>From:  Burt Hatlen <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject:      Re: discussions...
>Date:  Tue, 28 Mar 2000 05:44:52 -1000
>
>From: Jake
>>
>>       As a current undergraduate student very interested in Ezra Pound,
>>I joined this list serve with high hopes for mature, academic discussion
>>of Ezra Pound's works, most especially his poetry, as it is a formidable
>>and challenging (but also invigorating, and, at its best, moving and
>>affecting) collection.  At times, I have found this kind of discussion at
>>its best.  But more often, I tend to find meaningless squabbles over the
>>relative merits of completely unrelated books (i.e., the Seamus Heaney
>>discussion) and bitter academic infighting.  If this is the life of
>>academia, perhaps I should reconsider my choice of careers...  Is there
>>any way the list serve could perhaps sped more time on actual, worthwhile
>>discussion and less time on these more trivial matters.
>>               ...
>>--Jake
 
I do think that it's a good idea for you to *reconsider* your choice of
careers.  Not necessarily change it, but try to assess realistically what
it will involve.  It's hard to do this realistically with any sort of
career when you are a student.  One tends to be attracted to a career for
reasons that are very different from the reality of it.  I think that a
career in academia is probably no better nor worse in this respect than
most others.
 
People go to graduate school for all sorts of reasons.  Often, as in my
case, it's because they can't figure out what else to do with their life
at the moment, and going to school is one thing they know they're good
at.  But somewhere in the mix of motives there is probably some love, or
at least strong liking, for one's subject.
 
It often seems that everything about the academic world is designed to
kill this love one has for one's subject.  Certainly this seems to be
true of most graduate programs, which are pressure cookers focussing
students' attention on papers to be written, comprehensive exams, and
the like.
 
Within academia, it is the rare academic whose who manages to do work
which is primarily a manifestation of love for his subject.  These are
the exceptional scholars like Northrop Frye and Hugh Kenner whose books
are intended to enable readers to have a deeper understanding of
literature and a deeper enjoyment of it.
 
For most academics, though, critical work becomes an end in itself,
addressed not to the general audience of readers but almost exclusively
to fellow academics.  Most of the articles you see posted on the list
here are a reflection of this.
 
There was a visiting writer here at the University of Hawaii a few years
ago who said, "A short story should be an urgent message."  Whether this
is true of short stories, or novels, or poems  is something that can be
argued about.  But it is certainly seldom true of academic work, and
this is one of the major differences between EP and the academics.
Alomost everything EP wrote was written as an urgent message to the
world, not something intended primarily to add to his publication list
and boost his reputation.
 
Not everyone contributing to this list is an academic, though.  I
myself am one, at least technically, but not in literature but rather
mathematics.  I do not consider myself an academic any more, though.
Or at least, if I am, I am a totally irresponsible one.  Twenty odd
years ago, I found that I had wound up at a university where good
academic work is not rewarded.  (This is not the fault of the attitude
of the academics here, but rather built into the structure of the
university.)   At first I was very angry about this, because my work
had been rewarded extremely well at the University of Kansas, where I
had been previously, but after a while I realized that it was a
blessing in disguise, because publishing papers in journals and
establishing a reputation in the mathematical world was never something
I really wanted to do, but something I did in order to satisfy the
expectations of others.  Now, if I have something I want to say to the
world (usually not mathematics), I put it on my web site and write it
to satisfy myself, not some editor.  Occasionally someone sends me
email to ask, "How do I cite this article from your web site?" and I
write back, "Beats the hell out of me!  That's your game, not mine."
 
But I got where I am by playing that game.
 
 
I started reading this list because forty years ago I used to be one of
E.P.'s regular visitors at St. Elizabeths, and I finally decided that
I want to see what people now think about the man and about his work.
 
What I've found is that there's now enormously more information
available, but attitudes have changed very little.  The same old
arguments are still going on, and it's still true that most people who
write about him, and most people who have made a profession about being
interested in him, have little conception of who he was (despite the fact
that there are excellent biographies, such as those of Charles Norman and
Humphrey Carpenter, which portray him very vividly) and are committed
to ways of thinking that he condemned, such as concentrating attention on
labels ("traitor," "Fascist," "Imagist") as a substitute for looking at
the reality behind the labels.
 
>I don't agree with you about the discussion of Heaney's Beowulf, which
>has been, I think, a thoughtful exploration of the principles involved
>in the translation of poetry.  But I agree that this list is the scene
>of a excessive amount of egoistic posturing.  Pound himself was prone
>to such behavior.  In his prose especially, he was in the habit of
>announcing his opinions in a strident tone of voice, usually without
>benefit of supporting argument, as if any sensible person should be
>able to SEE the obvious truth of what he was saying.
 
Academic posturing is different in quality from Pound's posturing, which
for many people (myself being one) has a very refreshing quality, even
while one notices that at times it is extremely foolish: the attitude of a
bright young iconoclast (and even in his fifties, EP was still a bright
young man) who is an enthusiast rather than a thinker.
 
Posturing is an almost essential part of the academic world.  Go to some
of your department's colloquia to observe this, Jake.  An academic is
always grading, and always being graded.  The object is always to
impress, because success in the academic world depends on impressing
people.  When a new book in one's field comes out, academics will
always have to *judge* it.  And the judgement is not primarily on the
basis of "Did I enjoy it?" or "Did I learn something from it?"   but
instead on the basis of "How good is it?"  "How does it stack up?"
 
>this mode of discourse was energizing, sweeping away great tracts of
>unexamined assumptions, and thereby opening a space for what has become
>the most exciting poetry of the last half of the 20th century. As
>applied to social and political issues, on the other hand, this habit
>of mind and this mode of discourse issued in appalling results.  But
>for better or for worse, many readers (I include myself here) were
>initally attracted to Pound by the sheer bravura of that VOICE,
>slashing through to what he claimed was the gist of the matter.
>Therefore it isn't surprising that Poundians often try to talk LIKE
>Pound. The problem begins when some of these readers identify with
>"their" poet to the point that they begin to imagine that they ARE
>Pound, and that their own snap judgements are as interesting as his.
 
EP's egotism is of a very different nature than the egotism of academics,
blatant in a way that would be unacceptable within the academic world.
Within the academic world, it would be unacceptable to say, as EP so
often does, "I am the only one smart enough to see these things.  My
judgements are correct without question.  People who disagree with me are
total idiots."  But I find this much less objectionable than the covert
egotism of academics, who are always trying to impress, whether they are
giving a talk on their own ideas in a colloquium or seminar, or fawningly
introducing some distinguished visiting speaker, trying to steal a little
reflected glory from him.  (And the distinguished speaker is, after all,
just an ordinary person who at various moments of his life managed, often
by a process he himself doesn't understand, to do something which people
found remarkable.  The biggest danger for someone who becomes
distinguished is that eventually, as happened with EP, they themselves
start to believe the myth that they are not ordinary.)
 
Having said all this, though, let me add that being an academic is not by
any means incompatible with being a decent human being.  The "official"
persona that an academic manifests when "on duty" should not be mistaken
for the ordinary person who occasionally dons that persona.  I have sat
in on a number of courses here at the University of Hawaii, usually in
the English Department, and almost without exception I have found my
teachers to be worthwhile human beings with a genuine love for their
subject and a genuine desire to teach that love to their students.  (I
can think of only one exception where the person in question seemed to
fit my stereotyped paradigm of the academic, and I wound up not taking
his course.)  It is only a more formal occasions among their own
colleagues (or when presenting their ideas in written form in journals)
that they fall into the more academic competitive posturing paradigm
which is often also manifested on this list.
 
--Lee Lady     Http://www2.Hawaii.Edu/~lady
 
-------
Unlike past American intellectuals, who saw the educated nonacademic
public as their main audience, today's leftist intellectuals feel no
need to write for a larger audience; colleagues, departments, and
conferences have come to constitute their world.  -- Russell Jacoby