actually much improved by the thorough scrub-down and
manicure I gave it in consequence of the scare (see for yourself
sometime), I nevertheless remain deeply impressed by the multiplied
opportunities for fraud, waste, and ruin in our Internet “culture”.
I am disturbed that so many sleazy businesses can operate so
openly, that virtually no legal oversight is effective, and—most of
all—that casual errors on the part of well-meaning parties can create
tidal waves rather than mere ripples.
Of course, I really have no way of ever finding out if The Center
failed to receive a grant or endorsement because an important person
visited its site during those sixty-something hours.
I have no way of knowing, really, if our PayPal button is working
as it should. Links on the
site cease functioning without warning.
On this particular morning as I write, I plan to see a man about
a camera that was supposed to create DVDs capable of being viewed on a
TV screen… and it doesn’t. My
home computer (and the one at my workplace) will not even burn simple
text files onto a disc after receiving all the right commands until I
eject my disc and am told in effect (like a patient beau saddled with an
airy flirt), “Wait! Put
that back! I haven’t
finished with it!”
I wrote some of you during my panic attack that the latent
contradiction between The Center’s work and the Internet’s
importance to that work had at last reached the snapping point—that
readers and other thoughtful people simply don’t waste time clicking
around on a flashy box, and that the hit-or-miss, all-or-nothing links
upon which every stage of such communication depends cannot long be
tolerated by responsible adults. The
failure rate is unacceptable. The
risk, the margin of error, are too great.
The impenetrability of the failure’s causes and the
inaccessibility of a competent technician are infuriating.
To those of us who are dedicated professionals rather than bored
adolescents with an attention deficit, our culture does not seem to be
advancing… quite the contrary.
In various ways, I think our contributors are constantly noticing
this inadequacy of “progressive existence”.
Tom Bertonneau writes in this issue of the gross incivility
observable in the undergraduate coed who swaggers down college corridors
with a New Woman chip on her shoulder.
I wonder how much this situation is worsened by the absence
of young men who are not trapped in adolescence by a panoply of
electronic games? My own
essay about the sublime in English literature argues that applied
science has a built-in contempt for the incomprehensible (or even the
“unprocessable” as the technician understands it in his narrow
terms: try finding a young “geek” at Radio Shack who sympathizes
with your computer anxiety). Ivor
Davies has given us a short story which all too well illustrates the
squalor of prose-writing in this epoch of lunging at “icons” (a word
whose transformed meaning packs a walloping irony which will never graze
Bill Gates, let alone his cultural progeny).
In short, “e-culture” is not, and will never be,
civilization.
~J. H.
back to Contents
***************************
The Vanishing
Cultivated Girl and her Replacement:
From
Reading
Novels to Talking Trash on Campus
Thomas
F. Bertonneau
I
I
begin with three vignettes, the veracity of which my patient readers
will accept on faith…
First
Vignette. It is the end of the
semester in my “Western Heritage I” course, an undergraduate
“general education requirement” that I teach as a large-enrollment
enterprise, with over a hundred students in the auditorium.
Even with the help of a graduate-student teaching assistant,
keeping order in the classroom has required a massive and annoying
investment of the teacher’s energy.
Students come late, complain about lost points due to missed
quizzes, shuffle in their seats, and—most distracting of all—talk
during the lecture. It is women,
far more than men, who offend in this manner, although men are not free
from the vice. To allay
student fears about the final examination, I have agreed to spend the
last two days of the semester summing up the major points of the
syllabus and offering reminders about what we have read during the
semester. (Some, who have
not done the reading, mistakenly think that by taking notes during these
concluding sessions, they can fake their way through the examination.)
I am carefully making my way through an outline, tying Homer to
the tragedians, the tragedians to the philosophers, Greek literature to
Latin literature, and pagan civilization to the early Christian
discourse that it at last produced.
I find that I cannot keep the thread intact.
Something is addling my concentration.
I cock an ear and discover the source.
From the moment I began, two young women sitting halfway back in
the auditorium and close to the right aisle (from the lecturer’s
perspective) have been chattering to one another in loud stage whispers.
I shoot them a disapproving look.
The chattering continues, as if no one else were present.
I shoot them another look and clear my throat.
No result. Finally, I
must stop my lecture and address the two of them directly, with a
mandate to cease gossiping or take their palaver out of the classroom.
Both girls make it clear by their expressions that they feel put
upon and abused.
Second
Vignette. It is a more recent
semester. Again I am
teaching “Western Heritage I,” but in this little story the actual
course plays only a small part. The
public schools have a hiatus, so my twelve-year-old, a seventh-grader,
is with me on campus. He
sits through a lecture on Virgil while reading a book about UFOs.
When the class-time has elapsed, he helps me pack up my chattels
and we begin to walk to my next class, on the other side of campus.
In the crush of students we find ourselves walking next to a
female undergraduate engaged, like eighty percent of other students, in
a peripatetic cell phone conversation.
The young lady is well dressed—in the female equivalent of
“junior executive.” She
walks briskly, oblivious of anyone’s co-presence in the public space.
Her dialogue grows excited. She
is complaining to a sympathetic listener about one of her instructors,
who has apparently assigned what she believes to be too much reading and
who grades, as she sees it, harshly.
“He f---ing thinks nobody’s got other things to do,” she
says loudly. “Well, I’m
f---ing not going to let him push me around.
I’m f---ing going to report this f---er to the dean.”
In three sentences, she has inserted sailor-talk into her speech
four times. At the second
usage of the Anglo-Saxonism, I give her a disapproving glance.
At the fourth I say loudly, “Thank you for sharing that with my
twelve-year-old.” She
drops back, looking more irritated than ashamed, avoiding my eyes.
Third
Vignette. Often it is in the freshman
composition course that I have closest contact with students.
Here, still a bit intimidated by the college experience and not
yet cynically inured to education, students tend to show themselves most
naïvely and candidly. Insisting
that students share with me for consultation two drafts of each of their
four formal essays gives me the opportunity actually to talk to them
individually many times during the semester.
Undergraduates come to college today with less literacy than
ever. As a rule, functional
illiteracy little bothers the men—they imagine other spheres than the
intellectual in which they might demonstrate some kind of prowess; women
generally show themselves more amenable to constructive discipline in
the domain of their written expression and generally make better
progress than the men. “Better,”
however, means in comparison to a paltry norm.
This semester (Fall 2007), the best writer, and the most mature
eighteen-year-old in the class, is a young woman whom I shall call, by a
chain of protective associations, “Veronica.”
No opportunity presents itself that would let me discern much
about Veronica’s background. She
distinguishes herself from others, however, by doing the reading that I
assign (most skip it) and by always turning in her required
draft-versions of the paper; again, many fewer basic-language
deformities mar her prose than is the case with other students.
She has a mien of some awareness, a careful way of speaking, and
a measure of poise, as previous generations would have named it.
Veronica can make, rudimentarily, a logical and evidentiary
argument, something few of her peers can.
Her range of references shows much restriction; she has read a
little—more than other freshmen, but nothing challenging or brave.
I think to myself: Veronica
might be much more intellectually and culturally developed than a jejune
education has made her—and she is unaware of the possibility.
More than one commentator in recent years has bemoaned, and
rightly, the decline of masculinity in college students.
In place of the aspiring young man who seeks to add lettered
cultivation to his purely physical development, the male undergraduate
has become, for the most part, an infantilized, marginally overweight,
video-game-obsessed consumer of rap music.
In his sartorial habit and demeanor, he resembles the slaphappy
imbecile played to perfection by Huntz Hall in the old Bowery Boys comedies,
right down to the invariable baseball cap worn at any angle
except brim-forward, as the haberdasher sensibly designed it.
He might be de-sexed or not yet sexually determined (this will be
in parallel with his infantilism), or he might be crudely and
pornographically sex-obsessed. What
he avoids is balance. In
class he tends to the surly, but a noticeable admixture of effeminacy
often emasculates even his surliness.
A male student once told me, when I asked him in accordance with
my rules for classroom decorum to remove his hat, that he couldn’t do
so because he was, as he said, “having a bad hair day.”
He intended this as a meaningful remark.
Asked why he has come to college, the typical male student cannot
say, unless he recites the empty formula about “earning a big
salary” when—or rather if—he graduates.
Another characteristic of contemporary college males is that
their numbers have steadily decreased over the last decade.
Fewer men come to college than ever before; more men than women
drop out before completing a degree.
The blame for this etiolating of masculinity lies not solely on
the men themselves, although they contribute to it by making choices
that they could make otherwise. Rather,
for twenty-five years or more the American nation, in its public schools
and through its commercial mass-culture, has been deliberately censuring
real masculine behavior and deliberately feminizing males.
I wish to explore, however, not the emasculation of young men, as
catastrophic as that is, but instead its corollary: the equally enormous
de-feminizing of females.
Do comparisons run to unfairness?
So be it. In my
graduating class at
Santa Monica
High School
(1972), I knew many already formidably cultivated young women.
They were, for one thing, readers.
They read books on the bus traveling to and from school –the
usual girl’s fare of Jane Austen, but also surprising things like the
Tolkien trilogy, just then issued in paperback.
By the tenth grade, Diane S—— had finished the last
installment. They read Demian,
Siddhartha, and The Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse.
They read The Stranger by Albert Camus and Zorba the
Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis. They
read Love Story by Eric Segal, too, but this had its context in
their other literary involvements; it never defined them.
Then they read John Keats and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which
no boy did. In Mr.
Johnston’s Senior Honors English course, they sustained their part in
the discussion and often left the boys looking like they had little to
say. One really had to
compete with Regine W—— or Janet M—— or Ruth K—— in the
endeavor of interpretation. Those
girls sang in the chorus or in the smaller Madrigal Society, or they
played an instrument in the school orchestra.
They had their favorite Top Forty hits, I’m sure, but they
could appreciate a symphony concert or a song recital.
When an exhibition of Impressionist paintings came to the
Los Angeles
County
Art Museum
on a weekend, Regine and Janet and Ruth
would come to school on Monday eager to talk about it.
I once spent a memorable afternoon with Regine in the
Huntington
Gardens
, whose grassy and flowery beauty she grasped much more vividly than I.
Again in college, at UCLA, despite the pull still exerted on
adolescent habits by the descent into Hippiedom of the previous few
years, one yet encountered straight-backed girls, well dressed, well
read, and serious in their spiritual pursuits.
The privilege fell to me of dating such a girl, stately in her
possession of Episcopalian form, during my sophomore year.
Elizabeth (“Liz”) A——, who later earned a law degree,
played piano (Bach and Mozart), spoke French, and did not find an Ingmar
Bergman film foreign to her experience although she could equally well
laugh her heart out at a Woody Allen movie. Among their accomplishments
Regine and Elizabeth knew how to dine.
Their interest in cuisines embraced the adventurous, and
both knew to stand to let the lad seat them.
I can imagine neither of them eating a fast-food chimichanga,
the very name of which suggests barbaric engrossment.
In the incipient wisdom of my early thirties, right in the
shrillest Harridan days of academic feminism, I had the luck to marry a
genuine lady of the same species as Regine and Elizabeth.
Maleness impels me to the usual sex-related interest in women,
including frankly the coeds in my classes.
I don’t say that I fancy them, as a predatory humanities
professor of my UCLA days was known to do serially.
(As he grew older, the girls grew younger and younger.)
Indeed, most of these nymphae exert moderate repulsion by
virtue of their personal qualities or, as it might well be, their
amorphous lack of definite personality and their culturally bereft
condition. Nevertheless, at
an organic level, the presence of young ladies solicits a mixture of
curiosity and protectiveness that informs my sense of them despite
reason. Plato says that Eros
is intrinsic to education, so perhaps that ubiquitous Platonic Eros
acts to make my innards kick in. I
expect the males to avoid humane discipline like a plague; I expect them
to behave and speak crudely and to mumble their lame I dunno’s when addressed in the interrogative.
Emotionally unmoved by them, I have learned to shrug my shoulders
at their “slacker” imperviousness to edification.
For the coeds, although facts militate against it, I stubbornly
await a freshening of the wind, a calm sea, and a prosperous voyage.
In respect of them, the thought whispers to me: There is a
physiological beauty in this girl that ought to be matched by
intellectual formation; a bit of genuine knowledge might refine her
expression or positively alter her posture somehow.
Elizabeth, my sophomore-year girlfriend, and my wife Susan, in
their common upright and clear-eyed self-presentation, furnish the
ideal. Perhaps a prospect of
discovery will loom. The
ship of this hope usually breaks its keel on the Siren-Rocks of
classroom reality, as in the first of my three vignettes.
Men in their grimacing apathy sleep during class or stare at the
ceiling. Whispering to one
another lies outside their repertory of offenses.
No longer a rare intrusion, the chattering girls turn up
ubiquitously, holding forth in private parliament during the lecture,
while registering alarming non-susceptibility to rebuke.
Chatterers constitute a describable sub-category within the
larger realm of the de-feminized. As
befits their particular annoying quality, they usually correspond to raw
girlishness. They are more
likely than not to be the youngish-appearing puellile girls clad
in dresses rather than jeans and with curls or “done up” hair rather
than the straight shoulder-length tresses that define the default of
current coed coiffure. They
come in pairs, naturally, and must typically be sorority sisters or
dorm-room co-dwellers or off-campus apartment sharers.
Their chattering is at once narcissistic and aggressive.
It is narcissistic for being utterly selfish and anti-social.
The mindlessly prattling pair shows obliviousness to the
distinction between the outdoor space of the quadrangle and the indoor
space of the lecture hall; or worse yet, it is not obliviousness but
willful contemptuousness towards the indoor space of the lecture hall,
which they claim as theirs by treating it in what manner they will.
They also show obliviousness or contempt towards the presumptive
presence of other students—although in actuality these might be
few—who seat themselves with the intention of listening to and
following the lesson. Their girlishness
or even little girlishness belongs to the calculation of the
behavior: it functions as camouflage, as if to say, “my innocent
appearance preempts chastisement and shame on him who thinks me
guilty.” The guise puts me
in mind that a year or two ago, MTV ran a series of hour-long programs
called Sweet Sixteen, which featured pathologically spoiled
adolescent girls who extort their wealthy and indulgent parents for
lavish birthday parties. The
birthday girls all exhibited that same Barbie-Doll-like false
femininity.
Chatterers are that kind of girl.
Their irremediable self-absorption freezes them, in their moral
and intellectual (non-) development, at the seventh-grade level.
Chatterers are aggressive for being relentless in their rude
behavior and directly challenging in their appropriation of time and
attention. I like
occasionally to show films connected the readings that I assign.
Nowadays, however, turning down the houselights inevitably
operates as a sign for the gossipers to commence their obnoxious
volubility. More than once I
have suspended the screening to say, “Girls, you need to stop your
private conversation now and pay attention the movie.”
Who ever became a college teacher expecting to monitor habits as
disruptive as these? The
frequent visible gut-response of the miscreants is volcanic indignation
that can barely contain itself from Krakatoa-like eruption.
Chatterers disqualify themselves as feminine by a deliberate
choice to sustain infantile behavior into what should be the beginning
of their adulthood and, considering that they have accepted the
invitation to attend college, their Bildung.
I only once had to rebuke male
chatterers. This happened
when I taught extra courses one semester at a so-called community
college. The two offenders
were effeminate “Goth” males in Marilyn Manson makeup and garb,
which inclines me to classify them as belonging to a distinctly female phenomenon.
Chatterers contribute maliciously to the larger breakdown now
happening in society between the exterior forum and the interior
sanctuary. Stand-up
comedians have long since made the loud cell phone user a staple of
their routines. It’s
barely funny any more. Movie
theaters routinely run announcements at the beginning of the program
begging people not to talk during the performance and asking them to
turn off their cell phones. An
old phrase, “chattering like fishwives,”
whether fair or not, ascribes audible insouciant prattling to the
lowest, most unformed constituents of womanhood.
Fishwives presumably read few books.
Incessant talk militates against absorption in letters, a task
requiring the discipline of silent concentration.
Incessant talk militates against paying attention to road
traffic, too. When driving
on or near campus, one must keep an eye peeled for students, mostly
women, who think that they can chatter inanities and negotiate left turns at
the same time. Chattering
signifies a recursion in contemporary society of pre-literate oral behavior unrestrained,
however, by the village decorum that provided every European language
with the justifiable equivalent of the succinct French phrase, taisez-vous, Mesdames!
II
People
who chatter in class in violation of good taste and derail a formal
procedure probably abuse cell phone technology too and annoy others by
that abuse. The trespasses
run together in a syndrome along with much else.
It is not only loud private conversations out of place in public
areas—it is also text-messaging. I
have scolded ten times more women than men for text-messaging during
class, another dissolution of courtesy and social order that has reached
epidemic proportions and yet another deformation of the female
character. Text-messaging no
more signifies literacy than does chattering, reducing grammar and
syntax to a pidgin and restricting topics to those within a domain of
insipidity. Inveterate
text-messaging probably stunts the mind just as fully does inveterate
video-game-playing or television-watching.
One form of linguistic, and therefore also of mental,
stultification is the lapse from polite into vulgar language.
I would point to the new crassness of female speech as another
outstanding element in the low-class behavioral koine
characteristic of the de-feminized coed: on the one hand, mindless yadayada
even during lecture, and on the other, le patois des mâtelots and
the yob-talk of soccer hooligans.
My physio-chemistry
makes me liable to crises of low blood sugar.
Fortifying myself with a meal before pitching into two or three
straight class-periods of lecturing is a habit I carefully observe.
A creature of the campus, I take a sandwich or a bowl of hot soup
in the dining commons where students and faculty members sit at table
where they will. This makes
the luncheoner privy, without intentional eavesdropping, to many
simultaneous conversations during a forty-five minute leisurely repast,
and it opens access to a fair sampling of student locutions.
I exclude the male bull sessions that one might overhear.
Again, one expects these to occur at a low cultural level with
many sexual and scatological references.
It is the women, among whom I used to think that hope might lie,
who interest and disappoint me. The
cell-phone talker in the second vignette
has innumerable clones as far as her speech habits are concerned.
While it no longer surprises me to hear the s-word or the f-word distort the tongue of a cosmetically
noticeable twenty-year-old, the contradiction in it has not yet ceased
to shock me. I estimate that
seventy per cent of coeds casually employ excretory and fornicating
vocabulary in their conversation. They
use the s-word
and f-word
not merely now
and then,
by way of Jack Tar emphasis, but constantly, at least once or maybe even many times in
every single sentence. No verbal gesture being
devoid of some indexical function, even if semantically it were empty,
constant female trash-talking must point to something.
It points
to some obvious things. The
feculence of commercially mediated so-called popular culture grows more
immune to overestimation with the passing seconds.
Sixteen years ago, MTV, the long-time mass-instructor of our
wretched youth-culture, ceased devoting itself to music videos (the
genre it had pioneered) and began devoting itself to the mendaciously
named enterprise of reality programming, so-called.
As pandering virtuosity, the template of all such entertainment, The
Real World, showed cynical genius.
Producers Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jonathan Murray recruited groups
of kids in their early twenties to live together in a house while
cameras filmed every aspect of their lives.
The casting directors knew what they were looking for: a
combination of libidinousness and resentment that would lead to tension
and hostility among the cohabitants of the dwelling.
They valued a capacity for resentment at least as much as they
valued willingness to copulate on camera.
The introductory voice-over put it this way: “This
is the true story of seven strangers, picked to live in a house, work
together, and have their lives taped—to find out what happens when
people stop being polite and start getting real… The Real World.”
One element of mendacity is that no one who has never started
being polite can stop being polite.
The sound-track bleep,
which covers up a normatively impolite utterance, but only barely,
belonged as staple to the reality-programming formula from the
beginning. The sound editors
cleverly gestured in the direction of discretion while leaving the
matter of vocabulary-related limitation entirely clear.
The expletives signified to the audience (high school students),
by a moronic but powerful code, that the college-age students on display
in the half-hour episode had liberated themselves into an adult
existence bravely beyond parental supervision.
No one stood in danger of having his mouth washed out with soap.
The Real World
never caused the vulgarization of coeds, although, of course, it has
regularly reinforced a pervasive hard-meretricious comportment in young
women. The importance of The Real World lies
in its having so blatantly revealed a connection between the free usages
of four-letter profanity, debased sexuality, and perfervid resentment.
The producers clearly aim the show at high school girls and
freshman coeds, who take behavioral hints from it.
The
Real World and its spin-offs merely crystallized a trend
that already existed. Coarsened
language proliferated in movies almost immediately after Hollywood’s
abandonment of the vestigial production code in the mid-1960s.
Faye Dunaway’s eponymous gun moll in Bonnie
and Clyde (1968)
swore
only a little (some timid hell’s and damn’s)
although she behaved like a whore; whereas the same actress’s “Diane
Christensen” in Network (1976), an
aggressive female TV news producer, had a ceaselessly peppery mouth,
including the f-word. All the girls in The
Real World, whether they have ever seen Network
or not, take their model
in Dunaway’s Christensen,
played as a seething mass of executive resentment and inchoate ambition.
The archetype has seeped into the culture, not as an apotropaic
fright, but rather as a profitably imitable set of cues.
The theme of resentment plays a role in Sweet
Sixteen, too.
One of the birthday girls blithely tells the camera, “I want my
party to be bigger than anybody else’s so that all the kids will know
how rich I am.” Fear of
inferiority drives the display. Resentment
enters the pattern by definition: if they so much as think
their status is higher than mine, then my status
is effectively diminished and theirs is increased. The girl
resents the presumed self-evaluating higher status of others.
The girl
inserting profanity into every sentence on her side of a peripatetic
cell phone conversation—if “conversation”
were the word—in my second vignette has descended as deeply into
resentment as she has into profanity.
She dresses in the severe “Lady Executive” style and thus
imitates the Dunaway-Christensen archetype, whether she knows it or not.
I recall to the reader the occasion of her ire: one of her
instructors had evaluated her below her own estimation.
The reactive antics of a female student enrolled in my “Western
Heritage I” course in a recent semester equally well demonstrate the
depth of resentment with which the feminism-inspired, MTV-vulgarized
coed readily responds to the smallest perception of under-evaluation or
“unfairness.” The course
carries a high enrollment-cap of 140 students.
During the semester under discussion, 135 students had enrolled
in the course and even at the end of the semester, after some attrition,
117 students sat at the final examination.
The campus logistics people assign the course to a big
auditorium with so much seating capacity that, even with 140 students,
there are scores of seats remaining.
This creates a pedagogical problem that I have learned to address
immediately when the semester begins.
Many students try to be present in the lecture minimally by
finding a place in the back and off to one side.
I require students to shift their seats to create a compact
audience up front. I use a
mixture of mild coercion and non-corrupting bribery to draw students to
the front rows, especially, pointing out that an empirical correlation
exists between sitting up front and receiving a higher evaluation than
the norm.
On one occasion, as class began, several seats remained open in
the front row. I urged
students to fill in these seats and a few complied.
I had scheduled a quiz, which I then administered.
I usually let the students score their own quizzes, but before
collecting them, I said, “The students sitting in the front row may
give themselves two additional points.”
The justification was twofold: to reward those who had been
willing to come forward and to create future competition for proximity
to the lecturer.
At the next class-meeting a girl came down front while I was
setting out my notes and otherwise preparing for the lecture to say that
she wanted to talk to me about her quiz.
In fact, she wanted to talk about the two extra points that
I had given to the students seated up front.
This lagniappe for the bold had obviously obsessed her
since the last class meeting; she characterized it as “punishing all
other students.” I
explained to her that rewarding some after inviting people, as it
turned out, to be rewarded, was not at all the same as punishing
others; I reminded
her that every time I took roll in class, once or twice a week, I gave a
point to those present and none to those absent, and that this meant
that by the middle of the semester she,
who at least attended class consistently, had received far more than two
“free points.” She would
have none of it. She
demanded that I add the two points to her score.
I answered that I hadn’t the slightest inclination to do so,
but that if she wanted to she should feel free to take her complaint to
my department chair. My poor
chair! She first sent him a
1,500-word email message filling in the details of her outrage, and then
harangued him in his office for ninety minutes.
As he is as sane as she was not, her ferocious self-advocacy made
no more impression on him than it did on me—or rather it made the
identical impression of a little ego-monster whose college career was
likely to be one hyper-emotional crisis after another.
He did get her to assent weakly to his characterization of my
ploy as a “brilliant pedagogical maneuver.”
After that, she remained a morose presence four or five rows back
from the front, never saying anything, and acquitting herself on quizzes
with a C+ average. She took
no more interest in the course material, in other words, than any other
detached participant in the class. Neither
to me nor to the chair did this girl use bad language, but I remain
relatively certain that she used it about me to her friends,
supposing she had any.
Many men in the class must have regretted, as acutely as the girl
did, not coming down front at my behest.
I know that a large number of men enrolled in the course resented
having to fulfill the “general education requirement” in the
humanities that “Western Heritage I” satisfies, and felt no
particular fondness for me. It
strikes me as a sign of the times that a coed rather than a male student
took the initiative to act on her baseless feelings of humiliating
punishment and deprivation. I
cannot remember when last a truculent male student tried intimidating me
over a justly deserved low grade or for any other reason.
The same girl also complained that my reading-list for the course
“didn’t have enough women writers on it,” adding a distinctly
ideological cast to her dissatisfaction.
I pointed out to her that in Classical letters there isn’t an
abundance of female authors, but that my reading-list included Sappho of
Mytilene and my syllabus indicated lectures on Diotima, the teacher of
Socrates, and Lady Julia, the cultured wife of the emperor Septimus
Severus. Indeed, my first
day’s lecture devoted lengthy discussion to an image, recovered from a
house at Pompeii, of a young Roman woman either reading a letter just
received or writing one to a friend.
This image has long enamored me.
It represents an ideal of literacy for men and for women, mute
though it is. I urge my
students, all of them, to aspire to the condition of that long-dead
girl. I ask them to read The
Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius, a Second Century Latin novel that
roundly, if comically, condemns licentious behavior and makes a
roundabout case for prudence in matters erotic and for purity of mind,
as far as this is attainable for mere mortals.
In my decade of teaching this novel, no female student has ever
had the wits to draw a link between the pornographic milieu described by
Apuleius and the engrossed sexual life that plays out on campus,
signified in part by scores of young women who worry not at all about
being overheard talking like an Apuleian puta.
A coed enrolled in my “Twentieth Century American Novel”
class a few semesters ago exemplifies the indiscreet and shameless way
that college females nowadays talk and what carelessly they say to
people of mere casual acquaintance.
I taught in a classroom next door to my office.
Students usually congregated in the common area outside the
classroom in the twenty minutes or so before class.
One day I saw this particular coed, in conference with a friend,
outside my office. She and
her friend, also female, kept glancing at me.
Finally they both came to my office and the student said to me,
“I’ve been on the pill since I was sixteen and for the last six
months I haven’t had my period.”
I must have visibly flinched.
I rallied myself sufficiently to inquire, “Why do I need to
know this?” I should have
said, “I don’t want to know this, so please reserve any
further details.” The
student then said, because I had inadvertently given her the opening:
“My period just started. It’s
really, really heavy.” The
friend nodded. “It’s really
heavy,” she amiably testified.
The student said: “I hope you won’t mind if I skip class
today. I think I need
medical help.” I agreed,
and hoped fervently that I would never see her again.
Her unsolicited divulgences resembled the careless f---
you’s of the
strolling cell-phone talker in that they indicated complete
obliviousness of any distinction between personal and professional or
private and public. If she
had simply said to me, without explanation, that she felt ill and
preferred not to come to class, I could not have taken exception.
She had told me in so many words, apparently imagining that I
wanted to know, that she had been sexually active since high school, had
been medicating herself with hormonal prophylaxis just as long, and had
recently experienced an organic dysfunction of the most intimate sort.
Later in the semester, she argued with me about a question of
extra points on a quiz that would not even have altered her final grade
had I yielded them to her. It
fit the pattern.
Is the set of resentful, trash-talking or casually divulging
coeds the same as the set of rutting girls, the ones who, far from
criticizing male sexual grossness, have agreed to go along with it on
the feminist-abetted assumption that whatever boys do girls can do just
as well or even better? The
two sets overlap, and the overlapping represents more than an accidental
statistical convergence. The
bad language, the cynical and aggressive attitudes, and the lack of
spiritual interest: these things betoken the dominance of bodily
function over intellectual aspiration within the realm of campus life.
As the Greek mystics said, “Soma—sema,” “The body
is our grave.” In an essay
of some currency called “Dorm Brothel,” Vigen Guroian argues that
the sexualization of youth-culture and the increasing coarseness of
academic life have combined with an abandonment of the old in loco
parentis principle to create a campus atmosphere especially inimical
to young women. Guroian
writes: “The lure and availability of sexual adventure that our
colleges afford is teaching young women… to pursue sexual pleasures
aggressively. Yet, based on
my own conversations and observations, there is no doubt that young
women today are far more vulnerable to sexual abuse and mistreatment by
young men than when I was a college student, simply because the
institutional arrangements that protected young women are gone and the
new climate says everything goes.”
Guroian follows up with this: “In the new culture that our
colleges incubate and maintain, everyone is a ‘guy.’
Everyone is ‘familiar.’ Young
men and women who have never seen anyone of the opposite sex naked or in
underwear, other than family members, now must get used to being seen by
and seeing others—perfect strangers—in just such a state.
Everyone is available to everyone else.
It would be antisocial not to be.”
A USA Today story from December, 2007, seems to confirm
Guroian’s assessment: “College
students, including young women, are far more accepting of pornography
than their parents, a shift that might be related to easy access to porn
on the Internet, a study reports today.”
Guroian has described the morass of campus life accurately.
Pursuing sex aggressively the girls certainly are, maybe
more obsessively than the boys—now feminized and de-sexed—used to
do. I doubt, however, based
on the tone of female trash talk, that the phrase “pursuing
sexual pleasures” quite adequately defines late
adolescent women, for the emphasis in it falls on “pleasures.”
Most of these girls are merely hustling and grubbing, for the
status that they think “hooking up” endows on them and for grades
better than the ones that they objectively deserve because here, too,
they glimpse the dim Grail of badly defined status.
Pace Guroian, a Christian gentleman of the old school and
a friendly if casual acquaintance, women must acknowledge just as much
responsibility for the moral-sexual collapse as do men.
Where I teach, the administration is almost entirely female, from
the president through the provost down to the dean.
The student “Health Center” has not ceased handing out
condoms or prescribing hormonal prophylaxis.
The practice is this: the pharmacist gives the condoms to the
girls so that they can give them to the boys.
If the girls were truly victims, they would be massively
complicit in their own victimization.
Colleges abet and excuse the trollop-life, but the wider culture
teaches it before young women arrive at college.
They learn the lesson eagerly.
They appear to me to be participating in the contemporary rush of
the masses to the lowest levels of mentality and mien, seeing in orgasm
one more entitlement.
Nevertheless Guroian does hit the nail squarely on the head when
he observes—and it constitutes a genuine linguistic observation—that
“everyone is a ‘guy.’” In
restaurants, invariably the college-girl waitresses greet mixed parties
not with “Ladies and Gentlemen” but rather with “Guys.” “Hi, my
name is Tiffany. What will you
guys be having for your beverage?”
The word guy comes from the Italian Guido, used as
a proper noun. Its
provenance is theatrical. It
designates a low-class male character in a farce.
His antics trespass on decorum and so provoke the risible outrage
of haughty supercilious self-over-inflating co-characters in the play.
So they also produce audience-laughter at the haughty
co-characters. A guy
is a Bowery Boy, set loose from the proscenium; he is Huntz Hall,
but he is Huntz Hall as a porno-film player, and nowadays a Guidezza goes
with him, even dominating him in the action.
III
Around the year 100 A.D., Claudia Severa was probably thirty
years old, living in the fortress town of Vindolanda near the northern
march of Rome’s Britannic province.
Claudia’s husband, Aelius Brocchus Severus, officered the watch
over the Pictish lands beyond the frontier.
The gentle-lady’s letter to her friend, Sulpicia Lepidina, is,
as Chris Scarre writes in his Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient
Rome, “the earliest known writing in Latin by a woman.”
“Claudia Severa to her Lepidina,” reads the letter,
“greetings: I send you warm invitation to come to us of September 11th,
for my birthday celebrations, to make the day more enjoyable by your
presence. Give my greetings
to your Cerialis. My Aelius
greets you and your sons. I
will expect you, sister. Farewell
sister, my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper, and greetings.”
The manuscript, a mere torn fragment of a page, reveals a lovely,
readable cursive hand. In
the word “dearest,” which she addresses to Lepidina, Claudia uses
the Greek kappa, making the spelling karissima.
Perhaps as a girl she had a Greek tutor.
Everything about this precious remnant, recovered from ruins
adjacent to Hadrian’s Wall, suggests the possession both of grace and
of a determination to uphold canons of civilized life in what must have
amounted to harsh and trying conditions.
September on the border likely brings clement weather, but the
true autumn of October and November would see rain, cold winds, and
perhaps even snow. London
and Bath, the Britannic centers of Imperial life and therefore of
civilization, lay distantly to the south; Rome, mentioned occasionally
by letter-writers from the town, lay even more remotely.
Aelius had served previously in Pannonia; it is unknown whether
Claudia was with him then.
Not too long before Claudia Severa wrote the lovely missive
inviting Lepidina to her birthday celebration, the parents of a young
girl of Pompeii commissioned a portrait of their daughter to grace one
of the many frescoed interior walls of their splendid house.
Frescoes deteriorated rapidly in the humid climate and once every
few years, householders needed to arrange the repainting of the interior
décor. This implies that
the artist painted the image not too long before the famous eruption of
Vesuvius in 79 A.D., to the otherwise catastrophic results of which we
owe the fortuitous preservation of the artifact.
This is the image about which I lecture in “Western Heritage
I” on the first day of class. My
comments will gain meaning through acquaintance with the picture.
Here it is…
This young Roman woman, whom I guess to be in her late teens,
embodies the Platonic form of the cultivated girl.
In the 1970s, the same portrait used to grace the cover of the
black-spine Penguin edition of The Nature of Things by the Roman
Epicurean poet Titus Carus Lucretius, no doubt because the young lady
strikes even the casual viewer as modeling the “Love of Wisdom.”
I bought the book when still in high school largely because of
the image. The young woman
gazes, as she contemplates words in her tablet, into the true “Nature
of Things” in its substrate. Perhaps
the moment catches her quietly considering a letter from a friend, or
perhaps she is writing such a letter to one of her “sisters” in
correspondence. Whatever the
case, she might profitably have patented her femininity; she might even
more profitably have patented her humanity, for these attributes imbue
the graphic record of her with a benign and hopeful aura.
The tip of the stylus pressed against the lower lip sets the tone
and provides one of the central symbols of the Gestalt.
The young woman is profoundly literate and she is, as her eyes
tell us, a thinker. The link
with Epicureanism, fostered by the old paperback, is not necessarily
spurious. The Epicureans,
who had a strong following in Pompeii and Naples, set great store on
learning, as on the exercise of the mind; they also acknowledged the
intellectual and spiritual equality of women with men.
The young woman’s purple robe signifies the nobility of
intellectual endeavor, for purple is the royal color par excellence
in the ancient world.
Order and measure sign themselves forth from the image.
Again, Epicureanism valued the careful arrangement of life and
moderation in it, holding these desiderata in common with
Platonism and Stoicism. The
lower tip of the stylus, the ring on the young woman’s left hand, and
the apex of her upper lip thus form an isosceles right triangle, symbol
of geometry and of rationality as measure.
The notion of measure reminds us also of Plato’s metretike
ethike, or “calculus of morals.”
For here is an individual who can begin to gauge her own mind and
gauge the consequences of actions and omissions.
The soul is deep, said Heraclitus; it is of subtle
matter, said Epicurus. The
young woman’s eyes, indices of her soul, give wide entry to the
visible world. The fine
brows emphasize the intelligent, almond-like shape of the eyes.
The earrings avoid ostentation; they set off the straight-nosed
face without calling attention to themselves.
The coiffure shows the art of the hairdresser, but it betokens
nothing vain; cut short, rather than Venus-like in long tresses, the
dense curls suggest a chaste demeanor.
The net of golden filigree appropriately crowns the head, in
harmony with the purple vestment. A
Victorian novelist might have invented a Bildungsroman around
this image, interpreting its subject as a Stoic, a Platonist, an
Epicurean, or even an early convert from one of these doctrines to
Christianity, and plotting out a life for her with marriage, children,
crises both of the family and the civitas, and finally of old age
and death. Echoes of the
young woman of Pompeii indeed turn up everywhere in Nineteenth Century
fiction.
In William Dean Howells’ Rise of Silas Lapham, for
example, the Laphams have named their daughters in a Classical spirit:
Penelope, the older, and Irene, the younger.
Howells contrasts the two considerably, endowing Penelope with
wit and a largely self-acquired education, and making her, among other
things, an inveterate reader. Irene
has borrowed Middlemarch from the Athenaeum library but only
Penelope has read it. Irene
does not lack in virtue, but intellectual disposition plays no role in
her personality: she misinterprets a meaningless act of young Tom
Corey’s when he visits the site of father Silas’s new house,
disastrously building up on her error a full romance concluding in
nuptials. When the Nemesis
of disillusionment comes for Irene, it comes hard.
Tom, as it turns out, fancies Penelope, precisely for her
intellectual qualities. Among
contemporary actual college girls one meets only a few, a shrinking
number, of Penelopes; of Irenes contrarily a full selection remains in
offing. Many, lacking the
context of a traditional Protestant (or any other) home life, have
succumbed to the malaise of the ambient cultural toxicity.
Parents no longer name their daughters after Greek wives or
empresses or saints; they name them Tiffany and Brittany,
often spelled Brittny, or some other analphabetic cuteness.
I sometimes ask the Brittanys whether they know the origin
of their common name. It is
the same origin as in the surname Bertonneau and it designates
the Imperial province where Claudia Severa lived.
A Penelope knows this, or is at least capable of appreciating it;
an Irene knows it not and cares not about appreciating it.
The “Veronica” of my third vignette hovers somewhere between
Irene and Penelope, closer to the former than to the latter, but nearer
the latter than most.
Veronica stands for herself but she also subsumes a few other
coeds who have passed through my classroom over the last decade and a
half. They share the trait
of coming from religious backgrounds, in some cases merely vestigial and
in others intact and robust. One,
whom I knew while teaching in Michigan, came from a branch of the same
movement that yielded Seventh Day Adventism, although this chapter of
that phenomenon seemed to have shaken off the some of the fervent
quirkiness of its self-isolating cousin and to have cleaved more closely
to civilized life. But it
did disdain television and it did insist that children behave in an
orderly manner and show respect to elders.
The absence of television found its healthy compensation in an
abundance of thoroughly random books.
In sum, this girl had avoided the taint of popular culture long
enough to acquire some real culture.
She exhibited the propensity, on hearing about something
that promised interest, to go to the source and, when puzzled (as she
once admitted being with respect to Charles Baudelaire) to seek tuition.
At one point, she read a reference to Mozart’s Requiem,
acquired a recording of it, and listened to it obsessively.
As I earlier wrote, I had the chance to glean only a little of
Veronica’s background. But
because she has an Italian surname—Upstate New York boasts a large
Italian presence—I assume some exposure, grandparental at least, to
Catholicism. That she
catches a few religious references in one or two of the essays that I
have assigned for freshman composition bolsters me in the supposition.
I don’t care, really. That’s
the pattern, for what it’s worth.
Veronica fits the pattern in this way, too: that she convincingly
claims not to be a watcher of television and does not join with the
other students in the class in gushing forth with reminiscences when
invited to respond to some television-reference.
On the other hand, she carries the burden when I quiz students
orally on the required reading, so much so that I must ask her to shift
the onus to others because they have leaned on her too heavily.
Where the other students can produce only one and a half or two
typed pages when the assignment calls for four, Veronica turns in five
or six. Veronica has
meaningfully researched a fourth and final essay, exploring the
difference between cults and honest religion; it runs to seven or eight
pages. Compared to what
other students write—never mind confining it to the other
coeds—Veronica’s essay stands out as rising toward the mature in its
handling of adequately defined concepts.
Other students turn in cliché-ridden prose on novel, startling
theses such as smoking is bad, drinking and driving is a bad combination, and professional
athletes shouldn’t use steroids.
The language corresponds neither to grammar or syntax and
exhibits misspellings galore; one sees in it no evidence of any interest
on the part of the writers in the educational opportunity of gaining
mastery over their prose. The
writers have downloaded most of the “research” from un-vetted
websites and have cut and pasted it onto the page, often in different
font from the rest of the typescript.
In better circumstances than those provided by the contemporary
college campus, Veronica might catch a glimpse of her intellectual star
and begin her struggle through discipline to reach it.
It could still happen against the odds, but the mainsail of my
faith flags rather than billows before the wind.
To wend her way to her metaphysical goal of spiritual homecoming,
the lady-Odysseus must navigate the contemporary campus-equivalent of
Sirens, Cyclopes, Circes, and Scyllas.
What are these?
There is the insipidity—or worse, the nihilism—of the
fragmented curriculum now in place in our state colleges and
universities. The
potentially cultivated girl who arrives on campus at eighteen years of
age fronts something less than a well delineated educational prospect.
The freshman composition course, once an entré
into humane studies, is entirely unreliable.
The girl might luck her way into a section of the course
captained by a genuinely literate and mature instructor, or she might
find herself in one of the sections supervised by a graduate student
tenuously in possession of a Master’s Degree who is not much more
literate than she is. Worse
yet, she might find herself in the Cyclops Cave of the
Marxoid-multiculturalist or feminist composition instructor who
proposes, not at all pedagogically, to reduce the conceptual range of
vision of students to a hysterical binarism of devils and angels.
It will have nothing to do with reading and writing, nothing to
do with the human spirit, and everything to do with the inculcation of
“right attitudes.” Once
beyond freshman composition, the student is ten-fold more likely to be
stuck under the semester-long supervision of the Manichaean specialist
in this or that field of doctrinaire resentment.
What used to be called breadth requirements in actual
humanities and sciences nowadays consist largely in a shotgun blast of
indoctrination by the usual liberators and consciousness-raisers with
chips on their shoulders. No
college student, male or female, nowadays escapes The Vagina
Monologues.
There is also the spiritual bane of Guroian’s “Dorm
Brothel,” and beyond it the even deadlier bane of the Culture
Brothel of manipulative mass-entertainments and perverse behavioral
(non-) expectations. Quite
apart from the pornography of contemporary cinematic diversions,
consider the proliferating sado-masochism of the movies.
A notably successful series of films carries the general name of Saw.
The original Saw appeared in 2004, and the producers have
already sent Saw IV into the cineplexes.
Here is the Amazon.com product-description of this movie in its
DVD
incarnation: “Saw dives right
into the depths of the madness… opening with our killer’s current
victims, two men chained on opposite ends of a filthy restroom, a body
in the center clutching a cassette player and a handgun.
Each man is given a tape to play, which provides him with a nice
dilemma to ponder during his captivity.
The background of the killer and the events leading up to the
men’s current situation unfolds nicely during narrated recollections
and well-placed flashbacks, while the actual motive stays hidden
underneath the obvious delight the killer derives from the simple
pleasures of torture.”
Ah, filthy restrooms and the simple pleasures of
torture… I know about Saw
because a coed once enthused to me about it.
It would hardly have surprised me to hear fulsome praise of what
amounts to a snuff film from one of my culturally deprived male
students. When I ask
students what films they have seen in the past semester, Saw or
its equivalent usually figures in the response, with female students
praising items like Hostel or Turistas, which feature the
kidnapping and torture of college students on vacation.
What else? The
college town where I live and teach supports a thriving tattoo industry.
The local yellow pages list seven tattoo parlors within walking
distance of campus. In the
same town, the number of public houses per capita is a
long-standing cause of civic shame.
Two years ago a popular mayor lost his job and went to jail for
arranging an assignation with two underage girls.
But why go on? The
familiarity of our vices obviates any need for repetition.
Critics will accuse me of being a middle-aged gray-haired English
professor suffering from acute reminiscences of lost love and a
Pygmalion complex. I deny
the accusation: that is to say, while I am 53, gray-haired, and an
English professor (for whatever that’s worth), I am not suffering from
a bout of misplaced sentimentality.
I see in no coed any Eliza Doolittle.
The destruction of femininity—an immense cultural
achievement—and the functional illiteracy of the female college
graduate are the final nails in the coffin of social decency
because women, as mothers and wives, have traditionally fulfilled the
central civilizing function in the community.
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