Pankaj Mishra discusses Ayaan Hirshi Ali‘s Nomad along with Paul Berman‘s Flight of the Intellectuals in the current New Yorker here.   Mishra puts some valuable context and nuance on both books — and nails the authors when their passion outweighs their argument.  Useful, since relatively few of us in the West know the Islamic figures Berman cites.  But it seems to me Mishra elegantly sidesteps Berman’s more central point, that while intellectuals rushed to defend Salman Rushdie in 1989, regardless of their opinion of his fiction, those similarly threatened today are increasingly isolated: “How times have changed! The Rushdies of today find themselves under criticism … During the Rushdie affair, liberals who called for courage were applauded.  Liberals from Muslim backgrounds were positively celebrated.”  Elsewhere:

“And so, Salman Rushdie has metastisized into an entire social class. … who survive only because of bodyguards and police investigations and because of their own precautions. This is unprecedented in Western Europe since the fall of the Axis.  Fear — mortal fear, the fear of getting murdered by fanatics in the grip of a bizarre ideology — has become, for a significant number of intellectuals and artists, a simple fact of modern life.”

Meanwhile, I like the New Yorker cover.  Before I got to the Table of Contents and learned its title is “Five Weeks Later…” I was anticipating it would be called “A Jury of Peers.”  I still like my title better.

It’s commencement time.  You can tell from the tone of the op-ed pages.  Today’s New York Times featured two evergreen defenses of learning for the sake of learning, and extolled the value of a classical education that can’t be whored to the marketplace:

David Brooks’s “History for Dollars” topped the “most emailed” list of the New York Times, and opened with a lament:

When the going gets tough, the tough take accounting. When the job market worsens, many students figure they can’t indulge in an English or a history major. They have to study something that will lead directly to a job.

So it is almost inevitable that over the next few years, as labor markets struggle, the humanities will continue their long slide. There already has been a nearly 50 percent drop in the portion of liberal arts majors over the past generation, and that trend is bound to accelerate. Once the stars of university life, humanities now play bit roles when prospective students take their college tours. The labs are more glamorous than the libraries.

Not the liberal arts trivium

But allow me to pause for a moment and throw another sandbag on the levee of those trying to resist this tide. Let me stand up for the history, English and art classes, even in the face of today’s economic realities.

Stanley Fish’s eloquent defense, “A Classical Education: Back to the Future” — which is the third “most emailed” today — begins this way:

I wore my high school ring for more than 40 years. It became black and misshapen and I finally took it off. But now I have a new one, courtesy of the organizing committee of my 55th high school reunion, which I attended over the Memorial Day weekend.

I wore the ring (and will wear it again) because although I have degrees from two Ivy league schools and have taught at U.C. Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Duke, Classical High School (in Providence, RI) is the best and most demanding educational institution I have ever been associated with. The name tells the story.

Gioia (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

Elitist?  Not so. He recalls a high school “student body made up of the children of immigrants or first generation Americans; many, like me, the first in their families to finish high school. Nearly a 100 percent college attendance rate. A yearbook that featured student translations from Virgil and original poems in Latin.”

Interestingly, Fish’s words today echo Dana Gioia’s, when he received the Laetare award last month at Notre Dame. As a Latino boy who would become the first in his family to go to university, he recalled receiving an “superb 12th century education, which wasn’t a bad way to prepare for the late twentieth century” before he “traded down for Stanford and Harvard.”  (Video clip is here; and the text is here.)

Fish’s words are welcome.   Over a year ago, Fish’s column “Think Again” aroused ire, defiance, and lots and lots of emails and letters.  I collected a few viewpoints from Stanford luminaries here.  I did not mean to hold up Fish as a dartboard, but guess what?

Congratulations, Class of 2010.  Including one particular graduate down at UC-Santa Cruz: my own daughter who is, in keeping with the spirit of this post, an art major with a Japanese minor.

The incomparable Earhart (Photo: Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard)

On Discovery News here, new evidence suggests that Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan landed and eventually died as castaways on Nikumaroro (formerly Gardner Island), an uninhabited tropical island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati, near Australia and Papua New Guinea.

The news reminded me of my meeting, a week or so before, with Amelia Earhart biographer Susan Wels, author of Amelia Earhart: The Thrill of It.  The occasion had been one of Diane Middlebrook‘s writers’ salons, at the San Francisco home of Marilyn Yalom.  At that time, Wels told the small group of about 40 how she made the book happen:  “Finding a good biography subject is very challenging. It’s not enough for a person to be famous or fascinating. The life has to a have a dramatic arc, a really compelling narrative, if it’s going to be published as a trade book. It’s difficult to find a new biography subject, and if it’s not a new subject, you have to have new information.”

There have been dozens of books about Earhart, of course — the most recent published in 1997. Since then, said Wels,  new documents have become available that add context and nuance to Earhart’s story.  One example: in the late 1990s, diary entries by Dorothy Putnam were published. Dorothy was Earhart’s friend; she was also the first wife of Earhart’s husband, G.P. Putnam.

“Dorothy’s diary entries are amazingly frank and give intimate insights into the relationship between the two women and their 1928  love triangle,” said Wels — actually a love quadrangle, since Dorothy was having a simultaneous affair with her son’s tutor, a man 19 years younger. Also, in 2002, Purdue University acquired the George Palmer Putnam collection of Amelia Earhart Papers.

The journalist-turned-author also promised to showcase less familiar aspects of Earhart — as a poet, as a social worker, and even as a psychic.  Less than two years after she disappeared, in 1939, her husband told a reporter that Earhart “had a fragile psychic quality, some strange susceptibility to conditions beyond understanding. She rarely mentioned it to friends, never discussed it publicly. But whenever [she] participated in mental telepathy or other psychic experiments to further her curiosity, observers were astonished at the results.”  Earhart never tried to psyche out her own adventures: “She believed she would go when her number was up and not before, so there was no use worrying about it,” according to Wels.

Wels said her thing is joining image with word — particularly appropriate here, because Earhart was a visual icon.  Wels’ book has more than 300 full-color images, including photographs and documents that have never been published before.

So what does Wels think of the new theory?  It’s not new, she says.  Her email to me below:

In October 1937, three months after Earhart disappeared, a small British expedition to Gardner Island noted unexplained “signs of previous habitation” along the shore, “like someone had bivouaced for the night.” Then, in 1940, a member of a native work party found a human skull. That September, a British colonial administrator, Gerald Gallagher, came to live on the atoll. At the site where the worker came across the skull, Gallagher discovered a campsite and some scattered bones, along with evidence of a campfire, bird and turtle remains, and artifacts. British government records confirm and document the 1940 discoveries on Gardner Island.

Author Wels (Photo: Mary S. Pitts)

Since Gallagher suspected the remains could be Earhart’s, he shipped the bones and artifacts to British headquarters in Fiji for “strictly secret” examination. In April 1941, a colonial doctor analyzed the bones and concluded that they probably came from a muscular middle-aged male of European descent. The bones themselves have since disappeared, but TIGHAR researchers discovered the doctor’s measurements and notes. In 1998, forensic investigators reanalyzed them and found them consistent with a white female of northern European extraction who was about five feet seven inches tall.

Since then, on 10 archaeological expeditions to the island, TIGHAR [The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery] investigators have found additional artifacts, including a piece of a woman’s powder compact, a civilian zipper, and the bottom of a broken hand-lotion bottle, all manufactured in the U.S. and dating from the mid-1930s. According to a forensic anthropologist at the University of Alabama, the fire area, littered with more than a thousand bones and shells, is consistent with campsites of western castaways who subsisted on anything that they could find to eat.

In the absence of a smoking gun—a DNA sample or an airplane part marked with a serial number—all of TIGHAR’s evidence to date has been circumstantial. The new findings, if they yield DNA, could potentially provide conclusive proof.

We don’t know what happened to Earhart, but we do know that she had contemplated survival on a desert island. She  may have practiced landing on a beach. And months before she disappeared, according to Gore Vidal—who knew and adored Earhart when he was a child (because his father was having an affair with her)—she explained that it’s possible survive on an island without fresh water by making a sun-still to extract salt from seawater. Perhaps Earhart did, for a little while…

UPDATE 6/6:  Another article about new evidence on Earhart’s last days at the New York Daily News today; it’s here.

Voznesensky, with an attitude

Andrei Voznesensky died on Tuesday, June 1, at the age of 77.  The New York Times obituary is here.

Voznesensky’s heyday was in the 1960s, when he was, with Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the “officially left-wing” poet, allowed to tweak the Soviet masters, but only to a point.  They were intended to be proof that the Soviet powers allowed “freedom of speech” — but again, only to a point.  The two were famous for their theatrical readings to the masses, who filled sports stadiums to hear them.

The real star power, at that time, was meanwhile, shovelling manure in the far north — Archangelsk, near the Arctic Circle, where he was serving time after a show trial that described him a parasite on the state.  Joseph Brodsky went on to get a Nobel prize.  Of course, Voznesensky had the wisdom not to haul off and sock KGB agents, as Brodsky had … but still…

Brodsky’s umbrage against the dynamic duo of Voznesensky and Yevtushenko wavered in intensity over the years.  As with all mentors who shape one’s tastes and sensibilities, I’ve inherited his prejudices along with his predilections.  Death, as always, provides an opportunity to review both.  Easy to judge others’ reactions to a totalitarian regime when one is sitting on one’s bed with a computer on one’s lap, the California sunshine streaming in through a window.  Frankly, I don’t think I have Brodsky’s guts.  Voznesensky knew how to negotiate his survival.  It doesn’t always command respect, but it certainly commands my sympathy.

In Solomon Volkov’s questionable memoir, Conversations with Joseph Brodsky, Volkov draws out Brodsky’s opinions (Brodsky offhandedly says he had memorized 200-300 lines of poetry from each, despite his distaste; his memory was phenomenal), and gets this comment:

These boys were throwing stones in the officially sanctioned direction, knowing they’d land half a step ahead of the ordinary guy, who went nuts over it! That’s their entire historical role.  All this is very simple, banal even! Yevtushenko and Voznesensky had friends in the Central Committee of the Party all along the way — second, or third, or sixteenth secretaries — so they were always more or less in the know about which way the wind would blow tomorrow.

In Brodsky: A Personal Memoir (I reviewed it in the Kenyon Review here), Ludmila Shtern defends her friend Voznesensky against her other friend, Brodsky. She recalls  Voznesensky insisting on meeting her in Italy, although “Soviet émigrés were considered ‘untouchable’ by the Soviet government and any contact between them and Soviet citizens while on business trips could destroy a citizen’s career … When people were getting their permissions to go abroad, they were always warned by the KGB about avoiding émigrés in no uncertain terms, and they took these warnings seriously.”  Visits involved a great deal of risk and subterfuge:

Despite all these troubles he spent the evening with us, read his poetry, and even offered to take some letters and clothing back to our friends in Moscow.  We went to the flea market and bought enough used clothes to fill a whole suitcase.  To each piece I attached a note saying who was supposed to get what.  The suitcase came with a broken zipper, and when Andrei took it from a luggage claim in Moscow, it opened and all these dresses, blouses and shirts fell on the floor.  Andrei was crawling on the floor picking it up under the malignant cameras of journalists and reporters.  The next day one of the Moscow papers ran a big picture of this scene with the following caption: ‘The poor famous Soviet poet bought half of Italy.’

The Stanford University Libraries, by the way have Voznesensky’s papers; they were acquired six years ago.  They already have Yevtushenko’s papers — and Hoover has the papers Boris Pasternak, Abram Tertz (Sinyavsky), and others (I recently wrote about the extraordinary Pasternak collection here.)

Perhaps it’s the post-heyday years that say the most about the man.  From the New York Times:

In 1986 he published “The Ditch: A Spiritual Trial,” a work of prose and poems that centered on a German massacre of Russians in the Crimea in 1941 and the plundering in the 1980s of their mass graves by Soviet citizens. Mr. Voznesensky, tackling a subject long suppressed by the authorities, made clear that most of the 12,000 victims were Jews and implied that the looting of their bodies was tolerated for that reason.

At a poetry reading two years later, he took written questions from the audience. “All of you are Jews or sold out to Jews,” one note said. Another said, simply, “We will kill you.” Mr. Voznesensky read the unsigned notes aloud and demanded that the authors identify themselves. His challenge was met with silence.

In the 1990s Mr. Voznesensky disclosed a reluctance to go abroad. “I cannot leave the country,” he said in an interview with The International Herald Tribune in 1996. “I belong to the people. Now that they are in terrible trouble, they need me.”

“Poetry is the only hope,” he added. “Even if you do not believe it, you have to do it.”

POSTSCRIPT:  Tim Rutten writes the Los Angeles Times obituary here.  Bestest quote:  “We are born not to survive but to put our foot on the accelerator!”

The “Spy vs. Spy” battle between the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal continues.  At the Fishbowl today:

The New York Times has sent the Wall Street Journal a cease and desist letter after the latter used the slogan “Not Just Wall Street. Every Street.” in their new “Greater New York” section. The problem? The New York Times had used the same jumble of words in a recent ad campaign meant, it is assumed, to act as a dig at their rival.

The New York Times has a trademark “pending” for the slogan.  What I’d like to know is … which particular word do they think they own?

Best Fishbowl comment to date:

Here’s my definition of a frivolous lawsuit…high priced lawyers on both sides will spend millions on this ‘who’s got the bigger club’ issue disguised as ‘copyright infringement’ right while the publishers and editors on both sides complain that no one wants to pay for news anymore….priorities, guys…we don’t want to pay for lawyers racking up hours on your vanity…. get over yourselves & back to work…

UPDATE 6/6:  The New York Times said today it will drop its claim.  And the Wall Street Journal has returned snottiness with snottiness.  Its letter begins:  “We half-expected to hear from you. The other half thought you might have more important things to worry about. … Our lawyers tell us that we were within our rights to use the tag line to compare our two offerings.”  The Journal claimed that it never intended to run the ad for long.  “We think we’ve made our point. And to get a rise out of you is just a special bonus.”  Stories here and here.

A  New York Times article yesterday on “flarf”: “A novel form of digitally-inspired poetry, often generated from the results of the Internet search engines.”

Here’s the description in the Wall Street Journal:

Oooh yeah baby gonna shake & bake then take

AWWWWWL your monee, honee (tee hee)

If those lines sound like utter nonsense, it’s because they are. They belong to the world’s first “flarf” poem. Penned a decade ago as a lark, it has spurred an experimental poetry movement that’s become surprisingly popular.

Marjorie Perloff

While it started as one poet’s attempt to write the worst possible poem he could manage, flarf has since been published in that preeminent arbiter of tastes, Poetry. Fifteen flarf books have been published, and a 400-page anthology is due out soon.

One lit critic appears to be taking it seriously:

“Flarf is a hip, digital reaction to the kind of boring, genteel poetry” popular with everyday readers, says Marjorie Perloff, a poetry critic and professor emeritus of English at Stanford University. “You used to find it only in alternative spaces, but it has now moved into the art mainstream.”

I didn’t know that any kind of poetry nowadays is “popular with everyday readers,” so I guess that’s good news.  But so far I have to agree with the sole comment on the New York Times blog, from Laura in Santa Barbara:  “Blarf!”