Blogging pays off

Below you'll find an exchange between myself and "Mary V" over my latest blog post on the Haiti earthquake, which appeared on Good Letters, the blog of the literary journal IMAGE.

You have to read it from the bottom up, and you should read the blog post first to get the whole context. This really emboldened my faith in blogging and the comment function on blogs. Now, if the conversations could be this productive all the time...

Name: Mary V

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Comment:
Thanks for writing back, Dave. I was hoping you would. And thanks for your insightful post. I forgot to say that in the rush to get my own thoughts down. Some mornings it's hard to eat breakfast after reading the day's grim headlines. But of course, I always do. That's the dilemma. How should we then live?

2010-01-31 11:37 Permalink Reply
Name: Dave

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Comment:
MV,

You're right, of course. Even if you did have French colonial forbearers it wouldn't be your responsibility.

And I'm not advocating for doing nothing. In fact, I don't know that I'm advocating for any plan of action here. This is the mistake that we often make about writers, artists and art in general: that they/it is telling you to live and behave differently. My interest here was to capture the frustration and despair I was feeling--the helpless feeling of knowing that you can't really do anything to turn back the tide of suffering. When I start thinking this way, though, I ultimately start meditating on what it would take for the situation to be different. Here, as with most tragedies, the answer is very, very complicated, and, I think, it involves not just those French colonists you spoke of, or the witch doctors, but a radically different way of living and relating to one another, period. In other words, I start to think about how things might be different if we actually were a thoroughly and authentically Christian nation. What would that mean? What would that look like? I don't know. But I think that's where my grotesque and somewhat apocalyptic imagination comes from. I can't avoid the ironies of 21st century American life. They stare me in the face all day long and I feel compelled to write about them to make sure I'm not going crazy; that this is really happening.

So, yes, we rush to the aid of those in need, guilt and all, but what happens afterwards? Are our lives changed by these encounters? If they have been, then I think we need to tell that story. So, I guess what I'm saying is that maybe art does advocate; it advocates for taking the long view. As Flannery O'Connor said, she was not a realist insofar as everyday families are murdered by escaped serial killers, but a "realist of distances." You strive to see near things as though far, and far things as though near.

2010-01-30 08:16 Permalink Reply
Name: MV

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Comment:
Yes, Haiti has been there all along. And maybe it took an earthquake to wake the rest of us up long enough to remember that. I don't feel responsible for Haiti's misery, however, anymore than I feel responsible for the Holocaust. My forbears were not French colonialists nor Voodoo witch doctors, nor secret police operatives. When someone's house is falling down upon them, you don't stop to discuss who built the house, how long ago, and who was responsible for its collapse. You rush to their aid and help them survive, guilt and all.

2010-01-29 18:16 Permalink Reply

Image ◊ Good Letters: The IMAGE Blog ◊ The Center Did Not Hold

My latest blog post for Image's Good Letters--this one is on Haiti through the lens of WB Yeats, Joan Didion and the Biggest Loser.

Image ◊ Good Letters: The IMAGE Blog ◊ The Center Did Not Hold

The history of memoirs: newyorker.com

Another one of those articles that asks, "What-Does-Our-Love-of-X-Tell-Us-About-Ourselves?" in which X equals something that isn't necessarily good for you, or high art.

This one is about memoir.

The history of memoirs: newyorker.com

Why are Professors So Liberal and Underpaid?

Got your attention? In today's NY Times, Sociologists Neil Gross and Ethan Fosse say their findings show that professors tends to be liberal for the same reasons men tend not to be nurses. Certain occupations are so heavily associated with a particular gender, or, in this case, political ideology, that professors tend to clone themselves--that's my phraseology not theirs.

In their study, Gross and Fosse (any relation to Bob? Now there's a typecast occupation) find that the stereotype that Professors tend to be liberal and secular and earning a salary disproportionate to their level of education was supported by comparing professors' survey responses to "the rest of Americans."

The salary part, of course, caught my eye. Patricia Cohen, the Times' writer, quotes Louis Menand on this question:

The mismatch between schooling and salary complements a theory that the Harvard professor Louis Menand raises in his new book "The Marketplace of Ideas." He argues that the way higher education was structured by progressive reformers in the late 19th century is partly responsible for the political uniformity of today. In the view of the early reformers, the only way to ensure that quality, rather than profit, would be rewarded was to protect the profession from outside competition. The tradeoff for lower salaries was control; professors decide who gets to enter their profession and who doesn't.

I'm going to let this salary issue stew for awhile before I offer comment, but I do want to take issue with one aspect of the article. Patricia Cohen characterizes the professorial stereotype as "tweed jacket, pipe, nerdy, longwinded, secular ? and liberal."

Tweed--check.

Pipe--I have smoked one before and it tastes good. Actually, I have one of my grandfather's old pipes in my office, but he worked for the rail road his whole life (though he did want to be a writer).

Nerdy--my college friends regularly shouted "Nerd" at me for spending many many hours reading on the couch in my dorm room.

Secular--I'm Catholic (Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day are big influences on me).

Liberal--Well, depends on the issue.

My point is that I think that there's a larger variation of thought and belief among professors than can be captured in a survey. I went to a Catholic university that employs a lot of really smart and accomplished scholars and many of them were religious and liberal, so my role models showed me (though didn't often talk about it) that it was possible--and crucial--to hold faith up to reason and vice versa.

Thoughts?

Notes from No Man's Land by Eula Biss

I just finished reading Eula Biss' award-winning book of essays, Notes From No Man's Land: American Essays. The book won Graywolf Press' Nonfiction Prize in 2008, which has previously been bestowed on the work of Ander Monson and Kate Braverman--two of my favorite writers.

I'll write something longer and more considered later, but I want to say right now that it is upsetting and thought-provoking. I think it should be required reading for anyone who believes that we are living in a "post-racial" world. This is not to say that I agree with all of Biss' observations and conclusions and feel that everyone should think about race exactly the way she does, but it IS to say that Biss openly challenges many of the attitudes about race that, I think, Americans are cowed into accepting out of politeness--a desire not to rock the boat.

Good War on Video

Here's the collaboration I blogged about last week (or was it the week before that?--all the days are running together). Photographer Ashley Florence did it all. She found the images, did the cutting and splicing and sound design. All I did was read my essay. We're hoping to do more of this sort of thing soon.

In Memorandum - Ashley Florence and David Griffith from ashley florence on Vimeo.