The Little Professor

A new obstacle for biographers?

Terry Teachout calls our attention to this astonishing example of a biographical subject's heirs taking their objections to new heights.  According to the author, Deirdre Bair:

This is a chilling moment in the annals of Jungian scholarship. The heirs of C.G. Jung, led by their spokesperson Ulrich Hoerni, have raised objections concerning the alleged invasion of their privacy that, due to German law, has forced Knaus Verlag [the publishers of the German edition of Jung: A Biography] to include their opinions of Jung's life and work within the pages of my book. These will appear as annotations to my extensive notes that follow the text. This unprecedented invasion of my book by the Jung heirs is an appalling act and is happening against my will.

Comic relief

A visit to Southern California wouldn't be complete without self-torture by real estate.  I've seen two-bedroom, one-bath houses advertised at over $800K.  How about one-bedroom condos for $300K? Or maybe that "starter home" for $500K?  Let's not forget the studio for $200K.*  Oi.   "I'm never, nevvverrr going to be able to move back to California," I wail.  ("Not unless we give you a house," my mother comments.  "We don't have a house to give her," my father points out.  "Right.  You're not coming back to California.")  Yes, in upstate NY, we've got $800K houses--it's just that they're 4000 sq. ft. mansions on 6 acres with horse barns and an in-ground pool.  Even a $200K house is one serious chunk of real estate.  My own house would easily bring over $500K in CA (more if I managed to miraculously transplant the .29 acre lot along with it); the price I paid for it wouldn't even buy a semi-collapsed garage out here.

While I agree that I, as a singleton, enjoy considerably more mobility than the average academic couple, there's one catch: mobile in what direction, exactly? Given average salaries for bottom-rung associate professors, I couldn't afford to buy a house in any major city--or, indeed, many minor cities. For that matter, I couldn't afford to buy a condo in many major cities; Chicago is one of the few cities that the books** and I could probably swing (she says, looking wistfully in Chicago's direction).  Heck, there are cities where even renting would be out of the question.  I mention this because Chris Barnett's recent column about money presumed families, and while singletons vs. couples sniping is one of those things up with which I will not put, I think it's important to remember that a single academic's mobility is a slightly illusory phenomenon.***  It's not as though the landlord will cut the rent in half, let alone the mortgage company. 

*--I know, from personal experience, that it's possible to fit 3,000 books into a studio apartment.  Of course, it takes all available wall space, the closets, and a bunch of bookcases in the middle of the floor, but it can be done.  5,000 books, though, stretches the available space a bit, although I suppose it could be done if I built library stacks and eliminated all furniture except for a futon.  Still, now that I'm almost 34, I fear that I've become too accustomed to niceties like sofas and chairs to make this a viable option. 

**--I've suggested to the books that they might consider paying part of the mortgage--which would be only fair, since I bought the house for them--but they've remained strangely silent on the matter. 

***--Bitch Ph.D., by contrast, noted the problem. 

Scottish play

We went to the San Diego Old Globe on Saturday to see Macbeth.  (For some reason, the Shakespeare Festival productions play in the outdoor theater instead of in the Globe.  Brrrr.)  Afterwards, we couldn't help wondering if the scene with Banquo's ghost was normally played for laughs--not the ghost itself, that is (the effect, while simple, was quite eerie), but Lady Macbeth's attempts to explain her husband's mental derangement.  Thomas DeQuincey famously suggested why it was important to follow the murders with the Porter's appearance, but I'm not sure that there's an equally good dramatic reason to interlock horror and comedy during the banquet scene. 

Still, it was a strong production overall, with genuinely creepy witches and a powerful Lady Macbeth (extremely effective in the sleepwalking scene).  Macbeth himself sometimes betrayed a tendency to gabble his speeches, but he did well at conveying Macbeth's collapse into the madness of sin.  The only downside was the curse of the Scottish play, which manifested itself when I woke up the next morning with a code in my node.   

Social phenomena left unexplained by one's doctoral training, #2934

The Little Professor does not have a cell phone.  If the Little Professor ever does have a cell phone, she will not--repeat, not--hold lengthy discussions about her amours while answering the call of nature in a public lavatory. 

"My life is in the toilet," indeed. 

The Italian Secretary

A mass influx of novels devoted to Henry James is news.  A mass influx of Sherlock Holmes pastiches, on the other hand, is rarely news; novels and short stories in this subgenre are rarely heralded with ticker tape parades.  Nevertheless, numerous eyebrows have been raised by the appearance of three pastiches from well-known authors and higher-brow publishers.  Michael Chabon and Mitch Cullin use Holmes as a means to a historical end, but in The Italian Secretary, Caleb Carr sticks to the basics: Holmes, Watson, and game afoot.  (Yes, Carr's Holmes does say "the game's afoot!") 

The eponymous Italian secretary is David Rizzio, and the main action involves the cult of Mary, Queen of Scots.  Mycroft Holmes fears that a number of assassination attempts on Queen Victoria may be (gasp) part of a larger plot, spearheaded by German operatives.  The suspicious deaths of two Scots at Holyroodhouse raise the possibility that a (gulp) ghost may be involved--possibly Rizzio's ghost, out for revenge.  Holmes and Watson set out to investigate the links between the assassination plot and the Holyroodhouse deaths, and discover betrayed maidens, goshawks, trebuchets, and tourist traps.

Pastiches are rarely a satisfactory business, and Sherlock Holmes pastiches are no exceptions to the rule.  Doyle was by no means the world's greatest prose stylist, but Holmes and Watson are nevertheless marvelous characters--and they're Doyle's characters.    Moreover, while I think that Steven Dutch is a wee bit tone-deaf when it comes to Holmes' appeal, he's basically right about what he calls the stories' "essentially mystical view of the scientific method, where intuitive methods are infallible and never need correction"*; pastiche-writers often apply Ronald Knox's Ten Commandments of Detection (1928), which don't mesh at all well with what Doyle usually did.  (It's occasionally possible to figure out a mystery before Holmes explains it, but not all that often--especially since Doyle doesn't always reveal the necessary information before Holmes pulls the solution out of a hat.)  Throw in the ever-present danger of imitating late-Victorian prose style, the ongoing (and incorrect) assumption that Watson has about as many brains as the Scarecrow, and the temptation of quoting from Doyle himself, and you've got a recipe for disappearing over the literary Reichenbach Falls.  The writers who have managed to save themselves from death by Doyle have generally resorted either to outlandishness, as in the story featuring an android Holmes and a cloned Watson, or humor, as in Stephen King's engaging "The Doctor's Case." 

Carr tries to play things a bit more straight.  On the bright side, his Watson is actually a pretty intelligent guy; even better, the faux-Victorian prose is, if not brilliant, at least not actively obnoxious.  And the novel moves along at a reasonably fast clip (I finished it in the midst of various lines at the King Tut exhibit).  Unfortunately, though, there are a number of glaring flaws, many of them relating to the historical scaffolding.  To begin with, Carr has to assume that we don't know anything about Mary, Queen of Scots; alas, to remedy the situation, he has Holmes clumsily retell the story to Watson.  Cue reader: "Surely Watson knows this already?" Carr does try to work up a sense of history's emotional effect, as well as a (very) loose connection between the innocent Queen Mary and the innocent Queen Victoria, which suggests a possibly more ambitious fiction--Victorian fictional cult figures investigating Renaissance historical cult figures--but, in the end, the Renaissance and Victorian elements fail to mesh.  (Readers up on Carr's recent writings on terrorism may wonder, however, if there's some allegorizing going on when it comes to the workings [or not] of Victoria's intelligence agents.)

There are some other awkward points.  The plot occasionally has moments drawn from bad cop dramas, like this one:

And there, standing in the hallway, was [X], his height and strength never so apparent.

"Holmes!" I cried, lunging toward the bed and securing the Palm protector that lay under one of the pillows; but Holmes only placed himself squarely in my line of fire.  "Damn it, man!" I urged.  "Move, I've no clear shot at him!" (176)

Cue reader: "Er, Watson, old man? I'm guessing that Holmes doesn't want you to shoot this chap." Clunky moments like that aside, the real villain is too obvious, and Mycroft Holmes is too much of a buffoon.  Moreover, the plot is a bit stop-and-go, especially given one extremely large and extremely red herring.  And the gory conclusion to the Holyroodhouse murders would have worked better if Carr had been more consistent in his use of the Gothic; as it stands, the final deaths don't quite seem to me to fit in the book.  Carr's name on the cover aside, this is neither better nor worse than most pastiches of this ilk. 

*--I've always thought that Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse was a Sherlock Holmes parody, intentional or otherwise; he tends to come up with incredible hypotheses, almost all of which prove to be spectacularly incorrect. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Emma Lazarus, Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems and Other Writings, ed. Gregory Eiselein (Broadview, 2002). Anthology devoted to the famous nineteenth-century American Jewish poet and critic, author of this prominently located poem. More on Lazarus at the Jewish Women's Archive.

• John Banville, Mefisto (Godine, 1999). Contemporary take on the Faust legend. (Not to be confused with Klaus Mann's fine Mephisto.)

• Madison Smartt Bell, Doctor Sleep (Grove, 2003). Insomniac hypnotherapist as detective.

• Penelope Lively, City of the Mind(Grove, 2003). An architect deals with life and London.

• Rick Moody, Demonology (Faber & Faber, 2000). Short stories.

• Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters (Everyman, 1993). Aristocratic Japanese family desperately tries to marry off one of four sisters.

• Wendy S. Jones, Consensual Fictions: Women, Liberalism, and the Novel (Toronto, 2005). Political theory, marriage, and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel. (I'm reviewing it for Choice.)

Making nice

As I read Mary McKinney's column at Inside Higher Ed, I couldn't help feeling more than a bit ambivalent. On the one hand, McKinney is correct: most departments could do more with people willing to repress their primal urge to whine and less with people who can't tell the difference between a colleague and a verbal punching bag. On the other hand, accusations of uncollegial behavior can be convenient shorthand for "I'm not comfortable with your sex/politics/religion/whatever" (see the CoHE). To make matters more confusing, some campuses write collegiality into the requirements for tenure; others omit it altogether (and, therefore, should not be able to cite it as a reason to deny tenure). 

I don't know if academics are all loners at heart, but a number of us confuse two very different things:

1.  Our expectation that we will be assessed on the basis of our professional expertise, not on our social failings.  We're academics.  We like books.  Quite a few of us, I suspect, like books more than we like people.  This state of mind can generate a certain cluelessness when it comes to social interaction.  Of course, some academics would be annoying if they were working at McDonald's.  Nevertheless, once we've been hired--a process that includes evaluating the likelihood that current department members may want to permanently lock a potential new colleague in the broom closet--we rightly expect that we'll be evaluated for our scholarship, teaching, and service, not on our ability to play well with others (unless, of course, we've been informed otherwise in our contracts).

2.  Everybody else's expectation that colleagues who behave obnoxiously will be treated like obnoxious colleagues.  If you behave badly in department meetings, assault people in the halls, and blog about colleagues you dislike without removing all the identifying markers, then--newsflash!--people will not be nice to you.  Moreover, they are perfectly within their rights not to be nice to you, because you've demonstrated that you're not a very nice person.  (Some colleagues may be more charitable than others.)  And they are also within their rights to deny you goodies that require being, if not nice, then at least tactful.  For some reason, there are academics who seem incapable of realizing that working with the same group of people over a period of decades may require some modicum of self-restraint. 

In other words, I think that we should avoid anything so amorphous as "collegiality" when it comes to tenure decisions--but I also have little patience for those who expect deferential (or even friendly) treatment when they've done nothing but make themselves unpleasant.   

I don't understand...

One of the more annoying sentences in online discussion: "I don't understand why anybody reads this woman/guy/alien from Planet Xyyyrzh."  It's hardly an inexplicable sentiment, but it usually says far more about the irritated reader than the supposedly overrated writer--especially when the writer has a massive following.  Surely it's more productive to figure out why the alien from Planet Xyyyrzh attracts readers than it is to shut down the conversation altogether?

Anthologize me

I'm very fond of the remainders shelves, which always conceal unanticipated goodies somewhere among the piles of cheap Gramercy reprints and omnibus editions of Dickens' novels.  I'm not so fond of going-out-of-business sales, since I'm a firm believer in bookstores remaining in business--especially when the sort-of dearly departed bookstore was the only one in the local mall.  In any event, the former and the latter recently yielded a couple of anthologies devoted to things mysterious...

1.  Martin Edwards, ed., Mysterious Pleasures: A Celebration of the Crime Writers' Association's 50th Anniversary (Little, Brown, 2003).  This anthology combines older stories by authors mostly now-deceased with new work from popular contemporary authors, many of them British.  By and large, the stories are well-executed traditional puzzlers.  While Margery Allingham's "One Morning They'll Hang Him" failed to reconcile me to Albert Campion--one of the more annoying examples of detective-as-twit--there were some very good entries from authors I haven't been impressed with in the past: Dick Francis' "The Gift," in which a racing correspondent on the skids finds himself privy to a secret that could redeem his career; Val McDermid's "Consolation Blonde," an example of that anti-Mary Sue subsubgenre, "the horrors of the publishing industry"; and Ed McBain's "The Interview," featuring a director who takes auteurism to new heights.  The funniest story is Lindsey Davis' "Something Spooky on Geophys," which somehow manages to combine ghosts, a satire on celebrity culture, archaeology, and a remarkably out-of-place Marcus Didius Falco; Reginald Hill's "The Game of Dog" runs a close second, with its goofy and elaborate solution to the crime (even Peter Pascoe has to admit that Andrew Dalziel won't buy it), but Hill is at the head of the pack when it comes to turning a phrase.  Colin Dexter's "The Double Crossing" is an amusing bit of metafiction.  While the other stories in the collection are not as memorable, there are no real disasters.  Overall, this is a well-edited effort, offering stories far more consistent in quality than I've come to expect in such anthologies.

2.  Ed McBain, ed., Transgressions (Forge, 2005).  This book certainly looks slick, with its minimalist police-tape color scheme and silver lettering.  Unfortunately, the contents fail to live up to the cover design.  The brilliant idea behind this collection: get several famous authors to write original novellas on matters mysterious or horrific.  Yet most of the contributors handle the novella form clumsily--including the ones who have written novellas before.  The resulting tales veer awkwardly between two extremes: overstuffed short stories and half-baked novels.  Only Walter Mosley's vertiginous Archibald Lawless, Anarchist at Large: Walking the Line, featuring a young collegian who encounters all sorts of baffling characters in his new job, truly escapes the curse.  Of the other novellas, the least redeemable effort is Anne Perry's Hostages, which ornaments a predictable tale of the Irish Troubles with equally predictable dollops of female self-empowerment (to which I obviously have no objection, but one shouldn't see it coming from the very first paragraph) and banal reflections on religious conflict ("They created God in their own image: vengeful, partisan, too small of mind to love everyone, incapable of accepting differences" [99]).  Joyce Carol Oates' "The Corn Maiden," which is Oates in her Gothic/sadistic/torture-of-the-innocents mode, falls into the half-baked novel category: she doesn't really develop the youthful evildoer, Jude, and her various ruminations on abandoned children and group hysteria never gel.   In the overstuffed short story category, John Farris' "The Ransome Women" stretches a predictable plotline about the mysterious mutilations suffered by a painter's models well beyond the breaking point; it's a horror story in the Many Characters Behaving Utterly Idiotically mode.  (I had to sympathize with the detectives who, late in the story, bluntly inform one of the protagonists that "we can smell a crock of shit when it's right under our noses" [585]).  Sharyn McCrumb's historical "The Resurrection Man," based on a real slave who was purchased to steal bodies for medical students to dissect, starts off evocatively but winds up wandering off aimlessly.  It's a good idea, but McCrumb doesn't seem to have known where to take it.  Stephen King's "The Things They Left Behind" and Lawrence Block's "Keller's Adjustment" are at least reasonably engaging, reasonably inoffensive (from an aesthetic standpoint) stories about life after 9-11.  Not a resounding success, to say the least. 

So how did everybody else do?

What Now? wants to know if "you tell the class that they collectively earned 5 As, 12 Bs, 1 D, etc[.]"   To which my scintillating answer is: sometimes. I'm more likely to spend time discussing what was done well and what needed improvement; this seems more helpful than a list of grades, which focuses the students' attention on the least important element of the instructor's feedback. I've occasionally posted the overall list of grades for final exams and the course itself, usually with some general notes about any trends I noted in the exams/papers/whatnot.