How truly "neat" could it be?

Al Filreis

For the blockbuster special Esquire issue on the 1950s (June 1983), Frank Conroy contributed a piece called "America in a Trance." Here is a passage:

The Beats were just beginning, Kerouac, et al., and we greeted them with a certain amount of suspicion, convinced that art was not that easy. Our standards were rather high, I think. The New Critics had filled us with an almost religious awe of language. We read Leavis, Edmund Wilson, and Eliot as well, taking it all very seriously, worrying over every little point as if Truth and Beauty hung in the balance. The conservatism that colored so much of our experience did not evaporate when we dealt with literature. We defended literary art as if it were a castle under siege, in imminent danger of being destroyed by the vulgarians. In every college or university I knew anything about the most hated course was Social Science, as much a result of the incredibly rotten prose of the text as it was of our disinterest in things social … We were neat, very neat, and sloppiness of any kind irritated us.

Most of this will strike readers of this blog as unremarkable since so many chroniclers of and generalizers about "the fifties" set alleged Beat easiness against the rigors demanded by New Criticism. And the New Critics' hatred of Social Science seems to have persuaded aspiring young literati to join the crusade against sociological (and social-psychological) interpretation. And yet, when one steps even further back, one sees that the most influential social science — epitomized by Daniel Bell's End of Ideology — formed a great political alliance with New Critical formalism. In the former case, we're talking about conservatives (of Ransom's and Tate's and Donald Davidson's stripe) coming on as centrists; in the latter case — that of sociologists like Bell (shown at right) — we're talking about left-liberals moving rightward to the post-ideological center. In that context (and perhaps only that context) Conroy's recollection of being pro-New Criticism and anti-Social Science seems odd, and only points up the passion (I would say it comes from an exhaustion with political interpretation) with which the young generationally-unselfconscious writers of that day embraced aesthetics. But — again — this embrace was a function of an urge to gain distance from the merge of aesthetics and politics that had gotten so many in an earlier self-conscious generation into trouble.

The result is the advocacy of "neat" and a distrust of "sloppy." Yet "neat" derived from victory after a very sloppy battle defending the castle against vulgarians. Think about how truly neat that could be.

July 21, 2008

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.