Jacques Derrida Dead of Pancreatic Cancer

Sad news, indeed, though not that surprising. Ned Lukacher, a friend of Derrida's and the English translator of Cinders, told me last year that Derrida announced he had cancer to participants in a conference in UC-Irvine. Ned said that he was rather shocked at how frail Derrida looked at that time and noted that the philosopher, known for his vigor, was clearly tired and didn't participate as actively in the proceeding.

What's particularly frustrating is that this obituary is full of erroneous statements and distortions of Derrida's thought and project. Derrida's readings of philosophical texts don't aim to reveal hidden meanings; they proceed to interrogate rigorously the basic trope of revelation as it functions to perpetuate the myth of communicative immediacy. Moreover, why not quote Derrida directly, rather than telling us that "Fellow academics have charged that Derrida's writings 'deny distinction between reality and fiction'"? Which academics have said this, and why not name them and hold them accountable for their misinterpretation? It will be interesting to see which, if any, of the major journalistic publications publish an accurate description of Derrida's philosophy, particularly his account of language's capacity to generate signifying effects beyond the control of any single language user.

Was Bush Wired for the Debate?

Who knew that the rules governing the presedential debates allowed for electronic earpieces and offstage promptings? Sadly, this latest rumor is probably true and, even more disheartening, it's not even surprising. Everybody knows (as Leonard Cohen sings) that we've got an animatronic president with a history of lying and cheating.

Here We Are Now, Entertain Us

I'm taking the liberty of posting the following essay All Entertainment All the Time by Mark Edmunson, which pinpoints many of the challenges facing professors in the contemporary university, particularly professors who teach in the humanities.

The following essay is excerpted from Why Read? by Mark Edmunson, which was published in September by Bloomsbury.

I can date my sense that something was going badly wrong in my own teaching to a particular event. It took place on evaluation day in a class I was giving on the works of Sigmund Freud. The class met twice a week, late in the afternoon, and the students, about fifty undergraduates, tended to drag in and slump into their chairs looking slightly disconsolate, waiting for a jump start. To get the discussion moving, I often provided a joke, an anecdote, an amusing query. When you were a child, I had asked a few weeks before, were your Halloween costumes id costumes, superego costumes, or ego costumes? Were you monsters—creatures from the black lagoon, vampires and werewolves? Were you Wonder Women and Supermen? Or were you something in between? It often took this sort of thing to raise them from the habitual torpor.

But today, evaluation day, they were full of life. As I passed out the assessment forms, a buzz rose up in the room. Today they were writing their course evaluations; their evaluations of Freud, their evaluations of me. They were pitched into high gear. As I hurried from the room, I looked over my shoulder to see them scribbling away like the devil’s auditors. They were writing furiously, even the ones who struggled to squeeze out their papers and journal entries word by word.

But why was I distressed, bolting out the door of my classroom, where I usually held easy sway? Chances were that the evaluations would be much like what they had been in the past: They’d be just fine. And in fact, they were. I was commended for being “interesting,” and complimented for my relaxed and tolerant ways; my sense of humor and capacity to connect the material we were studying with contemporary culture came in for praise.

In many ways, I was grateful for the evaluations, as I always had been, just as I’m grateful for the chance to teach in an excellent university surrounded everywhere with very bright people. But as I ran from that classroom, full of anxious intimations, and then later as I sat to read the reports, I began to feel that there was something wrong. There was an undercurrent to the whole process I didn’t like. I was disturbed by the evaluation forms themselves with their number ratings (“What is your ranking of the instructor?—1, 2, 3, 4 or 5") which called to mind the sheets they circulate after a TV pilot plays to the test audience in Burbank. Nor did I like the image of myself that emerged—a figure of learned but humorous detachment, laid-back, easygoing, cool. But most of all, I was disturbed by the attitude of calm consumer expertise that pervaded the responses. I was put off by the serenely implicit belief that the function of Freud—or, as I’d seen it expressed on other forms, in other classes, the function of Shakespeare, of Wordsworth or of Blake—was diversion and entertainment. “Edmundson has done a fantastic job,” said one reviewer, “of presenting this difficult, important and controversial material in an enjoyable and approachable way.”

Enjoyable: I enjoyed the teacher. I enjoyed the reading. Enjoyed the course. It was pleasurable, diverting, part of the culture of readily accessible, manufactured bliss: the culture of Total Entertainment All the Time.

As I read the reviews, I thought of a story I’d heard about a Columbia University instructor who issued a two-part question at the end of his literature course. Part one: What book in the course did you most dislike; part two: What flaws of intellect or character does that dislike point up in you? The hand that framed those questions may have been slightly heavy. But at least it compelled the students to see intellectual work as confrontation between two people, reader and author, where the stakes mattered. The Columbia students were asked to relate the quality of an encounter, not rate the action as though it had unfolded across the big screen. A form of media connoisseurship was what my students took as their natural right.

But why exactly were they describing the Oedipus complex and the death drive as interesting and enjoyable to contemplate? Why were they staring into the abyss, as Lionel Trilling once described his own students as having done, and commending it for being a singularly dark and fascinatingly contoured abyss, one sure to survive as an object of edifying contemplation for years to come? Why is the great confrontation—the rugged battle of fate where strength is born, to recall Emerson—so conspicuously missing? Why hadn’t anyone been changed by my course?

To that question, I began to compound an answer. We Americans live in a consumer culture, and it does not stop short at the university’s walls. University culture, like American culture at large, is ever more devoted to consumption and entertainment, to the using and using up of goods and images. We Americans are six percent of the world’s population: We use a quarter of its oil; we gorge while others go hungry; we consume everything with a vengeance and then we produce movies and TV shows and ads to celebrate the whole consumer loop. We make it—or we appropriate it—we “enjoy” it and we burn it up, pretty much whatever “it” is. For someone coming of age in America now, I thought, there are few available alternatives to the consumer worldview. Students didn’t ask for it much less create it, but they brought a consumer Weltanschauung to school, where it exerted a potent influence.

The students who enter my classes on day one are generally devotees of spectatorship and of consumer-cool. Whether they’re sorority-fraternity denizens, piercer-tattooers, gay or straight, black or white, they are, nearly across the board, very, very self-contained. On good days, there’s a light, appealing glow; on bad days, shuffling disgruntlement. But there is little fire, little force of spirit or mind in evidence.

More and more, we Americans like to watch (and not to do). In fact watching is our ultimate addiction. My students were the progeny of two hundred available cable channels and omnipresent Blockbuster outlets. They grew up with their noses pressed against the window of that second spectral world that spins parallel to our own, the World Wide Web. There they met life at second or third hand, peering eagerly, taking in the passing show, but staying remote, apparently untouched by it. So conditioned, they found it almost natural to come at the rest of life with a sense of aristocratic expectation: “What have you to show me that I haven’t yet seen?”

But with this remove comes timidity, a fear of being directly confronted. There’s an anxiety at having to face life firsthand. (The way the word “like” punctuates students’ speech—“I was like really late for like class”—indicates a discomfort with immediate experience and wish to maintain distance, to live in a simulation.) These students were, I thought, inclined to be both lordly and afraid.

The classroom atmosphere they most treasured was relaxed, laid-back, cool. The teacher should never get exercised about anything, on pain of being written off as a buffoon. Nor should she create an atmosphere of vital contention, where students lost their composure, spoke out, became passionate, expressed their deeper thoughts and fears, or did anything that might cause embarrassment. Embarrassment was the worst thing that could befall one; it must be avoided at whatever cost.

Early on, I had been a reader of Marshall McLuhan, and I was reminded of his hypothesis that the media on which we as a culture have become dependent are themselves cool. TV, which seemed on the point of demise, so absurd had it become to the culture of the late sixties, rules again. To disdain TV now is bad form; it signifies that you take yourself far too seriously. TV is a tranquilizing medium, a soporific, inducing in its devotees a light narcosis. It reduces anxiety, steadies and quiets the nerves. But also deadens. Like every narcotic, it will be consumed in certain doses, produce something like a hangover, the habitual watchers’ irritable languor that persists after the TV is off. It’s been said that the illusion of knowing and control that heroin engenders isn’t entirely unlike the TV consumer’s habitual smug-torpor, and that seems about right.

Those who appeal most on TV over the long haul are low-key and nonassertive. Enthusiasm quickly looks absurd. The form of character that’s most ingratiating on the tube, that’s most in tune with the medium itself, is laid-back, tranquil, self-contained, and self-assured. The news anchor, the talk-show host, the announcer, the late-night favorite—all are prone to display a sure sense of human nature, avoidance of illusion, reliance on timing and strategy rather than on aggressiveness or inspiration. With such figures, the viewer is invited to identify. On what’s called reality TV, on game shows, quiz shows, inane contests, we see people behaving absurdly, outraging the cool medium with their firework personalities. Against such excess the audience defines itself as wordly, laid-back, and wise.

Is there also a financial side to the culture of cool? I believed that I saw as much. A cool youth culture is a marketing bonanza for producers of right products, who do all they can to enlarge that culture and keep it humming. The Internet, TV, and magazines teem with what I came to think of as persona ads, ads for Nikes and Reeboks, and Jeeps and Blazers that don’t so much endorse the powers of the product per se as show you what sort of person you’ll inevitably become once you’ve acquired it. The Jeep ad that featured hip outdoorsy kids flinging a Frisbee from mountain top to mountaintop wasn’t so much about what Jeeps can do as it was about the kind of people who own them: vast, beautiful creatures, with godlike prowess and childlike tastes. Buy a Jeep and be one with them. The ad by itself is of little consequence, but expand its message exponentially and you have the central thrust of postmillennial consumer culture: buy in order to be. Watch (coolly) so as to learn how to be worthy of being watched (while being cool).

To the young, I thought, immersion in consumer culture, immersion in cool, is simply felt as natural. They have never known a world other than the one that accosts them from every side with images of mass-marketed perfection. Ads are everywhere: on TV, on the Internet, on billboards, in magazines, sometimes plastered on the side of the school bus. The forces that could challenge the consumer style are banished to the peripheries of culture. Rare is the student who arrives at college knowing something about the legacy of Marx or Marcuse, Gandhi or Thoreau. And by the time she does encounter them, they’re presented as diverting, interesting, entertaining—or perhaps as object for rigorously dismissive analysis—surely not as goads to another kind of life.

As I saw it, the specter of the uncool was creating a subtle tyranny for my students. It’s apparently an easy standard to subscribe to, the standard of cool, but once committed to it, you discover that matters are different. You’re inhibited, except on ordained occasions, from showing feeling, stifled from trying to achieve anything original. Apparent expression of exuberance now seem to occur with dimming quotation marks around them. Kids celebrating at a football game ironically play the roles of kids celebrating at a football game, as it’s been scripted on multiple TV shows and ads. There’s always self-observation, no real letting-go. Students apparently feel that even the slightest departure from the reigning code can get you genially ostracized. This is a culture tensely committed to a laid-back norm.

In the current university environment, I saw, there was only one form of knowledge that was generally acceptable. And that was knowledge that allowed you to keep your cool. It was fine to major in economics or political science or sociology, for there you could acquire ways of knowing that didn’t compel you to reveal and risk yourself. There you could stay detached. And—what was at least as important—you could acquire skills that would stand you in good financial stead later in life. You could use your educations to make yourself rich. All of the disciples that did not traduce the canons of cool were thriving. It sometimes seemed that everyone of my first-year advisees wanted to major in economics, even when they had no independent interest in the subject. They’d never read an economics book, had no attraction to the business pages of the Times. They wanted economics because word had it that econ was the major that made you look best to Wall Street and the investment banks. “We like economics majors,” an investment banking recruiter reportedly said, “because they’re people who’re willing to sacrifice their educations to the interest of their careers.”

The subjects that might threaten consumer cool, literary study in particular, had to adapt. They could offer diversion—it seems that’s what I (and Freud) had been doing—or they could make themselves over to look more like the so-called hard, empirically based disciplines.

Here computers come in. Now that computers are everywhere, each area of inquiry in the humanities is more and more defined by the computer’s resources. Computers are splendid research tools. Good. The curriculum turns in the direction of research. Professors don’t ask students to try to write as Dickens would were he alive today. Rather, they research Dickens. They delve into his historical context; they learn what the newspapers were gossiping about on the day that the first installment of Bleak House hit the stands. We shape our tools, McLuhan said, and thereafter our tools shape us.

Many educated people in America seem persuaded that the computer is the most significant invention in human history. Those who do not master its intricacies are destined for a life of shame, poverty, and neglect. More humanities courses are becoming computer-oriented, which keeps them safely in the realm of cool, financially negotiable endeavors. A professor teaching Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper,” which depicts the exploitation of young boys whose lot is not altogether unlike the lot of many children living now in American inner cities, is likely to charge his students with using the computer to compile as much information about the poem as possible. They can find articles about chimney sweepers from 1790s newspapers; contemporary pictures and engravings that depict these unfortunate little creatures; critical articles that interpret the poem in a seemingly endless variety of ways; biographical information on Blake, with hints about events in his own boyhood that would have made chimney sweepers a special interest; portraits of the author at various stages of his life; maps of Blake’s London. Together the class might create a Blake—Chimney Sweeper Web site: www.blakesweeper.edu.

Instead of spending class time wondering what the poem means, and what application it has to present-day experience, students compile information about it. They set the poem in its historical and critical context, showing first how the poem is the product and the property of the past—and, implicitly, how it really has nothing to do with the present except as an artful curiosity; and second how, given the number of ideas about it already available, adding more thought would be superfluous.

By putting a world of facts at the end of a key-stroke, computers have made facts, their command, their manipulation, their ordering, central to what now can qualify as humanistic education. The result is to suspend reflection about the differences among wisdom, knowledge, and information. Everything that can be accessed online can seem equal to everything else, no datum more important or more profound than any other. Thus the possibility presents itself that there really is no more wisdom; there is no more knowledge; there is only information. No thought is a challenge or an affront to what one currently believes.

Am I wrong to think that the kind of education on offer in the humanities now is in some measure an education for empire? The people who administer an empire need certain very precise capacities. They need to be adept technocrats. They need the kind of training that will allow them to take up an abstract and unfelt relation to the world and its peoples—a cool relation, as it were. Otherwise, they won’t be able to squeeze forth the world’s wealth without suffering debilitating pains of conscience. And the denizen of the empire needs to be able to consume the kinds of pleasures that will augment his feeling of rightful rulership. Those pleasures must be self-inflating and not challenging; they need to confirm the current empowered state of the self and not challenge it. The easy pleasures of this nascent American empire, akin to the pleasures to be had in first-century Rome, reaffirm the right to mastery—and, correspondingly, the existence of a world teeming with potential vassals and exploitable wealth.

Immersed in preprofessionalism, swimming in entertainment, my students have been sealed off from the chance to call everything they’ve valued into question, to look at new forms of life, and to risk everything. For them, education is knowing and lordly spectatorship, never the Socratic dialogue about how one ought to live one’s life.

These thoughts of mine didn’t come with any anger at my students. For who was to blame them? They didn’t create the consumer biosphere whose air was now their purest oxygen. They weren’t the ones who should have pulled the plug on the TV or disabled the game port when they were kids. They hadn’t invited the ad flaks and money changers into their public schools. What I felt was an ongoing sense of sorrow about their foreclosed possibilities. They seemed to lack chances that I, born far poorer than most of them, but into a different world, had abundantly enjoyed.

As I read those evaluation forms and thought them over, I recalled a story. In Vienna, there was once a superb teacher of music, very old. He accepted a few students. There came to him once a young violinist whom all of Berlin was celebrating. Only fourteen, yet he played exquisitely. The young man arrived in Austria hoping to study with the master. At the audition, he played to perfection; everyone surrounding the old teacher attested to the fact. When it came time to make his decision. The old man didn’t hesitate. “I don’t want him,” he said. “But, master, why not?” asked a protégé. “He’s the most gifted young violinist we’ve ever heard.” “Maybe,” said the old man. “But he lacks something, and without this thing real development is not possible. What that young man lacks in inexperience.” It’s a precious possession, inexperience; my students have had it stolen from them.

But what about the universities themselves? Do they do all they can to fight the reign of consumer cool?

From the start, the university’s approach to students now has a solicitous, maybe even a servile tone. As soon as they enter their junior year in high school, and especially if they live in a prosperous zip code, the information materials, which is to say the advertising, come rolling in. Pictures, testimonials, videocassettes, and CD-ROMs (some hidden, some not) arrive at the door from colleges across the country, all trying to capture the students and their tuition dollars.

The freshman-to-be sees photographs of well-appointed dorm rooms; of elaborate physed facilities; of expertly maintained sports fields; of orchestras and drama troupes; of students working joyously, off by themselves. It’s a retirement spread for the young. “Colleges don’t have admissions offices anymore, they have marketing departments,” a school financial officer said to me once. Is it surprising that someone who has been approached with photos and tapes, bells and whistles, might come to college thinking that the Shakespeare and Freud courses were also going to be agreeable treats?

How did we reach this point? In part, the answer is a matter of demographics and also of money. Aided by the GI Bill, the college-going population increased dramatically after the Second World War. Then came the baby boomers, and to accommodate them colleges continued to grow. Universities expand readily enough, but with tenure locking in faculty for lifetime jobs, and with the general reluctance of administrators to eliminate their own slots, it’s not easy for a university to contract. So after the baby boomers had passed through—like a tasty lump sliding the length of a boa constrictor—the colleges turned to promotional strategies—to advertising—to fill the empty chairs. Suddenly college, except for the few highly selective establishments, became a buyers’ market. What students and their parents wanted had to be taken potently into account. That often meant creating more comfortable, less challenging environments, places where almost no one failed, everything was enjoyable, and everyone was nice.

Just as universities must compete with one another for students, so must individual departments. At a time of rank economic anxiety (and what time is not in America?), the English department and the history department have to contend for students against the more success-ensuring branches, such as the science departments, and the commerce school. In 1968, more than 21 percent of all the bachelor’s degrees conferred in America were humanities degrees; by 1993 that total had fallen to about 13 percent, and it continues to sink. The humanities now must struggle to attract students, many of whose parents devoutly wish that they would go elsewhere.

One of the ways we’ve tried to be attractive is by loosening up. We grade much more genially than our colleagues in the sciences. In English and history, we don’t give many D’s, or C’s either. (The rigors of Chem 101 may create almost as many humanities majors per year as the splendors of Shakespeare.) A professor at Stanford explained that grades were getting better because the students were getting smarter every year. Anything, I suppose, is possible.

Along with easing up on grades, many humanities departments have relaxed major requirements. There are some good reasons for introducing more choice into the curricula and requiring fewer standard courses. But the move jibes with a tendency to serve the students instead of challenging them. Students can float in and out of classes during the first two weeks of the term without making any commitment. The common name for this span—shopping period—attests to the mentality that’s in play.

One result of the university’s widening elective leeway is to give students more power over teachers. Those who don’t like you can simply avoid you. If the students dislike you en masse, you can be left with an empty classroom. I’ve seen other professors, especially older ones, often those with the most to teach, suffer real grief at not having enough students sign up for their courses: Their grading was too tough; they demanded too much; their beliefs were too far out of line with the existing dispensation. It takes only a few such incidents to draw other professors into line.

Before students arrive, universities ply them with luscious ads, guaranteeing them a cross between summer camp and lotusland. When they get to campus, flattery, entertainment, and preprofessional training are theirs, if that’s what they want. The world we present them is not a world elsewhere, an ivory tower world, but one that’s fully continuous with the American entertainment and consumer culture they’ve been living in. They hardly know they’ve left home. Is it a surprise, then, that this generation of students—steeped in consumer culture before they go off to school; treated as potent customers by the university well before they arrive, then pandered to from day one—are inclined to see the books they read as a string of entertainments to be enjoyed without effort or languidly cast aside?

So I had my answer. The university had merged almost seamlessly with the consumer culture that exists beyond its gates. Universities were running like businesses, and very effective businesses at that. Now I knew why my students were greeting great works of mind and heart as consumer goods. They came looking for what they’d had in the past, Total Entertainment All the Time, and the university at large did all it could to maintain the flow. (Though where this allegiance to the Entertainment-Consumer Complex itself came from—that is a much larger question. It would take us into politics and economics, becoming, in time, a treatise in itself.)

But what about me? Now I had to look at my own place in the culture of training and entertainment. Those course evaluations made it clear enough. I was providing diversion. To some students I was offering an intellectualized midday variant of Letterman and Leno. They got good times from my classes, and maybe a few negotiable skills, because that’s what I was offering. But what was I going to do about it? I had diagnosed the problem, all right, but as yet I had nothing approaching a plan for action.

I’d like to say that I arrived at something like a breakthrough simply by delving into my own past. In my life I’ve had a string of marvelous teachers, and thinking back on them was surely a help. But some minds—mine, at times, I confess—tend to function best in opposition. So it was looking not just to the great and good whom I’ve known, but to something like an arch-antagonist, that got me thinking in fresh ways about how to teach and why.

From the book Why Read? by Mark Edmundson. Published by Bloomsbury USA.Copyright (c) 2004 by Mark Edmundson. Reprinted courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing. Available wherever books are sold.

Mark Edmundson is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. A prizewinning scholar, he has published a number of works of literary and cultural criticism, including Literature Against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida, and Teacher: The One Who Made the Difference. He has also written for such publications as the New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, the Nation, and Harper's, where he is a contributing editor.

At the Stadium Club

Students in my American Literature and Culture class have to post responses to chapters from Don DeLillo's Underworld on our course website and present them before the class. Below are three of my questions, followed by a transcript of a student's response (this student, I might add, is the first post before the class, so kudos to him or her) and my response.

Ch. 3 (pp. 91–100)
Q: Explain the significance of the setting for this chapter--the Stadium Club. How does this ballpark setting compare with that in the "Prologue"?

Q: We learn that Nick Shay now owns the Bobby Thompson home-run ball. How did he come into possession of it and, more importantly, why did he want to own it? What significance does the ball hold for Nick?

Q: Summarize the remarks that Nick's dining company--e.g., Brian Glassic, Big Simms, and Jane Farish--make about The Shot Heard Round the World and the historic ballgame.

Response (The text is unedited, as submitted by the student).

Huge differences between the settings of the chapters three and the prologue seem to exist. However, one similarity between these two chapters is the fact that in both chapters, Dodgers are playing against the Giants. Nonetheless, the differences prevail similarities. In the prologue, we learn that the audience is made up of famous characters such as Edgar Hoover, Frank Sinatra, Jacky Gleason and Toot Shor. In fact, each one of these characters is actually viewing the game from the benches, unlike the characters in the chapter 3. Nick, Big Sims, Brian Glassic, and Jane Farish are watching the game drinking whiskey and eating, while sitting apart from the field (DeLillo 91). Moreover, in the chapter three, Jane who is a female is being company to Nick and his friends, thus watching the game as well. Unlike in the prologue, no female is being mentioned at the stadium. However, the greater difference in the settings of these two chapters is the location where games are being played, more specifically, which towns they belong to. In the prologue, both Giants and Dodgers are New York’s teams. However, these teams have moved west in the late 50’s (DeLillo 93). Likewise, after the game of 1951, when the Thompson hit the homer, the atmosphere at the game seem to be different as well. Before, Dodgers vs. Giants game seem to be more exiting than it is forty years later. Nevertheless, another difference between these two teams after the 1951 game is the status, position, and the significance of these two teams. “We had real Dodgers and Giants. Now we have holograms (DeLillo 95)”.

Moreover, we learn that Nick Shay has the Bobby Thompson’s home-run ball. Glassic, who is a friend of Nick tells us a story of how Nick got to own the ball. A dealer they met while ago, convinced them that he had Bobby Thompson’s home-run ball. In addition, the dealer told Nick and Glassic how he was able to trace the ball. After they heared his story they were convinced ninety nine and nine-tenths percent that this was the same ball from the October third, 1951 game between Dodgers and Giants (DeLillo 96). Nonetheless, the reason why Nick purchased the ball was not because Giants have won and because he wanted to have it as a symbol and memory, but because Dodger have lost. “Well, I didn’t buy the object because of the glory and drama attached to it. It’s not about Thompson hitting homer. It’s about Branka making the pitch. It’s all about loosing (DeLillo 97). Furthermore, Nick explains that the ball is about mystery of bad luck and loss. He says that it is the only thing in his life that he owned (97). Nick’s reasoning for buying the ball, even though unusual, shows how serious fan he was of Dodgers, and how much their loss seemed to shape his life. We learn that loss of Dodgers caused a lack of interest, desire and passion for this team. Similarly, later on in the novel, as the readers we find out that Nick used to live in New York for quite a time, and that he moved west. Perhaps, the author is suggesting that Nick followed the path of his ex hometown teams. Both Giants and Dodgers “moved West, taking Nick’s heart and soul with them (De Lillo 93)”.

While watching the game, eating and talking, Nick and his friends touch up on several great tissues, most of them having the connection with the game of 1951. The day the Giants have won, Nick alone listened to the game from his roof. However, unlike the others, since he was the only Dodgers fan in his town, their loss brought huge suffering to Nick. “I died inside when they lost. And it was important to die alone. I had to listen alone. And then the radio told me whether I would live and die (DeLillo 93)”. Nonetheless, other idea they discussed was the difference between the day when President Kennedy was killed and the winning of Giants. According to DeLillo when JFK was killed everyone closed themselves inside their houses. On the other side, when Giants won, everyone went inside (95). Later on, we learn that everyone rushed inside other than Nick. Likewise, they discuss the reasons why Thompson homer continues to live, forty years later. They say that it is because things were worn out, replayed, “The scratchier an old film or an audiotape, the clearer the action in a way (DeLillo 98)”. In other words, the more people talk about things and remember them, as well as record them in their minds that are film and audio tapes, more lively the events turns out to be.

In conclusion, perhaps the alternative title for this chapter can be “The Power and Impact of History on Its Creators”.
“He thinks about what it (baseball) means,” Glassic said. “It’s an object with a history. He thinks about losing. He wonders what it is that brings bad luck to one person and sweetest of good fortune to another. It’s a lovely thing in itself besides. An old baseball? It’s a lovely thing, Sims. And this one’s got a pedigree like no other”.

===

And my response...

Dear X

Thanks for posting your response early on Monday evening. That should give everybody plenty of time to read it before class tomorrow. Thanks too for signing up to go first. Your response is a good length—about 2 pages when I print it out double-spaced in Times New Roman 11 pt. font.

Let’s look more closely then at how you responded to the questions…

1. Q: Explain the significance of the setting for this chapter--the Stadium Club. How does this ballpark setting compare with that in the "Prologue"?

Your argument is that the differences between the two locales is greater than the similarities. Although both the prologue and this chapter are set during a baseball game between the Giants and the Dodgers, you note that both the location of the game and the atmosphere are quite different. It’s no longer the Brooklyn Dodgers vs. the New York Giants, but the Los Angeles Dodgers vs. the San Francisco Giants. The teams have moved out West. Since the games are set over forty years apart, it is not surprising to note that the specific people in the audience are different. I liked that you contrasted the two groups of spectators who DeLillo chooses to focus on and that you identified the woman, Jane Farish, in the audience as marking a significant gender difference. Could you say anything more about Jane’s presence? I’m not sure if we can read this scene as being about gender differences in any significant way. It seems to me that Jane’s lack of knowledge about the game of baseball is more a function of her being a Brit than of her being a woman. In any case, her outsider position there as a filmmaker creates a situation that justifies all of the commentary about baseball going on in the game.

In your revision, you should try to include a few statements that provide readers an overview of the nature of the conversation that Nick, Jane, Big Sims, and Brian Glassic have about the game and the setting. For example, the setting in which they watch the game—the Stadium Club is a matter of debate. Brian wants them to eat quickly so they can go sit in the stands with the other fans and hear the game, but Big Sims insists that they’re there to “eat a meal and see a game” (92). Sims emphasizes that they can watch the game fine from where they are, and disregards Brian’s insistence that the crowd noise is an essential part of the experience. (Here, you might think about how this episode relates to William S. Burroughs’ remarks about the way a soundtrack, that is, the background sounds, can completely change the nature of an event that one is watching.) Aside from the fact that this is, apparently, not an end-of-the-season game, one major reason, then, that the atmosphere is less intense is that it is taking place behind glass in a restaurant. Brian clearly finds this to be an unsatisfactory way to watch a ballgame. The experience isn’t authentic. He says “this isn’t reality. This is virtual reality” (92).

This latter remark is related to the quote you excerpted about the game being a hologram. I’m glad you cited this. Can you comment upon Brian’s remark for us? Contextualize it a bit. What is a hologram, and in what way are these teams holograms? Do you see how this comment, which depends upon a technological metaphor, is related to the other remark by Brian that you cite. Brian says that “The scratchier an old film or an old audiotape, the clearer the action in a way” (98). In your revision, spend some more time contextualizing this remark. I don’t think your gloss (In other words, the more people talk about things and remember them, as well as record them in their minds that are film and audio tapes, more lively the events turns out to be) is an accurate interpretation. Take note of how and why Brian first makes his claim. It is in response to Sims’ story about a “pitcher named Donnie Moore who gave up a crucial home run in a play-off game and ended up shooting his wife,” that is, a story about a black man’s inability to live with what he regarded as his failure (98). Sims’ argument is that unlike Branca, who gave up The Shot Heard Round the World but could still become a baseball legend, Moore committed suicide, because as a black man he “was not allowed to outlive his failure” (98). Brian responds by suggesting that Sims’ racialized interpretation misses the point, and then gives his analysis about why “[t]he Thomson homer continues to live” (98). Brian’s analysis is based upon a claim about older mediating technologies and how they affect our perception of a sporting event. Try to make Brian’s claim explicit.

You don’t need to address all of the conversational threads (it’s amazing how many of them are there once you begin to look for them) in your revised answer, but in order to answer the following question thoroughly (Q: Summarize the remarks that Nick's dining company--e.g., Brian Glassic, Big Sims, and Jane Farish--make about The Shot Heard Round the World and the historic ballgame) you’ll need to read more carefully.

You’ve already alluded to one of the major threads—failure and losing—when you remark upon Nick’s reason for purchasing the ball. The longer quote that you give at the end of your response (which I take to be your ‘favorite’ excerpt) is the one that you’ll want to comment upon further.

I’m not sure what to make of your title. In class, you’ll have to explain who you understand to be the ‘creators of history’ in this chapter. For what it’s worth, I would try to come up with a title that alludes to either (1) the alleged inauthenticity of the experience of watching a ballgame in the Stadium Club or (2) the way the Shot Heard Round the Word signifies is associated with failure in Nick’s mind.

My possible titles, then, are: “A Virtual Ballgame” (alluding to Brian’s comments) or “To Commemorate Failure” (The reason Nick gives for buying the ball).

In conclusion, the conversation reported on in this chapter covers many topics. It’s easy to overlook them, but you did a good job of getting some of the important ones on the table. The quotations you chose to cite focus our attention on some of the key issues that DeLillo raises. In class, we’ll all work on how to read passages closely in order to better contextualize these quotes.

Thanks,
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Anyone who claims that teachers don't work hard can kiss my ass. If I calculated my actual hourly wage, I'd cry.

The Power of History

This Tuesday, my American Literature and Culture Class will begin our analysis of Underworld by discussing how Don DeLillo came to write his Cold War-era epic. "The Power of History," an essay by DeLillo that was published in The New York Times Magazine shortly before Underworld's debut, provides insight into DeLillo's thoughts on the relationship between historical events and their fictional representation. Read it.