James E Hartley

Hemingway’s Blog

I finished reading Ernest Hemingway’s blog.

Now that I think about it, that is an odd sentence. How do you finish reading a blog?

The very idea implies that there will be no more entries. But how can one be sure?

I finished reading Ernest Hemingway’s blog. Now that I think about it, that is an odd sentence. How do you finish reading a blog? The very idea implies that there will be no more entries. But how can one be sure?

In Hemingway’s case, it is obvious. He is dead and to the best of my knowledge, despite the fabulous technological innovations in human history, nobody has yet invented the ability to do posthumous blogging.

Then again, what if someone took up the Mantle of the Dead Person and continued the blog? Is it then the same blog or a different blog? Curious. Maybe blogs can’t really end.

Nevertheless, I did finish reading Hemingway’s blog, which I can say, despite the philosophical quandary above, because in the present case the blog in question is really just a blog in substance, not form.

A Moveable Feast is actually a book (note the clever plot twist in this here blog post!) in which Hemingway, in a series of short anecdotes, relates his life (or more properly, what he is pretending to be his life (more about that anon)), in Paris in the early 20^th century.

Having read this book, I am perfectly confident in saying that if blogs had existed in the 1920s, Hemingway would have been a blogger.

This book has the same formula as a decent blog: one part tedium, one part narcissistic self-promotion, one part interesting aside. (Yes, Dear Reader, I hear your complaint that the present blog has only the first two components).

The tedium of Hemingway’s book arises from the fact that most of the 20 entries in this book are dull. Hemingway was poor and hobnobbed with lots of famous people and had mindless conversations with said famous people. Yawn.

The narcissistic self-promotion comes from the fact that it is hard to believe this is even remotely an accurate portrayal of either Hemingway’s life at the time or the assorted conversations; it’s all too cute to be real.

As for the interesting asides? Hmmm. Maybe I was being generous. I can’t remember any right now. Which makes me wonder—perhaps the interesting asides aren’t really there at all.

Hemingway writes well. (Understatement Award.) I enjoy reading Hemingway, and so I enjoyed reading his prose in this book.

But, if I think back over all the Hemingway books and stories I have read, this is easily the worst.

Now that is saying quite a lot, actually. If something akin to A Moveable Feast was the worst thing ever published under your name, you would be doing very well indeed.

If this is right, then the sole virtue of this book, and the reason you might want to read it someday, is the joy in rolling along with Hemingway in a book akin to hearing someone telling tall tales round a campfire.

I suppose there is another reason people read this book—fascination with celebrity.

The whole conceit of the book is that Hemingway is repeatedly saying (in effect): “Hey look! I am having a perfectly meaningless conversation with another really famous person. Don’t you wish you were me sitting around talking with famous people? Don’t you wish that the famous people would invite you into their homes for a conversation? Don’t you wish you were me?”

Alas, I have never been enamored with celebrity. When asked that parlor game question, “With which celebrity would you most want to have lunch?” I always draw a blank. I have no idea. I can’t think of any famous person with whom I would be excited to dine simply for the sake of saying I was able to dine with them. (Is that odd? I really don’t know.)

There was one part of the book which did leave me wondering. Hemingway writes:

It was a very simple story called “Out of Season” and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.

A curious theory. Does it apply to blog posts too?

Leadership in The Republic

As a manual on leadership, Plato’s The Republic is a very useful thought experiment.

But, it is a useful guide to leadership?

First off, The Republic a mammothly sprawling book. It is a conversation which wanders all over the place, constantly circling back to the general theme.

But even there, it isn’t entirely clear what the general theme actually is. Justice? Good Government? Education? Moral Character?

In previous readings, I had read the book as an argument about a Good Society. This would put the book in the same category as Locke’s Second Treatise or Hobbes Leviathan or Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty.

So, it was rather interesting to read it this time, thinking about it as a manual on leadership. (This was one of the texts in my course “Leadership and the Liberal Arts.”)

Part of the definition of a Great Book is that you can reread it and learn something new every time. With Plato’s Republic, such a thing is easy. Just pick a new central organizing principle and embark on a journey.

It is a fun book. This is truly one of those books where you just go along for the ride and see where you end up.

About halfway though I started wondering how well the whole thing would work as a stage play. A curious production, but I suspect, if acted well (which would not be easy), it could be great. The acting would be a problem though. It wouldn’t be easy to convey the sense that this is just a rambling conversation. The temptation to make it more directed or philosophical-seeming would be quite large.

What do we learn about leadership in The Republic?

Well, first, Socrates is, as always, in pursuit of Leadership, with a capital L. He wants to discover the Truth (capital T) about Leadership, the Form of Leadership of which all earthly examples are merely pale reflections.

This is, after all, where Plato’s Cave originates. You are all in a cave staring at shadows, and I have gone forth into the light and have come back to tell you all (I shall tell you all) about Leadership, the real thing, not the shadow of the real thing.

You want to know the Truth? To be a Leader, you obviously must be a philosopher, a true lover of wisdom, someone who pursues knowledge and wisdom to the exclusion of all else. The Leader is the one who understands the Truth.

You want Justice? You need a leader who understands Justice, True Justice, not the pale imitation which normal people call justice, but the Form of Justice.

You want, whether you know it or not, The Philosopher King.

There are two immediate implications of Plato’s argument (or should that be Socrates’ argument?—it is never easy to tell) which are rather interesting:

1. There are not different types of leadership. There is only good leadership and bad leadership; good leadership is that which comes closest to the Platonic Ideal of Leadership.

2. True Leaders will undoubtedly fail in a real society because it would take a True Leader to recognize the importance of True Leadership. The masses—all the farmers and soldiers, the people obsessed with honor and material gain—will have no ability to appreciate or even understand the best leaders. All those masses are still stuck in their caves, and they cannot comprehend the Beauty and Perfection of Leadership as it truly is.

Those two points are related. We think there are different types of leaders because we cannot recognize True Leaders.

And so, the best Leaders, those who would be closest to the Platonic Ideal, end up not being Leaders in the world in which we live.

Imagine the Platonic Ideal Leader coming to earth and walking among us. That Leader does not lead because nobody follows. So, is the perfect Leader still a leader if nobody follows?

Is the ability to attract followers a part of the Platonic Ideal of Leadership? Why not?

In some ways it is hard to take the idea of the Philosopher King seriously because, quite frankly, people with a Doctorate in Philosophy are not great material for leadership. (Recall William F Buckley’s quip that he would rather be ruled by the first 200 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard.)

But, Socrates would have an easy time noting that our contemporaries with Ph.D.s (doctorates in philosophy) are not generally lovers of wisdom. They are the sham philosophers, the charlatans, who masquerade as knowledgeable so that they can get paid to do very little in a tenured sinecure.

So, set aside the charlatans. Imagine the true philosopher, the person truly committed to gaining wisdom and knowledge. Would you want that person as the leader of your society or organization?

The short answer is “No.”

But why not? I suspect it is because when we think about leadership, we mean more than simply knowing where all the parts should go. We also imagine a mechanical or practical skill—the ability to get things done—and it is not at all obvious that knowing what would be best thing to do is the same thing as accomplishing the best things.

In Plato’s Republic, a society which could never actually arise on Earth, it makes sense to have the Philosophers as Kings.

But, here on Planet Earth? It’s not enough to have seen the light. You also need to have the ability to inspire the rest of us to want to leave the cave and the ability to lead the expedition.

The Problem of Not Being Dickens

Tom Jones is a novel.

Of that there is no doubt.

Depending on how you define “novel,” it may be the first “novel.”

Probably not, though. For no particular reason, I define “novel” more broadly, so Robinson Crusoe get the honor.

The novel (Tom Jones, not Robinson Crusoe) is divided into 18 books, and the first chapter in each book is an address from the Author to the Reader in which all sorts of asides and digressions and commentary are supplied.

So, in discussing Tom Jones, it is perfectly appropriate to begin with a digression having nothing to do with the actual substance of the story at hand.

Sadly, in order to truly be true to the spirit of Tom Jones, the digression at the outset must be both a) amusing and b) followed by an interesting tale. The sadness arises from the fact that the digression here fulfills neither of those two characteristics. But, I digress.

What would happen if you crossed David Copperfield with Tristram Shandy? You would get Tom Jones, well except that Tom Jones predates both of those other two books so you would have to add in some sort of time travel to make this all work out.

I enjoyed reading Tom Jones. I can certainly see why professors specializing in 18^th century novels are quite fond of it—compared to the other novels from that time period, this one is easily among the best.

But, the 18^th century was not a good time period for novels.

How does to compare to Dickens? Honestly, it isn’t that close. Tom Jones has the scope of a Dickens novel. It has all the characters and odd coincidences of a Dickens novel. But, it does not have quite the charm of Dickens.

Don’t get me wrong; there is charm here. But, the difference is easily seen when thinking about the characters. Dickens is littered with memorable charters.

Tom Jones? Well, there is the perfect heroine Sophia; but she is only memorable from the worship bestowed upon her by the author (not by Tom, though he worships her too—she is memorable because the author keeps telling us how amazing the author thinks she is—she isn’t even memorable in and of herself—it is really the heroine worship which is memorable.)

Mr. Western, Sophia’s father, is amusing. But nobody else in the novel really rises to something interesting. The story is good, the characters are nice, it is surely a Good Novel, and probably a Great Book. But, it is no Dickens.

Which leads to an interesting problem.

Is it a fault to not be Dickens?

Surely not. And surely, we would never say that only Dickens should be read. There are lots of great novels written by people who were not named Charles.

But, in this case, the connection is just too strong. Everything Fielding has done, Dickens has done better. That doesn’t make Tom Jones a bad novel at all. I would even recommend it if I wasn’t immediately afflicted with the thought that really, instead of Tom Jones, you will probably enjoy one of Dickens’ novels more.

How to get More People to Read Your Blog

If someone you knew was reading a copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie, would you commend them or get worried?

Even more troubling: if a college professor assigned the book to a class of undergraduates and they take took the book to heart, would said professor have been doing a noble or vile act?

When I was putting together my course “Leadership and the Liberal Arts,” I Googled things along the lines of “Great Books on Leadership” and browsed through the many book lists which appeared. This book showed up repeatedly.

I’d never read Carnegie’s book before. I always mentally tossed it in the category of “Tedious self-help books.” This is a category which I loathe. The thought of reading endless insipid rambling pep talks causes me to shudder.

I was a bit hesitant to even assign such a book in a college class. After all, I am aiming for Great Books here, not Pathetic Books which lots of people have read.

But, then I convinced myself that having a book in this category might provide some frission to the class and then I figured “Why Not? Maybe it will be entertaining.”

And after all, these people who talk about leadership all the time sure talk about this book a lot. And, Warren Buffet did praise Dale Carnegie and Warren Buffet is really rich and so at least one really rich guy liked this book and that would be enough to recommend it to some people and so why should I have a higher standard for book selection that that?

I also figured that having a book like this on the syllabus would be a nod to the way this class used to be before I took it over and put a bunch of Great Books on the reading list.

It was the first book on the syllabus. The conclusion: it is nowhere near as bad and painful as I thought it would be—which is not praise at all. But, I didn’t mind reading it—which is surprising, and thus can be considered to be praise. And, mirabile dictu, I didn’t even mind rereading it the next time I taught the course.

Dale Carnegie is the quintessential enthusiastic, peppy, can-do type of guy and the book is an endless stream of anecdotes illustrating 30 different Principles which if followed will allow you to win friends (section 2), convince them to think the way you think (section 3), and then become a leader (section 4). To his credit, Carnegie knows how to keep a story quick and to the point, and so the book is a fast read.

The conclusion: if Carnegie is right, then Leadership is Technique. Follow these simple steps and you too will be a leader in no time. Smile. Start with the positive. Think about what the other person wants. Get other people to talk about themselves. Let others save face. Avoid direct confrontation. And so on.

One of my students said the whole book was really just kindergarten advice, which was a perceptive remark.

That comment also immediately started a debate about whether anyone really learns this in kindergarten (obviously not), but nonetheless the student was fundamentally right—even though we don’t actually teach 5 year olds to “Call attention to other people’s mistakes indirectly,” the general impulse of this book is akin to the “Be nice. Play fair.’ advice which we do give to 5 year olds. Sadly, many people forget all about that advice as they get older. So, one way to read this book is as a corrective to the failings of adults.

Read that way the book has good advice, but it is shallow. Very shallow. Carnegie insists in a “stomp your foot when you say it” way that it is not sufficient to feign interest in others, you actually have to be interested in others.

But, the book is also premised on the fact that everyone is selfish, so if you want to win friends and influence people then you need to learn to manipulate that selfishness inherent in others. But, do that in a genuine way. And then report back on how you got what you wanted by manipulating others using this list of 30 tricks of the trade. Then Carnegie can use your anecdotes about manipulating others to show everyone how his principles are really useful and then everyone will want to use them too.

Oh, and by the way, be genuine about all this caring about others. Really, be genuine. But, be sure to smile and tell someone all about what a nice head of hair he has (an actual anecdote in the book), because if you do that, then the person with a nice head of hair will be really happy and after all, you want to make people happy, right?, and then you can insist that you only wanted to make people happy because you are altruistic despite the fact that a few chapters earlier you discovered that nobody else is altruistic and they only do nice things because they get that warm fuzzy feeling from doing seemingly nice things. Except of course if you are Dale Carnegie, in which case you only write books and give seminars for the good you can do for humanity and not for the large royalty checks.

Truth be told, that last paragraph wasn’t really fair to Dale Carnegie and this book. This is not a book which is meant to be taken all that seriously.

It is a book meant to be read in a rather uncritical way and then (hopefully) you will go out and be a little bit nicer and find that being nicer makes other people nicer too.

Honestly, I should just take the book for what it is—a quick read with some kindergarten advice, that, all in all, isn’t a bad reminder that I really ought to smile the next time I get irritated with a sales associate in a store.

Or, I could think of a title for this blog post and use this review as a way of drawing attention to my website and thereby win friends and influence people. Is that noble of me?

Time to Abolish Tenure?

If you are looking for a book which describes the modern college, Naomi Schaefer Riley’s The Faculty Lounge is a good choice.

The subtitle tells all: The Faculty Lounges: and Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid For.

There are two problems with that title:
1) It ends in a preposition—a grammatical failing which always causes me pain, and
2) it is terribly misleading.

The Book should really be called: The Faculty Lounge: Why Tenure Should Be Abolished. That title is honest, but wouldn’t sell as many books as the title the book actually has. Such is capitalism.

This book, predictably enough, is not well liked by academics. I decided to read it because I kept hearing people castigate it. I don’t think the people castigating it have read it.

On the whole, there isn’t really all that much shocking in it; it’s not a terribly polemical book at all.

It takes a long and critical look at the rise of adjuncts (visiting faculty) and the problems of the tenure system. I really have a hard time imagining anyone disagreeing with Riley’s assessment of the situation.

The debate is thus not whether there is a two-tiered system in the academy with a Select Few getting Lifetime Jobs and the Masses ending up in low-paid, low-prestige jobs with absolutely no job stability at best and a guarantee that the job won’t last more than 5 years as the norm.

The debate is what to do about it.

On the one side the well-meaning liberal academics think the solution is just to tenure more faculty. Such an answer shows a rather shocking ignorance about the cost of such a plan.

On the other side is Riley and people like her, who argue that Tenure should be abolished. After all, nobody else gets permanent jobs, so why should academics? Abolishing tenure, Riley argues, would free up the academy, making it more flexible and responsive to students.

(Not surprisingly, when you say to faculty that maybe tenure should be abolished, faculty get really agitated and make disparaging remarks about your book even if they haven’t read it.)

Am I persuaded? Nope. And neither, I suspect, are many other conservative academics.

You see, in the modern academy, tenure protects not just deadwood (the technical term for faculty who have retired on the job), but people with opinions which are really unpopular in academic circles. That would be people like me.

Now don’t get me wrong. I honestly don’t think I will get fired from Mount Holyoke because of my views. Indeed, I think Mount Holyoke as an Institution likes having me around. It’s like at the zoo when they have one of those prehistoric-looking birds and everyone can say, “Oh, look at the strange bird over there.” Having one religious conservative on campus is kinda cute. And it shows how committed to diversity Mount Holyoke really, truly is—they even have a member of the Religious Right in the Economics Department.

So, the reason that I would argue strongly in favor of keeping tenure at MHC is not that I am worried about losing my job.

It is the other side of the coin—if I was wrong about that and I did lose my job, finding another job would not be as easy as it should.

The problem is the way the academic job market works. Because schools cannot have a mandatory retirement age for tenured faculty, when schools go out to hire, they want to hire young faculty. If you don’t hire young faculty at every chance you get, then you run a real danger of having a very old faculty down the road. So, the market for professors over the age of, say, 45, is very, very thin.

This problem is what economists call a coordination failure. If every school abolished tenure simultaneously, then the market would free up and there would be a market for older professors. Perhaps a big one.

But, now we are living in Fantasyland. And that is where Riley missed the point—even if she is right that it would be better if there was no tenure, as a policy prescription it is DOA. How is anyone going to coordinate a massive simultaneous abolition of tenure?

Moreover, Riley spends too little time thinking about what that new world would be like. I have no idea how things would change in that new world, but it is not obvious that things will get better in any way that Riley or I would like.

The problem is that the academy, unlike most industries, has no real measure of productivity. So, in the new post-tenure world, schools may scramble to adopt productivity measures to decide when to keep faculty,

And it is quite possible that the productivity measures many schools will adopt will be counter-productive. Class sizes? Student teaching evaluations? Performance on standardized tests?

I am not at all persuaded that tenure is really the biggest problem facing the Academy these days. The bigger problem is the very real question: What exactly am I getting for $70,000 a year? To that question, schools have no good answer.

We need a new articulation of the benefits of a 4-year undergraduate education, but the Powers that Be have not yet developed a language to describe it, partly, I suspect, because they don’t really know the answer themselves. It’s a shame.

It’s not hard to articulate a reason why an expensive undergraduate education is the best thing you can do for yourself or your child, but I think many schools no longer believe in themselves, deep down they think they are frauds, so they buy off the students with nice dining halls and hope nobody notices. Tenure is irrelevant to that larger problem.

Indeed a school which could forcefully articulate why it exists and charges so much and then put together a curriculum to back up that claim would do very well, even with a bunch of tenured professors.

A Little Dose of Optimism

I don’t often read books which make me feel full of youthful optimism.

Obviously, I have a sardonic and mordant streak (Ok, “streak” may be a bit understated), but I am generally quite upbeat and think the future isn’t all that bad.

I can’t remember the last time I felt that bubbly, optimistic, really the world isn’t all that bad, attitude. After all, the world really is that bad, but we might as well smile as the ship is sinking.

Sure the world is decaying and getting worse all the time, but in the juvescence of the year came Christ the tiger and all that. (Yes, he devours us, but even still…)

Yet, here I am reading a book, thinking the whole time: “Oh, please Philip, it isn’t that bad. Seriously, now. Must you be so bleak and glum and dismal?”

That’s what Philip Larkin does to me…he is so unrelentingly depressing that he makes me feel like a giddy optimist. How in the world is he is such a popular poet?

The general spirit of the age is that if things go just right, if the right people are elected or the forces of evil can be stopped, then we can remake the world in our own image and everything will be all warm and cuddly and cheerful. Are there really enough pessimists who buy poetry to explain Larkin’s popularity?

Maybe I spend too much time with Americans. Maybe the British are really all dour and sad—come to think of it, maybe they have every reason to be glum—the weather’s bad and all they have to look forward to is King Charles.

After reading a review of Larkin, I bought a copy of Collected Poems. Well, one of the volumes entitled Collected Poems.

The same editor, Anthony Thwaite, has put together two different collections of Larkin and cleverly gave them both the same title. So, this is the one that has Larkin’s original books republished instead of putting all the poems in chronological order.

(Can I just say that Thwaite belongs in the Hall of Shame for this. How could he not notice that the two collections had the same title? Was he trying to confuse? Where were the editors in all this?)

I’ve read The North Ship, The Less Deceived, and The Whitsun Weddings. (He has one other book, which I still have not yet read: High Windows. One can only take so much dark sky before wanting a little sun in one’s poetry reading.)

The North Ship really isn’t worth reading. If he hadn’t published anything after that, we wouldn’t be talking about Larkin today.

The other two were good, quite good. But, bleak—did I mention that already?

Consider the poem “Next, Please.” I like this poem a lot, so it makes a useful means of seeing how Larkin works.

It starts:

Always too eager for the future, we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy.

The poem then tells how we stand on a bluff waiting for a ship to drop off the good things in life. It concludes:

We think each one will heave to and unload
All good into our lives, all we are owed
For waiting so devoutly and so long.
But we are wrong:

Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break

And after reading that, my first reaction is, Oh Please, Philip. It isn’t that bad.

Surely every now and then a ship drops off at least a small bit of cargo to brighten our days. Surely we get a trinket every now and then, don’t we?

And, therein lies the brilliance of Larkin and the tedium of Larkin. Poem after poem with the same tone and the same message. All is pointless and lost.

You are a toad, merely going to your dull job and learning to enjoy your dull, pathetic life (“Toads” and “Toads Revisited”). Your memories of good times are just that, memories—there is nothing to them and everything you remember as making you happy is gone, long gone (“I Remember, I Remember”). Seeing a dead body loaded into an ambulance is really just a picture of the emptiness of our lives (“Ambulances”).

So, what can we conclude about Larkin?

Technically, he is very good. He has a consistent message and relates it well. He is worth reading. Well worth reading.

But, it clearly takes a different temperament than I have in order to deeply enjoy reading him. Once can admire his work, one can even enjoy it. But only in small doses.