Article: 654 of alt.etext Path: news.cic.net!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!usc!nic-nac.CSU.net!charnel.ecst.csuchico.edu!olivea!decwrl!get.hooked.net!news.sprintlink.net!redstone.interpath.net!mercury.interpath.net!not-for-mail From: ctporter@mercury.interpath.net (Chris Porter) Newsgroups: alt.etext,alt.zines,rec.arts.books Subject: (news)letter 1:16 Date: 25 May 1994 14:44:34 -0400 Organization: Interpath -- Public Access UNIX for North Carolina Lines: 318 Message-ID: <2s06ai$l9e@mercury.interpath.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: mercury.interpath.net Xref: news.cic.net alt.etext:654 alt.zines:3819 rec.arts.books:95992 (news)letter "Say the thing with which you labor." Thoreau from the porter micro.press Volume 1, Number 16 May 24, 1994 _________________________________________________________________ Please send suggestions and submissions. To get on the mailing list, send your name and address to: CTPorter 117-A S. Mendenhall St. Greensboro, NC 27403 or e-mail ctporter@mercury.interpath.net Your input is appreciated. An article in today's Greensboro News and Fishwrap (er, I mean "Record") publicizes the plight of one of UNCG's assistant professors, Patricia Roberts. Dr. Roberts has been refused tenure because she has not published a book-length manuscript in her six years here, though she did receive high marks for her teaching abilities and her work with the English Department's Composition Program. She insists that she was told by various heads of the English Department that a candidate need only have a book-length manuscript to show, and that said manuscript need not necessarily be published. Regardless of what she was told, her experience boils down to the basic dictum that if you don't publish on that level then you will surely perish, your teaching record and civic accomplishments be damned. She is a first-rate teacher who gave a large portion of her time to create a strong composition program that helps all students, not just English majors, and UNCG has effectively told its community that such accomplishments do not matter. This after the president of the college system of which UNCG is a part sent a memo to all of the member schools urging them to begin to place more emphasis on the teaching record in tenure matters. This is an old debate and it becomes clear that UNCG would rather have more words published than to have a teacher improve a student's communication skills and thinking ability. There are too many words published these days anyway. I receive the Publication of the Modern Language Association (PMLA) and they have articles such as "Semiotizing the Sphere: Organicist Theory in Lotman, Bakhtin, and Vernadsky," which are, as a rule, incomprehensible to me. I haven't read one complete article in the four years I've received it. I haven't read UNCG's tenure guidelines but I would assume that they are vague enough to allow for individual consideration of a person's accomplishments, though that process failed this teacher. Like it or not she's gone, headed to the University of Missouri. The loss of the UNCG community is Missouri's gain. It's long past the time that schools such as UNCG quit regarding themselves as factories concerned only with numbers of graduates and start realizing that they provide services to their students. Many teachers don't have time for a student when that student attends classes, but the administration will certainly fill up the graduate's mailbox with pleas for money. UNCG has shown, once again, the side they have staked out in the "quality vs. quantity" debate. More Woofies I've heard people who either don't care for Hudsucker Proxy, or who, like me, loved it. Tim Robbins (Norville Barnes), Paul Newman (Sid Mussburg) and Jennifer Jason Leigh (Amy Archer) were all brilliant. The whole movie was a satire of the film noir style and one element in particular that I loved was the dialogue, especially in the newsroom with the editor and all of the reporters: it was rapid fire the whole way and I wondered just how did these people learn to speak so fast? The story takes place in 1958, Norville Barnes is a graduate fresh out of Muncie Business School, newly-arrived at the big city looking for work and he gets a break working in the mail room at the Hudsucker Company. Meanwhile, forty-four floors above (or is it forty-five?), the president of the company, Waring Hudsucker, takes a swan dive out the window during a board meeting when it's revealed that the company is doing so well that there's nowhere else to go but down. According to his will, as revealed by the evil vice president Mussburg, all of the president's stock is to be offered to the public the next January 1st. The members of the board decide that they will drive the price of the stock down so that they can buy it all up. In order to accomplish this they will hire some moron to be the new president, thereby driving down public confidence in the company as well as the stock prices. New boy Norville, down in the mail room, is unable to escape the "blue letter" that must be delivered to Mussburg personally, "no secretaries, no messengers, no nothing." It becomes obvious to Mussburg upon meeting him that Norville lives up to his idea of the total moron (and what a great scene that was, Norville vs. the Flaming Trash Can) and so Norville becomes president. From there the story moves on, somewhat typically, as Norville is made responsible for the decline of the company, but it all turns out aright in the end. It was a quality movie, everyone did well, and it was especially funny in the little details, like the constant tick- tick-ticking of various instruments (like the old-fashioned stock market ticker tapes), and the cast of bit characters who looked so perfectly odd and at home with the movie's bizarre atmosphere. I also saw the movie Maverick and the first thing that needs be said is that this is only brain candy. There's little cinematic value beyond watching Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster and James Garner strut their stuff with a mundane script. It just so happens that I like all three and the movie had some good laughs so I count it a success. Mel Gibson is the Maverick, a card shark who must collect a few thousand dollars as the entrance fee for a poker championship. Along the way he meets a thief (Foster) and an ex- sheriff (Garner) and their travails disrupt every Western cliche in the book. There's a surprise ending and of course plenty of strings left undone in there to ensure a couple of sequels. I've read several reviews that give it low marks, but the reviewers seem to ignore the only real reason to go to this movie. It's not Citizen Kane, but then it doesn't pretend to be either. How to the Singer Comes the Song? The late Bruce Chatwin wrote of Australian aborigines and the nomadic life in Songlines. I always enjoyed Chatwin's work because he struck me as the old-style, intrepid English traveler who might not fit in everywhere he finds himself but who always made the most of it in a "good-sport" kind of way. Chatwin explores in this book the native songlines, ancestral narratives encased within song by which an aborigine might find his way in the back country. Regardless of the words, it seems the melodic contour of the song describes the nature of the land over which the song passes. So, if the Lizard Man were dragging his heels across the salt pans of Lake Eyre, you could expect a succession of long flats, like Chopin's 'Funeral March.' If he were skipping up and down the MacDonnell escarpments, you'd have a series of arpeggios and glissandos, like Liszt's 'Hungarian Rhapsodies.' Certain phrases, certain combinations of musical notes, are thought to describe the action of the Ancestor's feet. . . . An expert songman, by listening to their order of succession, would count how many times his hero crossed a river, or scaled a ridge -- and be able to calculate where, and how far along, a Songline he was. 'He'd be able,' said Arkady, 'to hear a few bars and say "This is Middle Bore" or "That is Oodnadata" -- where the Ancestor did X or Y or Z.' 'So a musical phrase,' I said, 'is a map reference?' 'Music,' said Arkady, 'is a memory bank for finding ones' way about the world.' (108) Chatwin was a Renaissance man, ready to contribute to any discussion, be it on Russia, nomads, instinctive behavior or the fossils of Australopithecus. This book is a combination study: the framework of the Aborigines provides a forum for notes on nomads in general, and it concludes with an incident that speaks both to the skill of the native and "progress." An aborigine, upon hearing that some kin are congregating at the home of the ancestors to die, asks for a ride to the ancestral home. He accompanies Chatwin and friends in a jeep, and once they cross a certain river, the aborigine breaks into song, to himself, but Chatwin can tell that he has to speed-sing the song because the Jeep goes too fast. And though the native had never been there, he leads the men right to the correct spot with help from his song. Farmer Gonzo I absolutely devoured T. Coraghessan Boyle's Budding Prospects: A Pastoral. It's been ages since a book has made me laugh so much. He reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson in the days before he became a parody of himself, and in fact this book could well be considered a Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for the early 1980s (it was published in 1984). The narrator is a malcontent approached with an offer he cannot refuse. Some rich friends are willing to back him with the supplies and capitol to grow marijuana on an isolated piece of property north of San Francisco. All the hero has to do is to find some friends to help him with the labor, and come harvest time he will be $500,000 richer. Of course things don't work out quite so ideally given the vagaries of friends, weather, and the community, and by the end he will be lucky to collect one red penny for his nine months of hell. Budding Prospects is not just funny in an illicit, underground way: Boyle always has in mind the larger literary tradition and tells his story well. I particularly enjoy his style of breaking up the narrative continuity: instead of saying A + B = C, he will write about B, then introduce C, mention the addition of A, and with all of those details the reader realizes the "equals", and the whole equation becomes clear. From the Foreign Affairs Desk We've entered into a new stage in our relations with Haiti: a new embargo and a rented cruise ship steaming circles out in the ocean on which to interview the status of the Haitian refugees. I can't help thinking that we're trying to solve a contemporary problem with nineteenth-century tactics. The problem is that we don't like the Haitian government and want to reinstall the democratically-elected president. I think it's been adequately documented that blockades and embargoes hurt the lower classes, the poor, those who are usually of a mind to be against the government. Isn't it about time that we found a more effective way to achieve our ends, a way that would not damage a country's infrastructure, a way that would punish only those in power? It's time new thinking was brought to world problems, thinking that would take into account twenty-first-century technologies and goals. And while acting the diplomat, more about Rwanda: so many bodies have floated down the river that people in Uganda are warned not to eat the fish they catch from Lake Victoria (or is it Lake Edward -- there's a big difference). An estimated 40,000 bodies have floated their way to the lake from Rwanda. What's to be done, if anything, for that poor country? This is what they ought to do: have each side pick a hero, the best fighter from each camp, and have it out one-on-one. The Fox channel could buy the rights, televise this modern man-to-man combat, fifteen three-minute rounds, with the winner's side gaining the upper hand in the peace negotiations that would immediately follow in Swaziland. It's Okay to Be Single, Really I have regained my enthusiasm for reading, and it started early in the week with Phillip Lopate's collection of essays on Bachelorhood. Lopate has an interest in the personal essay, and in this book he puts a lot of himself on the table, for public view. We might not always like the picture that he presents -- who can applaud his motives with the ladies? -- but the reader has to admit that that's the way some things are in life, none of us is perfect. It's not a politically correct book, women might despise the guy on reading it, but it's a portrait of a lifestyle with the resulting drawbacks and advantages. The essays are divided into four parts, and personally I think the first part, on "women and love" is the best, most inspired writing. The first essay, "My Drawer," starts the book off right, an analysis of objects found in his dresser draw, an accumulation of miscellaneous pieces which say much about his life. Prankster Redux In the latest edition of Paris Review is an interview with Ken Kesey ("The Art of Fiction CXXVI," 58-94). The more I read of Kesey the more I come to like him and respect his work. I used to believe that he was a partier who happened to write, but I now insist that he is an artist that parties. He has very strong ideas about the job of the writer ("to kiss no ass, no matter how big and holy"), his art (he is currently on tour reading his children's books and performing a newly-written play), and life as well. We must all be put face-to-face with our own private terrors (the "hollow"), our faith must be tested and while confronted with our sins, our wrongs, all the times we've been mean and rude and hurtful, we must crawl back from that pit and reassume our sanity. We are driven to the pit but only by our mettle can we come away with it. His art is an exploration of that hollow and he considers those writers admirable who are able to come back with renewed faith, like William Burroughs and Wallace Stevens. It's quite a view of life, and ultimately an optimistic one. It's so easy to wallow in the pit and the amazing thing is that more people don't just lay down and give up. Quite a personality, that Kesey, and always instructive to encounter him, in whatever form his art takes. RIP, Jackie O I've never known of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis except as Jackie O. She always seemed as if she were a lady too elegant for America -- what did we do to deserve her example? She dulled her gleam a bit when she moved from Camelot to Onassis, but she came out of it still Jackie. Now the eternal flame is not just Jack's, but Jack and Jackie's, as it should be. Quote of the Week Ken Kesey, asked to tell the biggest lesson he learned under Wallace Stegner while attending the Stanford Creative Writing Program, said that lesson was to respect other writers' feelings. If writing is going to have any effect on people morally, it ought to affect the writer morally. It is important to support everyone who tries to write because their victories are your victories. (61) This goes for other professions as well. That's one reason why I get so angry at stories like that of Patricia Roberts. As a teacher-wannabe, it makes no sense to me that publishing alone should dictate the course of a professor's career. There has to be a happier medium found between teaching and publishing, and all teachers should support Dr. Roberts even if they publish constantly. Someone's got to teach.