It's All About Me
Sep. 29th, 2006 08:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraFinally read the recent New Yorker article on Deep Springs. It was snarky. Quelle surprise!
Snarkiness must be the number one bullet-point in the New Yorker's in-house manual of style.
Much of it seems to derive from a 1999 article published in Crosstalk, a publication of the National Center For Public Policy and Higher Education. Not plagiarism, exactly – we live in the era of the iParadigm IPO, after all – but artful paraphrase.
Piece gets its facts right as far as that goes and also hones in on an observation Ben made last Thanksgiving when we went up there – namely, that it wasn't run with any of the efficiency of a real cattle and alfalfa ranch; in fact, the students seemed to go out of their way to generate unnecessary work.
Observations like "(The students) dislike professors who use PowerPoint" are thrown out there as evidence of strong Luddite and neo-conservative tendencies. But, heavens. What intelligent human being on the face of the planet does like PowerPoint?
It also makes much of the fact that founder L.L. Nunn was the T.E. Lawrence variety of repressed homosexual, and that as a result Deep Springs is one of America's last all-male colleges.
I dunno. Add girls and it seems to me that all twenty-six of the students would be rutting like bunnies and neglect their Derrida. On the plus side, this might motivate them to be more efficient about the ranch work; on the minus, it would rob them of another, deeper experience – listening to the voice of the desert.
Because that's what the New Yorker article just didn't get. There's a romance to the Deep Springs experience, a sense of quest, a sense of touching an underlying planetary reality that is deeper than the staging of human culture. That's a gift few people living on this planet have ever been given.
Which is not to say it's always a fun time. Max sent Robin a letter yesterday. I think it was meant to buck Robin up after the humiliation of spending a week in the fifth grade while all his cohorts were off breaking legs in Sonora.
"For you," wrote Max, "the pangs of lost summer are probably still fresh, and remain as long as that which was lost can still be recalled. Look at that pain as a privilege.
"Recalled is not even as accurate a representation of the notion I want to express: I can still recall living outside the valley, just as I could still recall living at Deep Springs when I was last in Monterey. What I meant was something much less active, much more an involuntary access of recreation. I noticed my loss of this capacity most when I was in Monterey last time. Within a week, I could no longer experience Deep Springs, I had just spent a year…"
It is Margaret you mourn for.
"He uses a lot of big words," Robin shrugged, handing the letter over to me.
Reading Max's letter depressed me. So did the weather – unrelenting fog and gloom. "Well, he's a teenager," said Annie cheerfully with whom I chatted for an hour on the phone. "He's supposed to feel angsty."
But I couldn't help feeling as though I'd failed Max in some indefinable way, that I'd failed him because I am such a bad mother…
And then I thought of the Little Circus dying in Colorado because I am such a lousy publicist, and the Little Store dying on Cannery Row because I am such a lousy entrepreneur, and Ben skulking quietly like a ghost and sleeping on the couch because I am such a lousy judge of character, and the Republicans winning the upcoming Congressional elections because I want the Democrats to win… Global warming? It's my (still) un-smogged VeeDub that pushed the planet over. The coming jihad? It's because I think Muslims are thirteenth century Scientologists.
I'm a pretty important person, I am forced to conclude!
And with that, I went to the movies. The Illusionist, since you ask. Not good. But not bad.
Snarkiness must be the number one bullet-point in the New Yorker's in-house manual of style.
Much of it seems to derive from a 1999 article published in Crosstalk, a publication of the National Center For Public Policy and Higher Education. Not plagiarism, exactly – we live in the era of the iParadigm IPO, after all – but artful paraphrase.
Piece gets its facts right as far as that goes and also hones in on an observation Ben made last Thanksgiving when we went up there – namely, that it wasn't run with any of the efficiency of a real cattle and alfalfa ranch; in fact, the students seemed to go out of their way to generate unnecessary work.
Observations like "(The students) dislike professors who use PowerPoint" are thrown out there as evidence of strong Luddite and neo-conservative tendencies. But, heavens. What intelligent human being on the face of the planet does like PowerPoint?
It also makes much of the fact that founder L.L. Nunn was the T.E. Lawrence variety of repressed homosexual, and that as a result Deep Springs is one of America's last all-male colleges.
I dunno. Add girls and it seems to me that all twenty-six of the students would be rutting like bunnies and neglect their Derrida. On the plus side, this might motivate them to be more efficient about the ranch work; on the minus, it would rob them of another, deeper experience – listening to the voice of the desert.
Because that's what the New Yorker article just didn't get. There's a romance to the Deep Springs experience, a sense of quest, a sense of touching an underlying planetary reality that is deeper than the staging of human culture. That's a gift few people living on this planet have ever been given.
Which is not to say it's always a fun time. Max sent Robin a letter yesterday. I think it was meant to buck Robin up after the humiliation of spending a week in the fifth grade while all his cohorts were off breaking legs in Sonora.
"For you," wrote Max, "the pangs of lost summer are probably still fresh, and remain as long as that which was lost can still be recalled. Look at that pain as a privilege.
"Recalled is not even as accurate a representation of the notion I want to express: I can still recall living outside the valley, just as I could still recall living at Deep Springs when I was last in Monterey. What I meant was something much less active, much more an involuntary access of recreation. I noticed my loss of this capacity most when I was in Monterey last time. Within a week, I could no longer experience Deep Springs, I had just spent a year…"
It is Margaret you mourn for.
"He uses a lot of big words," Robin shrugged, handing the letter over to me.
Reading Max's letter depressed me. So did the weather – unrelenting fog and gloom. "Well, he's a teenager," said Annie cheerfully with whom I chatted for an hour on the phone. "He's supposed to feel angsty."
But I couldn't help feeling as though I'd failed Max in some indefinable way, that I'd failed him because I am such a bad mother…
And then I thought of the Little Circus dying in Colorado because I am such a lousy publicist, and the Little Store dying on Cannery Row because I am such a lousy entrepreneur, and Ben skulking quietly like a ghost and sleeping on the couch because I am such a lousy judge of character, and the Republicans winning the upcoming Congressional elections because I want the Democrats to win… Global warming? It's my (still) un-smogged VeeDub that pushed the planet over. The coming jihad? It's because I think Muslims are thirteenth century Scientologists.
I'm a pretty important person, I am forced to conclude!
And with that, I went to the movies. The Illusionist, since you ask. Not good. But not bad.
