writing classes should teach writing

Stanley Fish's latest opinion piece is very typical Fish: take a complicated thing that academics talk about in jargon, find an extreme position on it from which you can say "everyone else is fooling themselves," and then use superior powers of argumentation to blast apart the opposition. He's great at it, and reading his stuff, whether it's reader-response theory or arguments against teaching writing by using politically charged subject-matter, always makes me think much harder. He's a very smart guy.

But this piece is a straw-man argument. "My grad students, who teach writing to freshmen, don't write well. Their class syllabi show that they are having their students argue over issues rather than practicing rhetoric and grammar. Therefore, I decreed that they must teach only rhetoric and grammar." I don't understand why we can't teach rhetoric and grammar THROUGH reading and responding to and writing about controversial issues. I grant that grad students in particular aren't expert in balancing the two, in making sure that the WORK students produce for the class and the grounds on which they are evaluated must be writing, not understanding of the issues. But they are learning to teach, to fumble their way through achieving that balance. I don't think Fish is prescribing a 1920s-style writing class consisting of drills, but like I said--he loves to take the extreme position, and it's possible that that's precisely what he mandated.

The real problem is that most grad students--hell, many college English professors!--are not capable of teaching "grammar" as I think Fish means the term. Of the 50 people who work for me, and who do a very good job getting students to write more clearly and more correctly and more effectively for an academic audience, I bet fewer than 10 could identify an appositive or explain a nonrestrictive clause or describe a linking verb. Nobody gets that in the public schools anymore, they don't get it in college or grad school (even in ed schools!), so how can we expect them to teach it? It's impractical and really not possible to train them in the basics of English grammar in three pre-semester days of training, so I suppose that incoming TAs could take a year-long "Structure of the English Language and How to Teach It" class.

2666

I finally finished Roberto Bolaño's 2666. Wow. As many of you know, I am a sucker for the giant, messy, ultimately failed encyclopedic novel, and I'm pretty sure this is one of them. I'm just hoping it sticks with me--like V or GRAVITY'S RAINBOW--and doesn't fade into obscurity because in the end it isn't all that good--like AGAINST THE DAY. I have a book of photographs at home called something like JUAREZ, THE LABORATORY OF OUR FUTURE. It's one of these dystopian projects in which they take pictures of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and argue that all of its nastiness and violence and exploitation is what we're in for. I certainly hope not. Anyway, 2666 feels a bit like that book of photos is percolating underneath every page.

two Pittsburgh beer restaurants

I don't know about the South Side Works. What I initially feared was that it was going to be "The Grove," a nasty development in central LA near where we used to life. The Grove is a big outdoor mall right next to the Farmer's Market, but it's set up to be a sort of Disneyfied streetscape. It's got a little tram, a fountain, "street vendors," etc. All of this is entirely enclosed, of course; the outside wall running along Third Street is just as ugly as any exterior mall wall, faceless and windowless and giving the lie to the faux-pedestrian-friendliness of the Grove. It's really too bad, because there is a real potential for Third Street to be much more pleasant. It's got a park right there, a Whole Foods and (what used to be, at least) the foulest-smelling K-Mart in existence, and the Grove's other borders are essentially Fairfax and Beverly, two of the most pleasant streets in LA to stroll.

So as we watched South Side Works sprout up, and see the cutesy names for the coordinated parking garages and the streets and pseudo public park next to the Cheesecake Factory, I feared the worst. Fortunately, it hasn't gotten that bad, but there is a massive amount of street construction going on right now that might change things. It's still a pretty contained area--you definitely know you're in a mall kinda place. But there's an escape to the south (across Carson it's the gloriously shabby South Side Flats and wonderful Nadine's) and to the north, the South Side Trail is coming along after being interrupted by construction for several years.

Right along that trail is the first place we went, the Hofbrauhaus Pittsburgh, which bills itself as one of the few foreign outposts of Munich's famed Hofbrauhaus. It's a beer kinda place, but it doesn't double as a sports bar: it's got a series of cavernous areas (quite loud) where people drink liters of beer. There's also several levels of porches and patios overlooking the Mon. We took the boys there a couple months ago, when they were still getting things together. It wasn't at all bad. The beer was excellent, and the food was quite acceptable. It's German food, of course, so it's not all that light. But the pretzels and cheese were perfect, and the sausages and such were essentially what you would expect. Thumbs up.

Sadly, the same wasn't true about another similar place that had received good reviews from the P-G and the Trib. Robinson--that strip-mall area you have to pass to and from the airport--is a desert for restaurants, which is always too bad when you get back from a long flight. I was quite happy to hear that there was one good place out there, and that it wasn't a chain like the craptastic Max & Erma's. But sadly, Bocktown was pretty poor. I hope that it's just getting its sea-legs, because it clearly had ambitions beyond being a TGIF. The menu had some really interesting stuff on it, but let's just make this thing clear: the "pretzels and cheese" plate was literally a bag of pretzels emptied into a basket. They take their beer seriously, and the selection was great, but the food (beyond the pretzels) wasn't. It wasn't awful, but it was just not done well. There was also some sort of serious service glitch, because it took us forever to get our food--45 minutes or so--and by the grace of god or someone we had just gotten the boys new toys that entertained them (potty-training reward for the young one). Bocktown seemed like a good place to go for after-work beers, but I'm not driving to Robinson after work, so I hope there's a clientele out west of town.

fries

does every article on Pittsburgh HAVE TO mention fries on sandwiches?

RIP IT UP AND START AGAIN

Several versions of Simon Reynolds' RIP IT UP AND START AGAIN: POSTPUNK 1978–1984 circulate around. The UK version is long--almost 600 pages, with a chronology of releases and band foundings--and the US version is significantly shorter. But as far as I can tell, there are versions within versions and a couple editions of each. Having finished the longest version I could get my hands on (the second paperback edition), I can say that I don't quite understand why it needed to be as long as it was. The book traces "postpunk" from, as its title makes clear, 1978 to 1984. Because Reynolds is a rock critic, he's got to set forth some arbitrary landmarks and boundaries, and so his book begins with the breakup of the Sex Pistols (duh) and the founding of PiL (his first interesting choice, but not a very daring one) and ends with Frankie Goes to Hollywood, which is a very British choice. I don't think anyone in the US saw Frankie as following in a postpunk line, but Reynolds makes a pretty convincing argument that they did come from that stock. The book isn't as good of a read as I hoped, although the research is great. Three dozen or more stories about bands getting together in England, orienting themselves to punk rock, and either succeeding or disappearing gets pretty repetitive. It was fascinating to read about how the Human League, which have become essentially synonymous with silly 1980s synth rock and big hair, actually came from the projects of Sheffield, England with a very well-developed political project, a kind of Chumbawamba. (But for all of his understanding of English sociopolitical life in the late 1970s, it is amazing that Reynolds calls Cleveland the heart of the US steel industry.)

As far as I can tell, Reynolds' most important act of critical judgment was in deciding what to exclude and what to include and what to count as the main gene line of "postpunk." Unlike what an American-oriented critic would do, Reynolds puts synthesizer music at the very center of the postpunk family tree, sprouting from PiL's early records. Because of this, a lot of music that I never considered "postpunk" in any but a chronological sense is at the heart of Reynolds' story: the Human League, for instance, are key players here. Reynolds excludes from his story hardcore and the early 1980s punk revival, seeing them as irrelevant. It's an interesting story, very indebted to the post-Velvet Underground cult of artiness. But I don't think he mentions the Jam at all, and Elvis Costello is outside of his purview. Were they too derivative of pub rock? Dunno.

plotting in puerto vallarta

P1020361
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

naipaul and menand

Although I finished it several weeks ago, I'm still not sure what I think about V.S. Naipaul's A BEND IN THE RIVER. He's one of those authors that I'd heard a great deal about, essentially all of it wildly positive, but still didn't know much about even after reading one of his classics (A HOUSE FOR MR. BISWAS, which I read about five years ago). A recent and very sensationalistic authorized biography of Naipaul caused a commotion in the book-review press, as the biography dwells on Naipaul's taste for rough sex and his often brutal and generally callous treatment of the women in his life. None of this was an entirely new story, of course, as Paul Theroux had already written extensively about what a bastard Sir Vidia is/was, but to have this in an "authorized" biography was pretty delicious. Anyway, apart from all of the gossip I'd always heard that Naipaul was one of the great stylists in English and that if his politics weren't so uncongenial to the project he'd be the great postcolonial writer. (His novels certainly document the fragmenting of the old colonial order, but not in the celebratory way that lefty postcolonials prefer.) I had slogged through MR. BISWAS without it making a great impression, but since A BEND IN THE RIVER is considered Naipaul's greatest work I tried it out with my last Audible.com credit.

Like MR. BISWAS, it wanders and meanders and doesn't feel particularly tightly plotted. Huge events occur during the novel, and the main character (Salim) observes them from his unimportant position, and they determine Salim's development, but it's hard to say about this novel "this happened, and it led to this, and it ended up this way." Salim is an Indian Muslim from the Indian trading diaspora, here in southern Africa (an unnamed nation but most critics see it to be what used to be called the Belgian Congo and then Zaire). He leaves his "cosmopolitan" coastal city for a city in the interior where he buys a general-store business. The city in which he lives waxes and wanes with the nation's fortunes; over the course of the book the foreigners who give the city culture and money are driven out by "bush" people during decolonization, then return when the nation normalizes, then start to leave again when the Big Man leader (likely modeled on Mobutu Sese Seko) begins to rile up those "bush" people. It's a fascinating look at a little-known group of people and at a predicament I'd never thought much about.

After that I quickly sped through Louis Menand's THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB, a kind of heavy-hitters lineup of mid-19th-century American intellectual history: Dewey, Holmes, Agassiz, Peirce, William James, and many others make appearances. Menand is a New Yorker writer and he brings that blessed clarity to this book, but even at that I'm such a philosophical illiterate (and lazy reader of this book) that I couldn't quote back at you Menand's explanation of what "pragmatism" actually is. Oddly enough, I did start to understand why statistics was such a breakthrough by reading THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB.