The Books of My Life: Radical Campus

I don’t recall when I first heard about Simon Fraser University. It had to be sometime in the 1970s. I knew that it was one of the new universities being created and built around the globe in the post-World War II period in places like Great Britain (the most interesting of the bunch on new universities in the UK for me was the University of Sussex thanks to its interdisciplinarity), the United States (SUNY Albany), Canada (SFU, Lethbridge, Trent), Australia (La Trobe, Flinders, New South Wales, Macquarie), New Zealand (Waikato), and France (Nanterre). I also knew that Tom Bottomore, whose work on the history of sociological thought I admired, was there. What I did not know was that Bottomore had come and gone by the time I considered applying to Simon Fraser and that he came and went because of Simon Fraser's growing pains.

I thought about applying to Simon Fraser when I began applying to university in the 1970s. I ended up not applying, however, for some reason, probably because of the rain which I had had more than enough of when I visited my mum's England. Instead I ended up matriculating at Indiana University in Bloomington, something that, in retrospect, I regret given the humidity of the area and what has happened to that “university” in recent years. I now wish I had applied to SFU, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Texas, where I was going to finish my Indiana undergraduate degree anyway because of the health problems I had as a consequence of the climate in Bloomington, Indiana.

When it came time to apply for a postgraduate degree I once again considered applying to Simon Fraser. I ended up not doing so though I applied to several other universities in Canada including the University of Toronto,  the university closest to my heart in North America, and Queen’s University in Kingston, where Klaus Hansen and George Rawlyk, both of whom I wanted to study with. I also applied to the University of Chicago, the University of Kansas, and La Trobe University in Australia where I wanted to work with Rhys Isaac. I was admitted to all of them though none of them worked out for various reasons most of them revolving around money. I did not have it and I did not get the necessary financial aid in the form of teaching or research assistantships at any of them. I did get into a snail mail shouting match with the graduate chair at Kansas who eventually told me that perhaps I was not a University of Kansas kind of guy. I guess I wasn't. Oh well, such is academic life.

I never forgot SFU, however. Given my interest in the history of higher education and particularly in the history of higher education in Canada, the US, and, to a lesser extent, England and Australia, I never forgot that Simon Fraser was one of the new universities and I was interested in these new universities and if they really were that different from the old ones. For these reasons I wanted to learn more about the history of Simon Fraser. When the opportunity arose I picked up a copy of SFU historian Hugh Johnston’s history of the early years of Canada's “experimental” and “radical” (I would prefer the term “progressive” instead here) university Radical Campus: Making Simon Fraser University (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2005).

Simon Fraser University, as Johnston makes clear, is historically important, for more than simply being one of the new universities being built across the globe in the post-World War II era. Along with the University of Victoria (initially a satellite campus of McGill University in Montreal and later a satellite campus of University of British Columbia) in the BC provincial capital, SFU, and importantly so, broke the monopoly on higher education UBC long had in the province of British Columbia. The government of Social Credit premier W.A.C Bennett decided, in the early 1960s, thanks in particular to demographic pressures, to break UBC’s monopoly on higher education in the province, and he did. As a consequence Simon Fraser offered to BC’s growing student population an alternative to UBC, as did the community colleges established in the province around the same time.

Though Simon Fraser was the brainchild of the Bennett government SFU was and is, as Johnston tells us, Gordon Shrum’s university. Shrum, who had been a physics professor at UBC, head of BC Hydro, which the Social Credit government had also created, and first chancellor of SFU, was, to a large extent, the creation of Shrum, It was he who, with the help of SFU’s first president Patrick McTaggert-Cohen and its first academic planner Ron Baker, both of whom Shrum hired, built this “instant university” from scratch between 1963 and 1965, the year the campus, which was still partly under construction, opened on the top of Burnaby Mountain east of Vancouver.

Shrum, McTaggert-Cohen, and Baker, Johnston tells us, established SFU’s character, its curriculum, hired its administrative staff, hired the initial heads of faculties at the university, and hired its architect and designer, Arthur Erickson and Geoffrey Massey (yes one of those Masseys). The modernist campus Ericson and Massey built (one similar to the campuses of the new US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs Colorado, the new SUNY Albany campus in the capital of New York, and a host of other modernist campuses across the globe), reflects Shrum’s vision for SFU, one that drew on English elements and American elements. The massive Academic Quadrangle simulates, for example, if in miniature the quads and courts of Oxford and Cambridge while Shrum’s establishment of a board of governors for the university reflects a more US style of academic governance, a style of governance adopted by the University of Toronto and other Canadian universities in the early twentieth century and after. One might argue that this mixture of the English and the American is what makes English language Canadian universities Canadian and part of what, at least in part, makes English Canada, English Canada.

Shrum's academic vision for his university, one that was somewhat English, was one of curricular interdisciplinarity, a curricular interdisciplinarity dominated by the humanities, the arts, and education (the only other “practical”professional schooling for employment after graduation, commerce, was added at the last minute at the behest of one of the members of the board of governors Arnold Hean). His was a vision of a university with a small cadre of administrators, of a university with active faculty heads initially appointed by him and his staff, and of a university with an active faculty association (which never really got off the ground in the early years of the school given that limited numbers of faculty joined it).

Shrum’s vision for SFU was initially something that drew interested faculty and students to it in its early years. Many of them were fascinated by the university's “experimental” and “radical” or interdisciplinary aspect and character. Some will see this fact, namely that it was this “experimental” and “radical” in character, also, at least in SFU"s early years, Simon Fraser's Achilles heal. Much about the workings of process and power at SFU was not spelled out or addressed by its founder. Initially the play of power within the university had a more informal collegial English like character, hence the importance of faculty heads and the small administrative staff. Once issues of hiring, promotion, and tenure (something that was more important in American universities at the time) came into play, however, the struggle over who had the power became of great important.

The fact that SFU got up and running just as the student movement was becoming prominent, Johnston reminds us, all across the globe, also complicated the battle over process and power at SFU. This was exacerbated by the fact that one of the things the student movement and its faculty allies were concerned with was who had the power in universities. Many students and many faculty at SFU wanted more "democratic” universities in general and a more “democratic” Simon Fraser in particular. An additional aspect that complicated this struggle for power in at SFU was the fact that as Canadian universities were created and grew in the 1960s the differences between British, American, and Canadian conceptions of power and process, particularly amongst its nationally varied faculty, became increasingly important.

The issue of who had the power, as Johnston points out, became problematic at SFU when the questions of how faculty heads were chosen and when hiring, promotion, ant tenure issues and procedures reared their ugly heads in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many faculty (culture wars within the faculty are quite common) and students (culture wars amongst students are quite common) preferred elected to appointed heads seeing the election of heads as more “democratic”. They soon got what they wished for, and as a consequence, this gave meany the heady sense that, as Johnston notes, further “democratisation” of the university (not to mention Canadian society) was possible (the heady air of reform and revolution). As Johnston notes, these debates and disagreements, disagreements that eventually led to a strike by some Political Science, Sociology, and Anthropology faculty, an increase in paranoia and misreadings on all sides, and the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) censuring SFU twice for limiting academic freedom, if to little real effect, were the result of this battle for power and control of Simon Fraser University. That the battles in this culture war resulted in what was and is the original sin at the heart of American, Canadian, and increasingly British universities, the establishment of boards of governors made up of non-faculty elements who had a monopoly on power and who appointed the president and chancellors of their universities, will likely be read as a paradox by many. This original sin was aided and abetted by the BC legal system when a judge ruled that the power to hire and fire at SFU lay exclusively with the board of governors and that, as a consequence, whatever procedures there were for hiring, promoting, and firing of faculty was theirs.

Long story short, a long short story Johnston is more implicit about than explicit about (he is a historian after all), SFU became what it appears Shrum and many faculty who came to SFU in the early years of the school did not want it to become, a corporate university run by a board of governors and its appointed president. The history of the once “experimental” and “radical" SFU, in other words, was like that of other Canadian, American, and British universities in the post World War II period. SFU’s story, even if it began as something different, was the same as that of other universities in North America and Britain. It is a story of increasing bureaucratisation (see Max Weber), of increases in administrative personnel particularly in the middle and lower echelons of the administrative bureaucracy. It is the story of the bureaucratisation of faculties and the story of the increasing use of part-time quasi- faculty (sessionals, adjuncts),. It is the story of the need for more monies, monies that were increasingly raised via fundraising and wealthy donors as public support for education has not kept up fully with increasing numbers of students matriculating in universities. It is the story, of ever more pressure for “practical" professional programmes and the presence of more “practical" professional schools as the ideology of education for a job became more and more predominant and dominant (see Thorstein Veblen on this), a decline in the importance of the humanities, and the bureaucratisation of the interdisciplinarity that made SFU somewhat unique as it became a faculty with specific emphases rather than a mode of general operation. It is the story of more campuses, and, in turn, an even greater need for administrative personnel and the need—the circle of university life—to raise even more monies via fundraising and from wealthy donors who want their cut of “practical” and professional flesh as a consequence, and Americanisation. It is the story of isomorphism in action.

Life as Crisis Management: This Time it is UPS, or the UPS Kiada

 

It was only a few days ago that I wrote a blog about the Sisyphean task of dealing with FedEx, a private postal agency for those of you who don’t know. Today I am writing about my kafkaesque dealings with another private postal agency, UPS.

Both FedEx and UPS, along with a public postal agency the United States Post Office, USPS, can be difficult to to deal with as was proved to me once again this week when FedEx failed to get critical information from a company I bought CDs from in England before the package left England and it has been, as a consequence, stuck in customs in New Jersey since Monday of this week. 

As for UPS they were supposed to deliver a package to me yesterday between, they said, sometime in the morning, this sometime in the morning being left deliberately ambiguous, and 9 pm. So I did as you have to do when you deal with these postal corporations, I waited. I waited and waited and waited. Around 1 pm local time I looked at the tracking and saw that the package was stuck in Bayonne, New Jersey and that it would, UPS said, be delivered. What time or even what day it was supposed to be delivered was, as it always is with these bureaucracies and intentionally so, unclear.

So, I called UPS. It took me three to five minutes to finally convince the labyrinthian UPS automated answering system to give me a real living breathing customer representative. I asked the representative when the package was supposed to be delivered and he told me a thick accent that it would be delivered sometime tomorrow, Saturday. I told him I would not be home on Saturday and asked him to have it delivered on Monday. Stupidly, it appears in retrospect, I assumed everything was set. I even went to the grocery store and credit union afterwards.

When I looked at tracking this morning, the morning after, however, I saw that the item was loaded on the truck and is supposed to be delivered to me today. I ticked the box to change delivery times, as guest, but was met with a request for an almost $12 dollar charge for the honour of changing the time of delivery. That, that charge, which I regarded as emblematic of the sickness at the heart of vampire capitalism, was a no go for me. I ain't gonna pay to do something I already did via the telephone and which I or anyone else should not be charged for in the first place.

What I learned from all this is that the customer always gets screwed. UPS fucks us over in terms of delivery dates, fucks us over even when we call to change the delivery date, and it wants us to pay to change a delivery date online. This is the world we live in, I guess.

Life as Crisis Management: FedEx, Again

 

It happens like clock work. Every month I am reminded that we live in Franz Kafka’s world, that we live in Vladimir Voinovich’s world, that we live in a postmodernist world of bureaucratic absurdity. I was reminded of this yet again this week thanks to FedEx.

As some of you may know I love classical music. As some of you may also know I hate Amazon. Given this I try to order classical CDs from another source. Usually that other source is Presto Classical, an independent music store in England.

A week ago Presto Classical was having a half price clearance sale on Hyperion CDs, a classical label I admire and love. Time to buy alert. I bit. I ordered a tonne or a slew of Hyperion CD’s from Presto, so many, in fact, that I got the express FedEx delivery rather than the slower USPS one. Everything went swimmingly until the package of CDs got to US customs.

On Monday, American Memorial Day, I got a call from FedEx that took me aback (I initially thought it might be fake) because I had never experienced such a thing. They asked me how large the package of CDs I ordered from Presto was. As I had not packed the package I had no idea what its measurements were. I told them to contact Presto, they who actually packaged the package or to simply measure it themselves (the common sense approach). But that, of course, to paraphrase Faith in Buffy's body, would be wrong.

I tried to get hold of Presto but Monday was a holiday in Britain too. So, I estimated the size of the package (two rows of 5.5 inch CDs with safety packing material equals 14 inches wide. On Wednesday I finally head from Presto. They told me they send the measurements to FedEx and that my package would move through customs soon. As of [Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday...) morning it has not moved at all. Fingers are, however crossed.

Anyway short story short, this is the second time I have been screwed by FedEx. I am sure time number three will be coming soon. Why? Because, to put it colloquially, FedEx sucks. Oh and another thing, the FedEx representatives I spoke to had very thick accents something that proved problematic for a 71 year old without 18 year old hearing. 

In the end I am left to ask why the package was allowed to move from England to the US without the dimensions of the package if FedEx needed the dimensions of the package? The answer, I must assume, is because we live in the world of Franz Kafka and Vladimir Voinovich. 

Update: My CD's finely arrived nine days after they were supposed to thanks to FedEx. The morons at FedEx, however, had one more surprise for me. FedEx had somewhere along the line transferred my CD's from the package they were sent in to one that was far too big for the items. You can probably guess what happened. If you guess the discs arrived damaged you would be right. I immediately contacted the seller and sender, sent them pictures of the damaged discs ,and told them they should claim insurance for the damage and/or sue FedEx for their incompetence and idiocies. Let's hear it for American capitalism.

The Books of My Life: Demons/Devils/The Possessed (Dostoyevsky)

 

One of the things I wanted to do in my retirement is read or reread the great “big book” classics of Russian literature. Though the best laid plans of Ron don’t always come out as he intended, I have been able to largely do what I intended to do over the last several years. 

Since I have more in the way of cultural capital now then I had when I initially read some of Russian literature it has been an interesting experience reading or rereading the hefty Russian classics in my elderly years. The "big books" of Russian literature I have recently been able to get through or to get through again include Lev Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Ivan Goncharov’s Oblamov, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Aleksander Fadeyev’s The Young Guard, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, The Karamazov Brothers, The Idiot, and The Adolescent. I enjoyed them all immensely. They are, I discovered and re-discovered, classics for good reasons.

Recently I finished the last of the Dostoyevsky “big books” I have long wanted to read, Demons/Devils/The Possessed. I read two translations of this superb book simultaneously, the Penguin edition translated by Robert Maguire and the Alma edition translated by Roger Cockrell. Both were excellent though I think I preferred the Cockrell translation if by a very small margin. 

There were things I preferred in each of these translations, I preferred the notes in the Maguire edition. I found the notes in the Maguire, which were much more extensive and explanatory than in the Cockrell, superior to those in the Cockrell translation by a large margin. I preferred the Cockrell for its placement of the “At Tikhon's" chapter where Dostoevsky wanted it before his editor told him it would not make it past the censor. Maguire puts it in an appendix. 

There were also things I did not like in each translation. I did not like the use of country bumpkinish in the Maguire translation. It seems too mannered and fake to me. I did not like the use of Western measurements like miles in the Cockrell translation. I prefer that the Russian originals. I suppose that is the cultural anthropologist in me.

Finally, one thing I did not like about both translations was the fact that both placed their translations of the French, which in some chapters is extensive, in the endnotes. They should have been, in my opinion, at the bottom of the page a la the Oxford World Classics Anna Karenina and War and Peace. Footnotes make it much easier to read for those of us who have little French (like me) or no competency in French at all.

The American Health Care Kiada: Rolling the Boulder Up that Hill for Infinity, Continued...

 

The United States health care system is the worst I have ever encountered and I lived for awhile in Russia. I was reminded of this empirical fact again recently when I wanted to transfer my rheumatological care from the Centre for Rheumatology in Albany to Albany Medical Centre.

Why did I want to transfer care? Well for several reasons. The Centre for Rheumatology uses an online portal system devised by the minions of one Jamie Dimon and it is awful. Why is it awful? Well the Centre did not do the obvious thing to do, namely ti set up a pay system through our already existing portal accounts. They set up one which we had to go through a series of puzzles to finally get to a level and a point to pay them for services rendered. When the Centre did try to do what should have been done in the first place (setting up a pay system allowing us to pay through the portal—and remember the portal has all the necessary information so we don’t have to go through a series of puzzles to get to a point when we can pay—it messed up the accounts system and sent us bills for services we had already paid for. In response I threw up my hands and decided to go back to my GP to get a referral to rheumatology at Albany Med.

Actually, this was the second referral to rheumatology at Albany Med my GP sent to them. She initially referred me to rheumatology at Albany Med but Albany Med denied the referral claiming that my insurance denied coverage. This had to be a mistake since my insurance (Medicare and employment pension) did not deny me coverage at the Centre for Rheumatology which I got a referral to because I did not want to deal with the bureaucracy at Albany Med anymore given the incompetence (something inherent to bureaucracies since humans are inevitably involved in the processes related to them). 

To make a long story even longer I was denied care for my fibromyalgia at Albany Med again but this time for a different reason than the insurance. Interestingly, I never received a call or a text message from Albany Med saying that that there was a message in my Albany Med portal saying that I was denied care for my infirmity. Given this I called to make an appointment for rheumatological care at Albany Med. The customer service operative I talked to told me that she had no referral so making an appointment was a no go. 

So, thanks to the bureaucratic unmerry-go round I contacted my GP’s office again assuming that the referral did not go through for some reason. Another referral was sent. The person helping me informed me through all this informed me of another relevant bureaucratic puzzle level in Albany Med referral process. All referrals to Albany Med, I was told, have to go through a central referral office which takes a look at them and passes them on if they pass go in the game of health care cartel life.

Anyway, I thought I have better look in my Albany Med portal to see if there was anything there. And there it was. There was a document relating to the referral sitting there waiting for me to read it. And read it I did. The document said that I needed to print out said document and bring it with me. 

There was a problem, however. I don’t have a printer. So, I called Albany Med was again. The person in rheumatology I was transferred to by Albany Med’s general customer service operative told me the referral had been denied. This time it had apparently been denied not for insurance reasons as before but it was denied because Albany Med’s rheumatology department does not treat patients with a diagnosis of fibromyalgia.

Why Albany Med could not have sent me a text message saying this or sent a message in my portal saying this instead of the download allowing me to avoid the download document prompt in the first place is beyond me. Well, on second thought, it is not beyond me. This is how bureaucracies, public or private, work. Computers and the internet have made it all worse. Their motto seems to be why save the “consumer” time and aggravation when you can have them go round and round in the unmerry-go-round that is bureaucracies?

The Books of My Life: The Perpetual Dream

 

Gerald Grant and David Reisman explore the variety of attempts to reform the liberal arts in American higher education since the 1920s in their award winning book The Perpetual Dream: Reform and Experiment in the American College (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). Taking a page from Max Weber Grant and Reisman argue that these various attempts at reform (Grant and Reisman call them telic reforms or reforms pointing toward different endings for undergraduate education than those that dominated the world of undergraduate education at the time the book was written) can be conceptualised in terms of three broad ideal type forms: the neo-classical, the communal-expressive, and the activist-radical.

After defining what they mean by telic reforms Grant and Reisman flesh out their three ideal types of telic reforms in three subsequent chapters. In chapter three they explore the neo-classical great books programme at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland (and to a lesser extent at the campus in Santa Fe, New Mexico) with its we want to create the carriers and bearers of Western civilisation at its heart. In chapter four Grant and Reisman explore the communal-expressive ideal type of reform using Kresge College which was, at the time, part of the new University of California Santa Cruz, as its example. Kresge, according to Grant and Reisman, adopted their reform model of change me and I can change my world from social psychologist Carl Rogers. In chapter five Grant and Reisman explore the activist-radical type of telic reform using Audrey Cohen’s The College for Human Services (now the Metropolitan College of New York), as its prime example. The College for Human Services adopted a type of reform whose battle call was change the student and he or she can change the world making it a much better place in the process.

In later chapters Grant and Reisman explore similar reform attempts at and in other colleges and universities across the United States, all of which sought to bring engaged faculty and engaged students together in engaged and engaging interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary colleges and universities. Chapter seven focuses on New College in Sarasota, Florida. Chapter eight focuses on the colleges at the University of California of Santa Cruz. Chapter nine focuses on the two new colleges, at the time, in the university system of the state of New Jersey, Ramapo College and Stockton State College (now Stockton University).

I quite enjoyed Grant's and Reisman’s book. I was somewhat familiar with attempts to reform American undergraduate higher education but The Perpetual Dream added immensely to my previous knowledge of attempts to reform American undergraduate education. There were a number of things I found interesting about the book. I think that Grant and Reisman were correct in arguing that one of the central things these reforms wanted to do was to create a sense of community. I liked that Grant and Reisman took a historical, sociological, and ethnographic approach to higher education reforms. I liked that The Perpetual Dream was in large part ethnographic in that Grant and Reisman individually and collectively spent time interviewing those at colleges and in schools undertaking telic reforms. 

One of the disappointments I had with the book is that Grant and Reisman aren't as explicit in tying these reforms to the economic, political, cultural, and demographic change the US was going through in the 20th century. That said, one gets the sense that Grant and Reisman are arguing that the ideal type reforms they explore were attempts to counter the anomie unleashed by modernity. In this context I found it interesting and, in hindsight, obvious, that money, economics, was central to these experiments in American higher education. Monies seem to be an eternal problem for experimenting colleges particularly of the private variety. They aren’t mainstream after all. They are more akin to institutionalised bohemias. Antioch College, for example, perhaps the example of the activist-radical type, seems to have been almost always be cash strapped. The Metropolitan College of New York is facing financial problems as I type. 

Political realities have also impacted the longevity of American reform colleges and reform within colleges and universities. Recently New College has been in the news thanks to the successful attempt of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his merry men to remake the college in their own politically and ideologically correct image. They want to make it, they have said, the HIllsdale College of the South. Hillsdale is a favoured college of some segments of the American right What is happening to New College reflects the broader reality that since the administration of Richard Nixon in the late 1960s and early 1970s the US has become increasingly dominated by neo-liberalism and right wing populism. Note of interest, one of the other telic colleges of the countercultural era, Hampshire College in Massachusetts, agreed to accept New College students who did not wish to attend the Hillsdale of the South. Paradoxically Hampshire has recently decided to close because of economic difficulties.

There were other things I found less troubling about the book. I found, for example, Grant’s and Reisman’s contention that unionisation efforts by faculty in American universities added a layer of centralisation and bureaucratisation to American colleges and universities spot on but wondered why they did not pay as much attention to something else that added centralisation and bureaucratisation to American universities, the increase in administrative staff. From the vantage point of 2026 it is clear that not only has there been an exponential increase in administrative bureaucrats in American universities since the time Grant and Reisman wrote, but that these bureaucrats, because they are addicted to federal dollars and the ties of research dollars to college and university rankings, are undercutting faculty co-governance and faculty freedom of speech and research. Perhaps the faculty unionisation efforts Grant and Reisman criticise, were a  necessary countervailing force even if it has proved to be ineffective in pushing back against increasing administrative authoritarianism in America's major research universities.

Grant and Reisman rightly note that the increasingly consumerist model of American higher education and its need for student consumers has impacted reform efforts. It is, as they also note, not easy to convince students who have an increasingly I go to school so I can get a job mentality that a liberal arts reform college or programme is worth their while. Needless to say, many of the business types that serve on college and university boards of governance have a similar "pragmatic" attitutde.

Finally, I was intrigued by the fact that one might possibly and profitably apply another Weberian proposition to the reform movements in American higher education, namely, Weber's conception of authority. Many if not most of these reform efforts began with a charismatic reform figure and, increasingly, over time, became tradition bound and bureaucratic after the charismatic figure leaves or dies. At St. John’s, for instance, Scott Buchanan eventually came to the conclusion that books, including books outside the Western canon, needed to be added to the great books reading list. By that time, however, he had left St. John’s and St. John’s curriculum had been fossilised and sanctified, had been, in other words, turned into a tradition by those who followed in his wake and any effort to change that tradition was seen as a profanation.

As Grant and Reisman note academic reform is a perpetual dream, something that never ends and something that is often grounded in and founded on utopian ideologies. In my academic life I have been privy to several attempts to reform the curriculum all of which involved the reinvention of the metaphoric wheel. When I was at the University of Albany, for instance, there was Project Renaissance, an attempt to develop a living-learning interdisciplinary programme for selected students at the University (Grant and Reisman ignore these living learning reform efforts). It was actually hardly interdisciplinary at all. It was comparative. When I was at RPI there was an attempt to create an interdisciplinary curriculum with classes of over one hundred students, something hardly likely, in my opinion, to create a sense of community let alone a helpful learning environment. That "reform" effort seems to have ended as well. And so it goes and so it will likely continue to go.

Theocratic Blues: Life During Wartime

 

Unlike many of you out there in InternetLand I  lived in a theocracy in the United States, yes the United States the country that supposedly has and has had a separation of religion and state, church and state. How did I manage that? Well once upon a time I once lived in a place where religion, in this instance the Christian religion, and politics, in this instance conservative and right wing populist politics, were intertwined.

When I say I lived in a theocracy I don’t mean that I lived in Saudi Arabia where Sunni Islam is intertwined with the monarchical Saudi state. Nor do I mean that I lived in Iran where Shia Islam is intertwined with the Iranian state. Nor do I mean that I lived in Russia where once again the Orthodox Church and the Russian state commingle. I mean that I lived in Mormon Utah.

When I lived in Utah between 1991 to 1993 some 72% plus of the state was Mormon. The legislature of the state of Utah was dominated by Latter-day Saints. Some 90% of Utah legislators were Mormon. While the Mormon population of Utah has declined since 1993, in 2021 it was around 60%, the number of Latter-day Saints in the state legislature has remained about the same, around 86% in 2021. The Mormon theocracy that dominated the Utah of the early 1990s, in other words, remains intact.

Many will tell you that when I lived in Utah Zion was not a theocracy. That would be, they point out and despite many who believe the contrary, unconstitutional. It would be a violation of the US Constitution, the founding document of the American state. And while I agree that Utah was not a Mormon theocracy officially, it was one in practise. In this it parallels nineteenth century America, an era when the United States was unofficially (and illegally) a theocracy.

I say that Mormon Utah was a theocracy for a number of reasons. I had, to backtrack a bit, moved to Provo, Utah to do research on Mormons (Provo is to Mormondom what the South is to the US religiously, it is, thanks to Brigham Young University,  the LDS Church run university, the buckle of the Mormon Bible Belt).  When I lived in Provo the city was around 95% LDS. BYU was around 97% LDS. BYU had rules that everyone, student, faculty, and staff alike, had to abide by. Men could not have hair below their ears or their necks. Beards were forbidden for males. Women could not have dresses or skirts that rose more than one inch above their knees. Alcohol was forbidden. Caffeinated beverages, whether coffee, tea, or soda pop, were verboten. Smoking was prohibited. Unmarried men or women could not live together in "sin" on campus or off.

Of course, one might wonder whether these rules were followed. After all couldn’t I get 3:2 beer at local grocery stores in Provo if I wanted? Couldn’t one go to Provo’s one pub? Couldn’t one get coffee and tea at one of the few local coffee houses? The answer, of course, is yes. I would point out, however, that according to information I heard though the samizdat mill the police force of Provo and the BYU Police, which could operate state wide, kept an eye out for BYU students who violated the “honour code”. The Provo cops supposedly even kept an eye out for students coming out of the lone pub. 

I would also note anecdotally (ethnographically) that when I was on campus everyone I saw was following the dress and grooming standards the Church commanded. I did run into “Jack Mormons”, those who were only nominally LDS, in Salt Lake City. I saw "Jack Mormons" who smoked. I saw some Jack Mormon males with long hair. I saw all this during one of my monthly visits there to bookstores (Sam Weller’s Zion’s Bookstore, in particular) and to Squatters, where one could get a beer for a reasonable price since they brewed their own (I sometimes, I have to admit, went to Temple Square after getting a beer buzz at Squatters and listened to the sister missionaries there; Gentle entertainment in Utah). I could do all this because Salt Lake City was only barely dominated by Mormons at the time and thus was, despite the presence of the Church bureaucracy there, a less theocratic place (less not absent) than Provo or the rural towns in the state where nearly everyone was LDS and nearly everyone practised what the Church preached (the plan of salvation or eternal progression, the ideology around which all Mormon practise flows).

I would describe the unofficial Mormon theocracy as a kindler and gentler version of a theocratic state. No one was burned at the stake when I was in Zion, No one was tortured on the rack. No one was killed for their beliefs of lack of beliefs. Mormondom, in other words, was different in these regards from Christian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant theocracies in Europe during the so-called Middle Ages (ironically Christians had been killed for their beliefs in the Roman Empire but then the group persecuted often replicates what happened to it in kind) and beyond. On the other hand, there were some of the feminist variety who taught at BYU who were fired. There were people, including Mormon historians, who were excommunicated from the Church. And there were individuals, Mormon historians, for instance, whose scholarly work and published presentations drew the ire of true believers who threatened them with bodily harm and even death via email and the telephone. Again, kindler and gentler theocracy.

I have been thinking about my life in theocratic Utah because the United States, thanks to right wing populist "Christian" nationalists who worship at the altar of the American state rather than the Christian god ignoring, in the process, almost every aspect of Jesus’ supposed Sermon on the Mount (so-called in one of its two versions), not to mention the prohibition against having gods other than YHWH, are on the verge of turning the United States again into a theocracy, though this time an official theocracy. One can reasonably argue that they have already established theocracies in certain US states. And that is scary given the history of religious intolerance.

It is scary because these theocrats are people convinced of their own absolute rightness. They, they believe, after all have god on their side. They are people who, because of this, are inherently intolerant and inherently fascist (fascism goes back to authoritarian monarchs who claimed that they were god or the representative of god; theocracy). They cannot be reasoned with because of this holier than thou attitude. Backed by Big Money, particularly from big oil sources, they are taking over school boards and cleansing school libraries of books which they regard as pornographic (meaning books characterised by sympathy toward gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, and other "outcasts") and which don't fit with their narrow and narrow minded ideology, and they are actively working for the firings of those who speak out against those they regard as saints (according to Reuters and the Guardian over 600 people were fired for freely speaking their piece about the theocratic and intolerant Charlie Kirk, for example). They are running for local offices, state offices, and federal offices. And they have an ally in that multi-divorced, bully, misogynist, arrogant, narcissist, and mentally ill bloke named Donald Trump. Their theocracy, I suspect, won’t be as kind and gentle as that of the Mormon Utah in which I lived. I only hope I can get out before the stone age horror begins yet again.

Is yet another Civil War in the American future? Should states like New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, New Jersey form a union of their own? Should California, Oregon, and Washington do the same? Should all of these explore union with Canada, a nation, like any nation, with flaws but nowhere  near the flaws of the theocratising United States)? Should Margaret Atwood be considered a secular prophet? Time, as always, will tell.

The Books of My Life: Hollywood Cinema (Maltby)

 

In Hitchcock’s Films, Robin Wood's seminal study of several of the American films of director Alfred Hitchcock, Wood opens the book by asking what at the time, was a very important question, why should we, he asks, take Hitchcock seriously? Richard Maltby opens his book on  Hollywood cinema, Hollywood Cinema (Oxford: Blackwell, second edition, 2003) by asking a similar question. Why should we take Hollywood seriously? While Wood argued for taking Hitchcock seriously to sceptics for whom Hitchcock could not be taken seriously because he worked in a commercial medium, 

Maltby, giving us a preview of coming historical, commercial, cultural, and theoretical attractions in the book, answers his own question about why we should take Hollywood seriously in his introduction to Hollywood Cinema. We should take it seriously because Hollywood is an industry, a corporation, an industry and corporation that sells dreams to willing consumers who wish to “purchase" its product.  In the rest of the book, which is divided into four parts,  "The Commercial Aesthetic", “Histories", “Conventions", and “Approaches", Maltby tells us what Hollywood is, a  dream factory which sells its commodity. It uses, Maltby argues, technological and cultural strategies to sell willing consumers pleasure. 

Hollywood, as Maltby notes in part one of the book, “The Commercial Aesthetic", was and largely still is, much like any other corporation that arose in the corporate era of American capitalism. It was and is a vertically integrated (capitalist pop linguists call this synergy today) managed corporation which is structured hierarchically and whose goal it is to turn a profit and make monies for its stockholders. It does this like any other modern corporation, it sells a commodity, pleasure, dreams, utopian fantasies. Genres, Maltby argues, such as the Western, with their conventions, stereotypes, and repetitive visual motifs, is one of the things Hollywood uses to sell pleasure and to essentially pre-sell films to waiting audiences who were familiar with genre repetitions and enjoy them and also enjoy the novelties Hollywood seeds into these genre repetitions.

In the “Histories” section of the book Maltby  takes readers on a journey from the Hollywood of the Classic era of 1910 to 1948 with its vertically integrated studios that produced, at least in its big studios, A pictures, B pictures, shorts, newsreels, cartoons, and distributed and exhibited their product, to the Paramount decision by the US Supreme Court, a decision that marks the end of the classic Hollywood era since it forced Hollywood to divest of its theatres and made it easier for other companies to distribute product. Next Maltby takes us to the era of the New Hollywood from 1948 to the 1980, a period characterised by roadshow films and spectaculars like Ben Hur and Jaws, and an increasing reliance on expensive advertising. Finally Maltby takes us to the era of the conglomerate Hollywood since 1980, with its, studios as distributors of largely high stake big budget spectacles, its big and spectacular advertising budgets, and its horizontal integration or “synergies”, an era that also brings us full circle back to the age of vertical integration. 

In the technology chapter of the “Histories” section Maltby takes aim at a prominent theoretical approach to film and Hollywood cinema since the 1950s, Bazinian realism. While Bazin argued that technological changes were the product of Hollywood’s seeking after increasing realism, Maltby instead argues that Hollywood realism, such as it was (movies cannot, as Maltby notes, be fully realistic given their manipulations of time, space, narrative, and performance) and is, was the product of technological developments that were not teleological but piecemeal and which ebbed and flowed. These technological innovations, Maltby argues, had to do one thing, they had to fit into the dominant industrial, hierarchical, and aesthetic practises of Hollywood. Technological changes such as sound, colour, widescreen, and digital forms, the four case studies Maltby offers, had, in other words, to intersect with preexisting and standardised, routinised, rationalised, and bureaucratised (all these, as Max Weber notes, were was central to mass business and American mass corporate capitalism) Hollywood genres, styles, and editing strategies. The moral of this story seems to be that the more Hollywood changed the more it had to stay the same. 

Next in the Politics chapters in the "Histories" section Maltby argues that Hollywood has generally preached the gospel of political neutrality. He also notes, however, that at certain times the social problem film, for example, has been significant in Hollywood. It was significant, as Maltby notes, during the New Deal and the post-World War II era, despite the McCarthy witch hunt. It was also important, as Maltby tells us, during World War II when Hollywood, just like the US, went to war with its allies including the USSR against the evil Axis nations. Finally, Maltby rightly notes that though Hollywood has typically sought the widest possible audiences for its films in order to maximise profits Hollywood is also embedded within a culture in which ideology, the fetishisation and universalisation of capitalist economic notions and notions of American exceptionalism, are present and universalised. 

Something else Maltby takes aim at in the “Histories” section of the book is auteur theory, the notion that there are film authors, mostly directors, who have worked within the Hollywood industrial and profit making machine. Emphasisng that Hollywood is a dream factory, Maltby raises questions about the auteurist theory that has dominated film theory into the 1970s and which has continued to prove a useful way of organising the study of Hollywood ever since. 

In the “Conventions’ section of Hollywood Cinema Maltby explores how Hollywood uses space, time, performance, and narrative to produce the product it wishes to sell to consumers. Maltby argues that Hollywood strategies like camera placement, the centring of shots, “invisible” editing, star personas, the emphasis on action, self-censorship, and reading movies between the lines, to note a few examples, are means that Hollywood uses to manipulate audiences into purchasing and watching their product often a second time. Along the way Maltby argues against the crystal ball textualist approach to film, one that assumes everything you need to know about a text is in the text (an odd kind of contextualism) noting that film is not a text; it moves.

In the final section of the book Maltby explores the history of criticism and scholarly analysis of Hollywood product. He divides this section of the book, Approaches, into two parts: Criticism and Theory. 

I was quite impressed with Malby’s book on Hollywood cinema. That said, and in the critical spirit of F.R. Leavis and Robin Wood I had several buts. I would like to have seen more discussion by Maltby of tone (melodrama, drama, tragedy, comedy, satire, parody) in Hollywood movies, aspects of the movies that are just as important as genre. In fact, I think many of what are thought of as genre forms are actually tonal forms. 

I did not find Maltby’s argument against auteurism, an old argument, by the way, one which parallels the main criticisms of auteurism during the 1950s and 1960s, namely, that Hollywood was too commercial to have an author, compelling. Hollywood, as Robin Wood notes, can be both a commercially oriented medium engaged in commerce and still have a few authors, like Alfred Hitchcock and Frank Capra, working within it. 

Maltby could have done a better job of exploring how Hollywood’s economies of scale have helped it become successful in overseas markets and how its restoration of control over exhibition in the United States has squeezed not only foreign movies out of the domestic market but domestic “independent” films out of the marketplace. Remaking foreign movies, of course, was and is also a strategy Hollywood has used to squeeze foreign movies out of the market (something Hollywood TV has sometimes done). 

I liked Maltby’s contention that different groups of spectators read Hollywood films differently, some read them more literally and fundamentalist like while others read them, as Hollywood also intended, between between the lines. Reading between the lines, however, requires a degree of cultural capital and different caches of cultural capital exist leading to different readings of these between the lines. Some spectators pay attention to mise-en-scene (cultural capital acquired via schooling) others pay almost exclusive attention to special effects (the effect of socialisation to the popcorn spectacle movie). Maltby could and should have paid more attention to the issue of cultural capital and the different degrees of cultural capital readers have.

Maltby could have done more exploration of qualitative and quantitative studies of how audiences actually read film texts. Speaking of how audiences “read” texts, while I liked Maltby’s discussion of the literal and “sophisticated” readings of the film Casablanca his reading of the readings of the film is too simplistic. Many readers of Casablanca today on YouTube, self proclaimed reactors, don’t know enough about World War II to grasp the propaganda, Rick as a metaphor for the US, in the film, while others literally hate Ilsa through much of the film because they do not pay attention to her gestures and her mention that she thought her husband Laszlo was dead. I should also note that many “readers” of Bringing Up Baby read the film literally and not between the lines and criticise it for being ‘unrealistic”. Many readers of the film, in other words, are embedded within ideologies of realism, something prominent in amateur film “criticism” these days, and aren’t “entertained” by Bringing up Baby's comic and intentional unrealism. Additionally, given the historical amnesia of many “readers” they don’t really comprehend how Hollywood movies were made for maximum consumption and could and were sometimes read against the Code since they aren’t really aware of the Code.

All that said Hollywood Cinema is one of, it not, the best English language introduction to Hollywood I have ever read. I agree wholeheartedly with Maltby that academic criticism has generally become not only too focused on aesthetics and dominated far too often by notions of political and ideological correctness. I wholeheartedly applaud Maltby for doing something too many of these academic critics don’t do; focusing on the industry, the dream factory, that produces films in order to make profits and the means (genre, narrative strategies, use of space, manipulation of time, performance strategies) it uses to produce films that appeal to audiences, mostly 14 to 25 year olds in the post-Jaws and Star Wars era. I agree with Maltby that Hollywood has tried to insulate itself from governmental interference in its affairs not only through lobbying efforts and through self-regulation but by making its films ambiguous enough to be appreciated and read in multiple ways by those who go to see see Hollywood films. And, as I said earlier, I liked, really liked, how Maltby argued that spectators were central to Hollywood’s strategies and that movies were made to be “read” literarily, akin to how religious fundamentalists read the Bible (if selectively) and more complexly by readers with more expansive degrees of cultural capital. I appreciate Maltby’s contention that Hollywood has sold the American dream and the notion of American exceptionalism to audiences at home and abroad. In general, I think Maltby deserves praise for his descriptive approach, his sociological, ethnological, historical, physiological, anatomical, and cognitive science approach to Hollywood cinema, something often lacking from both film criticism and film scholarship these days and, therefore, something which is much needed. Kudos. Very, very, highly recommended despite its sometimes too reductionist economic approach. It must always be remembered that the infrastructure that undergirds economic ideologies is cultural.

Life as Crisis Management: The Costco Kiada (aka, the Costco Muck-up)

 

I recently decided to join the Costco Club. I did it for several reasons. First, Costco is coming to where I live and I wanted to have a membership before it opens. Second, Costco had a bed I wanted, a bed brand the New York Times’s Wirecutter liked, and I needed a new twin instead of a full bed for myself. Third, if you joined and used a code you got a $45 dollar credit toward future purchases.

Anyway, I ordered the bed, got it, put it on my new Zinus bed frame and liked it (it is quite comfortable) and liked the experience I had with Costco. So I decided to use my $45 dollar credit and order two items amounting to over $800 dollars. 

I looked forward to receiving these items then I learned there was a problem. My order was cancelled. It took me 40 minutes with the chat associates to learn why. That, by the way, was an experience in and of itself. The first associate was going to transfer me to his supervisor but transferred me instead to a private home telephone number. The person who answered was not amused. The second associate eventually said that my shipping and billing addresses were different and that was why the order was cancelled. She said the latter had the address and the apartment number on the same line while the former had the exact same address with the apartment number on a second line instead. How horrible! No wonder the computer could not make sense of it. Computers we should always remember, thanks to their literalism, cannot see that two same addresses with a slight variation are the same.

So, I went to change my addresses. To go back a bit I do recall that when I ordered the two items that were cancelled that I noticed that the shipping address, according to the Costco website had a New England zip code. That was odd since I did not live in New England and Costco had sent my bed to the right address and billed the order to the correct credit card. So, I changed my shipping address before I ordered. When I went back to look at the addresses again after my forty minute chat and call with Costco customer service agents, I found that both the shipping and the billing were exactly the same. Still I changed them to the same address Costco, using USPS data no doubt, suggested. Will it work? Who knows.

Will I be ordering from Costco again? I don’t know. Possibly not. I can get the items I wanted locally and will likely do so within a few months. At least then I won’t have to screw around with stupid computers and stupid websites not to mention customer service agents.

Postscript: So, I chatted with a Costco representative to try to ascertain if my billing and shipping addresses were the same. This turned out, not surprisingly, to be Kafkaesque. Chat sent me to member services on the phone. Member services sent me to online. Online sent me to orders. All in all I spent an hour on the phone being passed from one customer service person to another who told me they could not help but someone else could. Could that someone else help me? Perhaps. Only time and ordering something will tell. Stay tuned.

Another Postscript: I cancelled my membership at Costco after learning that they did not take American Express of MasterCard credit cards. I tried to get their credit card, which they basically force you to do, but was denied despite already having three cards and a high credit score. They don't want me or my money (I was going to buy a Mac Neo from them but won't now) so I no longer want them. Bah humbug.

If I Knew Then What I Know Now: Musings on Movies, Evaluating Movies, and Cultural Capital

 

Last night I watched two movies on the over the air Movie channel: Prime Cut (1972) and End of the Game (1976). I had seen both films before, the former just a few weeks ago also on the Movie channel (with blurring of nudity and cleansing of language, both of which one can easily figure out), the latter fifty years ago with my dear friend Duane Stigen at a cinema in Middletown itself, Muncie, Indiana. Both Duane and I were students at Ball State University at the time.

My initial reaction to Prime Cut, a film directed by Michael Ritchie, was that I liked it. I am a dark comedy or black comedy kind of guy after all and Prime Cut is definitely a dark comedy. Prime Cut is a film which reflects American films increasing adventurousness in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. In fact, I am still amazed and stunned that a film this dark could have been made in the United States even outside of Hollywood, as this film was. 

Christ Petit, who did the entry for the Prime Cut in the Time Out Film Guide, describes the film, and rightly so, as a mash up of pulp gangster fiction and fairy tale with Lee Marvin as Nick Devlin, playing the white knight to Gene Hackman’s Mary Ann, the dark knight. It is a noirish fairy tale which reveals the darkness at the heart of America including middle America. The film is set in Kansas City and rural Kansas where Mary Ann's meat packing plant is. Mary Ann is not only selling cattle and pig meat at his meat factory. He is also selling female flesh to the rich. (Hello Jeffrey Epstein). There is no difference between selling cattle and pigs and female flesh, female commodities raised from youth in nearby orphanages, Mary Ann tells Devlin when hit man Devlin raises moral questions about what Mary Ann is doing.

Devlin and his fully armed crew, have been sent by his bosses—gangster capitalists—from Chicago to collect the dues ($500 grand) Mary Ann owes the Company. One of his first acts (Devlin as White Knight) after arriving at Mary Ann’s meat plant—he arrives as the sale of female flesh is in progress—is to save Poppy (Sissy Spacek), who asks for his help, from the clutches of Mary Ann, his hired gun hands, and the rich sellers checking out the female flesh for sale in the pens (Mary Ann as Black Knight). By the way, all the female flesh for sale in the pens, it appears, are named after flowers (a reference to their soon to be deflowering after purchase?).

Chris Petit also notes in his entry in the Time Out Film Guide that a couple of set pieces in Prime Cut mirror the work of Alfred Hitchcock, particularly his North by Northwest (1959), something that is certainly intentional. The first finds Devlin and his crew running for their lives through a busy all-American fair complete with the Lawrence, Kansas marching band and a mannequin cow filled with milk which can be put into cups by pressing on the simulated teat of the cow. The second finds Devlin and Poppy running for their lives as a terrifying and horrifying combine bears down on them. Both set pieces point up the fact that the White All-American types who are at the county fair are blissfully ignorant about not only what is happening at the fair but are largely blissfully ignorant about the darkness—the violence, the misogyny, the imperialism, the collateral damage, the forced prostitution, the heroin—at the heart of the US and, thanks to the US, around the world, including in Southeast Asia.

The second film, End of the Game (Der Richter und sein Henten), which was directed by Maximilian Schell and written by Frederich Durrenmatt and Schell, I did not like when I first saw it. In fact, I hated the film. I thought it was the worst film I had ever seen at the time. Looking back on it, one has to take my “evaluation” of the film with a very large grain of salt. There were a lot of things in the film which went right by my head. I was, after all, only a sophomore in college and most of the movies I had seen up to that point were mainstream Hollywood films. I had yet to see films made in Europe or Japan, though that would soon would thanks to my move to Indiana University, and I had yet to take film classes which introduced me to the workings of narrative in film, mise-en-scene in film, the use of music in film, editing in film, and the various styles of acting in film. That too would soon change thanks to film course offerings at IU.

Between 1976, when I first saw End of the Game, and 2026, when I saw it for the second time, I had changed a lot. I was, thanks to the cultural capital that comes with age, education, and experience, better able to get the references, some satirical, in the film, a detective movie that explores the darkness at the heart of German Switzerland. I was also able grasp and to better appreciate the several styles of acting in the film, the way the film was cut, the films limited Brechtianism, and the films' dark humour in the film. For all these reasons and more I quite liked End of the Game on second viewing.

I guess the moral of the story is that we humans can, though we often don't, change. Some of this change comes from growing up and opening ourselves up to learning. Thank the lord Beezus for universities, teachers, and books. Amen.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Southernbelle Reacts Reacts to Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The theory of human devolution, the notion that humans are deeply flawed, that humans have devolved rather than evolved or that devolution and evolution occur simultaneously in the human community has been around for a long time. One can, of course, trace aspects of it back to the Christian notion that Adam and Eve fell into original sin when Eve, in the second mythic tale of creation in the Tanakh, offered the willing Adam a bite from the proverbial apple which made both of them realise they were naked (note that this has, in actuality, no relation to sex though later puritanical Christians did tie original sin to sex at least before marriage). Apparently, god preferred to keep his human creations innocent and naive kind of like the gatekeepers of 1950s and 1960s American television who made the presence of toilets and talk of pregnancy, at least in English, verboten (apparently they did not understand Spanish as in "Lucy in Enceinte"). Christian Calvinism, of course, really picked up and ran with the notion of original sin. For hardcore Calvinism humans were and are, to put it nicely, fallible.

In the nineteenth century, sources tell us, an era when science was deeply wedded to a unilinear and progressive notion of evolution, science got into the devolution game as well. In 1857, for example, the French physician Benedict Morel argued that drug and alcohol use could lead to social degeneration or devolution in the offspring of those taking drugs and alcohol. In 1880 English zoologist Ray Lankester argued in his book Degeneration that degeneration or devolution was one of three paths Darwinian evolution might take. In 1909 the Baden born American ichthyologist Carl Eigenmann, who taught at my alma mater Indiana University and for whom a hall of accommodation for graduate students is named, argued that devolution occurred amongst those species who took to living in caves.

Devolution was also, according to sources, applied to human beings during these years by some. Thuringian physician, naturalist, physiologist, and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and the French naturalist, mathematician, and cosmologist Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte du Buffon opined that races of humanity could devolve from higher forms into primitive forms. Blumenbach claimed that Adam and Eve were White and that all other races of man,who came from them, other than the Caucasian race, of course, had devolved thanks to environmental factors such as too much or too little sun and poor and poorer diets. Leclerc like Blumenbach, believed in the devolution of species from higher forms due to environment, climate, and diet, while also arguing that such devolution could potentially be reversed. 

The notion of human devolution was also something that interested many writers and musicians from the late eighteenth century on. Jonathan Swift, for example, played with the notion of human devolution in his satirical book Gulliver’s Travels of 1726. H.G. Wells's The Time Machine of 1895 portrayed a future world in which the human race had devolved into two forms: the Morlocks and Eloi. H.P. Lovecraft’s 1924 short story “The Rats in the Wall” starred a group of devoluted humans. Cyril Kornbluth's 1951 satirical short story (satire, of course, is also generally deadly serious as well as being darkly humorous) “The Marching Morons” portrayed a future where dysgenic or anti-social and maladaptive evolutionary pressures led to the rise of massive numbers of morons who a small group of geniuses had to assure did no damage to both others or to themselves. The satirical and parodic Kent, Ohio rock band Devo, who formed in 1973 and who rose to prominence in the late 1970s and 1980s, made devolution a part of their very name, a name they took in shortened form from a Christian pamphlet on which a devil with the word D-EVOLUTION was portrayed (see their song "Jocko Home", in particular, a song title that comes from the same pamphlet). What was originally a joke, says a source, became much more serious after the murder of four students at Kent State University, which some members of Devo attendted) by the Ohio National Guard and the subsequent realisation by members of the band that responses to that murder—specifically that this murder was not murder—could be explained by a a devoluted human herd clone mentality that functioned automatically in cognitive terms thanks to the disciplining or socialised enforcement (political and ideological correctness).

I mention all of this if briefly and selectively because it seems to me that anyone who has taken even a cursory look at the wasteland that is social media like YouTube must conclude that not only is devolution a general human condition (social media seemingly has replaced American television as the vast wasteland, as the even vaster wasteland) but that with each new group of reactors to, for example, the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer human devolution seems to be increasing compared to earlier crops of reactors, reactors (each social media generation a degeneration?) like SoFie REacts, The Lexie Crowd, and Domi.e all of whom were all slightly above average with SoFie being the most above average. (The same thing, by the way, holds true for reactors to Firefly, Sherlock, and Doctor Who).

Perhaps the poster child for this further devolution of what is already devolved is Southernbelle Racts. I had seen and heard Southernbelle Reacts reactions before she began to react to Buffy recently. I had perused her reactions to a later Joss Whedon created television show Firefly. In Southernbelle Reacts reactions to Firefly I noticed what seems to be her modus operandi: she gabs and gabs over each episode of Firefly she reacts to missing important plot, informational, and character points (e.g., how one becomes a vampire) in the process. In her reactions to Buffy Southernbelle Reacts has compounded this attention deficit disorder (talking rapidly over television shows that require attention because they are unfolding texts (unattending, of course, is a common malady among YouTube reactors though often not to the degree it is with SoBelle) who even misses the rather obvious clues laid down about Angel from episode one to seven, season one...wow) with the questionable assumption that Buffy is a show for teens and tweens, an assumption grounded in nothing more than, presumably, the name of the show and/or the television channel it was on (initially the WB, later UPN). It is certainly not grounded in research either on what the author of the series said. (For Whedon, by the way, the title of the show was both parodic and satirical and explanatory. Nor was it based on data research, research shows that in the middle of the shows run the average age of the Buffy watcher was 27 or wandering why so many academics had written about Buffy (who are hardly tweens or teens. (Research, by the way is not a strong point for most of the reactors to Buffy though some do have more cultural capital to draw on than others). One would think that after watching Firefly Southernbelle Reacts would make the connection that Whedon shows are not only unfolding texts but are deadly serious amidst all the fun and tonal play and that they share several common themes (e.g., existentialism, chosen families). One wonders if she even realises that Whedon was deeply involved in both shows.

Southernbelle Reacts may be amongst the worst, in attention deficit terms and cultural capital terms, of the new crop of Buffy reactors. If we delineate three mediocre ideal types—mediocre highbrow, mediocre middlebrow, and mediocre lowbrow or mediocre plus, mediocre in between, and mediocre negative (SoFie Reacts is above mediocre but below excellent for comparative purposes)—one can easily argue that Watch This! With Kevin and Joe are mediocre highbrow or plus though their reactions to Buffy aren't as incisive as their reactions to Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, a thriller that is in their wheelhouse since they appear to be fans of the James Bond films. North by Northwest, of course, is a Bond film before Bond films and Kevin and Joe view it exclusively in those terms and actually do a good job of talking about each scene of the movie. Chance's House of Horror, Shadowcat (a Canadian), and Nythical Reacts are decent in a mediocre middlebrow or mediocre in between sort of way. RolyPolyOllie Reactions, JayPerView, and JerBear Reacts are mediocre lowbrow or negative. Anna Alexander and 2 Girls 1 Episode, both of whom are below the gentleman's C average, and rival Southernbelle Reacts in attention deficit. Like her they also try desperately, too desperately, to be witty but are clearly unable to do so (perhaps proving in the process that the English are often right about Americans and wit) and lack the cultural capital in which to analyse the show in intellectual and scholarly terms. Tyler Alexander, who does have a degree if cultural capital thanks to his days studying creative writing at the University of Hull, is in a politically and ideologically correct world all his own. He makes even me, who makes use of critical theory regularly, cringe at his use of crystal ball textualist representational theories of writing and filmmaking.

I can hear the Beatles's song "You Never Give Me Your Money" as I type. How apropos when thinking about social media in this everybody wants to be a star postmodernist age.

Musings on Capitalist Free Enterprise...Again...

 

The profitic prophets of free enterprise capitalism, cheerleaders and demagogues that they inherently are, like to claim that nobody does it better than free enterprise capitalism. Every month, however, free enterprise capitalism reminds me that bullshit, including capitalist free enterprise bullshit, to often makes the world go round.

This month I was reminded that much of the rhetoric of capitalist demagoguery is bullshit in a couple of instances. First let’s talk garbage. Our garbage and recycling is picked up by the private company County Waste and Recycling on Monday morning's thanks to a deal our landlord cut with this company. They don’t, however, always pick up our garbage and recycling on time. This week they picked up the garbage. The recycling, however, remains sitting on Caroline waiting for them to pick,. As I type it is Thursday, four days after it is supposed to be collected, and there is no sign of County Waste and Recyclling.

Now let’s talk satellite digital television. As I have said on these “pages” previously I have all sorts of problems with digital television. I live on a busy street and when a car goes by at speed (30 mph is the speed limit) my over the air signal disappears for a few seconds and, on rarer occasions, for longer. That is not the only problem with my over the air digital signal, however. The last couple of weeks the signal has disappeared twice on the Minnesota based Hubbard Broadcasting owned Albany broadcaster WNYT's sub-channels 51.2, 51.3, and 51.4 right in the middle of the movie on the Movies channel which, to say the least, rather annoying. Is it the satellite going out? Or is it something else? Presumably WNYT knows.

The Books of My Life: Racism, Sexism, and the University

 

In June of 1992 twelve graduate students in the Political Science Department at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver sent an anonymous letter to the Dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies at UBC accusing several White male professors in the Department of being racist and sexist. A few months later in November of 1993 six more students joined the chorus of voices claiming that UBC’s Political Science department was sexist and racist. 

Instead of investigating these accusations internally through UBC’s administrative officers tasked with investigating harassment and multiculturalism or by the recently appointed vice-president of Equity, an outsider was tasked with investigating the accusations, the Vancouver lawyer Joan McEwen. The McEwen report, which was finally issued in 1995, found the accusations of the graduate students credible. Even the president of UBC, David W. Strangway, believed the accusations though most of the administrators at UBC did what university administrators usually do, they sat with one leg on one side of the fence and the other on the other side. What the administrative bureaucrats at UBC did do was mandate that no further graduate students would be admitted to the Department of Political Science for a time. 

UBC sociologist Patricia Marchak in her analytical and ethnographic study of this battle in the culture wars being fought all across the English settler society world, finds the conclusions of the McEwen Report less than credible in her book Racism, Sexism, and the University: The Political Science Affair at the University of British Columbia (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996). To Marchak, who was the Dean of Arts in the Faculty of the Arts when the affair began, the evidence, in the McEwen Report was not only anaemic. It was grounded in ideological correctness. In fact, according to Marchak, it was McEwen, who introduced racism and sexism into the report by repeatedly using terms like “white”, “female”, and “Jewish" in her final report, a report that sounds from its description more like a prosecutorial brief than an investigation of the facts of the case.

While racism and sexism seemed to be, on the surface, what the UBC Political Science affair was about Marchak argues that this battle in a long standing culture war was really about power. It was about, Marchak argues, who had the power to determine the Political Science curriculum at UBC, who had the power within the hierarchical Political Science Department at UBC, whether the Political Science Department at UBC would be one in which truth grounded in empirical evidence was pursued or good causes were promoted, and whether academic freedom and Enlightenment rationality (empirical facts and empirical context as evidence) or postmodern relativism (perceptions as facts) would prevail in the UBC Department of Political Science. As Marchak notes, this battle for the soul of the university was hardly singular to UBC or Canada. There were battles like this in other universities across the English settler society world in Canada, Australia, the UK, and the US, where Trump and his comrades are trying to remake universities and colleges in their own political and ideological correct image.

In 1995 the dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies ended the ban on the admission of graduate students to the Department of Political Science. In 1998 then UBC president Martha Piper apologised for how UBC’s administrative bureaucrats had treated Department of Political Science during the affair (these apologies seem to always come after time has passed and the damage is already done, don't they?). As is so often the case with these after the fact apologies, however, it could not erase memories of the damage caused by vigilante like attacks on the Department between 1992 and 1995. 

I enjoyed Racism, Sexism, and the University quite a lot. Marchak was spot on about the impact of consumer capitalism with its mantra that the customer is always right on North American universities (one of the original sins of the modern North American university). I personally experienced this culture of consumer feelings when I received a visit from the college lawyer and the college equity officer at the college in which I worked when one student in a class of 34 complained about a joke i told which apparently offended her or him. She is right about the impact of managerial corporate capitalism with its mantra that professionals, well non-academic professionals, know best how to run the institutions of higher education (another of the original sins of the modern North American university). She is spot on in her contention that the anti-hierarchal attitudes of postmoderns undermines the notion of professionalism and professional training and its accumulated cultural capital and that the cultural war between moderns and postmoderns is a battle for power in the North American university. She is spot on that illiberal intolerance can be found among many postmodernist sects. The radical right hardly has a monopoly on illiberalism. She is right that many varieties of postmodernism have a radical democratic aspect to them. This makes some postmoderns close cousins to religious fundamentalism with its ideology of every man a Bible interpreter regardless of educational level and cultural capital accrued. She is spot on about the need for a middle way, a middle way that respects the seeking after truth, natural justice or due process, and merit (even if this is unequally distributed for class, race, and gender reasons), and respect and equity for all.

Finally, I do agree with Max Weber that value, what someone values, does impact what academics and fan boys and girls study but that does not mean that we have to throw out the scientific method with its dispassion with the everything is about power ideologically correct water. One can and should be trained in the fine art of dispassionate analysis grounded in an understanding that every human thing is grounded in economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic realities, even if many of those realities are nothing more than social and cultural constructs.

Anne of Windy Willows, Anne of Windy Poplars, and the Fine Art of Being Sparing With the Truth

 

I think I was around five years old when my mother started buying books for me to read. It was strange because neither my mum, who came from a working class English family, nor my dad, who was middle class and came from a Swiss family, really read many books or at least I never saw them read many books.

Thanks to my mum I became an inveterate reader. When I got intense asthma when I was twelve I became an even more inveterate reader (and movie watcher I might add). Most of what I read as a teenager was fiction. I read Shakespeare. I read Mark Twain. I read George Orwell. I read Moby Dick. I read Dickens. I even read Ethan Frome (which was not one of my favourite reads by any stretch of the imagination). And I read all of the Anne books by Canadian author L.M. Montgomery save Rilla of Ingleside and The Blythe’s Are Quoted, which wasn’t published at the time save in excerpts in The Road to Yesterday.

My love of the Anne books has not changed over the years. The books remain amongst my favourites and I have, as a consequence, even collected Anne and L. M. Montgomery books over the years. What did change is that I went to college and I learned how to do research. 

One of the things that has interested me is the fascinating textual history of one of the Anne books, Anne of Windy Willows also known as Anne of Windy Poplars first published in 1938. I learned that Anne of Windy Poplars was not fully the book Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote. Montgomery, of course, had several different publishers. Frederick A Stokes was her publisher for the US market. Harrap was her publisher in Great Britain. Angus and Robertson was her publisher in Australia. McClelland and Stewart was her publisher for the Canadian market.  

Another thing I learned was that that Anne of Windy Willows was the original title of the book and that the American publisher was unhappy with that title and was unhappy with some of the darker parts of the text. For these reasons Montgomery changed the title of the book and excised and changed some of the text.

I note all this because I recently bought the Anne of Windy Populars Sourcebooks edition. Sourcebooks, which is based in Illinois and which has the imprimatur of the of the relatives of Lucy Maud, claims, on the back of the book, that this edition of Anne of Windy Poplars, has the original restored unabridged text of the novel. This, along with the fact that I wanted one Sourcebooks edition of the Anne books, was why I bought this edition.

So you can imagine my surprise when I discovered that the Sourcebooks edition of Anne of Windy Populars is not the original text of the novel. First off, it does not have the original title, the title Lucy Maud preferred, Anne of Windy Willows, a title Stokes apparently disliked because it was close to Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. Second, it does not contain the passages excised and changed by Montgomery because the American publisher and McClelland and Stewart which apparently followed the American leader, wanted. So, to sum up, this the Sourcebooks edition of Anne of Windy Willows is not the “original, unabridged text” Sourcebooks and the relatives of Montgomery make it out to be. Sourcebooks and the relatives, in other words, are being sparing with the truth. 

Wouldn't it be nice if all concerned could admit the truth, namely that Anne of Windy Willows is the text as Montgomery wanted? And wouldn't it be nice if all the Anne books could be standardised and that Anne of Windy Willows, the fourth in the series (though not the fourth published), could be published in the North American market as part of this standardisation?

A Note: Another thing the Sourcebooks edition of Anne of Windy Poplars has done is to renumber the chapters. In the original edition of the book the chapters for each of the three books begins with 1. In this reworked edition the chapters are numbered consecutively.

The Corner of Hollywood and Life: Musings on Life Mimicking Entertainment and Entertainment Mimicking Life

 

I recently read Richard Maltby’s excellent introductory book on the Hollywood cinema (Hollywood Cinema). As I read the chapters on narrative I was struck by how much Hollywood cinema is like life. Both, though this largely goes unnoticed by those who watch Hollywood movies and who cycle through life, are largely social and cultural constructs.

Hollywood cinema is, as Maltby foregrounds, first and foremost a business. It is and has been, at least since the classic studio system came into existence by the 1920s, a vertically integrated (production-distribution-exhibition) corporation, whose function it is to make monies by selling dreams,  fantasies, and pleasure to willing consumers.

Hollywood, as Maltby notes, sells dreams and fantasies in multiple ways, thanks at least in part to the self-regulation codes Hollywood put in place in the  1920s and early 1930s. As a profit making enterprise Hollywood has wanted to sell its films to the widest audience possible though, at the same time, Hollywood did make B movies, serials, and genre flicks, to more targeted audiences. 

The Production Code, put finally in place in the 1930s, limited Hollywood’s ability to do certain things including issues relating to explicit sexuality. Hollywood learned to get around this literalism by making films that were sometimes ambiguous, that could be “read” (Malby does not like this term because film moves while books do not) in different ways depending on the degree of cultural capital audiences had. Maltby distinguishes between “innocent” readers and “sophisticated” readers (one can break down these categories even further since their are variations in the cultural capital those in each category have). “Innocent” “readers” tend to read movies and, I would add television, literally. They are akin to fundamentalists who tend to read certain parts of the Bible literally.  “Sophisticated” “readers”, on the other hand, Maltby notes, read movies and television not only between the lines but can also delineate the metaphors, allegories, mythologies, and reflexivities movies and television are playing in and on. They can grasp that a television show like, for example, Buffy the Vampire, plays with metaphors of growing up making that show a bildungsroman. The literalists, as a rule don’t get or grasp this. They tend to concentrate on plot (the order in which events are represented in a movie), story (the reconstruction of plot events in a chronological order and which allows audiences to grasp causation), narration (the process by which is a plot is arranged  to permit the telling of a story) and spectacle, particularly the almost orgasmic spectacles of special effects and action. 

Hollywood, of course, socialises viewers. By watching movies audiences, particularly ‘innocent” audiences, come to see Hollywood’s style and strategies of story telling as the only way movies should be made, as the way films are. Socialised to see Hollywood style and stories as natural (fetishisation) they no longer even recognise how Hollywood makes or produces its movies. They no longer, if they ever did, see Hollywood’s 180 degree eye level rule. They no longer, if they ever did, recognise that Hollywood centres its characters much like a Renaissance painting. They no longer, if they ever did, recognise the editing strategies Hollywood uses. They no longer, if they ever did, recognise how Hollywood uses music to emotionally manipulate its viewers, its consumers.They no longer, if they ever did, recognise Hollywood’s “invisible’ camera movements. They are not familiar with the fact that Hollywood uses depth of field and optical technologies to give viewer-consumers the illusion of reality in Hollywood films and it does this not to, Maltby argues, because of an ideology of realism, but because Hollywood wants to make money because Hollywood believed and believes that is what its audience wants.

Hollywood, even after the 1948 Supreme Court decision to break up the Hollywood monopoly or cartel, a decision that was undermined by the 1980s and 1990s, was quite flexible in selling product to customers. Since the late 1940s, Hollywood’s audience had become more male and more young and Hollywood eventually began to make movies for this audience (see Star Wars, a serial with state of the art spectacular special effects, action, and romance). Today, if YouTube reaction videos to movies and television are a guide, most viewer-consumers, “innocent” or “sophisticated”, are fully enmeshed in a films and television should be realistic ideology. These reactors, most of whom have lower degrees of cultural capital, complain again and again about “unrealistic” plots, stories, narrative, character motivations, and even that most unrealistic of contemporary Hollywood movies, special effects (digital matte painting) even when films and television shows are genre shows that are inherently unrealistic.

In life we too, of course, are socialised into seeing certain things that are social and cultural constructs, that are cultural norms, customs, and traditions, as just the way things are, as reality. Many Americans, for instance, and Americans are not alone in this, see the American economic system as the one and only natural or god given economic system. Many Americans believe that American democracy (which has, if you define democracy as the rule of the people, never existed; the US has long been an oligarchy) is the one and only natural or god given political system. Many Americans believe that their culture is the one and only natural or god given culture. Many Americans believe that they are nature’s or god’s chosen people and that they are on a mission from nature or god to bring others the "blessings" associated with their chosen nation. In this scenario America, the nation, is a brand as is American nationalism.

William Shakespeare and Erving Goffman, using theatrical performance as a metaphor for how humans “act” in life, recognised long ago that humans develop frontstage and backstage personas that are grounded in socially and culturally constructed conventions, norms, customs, and traditions as well, personas that are characters in their own often little dramas, melodramas, tragedies, and comedies, sometimes even dark comedies, of life. One of the major places many today get their performance techniques (gestures, facial expressions, ways of talking, etc.) from these days, just as they did in the past, is, of course, the mass media. 

Today is a bit different from the past since social media allows almost anyone who is tech savvy to become a player and even a star on social media like YouTube if sometimes only for a now proverbial fifteen minutes (and dropping). Social media has also made, in many instances, the backstage the frontstage as many no longer manage their backstages to be separate from their frontstages, something anyone who rides public transit or who has walked through a college campus knows (and which has made it mandatory to engage in safe walking).

Needless to say, YouTube reactors foreground the fact that in the brave new digital world, reactors have become, at least in their own minds, actors in their own plays, and they are paid for being actors in their new digital media plays. So many of the presenters on YouTube have been Hollwoodised or Disneyfied, just like Taylor Swift who, at best, is the simulation of a simulation of a simulation, and they are well aware that one of the ways they can make money, in these curiously incurious days, is to ask viewers to do research for them, research which, of course, varies in cultural capital quality, and post it as comments on their YouTube pages. In some cases these social media personalities remind one of PBS since they sometimes urge viewers to contribute monetarily to their social media pages (YouTube, Patreon). On YouTube, for instance, “fans" can “buy’ the YouTuber a coffee, and“donate” monies to a YouTuber. Welcome to a monetised community where even community itself and conversation have been commodified. "Civilisation" on the march.