Headline of the day: Drunken moose gang menaces Stockholm resident.
September 2013
Adam Gopnik offers what I think is one of the better arguments in favor of English—and the humanities in general—as an academic and professional pursuit.
So: Why should English majors exist? Well, there really are no whys to such things, anymore than there are to why we wear clothes or paint good pictures or live in more than hovels and huts or send flowers to our beloved on their birthday. No sane person proposes or has ever proposed an entirely utilitarian, production-oriented view of human purpose. We cannot merely produce goods and services as efficiently as we can, sell them to each other as cheaply as possible, and die. Some idea of symbolic purpose, of pleasure-seeking rather than rent seeking, of Doing Something Else, is essential to human existence. That’s why we pass out tax breaks to churches, zoning remissions to parks, subsidize new ballparks and point to the density of theatres and galleries as signs of urban life, to be encouraged if at all possible. When a man makes a few billion dollars, he still starts looking around for a museum to build a gallery for or a newspaper to buy. No civilization we think worth studying, or whose relics we think worth visiting, existed without what amounts to an English department—texts that mattered, people who argued about them as if they mattered, and a sense of shame among the wealthy if they couldn’t talk about them, at least a little, too. It’s what we call civilization.
Or is he the George Lucas for sensitive types? According to Alex Balk, yes:
[I.e.] you are a child when you are first exposed to his stuff and because you are a child you think it’s incredible, but when you encounter more of it as an adult you blame the material rather than the fact that it was always hokey as shit, and it’s not that it got any worse, it’s just that you got smarter, but to acknowledge that would be to betray your own innocence etc.