Why Art?

Why study the arts? Some politicians ask the question as a joke, mocking this or that discipline as impractical. Those who defend the arts and humanities answer in economic terms, arguing for the rich and versatile skills one learns in the humanities classroom. I have made that economic case myself. As far as it goes, it is true. But it is not the only argument, and it does not go far enough.

We need the humanities because we are human. We need the arts because we are mortal. We need art and poetry because everyone we love will some day die.

We are human, and so we have problems that we cannot solve. That is not pessimism. Life is also full of beauty, wonder, and fulfillment. But even the best life includes the certainty of pain and loss. They are sure to come, and there is no "practical" solution for them.

Medicine can cure disease, it can ease suffering, it can extend life. It cannot banish death. Medicine does remarkable things, and I am grateful for it. But the larger problem remains.

Human ingenuity and practicality and industry can do wonders, and I am lucky for everything technology has done for me. But technology does not end the problems of the human spirit: loss and loneliness, wounded hearts and broken souls. We will never have a technological fix for these problems. There is not an app for that.

Right now, somewhere in California, some of the richest men alive are trying to find a technological solution to the problem of death. They have come to believe, or at least to hope, that money and technology will buy them immortality. What does this teach us? That people like Larry Ellison, Sergei Brin, and Peter Thiel, for all their fabulous wealth and admirable math skills, can be complete idiots. This problem is not to be solved in the way they hope. (The idea that immortality would come out of Silicon Valley, whose products are not built to last even a single decade, is hilarious.) The problem that they want to overcome is called "thermodynamics." It is part of the nature of all things. Silicon Valley's riches do not change that. They only fuel the hubris that lets billionaires mislead themselves.

None of us, personally or as a society, are ready to look straight ahead at problems like death, or to think about them too long. We have built marvelous toys to distract ourselves, like children putting off bedtime. The old folk saying about only using ten percent of our brainpower is not quite true; the truth is we use ninety percent of our brain power to trick ourselves out of dealing with the truths we can't face.

But we will all find ourselves, sooner or later, dealing with problems that money and technology cannot solve:

                   Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
                   mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
                   che la diritta via era smarrita.

                  (In the middle of our road of life,
                  I found myself in a darkened wood
                  Where the right path was lost.)

When that happens, and it will happen to all of us, we will be stuck with it. We will not be able to write a check. We will not be able to take a pill. We will not be able to ask Siri for the answers. The new car won't save us, because we'll already be off the road.

For these moments, humankind has invented the many arts and disciplines called "the humanities." Philosophy, art, literature, history, religion, theater. These disciplines do not solve the fundamental problems in the sense that those problems go away. No poem will keep you from dying. But all of these arts search for ways to deal with those problems, to come to grips with them honestly. Technology solves the problems that can be solved. Art faces the problems that cannot be solved.

Those problems do not go away. But the accumulated human wisdom of a few millennia does often help. Sometimes, what you need most is perspective, and sometimes, alas, there is nothing to give you but perspective. Philosophy, literature, and art are tools for broadening and deepening your perspective. You are a thinking soul in a difficult and transient material world. When there is nothing for you to do except to think, nothing you can change but your own thoughts, Tolstoy and Milton and Yeats are there to help.

And when all else fails, as eventually it must fail, the arts provide consolation. When the matter fails you, you will be forced to seek the comfort of self-deception or to reach for the hard-won consolation of difficult truths. For some, that consolation is philosophy, for others faith, for still others art. But I would humbly suggest that you rely on everything you can.

If nothing else, the arts and humanities give us something durable to think about in our fleeting, temporary world: things that, if not eternal exactly, are at least durable. When the world changes under your feet, the thought of something that came long before you and will remain long after you are gone is a kind of comfort. At least, it has been for me. And then I am like the poet Keats, who could no longer deceive himself about his death), looking at the ancient Greek pottery which would outlive him:

     When old age shall this generation waste,

                Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man ...

What else to say? We are flawed and human and fragile, and we need all the friends that we can get.

 

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Blogging Like Chaucer

cross-posted from Dagblog

I love academic bloggers. Academic bloggers worry me sick. And the bloggers who keep me up at night are the ones who have adjunct or alt-ac jobs but are trying to move to the tenure track. Some of those people are using blogs and social media to advance their careers in ingenious ways which I would never have foreseen. But others seem, at least from my vantage, to expect or hope that their online work will help their career in specific ways that it will not and cannot. Being online can help an academic career. But it's important to be clear about what it can help and what it can't.

Last week a blogger at Inside Higher Ed, a person who has a prominent and well-established online platform but teaches off the tenure track, wrote a post about her frustrations on the job market and her sense that no amount of professional achievement would be enough to get her a tenure-ladder job. There was a brief kerfuffle, with various unhelpful comments on her original post and one great and insightful response post by John Warner. But the issue I would like to highlight is that what she calls her "rather high-profile blog," a gig writing for Inside Higher Ed two or three times every week, did not tilt the job market in her favor. There, I think is the key lesson. Even blogging from terrific, high-profile platform was not enough.

[A few important caveats here: 1. The IHE blogger's larger point that in this market you can do everything right and still not get a job is absolutely true. There are far more qualified people than there are jobs, and so qualified people go without. Everything else I say should be read with that larger problem in mind. 2. I have no intention of commenting on the IHE blogger's specific case except for the fact that blogging seems not to have served her as a job credential. She's not asking my advice.]

But here's the big takeaway:

You can't blog your way to a tenure-track professorship.You simply can't. Even a gig at IHE or The Chronicle for Higher Education is not enough. That doesn't mean blogging is not professionally useful to you. It means you need to be clear about what it's useful for.

Blogging and other social media serve academics by bringing you to other people's attention and building your professional network. It works largely as publicity for your other work, and it widens your potential audience while strengthening your connections. (I, like many bloggers, mainly do this for non-professional reasons, but this is a fair assessment of blogging's professional benefits. And because academia is a small world, you can get most of those benefits even with a pseudonymous blog.) The most successful academic bloggers I can think of, such as Tenured Radical and Historiann, are productive bloggers who've built up a strong community of readers and commenters on one hand while also maintaining a steady output of strong scholarly writing on the other. Their blogging works as what military types call a "force multiplier" for their other work, making their scholarship more effective by drawing more audience attention to it.

What blogging never does is substitute for other academic writing. It doesn't get counted as scholarship. It does not serve as an employment credential. (If you wish to argue that it should, I can't help you. I'm interested in describing what is, not what ought to be. If you wish to argue that someday your blog will be recognized as cutting-edge scholarship, I would point out that "someday" will be too late.) This distinction doesn't pose a problem to science bloggers, or to most social scientists or historians, where the difference between a journal article and a blog essay is usually self-evident. But it can be tricky for people who work in literature or cultural studies, who can be tempted to blur the distinction between writing scholarship about new media and doing other writing on new media platforms.

Blogging functions for today's academics much the way that poetry functioned for poets like Chaucer or Spenser, which is to say that you can't actually make a living at it but it can help you make connections for other jobs. Chaucer's poetry only served him economically or professionally by building his reputation at court while he looked for various civil-service gigs. Writing The Canterbury Tales was a good way to get a customs or weights-and-measures gig. Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar led him to a career as personal secretary to important noblemen. Making a living off the books themselves was out of the question for both men. Poetry might have been their true vocation, but it wasn't their actual career. It was simply grease for their career. If you are an academic blogger, the same is true of your blog. You write it for personal satisfaction and to express various interests and for the pure joy of making something. The exposure it brings might also help your career. But it won't be the main driver of your career. The exposure only helps if you have other credentials to bring to the table.

Consider, for example, the Chaucer blogger himself, who writes "Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog," and tweets as "LeVostreGC." He's an inventive, sophisticated, and hilarious user of social media who also holds down a junior-professor job as a medievalist. He's even published a selection from his blog as a book. But that book isn't going to be his main source of income. It didn't get him his job, and it won't get him tenure. What is has gotten him is attention from other literary scholars, whom he has impressed and made laugh. (He is very, very funny.) And people in our strange little profession know who he is, sooner than they likely would have otherwise. So being Chaucer the blogger is a bit like being Geoffrey Chaucer the Ricardian poet: it's not a living, but it does help you in your day job.

For an academic, blogging is the writing you do to get attention for your other writing. Blogging, even with my open-secret secret-identity, means that I'm more likely to be on some people's minds, and that they're more likely to come to one of my conference papers, glance at one of my articles if they see my byline, or read a review of my book. And I have professional friendships that are largely kept up through the blog and other social media. Blogging helps to get and keep you on people's radar. It's a good thing to do. But it only serves to assist your other work.

Not the Real Shakespeare

Flavia has a post that makes me laugh. She recently went to see a Shakespeare comedy produced by a regional theater company, who staged it in modern dress, worked to keep the piece "accessible and appealing," and used some good, old-fashioned slapstick. In short, the production was straight out of the standard Shakespearean-performance playbook: faithful to the text but using costumes and set as an interpretive gloss. At the end of the evening Flavia overheard a number of other playgoers who had enjoyed themselves enormously but were under the impression that they'd seen an adaptation, rather than Shakespeare's play. After all, how could it be the "Real Shakespeare" if it's accessible and fun?

I've run into this many times over the years with modern-dress Shakespeare, which some people view as Not Shakespeare even when the language is unchanged and the story choices are enormously traditional. What I enjoy best about this misapprehension is the how people feel free to respond honestly to the play when they don't think it's Shakespeare's original, and become willing to talk about the parts they dislike. This can be especially hilarious when it comes from professional reviewers who haven't read the play for a long time. My favorite in that genre came from a reviewer who was absolutely furious that a director at the Goodman in Chicago had "added" a scene full of wise-cracking musicians to Romeo and Juliet, especially when it was "added" at such an inappropriate moment, just after Juliet has taken the potion that fakes her death! What was the director thinking? The answer, of course, can be found in any edition of the play, because it wasn't the director's addition: a glance at, say, a Pelican paperback of R&J would have cleared it up.

Years ago, after the credits for Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet had finished crawling by, one of the friends I'd seen it with stood up in disgust. "I really hated what they did to Juliet's family," she said. "They're so much worse than Romeo's family."

"But that's how it is in the play," I said.

"That much worse?" my friend replied.

The answer, although I didn't voice it, is "yeah." Romeo's mother is barely in the play, with fewer lines than it takes Mercutio to clear his throat. And since Romeo's parents never actually come face to face with their son, they don't get the kind of quality time that the Capulets spend forcing their daughter into an arranged marriage and threatening her with beatings. But the point isn't whether my friend was right or wrong; it's that she only felt free to express herself when she thought the storytelling choices belonged to someone else. My friend thought that Shakespeare's development of those characters was lame, and maybe she's right. But it was only okay to say it when she had someone else to blame.

The Real Shakespeare turns out to be an extraordinarily slippery cat. When something in his scripts rubs the audience the wrong way, somebody must have changed things without permission, because the Real Shakespeare never makes mistakes. (The actors have screwed it up again!) But on the other hand, if you enjoy yourself too much in the audience, like Flavia's new friends did, that can't be the Real Shakespeare either. How could the Greatest Poet Ever be so damned silly? I guess the obvious conclusion is that the Real Shakespeare was artistically infallible, but also sucked. It's up to those rascally actors to spoil everything, and play his comedies for laughs.