The Tropes of Tenth Street

Garcia Marquez conference at the New School

2017-09-06T07:45:00.001-07:00

Mary McCarthy's review of the Handmaid's Tale

2017-09-06T04:55:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/03/26/specials/mccarthy-atwood.html amazing how unperceptive Mary McCarthy's review of The Handmaid's Tale was. I think there are three reasons for this: 1) she was too old to see the Right as a real threat; to her they were bumpkins and yahoos who might temporarily attain power but could not alter the course of history; also, she could not see how the new Right was more like the totalitarian Left in the way it looked at things. 2) she was just too insulated from the life of her time; she could disdain credit cards because she never had to pay for something she couldn't immediately afford, which was not true of most Americans in 1986 3) she was determined to be 'tough' and to not particularly read or write 'as a woman' which I think hurt her in reading Atwood's novel.

The Dear Illusive Dream: Jennifer Firestone’s Gates & Fields

2017-08-22T09:32:00.002-07:00

The Dear Illusive Dream: Jennifer Firestone’s Gates & Fields

By Nicholas Birns

In its oracular tone, sparsity yet pertinacity of diction, and gnomic emotionalism about experience, Jennifer Firestone’s Gates & Fields (published by Belladonna and featuring a ravishingly arxhaic book design) recalls Emily Dickinson. It is one of many instances where contemporary American women poets are using Dickinson as a source for a poetic at once experimental and felt. Yet this relation is made less homey and ancestry than might seem because of Dickinson’s pessimism and her own poetry’s resistance to being thematized:

Heaven is so far of the mind

That was the mind dissolved

The site of it—by architect—

Could not again be proved

What cannot be articulated is so unable to be formulated that we cannot even discern its frame; and thus not just Dickinson’s incantatory austerity but an underlying elusiveness is there in Firestone’s work as well as generational peers of hers such as Katy Lederer and Lisa Jarnot.

But, on this particular day that I sat down to write this post, the anterior American female poet in my mind was not Dickinson, but an even earlier figure, Annis Boudinot Stockton, who may well be to the late eighteenth century what Dickinson was to the mid-nineteenth or Anne Bradstreet was to the seventeenth:

And is it thus the dear illusive dream

Of social bliss and happiness serene

Must vanish quite—dissolved in empty air

And leave my heart a prey to pangs severe….

Importantly, Stockton is not just writing an elegy for another woman, Ann Meredith Hill, itself rare at a time when the elegy form was dominated by young men mourning their young male peers—Edward King; Keats; Hallam—but an elegy for Mrs. Hill spoken in the voice of her sister, Mrs. Clymer. Stockton, like Dickinson, is always personal, yet not always autobiographical. This totally fortuitous juxtaposition enhanced my sense of the dramatic tectonics of Firestone’s book, in which so often a female persona is evoked, who is observed or watched or commented upon a first-person plural chorus:

As in yesteryears days seemed long

A ball upon her very neck

We were there saying come what you are

We were there saying

The ‘we’ could be the mourners, and the ‘her’ the mourned object; but the “her” could just as well be the speaker of the poems, and the “we” the audience. This indeterminacy about who is speaking and who is echoing, who is acting and who is contemplating:

She authenticates herself unknowingly

She has laid her vision bare

We collaborate our chorusing

She has laid her vision bare

There is also a constant alteration between past and present tense, which further ramifies the state of the action: at one minute we are face to face with the “she,”, or, alternately, the speaker is face to face with the observed or mourned object; at another, we are commenting, or the speaker is noting, a recorded past, perhaps more a near past than a deep past, but a time sufficiently lapsed so as to have its consequences recognized.

Yes you just say it She is just one body Hardly there.

We can say field and feel it because we did not designate

The sky turned pages and the language rained. We do not hesitate.

We did not designate, but do not hesitate. Why is one verb in the past, and one the present? Does it have something to do with the "she” being incarnate and yet also evanescent? Yet the non-designation is presented as enabling: because we did not designate the field we can say the word ‘field’ and feel it, entering into a surreal release of signification where we do not hesitate. Breakdown, dissolution, can liberate:

The latch of this is broken the latch of this is open

In other words something done in the past has enabled something done in the present. Elsewhere, though, the event in the past seems to have been tragic, catastrophic, or at least precipitating a diminution, as seen near the end of the volume:

We are in this time All has been done

And then, on the next page of poetry:

There is she who is here in our space so near

Her work may or may not have gone to waste

Her waste is re-defining as this night star sun.

The easiest way to read this is as about a person who has died, with the ‘we’ are the mourners. But this is not exclusive, or denotatively confining, because the “she” is so elusive, and her presence, even if altered or re-formed, still so felt. Again, we see the alternation between the present and past tense. There is a possibility of seeing the past tense as the 'gate’ and the present as the ‘field’. Certainly gates are closed and fields are open, gates material and fields ideal—as a field is really a human perception of space on a natural tableau—gates fixed and fields fluid. The late Japanese-American artist Minoru Kawabata had a similar dichotomy in his images of gates and robes, which for him were tantamount to objective and subjective. But Firestone’s dichotomy of gates and fields is a bit more elusive. Both pertain to death: the gates to hell, but also the Elysian Fields. If fields are the afterlife, gates, as the transition-point to the afterlife, at least have the tangible link to life of marking life’s ending, the proximity of a portal.

The various shapes are we collecting down the trees

We will come from the leaves down the trees

We are more confident in this space than she

We impress ourselves this way

Our perception is the light, the light

In almost any other context, the last line would be a visionary affirmation, and the words shine with a spiritual intensity. But here it is a sign of a diminution or perhaps more a substitution. Our perception must needs be the light that the ‘she’ has once been; or more convincingly our perception was once the ‘she', but is now reduced to the light, as a stand-in, a vicarious absence. Also notable is the inverted syntax of “various shapes are we collecting down the trees,” where conventionally it should be ‘We are collecting the various shapes”, though it would typically be not ‘down the trees’ but ‘from the trees.’ The inversion diminishes our agency, makes us random vagabonds among the trees rather than exercising dominion or decision in them. There is determination in ‘our’ stance here, but also some presumptuousness. ‘Our’ confidence and love of impressing ourselves makes us almost blunderers; we are more confident in this space than she, but not more dignified or more present. And, if the ‘she’ is indeed dead, that we are ‘more confident in this space than she’ is not so much an inability to admit her passing but a tender acknowledgment that at once she is still there, perceptually, and that her absence means so much that we cannot say it other than decorously, timorously.

For all the abstract musings the reader must make about tone, stance and address it is very important to note that Gates & Fields is a narrative, a story. It is a story without names or characters or places, a story without context, but nonetheless a story, a chronicle of what has happened, with a gap between past and present that complicates the translucency and intuitiveness of the pure lyric utterance. The English language (as contrasted especially to French) has had trouble establishing genres that are in-between fiction and poetry. Yet, for all this book’s homage to Dickinson, and genuine lineage in her vein, Firestone’s work inhabits this expansive and elusive middle realm between lyric and narrative:

Presently attend to this whole space not a designated marker

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Ernest Chanes 1923-2017

2017-02-24T07:56:00.004-08:00

Regarding our friend, ErnestChanes

“Ernie” (or Ernest, as he was known to his adoring wife) had a number of friends that he fervently admired, but he always turned to his beloved wifeJosely before he made any big decisions.Josely was a gifted artist with an international following as well as a highly sought-after chatelaine, gracing many wonderful warm-hearted gatherings. Ernie also loved the devotion of his affable stepson Emiliano Saxe, who came into his life decades ago and gave Ernie another figure to cherish.

Among Ernie’s primary relationships was that of his devoted Irish Setter, Mitzu, who historically was devoted to Ernie and loved to range mountain peaks on weekends. While Mitzu was given the decision to periodically crash in and out of our weekend home, only to drift off on an overnight sojourn through the woods, throughout all of this, the dog saw to it that Ernie never left her side. When a man and his dog would afterward return home, it was to heal their wounds after a blissful romp across in the countryside.

And then there was the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA)-- our organization which focuses on progressive human rights and policy issues throughout Latin America. Ernie was involved with COHA almost from the beginning, since the first faltering steps that the organization managed to take starting in the early 1970s. At the time of his death, he was serving as COHA’s Secretary as well as a member of its executive committee.

Ernie was also a well seasoned chef, a spectacular sailor, a resolute hiker, and a devoted Brazilianist. A convivial host, he presided over a table that hosted a variety of interests. Meanwhile, Josely was pugnacious in her determination not to be lead astray as she resolutely pursued her art, her career, her marriage, her family and her culture. She had talked about her art long before anyone knew precisely what she was talking about. Through all of her crusades, Ernie was always by her side, dutifully toting around her illustrations for the many shows in which she participated.

Ernest Chanes was a person whom I lived in close quarters with for decades. At these distances, his importance to COHA went far beyond his role as one of its ranking officials and a critical funder. He was at the core of the organization’s soul. With passion, he monitored events circulating around Cuba, was a lion for insisting that COHA beErnest was a proudly generous person who welcomed perplexing moments that would eventually be reconciled by his immense intellectual hunger for new ideas. In almost every facet of his star-studded life, he was on the right side of history every time and brought a barrel of creative ideas for policy initiatives to the table at any particular time. But somehow, he added much more to the organization than had just been suggested by these bits and strands of endless recollections. He was committed to fighting battles that he instinctively knew represented the right side of the “good fight.” For Ernie, there was a series of grandiose struggles that would help define, and even consume his imagination.

He was willing to embrace COHA’s mettle on all occasions and to give voice to the worthiness of the organization that at times stood empty-handed before the media, on whatever issue revealed its sense of moral value. In addition to joining in the war of ideas that colored Allende’s struggle in Chile against Pinochet, Ernest fought with passion against Argentina’s General Videla and the military regime that repressed the likes of Allende’s dignity and prevented the dousing of the constitutional veneer which was ripped away from the Bolivarians who temporarily lay decimated throughout a battered Latin America.

But everything was in place with Ernie who we so greatly loved and admired, and who revered everyone in return.Ernie was a giver who always opted for life. He grew up in a depression-era culture where funds always fell short, but that was more than compensated by the beautiful life and people with whom he surrounded himself. Ernie was known as a man who could unite others by invoking rational solutions in favor of peace and humanity. He was determined to keep the torch of progressivism be held aloft a mile high, and to be thrust even further into the open hands of another human being. Ernie will not allow any of us to forget our duties. Of course, he never did, and we hope that Brazil proves to be worthy enough to share custody of part of his being.

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From the Chanes/Carvalho Household:

Ernest Chanes, activist, included in the Nixon`s enemy list, dies at 93 in Rio de Janeiro.

Ernest Chanes passed away at home in Leblon, Rio de Janeiro on February 8, 2017. He will be remembered for his ethics, compassion, intelligence and memorable beard Lincoln style, unforgettable laugh, and a list of causes and endeavors that could fill several lifetimes.

Born on June 13, 1923 to Russian Jewish immigrants, he grew up in the Bronx during the depression. After the early loss of his father, he helped his mother and sister by fishing and selling fish from door to door. He graduated from City College of New York with a degree in mechanical engineering. During World War II he helped design rockets in the organization that later become NASA. He started three successful businesses, including Consolidated Water Conditioning and ChemTech, an environmental water laboratory.

His activism ranged from voter registration in Mississippi to progressive causes in Cuba. He participated in Freedom Summer in 1964, joining hunger strikes and creating a bond Project to liberate imprisoned Young African Americans.

As civic leader in his local progressive Democratic club, the Village Independent Democrats, during Vietnam War, he won a coveted spot on President Nixon`s enemies list in 1973.

As a board member of the Center for Cuban Studies, he went to Cuba in 1972 to assist the government with a clean water project at the invitation of Fidel Castro`s brother; organized a conference in the U.S. Congress to encourage relations between Cuba and U.S.

He was on executive committee of the National Emergency Civil Liberties and the Center for Constitutional Rights.

In 1975, Chanes provided assistance to Larry Birns in founding the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA), an independent research and information organization established for human rights in Latin America, a more US attitude towards the region. Chanes remained on the board of COHA until his death.

A swimmer, a foodie, a traveler, and a dog lover – most recently best friend to a black standard poodle named Xica.

In his later years he divided his time between New York City and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, his wife`s birth country. He is survived by his great love companion of 41 years, the artist Josely Carvalho of New York and Rio; by his son, Emiliano Saxe & his wife Irma; his grandchildren, Ibrahim and Elias of California; his niece Ilene Price, and her three children Adam, Alexis and Amanda.

Manchester by the Sea and Jaroslav Halák

2017-01-16T18:05:00.001-08:00

Saw Manchester by the Sea. A moving, engrossing film, full of trauma and sorrow. Casey Affleck did a great job of acting affectless and Matthew Broderick had a hilarious bit part as an evangelical Christian. Well-acted, well-directed, well-scored. I do hear the critics who thought it universalized while male experience a bit too much. The funny thing is, though, the movie, set in 2015, featured an old clip of hockey goaltender Jaroslav Halák, a star when the clip was filmed, now a failed and humiliated figure. I noticed this, and then after the movie two guys behind me could only talk about Halák, and I turned around and said I had noticed it to: two hours of moving story and all three men in a well-heeled, culturally sophisticated part of Manhattan could talk about was this odd hockey detail! In a way the hockey issue brings up the problem of normed white masculinity that Alicia Christoff brings up in her essay from the other end, that perhaps the film so assumes a model of white maleness that it does not bother to get right just the details that actual working class white men, who would be likelier than average to know who Jaroslav Halák is and appreciate the declivity of his career, would notice and respond to…it's an echo of Trump, that their stereotypes are being addressed,but not their real needs...

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My 2017 MLA paper

2016-12-31T09:46:00.001-08:00

Jeanine Leane unfortunately will have to miss our teaching Australian Literature panel at the Philadelphia MLA but I am doing a short paper instead, the first two paragraphs of which are below.

Reading Melissa Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby in the Age of Trump

On November 5, 2008, I taught Aimé Césaire’s Miraculous Weapons as part of the New School's then-current literary foundations course. The poem was on the standard syllabus, but I deliberately assigned that day’s class to this African diaspora text as likely to mark the election of the first African American President the day before. And so, bleary eyed but quietly celebratory, we convened and, after I acknowledged the previous day’s events, had an attentive and involved discussion of the Martinican poet.
Eight years later, I was teaching in New York University’s School of Professional Studies and was finally getting to give a course in one of my specialties, Australian literature. For November 9, 2016, I assigned Melissa Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby. This was not directly to honor the prospective first woman President, though I certainly wanted a female writer on that day. But I wanted to gesture towards a society where multiple racial, religious, sexual, and gender identities were celebrated, and dispossessed and under-recognized groups such as Indigenous Australians were achieving acknowledgment and redress for the land that had been stolen from them by white settlers.
My aspirations for this day were, alas, trumped.

From 2015--my take on the "class struggle vs identity politics" meme

2016-12-08T06:16:00.002-08:00

"Here, I would differ from Walter Benn Michaels’ analysis of recent American literature in The Shape of the Signifier, in that from my perspective cultural diversity is not, as Michaels argues, simply an illusion proffered by a protean and transmogrifying capitalism, but an ideal genuinely to be honored. Racial justice, if it had occurred, would justify any extreme of capitalism or inequality. But is there racial justice....today?" Nicholas Birns, Contemporary Australian Literature, published December 2015. And still relevant to "what should the Democratic party do?" debates today, Nicholas Kristof's op-ed in todays TIMES made me think of this passage.

My marital status may change but not my politics

2016-11-14T15:18:00.002-08:00

With all the discussion about various divisions among groups in the election, one has been little mentioned: single people voted more for the party advocating a more compassionate, inclusive and heterogeneous society, while married people voted more for the party advocating the opposite. Isabella and I are getting married this spring and it will be a happy and special and wonderful event. But, God willing, may I still vote the way the single people tend to do.

Forget Hillary

2016-09-16T09:10:00.001-07:00

I have been polite so far about the election. Now I have had it because of what a now-ex-friend posted on my page. (It has been deleted).

First of all, forget Hillary. In much the same sense Jean Baudrillard once urged us to "forget Foucault." Bracket her. Leave her aside. Some like her, some don’t like her. I have worked hard for her both in 2008 and now, donating money I could not afford, making countless phone calls to total strangers. But even I will admit she has her strong points and weak points. I certainly do not claim her as a figure who should exert universal admiration.

But we are talking about Trump. And you should vote against Trump. Not for Hillary. And by this I don't mean for Stein and Johnson. I actually contributed $10 to Jill Stein when she was running for governor, I think, of Massachusetts. You can see that if you search online. But she is not presidential calibre. She is a vaccine sceptic and would not defend the country.

Gary Johnson is appealing to young white males who feel they will lose some of their privilege under a Hillary administration. Guys, one of the things straight white men have to deal with in this era is conceding our privilege. My generation had to deal with it. So does yours. Johnson is a radical free-marketer and guess what, millennials, you will be stuck with your student loans forever under a Gary Johnson administration, with your only consolation knowing what Aleppo is. And Gary Johnson would roll back the Obamacare that, among other things, paid for my colonoscopy last year. But that doesn’t matter, as he will never win. It is between Trump and the Democratic candidate.

But here is the thing: you should vote against Trump, not for Hillary, but for yourself. So many of you I know on here are idealistic, have your own dreams and aspirations; want this to be a better country and world. Your visions may be different from mine; my politics are very idiosyncratic and will be mirrored exactly by no one. But in all cases Trump will squelch and corrode your dreams. He will make them impossible. He is a racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, atavistically ignorant moron who stands against everything that has always made this country truly great, even if sometimes more in promise than in fulfillment. So forget Hillary. Close your eyes and pull the Democratic lever and just forget who is on it. Vote against Trump. Vote for yourselves and your dreams.

Trump, Obama, Putin--and systemic racism

2016-09-08T07:02:00.005-07:00

Can anybody deny that when Trump says Putin is 'far more' of a leader than Obama, he is appealing to race and race only? In other words, I don't see Trump saying that Xi Jinping or Narendra Modi or Shinzo Abe is more of a leader than Obama, just Putin--the white guy. I think there is systemic racism in American life and I am not wary of attributing nearly any aberration in American culture to this systemic racism. This certainly includes "Mr. Trump" and his bizarre hostility to our President, whose American birth he has denied. And, furthermore, I believe that, to my horror and disgust, this systemic racism 'trumps’ the Republican Party's historic hostility to Russia (seen as recently as Mitt Romney’s comments in 2012), and their historic championship of the small countries menaced and, yes, dominated a 1976 campaign reference), by the USSR and now Russia. I think Estonia, Poland, etc. are finding hat their former Republican friends have swerved away now that a chance to champion a more powerful white man, Putin, has presented itself

That Trollope

2016-08-12T13:32:00.005-07:00

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B19MGvOdqactdXk2ZmRtNDB4Rmc/view?usp=sharing

Podcast concerning the life and works of Anthony Trollope

Dates and order of reading of my NYU Australian course

2016-08-11T04:37:00.002-07:00

September 28 Gail Jones, Five Bells

October 5 Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang;

October 12 Charlotte Wopd, The Natural Way of Things

October 19 Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

October 26 Tim Winton, Breath

November 2 Melissa Lucashenko, Mullumbimby;

November 9 Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap

November 16 Thomas Keneally, The Daughters of Mars;

More on my NYU Australian course

2016-08-10T07:06:00.002-07:00

https://www.sps.nyu.edu/professional-pathways/courses/LITR1-CE9124-the-australian-novel-and-the-modern-world.html

Charlotte Wood's book just came out; it is an incredibly engaging and also quite riveting thriller. Liane Moriarty just raved about it in the Times, and it got a long feature in the Economist.

Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap got huge publicity worldwide and was made into a very good Australian TV miniseries and a far less good American one. It is a highly contemporary, often divisive, but quite attention-holding book.

Peter Carey and Tim Winton really need to introduction to American readers; of course they are writers of widespread fame, among the finest in the world, and both Nobel contenders. Both Carey and Shirley Hazzard have lived and worked in New York City for many years and have been vital players on the American literary scene, demonstrating the continuing global stakes of Australian literature. Thomas Keneally won the Booker Prize in 1982 for Schindler's List and has made war and its legacies his particular subject.

Gail Jones and Melissa Lucashenko are up-and-coming writers who address Australia's neglected histories and the possibilities for changing them in this new century.

2016-08-10T05:09:00.000-07:00

http://thetropesoftenthstreet.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/podcast

Fulgentius as Literary Critic

2016-06-17T05:06:00.000-07:00

Fulgentius (North African Roman: fl. Late 5^th-early 6^th century)

Fabius Planciades Fulgentius was most likely from North Africa during the last part of the era of Vandal rule there, but, despite persistent attempts to link the two, was probably not related to the Christian saint of that name who lived roughly in the same period. Fulgentius wrote several interesting works on history and mythography. But his importance to literary criticism consists of his writing on Vergil. Fulgentius, along with Servius (fourth century), was one of the first critics to devote a major piece of criticism to a single work, in both cases Vergil’s Aeneid. (Macrobius, who flourished in the early fifth century, also allegorized a major work, the Dream of Scipio section of Cicero’s De re publica). This contrasted with many of the ancient critical texts that have reached us, largely treatises on general rules of literature or rhetoric. Fulgentius set a precedent both in terms of detailed attention and moral/allegorical orientation that vitally influenced other medieval commentaries.

“The Exposition of Vergil According to Moral Philosophy” was at once a faithful attempt to try to, within the critic's given framework, attend to the literal meaning of the text, and a rewriting so audacious as to almost give us a fundamentally new work. Fulgentius, for instance, paid no attention to the poem’s major manifest theme of conquest and the proto-establishment of the Roman state, which for him, living under Vandal occupation and as a Christian, would not have been relevant anyway. But it was relevant to Vergil, a circumstance that Fulgentius nonetheless sidestepped. This was in contrast to Fulgentius’s “rival,” Servius, who treated Vergil’s epic as a historical treasure-trove and was much more attentive to literal fact. It was closer to Macrobius, whose transcendentalizing inclination went beyond that of Fulgentius, but who was closer in this respect to Fulgentius than Fulgentius was to Servius. Analyzing the poem’s first line, arma virumque cano, “Arms and the man I sing,” Fulgentius translated “arms” as the virtue of Vergil, the syntactic placement if the word indicates the particular merit of the character. Fulgentius saw language as connotative, symbolic. Though he did not read in a wholly allegorical manner, he did not just see words as representing what they literally meant. Fulgentius, near the beginning of his exposition, invoked the muses, much as an epic poet would, indicating his sense that criticism, like creative writing, required inspiration and was itself a kind of work of art.

Fulgentius forswore discussions of Vergil’s lyric poems, the Eclogues and the Georgics, on the grounds of their at once being too difficult and too dedicated to specific practices. But this decision is also in line with the general ancient emphasis on epic over lyric poetry. Fulgentius explicitly communes with the spirit of Vergil, which he has the Muses summon, feeling inspired not only by the Muse in general but with the soul of the author he is writing about. Fulgentius also eschewed a philosophical reading, disclaiming any intent to read Vergil in a Platonic or Pythagorean mode. He positioned himself as a more practical critic who will tell his reader what the text means, rather than trying to explicate—or posit--its higher mysteries.

Fulgentius proceeded by a combination of etymology, morality, and symbolism. He defined, or speculated on, the meaning of proper names, then suggested what those names symbolize and what their moral import was. For instance, he interpreted the name Palinurus from Latin words that make up its elements a “wandering vision,” and this explained for him why Palinurus falls into the sea--as Palinurus's vision was wandering, which it should not have been, it should have been steadfast. Fulgentius was halfway between ascribing a moral intent to Vergil and saying that this moral mode of reading was the reader’s way of making sense of the Aeneid and rendering the text ethically constructive.

Much of the “Exposition” dealt with interpreting names, linking names to characters. For instance, “Misenus” was seen as meaning “vain praise,” thus that character must die in Book Six in order for this false virtue to be overcome by the hero. But Fulgentius’s reading, though moral, does not reach full Christian allegory. Fulgentius, in a mock-dialogue with Vergil, proposed a Christian understanding, which Vergil does not disagree with, but of which he says that he can only say what he thinks. Fulgentius at once paraded his own Christian viewpoint and also indicated an understanding that the original text is not Christian in intent. This provided an important precedent for later critics—such as the twelfth-century scholar Bernardus Silvestris who wrote a more ambitious, though unfinished, commentary on Vergil-- who at once read texts in light of their own ideologies but also respected the spirit of the past. Fulgentius also provided ground for Dante’s treatment of Vergil in Dante’s great poem, the Comedy, and for the role played by Vergil as the connector between classicism, medieval times, and modernity, as sketched by scholars such as the polymathic comparatist Domenico Comparetti (1835-1927) and the eloquent cultural critic Theodor Haecker (1879-1945).

Bibliography

Merrills, Andrew H. Vandals, Romans and Berbers: New Perspectives on Late Antique North Africa. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.

Bernardo, Aldo S. and Saul Levin, The Classics in the Middle Ages. Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1990.

Comparetti, Domenico, Vergil in the Middle Ages, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Originally published 1895.

The virgil.org website written and maintained by David S. Wilson-Okamura is also a vitally important resource for Fulgentius, Servius, Macrobius, and all commentary on Vergil.

Bibliography

Merrills, Andrew H. Vandals, Romans and Berbers: New Perspectives on Late Antique North Africa. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.

Bernardo, Aldo S. and Saul Levin, The Classics in the Middle Ages. Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1990.

Comparetti, Domenico, Vergil in the Middle Ages, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Originally published 1895.

The virgil.org website written and maintained by David S. Wilson-Okamura is also a vitally important resource for Fulgentius, Servius, Macrobius, and all commentary on Vergil.

Geoffrey Hartman as Literary Critic

2016-03-21T06:04:00.001-07:00

Geoffrey Hartman as Literary Critic

By Nicholas Birns

Hartman (1929-2016) was born in Germany and came to America before the Second World War; he served as a private in the US Army in the late 1940s, by which time he was already pursuing an advanced degree at Yale, where he spent the entirety of his academic career. After Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787-1814 (1964) Hartman became not only the late twentieth century‘s leading expositor of the poetry of Wordsworth, but the critic who put Wordsworth back on the map, rescuing him from decade of New Critical obloquy and restoring him to the place in literary culture he had possessed in the time of Matthew Arnold. Hartman, though, had a very different view of Wordsworth from Arnold, at once de-emphasizing his sense of social responsibility and seeing him as, despite his imaginative flights, bound to existence in a way that generated, paradoxically, the euphoria of failed transcendence. Hartman liked Wordsworth’s poetry, but neither idealized it nor used it to idealize experience or perception. Hartman used the metaphor of akedah (the Hebrew word for the binding of Isaac before his near-sacrifice to God by Abraham) to express this sense of perilous yet concrete epiphany. Hartman’s early work was seen by his teacher René Wellek as reflecting the influence of heidegger and sartre, but nonetheless going in its own distinct direction.

In the 1970s, Hartman also became known as one of the principal expositors of Derrida and as part of “the Yale School.” Saving the Text (1981) was originally published as essays in The Georgia Review in the mid-1970s, when that journal was under the editorship of John T. Irwin, and were expositions of one of Derrida’s most difficult texts, Glas (1974). Unlike most guides, Hartman did not aspire to be simpler than what he was explicating. He took full advantage of Derrida’s wordplay and allusiveness. In a sense this spirit of commentary was reminiscent of medieval commentators on anterior texts such as Fulgentius. Indeed, Hartman spent much of the later portion of his career working on a cognate tradition, the mode of Biblical exposition practiced by scholars of the Hebrew Bible called midrash.

Hartman’s growing concern with Jewish issues was manifested in his increasing interest in issues of trauma, particularly regarding the Holocaust. The Third Pillar: Essays in Judaic Studies (2011) followed earlier books such as The Longest Shadow: In The Aftermath of the Holocaust (2002), in indicating Hartman’s dedication to this subject and to, among other aspects, the oral testimony of the atrocity’s victims---far from the nihilism and relativism often imputed to deconstruction by its opponents. It was not only Hartman’s Jewish background but also his depth of his involvement in Holocaust studies that made his strong defense of his late friend Paul de Man, written after de Man‘s pro-Nazi wartime journalism had been unearthed, so compelling. Hartman argued that de Man’s emphasis on skepticism, critique, and unreliability could be read as atoning for the ideological mistakes of his youth. In this respect, deconstruction was not a nihilistic relativism but an ethically alert practice whose honesty lay in its recognition of linguistic fissure and rupture, which made impossible the crude doctrinal affirmations of de Man’s wartime writings. Hartman’s own position on language, though, was as close to that of his lifelong friend and colleague Harold Bloom as it was to deconstruction, seeing a strong if fractured agency behind linguistic play. Not only Hartman’s critical acuteness but also his rigor of judgment, his unwillingness to bend towards ideologies he saw as less than perfect, made him an independent critical voice, which survived the historical fate of deconstruction as such.

Bibliography

Atkins, G. Douglas, Geoffrey Hartman: Criticism as Answerable Style. London: Routledge, 1990.

Vermeulen, Pieter, ed. Geoffrey Hartman: Romanticism After The Holocaust. New York: Continuum, 2010.

Whitehead, Anne, “Geoffrey Hartman: A Deviant Homage.”

The Wordsworth Circle, 37, no. 1, (Winter 2006): 30-42.

New Paltz, April 13 Eastertide Celebration

2016-03-05T12:21:00.001-08:00

On Wednesday, April 13, at 6 pm, an Interim Shared Eucharist celebrated by the Episcopal Church with the United Methodist Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America at Redeemer Evangelical Lutheran Church on 90 Route 32 South in New Paltz, New York. Bishop Andrew Dietsche of the Episcopal Diocese of New York will celebrate the Eucharist, and the preacher will be the Rev. Timothy Riss, superintendent of the Catskill Hudson District for the New York annual conference of the United Methodist Church. The pastors and congregations of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church and the New Paltz United Methodist Church will be involved in the readings and musical offerings, along with the chaplaincies at SUNY-New Paltz and Vassar College.

Both wine and grape juice, in separate chalices, will be available at the Eucharist; there will also be gluten-free bread.

This is an opportunity for our churches to come together in Eastertide and rejoice in our growing dialogue and concord. Not only will three different denominations be represented, but also there will be diversity in musical offerings (including performances of settings by the host pastor, Tobias Anderson of Redeemer) and in the language of the readings. Yet the liturgy will be traditional, emphasizing elements common to all three churches and giving a sense of their rich and frequently shared heritage. Ecumenism offers an opportunity not just to develop links between individual churches but also to participate in a common and inclusive fellowship and witness to the glory of God.

The Episcopal Diocese of New York, the UMC New York annual conference, and the New York Episcopal Diocese Interfaith and Ecumenical Commission sponsor the event. It is the third in a series of interim shared Eucharists celebrated by Episcopalians and Methodists in the New York area since 2012; previous celebrations were at St. Paul’s Chapel and the John Street Church, both in downtown Manhattan. The Rev. Robert Walker, Assistant to the Bishop of the UMC New York Annual Conference, and Dr. Nicholas Birns, parishioner at Grace Church Broadway and member of the Interfaith Ecumenical Commission, are the co-chairs of the Episcopal-Methodist dialogue in the greater New York area,

After the Eucharist, pizza, salad and soft drinks will be served at Redeemer Lutheran; all are invited.

Jean François Vernay's Brief Take on the Australian Novel

2016-03-04T19:11:00.001-08:00

Just heard from one of the leading global Australianists that his new book is now out:

From Jean-François Vernay, A Brief Take on the Australian Novel offers a sweeping view of Australian writing since colonialism. Written from an outsider's perspective, this single-authored overview will appeal to readers through its playful, jargon-free and potentially contentious account of the Australian novel. Vernay offers a unique and insightful perspective on Australian literature.

Like a film narrator, he speaks directly to the reader, offering close-ups on particular works alongside panoramic views of the literary landscape. One can imagine the reader as part of an audience in a darkened cinema, absorbed in exciting action on the silver screen.

Born of an Australian mother and a French father, Jean-François Vernay grew up in New Caledonia's multicultural community which shares some of Australia's characteristics, including a convict heritage and a complex history of settlement. Using Peter Carey and Christopher Koch as a starting point, he has been researching Australian fiction for 20 years and has published widely in the field, both in French and in English. Dr Vernay is an energetic critic, editor, creative writer and cultural commentator. His fiction and nonfiction books have appeared in France, Australia and in the United States.

'Vernay's approach to the Australian novel has the intellectual playfulness associated with some of the best French critical writing ... Panorama du roman australien [A Brief Take on the Australian Novel] is bold in its conception and promises to be influential in shaping the wider world's appreciation and understanding of Australian literature.' - Simon Caterson, Age

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Break up the banks?

2016-02-02T05:14:00.003-08:00

Whenever I participate in any sort of community activity or go to a party in NYC, most of the people I meet either work for banks or hedge funds, or have partners or spouses who do. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am hugely unhappy about both the big banks and the hedge funds, and a stringent critic of the “financialization” of US and world society. “The Big Short” had no bigger fan than me, and neoliberalism no more fervent scourge, as my academic writing attests, since as early as 2010, and some readers of my book think I am far too critical of, and angry about, neoliberalism for their tastes. I am, and have been for many years, outraged at how unequal our society has become. As Elena Ferrante puts it so brilliantly in The Story of the Lost Child, the last of her Neapolitan novels, "the exploitation of man by man and the logic of maximum profit, which before had been considered an abomination, had returned to become the linchpins of freedom and democracy everywhere."

But when a bohemian, left-wing, passionately egalitarian intellectual like me, in all areas of their life continually meets people working in the financial-services industry, “break up the banks!” sounds a bit tinny. New York with respect to the financial-services industry is now what Detroit was to the automobile industry in the 1950s: a company town. I do not extol this; but I do recognize it. I was, for instance against the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era bill which put a wall between banking and financial services, which was to the huge disadvantage of the everyday consumer, but you can’t just bring Glass-Steagall back and expect the financial world to revert to the way it was before. Neoliberalism has changed our society and our world—mostly to the worse. But we just can’t go back to the way things were before: we have to reform carefully in ways that acknowledge the situation on the ground, Mayor de Blasio, for all his stalwart progressivism and criticism of rising income inequality, has recognized this and has recognized change has to come incrementally and through a revaluation of social goals and not just trying to put the genie of financialization back in the bottle. Mayor de Blasio has also, unlike Senator Sanders, included racial and gender inequality, not just economic inequality, as part of his explicit agenda.
This is why I am supporting Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Not only do I believe she is the most qualified candidate, the one with the most competence as a leader, the greatest grasp of policy, and the most empathetic understanding of the condition of the poor, the underprivileged, and the passed-over in America today, I believe she understands that, as President you have to lead the nation that is actually there, not the one you wish was there.
I would like it if New York CIty had a more diversified economy, one less dependent on the financial sector. I would like it if the people I met were not all working for Wall Street in one way or another, or were not connected to those who did. But we have to reform the economy we have. Hillary Clinton understands this.

Australian course description for next fall

2016-01-28T05:02:00.001-08:00

The literature of Australia is passionately engaged with the land and its history, conveying an often outsized sense of the incomers and the dispossessed, the settlers and migrants, the rebels and the rulers, the extraordinarily landscape of eucalyptus trees and kookaburras and kangaroos. . But Australian writers also look to the world, taking all of history as their canvas. This seminar will study great Australian writers such as Peter Carey, Shirley Hazzard, and Tim Winton. Thomas Keneally, and Gail Jones who incarnate in there work Austrlaia aspirations and failures, its ideals and tragedies. We will also examine younger writers such as Christos Tsiolkas, and Melissa Lucashenko who focus on a changing Austrlaia in the twenty-first century. Discussion will focus on these writers’ diverse and inventive styles and narrative strategies, their social and psychological insights, their sense of their own nation’s terrain and people, and the world beyond its borders. Reading list: Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, Shirley Hazzard, Transit of Venus, Tim Winton, Breath, Gail Jones, Five Bells, Melissa Lucashenko, Mullumbimby, Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap. Thomas Keneally, The Daughters of Mars.

Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead

2015-10-30T11:21:00.000-07:00

My forthcoming book on Australian literature is about to be released by the University of Sydney Press. The link can be found here. The book is a summation of my quarter-century of studying Australian literature and is even, on the fringes, partially autobiographical as I tell the story of how I, an American with no organic Australian affiliations, came to be in the field. The book surveys Australian writers from the time of 'late modernity'--welfare-state social democracy from 1945 to 1980---to that of neoliberalism---the global unleashing of the free market and its creative and, mostly, destructive energies from 1980 onward. Its subtitle, "a world not yet dead," refers in the first instance to the declaration by the journalist Rosemary Neill in 2006 that Australian literature as a category was dead. More broadly, it refers to way neoliberalism, with its promotion of inequality between rich and poor, heartless bimodal division of humanity into winners and losers, the central and the marginal, has shredded what Edmund Husserl called the 'life-world'. Australian writers have been faced with a challenge to re-articulate a vision of affective and compassionate life, and they have done so, albeit in many diverse ways.

If there is a possibility that your community or university library could purchase it, I would really appreciate it--it is even fairly reasonably priced for an academic book.

Nicholas Birns--fall update 2015

2015-09-15T05:36:00.001-07:00

Just an update on activities in the recently concluded summer and recently commenced fall--this summer I had an enjoyable five weeks in China lecturing and conferencing in Shanghai, Beijing, and Hohhot, followed by a week in Shropshire, Denbighshire, and Cheshire also conferencing and lecturing. Today I am off to Leuven, Belgium, for a talk at the Catholic University there and a conference on the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Anthony Trollope. I am chairing and opening a panel on Trollope and the Antipodes there. Speaking of the Antipodes, my book on contemporary Australia literature, with a very little bit on New Zealand, is in the final stages of copy editing at Sydney University Press and should be released in the next six weeks. As we have seem recently, Australia is in great political tumult, and, though I do not make specific references in the book to current politicians, my book does show why Australia right now is a very relevant places for discussions of such issues as neoliberalism, social inequality, and whether we have ever been modern. Another book of mine, co-edited with Nicole Moore and Saraj Shieff, is called Options for Teaching Australian Literature and will come out in 2016 from the Modern Language Association,

I have also been able to do some traveling in the US, visiting western Pennsylvania, Washington, DC, and various parts of New Jersey over the summer. In late October, I will go to the Cincinnati area for the annual conference of the Guild of Scholars of the Episcopal Church. I will be speaking at Grace Church in NYC on October 4 and October 25 on St. Paul's Epistles to the Corinthians.

I am continuing my work on Latin America, taking a more active role with the Council on Hemispheric affairs, speaking on Ricardo Palma and Asia at the Asians in the Americas conference in Philadelphia in November, and writing a chapter on the Peruvian literary criticism of late modernity for a major reference work on Peruvian literature. I will also be appearing at a forum on Roberto Bolaño at the New School on October 28 and continuing to edit, along with Juan E. De Castro, Roberto Bolaño as World Literature for Bloomsbury.

I have begun my teaching for the fall and have a full slate of classes and, so far, highly enthusiastic undergraduate students. In October, I will begin the second half of my course on Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time at the New York Society Library. The 2016 conference of the Anthony Powell Society, at which I will be giving a plenary address, \will be held in York in early April 2016 and the CFP is posted online.

Finally, the 2016 conference of the American Association for Australian Literary Studies is being held in Seattle March 31-April 2 2016; I will be offering a paper on Eve Langley and Jeannie Gunn as novelists of settler mobility.

I am also beginning organizing for a third Interim Shared Eucharist in the greater New York area between the Episcopal Church and the United Methodist Church, this one to be held in New Paltz, New York; this is a follow-up to the Eucharist held at the John Street Church last March.

Lewis Turco's brilliant Enkidu retelling

2015-06-10T11:44:00.003-07:00

Lewis Turco is one of the great-undiscovered treasures of American poetry: though those who really follow the scene know his work well, both as poet and as critic. In that latter role, he has not only provided cogent commentary on major poets and on the mode of poetry itself (and I say that being a less ‘formalistic' reader myself than Turco is, but granting and celebrating his percipience) but has also championed a major early nineteenth-century American poet in Manoah Bodman. He has taught at SUNY Oswego for many years and has been a vigorous and constructive participant on the poetry scene. Though I know full well that Turco was born in 1934, that he was already mature and established by the time I started reading him in the early 1980s, it astonishes me to think of him as over eighty, as his work is not only still buoyantly being produced but vitally contemporary: offering perspectives on imagination just not available elsewhere.

Turco's latest book, The Hero Enkidu: An Epic, available on Amazon, is particularly timely, as we are all thinking about Mesopotamian civilization in the light of the atrocities toward archaeological remains in Iraq and Syria of the terrorist group calling itself IS. Or at least we all should be. Sadly, many of the same people who celebrated the movie The Monuments Men, about the heroic attempts of a special detachment of the US Army to save European art treasures both from Nazism and general wartime destruction, do not seem to give a darn about these ancient Near Eastern antiquities, Not only are they so remote from most of us, erected by people whose languages are no longer spoken or known—not Arabs no more than they were Israelis—but the ancient Near Eastern monuments were built by people often described as villains in the Bible, and under the aegis of harsh-ruling kings whose combination of rigid authority and appreciation of artistic skill and craft brings to mind Walter Benjamin’s dictum that every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism. This is true of the history of Western art works, often born of hierarchy and privilege. But in the Middle Eastern context it is far more obvious, that we’ cared about Palmyra more than we’ did about Hatra or Nimrud simply because Palmyra, architecturally, shows Greco-Roman influence, and was influential on neoclassical architecture, is the proof of this shameful bias. Western concern about Palmyra may have--knock on wood—stopped the IS from utterly destroying it. But we should have spoken up just as much for Hatra and Nimrud.

This Western bias against the ancient Near East has extended even to the most prominent document of Mesopotamian civilization, the poem called Gilgamesh. As the recent scholarship of David Damrosch and Wai-Chee Dimock has shown, Gilgamesh has assumed privileged role in accounts of 'world literature', and has in turn been translated by writers as various gifts and dispositions as David Ferry, John Gardner/John Meier, Herbert Mason, and, most recently, Stuart Kendall. As Michael Palma reminds us in his splendid introduction to Turco’s book, the Gilgamesh poem has also inspired a para-literature of epic, fantastic, and historically minded retellings.

One might see Turco’s focus on Enkidu, the best friend, homosocial soulmate, and sidekick of our hero Gilgamesh, as simply another instance of the various postmodern retellings of canonical stories from the vantage point of subordinate or alternate points-of-view. But Turco is turning to Enkidu for a different reason: to make sense of the tremendous distance between us and the poem, or the cultural origins of the poem, as figured not only by 'our’ indifference towards the terrorist atrocities in Iraq and Syria but the way it is acceptable to be an intellectual in the humanities and have near-complete ignorance of ancient Mesopotamia. For instance, a literate reader of one of the translations mentioned above said to me, in deprecation of his ultimate abilities to assess the translator’s achievement, that he did not know the original Sanskrit! As if Sumerian was Sanskrit, a language that it has as little relation to as it does to Sindarin!

Turco uses Enkidu as a prism through which to relate to the poem: as Enkidu's earthiness, primal rage, and unbridled bundle of emotions are closer to us psychologically than Gilgamesh’s heroism, always imbricated with themes of piety to both his gods and his city, barriers that do not hinder our view of Enkidu, wild, unfettered in Turco's words “hairy and naked” and thus unacculturated in Mesopotamian civilization. With this psychological proximity, Turco gives us verbal proximity: by making the bold, but infinitely successful, decision to approach the material through the verse forms of Anglo-Saxon and alliterative Middle English poetry.

Turco is not just making a a comment on the comparable ‘state’ of civilization between the two cultures, but also providing a meditation on the possibility that Gilgamesh might have had, in Mesopotamian culture, a similar role to what which Beowulf might have had in Anglo-Saxon culture. (We can never know, as both works were rediscovered much later, after much of the other elements of the literary corpus of those cultures had been lost). Though we actually are as much at sea concerning the original date, author, or cultural purpose of Beowulf as we are of Gilgamesh, we have linguistic connections to Beowulf we do not to Gilgamesh, and even more to the Middle English alliterative corpus such as Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Turco’s verse maximizes these connections, especially in his deft use of alliteration:

Nimrod entered

The fertile forest

And found the traps

That he had dug

Had all been filled

with soil and scrub;

Turco even uses rhyme at times. Even though this is highly anachronistic, as rhyme only entered the Western tradition in the High Middle Ages-the Greeks and Latin’s, as I discuss in chapter 4o of my recent book Barbarian Memory, did not use rhyme—it is our primary mode of poetic coherence. Since Turco only uses rhyme sparingly and tactically, it does not make the verse mawkish or clanging, as too much of it might:

Enkidu stopped,

To stare, astonished,

at this wonder,

then stood in sorrow,

in agony and woe

to see this man aglow

with manliness as though

he were godlike crown to toe.

This is disciplined and restrained, and coexists happily with the alliteration, blank verse, and Turco’s own elegant attempt sot simulate the distich-structure of the Mesopotamian originals (as the text was first written in Sumerian then 'adapted' into Akkadian). The very end of the poem also rhymes in ways both apt and gratifying. My favorite mode, though, is the alliteration, which can capture ingenuous cultural truths in a sly apothegm, as when the gods, Anu and Inanna, are called "sky sovereigns”: simple, supple, and stark. In something i read by him in the 1980s, Turco pointed out that his middle name was Putnam, and that this was the same surname as that of George Puttenham, the great Elizabethan anatomist of metaphor. Turco's deft and seamless handling of figuration would have warmed the heart of his Elizabethan forebear.

There are some aspects of Turco’s poem I could have done without-I did not liked the intrusion of Biblical personages based on, but not themselves present in, Mesopotamian myths and histories although this objection is merely “Johnsonian” on my part and not meant to be taken as universal cavil. On the other hand I rather like the intrusion of Tolkienian references, based on Tolkien’s use of “Erech”—the Hebrew rendering of “Gilgamesh's home city and the version, rather than “Uruk”, employed by Turco—to the resting-place of the Faithful Stone brought to Gondor by the Númenoranean exiles, themselves fleeing from a flood much like the Gilgamesh story's Utnapishtim.

On their trek to Erech

Lilitu told

Enkidu the tale

of the city’s founding:

“In the second age

Isildur carried

Out of the ruins

of golden Númenor

A great globe

made of stone.

Upon the stone

he etched an oath

And caused the great

King of the Mountains

To place his hand

upon the rock

And swear that he

would bear fealty,

To Isildur’s lineage

and to Erech when

Its temple and walls

were raised upon

The crown of the hill.

I myself explore this connection in my essay on Tolkien and Mesopotamia in Jason Fisher’s Tolkien and the Study of His Sources. Turco uses the Tolkien allusion to explore how the Gilgamesh story contains both history and prehistory, both the human and the supernatural. Turco’s moving poem shows how literature can be a bridge between the immortality Gilgamesh vainly seeks and the frail mortality that envelops even the ferocious Enkidu:

When he saw its walls

He also saw

that they were hiss

Immortality,

for they would last

Eternally

Walls can in fact be destroyed, as we have seen all too vividly recently, but the stone tablets of the Gilgamesh story miraculously made it into the permanent record, and Turco has given us a thoughtful, innovative, and perceptive expansion on it, a contribution to he literary trove in its own resplendent right.

St. Paul, the Corinthians, and Transgender issues

2015-06-10T09:26:00.002-07:00

Just rereading St. Paul's Epistles to the Corinthians (the theme of next fall's Grace Church Adult Ed program) ....in light of the current discussion of transgender issues, this line, 1 Corinthians 7:20, caught my eye..."each person would remain in the situation they were in when God called them." On the one hand this could read that people should tay where their biology calls them, if you are born a man, you stay a man, and the same for women...which would surely be the 'conventional' reading. But it seems to me it reads just as much that 'people should stay as who they think they are at the moment God calls them', so if e. g. you think you were born a man, you feel that, you should not be a woman just because people say you should be given your biological condition that if you were called by God when you felt yourself to be a woman you should remain in THAT state....St. Paul could be very inclusive, even if not consistently. Later on he says women should not speak in church. Yet he ends the epistle receiving warm greetings from a house church run by two women....the New Testament cannot be described in either 'liberal' or 'conservative' terms, but it is way more open on gender issues than many suppose....

Wally Osterholz 1942-2014

2015-03-31T00:33:00.002-07:00

(From remarks made at the New School on March 30, 2015, at Wally's memorial service)

As a child, Wally for me was neutral ground: she knew both my parents, who were divorced but both taught at the New School, Unlike others who knew them both, Wally was not on one side or the other; her relationship with both my parents was a professional one. Precisely for this reason, when I saw how she interacted with both I gained a perspective on their peculiarities and learned better how to situate myself between both of them. This was a skill I think Wally had to exercise many times working as an omni-administrator at the New School for over four decades: interacting with people of various dispositions and enabling the institution to negotiate among and around their various quirks. She was warm yet competent, caring yet efficient; and this humanistic demeanor helped her work well with the other unusual and resourceful thinkers—Reuben Abel, Allen Austill, and Al Landa, who epitomized the New School of the 1960s and 1970.s. Academic traits that are buzzwords today---interdisciplinarity and, yes, public engagement--were unarticulated then, but Wally’s work, in the most ingrained way possible, was fostering these tendencies. Just the fact that she worked both with my father, a political scientist, and my mother, a literary scholar, showed me that thinking across disciplines was possible. Wally helped the New School show this to many through her four decades of service and through many institutional permutations and redefinitions.

Often, one or the other of my parents would leave me in the fishbowl room to read while they taught. Wally was there to ultimately watch over me but never interfered, just letting me read and adventure amid real and imagined worlds. Meanwhile, I would hear Wally typing—one still typed back then—and talking on the phone, laughing, improvising, reacting, arranging, and above all receiving the Hogarthian parade of humanity that processed through the third floor. To me she was the New School. I was not far off.