Michael Bérubé - American Airspace

Balls to the wall

Joseph Epstein has an essay in this week’s Weekly Standard, and it honestly isn’t very good. What do I mean by “not very good”? Do I say such a thing because I don’t like Epstein, or because I disagree with many of his remarks in the essay? Not at all. I say it because the essay isn’t very good as measured by the standards one applies to “essays” that are “good.” For example, in his fourth paragraph, Epstein introduces his subject—he’s writing a review essay on Elaine Showalter’s new book, Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents—in the following manner:

An early entry in the feminist sweepstakes, she is currently the Avalon Foundation Professor of the Humanities at Princeton, a past president of the Modern Language Association, a founder of “gynocriticism” (or the study of women writers)—in other words, guilty until proven innocent. She has also been described—readers retaining a strong sense of decorum are advised to skip the remainder of this paragraph—as “Camille Paglia with balls,” a description meant approbatively, or so at least Princeton must feel, for they print it on princetoninfo.com, a stark indication of the tone currently reigning in American universities.

The drawing-room prose is full of little drolleries—feminist sweepstakes, indeed! jolly good, Joseph old boy!—guilty until proven innocent! oof! a snort of brandy for the merry fellow in the bow tie, sir!—before settling down to serious matters, advising “readers retaining a strong sense of decorum” (the word “retaining” is key, of course) that we are in for yet another shocking little demonstration—nay, a “stark indication”—of how degraded is the standard of discourse at American universities. Yes, even Princeton now speaks of “balls.” Surely it is only a matter of time before Princeton offers a named chair to 50 Cent.

Except that Princeton happens to be innocent of this little transgression. Epstein’s drawing-room prose may get its chuckles and its sputters of righteous indignation, but every once in a while, it behooves a writer to get out of the drawing room and onto the Internets. Go ahead, Google “Camille Paglia with balls.” I’ll wait. My own search took all of 0.2 seconds, and turned up this item from princetoninfo.com. At the top of the page you can read the following: “This feature profile by Nicole Plett was published in U.S. 1 Newspaper on May 14, 1997.” “Princetoninfo.com” is in fact U.S. 1’s website, and has no connection whatsoever to Princeton University. As for the testicular-Paglia reference, you have to read for a bit more than 0.2 seconds to find that even the U.S. 1 newspaper didn’t call Showalter “Camille Paglia with balls”; in fact, Nicole Plett quite clearly held the phrase at arm’s length, no doubt out of a sense of decorum:

The six-page profile of Showalter, featured in the April-May issue of Mirabella, raised the critic’s public visibility enormously. The author, who shadowed Showalter for four days through routine classroom lectures, chats with professors, and a swank, alumni-hosted literary dinner party, rewarded the maverick feminist with yet another dubious moniker: “Elaine Showalter is Camille Paglia with balls.”

A stark indication of the tone currently reigning in American universities, indeed.

Now, why does this matter? Hell, Michelle Malkin, Ben Shapiro and the entire Clownhall.com crew do this kind of thing every day. Ah, but Joseph Epstein is not usually considered a third-rate hack. He is more often considered a master of the genre of the personal essay—so widely that at one point in the 1990s I began to wonder whether Epstein had secretly copyrighted the phrase and had had it contractually sutured to his name in some way (you know, Michael Jackson took “King of Pop,” and Epstein took “master of the personal essay”). So it is especially surprising to find this piece of third-rate hackwork in one of his essays. It’s almost as if he’s not trying anymore. Either that, or someone at the Weekly Standard doesn’t like him, and left this gaffe untouched in order to discredit him. But that wouldn’t explain why Arts and Letters Daily (which is, after all, a website, and tends to be read by people who have computers) saw fit to link to it. No, I think Epstein just got lazy, and reached for the nearest club at hand, safe in the assumption that readers retaining a strong sense of decorum would never bother to check up on him.

Don’t get me wrong—I don’t like the rest of the essay, either. It really does sound to my ears like a tired old rant, and, like so much of Epstein’s recent work, it tries to make a virtue of its tired-oldness:

In the 1970s, I was invited to give a talk at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. I arrived to find all the pieces in place: On the English faculty was a black woman (very nice, by the way), an appropriately snarky feminist, a gay (not teaching the thing called Queer Theory, which hadn’t yet been devised), a Jew, and a woman named Ruthie, who drove about in an aged and messy Volkswagen bug, whose place in this otherwise unpuzzling puzzle I couldn’t quite figure out. When I asked, I was told, “Oh, Ruthie’s from the sixties.” From “the sixties,” I thought then and still think, sounds like a country, and perhaps it is, but assuredly, to steal a bit of Yeats, no country for old men.

When readers with a newly-minted sense of decorum get over all the distracting things about this paragraph (did he say “a gay”? the black woman was “very nice”? and what’s that Jew doing there? was he—or she!—one of the pieces, too?), they should ask themselves, wait a second—Epstein is citing “Sailing to Byzantium” about the 1960s? Was Epstein old in the 1960s?

Well, dear decorous readers, not literally: he was born in 1937, so in chronological time he entered the 1960s in the full flower of youth. But in Gerontion Time, he was about seventy, and there he has remained ever since, scolding the youth in the voice of an old man in a dry month even when he was a young thing and the youth in question were actually ten or twenty years older than he. Look for instance at his essays about how “out of it” he is—the essays in which he writes with pride of having never read this contemporary novelist or heard of that current fad (yes, he’s written more than one—it’s like he has to keep updating us on how steadfastly out of it he is). Or look at his habitual citations to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” one of which can be found (sure enough) in this very essay. It’s like finding the “Nina”s in the Al Hirschfeld caricatures, and it would be good fun, except that Epstein has (by some estimates) accounted for over sixty percent of all the Prufrock allusions in the world, and has left the poem with only five or six uncited words for future generations.

I’ll say just a few things about the substantive claims of the essay. These are tired, too.

Theory and the hodgepodge of feminism, Marxism, and queer theory that resides comfortably alongside it, has now been in the saddle for roughly a quarter-century in American English and Romance-language departments, while also making incursions into history, philosophy, and other once-humanistic subjects. There has been very little to show for it—no great books, no splendid articles or essays, no towering figures who signify outside the academy itself—except declining enrollments in English and other department courses featuring such fare.

The bit about “no splendid articles or essays” is a judgment call, of course, and needless to say, I disagree with it. But the bit about “declining enrollments” is—and I really am getting tired (tired, I tell you!) of saying this—factually wrong. Let’s start where Epstein starts, twenty-five years ago. In 1980, English accounted for 3.5 percent of all B.A.s awarded in the country, 32,541 degrees in all; in 2001, the most recent year for which I have figures, we awarded 4.13 percent of all B.A. degrees, or 51,419 in all. You can make any judgment call you like about English departments and their hodgepodges, but you actually can’t accuse “theory” of driving away undergraduates. You can’t do it, that is, in the sense that it is “untrue,” just like saying “Princeton University trumpets the fact that Elaine Showalter has been called ‘Camille Paglia with balls’” is untrue.

Last but not least, there’s the complaint that nobody writes for nonscholars anymore.

All that is left to such university teachers is the notion that they are, in a much-strained academic sense, avant-garde, which means that they continue to dig deeper and deeper for lower and lower forms of popular culture—graffiti on Elizabethan chamber pots—and human oddity. The best standard in the old days would have university scholars in literature and history departments publish books that could also be read with enjoyment and intellectual profit by nonscholars. Nothing of this kind is being produced today. . . . The bad old days in English departments were mainly the dull old days, with more than enough pedants and dryasdusts to go round. But they did also produce a number of university teachers whose work reached beyond university walls and helped elevate the general culture: Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, Ellen Moers, Walter Jackson Bate, Aileen Ward, Robert Penn Warren. The names from the bad new days seem to end with the entirely political Edward Said and Cornel West.

OK, so it’s the new, inclusive nostalgia—look! two women! (But no human oddity, now.) Still, this is at once tired and tiresome. First, note the unsubtle switching of the dice: we start off with the proposition that no one is writing books that can be read with enjoyment and intellectual profit by nonscholars, and we finish with a dismissal of two of the people whose books are read with enjoyment and intellectual profit by nonscholars, on the grounds that they are “entirely political.” As for Epstein’s giants who no longer walk the earth, well, that’s a fine list of names, but really, I’ll put Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Menand, Gerald Early, Ann Douglas, Mark Edmundson, Elaine Scarry, and Henry Louis Gates up against ‘em any old time. Say what you want about their work, or about Said’s (Cornel West does not actually teach in an English department); but you really can’t pretend that these people aren’t read by nonscholars. And even though I don’t always love everything written by these folks, I want to point out that these are all quite distinguished and serious people who are widely reviewed and generally acclaimed. They aren’t just cranks with blogs, now.

But I return to my earlier point. Joseph Epstein is not, in fact, a hack. He’s capable of much better than this. Even his most tedious essays have flashes of genuine wit and grace, and I’ve found his best work thoroughly entertaining even when I don’t care for its propositional content. The problem with this ubi sunt genre of lamentation, in this respect, is that it’s inevitably self-aggrandizing: you don’t have to scratch the surface of the text very hard to find that its subtext is no one writes well for the general public any longer—except me, the way I’m doing right now. And when you’re working in that genre, you’d better get your “Camille Paglia with balls” passages in order, or you’ll wind up looking very foolish.

Posted by on 05/03 at 12:23 PM

I can’t imagine a more hellish fate for Camille Paglia than balls. She’d have to become a feminist just to keep her contrarian street cred.

Posted by julia on 05/03 at 02:02 PM
For the record, I have decided not to interpret the phrase “Camille Paglia with balls.” Nor will I pass judgment on whether the phrase is well applied to Elaine Showalter. In fact, I believe we should treat it as if it were a conundrum beyond our current ability to understand, a kind of Fermat’s Last Theorem for our times, and trust that it will meet its Andrew Wiles at some point in the twenty-fifth century.

Posted by on 05/03 at 02:08 PM
While I completely agree with 99.999% of this delightful essay, I feel compelled to point out that it was, in fact, Al Hirschfeld who drew the caricatures with Ninas hidden in them. Just sayin’.

Posted by Elise on 05/03 at 02:19 PM
Filthy English professors! Not only do you tolerate two canons rubbing against each other, you enjoy it!

Posted by on 05/03 at 02:19 PM
Oops! Thanks, Elise, and here I was looking for “Nina"s in all these parking garages in the outer boroughs. OK, all fixed.

Posted by on 05/03 at 02:21 PM
I caught this article on Arts and Letters Daily yesterday and I had similar thoughts while reading it, but I tip my hat to you, Michael, for giving it a thorough critique.

You must have given up at least an hour of your luxurious leisure-filled tenured life to write this! Gasp, shouldn’t you have been complaining about capitalism and undermining family values while golfing in all your work-free spare time?

Bad form chum!

Posted by Jon S. on 05/03 at 02:47 PM
So what you’re saying is that Joseph Epstein is Camille Paglia without balls?

Posted by on 05/03 at 02:53 PM
So what you’re saying is that Joseph Epstein is Camille Paglia without balls?

I have discovered a truly wonderful proof of this, but this blog is too narrow to hold it.

Posted by on 05/03 at 02:58 PM
Oh dear. Michael, I agree with you in many ways, especially since I find this sort of self-aggrandizement really annoying, but I also sympathize with Joseph Epstein just a tiny bit, because there is a tiny kernel of truth in what he says. The problem is that he is fundamentally dishonest about his points.

Reading a Stephen Greenblatt essay on the Tempest in my sophomore tutorial convinced me that I’d rather do Classics than the history and literature of the Renaissance and Reformation. The philologists might be boring and excessively pedantic, but I could spend more of my time reading Virgil and didn’t have to worry about reading a whole bunch of articles.

I find Skip Gates really boring, and I enjoyed the writing of the late William Arrowsmith and even some of the contributors to the New Criterion even if I don’t agree with much of their neoconservative politics (broadly defined), I really do enjoy reading the articles in the old Arion. I can’t stand Roger Kimball, but I loved the profile he did of John Herington in 1997.

http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/15/may97/homage.htm

This sort of essay can be really offensive and unreflective, but I do understand the claims of nostalgia which isn’t what it used to be, let me tell you.

Posted by on 05/03 at 03:05 PM
Thanks for taking it to Epstein. Whether you aggree or disaggree with his arguments (I’m very slightly sympathetic), it’s hard to engage them when he does such a crappy job of making them. I wonder if writing for this particular publication worked against him - after all, it’s a conservative, inside-the-beltway publication that is really more interested in repeating stock positions (here, professors are lazy, out of touch, liberal crybabies who have fallen far from the good old days) than articulating a singular opinion. As you pointed out, it’s all in all a rather shoddy piece.

Posted by on 05/03 at 03:31 PM
Michael’s smackdown reminds me of a Doonsebury from the 70’s where a geek comes up to Uncle Duke in a bar and says “I loved your piece on Cher! It’s like you use words like a blunt instrument!”.

Posted by on 05/03 at 04:27 PM
Abby, Brian, I don’t think Epstein is utterly wrong in every jot and tittle. English departments do indeed have their problems these days—but enrollment, in the national aggregate, just isn’t one of them. And personally, if you want a sense of my own relation to “theory,” just take Marianne Moore’s poem “Poetry” and substitute the word “theory.”

As for Greenblatt, you really should check out the reviews of Will in the World, and then check out the book itself. Is Skip Gates boring? To some readers, apparently so. But I want to keep playing with the same pair of dice. The question wasn’t whether one thinks that some prominent English professors are boring (I have my own list, which I’ll not divulge here!). The question was whether they were being read with enjoyment and intellectual profit by nonscholars, and I can assure you that for some nonscholarly readers, Gates has been both utile and dulce both.

But then, Virgil is a pretty high standard, as writers go. That old Tom Eliot thought very highly of him, and so does Joe Paterno, who’s read him in the original (I read mere snippets in my high-school Latin classes, and had to rely on Allen Mandelbaum’s translation for the rest).

Posted by on 05/03 at 04:30 PM
As Epstein himself says in the article: But something, inevitably, goes awry, something disagreeable turns up in the punch bowl.

Another reason not to drink the Kool Aid.

Posted by The Heretik on 05/03 at 04:35 PM
Michael,

I do agree with you about substituting “theory” for “poetry” in Marianne Moore’s poem, and I am not entirely opposed to theory, just obscurantism.

The numbers argument is an important one for professors to make, but just because other people find meaning in these things doesn’t mean that I have to, but I was trying to acknowledge that I am in many ways a young dinosaur who doesn’t want to fall into the trap of saying that everything was better once in a long ago golden age. All eras have their problems. Thus my joke about how much better nostalgia used to be.

My favorite quotation about the role of theory came from my favorite professor, the late Charles Segal, who, I always thought, employed it well while recognizing that in the end the literature (Ovid, Sophocles or anyone--his range was nearly everything) itself was more important than any theory or article that *He* might write.

In his presidential address to TAPA in 1994, he criticized what he called the Tyranny of Theory over Literature in this way:

“Nevertheless, the center of gravity in the profession has shifted in important ways, although the young are still young and the old still old. Younger classicists perhaps read less Wissenschaft than their older colleagues but are more widely read in anthropology, aesthetics, linguistics, feminist criticism, and literary theory generally, and they are more inclined to experiment with a wide range of methodologies and disciplines. Although such experimentation may cause flutters of perturbation in some circles, it is a sign of health rather than deterioration in our field. We are increasingly aware of the assumptions and problems that surround the notion of the pure fact. We know that even the denial of methodology implies a methodology. Theory is indispensable for helping us to compare different ways of studying literature, to get perspective on our own approaches, and so to understand our presuppositions, aims, and point of view in approaching works of art. Those who regard theorists as Harpies befouling the fair banquet spread before us on the pages of ancient writers might be invited, if I may mix allusions, to look at the sack of assumptions on their own backs. In classical studies the debate between theorists and empiricists is nothing new and has taken various forms over the past two centuries, going back to the debate between Gottfried Hermann and August Boeckh over a hundred and fifty years ago.[[3]]”

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/TAPA/segal.html

It’s good stuff.

Posted by on 05/03 at 05:16 PM
I gotta say, I know where he’s coming from. Just last weekend I went to a party in Brooklyn where all the pieces were in place: a Jew, three or four gays, a couple blacks, a guy who might’ve been Puerto Rican, and a lesbian octaroon (very nice, by the way). Then there was this guy named Steve, who wore a skinny tie and drove a scooter.
“What’s up with that heterosexual white male?” I asked one of the gays.
“Oh, that’s Steve. He’s from the ‘80s.”

Posted by Alex on 05/03 at 05:17 PM
Pardon my ignorance but what is this “queer theory” that he speaks of? Anything like the mythical “gay agenda”?

Posted by on 05/03 at 05:20 PM
I think the Le Tigre reference is subversively hip.

Posted by on 05/03 at 05:27 PM
You’re putting Mark Edmundson with Robert Penn Warren, Lionel Trilling, and Edward Said? That’s like Gomer putting Andy in the CHIPs Hall of Fame.

Posted by on 05/03 at 05:43 PM
Life is too short to read the Weakly Standard.

As the heroic James Joyce stated in a slightly different context:

Moses, Moses, King of the Jews
wiped his ass with the Daily News (Weakly Standard)

Posted by on 05/03 at 05:57 PM
Epstein is just one more of those who want “the good old =days” and thinks things “are now going to the dogs.” The “good old days” circa 1965 when J. Alfred Prufrock was the most important character in one of the most important poems. The problem with Pruforck is he’s boring, really boring.

The problem with Epstein is he wants to be top dog and knows he isn’t. I was told at UC Irvine in 1968 that there was a whole course devoted to T.E. Elliot, but students wouldn’t sign up for it as they had better things to do in 1968, so the English Department had to cut the class, or give T.S.Elliot only 1/5 of a class, not a whole class. Epstein would be displeased.

Posted by on 05/03 at 06:13 PM
"You’re putting Mark Edmundson with Robert Penn Warren, Lionel Trilling, and Edward Said? That’s like Gomer putting Andy in the CHIPs Hall of Fame.”

There’s a whole slew of Mt.Rushmore-shtick cartoons that come to mind, too.

Posted by David Ross McIrvine on 05/03 at 07:52 PM
Well, Louise, actually I was going to have Edmundson cover Barzun, and ask Greenblatt to step up against Trilling. If that didn’t work I was going to go to a zone.

As for the Gomer and Andy bit, I can take an insult here and there—Lawd knows I dish ‘em out. But Andy, being a resident of North Carolina (and a sheriff, at that), is not eligible for the California Highway Patrol Hall of Fame. Even Gomer knows that.

Posted by Michael on 05/03 at 08:41 PM
As I recall, way back in the late 70’s, it was a Joseph Epstein essay on newly visible gay people that was one of the two remarkable essays that led Gore Vidal to write his classic “Pink Triangles and Yellow Stars” essay in the Nation. Evidently Epstein had written an essay (in I believe Harper’s) where he announced that if he had the power, he would wish homosexuality, and homosexuals, off the face of the earth.
Gore V. pointed out that it really was not intelligent for a Jew to casually discuss any group being wiped off the face of the earth.
Meanwhile, as to “Arts & Letters Daily”, I trust Michael has seen that today they linked to the Chronicle of Higher Education piece on his beloved friend David H. The writer just lets David H. talk and talk, points out a few salient facts, and pretty much lets him hang himself. He seems to have an ego even bigger than Butterflies and Wheels claims for our host! A lot bigger.

Posted by on 05/03 at 09:10 PM
I’ve found Epstein tiresome for as long as I’ve read him ("read" is an approximation here, as I typically slip off, about a third of the way through his meanderings, into one of those naps he’s so fond of ). Being one of those young folk for whom he has such disdain, I may have missed his glory days, but he’s already wasted so much of my good will in long-winded bloviation on the languor of time, the weave of Prufrock’s bowtie, and the pleasure of having contempt for the insufficiently ruminative that I’m not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

By the way, I find Henry Louis Gates a wonderful writer for the general, educated public (i.e. people like me). I once made a pass at The Signifying Monkey, giving up when I found charts and graphs and such, but his Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man is a fantastic book, and his essay in the New Yorker on the Chitlin Circuit was a classic. I’d put him up against Barzun any day of the week and twice on Cinco de Mayo (I hear he can down tequila like nobody’s business).

-Dan

Posted by on 05/03 at 09:27 PM
Somebody help my ignorant self out. When T.S Elliot wrote the famous line:

And in the rooms the women will come and go,
Talking of my balls to the wall . . .

what exactly did Elliot mean?

Posted by The Heretik on 05/03 at 09:59 PM
As for Epstein’s giants who no longer walk the earth, well, that’s a fine list of names, but really, I’ll put Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Menand, Gerald Early, Ann Douglas, Mark Edmundson, Elaine Scarry, and Henry Louis Gates up against ‘em any old time. Say what you want about their work, or about Said’s (Cornel West does not actually teach in an English department); but you really can’t pretend that these people aren’t read by nonscholars.

It’s worth noting that people outside academia are still reading Stegner, who I’d lay odds still be teaching were it not for that car accident. (I suppose he could be written off as a writer who taught in an English department at a major university rather than a Professor of English at a major university who wrote.)

Also, David Bowie is apparently now with the English Department at the University of Central Florida, and what Professor of English, old or new wave, can boast sales to rival Let’s Dance?

Incidentally, Michael, “clownhall.com” seems to be for sale. I’d be interested in putting up some cash if we could (to put it as Stegner might have) round up a stable of ghostwriters. Personally, I think you’d make an excellent Sowell.

Posted by Chris Clarke on 05/03 at 10:11 PM
Michael, I don’t know why, with all of the maddening events in the world, this one made me mad enough to write a letter to the editor of the Weekly Standard. I pointed him/her to the links, the Mirabella quote, and told him/her that I usually trust the integrity of the author but this time I happened to check and found my trust was misplaced, and I was very unhappy about this.
I had never heard of Joseph Epstein until reading your post, and maybe he’s a great person, but having spent the entire day double checking a number in an astrophysics paper (a number that I want to quote in an article I’m writing for the general public) and realizing it may not be accurate, I’m quick to anger with people who don’t check these things before publishing.
Anyway, I’m glad I wrote, and glad you poked around and found out the real source of that extremely distasteful quote (or at least, I would find it so had I retained or originally started with even the weakest sense of decorum, but alas...).

Posted by on 05/03 at 10:28 PM
Actually, I know of several people teaching Western Canadian history who still assign “Wolf Willow” by W. Stegner as a brilliant description of life and mentality on the Canadian prairies. John H. Thompson @ Duke for one.
Meanwhile, do check out the article on D. Horowitz, if for no other reason than the conceit that, had he been a ‘liberal’, Hollywood would already have made a wildly successful film of his autobiography. Where he would doubtless be played by Brad Pitt, with a lot of shirt ripping off while he deals with opponents played by Wally Cox lookalikes. I didn’t say it-he did.

Posted by on 05/03 at 10:31 PM
Seriously, Geoff. Have I read that Chronicle article about Horowitz? C’mon—does the Pope wear a dress? But your casting suggestion for Radical Son gives me an idea. I will not fail to credit you in tomorrow’s post. . . .

And Chris, my apologies for not welcoming you back before this. Thank you for nominating me as the replacement for Sowell. I will enjoy spending the rest of my life declaiming about ineradicable cultural differences and making up all manner of nonsense about affirmative action. When do I start? (And those UCF faculty do seem to be very frisky bunch. What’s up with that?)

Jennifer, Dan, Julia, Heretik (we’ll talk about Joan of Arc later), thanks for chiming in. But for the record, “Balls to the Wall” is a song by the German metal band “Accept,” and the subject of one of the funniest Beavis & Butthead reviews ever. Ask me for details. Please, please ask me for details.

Posted by Michael on 05/03 at 11:05 PM
I found <a href=http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4021/is_200207/ai_n9126931/pg_2">this</a> to be considerably more revolting. And it didn’t have the excuse of being published in a rag like the Weekly Standard, but was in one of those fancy Readers Digest-sized things that only comes out a couple of times a year and costs eight bucks.

Hard to encapsulate what I find contemptible about Epstein, but the phrase “intellectual anxiety” (i.e., Epstein absolutely oozes it) comes to mind. What he hates isn’t the lefty bias of lit scholars so much as that they are plainly smarter than he is, and it’s not close.

Posted by on 05/04 at 12:08 AM
great, I broke your page; try
Bloomin Genius

Posted by on 05/04 at 12:09 AM
Michael,

Okay, I ask you for details dammit. Seriously. I’m a cable-deprived grad student. And I want to be more with-it than JE.

Also, is it just my imagination, or did he steal from Field of Dreams. You know, the part where James Earl Jones says:

“Hey, now I know where you’re from. You’re from the sixties!” [begins spraying Kevin Costner with pesticide, which, I must say, is fairly intuitive]. “Go! Back to the sixties where you belong. No place for you here in the future!”

Best part of a bad, bad movie.

Posted by Lee on 05/04 at 12:17 AM
Oh, michael, i do adore you and your blog! Accept’s “Balls to the wall” on beavis & butthead is truly one of my favorite television moments. really. and how good of you to remind me of it…
and how happy it makes me to know an academic - a Professor! with a Chair! and Tenure! - can play hockey AND reference beavis & butthead AND write intelligently about, you know, academic stuff.

Posted by kbryna on 05/04 at 02:04 AM
"She has also been described—readers retaining a strong sense of decorum are advised to skip the remainder of this paragraph—as “Camille Paglia with balls,” a description meant approbatively, or so at least Princeton must feel, for they print it on princetoninfo.com, a stark indication of the tone currently reigning in American universities.”

Speaking of balls, Epstein’s readers may also want to avoid Laura Bush’s recent remarks at the White House Correspondent’s dinner as well. [I think Dick (Big Time) Cheney’s remarks to Patrick Leahy LY are probably a better ‘indication of the tone currently reigning in American’ government, but Laura’s masterful manipulation of the White House press corps left me whinnying with pleasure.]

Posted by on 05/04 at 08:51 AM
one of those fancy Readers Digest-sized things that only comes out a couple of times a year and costs eight bucks.

Wait, wait, you talking about Penthouse Letters?

Posted by Jeremy Osner on 05/04 at 09:10 AM
Ok, haven’t given this *any* thought, but two works that spring to mind immediately that are written by academics, infused with intelligence and wit, and enjoyed by many non-academic readers are Michael’s own *Life as We Know It* and Mike Rose’s (of comp/rhet fame) *Lives on the Boundary*. Oh, and Shirley Brice Heath’s *Ways With Words* might qualify as well.

Posted by on 05/04 at 09:46 AM
Well, I’m relieved that Epstein found the black woman at Denison to be “very nice”. I know how tought that can be, to find one of “those people” to be “very nice.”

Posted by Bulworth on 05/04 at 11:34 AM
Actually, Michael, for a self-styled throwback, Epstein’s 1970s Denison episode may reveal him to be a man ahead of his time.

Epstein’s “a black woman, a feminist, a gay, a Jew, and a woman from the 60s” is strangely anticipatory of the line “I have a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple” that took James Watt out of the Interior Department in 1983.

OTOH, while Epstein’s Denison ordeal occurred first, he was perhaps being referential in the way he described it in 2005.

Posted by on 05/04 at 11:55 AM
I don’t know if Epstein is willfully ignorant of this, but Jacques Derrida made his reputation in America through literature departments, and “deconstruction” is now a household term (and they’re working on “differance"). He was famous enough that the New York Times went to the trouble of smearing him shortly after his death. So, for better or worse, he “signifies” outside of academia. Seriously. And was he trying to slip in some structuralist jargon there?

I’d also note that the “political correctness” deal for which meddling English professors are often blamed has had wide-ranging effects on people’s everyday speech—everyone at least knows that you’re supposed to say “African-American” rather than the n-word, for instance. It’s not the biggest deal in the world, but once again, its effects are felt outside the hallowed halls of academia (and widely decried by those who are the most trenchant critics of academia).

Maybe Epstein believes that when English departments are effective in the outside world, it’s only in evil ways. And therefore, it’s not the academics themselves who are doing it, it’s Satan.

Posted by Adam Kotsko on 05/04 at 12:18 PM
Epstein’s recent essay contains yet another instance of laziness (or, perhaps, conscious deceit). It relates to his anecdote about Denison, where I was teaching in the English Department when Epstein visited us in November, 1980. He has told this story, or something like it, on numerous occasions. But he’s wrong in his claim that some member of the English Department then was identifiably homosexual. He first made this claim in his Spring 1991 Hudson Review article “The Academic Zoo.” There he said the following: “At Denison I noted an altogether too tidy distribution of English department personnel: two blacks, one feminist, a homosezual, a Jew, and a bedraggled woman who was described to me as being `from the sixties,’ as if the decade were a country, like the Ukraine” (12). Puzzled by this description, Denison English faculty member Anne Shaver wrote a letter to the editor, which appeared in the Autumn 1991 issue. She pointed out that the department had “no known homosexual--though perhaps Epstein has exceptional gaydar” (358). Epstein’s response was characteristically snide: “I took the homosexual I mentioned in my essay to be a youngish man who was in intellectual thrall to a combat-boot-wearing feminist” (361). He added, “A peculiar breed, the male academic feminist, resembling nothing so much as those inmates of prisons and concentration camps who identify with their guards and captors, or so I have always thought” (361). Yeeesh! At any rate, he doesn’t argue with Shaver’s claim that he was factually wrong. And yet now, in 2005, he’s back to asserting that our department did indeed include a homosexual--though now he curiously resorts to the term “a gay.” Apparently he finds his original version of the story just too good to give up. By the way, none of our department’s feminists wore combat boots. But with Epstein, you could spend all day correcting his breezy (and recycled) inaccuracies, and you could gnash your teeth to pulp over his incredibly tasteless comparisons ("concentration camps”?!).

Posted by on 05/04 at 03:38 PM
Yikes indeed. As a male feminist who wears combat boots, I must say that I do not identify with my captors. They’re nice people, but not terribly stimulating company.

Reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Nelson is caught by his friends in the act of kissing Lisa. “That’s so gay,” one of them says.

It’s also the single most egregious literalization of the term “feminazi” ever.

Posted by Lee on 05/04 at 03:52 PM
Amazing stuff, John, especially that reply to Anne Shaver. Thank you. But as I’m sure you’re aware, Joseph Epstein is a master of the personal essay.

Posted by on 05/04 at 03:53 PM
My favorite academic novel is Gaudy Night, which has been described as “Lord Peter Wimsey with balls”.

Posted by Ray Davis on 05/04 at 08:56 PM
drat. someone else beat me to the le tigre reference. I smell lawsuit!

Posted by zach on 05/05 at 12:29 AM
>My favorite academic novel is Gaudy Night

which is one of the worst!—typical snobbery-ridden ponderous Sayers.

That reminds me. Epstein was so busy venting, he didn’t say that much about what Showalter actually said…

Posted by Jayanne on 05/05 at 09:23 AM
Yay Michael, yay theory, boo Epstein, yay feminists, boo Paglia, yay Moore. But poor Prufrock deserves a yay too.

Posted by bitchphd on 05/07 at 12:16 AM
Dr. B., my essay, “Yay Prufrock” (Modern Language Quarterly 62.2 [2001]: 126-44), develops your argument in more detail.

Also, yay you.

Posted by Michael on 05/07 at 04:09 AM
Ah, but Epstein writes better than you, Michael, on the evidence of this blog. Or perhaps you save your better stuff for other venues?

Posted by on 05/07 at 09:07 AM
Given the amazing lewdness of the Grand Old Authors of past centuries, *not* excluding Eliot, I have to think Epstein’s in the wrong business if he wants to avoid being obliged to think about sex.

As a sheltered young teen sent off to enlighten myself by reading Great Books, I frequently found myself inhaling my tea in shock, blinking, thinking I can’t really have just read that, or it can’t mean what I suspect it means, and wondering if my elders had actually bothered to read any of these Venerable Poets (eg Burns) they were sending me off to read, all the while forbidding me from watching R-Rated movies or the racier sorts of television shows in the 1980s…

Not just sex and scatology, either. Murder, covert desire to commit murder, venality, the blase attitude towards entrenched corruption - and above all, the bemused and cynical gazing on hypocrisy among the virtuous that have preoccupied writers since forever - the teenage reader encountering the Classics directly, epigrams and satirical odes and whatnot, without benefit of protective interpretation, is partly in shock over the realization that other adults also thought these things, and moreover, went on to say them and get away with it in print!!!

Posted by bellatrys on 05/07 at 02:39 PM
Jerry, it’s customary around here to give a bit of explanation for one’s objections, rather than cryptic, contentless criticism.

At least, whatever is obvious to you, is not obvious to the rest of us, who come here voluntarily to read Prof. Berube but could not be paid to read Epstein…

Posted by bellatrys on 05/07 at 02:40 PM
Hm, somehow I doubt Epstein would have approved of me and other friends getting high on poetry. Yeats and Eliot were our drugs of choice, but others from the shadowy past were also better than malt or pills for getting thru the days’ insanity and the mundane madness of th’unreal world that passed itself off as true Reality - the arcane words, the complex webs of meaning and play with structure of conceit, the defiant and radical ideas that we could carry in plain view, subversive and contrarian ideas looked on benignly by our gaolers, hidden in foxed with the venerable name of cummings or Shakespeare on the cover - i sing of Olaf glad and big--the Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed--where are the eagles and the trumpets?--thou shalt not kill, but needs not strive/officiously to keep alive--in the old age black was not counted fair--there’s keen delight in what we have/the rattle of pebbles on the shore/under the receding wave--

Posted by bellatrys on 05/07 at 02:54 PM
I’m not convinced Jerry isn’t Michael in drag, trying to stir things up.

Posted by Chris Clarke on 05/07 at 03:11 PM
It certainly isn’t me! I did my “arbitrary but fun value judgement” bit yesterday.

Posted by Michael on 05/07 at 04:12 PM
Also ... Elaine Showalter is not “currently Avalon Foundation Professor of the Humanities at Princeton”, as Joseph Epstein seems to believe. She retired two years ago.

Posted by on 05/09 at 11:06 PM
I never could take seriously someone who makes such an effort to look intelligent, and his efforts to seem insouciant are so labored that they rouse pity and condescension. His departure from American Scholar was a positive contribution to the tone of the magazine.

Posted by on 05/12 at 12:45 AM

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