Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, & Spinach

Watching Gina Rinehart's son talk about the law suit in which he and his sisters are embroiled put me in mind of wretched Richard Carstone in Bleak House. A man whose life is ruined by false expectations, and wasted in a fruitless suit. Here's Esther worrying at the earliest signs of Richard's disintegration:

He was as vivacious as ever and told us he was very industrious, but I was not easy in my mind about him. It appeared to me that his industry was all misdirected. I could not find that it led to anything but the formation of delusive hopes in connexion with the suit already the pernicious cause of so much sorrow and ruin. He had got at the core of that mystery now, he told us, and nothing could be plainer than that the will under which he and Ada were to take I don't know how many thousands of pounds must be finally established if there were any sense or justice in the Court of Chancery—but oh, what a great IF that sounded in my ears—and that this happy conclusion could not be much longer delayed. He proved this to himself by all the weary arguments on that side he had read, and every one of them sunk him deeper in the infatuation. He had even begun to haunt the court. He told us how he saw Miss Flite there daily, how they talked together, and how he did her little kindnesses, and how, while he laughed at her, he pitied her from his heart. But he never thought—never, my poor, dear, sanguine Richard, capable of so much happiness then, and with such better things before him—what a fatal link was riveting between his fresh youth and her faded age, between his free hopes and her caged birds, and her hungry garret, and her wandering mind.

Cherished like the thought of heaven

in

You’d be surprised how difficult it was to find a poem celebrating the passing of the fiscal year. I guess it’s not something that captures the poetic imagination. I don’t usually run competitions on this blog, but there’s tuppence ha’penny for anyone who can write a convincing ode to the beginning of a new financial year. “O! Tis time for taxes their return to make…” it might begin.

I think it was Robert Graves who said “There’s no money in poetry; but neither is there poetry in money.” Or something like that. Wallace Stevens, on the other hand, said money is a kind of poetry. I looked in the works of both for today’s poem, and Stevens won the day with ‘What is Divinity’. It’s not about money – just a gorgeous little elegy for this heaven-haunted earth. Happy new year.

What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch,
These are the measures destined for her soul.

Dusk in Academia

“Most people I know in academia want to get out." So says Terry Eagleton (in this interview), confirming something I've suspected since my own exit nearly five years ago. Eagleton was one of the first big academic figures I encountered at university: it was his Literary Theory I had to plow through in first year. It was often his name at the end of introductions to Penguin classics. By the time I began to specialise in early modern writing, he was no longer so prominent in my reading, since his own work lay in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the time I wound up my brief teaching career (by the age of 29 I was a former academic), I was both disheartened by my failure to land anything like tenure, and glad to be leaving a field where the prospects were so bleak, in which so many were so beleaguered, depressed, and embittered. That’s what Eagleton’s comments point to, and I find it reassuring that one of the superstars of the profession is happy to spill the beans on the “hideous neomanagerialism” that has exerted its clammy grip on universities, effectively scuttling their historic role as centres of critique. I knew many academics who said they were spending up to eighty per cent of their time on administration. They were constantly called on to justify their existence, and to demonstrate their productivity by the volume of work they managed to publish in journals rated highly not by their peers but by the federal Government. Their most important skill was not in research or teaching but in writing successful grant applications, mostly in order to buy themselves out of teaching so they could get on with the research they needed to buy themselves out of oblivion. Teaching was valued only by the students and the teachers: not by the people who actually made decisions about how teaching should be valued and what students should be taught. Reductionism, economic rationalism, managerialism were rampant, and they were killing the humanities (to say nothing of the sciences and other purities), which are intrinsically expansive, liberal, and enlivening. In my post-academic career I have encountered the same three forces at work, but in the corporate world, public and private, where so much matters so little, these are merely a plaque, not, as in academia, a cancer.

Evening in America

About Ray Bradbury's death I have nothing to say. I was not a reader of his books, so I won't pontificate on his death. A death less observed but roughly coincident is that of Earl Shorris, who should not go unremarked on this blog. As the NY Times obit explains, Shorris made his mark by sharing the riches of literature with the poorest Americans. The Clemente Course in the Humanities he designed in 1995 was, as he saw it, real redistribution of wealth. It brought literature, art, moral philosophy and history to the homeless, the unemployed, the addicted, the poor. Poverty, he came to think, is not an absence of money but of reflection and beauty. Reflection, which the humanities instills, is the beginning of engagement, and of the leap out of poverty. 

I was moved reading this essay Shorris wrote for Harper's: the last thing he submitted to the magazine before his death on May 27. It's about his slide toward death in a cancer ward, and the slide into darkness he observed in America. His dystopian vision was not of book-burning, but of an unethical and unequal society in which poverty grows, and happiness belongs to a smaller and smaller elite.

His passing is the more to be lamented because he strove to increase the stock of the world's happiness, and to bring light to the darkest places.