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Now I know my life has meaning

We suspend this blog’s customary Friday Follies—the widely-popular Arbitrary but Fun Value Judgments—to bring you two special announcements. 

One: After months of effort—much of which, as veteran readers will recall, was expended on this very blog—I have finally been accepted into the Inner Party.  Yes, my friends, I have been awarded my very own page in David Horowitz’s “Discover the Network!” And it’s not just a perfunctory entry, either!  Horowitz assigned somebody to read no fewer than five of my essays (even the one on Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist!), and Discover the Network provides links to all of them, including two .pdfs that come right from the “essays” section of this website.  I am faulted for my “forbiddingly clotted prose,” and I’m described as someone who “believes in teaching literature so as to bring about ‘economic transformations.’” (The evidence for this last bit is provided in the fifth paragraph of the entry:  “Arguing that the purpose of ‘cultural critics,’ among whose number he plainly counted himself, was to advance economic change, he wrote: ‘The important question for cultural critics, then, is also an old question—how to correlate developments in culture and the arts with large-scale economic transformations.’")

Well, so what if they’re not sure of the meaning of the word “correlate”?  This is not a time to nitpick.  This is a time to celebrate! There are only about 250 people listed on Discover the Network’s “academics” list, and some of the entries are really perfunctory.  The one for Paul Gilroy, for instance—one of the leading figures in British cultural studies—basically consists of “Paul Gilroy:  is uppity.  Teaches at Yale.  Criticized the Iraq War.” Compared to that, I got me a stretch limo with complimentary hemlock, folks!

I’ll have more to say about my entry next week, but in the meantime, do check it out.  It’s a piece of work, and for that, I am very grateful.  I only hope I can find some way of repaying the favor!

Two: The College Republicans are gathering today through Sunday in Arlington, Virginia, for their annual convention.  The Heterosexual-in-Chief, General J. C. Christian himself, is mounting a heroic campaign to help these young men and women gain some real-world experience and support their country in a difficult time.  It’s a win-win:  the College Republicans will help our armed forces meet their recruiting goals, and they’ll pick up some much-needed moral legitimacy at the same time.  Please stop by the General’s place and support the troops today!

UPDATE, June 26:  Discover the Many and Varied Networks (yes, Anthony Smith’s comment below is right, they’ve recently made “Network” plural) has revised my page, making it 40 percent more spiffy and 25 percent less nutty.  (For instance, they no longer hold it against me that I asked graduate students to analyze a theoretical essay, and they’ve dropped the “forbiddingly clotted prose” bit, too.  They’ve also looked up the correct spelling of “losing.") But thanks to the wonders of the Internets, you can still read the original draft here.

Posted by on 06/24 at 10:02 AM

  1. Why you lucky bastard! Not only do you get your own page with cool blurry picture, but your recipe for forbiddenly clotted prose is included. No one understands you, students cannot figure out how to succeed in your courses, and yet your writing and teaching on literary criticism is deft enough to foster revolution and you personally are popular enough to merit this tribute. One has to wonder what your close friends say about you.

    Posted by  on  06/24  at  11:47 AM

  2. Well, congratulations. I didn’t understand a word of the write-up, and it made no mention of the recent unpleasantness that left Horowitz with a new poop-chute, but a fine accomplishment nevertheless.

    Posted by norbizness  on  06/24  at  11:55 AM

  3. I’m concerned.  DTN says you “ called for students ‘to produce an eight- to ten-page analysis of a theoretical essay of their choice.’”

    But what if their essay was on TS Eliot, or Matthew Arnold, or someone who didn’t support the revolution?  I’d hate for you to get “flummoxed” by another conservative student!

    Also Richard Rorty isn’t even French - I’d prefer to see you ‘dilate’ on someone who is at least a European.

    Posted by  on  06/24  at  12:03 PM

  4. ::visits Horowitz’s site for first time in months::

    ::looks for his own page::

    ::fails to find his own page despite having provided Horowitz with all the necessary information::

    You suck, Bérubé.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  06/24  at  12:04 PM

  5. My possibly too quick glance at the Horowitz piece:  I note the Horowitz piece does not state that you discriminated against the so-called “conservative” student for the student’s contrary views when it came to his/her grade.  Would that Horowitz be so “objective” as a teacher…

    As with the other commenters, congratulations for making the “grade” with Horowitz.

    Posted by Mitchell Freedman  on  06/24  at  12:06 PM

  6. There’s a whole new spectrum of stroke-reventing drugs called clotbusters.  Perhaps these could help you with that prose problem.  The downside is that the slightest prick could become life-threatening, and I wouldn’t want to elevate Horowitz to the life-threatening level.

    Posted by  on  06/24  at  12:13 PM

  7. Grrr… “stroke-preventing”.

    Posted by  on  06/24  at  12:14 PM

  8. I don’t really understand the rules this week.  I’ll just say “Ca Plane Pour Moi” by Plastic Bertrand.

    Posted by Doghouse Riley  on  06/24  at  12:14 PM

  9. When he did he change it to “Discover the Networks”?  I’m not wrong in thinking it used to be singular, am I?

    Either way congrats.

    Posted by Anthony Paul Smith  on  06/24  at  12:25 PM

  10. Now I know my life has meaning
    Woah woah

    Posted by The Heretik  on  06/24  at  12:35 PM

  11. Something’s up with the discoverthenetwork website (or something’s up with my internet connection).  I can’t reach the page!  How am I supposed to know who’s a freedom hating lib’rul and who’s a flag waving, gun totin’ amer’can?

    Posted by RPM  on  06/24  at  12:39 PM

  12. I am awaiting orders, Professor, to do my part in the realization of large scale economic transformations.  The only cultural development I am aware of is the return of “one-hit wonders” via Hit Me Baby 1 More Time. What confuses me is how to use that to facilitate la révolution.

    Posted by  on  06/24  at  12:41 PM

  13. My favourite bit’s that Horowitz couldn’t manage to work out how to use ASCII. I mean, who the hell is Michael Berube?

    Posted by  on  06/24  at  12:58 PM

  14. I’m doing what I can for our friend Chris Clarke. I wrote Horowitz to say that Clarke is soft on terrorism, and that he (Clarke) believes that the war on terrorism can be won if only we apply French psychoanalytic principles to the sources of terror indirectly, and to the prisoners in GITMO and Abu Gharib directly. Many thanks to Karl Rove for the talking points. If anyone else has some dirt on Chris, won’t you please help the cause by sending it along to “Discover the Network”?  Best of luck, Chris.

    Posted by  on  06/24  at  01:06 PM

  15. Chapeau bas. It couldn’t happen to a nicer objectively pro-terrorist America-hating crypto-islamofascist.

    Posted by  on  06/24  at  01:09 PM

  16. if only we apply French psychoanalytic principles to the sources of terror indirectly, and to the prisoners in GITMO and Abu Gharib directly.

    Two hours of reading Lacan, and they’ll beg us to piss on the Koran instead.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  06/24  at  01:22 PM

  17. Congratulations, Michael.  We’re all so proud of you! And I noticed that this was one of the better-written bios DTN has, at least in terms of grammar, organization, etc.  And there’s none of the usual “and therefore it’s clear he hates America” nonsense.  I think they really labored over this one to impress you.  Either that, or you scare them.  Or both.  Hmmm...maybe Horowitz has a crush on you! wink

    Posted by  on  06/24  at  01:23 PM

  18. The choice of passage they describe as “forbiddingly clotted” is rather funny, in that it’s remarkably free of academese. I mean, if I were editing it for a popular, non-academic magazine read by a lay audience, I might strike “Weberian” and “rationalized” - and that judgment comes without looking to see whether the elided surrounding paras provide sufficient context to explain “Weberian,” and illuminate the distinction between “rationalized” and “routinized.”

    In other words, compared to most of the academic writing I’ve edited for non-academic publishing, that para is camera-ready.

    I can only assume that Horowitz’s target demo is defensive morons. But I repeat myself.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  06/24  at  01:39 PM

  19. Congrats. Anyone who’s read this blog knows you deserve to have this page, if for no other reason than the fact that you are “unprepared to entertain alternative viewpoints”. You know, like torture is a good thing, as long as we do the torturing. And the ever popular, “if you’re not for us, you’re agin us”. Keep up the good work.

    Posted by  on  06/24  at  01:52 PM

  20. I am troubled by one revelation on that page.  You are said to be “Conceding that English departments had been steadily loosing students over the years”...is it true? It’s you guys who are responsible for turning all those students loose?

    You need to learn from biology departments. We keep our students caged up for years, hemmed in with chemistry and math, and threaten that they’ll never get into med school if they don’t do as we say.

    Posted by PZ Myers  on  06/24  at  02:07 PM

  21. But PZ, who then would I pay to mow my lawn?

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  06/24  at  02:12 PM

  22. I am so proud that my Koufax vote for Best Writing went here.  Congratulations on your glorious new distinction.  Let the economic transformation begin.

    Posted by  on  06/24  at  03:23 PM

  23. Congrats on being in “The Network”!  I had never visited that site before today.  It’s the most well-organized and technologically advanced collection of crazy I’ve ever seen.  Marcuse, Jameson, hooks, Baudrillard...sounds like you’re in good company.  Who knew that all my favorites were so evil? 

    Incidentally, I wonder why the “radical philosopher” Richard Rorty doesn’t have a page of his own?  Or Judith Butler?  I’m guessing that Horowitz is just pretending Judy doesn’t exist.  “La la la!! I can’t hear you!!”

    Posted by res publica  on  06/24  at  03:25 PM

  24. Congratulations. It couldn’t have happened to anyone more deserving.

    I assume also we are all that much closer to Network fame ourselves, by clotty association--woohoo! Clumpy Writers Unite!

    Posted by KathyF  on  06/24  at  05:41 PM

  25. 24 comments and not a single correlation does not equal causation joke. The host practically begged for it. What the hell is wrong with you people?

    Posted by  on  06/24  at  05:45 PM

  26. david, that’s only because I used mine up for the week in the last Mister Answer Man thread.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  06/24  at  06:04 PM

  27. A few quick thoughts: 
    1.  The ridiculousness that Horowitz is shocked, shocked!, that you think that internment of Japanese Americans was bad.
    2.  That his prose is almost as forbiddingly clotted as he accuses yours of being.
    3.  That since he never really accuses you of anything, as he often does others (i.e. That you show the moral hypocrisy/failings/badness of liberalism, that you are just another secretly racist liberal, etc. etc.), he is essentially accusing you of thought-crime.  The question is not whether or not your thoughts may be right or if by being a dreaded liberal you have abused your status as a professor.  There is no question of guilt, just an implied insistence that you being liberal is wrong, therefor you are wrong, without saying why.

    Well that was long and maybe not too clear.  However, congratulations!  May we all meet one another on such a website, and there be merry and feast such as heros of the Left are able!

    Posted by  on  06/24  at  06:57 PM

  28. [sincere tear daubing]

    Best wishes for a long and contentious reign.

    Posted by  on  06/24  at  07:40 PM

  29. Wow. Horowitz’s funds are clearly drying up because otherwise he wouldn’t be clamoring for attention like this. I haven’t laughed this hard since trying to do a Derridean reading of Payne’s Youth In Revolt.

    And hey, I don’t remember thinking your essays were that hard. But Jesus, didja have to lay all that “economic transformation” stuff on us?

    Posted by Paul  on  06/24  at  08:23 PM

  30. David and Chris--

    For Horowitz, it’s even simpler (and more moronic) than that.  He won’t even concede the correlation between cultural and economic developments--mainly because, as Michael points out, he doesn’t know the definition of “correlation.” He thinks “to correlate” means “to screw the right over by being sneaky little leftist shits,” rather than “to point out parallels between one pheonomenon and another.”

    (Michael, therefore, must no doubt be contrasted to *Animal House’s* Niedermeyer, who desptite having been a “sneaky little shit” himself, quite obviously worked for the right wing.  In fact, in my more paranoid moments, I imagine a Dean Wormer (read:  Karl Rove) in charge of the entire right-wing conspiracy who, to deal with Berube, told one of his minions:  “Get Horowitz to do it.  He’s a sneaky little shit, just like you.")

    Posted by  on  06/24  at  09:43 PM

  31. Um, how come you aren’t listed on the leftist millionaire page, too?

    Posted by  on  06/24  at  11:19 PM

  32. So, can we commentors now consider oursleves members of the Networks by Proxy? Or, are we just a sub-net?

    BTW, I think he’s using the word Networks to get on that internets bandwagon.

    Posted by  on  06/25  at  01:51 AM

  33. I don’t know you well enough for my gratulations to be anything but superfluous, but I’ve always enjoyed superfluous gratuity myself, so Congratulations!

    Posted by Houston Bridges  on  06/25  at  02:39 AM

  34. see, I would have said the students were devoting themselves to analysis of a product of critical theory, but I’m not edjumacated like you folks.

    Posted by julia  on  06/25  at  05:10 AM

  35. Congratulations. Here’s hoping that the economic transformations will see the Networks keep only enough resources to maintain your page.

    ~~~Ash

    Posted by Ashley Villegas  on  06/25  at  08:39 AM

  36. "I’m described as someone who “believes in teaching literature so as to bring about ‘economic transformations.’””

    You Learned English Dog, you.

    Posted by david r mcirvine  on  06/25  at  11:02 AM

  37. LOL, congratulations!

    Posted by bitchphd  on  06/25  at  11:48 AM

  38. When a web site has nothing but links (on its home
    page) to publications of the web site’s author, you know you have stumbled into The Marketing Zone.

    I wonder why his DSM-V compulsion to make lists of people he suspects are tearing this country’s fabric apart helps the sale of his books - but it must.  The College Republican’s uncles and aunts must be heartened by his service to a future inquisition, and send right away for several titles.

    I’m relieved the right still puts Chomsky front and center.  Sometimes you feel times are changing too fast - but then you realize, no, la plus ca change ...

    Marianne

    Posted by Marianne Mueller  on  06/25  at  12:01 PM

  39. Congrats on the Horowitz link, but you still far short of the more elaborate guilt by association logic of the Network.  See his chain of association for Bob McChesney, linking him indirectly with Kurt Cobain’s suicide:

    “In 1979 McChesney became a sports stringer for the wire service United Press International (UPI). He also became publisher and president of two new publications. One was the short-lived counter-cultural newspaper The Seattle Sun. The other, which he founded, was the music and pop culture magazine The Rocket, which continued until 1984 and is credited in Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with helping to create Seattle’s successful music scene that launched the so-called “Grunge” style of bands like Nirvana, whose lead singer blew his brains out at the age of twenty-six.”

    Unless you can be linked to an untimely death, Michael, you don’t really rank…

    Posted by  on  06/25  at  12:45 PM

  40. Wow Michael, obviously you have finally arrived. It isn’t quite as prestigious as the Nixon enemies list, but hey, its a start.

    Posted by rev.paperboy  on  06/25  at  12:49 PM

  41. I’m glad that the network also includes people who are dead (Edward Said).

    Posted by  on  06/25  at  02:01 PM

  42. I’m glad that the network also includes people who are dead (Edward Said).

    a.k.a “in an undisclosed location with the Ayatollah Khomeini"…

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  06/25  at  02:09 PM

  43. Do the ‘Visual Maps’ (at DiscoverTheNetworks.org) have the jitters on everyone’s computer, or is it another sign of my imminent mental breakdown?
    Michael, it’s true you are now one of 250, but you can still strive to get your photo on the index page, a true feather in any subversive’s cap.

    Posted by  on  06/25  at  05:17 PM

  44. If there were true equality in academia, 50% of the professors would be against internment of Japanese-Americans and 50% would be for it.  O the oppression.

    Of course, just by using the term “Japanese-American,” I have revealed myself as a Japanese separatist, now haven’t I?

    Posted by  on  06/25  at  06:39 PM

  45. and they’ve dropped the “forbiddingly clotted prose” bit, too.

    I think I’ll just privately award myself credit for that, based on my unwarranted assumption that they were shamed by my editorial comments above.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  06/26  at  05:17 PM

  46. I agree, Chris—and I agree with your edits, too.  But you know, I wasn’t even writing on Whitehead for a nonacademic publication.  That article first appeared in Science, Technology, and the Humanities in Recent American Fiction, edited by Peter Freese and Charles B. Harris, and published by Arbeiten zur Amerikanistik v. 35 (Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 2004).  I mean, if you can’t say “Weberian” to the Germans, to whom can you say it?

    Posted by  on  06/26  at  06:08 PM

  47. I mean, if you can’t say “Weberian” to the Germans, to whom can you say it?

    There’s always the Texans.

    Of course, they’ll think you’re talking about something into which you put lit charcoal.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  06/26  at  06:26 PM

  48. Um, OK, but I too was talking about something into which you put lit charcoal.  I was thinking of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of a Couple of Juicy Grilled Burgers.  I have to check the Works Cited for the exact reference, though.

    That leaves only “rationalized,” and the distinction between rationalization and routinization.  But there, the whole point—Whitehead’s, not mine—is that while the elevators enable the vertical growth of the metropolis, it’s the system of professional elevator inspection that makes it all work.  Thus (as I note in the essay), one character distinguishes the reliable elevators of the United States from those of “backward” places like the Ukraine, where “they might as well have their cabs hooked up to mules for all we know.”

    Posted by Michael  on  06/26  at  07:10 PM

  49. Not to be horribly pedantic, but “the Internet” started its twisted-pair life as “a network of networks” and depending how you define a network, that’s probably still the best physical description, not to mention the best logical description.  So I think 50% of the College Students can be forgiven, even applauded, for recognizing the essential plural nature of the Net.  cf Netizens by Michael Hauben and Ronda Hauben for some history of our beloved Internet.  Why, I ‘member when we didn’t even have an agreed-upon email syntax ...

    Posted by Marianne Mueller  on  06/26  at  08:28 PM

  50. That leaves only “rationalized,” and the distinction between rationalization and routinization.  But there, the whole point—Whitehead’s, not mine—is that while the elevators enable the vertical growth of the metropolis, it’s the system of professional elevator inspection that makes it all work. 

    Oh, that was entirely clear from the text. And it’s a wonderful point. My issue was the far more trivial one that using both “rationalized” and “routinized” seemed potentially redundant, in that both words imply that the inspection process went through a period of being deliberately thought out in advance, with standards set and procedures outlined.

    Faced with this puzzle, I took what is for me the rather unorthodox step of actually going to read the essay in question. And as it turns out, the passage actually reads:

    Rather, it’s his Weberian insight that the regime of modernity entails not only the elevators themselves but the rational, routinized means of their inspection and maintenance

    “Rational” and “routinized” pose no such redundancy problem, at least not to my mind. “Rational” is much broader, and “routinized” mrely serves to refine the intent of the writer. Editor’s verdict: STET.

    Editor’s additional verdict: the people in the Horowitz camp are too stupid to realize one can copy and paste from a PDF.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  06/26  at  08:52 PM

  51. You are so lucky.

    I discovered that Paul Robeson is listed. Of course there is no mention of how Robeson is undermining our war on terror today. 

    You have to wonder about this entire operation.  There is not a single mention that the obviously Commie-influence/pro-terrorist US Post Office has “honored” Robeson with a stamp!

    And, the US Post Office is not part of the network.

    Posted by  on  06/26  at  10:00 PM

  52. I had a crazy Creative Writing professor assign us an overnight reading of “The Intuitionist” and then planned a 10 minute discussion of it the next day in class with no follow-up assignment whatsoever.  If you slept in, you not only freed yourself of having to read the entire book overnight, but also avoided the dreaded unexcused absence.  I did the only rational thing, which, happily enough, also happened to be routine for me at the time.

    If I were to create a network of evil professors that needed to be discovered, that guy would be on it.

    Posted by  on  06/29  at  03:33 PM

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