privilege as a meme

like that is on the reader not on the author. his writing makes no claim on my attention. there are millions of people generating written content worldwide - to claim that the added presence of (1) particular writer will shift the dynamics of the field of literature in any given direction is absurd.

mordy & j otm

One could say by Othering W/M dominance, framing it in past-tense, and pretending it is something you can simply ignore, is all harmful to whatever cause this guy is struggling with.

Samuel Beckett — 'Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.'

On the other hand, he said it, amirite? (h/t art spiegelman in Maus)

Ah yes, you're right there - but still addicted to odd binaries, I see. People read literature for lots of reasons, some not even clear to themselves.

It is of course a pompous thing for him to wonder, as if his choice will make an enormous difference to anyone - but it is good sometimes to act as if there was a larger number of you, in voting or general civic mindedness - there are worse pompous things to do than viewing yourself as a part of a statistic rather than a special snowflake.

TL;DR: this should be a mandatory question on a lot of university courses.

it reminds me a little of radical marxist literary critics who are only really concerned about whether a piece of fiction challenges or reaffirms capitalism. it's a mostly internally consistent way of viewing of the world but it seems so sad to me that ppl live & think this way.

join a curriculum committee sometime : /

Sometimes I feel like the time to write from my experience has passed, that the need for poems from a white, male perspective just isn’t there anymore

This is a strange egotism at work. An author doesn't decide what sort of writing people want or need. An author writes and people either read it or they don't. Or else the author stops writing and takes up macramé for reasons that they know best. But if no one wants to read your poems, maybe it has nothing to do with being a white male whose time has passed. Or maybe it does, but it shouldn't concern you. Your job is to write poems. The rest is out of your hands.

i think it's sad that he has so dehumanized himself that he thinks his perspective in his writing is a 'white male perspective,' and not the perspective of an individual human w/ unique experiences + thoughts.

He's also dehumanizing others, in effect claiming that there is only one white male perspective. This is a bad move no matter what group you're claiming; any sentence that begins, e.g., "As a [member of x group], I believe..." is a sentence that should be deleted.

I've considered these questions a lot, I think it's commendable he earnestly sought advice, and even though I have no idea what the answers ought to be, it doesn't seem to me like the answer he's given here is sufficient. What do the rest of you do, assume these questions sort themselves out in the wind?

There is no one who is capable of giving him the type of advice he is seeking. The answers he's been given here are sufficient, in that they are the only valid answers, even if they do not appear to satisfy his desire for a different kind of answer. Although his questions may be asked endlessly and the desire behind them is real enough, the answers really do sort themselves out 'in the wind', in that the eventual use of what anyone writes cannot be controlled or predicted by anyone at all. Least of all the author.

"i feel like 'dont publish your poetry' is more than sufficient advice for this person and anyone struggling with these questions"

i feel like this sufficient advice for most people on earth.

betcha the answer he was hoping for was something like: "so many white male authors don't grapple with these issues at all. that you do is commendable and indicates that your perspective has been appropriately vetted and so, though you should proceed carefully and always w/ privilege acknowledgements upfront, i give you permission to continue to write."

i think if you have any question about whether you should write that you should never ever write anything again. that's the correct advice. don't even write a check. or someone's telephone number on your hand.

*takes notes, eats them*

great question, even better answer

"your poetry is probably bad, keep writing, don't submit it"

you guys are harsh, i'd answer like "u r beautiful"

j/k i'd answer "no one cares ur the worst"

When you want to be so inclusive you don't want to include yourself.

you guys are flummoxing the fuck outta me, i give up.

pls don't tell me u submitted the question urself

you gotta lay it out there hoos

don't opt out of the great struggle

maybe not tho being mexican = wheels within whiteness wheels = 'whose' experience is it anyway = write what u please, the reading discourse is where this battle is fought, u will only drown others out in a just literary discourse if ur shit is dece

obv male & that probably won't be helped but if u refuse to write female characters or empathise w/ female conditions whatever they are ur contributing to bad literature and phallocentricity so just be the messenger & represent everything u feel needs representing

refuse to

also, everyone shd write if they feel like it, ludicrous asceticism itt

imma write a poem about this guy

good!

gonna post it to every thread

white male deems was tonight encouraged towards verse in a shocking abnegation of critical duty

I'm not white I'm irish

not irish but culchie indeed

I'm not white I'm irish

so you can hold yr literature

it's hard enough to write anything and finish anything and get literally anything done - people should be happy if they can do that, and people who are good at writing tweets should continue to do that.

pls don't tell me u submitted the question urself

― strangled whelps (imago), Tuesday, June 2, 2015 7:08 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

obviously not, i'm too much of a narcissist to do anything anonymously

I would tell the guy to keep writing--but only racially sensitive Conceptual Poetry pieces--for instance tweeting out The Bell Curve in its entirety, four sentences a day, and ending with an osamathumbsup .jpg

would follow

'HOOS' experience is it anyway

i've tried to argue this in academic settings, to little success against those who thing professors should be writing daily blogs, etc.

― ryan, Tuesday, June 2, 2015 12:03 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

send them this http://secondlanguage.blogspot.com/2014/08/academic-virtues.html

i think professors should be writing daily blogs. or at least, i'm very grateful for those who do that i read

oh my gosh i love that -- xpost

i think a lot of people in what i might broadly consider my "field" similar don't seem to grasp what makes academic writing different from other forms of writing. or rather what the unique virtues of academia are and what sort of thinking, research, and writing they permit that journalism and other forms of writing do not. so they end up writing a lot of glorified think-piece stuff dressed up with "academic" language, i.e. big words and obfuscatory rhetoric. they don't do the kind of long-haul research and analysis that the academic setting allows--indeed they often don't even see the virtues of it.

that said, i think there's something valuable in academics who /have/ a deep background on a subject weighing in on some "current" issue by means of a blog post, an editorial or whathaveyou. but its precisely their immersion in a subject through the kind of research/study that academia permits that lends their perspective value. not simply the armature of some easy-to-grasp cultural-studies "theory" through which which any given text (the blockbuster du jour, for example) might be ground.

that said, if you are the sort of person who has a hard time finishing a piece of writing, and you would like to get a job in the academy, you should absolutely concentrate on writing stuff for peer-reviewed journals rather than expending your energies writing a blog. i admit that many find that the daily practice of writing for a blog makes it /easier/ for them to put together longer pieces for journals. but that's not true of everybody.

i love that post so much. i have posted it here many times.

his day job afaict is to teaches academics to write well

but he thinks about bigger 'what is knowledge/the product of the academy' stuff in a way that is v appealing to me

"Too many academics today think of themselves as public intellectuals whose job it is to "spread ideas" through the most efficient media available to them. Such academics are, literally, ideologues; they think universities produce and distribute ideas."

👏👏👏

that's (ironically?) a good blog spot, caek!

part of my pov on this is that i am a big fan of big ambitious long-in-the-making intellectual books that only the academy seems to reliably produce, though not as much anymore.

spot = post, obv

while there's certainly room for a corrective to overeagerness to popularization of academic research there are many problems with this article

(1) the ideas are going to get spread whether academics themselves do it or not. is it better to have the author themselves write a blog-post, or a journalist? the choice isn't between spreading ideas or not, but being spread by experts or amateurs. take a site like Vox.com. they basically just skim abstracts of economics & poli-sci papers and turn them into articles, and do it on a massive scale at internet-attention-span frequencies. academics can't stop journalists from disseminating their ideas (although i wonder: does this author think it would be a good thing if we could?) so unless they are doing a perfect job of it (they are not), why not step in?

(2) this

In my speech from the floor, I had suggested that our admiration for people like Malcolm Gladwell (with whom many of the members of the panel were of course impressed) shows we are now trying to get people believe things they can't possibly understand. We are telling them what we think the truth is but without allowing them to engage critically with it.

is totally backwards! of COURSE people believe things academics tell them they can't possibly understand. that's a GOOD thing. and it has always been so. people study engineering so that when i drive over a bridge i trust it won't collapse. i don't have to critically examine the inner-workings of my remote to know it will turn on the television. the trust comes from knowing that these ideas were produced by a community with institutions (peer-review, replication, etc) that incentivize the scientific ethic. it's a brilliant solution to a principal-agent problem! if popularization were coming at the cost of scientific rigidity that would be a problem, but as i see it there is no significant trade-off?

of course not every academic is a scientist (and i know academics on ilx skew to critical theory humanities which has a complicated relationship to its own usefulness so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) but i think as the perception of the rigour of the discipline decreases (from, say, physics to political science), so too does (a) people's inherent skepticism (that's one thing that annoys me about this argument: it assumes only people currently within academia will approach things critically--totally condescending and untrue!) and (b) the number of counter-blog pieces written by other academics criticizing it. but for (b) to work we need lots of academics to join the public discourse!

(3) i work in a relatively technical/jargony field that produces unreadable academic articles and yet this

there was a time when everyone understood that our knowledge was not the sort of thing that could be disseminated by op-ed or blogpost but required the long term mutual commitment of students and teachers in the classroom to be properly understood.

rings totally false to me. we would be a much stupider and poorer society if knowledge required long term mutual commitment to be understood. of course, it takes a lot of work and mutual commitment to produce knowledge. a social scientist should deeply understand the properties and assumptions required of all statistical estimators used, should have a thorough understanding of their data, etc. but the end result should be something people can understand in relatively little time. i think that's a depressing thought to some academics, that you could spend years of your life producing something that can be explained to a layman in a matter of minutes. maybe people want to feel that they have unlocked some secret hard-earned truth. but it would be a tragedy for humanity if all knowledge was so costly to acquire! personally, i think it's awesome that i can explain my research to uneducated members of my family. that the author had to exaggerate his point to meaningless hyperbole ("It takes... much more than a tweet" weren't we just making fun of this exact idea the other day? this is like my mom's understanding of twitter) kind of proves my point

caveat: obviously there is research that is just really complicated and technical by nature. sometimes the principal-agent problem is resolved nicely, as in science. sometimes not so nicely, as in macroeconomics where data is extremely limited and rather than admit ignorance, some academics become ideologues and elide the complexity and use their academic prestige to spout their political preference. but at least in the case of macroeconomics, i don't think anyone can argue that blogs have been bad for the field. quite obviously the opposite; they've basically become the new centre of debate in the field. that's so much better than debate happening in closed conferences IMO

personally, i have learned as much from reading blogs and wikipedia and the internet than i did in university. that's awesome because the internet is free. unless it can be shown to diminish the actual quality of research produced i support academic populism

part of my pov on this is that i am a big fan of big ambitious long-in-the-making intellectual books that only the academy seems to reliably produce, though not as much anymore.

― ryan, Wednesday, June 3, 2015 3:53 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

FWIW, i'm a fan of these too. i just don't see it as an either/or

i think this is the wrong thread for this debate, but i'll just say that, for me, academic work is distinguished by far more than just a question of its audience. and i think once you step into being, say, a "public intellectual" or ny times columnist or vox blogger or whatever, you've already made certain concessions to a discourse that doesn't have the same habits and rules as academic discourse. whatever you're doing, it's not scholarship. (this is of course a very humanities based point, but i think it applies across fields). i think there are very, very good reasons for academics to insist over and over again on the specificity (and that entails limitedness) of what they do and what they can't do.