Michael Bérubé has published a brilliant reconsideration of an early run-in he had with Dinesh D’Souza, on the occasion of D’Souza’s being hired as an analyst for CNN.  The myth of the liberal media has been explored in some detail, several times, in fact, by better folks than me, and so the myth-busting implications of D’Souza’s hiring need not be rehashed here.

What I do find fascinating about the story, though, as Bérubé points out, is that it likewise puts the lie to the Horowitzian insistence that campus conservatives are marginalized and silenced.  Not at a place like Dartmouth, clearly.  And not here, either.  I reiterate what I told my students in the midst of the the spring semester’s horrors:  the dominant campus ideology, here at least, is not liberal, whatever one might take that to mean; it’s polite.  If our campus conservatives are too intimidated to express their inmost opinions, it’s not because of the substance of their peers’ (or their professors’) potential disagreement, but because of the existence of disagreement at all.  Campus conservatives who express their opinions might find those opinions publicly disputed, but they’re hardly punished for their expression—not when they’ve got God, the government, and CNN on their side.

If you think they might be hiding something from you, it’s entirely possible that they are.

For those unfamiliar with the robots.txt function, this file keeps all web-robots, such as those employed by search engines, from crawling through the listed directories.  The interesting question, for me, is whether I’m more paranoid about what they don’t want me to know, or they’re more paranoid about making sure I don’t know it.

[Thanks, Marcel.]

There’s been a mighty lot of silence on my end here, and though I wish I could ascribe it to being terribly, terribly busy, that is simply not the case.  Continuing issues with the manuscript have left me feeling utterly stagnant, inspiration-free, and—while I hesitate to use the D-word, there’s undoubtedly a big chunk of that at work here, too.  In the face of mounting evidence that the project I spent the better part of the last eight years on may never see the light of day—or, may see it, but not in the form that I’m still pretty unreasonably cathected onto—I’ve been left completely stalled-out, unable to see why I should bother writing if I’m working in a field about which no one cares, least of all me.

Of course, as soon as I write all of that out, it begins to seem ridiculous, histrionic, self-dramatizing.  Honestly, if I were never to write (or publish) another piece of academic criticism again, it would hardly be a disaster.  The main issue is to figure out what I want to do, and then to decide how to go about it.

That I cannot figure out what I want to do—that nothing seems quite right, or quite possible—is the thing that keeps leading me to contemplate depression.  I want very much to resist the suggestion that something like that could be at the root of what’s bugging me right now, in part out of a sense of been-there-done-that (fairly big depression many years ago; several years of therapy; problem solved!), and in part because I want to believe that, since work got me into this mess, work can get me out of it.

I’m taking a little time off from attempting to write, as an experiment, and immersing myself in some reading, hoping that I’ll remember why I picked this field and why I thought I had something useful to say about it.  I may record some of the process here, if there’s something that I either feel is worth sharing or is something I’d like to remember.

I want one of these…

Just snagged this yesterday off eMusic. Turns out they played in Pomona last night. Of course, I’m in San Diego this weekend, so that does me no good. And they’re here in SD tonight, but I’m booked. It’s a shame: the album’s worth a listen, and I’d like to hear more.

Today:  Ronald Reagan dies at the age of 93, Smarty Jones just misses winning the Triple Crown by a heartbreaking nose, and I spend the day at the pool, trying to remember why I wanted to write, and what I might have to say worth reading.

Returning to a topic from way back:  Dale Peck, who wields the book review like a truncheon, has published a collection of his articles, entitled, appropriately, Hatchet Jobs (note the subtlety of the cover!).  Peck, should you have forgotten, or should you have missed it in the first place, was the author of the following bit of tempered criticism:

Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation.

And, on the state of contemporary fiction more generally:

All I’m suggesting is that these writers (and their editors) see themselves as the heirs to a bankrupt tradition. A tradition that began with the diarrheic flow of words that is Ulysses; continued on through the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of Nabokov; and then burst into full, foul life in the ridiculous dithering of Barth and Hawkes and Gaddis, and the reductive cardboard constructions of Barthelme, and the word-by-word wasting of a talent as formidable as Pynchon’s; and finally broke apart like a cracked sidewalk beneath the weight of the stupid—just plain stupid—tomes of DeLillo.

There’s something a bit breathtaking about such an intentionally provocative position, but something risky, too; if you’re going to call the writers whom many feel are the century’s greatest “incomprehensible,” “ridiculous,” “reductive,” and “stupid—just plain stupid,” you’d best have some genius of your own with which to back it up.

As one might have expected, Peck’s Hatchet Jobs are producing a response in kind:  Carlin Romero, in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education fires back, reading Peck through the history of literary snark, coming to an almost inevitable conclusion:

Dale Peck is not the worst critic of his generation. He’s simply the worst to have his essays gathered in book form.