End the University as We Know It
A friend sent me this interesting article from NYT that discusses the sorry state of the American graduate education that current economic troubles have brought into full fore but which have actually been around for ages. It is an insider’s account to a topic that I recently touched upon myself – an increasing specialisation and the division of knowledge into ever increasing number of subfields that have little contact with each other and even less with the rest of the world. And while I am, at least to a certain extent, symphatetic towards viewing knowledge as transcendent good, the relevance of the knowledge produced by the system of higher education has long been a serious issue – and not only in economic terms.
As the shit has now officially hit the fan also in terms of academic funding, there are cuts and pinches all across the board. Several highly reputed universities are drastically reducing their intake of graduate students this year – at Emory it will be down by 40% in 2009, Columbia is cutting 10% and so on. At the ACLA conference at Harvard, the availability (or rather, the lack thereof) of tenure track jobs was something that was being discussed both formally in panels as well as informally between aspiring PhD students in pubs. What has long been a kind of a game of musical chairs (in terms of there always being less faculty positions available than there are graduate students who hope to eventually get a tenure) has now officially turned into a bloodbath. The evaporation of already slim chances of getting tenured are now combined with the overall drastic worsening of the job market and this is very bad news indeed for young people who have been studying something obscure for last six years while taking student loans in order to pay their undergrad tuitions and living expenses.
Mark Taylor makes some very pertinent suggestions in his article – but if you thought that turning around the US auto industry is difficult then watch this. Although it is evident that the current system is seriously flawed, I am not overly optimistic that plans to do away with the academic disseration or tenure system as we know it; or forcing people from different fields into an applied research would be greeted with much joy and support. For all practical purposes concerning the present academia, this would be a transformation akin to the one that started with nailing of 95 theses to a Wittenberg church door in 1517. Many of the things that Taylor recommends have actually been tried, to varying degrees of success and disaster, in smaller universities, but have so far been mostly even beyond consideration for the most prestigious and well-known istutitions of higher education. Academia has indeed become a kind of a modern clergy and while there has been some heresy at margins, the center has remained true. But it looks as if things might be falling apart now also here.
Fun in the sun
For the last three weeks my daily schedule has been pretty much unchanging – wake up at 10, breakfast at the hotel, checking mails and then on to the library. Every other day I break the reading for an hour and a half in the gym, then back again until it’s time for dinner at around 9-10pm and then the final stretch of library – usually writing until 2am, after which it’s time for bed. That is also the main reason why the posting frequency has dropped somewhat – there simply isn’t much to tell different days apart beside a different pile of books every day.
Not this weekend though. As I got on Saturday morning there was an invitation in my mailbox that was sent to the mailing list of the anthorpology seminar I had attended for three times – to go to Inman Park (some kind of a posh neighbourhood close to Emory) festival. Nobody seemed to have much of an idea what the festival is about, but the weather was fine and I really felt it would be lovely to spend some time outdoors. It turned out being a standard American thing – enormous parade where otherwise respectable-looking people are dressed up as bees or butterflies, old men in straw hats drive tractors with gazillion US flags and a huge boombox fixed to the roof, high-school brass bands marching, and the like. The whole neighbourhood was absolutely packed, so after taking the initial look around we decided to duck out the heat and crowds in a pub with sidewalk seats and engage in quality people-watching for a couple of hours. Once the parade finished and the sun got a little lower we headed back to the park and spent next two hours mostly throwing frisbee – which is something that’s taken a lot more seriously here than in Europe. I learned a few new ways to throw it, although I didn’t manage to achieve anything close to the level of proficiency that one of our local hosts was displaying.
Once the festival thing seemed to wind down we stopped by a mall, stocked up on pizzas, beer and wine and headed back to Jen’s place where rest of the evening was spent eating unhealthy food and abusing alcoholic beverages while playing Trivial Pursuit. And once that exhausted itself some people decided to go on to a recording studio nearby where a spontaneous jam ensued – which went on to early hours of Sunday morning. This unfortunately meant that today was not the most productive day in terms of reading or writing, but who cares. I will have another full week here before flying to Miami where we will meet up with Helelyn on next Monday in order to head on to Guatemala together on Tuesday. And after that it will be on to the West Coast about 9 days later.
Still not dead
On April 12, Marilyn Ann Taylor, 56, passed away in her trailer house in somewhere in North Los Angeles County, California. Her death made some brief headlines in the American press and got a mention in the main TV channels’ news reports. Having been the face girl of 1970s Procter&Gamble’s ad campaign of Ivory Snow laundry soap, famously described by its manufacturer, as “99 and 44/100 percent pure”, and ran twice for the office of Vice President in the US presidential elections (in 2004 she received 946 votes), her actual claim to fame was movies. In 1972 she appeared, under the name of Marilyn Chambers, in a movie called “Behind the Green Door” which was, together with another 1972 release “Deep Throat”, one of the first feature length pornographic movies.
“Deep Throat” and “Behind the Green Door” started a short period of “porno chic” in New York in early 70s and subsequent, almost two decades long Golden Age of Porn that was the subject matter of 1997 movie “Boogie Nights” by Paul Thomas Anderson. Both movies were enormously successful also financially, with “Deep Throat” widely considered being the most profitable movie ever made – costing less than $50,000 to produce it has made well over $100 million even by rather conservative estimates of the FBI, and is still going strong with a screening in Dutch national TV last year that was seen by estimated 907,000 viewers. However, the importance of Marilyn Chambers and Linda Lovelace (who died in 2002) lies somewhere else. “Porn chic” movies such as Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door, Devil in Miss Jones, Boys in the Sand, and Score (which featured Sylvester Stallone in a brief role as telephone repairman Mike) were important not simply because they were first full length forms of adult entertainment that so far had been a genre geared for “horn dick daddies” frequenting the XXX-rated theaters for reasons that didn’t quite require 90 minutes of screen time. With going mainstream, they were influenced by, as well as feeding into, a much broader culture of gender and sexuality – and this is why feminism has had such a torn and difficult relationship with porn ever since. On one hand, the new wave of pornography that saw Marilyn Chambers, Linda Lovelace, Traci Lords, John Leslie, Ginger Lynn, John Holmes, Kay Parker, Harry Reems and many others becoming household names among the American urban high-middle class was seen as leading into a commodification of sex and female body on an industrial scale. On the other hand, however, together with an increased availability of birth control it largely contributed to the slackening of old and not overly liberal attitudes towards female sexuality and gender roles – it was both increasingly possible as well as acceptable for women to be sexually active the same way as men.
In addition to the explicit nature of the sex scenes, Golden Age movies caused a lot of strife for breaking many other taboos and customs that were of a more broadly social nature. For instance, “Behind the Green Door” featured, for the first time, an interracial sex scene between black male and white female, which was a very difficult terrain at the time. Many of the later classic porn movies dealt with similarly controversial themes – “Taboo” series movies in 80s featuring Kay Parker caused a public outrage by depicting incestuous sex. Yet other movies, such as “The Grafenberg Spot” were openly didactic in terms of sexual practices and details that were certainly beyond the prevailing standards of “normal”.
“Deep Throat” and “Behind the Green Door” also broke some new ground in terms of adult movie aesthetics – the most famous point in the case being the 7-minute slow motion money shot at the end of 45-minute sex scene in “Behind the Green Door” – at the end of which Marilyn Chambers was said to have fainted at the set. Although certainly not overly sophisticated, they had soundtracks that featured some distinctive, very catchy and campy funk and jazz that became enormously popular. The original 1972 soundtrack of “Deep Throat” by Trunk Records has became a collector’s item that would set you back by at least $300, should you be lucky enough to find it. There still are several remastered and remixed 70s adult movie soundtrack anthologies (such as, for instance, Inside Deep Note – check out the tune called “Fuzzy Navel” for a good example for the kind of a funk track that I referred to earlier) to be found in amazon.com and iTunes Store.
For a while in early 70s there was a rather widely held belief that, at some point, adult and mainstream movie industries would merge. Although this never happened, there is a certain amount of overlap today. Somewhat explicit content (at least what would certainly have been judged as such before 1972) is now a commonplace in pretty much every Hollywood movie with a romantic theme. And the porn industry has been experimenting with productions that are edging closer to the regular fare of movie theaters. The last example of this is the recent release of Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge, that, with a production budget of $10 million is hands down the most expensive adult movie ever made. It recently caused a controversy in the USA when it was intended to be screened in University of Maryland campus. The irony of the situation is that “Deep Throat” was screened there four years ago without anyone so much as batting an eyelid. So in that sense, “Deep Throat” has managed to acquire enough cultural capital that makes it possible for people to overlook the hard core content and treat it as kind of a period piece – something that is apparently not possible with a mock Pirates of the Carribean style porn movie. And while both Linda Lovelace and Marilyn Chambers are now dead, the legacy of their… shall we say “work”, is still very much alive and debated today.
A whole new genre
This afternoon I went to see a screening of a recent documentary here at Emory, with a full title of I.O.U.S.A. – One Nation. Under Stress. In Debt. It’s a rather small budget simple movie that, much like The Blair Witch Project ten years ago, aims to scare the wits out of its American viewers. Quite like in the BWP where the good people of Burkitsville might or might not have heard stories about the child-stealing ghost of Elly Kedward, there are streetwalk-interviews in IOUSA with your average Americans, who in general are completely clueless and oblivious of what a budget or trade deficit might be and why precisely should it be a problem. There’s similarly shaky camerawork and instead of amateur actors of Blair Witch you’ve got Alan Greenspan, Paul Volcker, Robert Rubin and Warren Buffet telling you the similarly spooky things that are about to happen to USA very soon unless Americans mend their ways. Only that Greenspan and Buffet are no actors and they’re not reading a script. For an added dramatic effect the movie was presented (and followed up by a Q&A) by a former US State Comptroller from 1998 to 2008, David M. Walker, who was present in person.
Apparently the official national debt of the US is currently somewhere around $11 trillion. Again, in order to help lay people visualise what are we talking about – here is a helpful link in that regard. Of course, on its own 11*1018 expressed in dollars might be big amount of money or not so big – depending on what we compare it to. So how about that – according to the CIA Factbook, the US 2008 Gross Domestic Product was $14.33 trillion. Not too bad, the national debt is less than 80% of the annual output of the US economy. Somewhat worse news is that it is growing pretty fast – according to the current estimates, this year’s budget is in the red for another $1.8 trillion or thereabouts, while the GDP ain’t doing that hot either.
However, the scary point of the movie is that this is only part of the story, and a small part at that. In addition to direct public ($6.3tr) and intergovermental ($4.3tr) debt, the US government has apparently a total of about $43 trillion in unfunded liabilities mostly in Social Security and Medicare, on top of a few more trillion here and there. You can get the whole breakdown here. Of course, I’m really not in a position to assess what part of this is going to be unavoidable and what can be simply cut – and something certainly will have to be. And while this doesn’t necessarily have to mean that the USA will be bankrupt in a decade or so (although quite obviously this kind of a thing is no longer a realm of science fiction for an increasing number of people in the US), it does mean that the current levels of spending and saving are not sustainable.
The movie doesn’t even get into the issues of private debt which has, if anything, ballooned even faster. Or discuss the fact that the savings rate that has now steeply rebounded from the negative levels of last few years is a bit of a mixed blessing currently, as every penny saved also means penny not spent – and that will further add into the contraction of the economy.
The movie has apparently caused a bit of a stir, ranking #5 in amazon.com among documentaries. And it seems that there will be a rich field of inspiration to draw upon, as well as a wide market of viewers to cater to, for other similarly minded practicioners of the economic horror documentary genre, both in America as well as in Europe.
Millal maksan…
Kirjutasin just ühe pikema hirmu- ja õudusloo koduse banaani ponzi-vabariigi majanduse teemal Memokraati. Nõrganärvilistele ei soovita.
Useful useless things
By my second week at Emory I have dug myself in pretty well. The library is open 24 hours throughout the week and only closes for the night on Fridays and Saturdays, and what’s best is that I’ve got a private study here – so I can leave all my books open on the table and return to them the next day. I also got a membership to Emory’s olympic-grade sports center, though I am really only using the gym part. The whole campus is very convenient and nice – if a bit heavy on Roman aesthetics and pink marble for my personal tastes. It is also pretty much self-contained, as I found out when an overnight storm cut the power for what was apparently about 250 thousand people in this side of Atlanta for the better part of the whole day – with Emory campus simply powering up the generators in the hospital building and going on about its life as if nothing had happened. I’ve gotten into a good groove with reading and writing and am making a steady progress.
I have also gone to a few seminars and workshops (in anthropology), met up with a few professors to discuss my research – and everyone has been exceptionally friendly and forthcoming. Also, I couldn’t ask for a nicer weather – sunny days around 20C and balmy nights only a few degrees colder. It’s about nice as it gets in Estonia in the middle of the summer.
One interesting observation that I have made so far (and this by no means applies only to Emory) is how specialized people in the US academia – at least in humanities – appear to be. Knowing the strong standing of liberal arts curricula in the United States I somehow expected to find it evident everywhere, but in reality is is very rarely that you meet someone who would feel comfortable having a serious conversation outside of the narrow confines of their own specialization. And this doesn’t only apply to graduate students but also to professors, albeit to a lesser degree. People know their own stuff very well, but seem to lack even a passing familiarity with fundamental defining texts of other fields that are nonetheless related to their own – or indeed with texts that would be considered universally important across the different fields of humanities. Or even basic things such as a very general knowledge of the Greek mythology – and I am not talking about being able to name the muses, recount the genesis of furies, or know the differences between Promethean myth of Hesiod and that of Aeschylus – I am talking about PhD students in literature blatantly not knowing who Prometheus is or that he had something to do with fire and getting chained to the mountain.
But apparently these things do change. In late the antiquity and early middle ages one couldn’t be an intelligent and educated person without knowing the greek language – and nowadays we seem to be doing just fine without it. So maybe we can also afford to lose the knowledge of the Greek mythology from the canon and simply leave it to the specialists. Of course, specialization is good and to a certain extent inevitable – there is simply too much to know in order to be able to know everything. However, each of us going our separate specialized ways will also mean that we will lose the ability to talk and relate to each other, and that applies both within the academia and outside of it. And this may well be the reason why study some things that have no immediate practical and specific use – to study them because others do. So that we would share something beyond drinking the same coffee and wearing the same jeans.
Look before you leap
French thinker Régis Debray has this grand theory in which he divides the cultural history of the Western humanity into three eons: Logosphere, Graphosphere and Videosphere – which could loosely be interpreted as a “time of writing” (which designates period from the invention of writing to Gutenberg), “time of printing” (which is by and large modernity) and “time of showing” (which is, basically, now). What he is claiming, among many other things, is that our main mode of acquiring information, as well as validating it, has shifted from reading to watching, from books to TV and movies. This, quite obviously, doesn’t spell anything good for books and reading. That is, unless they can adapt and somehow fit into the new modality.
While completely morphing into Debray’s “videosphere” would probably mean that books stop being books and simply become movies (which is also happening to a great degree), there are another ways of skirting the audio-visual medium without having to give up the print. You could, for instance, promote your book in a video – and there you go, you’ve got an extremely fast growing crossover genre of book trailers. Virtually unknown before 2006, HarperCollins now estimates that between 25 and 50 percent of their titlesare promoted by trailers.
While the idea certainly sounds enticing, there is a million ways to go wrong with it. The ease of use of both the tools for making videos as well as distributing them means that it was probably indeed only a question of time when will someone come up with something as heinous as the clip below:
The previous attempt exemplifies all the fears that different people have voiced over the last couple of years about internet killing our culture, making us dumb and causing the universe to freeze over in general – but all is not lost. One only has to have some taste and basic dignity to try a bit more, and the result can be pretty darn good. Instead of reading your own book and then stiching the resulting soundtrack and photos together in iMovie, you can actually ask people in the NY subway to read it, and then resist the temptations to get creative with hideous violet-background-fade-in-and-out effect. And the result looks a lot better:
Now, watching someone read a book instead of reading it yourself will probably get old pretty soon. And in many ways, this hardly gives you an idea about the whole book – unless you watch someone reading the whole book, but that’s probably not going to work out too well. So the alternative might be to use the video to try and convey the mood of the book – and if people like it, they will probably want to go and read the book. This is a haunting trailer of “The Kept Man” by Jami Attenberg:
If you happen to have a bigger budget and more of a mainstream book, you may want to go about it in a way that pretty much falls into the Hollywood mold of movie trailers. It is basically still the same approach – reading the beginning of the book – it is simply made to look and sound as if you were not reading a book rather than watching a movie. “The Mystery Guest” by Gregoire Bouillier:
Or, you can disregard the text completely as reading the first few paragraphs with a very dramatic voice might not necessarily be the best way to convey how thrilling or witty the book is. So you may take the same approach what William Bernbach did with TV commercials in 1960s and 70s and instead of talking about the book, talk to the reader. Last two trailers, both by m ss ng p eces are good examples of this kind of a creative approach – “I Was Told There’d Be Cake” by Sloane Crosley and “Blood and Ice” by Robert Masello
Lucky number
Anyone remember when precisely did Beijing Olympics start? The right answer is August 8, 2008 at 8 seconds and 8 minutes past 8pm. The reason being that 8 (pronounced ‘bā’) is a very auspicious number in Chinese tradition as it sounds very close to the word for “prosperity” (发财, pronounced ‘fā’).
Now, the fun thing is that last month Premier Wen Jiabao announced that the Party will set a target for China’s 2009 GDP growth at – you guessed it – 8%. You can read this article for more thorough discussion of China’s long history with 8% GDP growth target, and in the past it has substantially underestimated the actual performance. However, aiming for auspicious 8% this year is nothing short of lunacy (here are some charts to put things in perspective – pay attention to the industrial production one in center). Or it simply goes to illustrate a principle for estimating the economic performance on the grounds of political wishful thinking – an approach that is by no means confined to Chinese politics, although probably honed to perfection there.
GTA goes marxist
There is an interesting review of GTA (that’s Grand Theft Auto for those of you who use computers for working) IV on Open Letters Monthly website. GTA has long been one of the most successful video game franchises and has made headlines with both its innovative way of mixing different game genres as well as its violence and adult themes – which has made it hugely popular among adults as well as adolescents and children. It is probably also as close as you can get to a true crossover phenomenon – in addition to what seems to be pretty solid scripting, GTA features names such as Michael Madsen, Burt Reynolds, Dennis Hopper, Samuel L. Jackson, Chris Penn, Kyle MacLachlan, Ray Liotta and many others in its cast of voice actors.
The article above, however, is first and foremost concerned the social commentary that the fourth installment of the game provides. It seems to play on similar kind of alienation and paranoia that was evident in latest Batman movie or Watchmen and features several interesting choices – such as casting its protagonist as an immigrant and therefore providing an outsider’s view of the game’s playground: USA. And in doing this, it doesn’t offer any easy and clear-cut choices between good and evil.
This all makes me actually want to try it out (I have a very limited experience with GTA from several years ago). The only thing I’m really worried about is that since many characters seem to be of Russian origin this would probably mean having to endure hours and hours of less-than-subtle dialogues in fake russian accents.
Avanti popolo
I think I’m gonna lay low tomorrow, sneak into the library, lock the study door and draw the blinds. In the US, public demonstrations and rallies are nothing out of ordinary. However, this particular one is different – tomorrow, on April 11, there are rallies scheduled to take place all over the United States against… the bankers. That’s right, the bankers. And take a look at the rhetoric: “We must break up the banks and never again let them get so big that they distort our politics and take down the economy.” Or: “Dismantle the power of the financial elite and make policies that keep a new crop from springing up. We want our economy and politics restored for the public.” For someone who grew up in the USSR this thing has déjà vu written all over it.
This used to be the country of Gordon “The Greed is Good” Gekko. This used to be the country that celebrated a person’s right to strike it rich and then enjoy it without having to excuse himself. Of course, America has a long tradition of individual crucifications of former star bankers such as Michael Milken or Nick Leeson, but those were considered simply bad apples in an otherwise good, if not entirely moral, lot. Not this time.
The US has a long history of rallies and popular dissent against racial oppression, but the differences of class (which have always been an important part of public consciousness in Europe, particularly in France) have been viewed as something quite natural and, above all, justified. After all your success is up to you in America and the traditional wisdom has always been that if you ended up on top then you’ve apparently earned it.
It will be interesting to see how many people will actually show up tomorrow. I’m sure that for most of the people who do it will be more of an occasion for venting their anger “against those who got us into this mess yadda-yadda” rather than asking for a genuine change in society – so one shouldn’t really read too much into it. But the mere fact that this thing is taking place is already telling. James Kwak finished his post on baselinescenario.com with a line “And don’t forget your pitchfork. (Just kidding.)”. I wonder how long will it remain just a joke, as many people seem to be kidding along the similar lines recently:
