Review: 'Selected Poems' by Thom Gunn

In his introduction to the new selected edition of Thom Gunn's poetry, August Kleinzahler tries to debunk the popular narrative of Gunn's career: off to a good start with Larkin and others of The Movement, he loses his grip in the hippie-dippie LSD era and then regains his power and importance with the AIDS epidemic. I've heard this story before; not in the arc presented here, exactly, but implied in the way Gunn is now pigeonholed as a poet of homosexuality and AIDS who also happens to utilize form and allusion.

The alternative, presented in the introduction, is one in which Gunn's work develops steadily, growing from one collection to the next with a patient insistence on renewing Elizabethan verse, itself characterized by formal ingenuity, wit, and 'the disinterested "I".' There is an element of truth to Kleinzahler's revision. Writing in mid-career at the peak of the confessional moment, Gunn's work must have been read as formally old-fashioned or generally affected by those drawn to his psychadelic themes. Gunn was also derided in Britain in the middle of his career for being, it seems to me, too little an existentialist like Larkin and too much of an American. His early work attracted the attention of relatively conservative critics and readers who were least likely to accept poems of drug-induced hallucinations and urban life. From either extreme, the poet received no quarter. Fatefully Gunn found a suitable mentor in maverick outcast Yvor Winters, who had a similar Elizabethan kink.

Kleinzahler quotes Gunn from an undated interview, 'I want to be an Elizabethan poet. . . . I want to move around between forms in the same way somebody like Ben Jonson did. At the same time I want to write in my own century.' Beyond critical and popular reception, this is a complicated proposition. It creates a difficult set of constraints under which to succeed, even by his own standard: he stands in the shadow of poets whose formulations and syntax still define the English language. His rhetoric would need to be brilliant, his turns genius, his arguments taught. It may be that a true revitalization of such verse is impossible, and that the best Gunn could achieve was an admirable likeness of style and quality. If that is so, then he did.

There is no doubt that Gunn was a master of the language. Though he may not have joined ranks with the likes of Donne, Jonson, and Greville, his work was largely successful. The quality of his verse ought to be evaluated on its own terms, and its content thereafter separately — in the former regard, Gunn excelled, faltering no more than any poet does as they mature and far less than most. There seems to be an unfair bias in favor of the very early and very late work. However, his 1971 poem 'The Rooftop' does not pale in formal comparison to 'Tamer and Hawk' from his debut in 1954; feelings of preference aside, the two pieces are equally well-executed works of formal verse. His gift with language sustained, unabated.

In the middle of his career, though, his virtuoso control does not atone (to use the language of Geoffrey Hill) for the often narrow or oblique content. His themes in this period often do not challenge, but explicate; they do not feel tensed against his formal techniques. Epigrams to Jefferson Airplane, poems that describe the experience of surfing, LSD-fueled reflections that verge on pastiche: it too much relies on Jonson's lighter mode perhaps, or is too contented in the impersonal voice (which itself relies on the power of the content to move). Gunn's middle work is beautiful and accomplished, but the themes are mostly without.

The quality that makes Gunn's later work so moving (and beloved, able to force an honest reconsideration of his whole oeuvre) is the chaos of deeply-felt grief, powerfully constrained by language: 'skill and pride and hope / strangled against each other in the rope? // I think it is a tangle of despair', as Gunn writes in 'Arachnae'. Kleinzahler scoffs at the notion that Gunn won favor because he 'became a feeling poet at last'. Yet readers and critics (and other poets especially) rediscovered Gunn exactly because, in his last two decades, the poet finally found a theme that was equal to his verse. It was not the particular feeling that mattered (nor even the fact of it being an emotion); rather, it was the poet's having found content with enough energy to no longer wilt under the heat of his control. This tension is what makes poems such as 'The Man with Night Sweats' or 'Still Life' so moving. It could have been any theme, but it happened to be grief; and what is more universal than grief, besides?

We read Gunn's middle career more seriously now for the fact of his artful prosody being illuminated by that later work; it is read with wider sympathy for the deeply human themes. Kleinzahler has gifted us with this slim selected volume, which begs for easy comparison of work across the decades. What one realizes is the consistent poetic achievement, regardless of content. This is a brief but crafted edition, as it ought to be; an Elizabethan sonnet of a book rightly in favor of Gunn's greater appreciation.

Brilliant Move

The Boston Globe book blog, Off the Shelf, reports that Barnes & Nobles will begin to offer free wireless internet in conjunction with the launch of their new 700,000 title e-book store. 'As part of a larger push into the e-book world, Barnes & Noble says that it is offering complimentary WiFi at its nearly 780 stores across the nation. Formerly, BN customers were charged $3.95 for two hours of access to AT&T's in-store wireless Internet service, which has been available in stores since 2005. The book retailer said in a news release that customers in its stores now will be able to download and preview any of the more than 700,000 titles in its recently launched e-bookstore, along with the thousands of free, public-domain books available through Google. Earlier this month, the company released its free eBook reader application called eReader for the BlackBerry, iPhone, and iPod touch.' Brilliant move they should have done years ago, which goes right in hand with their other smart public relations policies.

Bits & Pieces

Just a note: the Godine special offer of The Prospector and Desert for 30% off ends Friday. Read up on Nobel Laureate J.M.G. Le Clézio cheaply, while it lasts!

* The reviews of Thomas Pynchon's new novel Inherent Vice are just starting to roll out, mostly in the UK, but here is one from Louis Menand at The New Yorker. Menand writes, 'The title is a term in maritime law (a specialty of one of the minor characters). It refers to the quality of things that makes them difficult to insure: if you have eggs in your cargo, a normal policy will not cover their breaking. Getting broken is in the nature of being an egg. The novel gives the concept some low-key metaphysical play—original sin is an obvious analogy—but, apart from this and a death-and-resurrection motif involving a saxophonist in a surf-rock band, “Inherent Vice” does not appear to be a Pynchonian palimpsest of semi-obscure allusions. (I could be missing something, of course. I could be missing everything.) It’s a slightly spoofy take on hardboiled crime fiction, a story in which the characters smoke dope and watch “Gilligan’s Island” instead of sitting around a night club knocking back J&Bs. It’s “The Maltese Falcon” starring Cheech and Chong, “The Big Sleep” as told by the hippy-dippy weatherman. Whether you think it’s funny depends a little on whether you think Cheech and Chong and the hippy-dippy weatherman are funny for more than about two minutes. It’s funnier than Chandler, anyway.'

I can say absolutely nothing about Pynchon — his being one of the more gaping holes in my contemporary fiction knowledge — and so I can say nothing about whether the book sounds interesting, on its own or compared to other Pynchon novels, beyond Menand's essay and that of others. That being said, by its descriptions this book sounds tedious.

* The LA Times book blog Jacket Copy reports on six famed literary feuds, including that between 'three giants — Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Ivan Turgenev' who 'carried on their dispute in public. They called one another names, satirized one another in print, and in 1861, Dostoevsky challenged Turgenev to a duel. It never happened, but they did stop speaking for almost 20 years.' Oh Fyodor, you rascal!

Posted by Daniel E. Pritchard at 9:24 A

Booker Longlist Announced

The Man-Booker Longlist has been announced. Lots of familiar names, and look at those corporate publishers roll:

AS Byatt | The Children's Book | Random House - Chatto and Windus

J M Coetzee | Summertime | Harvill Secker (Random House)

Adam Foulds | The Quickening Maze | Jonathan Cape (Random House)

Sarah Hall | How to paint a dead man | Faber and Faber

Samantha Harvey | The Wilderness | Jonathan Cape (Random House)

James Lever | Me Cheeta | Fourth Estate (HarperCollins)

Hilary Mantel | Wolf Hall | Fourth Estate (HarperCollins)

Simon Mawer | The Glass Room | Little, Brown

Ed O'Loughlin | Not Untrue & Not Unkind | Penguin-Ireland

James Scudamore | Heliopolis | Harvill Secker (Random House)

Colm Toibin | Brooklyn | Viking (Penguin)

William Trevor | Love and Summer | Viking (Penguin)

Waters, Sarah | The Little Stranger | Virago (Little, Brown)

Coleridge via Hill :: Nota Bene

'For if words are not things, they are living powers, by which the things of most importance to mankind are actuated, combined, and humanized.'

—from Aids to Reflection, as quoted
in the essay 'Poetry & Value', by Geoffrey Hill

A Malleable Feast?

At the New York Times recently, A. E. Hotchner wrote an editorial against the new, heavily revised edition of Hemingway's A Movable Feast. Hotchner writes, 'The grandson [of Hemingway] has removed several sections of the book’s final chapter and replaced them with other writing of Hemingway’s that the grandson feels paints his grandma in a more sympathetic light. Ten other chapters that roused the grandson’s displeasure have been relegated to an appendix, thereby, according to the grandson, creating “a truer representation of the book my grandfather intended to publish.”It is his claim that Mary Hemingway, Ernest’s fourth wife, cobbled the manuscript together from shards of an unfinished work and that she created the final chapter, “There Is Never Any End to Paris".'

He goes on to argue, citing his own experience with Hemingway at the time of the book's composition, that 'the manuscript was not left in shards but was ready for publication. . . . These details are evidence that the book was a serious work that Ernest finished with his usual intensity, and that he certainly intended it for publication. What I read on the plane coming back from Cuba was essentially what was published. There was no extra chapter created by Mary.'

It is a pretty compelling case, considering the bias that the grandson holds (& reasonably so) — but more than the simple fact of the grandson being probably wrong about the original edition, Hotchner points out the danger of meddling in ethical gray areas. 'With this reworking as a precedent, what will Scribner do, for instance, if a descendant of F. Scott Fitzgerald demands the removal of the chapter in “A Moveable Feast” about the size of Fitzgerald’s penis, or if Ford Madox Ford’s grandson wants to delete references to his ancestor’s body odor. All publishers, Scribner included, are guardians of the books that authors entrust to them. Someone who inherits an author’s copyright is not entitled to amend his work.'

Of those last few sentences, I have a few thoughts. First, Hemingway handed his manuscript over to Charles Scribner Jr. in 1959 or 1960. Today he would have handed it over to an editor at a house owned by a media corporation, held by a capital trust, or that was publicly traded. Charles Scribner's goal was to publish good work, protect authors and their titles, and make a little money; that ethos trickles from the top down. Today's Scribner is an imprint of Simon & Schuster, which is owned by the CBS corporation: their goal is to make money, bottom line, and that ethos has also trickled down the ranks.

I don't blame a corporation for trying to make money however they're able, any more than I do a bee for stinging me — each act is simply essential to their nature. Likewise, I wouldn't entrust an important work of literature to a corporation. Their goal is not to be, as Hotchner writes, 'guardians of the books that authors entrust to them.' It is not in their essential nature to be ethical, or to be guardians of culture.

This is Libation for Jupiter

There are times when people around me seem to be falling as if from an unacknowledged plague: personal relations and public figures; of the latter, known for their merit and infamy alike. Maybe death does harvest in seasons, as the adages imply. You'll have to excuse me for my morbidity today — last night I completed Tacitus' Annals of Imperial Rome and this morning began David Ferry's translation of Gilgamesh. In both works the issue of mortality is central, and both emphasize the quality of a life's work being tantamount to its value. In a Times Literary Supplement letter to the editor I came across this quotation from D.H. Lawrence, 'Even the dead ask only for justice: not for praise or exoneration. Who dares humiliate the dead with excuses for their living?'

Notent Potables

A few bits for the day:

* CNN reports that an American citizen (well, I guess Long Island is close enough) has been arrested in Pakistan on charges of 'conspiracy to murder U.S. nationals, providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization and receiving military-type training from a foreign terrorist organization.' I kept feeling that I knew about this already until I realized that, actually, it recalls the plot of John Updike's late novel Terrorist.

* This book review from The Smart Set is being quoted all over the literary industrial complex, so I might as well. In discussion of the virtues and difficulties of kindness, especially on the internet, Bookslut editor Jessa Crispin writes, 'Really what the kindness and goodness of these books comes down to is understanding. To adopt their viewpoint takes respect for people’s vulnerabilities and empathy.' That's not the one you expected, but it would feel wrong to ignore this virtuous insight. I'm reminded of a quote from William Empson (via Don Share), 'The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own.' It also directs me to two major articles on CNN today: one regarding the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.; the other regarding homophobia and book banning in Wisconsin.

* Lastly, The New York Times reports on Target's lucrative book club program. They hit an interesting demographic: 'Target’s “core” book buyers were women, with a median age of 42 and median annual household income of $60,000. About half have completed college degrees, and some have children at home.' Sounds like a small press I know. Ahem.

Amazon's Kindle eBook Recall

A lot of folks are riled up about the Amazon recall of several Kindle titles — Farhad Manjoo at Slate is even worried about the future of book banning. There are two things that spring to my mind reading about this eBook recall, and neither have to do with the big-brother Orwellian irony.

First, this is not the last time that something like this is going to happen. Books remain in print for as long as they exist in the publisher's warehouse, and contracts generally last for as long as the book remains available. Not so with eBooks. Their 'existence' is fluid, insubstantial, and will be available (or not so) at the whim of the literary executor or author. If a contract term between and author and a publisher ends — contracts should always end, and be made revisable / renewable for all parties — and the publisher loses the rights to a title, it is possible that eBook editions could be pulled as well. (Imagine Amazon trying to take books out of your apartment for the sake of a similar mix-up; it would cause an outrage.) The moral: When you buy an eBook, you never really own it.

Second, notice the loss. Deletion is total. The books are gone, completely. On the other hand, my copy of Animal Farm, a 1960s edition now certainly OP but obviously still existent, is sitting on my shelf right now. Where Manjoo posits a world in which Ulysses was banned so thoroughly that every known copy was lost in deletion, and one thinks of Descartes, I put forth a world that actually exists: where technologies are fluid and companies fallible. Let's say that Amazon dominates the eBook world and then, through market forces or malignant managers, the whole thing collapses — some data is inevitably lost. Maybe (or, hopefully) it will be Ayn Rand. And as well with each digital upgrade, some data is lost: think of 5" floppy disks, movie film, or eight-tracks. We probably won't lose a lot, and maybe nothing important; or, maybe they lose the moon landing. Maybe we'll lose The Unbearable Lightness of Being, to continue the ironic trend begun by 1984. The current proprietary digital formatting makes things a little bit slippery. Literature might be better served by an LOC-type master system without proprietary coding that includes physical copies. Call it: In case of fire.

Monday Morning Postmodernism

{It was a very good but not re-energizing weekend of dancing, lawn mowing, Tacitus, late nights, argumentation, and house guests. TBG and I will be taking the English GRE Subject Test in a few months (she for her PhD applications; myself in support of her and for the outside possibility of further degrees), so studying for that began over the weekend as well: I re-read the 17th century poets up through Marvell; she began Paradise Lost and brushed up on Beowulf and Everyman. The Critical Flame is on a tear so far this month and September's issue will be very, very good if it comes together as planned.}

At the LA Times' Jacket Copy, Carolyn Kelogg ponders the nature of the postmodern novel, and makes 61 suggestions for further reading. She writes, 'The thing about postmodernism is it's impossible to pin down exactly what might make a book postmodern. In looking at the attributes of the essential postmodern reads, we found some were downright contradictory. Postmodern books have a reputation for being massive tomes, like David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest — but then there's The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, which has just 144 pages. And while postmodern books would, you'd think, have to be published after the modern period — in the 20th or 21st centuries — could postmodernism exist without Tristram Shandy? We think not.'

Without getting into the specifics of the list, and whether I agree or disagree with the attributed qualities or inclusions, I'm interested in thinking about her primary dilemma, illustrated in the passage above: what is postmodernism? I wrote here before, and then again further, in a sort of case-study discussion, about the way that postmodernism in poetry and culture has a familiar analog in contemporary reactionary conservatism and extremist religious movements. (In retrospect, I realize that such a critical analysis is possible, in large part, because of Fredric Jameson's unique and insightful Marxist critique of postmodernism.) It caused a little storm, although that focused more on my criticism of Ashbery than anything else.

Kelogg here tries to find a set of qualities that would help identify postmodern novels — yet the criteria she sets defies differentiation, as she notes by including works such as Hamlet, Tristram Shandy, and the Metamorphoses of Kafka. One could include any number of other works as well from the recent and distant past. The qualities by which she is judging are not incorrectly attributed, for the most part; they are just so broad as to be useless. They do not differentiate a work as being in one camp over another, because they include so much of what has ever been written.

Postmodernism, I would argue, as even an incoherent movement in culture, has no intellectual of aesthetic content. Qualities of any sort, however contradictory, are not the defining aspect, because most if not all of the qualities that postmodern novels, to take this example, engage, are lifted from already-existing (often idiosyncratic) works. The qualities operate in essentially the same way in the postmodern works as in the older works; thus postmodernism does not operate in the same way as, say, surrealism or Modernsim, where older qualities (i.e. unrealistic landscapes; allusive density) are co-opted and used to create a different effect on the reader than previously. This is not to argue that postmodernism does not exist, or has no worth; nor am I being coy for the sake of a snickering wink. I believe that thinking about postmodernism in terms of qualities is primarily flawed, and can only lead to confusion. Or, I should say, to greater confusion.

Postmodernism is an action. Specifically, it is a denial. Postmodernism denies is the possibility of certain knowledge, of communication in language, and / or of the centrality of individuated human experience. The purpose of these denials is not to replace, but to generate greater skepticism (another affinity that postmodernism finds with fanatical religions: its evangelism). Postmodernism does not attempt to replace these denials with content; rather, the denials are themselves an act of revelation (often if one rejects postmodern concepts, one is accused of closed-mindedness, willful ignorance, or of being a fool — all other content is a veil of ignorance). Implicitly, it proposes to give a clear view of some otherwise hidden reality.

Maybe not. I am also definitely a skeptic, being raised in postmodernism's heyday. At the very least, I am very open to this being a further discussion.

Tidbits on Thursday

Here are just a few bits I found interesting this Thursday. Enjoy!

* Jack Shafer at Slate predicts that the book industry is about to get Napstered. 'While publishers, authors, and agents are well within their rights to attempt to maximize profits by forcing e-book prices up, their efforts may backfire. Put off by higher prices, readers who have grown accustomed to $9.99 Kindle editions may choose to flout copyright law and turn to the lush "pirate" markets for books on the Internet. It's a simple matter of querying a search engine to find thousands of e-books — best-sellers included — that can be imported without charge into a Kindle, a Sony Reader, personal computer, or smart phone.' I asked our Amazon Kindle proselytizer about pirating material and e-books, and he had no response beyond We just think it won't happen. This is not reassuring.

* E.J. Dionne, Jr. at The New Republic reports on deteriorating higher education possibilities and opportunities therefrom. 'In a report for The Workforce Alliance, Holzer and Lerman argued that both high-skill and service job openings will be outnumbered in coming years by middle-skill opportunities in health care, construction, installation, repair, and many other fields. A single year of postsecondary [sic] education, especially in programs linked directly to employers' needs, can do wonders in helping job seekers gain their footing on the mobility ladder.'

* This really is a good deal. I'm not saying it was my idea, I'm just saying that I hope you enjoy.

Inflation

At Slate, Zachary Karabell rubs the rust off of ideas about inflation. 'Many people find the notion of arguing that inflation may not be a problem offensive. At an individual level, inflation is a catch-all for not being able to afford whatever one needs or wants to buy. In addition, while there has been almost no evidence of goods inflation for the past years — the Consumer Price Index has stayed at about 2 percent and now is much less — there has certainly been food and fuel inflation well into 2008. But rising fuel costs aren't the same systemic issues that rising goods costs are, because as fuel goes up, consumption tends to go down and efficiency increases. In essence, fuel costs are both volatile and distinct, as is the price of agricultural commodities. They certainly impact individual balance sheets, often negatively — or during the first few months of the year, when prices were falling, positively. That isn't the same as widespread goods inflation, which is what sets off alarms for economists and policy makers.

Yet, as most investment advisers will tell you, most "average" people tend to believe that inflation has been rampant. That's because wages in the United States have barely budged in years even as desires (not to mention health care costs) have increased. That helped fuel both the mortgage crisis and a widespread feeling that life isn't affordable because inflation is placing too many of life's necessities (desires) out of reach. The fact that everything from cell phones to televisions to cars has become cheaper isn't experienced with the same visceral intensity as the fact that incomes are usually not enough to cover both core needs and natural but not essential desires. Saying that inflation isn't an issue is like a slap in the face, and people tend to reject the proposition angrily.'

Summer Poetry Seminar from the BPU

The Boston Poetry Union invites writers and readers of poetry to reserve a seat at the upcoming Summer Poetry Seminar, convened by poets George Kalogeris and Melissa Green. Students will undertake close reading of works by major poets in English and in English translation. The goal is to help students deepen their sensitivity to and appreciation for the strata of history, allusion, structure, and language that a poem may contain. Time at each session will be set aside for students to discuss their own recent writing. Having sat in on similar seminars with both poets in the past, I can well attest to the value of their wisdom and tutelage.

The seminar will be held over five consecutive Mondays, July 20th — August 17th, from 6-8 PM at Boston University's Mugar Library.

Registration for this seminar is $8 per session ($40 for the whole lot), whether a student registers for one or for all. To sign up, email bostonpoetryunion@gmail.com with your name, contact information, and the dates you plan to attend. Payment may be made at the first seminar with cash, by check to The Boston Poetry Union, or via PayPal to the Union's Gmail account.

About the Instructors

GEORGE KALOGERIS teaches humanities and literature at Boston University and Suffolk University. His book of poems, Camus: Carnets (Pressed Wafer), is based on the notebooks of Albert Camus. His poems and translations have appeared in Agni, Harvard Review, Hawk & Whippoorwill, News from the Republic of Letters, The Warwick Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry.

MELISSA GREEN's first book, The Squanicook Eclogues (Norton), was awarded the Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent volume is Fifty-Two (Arrowsmith Press). Her work has appeared in Yale Review, Agni, Paris Review, and The New York Review of Books. Nora Delaney reviews Green's writing over at Jacket magazine.

Book Review Sunday

Hope everyone is enjoying a fairly lazy Sunday morning. It is July, which is traditionally a dead zone for journalism and the arts — theaters are off season, symphonies are holed up in semi-rustic locals, and the reading crowd all resort to their 'beach reads.' With that in mind, Katherine A. Evans (aka TBG) has reviewed In the Kitchen, the new novel from Monica Ali (of Brick Lane fame) for The Critical Flame :: Issue 2.

* The literary canon: are we all together now? Apparently, we're not. At The Second Pass, the editors choose a sampling of canonized titles they would like to see struck from the (sadly, less and less important) must-read list. I agreed with some deletions (Kerouac's time might be up) and not with others (Marquez; enjoy their racist caricature), but with most I was confused by the book's status as being canonized (Franzen is in the canon? that was clearly a filing mishap; Jacob's Room is hardly Woolf's must-read title; etc.). It seemed a bit unnecessary, considering the titles they chose, but whatever floats their boat.

I had not planned on mentioning it until I saw this rebuttal by Carolyn Kellogg at the LA Times book blog, Jacket Copy. She defends Kerouac's On the Road in a wash of banal truisms, 'the book is a work of literature, one with an intensity of vision and a language of impure steamroller incendiary jazz.' I'd argue that the 'vision' or scope of the book is actually quite diffuse, and that last bit about the language means not a thing, although it sounds nice. Keep in mind that I really loved On the Road when I read it, and still think it is an important milestone in American writing — without his over-the-top American dialect and subversive posture one can hardly imagine later American authors such as Raymond Carver or Denis Johnson being possible.

The danger of the book, as the editors of Second Pass point our (and Kellogg unwittingly illustrates) is that the posture of the novel and its hip, quasi-transgressive content creates a cultish sense of worship. On the Road is a document very much of its time, important for its effect and influence (for better & worse), but perhaps not the great work of literature it is claimed to be.

Falsities & Feminism

Aside from any review at The Critical Flame :: Issue 2, there is an article that I think folks should read at The Chronicle of Higher Education. On the issue of misleading or blatantly false statistics and explanations in feminist scholarship, Christina Hoff Summers writes:

'All books have mistakes, so why pick on the feminists? My complaint with feminist research is not so much that the authors make mistakes; it is that the mistakes are impervious to reasoned criticism. They do not get corrected. The authors are passionately committed to the proposition that American women are oppressed and under siege. The scholars seize and hold on for dear life to any piece of data that appears to corroborate their dire worldview. At the same time, any critic who attempts to correct the false assumptions is dismissed as a backlasher and an anti-feminist crank. Why should it matter if a large number of professors think and say a lot of foolish and intemperate things? Here are three reasons to be concerned:

1) False assertions, hyperbole, and crying wolf undermine the credibility and effectiveness of feminism. The United States, and the world, would greatly benefit from an intellectually responsible, reality-based women's movement.

2) Over the years, the feminist fictions have made their way into public policy. They travel from the women's-studies textbooks to women's advocacy groups and then into news stories. Soon after, they are cited by concerned political leaders. President Obama recently issued an executive order establishing a White House Council on Women and Girls. As he explained, "The purpose of this council is to ensure that American women and girls are treated fairly in all matters of public policy." He and Congress are also poised to use the celebrated Title IX gender-equity law to counter discrimination not only in college athletics but also in college math and science programs, where, it is alleged, women face a "chilly climate." The president and members of Congress can cite decades of women's-studies scholarship that presents women as the have-nots of our society. Never mind that this is largely no longer true. Nearly every fact that could be marshaled to justify the formation of the White House Council on Women and Girls or the new focus of Title IX application was shaped by scholarly merchants of hype like Professors Lemon and Seager.

3) Finally, as a philosophy professor of almost 20 years, and as someone who respects rationality, objective scholarship, and intellectual integrity, I find it altogether unacceptable for distinguished university professors and prestigious publishers to disseminate falsehoods. It is offensive in itself, even without considering the harmful consequences. Obduracy in the face of reasonable criticism may be inevitable in some realms, such as partisan politics, but in academe it is an abuse of the privileges of professorship.'

Thoughts?

The Critical Flame :: Issue 2

The second issue of The Critical Flame: a Journal of Literature & Culture, is now available!

We have gotten plenty of traffic to the first issue but are dying for Letters to the Editor to reprint in the month between issues. Keep it in mind as you read Scott Esposito's review of Desert, by J.M.G. Le Clézio; my review of D.A. Powell's Chronic; TBG's review of In the Kitchen, by Monica Ali; and more! Yes, more! Issue 2 is almost twice the length of the first (at no extra cost to you, I might add).

As further enticement (like you needed it!), here is a selection from this issue's Letter from the Editor: 'As the editor of a book review journal, I consider myself a servant with many masters. Without being servile in the callow sense of the word, I serve those authors whose work is under review; I do my best to serve well the writers who carefully pen our essays; and I serve you readers, trying to produce something of quality and trying to provide a rough guide to the perplexing forest of titles, authors, and publishers. For the most part, each of these responsibilities share fundamental common principles. We would do a disservice to author and reader alike if the strengths and failings of a work were not illustrated in their measure, as much as some authors might prefer basking in praise. It would only harm the reputation of our writers, and disappoint our readers, if I allowed an essay to be published before it was well developed and crafted. And a well-written, thoughtful review of a well-chosen book will, generally speaking, greatly benefit our small, slowly expanding gallery of readers. It seems very simple, doesn’t it?'

Happy Independence Day

With hope that you and yours are well this Fourth of July, and that we continue to right out course in these difficult times, I offer an insightful passage from a most American writer:

'The idea, that the country cannot bear it, is a reproach upon her honour and firmness. She has borne ten times as much. Her fortitude and her principles have been tried in a thousand instances of severer fortune; and it is a paradox not to be explained, and which ought to be exploded, that the people whom no force or misfortune could conquer, no temptation seduce, should, at the summit of success, trepan themselves into destruction by an ignoble and imperious covetousness.'

— from Thomas Paine, "The Necessity of Taxation." April 4, 1782