Woodcuts Between the Wars

Here we are in the brief interregnum between RSA and SAA, so to help while away the days, I thought we might all enjoy BtR's Woodcut Caption Contest #7. Remember, all you Spenserian numerologists, 7 is the number of days in the week, and the seventh day of the week is the Jewish Sabbath, and so this woodcut doubtless has some sabbatarian symbolism hidden in it. Or it will allude to the deadly sins. Or something like that, I don't know; when I was in grad school and the Spenserians started doing numerology, I tended to just nod politely and think about where to have dinner later. Get captioning, people:

RSA: Not all bad.

This will be a brief post, since it's late, I'm tired, and I have a very early flight out of purgatory I mean Miami tomorrow. But I do feel like this must be said in a post: the closing reception for RSA this year featured one of the best buffets I have ever had the pleasure of buffeting. So someone did something very, very right. Ok. That's my positive post. To bed.

Ok, that's it.

I am back from RSA, where I had extremely limited computer access and hence could not do any real-time blogging. But let's just say that Truewit's griping sums up my own reaction to the conference--but with teh funny added in. I think I may have attended my last RSA conference. Since it comes so close to SAA, a much better run conference and one that increasingly includes both drama and nondramatic literature (but without 1000 panels on neo-Platonism in the quattrocento), and since I end up at SAA almost every year, I just can't see going through the stress and hassle of two conferences in a month when one of them is so poorly run and so annoying in so many ways. I did have two seriously delicious meals in Miami, but other than that my time there seemed to involve: endless cab rides that cost $25-30 whether they were 1 mile or 15 miles; a glorious view of the Miami skyline from whichever of the 100 highways cutting through town I happened to be on, a skyline that resembles a post-apocalyptic 1970s movie like Omega Man, with lifeless cranes dotting the landscape of half-built, de-skinned skyscrapers that are doomed never to be completed; not going to conference sessions because I was so infuriated by everything involved in trying to get to one (see Truewit's posts), and because I found myself needing a drink constantly, to lower my blood pressure; going to South Beach and feeling incredibly old, exhausted, scrawny, and with way too high a percentage of my nipples remaining unexposed; drinking in the Radisson bar, where there was about one bartender for every 500 conference-goers; this--combined with the ridiculously small room block, the distance to the overflow hotel, the bad food in the hotel, the absurdly slow room service, the remarkably consistent ineffectiveness of my "Privacy, please" doorknob sign, and the many old people that I felt like I sort of recognized but didn't really know--gave me the feeling that I was attending the worst wedding ever. Suffice to say that high on my list of things to look forward to for the weekend was flying home, and yet Miami managed to ruin even that delight with massive lines and cancellations at MIA. Remind me why all the basketball players want to be traded to the Heat? Oh yeah, no income tax. And if you are a billionaire, you can have an incredible mansion on one of those islands that seem to have no roads other than the one that leads straight from the "on"-bridge to the "off"-bridge. Visitors are definitely not welcome, and residents seem to travel mainly by speedboat to their private docks. RSA would have been much more enjoyable if we could have booked rooms at Shaq's house. Grrr. And I don't mean Andrew.

The RSA Blues

This RSA conference may go down in history (history, I tell you!) as the one that makes the members of RSA refuse to pay dues next year. I do not understand what they're spending all that money on. Conference programs? Misprinted -- the times along the margins of the pages don't always match the actual times of the panels on those pages (this is particularly disastrous for a conference that features 12 sessions of 40,000 panels each). Name tags? They don't even say 'RSA' on them. Just your name, your affiliation, and "Annual Meeting" all printed in black ink on white cardstock in what looks to be 14pt. Times New Roman. I could be anywhere! Which brings us to the next thing they're clearly not spending money on. The hotel. We're trapped in some strange section of town between the bay and the interstate which passes for a cultural district in Miami. From GEMCS I expect this kind of thing. I like it, even, in that context. GEMCS is the scrappy little conference that could. The adventure of walking through rubble to find a good bar in Tampa? That was fun. But couldn't an organization with what I'd guess is over 1,000 dues-paying members find a place that didn't have stains on all the carpets of its rooms? Or how about one that can actually house all the conference attendees? Half the people here are staying at some "spill-over" hotel by the airport, paying 25 bucks one way to get to where the 'action' is. And don't get me started on the book exhibit. I know RSA itself doesn't pay to get publishers in here, but there are like four presses with tables here, and they all specialize in facsimile editions of Italian grammars! Argh! If I sound a little gripey, it's because of the sheer expense of this conference. Not everyone works at Huge Pile of Money U, and there are only so many of things my department will spring for. I'm seriously considering crossing this one off the list. What do I really get out of RSA? A chance to see my non-dramatic peeps in action. That's good. A sense of connection with historians, art historians, and scholars working on continental renaissances. That's also good -- and possibly even intellectually important. But I also get completely overwhelmed by the panel options (there are approximately 324 this year), and I have very little faith in the program-selection committee. No real fault of their own: it's just impossible to choose 972 good paper proposals. I end up going to see the same people speak year after year, simply because I know their written work is good. I suppose this is true at most conferences, but still. There's something about the size of this one that actually squelches my desire to be adventurous. If RSA is going to continue to be a monstrous, and therefore presumably profitable conference, it should be organized with style and purpose. There's a fantastic amount of raw material here, and there has to be some way to bring scholars with interrelated interests into conversation with one another, rather than atomizing them into a million tiny panels. Perhaps broad aesthetic or historical categories could serve as organizing rubrics for seminar-style sessions a la SAA? I could imagine historians, art historians, and literary scholars working together on Empire or Labor or Patronage or even something as broad as Style. Maybe there should be a greater number of large, purposefully cross-discipline paper sessions bringing together reputable scholars from different fields under a broader heading? Just a bit more guidance from an organizational center would, I think, make this a great conference. But as it stands right now, it feels a bit like torture, plus seeing some friends. And I think nearly everyone in Miami this year would agree with that.

South Beach: Not Very Early Modern

South Beach, Miami is the least early modern place in the United States. Having never been here before, the missus (who for some strange reason does not want to be referred to as 'Lady Truewit' anymore) and I decided to book a room for a few nights in the middle of it all before heading over to the Radisson for three glorious days of Renaissance Society of America-ing. This decision will go down in Truewit vacation history as "a big mistake." First off: when the internet review tells you that the hotel you're randomly choosing in South Beach is "in the center of the action on Ocean Drive" you should keep in mind that "the action" is composed entirely of hordes of skimpily clad men and women climbing in and out of Hummers in order to pay 30 dollars a plate for bad pasta served in outdoor restaurants blasting deep house music 24 hours a day. This would be fun to watch for about 2 hours and maybe more, depending on whether or not you want to keep drinking 12 dollar mojitos. Indeed, when you first get there, it's even deeply gratifying, in the way that the world it is when it completely conforms to your expectations: But of course, young man, you are wearing nothing but artificially inflated muscles, sunglasses, and shorts while you eat your bad pasta. And of course, young lady, you have decided to go to the supermarket wearing a bikini, high heels, and giant golden earrings. Why wouldn't you? It's South Beach! Keep up the good work! But then, when the buzz from the mojitos wears off, and you think you might like to take a nap, and you head back to your room to discover a dance party happening on a roof thirty feet away from your window, and the lady at the front desk shrugs and says, "It's South Beach," well, then you begin to realize that the world conforming to your expectations with complete unthinking consistency is not always gratifying. In fact, it actually becomes horrifying. Waking up in the morning to discover the places that served bad pasta whilst blasting deep house are now serving bacon and eggs whilst blasting deep house -- this is one of those unwelcome moments, perhaps associated with aging, when you realize the world has more staying power than you do. At 10AM, I cannot pump up the jams, no matter how many times I am exhorted to do so. Unless said jams are things like marmalade, and I am being asked to pump them up on toast, in which case, we can talk. Making matters even stranger, the fates have conspired to bring RSA to Miami on the same weekend as the Winter Music Conference, an event I'd never heard of before, but one that immediately marks itself out as cooler than RSA by leaving the word "Renaissance" out of its name. As I discovered when I tried at the last minute to book a room in a nearly sold-out South Beach, the WMC is a yearly party/schmooze-fest for DJs and dance music aficionados that attracts thousands of groove-obsessed club kids to Miami every year. I like dancing, a lot, but I am not entirely sure that I would shell out $435 to get passes to a bunch of dance parties over a 4 day period. Of course, I shelled out $175 to get passes to a bunch of panels on Erasmus and masculinity in Dutch landscape painting over a 3 day period, so who am I to talk. The point is, why do the fates have to torture me with this particular alignment of conferences? Couldn't it have been RSA versus the Necrotic Flesh Removal Society of America? Or the Kidney Bean Association of America's Biennial Legumapalooza? Or anything? Those club kids look like they're having FUN. Plus you know they've got better drugs than us. Damn. Anyway, it's not entirely a disaster here. It is fun to sit and drink and watch people go by. The weather is really pleasant, if you go in for that kind of thing. I've also had two celebrity sightings: while eating my first 18 dollar hamburger, I saw Bernard Kerik, the man who will single-handedly keep Rudy Guiliani from winning the Republican nomination, at the table next to me. He was talking with his co-lunchers about a book by 'Jay' that he really liked... I'm going to go ahead and assume that he was using his pet name for Ben 'Jay' Jonson. Celebrity sighting number two: the New York football Giants' tight end Jeremy Shockey, riding in a gargantuan black Hummer down Ocean Drive, shouting at the top of his lungs and giving some dude on the sidewalk a big 'hang loose' sign. When Jeremy Shockey tells you to hang loose, I suggest you immediately begin to do so, because that guy is big. So I guess there are some things I like about South Beach. But if you take away the celebrities and the dancing and the sunshine and the sexy people and the delicious mojitos and the music and the beach and the cool parakeets flying around everywhere and the novelty thongs and the cosmopolitan party scene, you really aren't left with much. Just RSA. Sigh.

I can't stand the title of that last post.

I have nothing -- truly nothing -- of substance to post here, but I can't stand to see that profane headline on the top of our classy blog any longer. So I am using my powers as co-blogger to bump it with a link to this amusing piece that one blog got from another blog who in turn got it from The Simpsons. The comments section reveals that we are not the only ones who sit around rewriting iambic pentameter for fun. Not of an age, but for all time, as long as he gets enough brains to eat. Zombie Shakespeare is making me think of something. Rotting corpses climbing out of mouldy sarcophagi; huge crowds of shuffling monsters yowling with mindless anger; fresh-faced men and women torn limb-from-limb by the forces of the night... hey! Isn't RSA coming up? We'll be there, and we'll blog as long as we can before this strange festering wound on our arm turns us into the very thing that we abjure.

Shit-Ass Film Classes; or, Why to Study Shakespeare

Overheard yesterday on campus at State University: "Yeah, I dropped that class. I'm going to take some shit-ass class this summer where you just sit around and analyze movies." Nice. I especially enjoy how the idea that one would be sitting around analyzing movies literalizes the implied posture of moral and intellectual lassitude apparently inherently implied by the whole practice of analyzing movies. I have to admit that I was sort of relieved to hear that final word "movies"; for the seemingly endless, terrible moment between "analyze" and "movies," I found my mind racing through other possible endings: "plays"? "books"? "poems"? "Shakespeare"? It was like Stanley Fish's reading of Milton come to life, and I was stuck in the enjambment. Maybe this is just a moment of cynicism, but this comment did underline for me what I think is one of the biggest criteria of intellectual or academic legimacy of the introductory Shakespeare course I teach pretty regularly, at least for some of the students who take it: the fact that the language is hard. It's Old English, as they like to tell me. You have to Look Up Words. But that, apparently, is less an objection to the class than the actual basis of its "Real-ness": it's exactly what makes my class a little more like, say, Organic Chemistry, and a little less like some shit-ass film class. I don't think this group of students sees much inherent value in "learning Shakespeare," in and of itself, and certainly still less in reading literature more generally; as for the idea of "analyzing cultural texts," I don't think that has registered at all. Again, I'm just talking about a certain group of our students -- leaving aside English majors, budding intellectuals, and other aberrations of nature; the course I'm talking about draws heavily on non-majors, and at State U, that tends to mean science majors. For the person I overheard, certainly, it's clear that the only thing that might make my class more "real" than a film class is that you have to use a dictionary. Even a historical dictionary.

Why I'm Skeptical of Claims about Grade Inflation

This started out as a comment on my previous post, but I reckon I might as well bump it up to the big show. I'm generally skeptical about claims of grade inflation for two reasons: 1) lack of data, and 2) misty-eyed sentimentality about how much harder things were when Person X was in college (or grad school, or just started teaching, etc.) The best analysis I've read on the empirical evidence for grade inflation is this article by Alfie Kohn. Kohn's take-away point: "No one has ever demonstrated that students today get A's for the same work that used to receive B's or C's. We simply do not have the data to support such a claim." And it's not that people haven't been looking: it's just not there. As Kohn notes, Clifford Adelman, a senior research analyst with the U.S. Department of Education, reviewed "transcripts from more than 3,000 institutions." When he reported his results in 1995, he found that "Contrary to the widespread lamentations, grades actually declined slightly in the last two decades." Kohn's website also includes this 2004 Addendum to his original article: "A subsequent analysis by Adelman, which reviewed college transcripts from students who were graduated from high school in 1972, 1982, and 1992, confirmed that there was no significant or linear increase in average grades over that period. The average GPA for those three cohorts was 2.70, 2.66, and 2.74, respectively. The proportion of A's and B's received by students: 58.5 percent in the '70s, 58.9 percent in the '80s, and 58.0 percent in the '90s. Even when Adelman looked at "highly selective" institutions, he again found very little change in average GPA over the decades." For the sake of contrast, here's how the argument stressing the existence of grade inflation is usually made, in this case by that bastion of enlightenment, Harvey Mansfield. Both Kohn's and Mansfield's articles were originally published in the Chronicle. I take it that the word "facts" in the title of Mansfield's article is meant to be taken ironically, for most of his "facts" come in the form of statements like these: "I have seen..."; "everyone knows that C is an average grade"; "exact figures on grades are difficult to come by"; "I said that when grade inflation got started, in the late 60's and early 70's, white professors, imbibing the spirit of affirmative action, stopped giving low or average grades to black students and, to justify or conceal it, stopped giving those grades to white students as well"; "Because I have no access to the figures, I have to rely on what I saw and heard at the time"; "Of course, it is better to have facts and figures when one speaks, but I am not going to be silenced by people who have them but refuse to make them available." Gotta love that an article titled, "Grade Inflation: It's Time to Face the Facts," ends with an admission that, well, the author has no facts because they're being horded by the factinistas at Harvard University. [As a side note, I'd recommend people always remember the distinction between Harvey C. Mansfield, Professor Government at Harvard University, and Edwin Mansfield, deceased Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. Harvey recently wrote a book called Manliness; Edwin wrote a great series of economics textbooks (they've both written many other books, too). I recently confused them in a conversation with a colleague, which I realized only later; that person now clearly thinks I'm a raging conservative. I guess it's good to keep them guessing.]

Living Measure for Measure

I have a student in my class this term who is a non-native speaker of English. English might in fact be his fourth language. He's a reasonably bright guy, a very nice person, but he can't write a lick. No, really. Most of his sentences are grammatically and syntactically incorrect. No, that's an understatement: Most of his sentences, paragraphs, and essays are almost impossible to understand. So he should clearly earn an "F" on his essays and therefore an "F" for the course, right? Maybe, but... He's a senior. A senior English major, at that. Clearly others have been giving him (barely) passing grades. He also has six children and a wife living in a refugee camp (or two) on the other side of the world. He says he needs to graduate so that he can earn enough money to bring them over to the U.S. (assuming he can successfully navigate all the bureaucratic obstacles, which is no sure thing). I tend to believe these claims. Justice or mercy, mercy or justice? Measure for measure, or measure for measure? Do I give him what he "deserves" or do I make his life easier and give him the barely passing grade he does not deserve? Do I give him justice or show him mercy? What say you all?

Rosenbaum's The Shakespeare Wars (still unread)

We've talked a bit in the past about Ron Rosenbaum's book The Shakespeare Wars, which I haven't read. But I have just been reading Anne Barton's review of it in the New York Review of Books ('Words, Words, Words,' 29 March 2007). Barton has some rather remarkable things to say about the book. For instance, she begins her final paragraph with a sentence that I imagine many of us have often wanted to write: It has not been a pleasure to write this review. ... adding: "The Shakespeare Wars, however, has already been much praised, and is being widely read. It seems more than time that someone pointed out that it is, in many respects, inaccurate and seriously misleading." Rough. And yet, it seems, entirely deserved. Unless Barton has had a brain-freeze, Rosenbaum commits some really egregious errors. He refers to Othello's dying boast that "in Aleppo once I smote a turban'd Turk" a misquotation that really ruins Othello's incredible dying speech, poetically of course, but also in destroying the irony and ambiguity of Othello's "I took by th' throat the circumcised dog, / And smote him, thus." And apparently Rosenbaum believes that, in act four of Lear, Gloucester laments: We are to the gods as flies to wanton boys They kill us for their sport. Perhaps the greatest scholarly import of Rosenbaum's book will be that it provides a good empirical example of the sorts of textual derangement that occur during the process of memorial reconstruction. Maybe Laurie Maguire can run her analysis on this book, which seems to be a Shakespearean suspect text.

The History of George the Second, continued

A while back I posted the opening of a Shakespearean history cycle about the Bushes. Today the heav'nly muse, that on the secret top of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire that shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed, in the beginning how the heav'ns and earth rose out of chaos, inspired me to continue my efforts. Or maybe it was just the news about Scooter Libby's guilty verdicts that inspired me, I'm not sure. This is from 2 George II, Act 3, scene 2: Sound a parley. POTUS discovered in the Oval Office. To him, in haste, VPOTUS and ROVE. VPOTUS The time is now, my lord; 'tis you must act Or else we lose Sir Scooter to the foe-- Hateful and deluded in their souls, With Bush Derangement Syndrome in their hearts. You must have mercy on my faithful page. ROVE Must! You dare to give our sov'reign king the must! Know, Dick, that 'vice' in your addition Enforces you submit unto your better, You ought to sue with pliant knee, with voice As reedy as the hymning puritan. (To POTUS) My lord, The enemy redoubles his assault, In Congress where they woo the people's voice And seek to make your courtiers stoop to them, The falconer fly aloft at falcon's call, The horse to ride the horseman, and his fox To hunt his hounds throughout his home and hearth. To pardon now were mercy, beyond measure, Yet kings must kings above all others treasure. Let Scooter to the hungry crowd be given, For fear your state and power be further riven. POTUS Leave me. Exeunt VPOTUS and ROVE Never 'til now have Dick and Karl been so discordant. What shall I do? I fear to insult the one, and I fear more to disregard t'other. To sacrifice Sir Scooter? To yield to my enemy's angry talons one of my choicest lieutenants? And so to look weak before my subjects? 'Tis just that weakness I have always sought t'avoid; that weakness did my father undermine. And yet, were I to pardon, do I not remove him from the lion's jaws by placing my own head there in his stead? What would Our Lord and Savior do? Though Judas him betrayed, he pardoned all. And shall I not pardon one who has refused to betray us, and in that refusal fallen? (He picks up a book and reads) This book has never failed to provide sound advice: A friend in need is a friend indeed. So, trusty Bartlett, you have again proved my wisest and most privy councilor. I am resolved. Exit.