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Certainly we shall be resurrected, certainly, we shall see one another again and we shall tell one another happily, joyfully, everything that has happened.
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Recently the author Michael Cunningham (The Hours, A Wild Swan) said that he had come to think of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain as "a book I’d spend my entire life intending to read." It wants focus and isolation (rather like Hans Castorp's years in a sanatorium on the mountain), "enormous in every sense of the world."

The Magic Mountain also reveals how the relationship between writers and readers has changed since 1924, "a reminder of a kind of relationship to a book that’s difficult to maintain, now."

How many of us, in 2020, can devote two months to reading one book every single night, all the more so when it’s a book that can be transcendent and can be exasperating? I’ve been thinking, ever since, about how the relationship between writers and readers has changed since Thomas Mann came and went.

Cunningham hated it on same days, adored it on others, and threw it across the room twice. Apparently he finished it, nevertheless.

I had my own experience lately with The Karamazov Brothers, in the translation by the late Ignat Avsey. Is that properly The Brothers Karamazov? Well, no; that title (of Бра́тья Карама́зовы) was a modest affection by Constance Garnett's 1912 translation, the English edition most available to most people. (There were others, including a significant reworking of Garnett's version for the Norton Critical Edition, 1976.) Avsey wanted to make his translation both readable in natural English and more faithful to Dostoevsky's rough-edged Russian than Garnett's adaptation of the novel's numerous voices, and dense prose.

I had my own experience lately with The Karamazov Brothers, in the translation by the late Ignat Avsey. Is that properly The Brothers Karamazov? Well, no; that title (of Бра́тья Карама́зовы) was a modest affection by Constance Garnett's 1912 translation, the English edition most available to most people. (There were others, including a significant reworking of Garnett's version for the Norton Critical Edition, 1976.) Avsey wanted to make his translation both readable in natural English and more faithful to Dostoevsky's rough-edged Russian than Garnett's adaptation of the novel's numerous voices, and dense prose.

Kay Bross, as I began to think of it, like The Magic Mountain demands two months of sustained reading—ideal for a time of pandemic and social isolation. It renders an entire world of a Russian provincial town named "Skotoprigonievsk" ("animal coral" or pen, a Russian version of fictional Winesburg, Ohio). Dostoevsky wrote much of the novel in Staraya Russa, a provincial town with several features that appear in the novel, such as the adjoining Monastery of the Transfiguration (Spaso Preobrajensky mon).

Spaso Preobraj Staraya Russa
Собор Спасо-Преображенский: улица Володарского, Тимура Фрунзе, Старая Русса, Новгородская область: Wikimedia CCA:SA 4.0

The world of the novel has many voices: Ivan's tale of the Grand Inquisitor, his encounter with "the Devil," the life and sayings of Starets Zosima (a holy man), the formal, authorial account of the trial of Dmitri Fyodorovitch Karamazov, among others. It represents an immersion in an intricate, class-based society animated by concepts of honor and holiness that clash with newer, bourgeois ideas of commercial value, transactional relationships, and the "science vs. faith" argument. Reading the novel demands a great deal of energy and attention, but pays off with its celebration of humanity, both good and bad, and the promise of grace and resurrection.

Certainly we shall be resurrected, certainly, we shall see one another again and we shall tell one another happily, joyfully, everything that has happened.

The Karamazov Brothers, Oxford World's Classics, p. 974

When Aloysha, the unforgettable, cherubic third Karamazov son says everything —in a novel of 900-odd pages—he means everything. Not a flower petal, not a spring onion, not a child nor a thief, will be left behind.

I first read Kay Bross forty years ago, for a class on Russian Orthodoxy at Princeton Theological Seminary, taught by the legendary Fr. Georges Florovsky. Father Flo (as he was known only behind his back) was himself a character from Dostoevsky: born in Odessa in 1893, the erudite son of an Orthodox priest, exiled in 1920, further educated in Prague, ordained 1932 in Paris, teaching at St. Serge Institute there, then St. Vladimir's Seminary in Crestwood, New York, then at Princeton University until his death in 1979. I knew him only in his very last years, when he was entirely deaf in one ear, reading and commenting from his collected works. He was then a living connection to a lost world, a fragile, black-robed octogenarian on Mercer Street, a local saint living on the social margin of Princeton in the William Bowen and James McCord years.

Now forty years later I sometimes feel like a living connection to a lost world of prosperous, middle-class industrial Michigan as the working class began to decline even before the neo-liberal disaster of the Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Obama decades. The world of Kay Bross seems only a little more remote. Its vivid testimony to the power of grace in forgiveness, loyalty, and resurrection has touched me in new ways in a time of fear, uncertainty, and viral pandemic.

Kay Bross needs the reader to come to life, and all of the reader. It is both uncompromising in its demands and unstinting in its full humanity. Its run-on prolixity approximates the pace of human time: sometimes fleeting, sometimes hardly passing at all.

When Aloysha drenches the earth "with 'the tears of thy joy, and love thy tears' . . . threads from all God's countless worlds converged in his soul . . . He wished to forgive everyone for everything, and ask forgiveness—oh, not for himself, but for others!" (p. 456) In that moment, something firm and immutable as heaven entered his soul: God's grace to all, the Holy and Wholly Other. Certainly we shall be resurrected, surely the Divine shall draw us to God's self and transfigure our health, justice, and relationships. Hurrah for Karamazov!

As Barth's concept and usage of Krisis develops in the second edition, it becomes a key to understanding his revolutionary theological reading of The Epistle to the Romans.
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In September 1921 Barth wrote the preface to his second edition of The Epistle to the Romans, and one can fairly regard the second edition as written a period of intense and unpredictable turmoil after August 1918 (the date of the preface to the first edition), early 1919 (publication and critical reception), and mid-1921: Armistice and German capitulation, Swiss general strike, European famine, military demobilization (less prominent but still present in Switzerland), and the "Spanish" H1N1 influenza pandemic. General crisis pervades this historical backdrop, and lent authenticity to the concept of Krisis that Barth so effectively deployed in the second edition.

Krisis is a distinctive development in the second edition; Barth used the term only once in the first (and not in particularly theological sense, um der Gleichartigkeit der Krisis willen, in der alle Menschen aller Stufen immer wieder vor Gott stehen ("thanks to the similarity of the Krisis in which humans of all ranks stand before God"). By contrast, Barth introduces Krisis in the preface to the second edition. He responded to the charge that he imposed his meanings upon the text of Romans rather than drawing meaning from it --the charge of eisegesis in place of exegesis--"and that my method implies this" (Der Verdacht, hier werde mehr ein- als ausgelegt, ist ja wirklich das Naheliegendste, was man über meinen ganzen Versuch sagen kann.) He continued:

Wenn ich ein „System” habe, so besteht es darin, daß ich das, was Kierkegaard den „unendlichen qualitativen Unterschied” von Zeit und Ewigkeit genannt hat, in seiner negativen und positiven Bedeutung möglichst beharrlich im Auge behalte, „Gott ist im Himmel und du auf Erden”. Die Beziehung dieses Gottes zu diesem Menschen . . . ist für mich das Thema der Bibel und die Summe der Philosophie in Einem. Die Philosophen nennen diese Krisis des menschlichen Erkennens den Ursprung. Die Bibel sieht an diesem Kreuzweg Jesus Christus.

I translate this as:

If I have a system, it consists in this, that I keep in view as tenaciously as possible, in both its negative and positive sense, that which Kierkegaard termed the "infinite qualitative distinction" between time and eternity". "God is in heaven and you are on earth." The relation of this God and this human . . . is for me the theme of the Bible and the sum total of philosophy in one. The philosophers call this Krisis the origin of human recognizing. The Bible looks at [this] crossroad [as] Jesus Christ."

Sir Edwyn Hoskyns by distinction translated:

. . . if I have a system, it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called the 'infinite qualitative distinction' between time and eternity, and to my regarding this as possessing negative as well as positive significance: "God is in heaven and thou art on earth." The relation between such a God and such a man . . . is for me the theme of the Bible and the essence of philosophy. Philosophers name this KRISIS of human perception—the Prime Cause: the Bible beholds the same cross-roads—the figure of Jesus Christ.

One can see here how Hoskyns subtly renders Barth more as a Cambridge don than as a brilliant, activist pastor. It is no denigration of such dons to note that their métier is careful nuance, and such nuances can tire easily. By translating des menschlichen Erkennens den Ursprung as the Prime Cause (of human perception), Hoskyns imports a philosophical term more allusive to St. Thomas than Barth's text really allows. (For example: Cum igitur Deus sit prima causa universalis non unius generis tantum, sed totius entis, impossibile est quod aliquid contingat; ST I:103:7, "Therefore as God is the first universal cause, not of one genus only, but of all being in general, it is impossible for anything to occur" [outside of God's governing].). "Philosophers calls this Krisis the origins of human recognizing" (or perceiving): Erkennens in the text is not exactly the same as its relative Erkentnis. The phrase "the essence of philosophy" shies away from Barth's declarative unity between the theme of the Bible and the sum total (Summe not Summa) of philosophy.

In the first usage of the critical term Krisis, Barth's received English translation already steers in a more philosophical and less expressive direction. Barth thanks his brother, the philosopher Heinrich Barth, for leading him "to recognize the importance" of Plato and Kant, but Karl does not wish to be philosopher in the academic sense, "I have also paid more attention to what may be culled form the writings of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky that is of importance for the interpretation of the New Testament. The latter I owe more particularly to the hints given me by Edward Thurneysen" —(und das vermehrte Aufmerken auf das, was aus Kierkegaard und Dostojewski für das Verständnis des neuen Testamentes zu gewinnen ist, wobei mir besonders die Winke von Eduard Thurneysen erleuchtend gewesen sind.).

As Barth's concept and usage of Krisis develops in the second edition, it becomes a key to understanding his revolutionary theological reading of The Epistle to the Romans.

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I have long loved the elegant verse of David T. W. McCord, "Books fall open, / you fall in, / delighted where / you've never been." Sometimes that's even true. (A poet with a day job, McCord also raised millions for Harvard as director of the Harvard College Fund.)

Several months ago a book fell open for me, one that I had long known about but never really read: Karl Barth's The Epistle to the Romans. I started to read it not long after I resolved to nurture my knowledge of Greek by reading some New Testament daily. I chose Romans because it was there (and because I read much of it for a seminar with the late great Prof. Christian Beker): it demands attention, is linguistically difficult, and seems to be found in the midst of every major turn in Christian history, such as Martin Luther and Karl Barth.

I also chose Barth because I also have access, courtesy of Princeton Theological Seminary Library, to the German text of Barth's second edition, 1922, which open the way for so-called "dialectical theology" and a decisive turn from previous liberal Protestantism by many German-language writers. So I could exercise my Greek, Latin (I read parallel in the Nova Vulgata) and German, languages that I spent a lot of time and effort learning when I was an undergraduate, and which I do not wish to lose at this later stage of my life.

Little did I realize, when I began this project in 2019, that it would become so timely. I began Romans exactly because I have been so dismayed by the slow slide into fascist authoritarianism underway in my native country. (I hesitate to call it my home any longer; I live here as a resident alien.) I had some inkling that it has something to say to my condition. I was little prepared for how much it had to say.

Barth's book came out in successive editions in 1919 (finished in the last days of the War, December 1918), and a second edition in 1922, as well as other later minor alterations, clarifications, and republication, with an English translation by Sir Edwyn Hoskyns in 1933. The Epistle to the Romans established Barth's early reputation as a disruptor; the second edition in particular critiqued (or bulldozed) the cultural liberalism of the Protestant theology of his teachers at Marburg and elsewhere. The term "dialectical theology" which arose in the early 1920s highlighted frequent use of paradoxical formulations and polar opposites by several writers (Barth, Gogarten, and Brunner prominent among them) and was always --given the prominence of "dialectic" among the heirs of Hegel, and especially Marx--something of a misnomer. There is a very great amount of distinguished scholarship regarding the origins and development of "dialectical theology" in the 1920s and the disagreements of its original proponents as time went on (and especially in the 1930s), and I do not intend to rehearse any of that here.

My focus instead is how unexpectedly contemporary the second edition of Barth's Epistle to the Romans now seems to be, despite its readily apparent and important differences with the present moment. I am enough of a historian to remember and acknowledge that history does not repeat itself, or even often rhyme (in words erroneously attributed to Mark Twain), but somehow sometimes retains a certain metrical force, like blank verse in iambic pentameter. Or in Yogi Berra's reputed words, "It's like déjà vu all over again."

When reading the German second edition (available in the Karl Barth Digital Library, or via Hathitrust here (Vorsicht: Fraktur!), I immediately felt great sympathy for the late Sir Edwyn Hoskyns, translator (13th Baronet of Harewood, County Hereford, and Dean of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge). Sir Edwyn faced the daunting challenges of Barth's German which intentionally pushes beyond normal boundaries with multiple-compounded words, neologisms, paratactic paragraph-long sentences, and now-obscure references to contemporaneous events and well-known persons. Sir Edwyn's English version of the German sixth edition (1928) unavoidably presses Barth's free-range German into Oxbridge English, and the language of the Authorized Version. He inadvertently misses or minimizes Barth's Sprachspiel or playing with the language in an attempt to demolish over-familiar and well-worn phrases bearing the echoes of discredited theologies, politics, and cultural outlooks. On the other hand, following Barth's German too closely would nearly completely obfuscate his meaning and significance for English readers, and linguistically daze them.

Barth's German is variously playful, allusive, hortatory, monitory, and nearly aphoristic. (I will give examples in succeeding blog entries.). It reminded me less of the weighty German of Barth's later Kirchliche Dogmatik than of writers associated with German "expressionism:" Georg Büchner (especially Woyzeck, adapted for Alban Berg's opera), Frank Wedekind (Lulu plays, the basis of Berg's opera, and Frühlings Erwachen or Spring Awakening, source of the 2006 musical), Franz von Unruh (especially Opfergang, anti-war drama written during the Siege of Verdun/Schlacht um Verdun). I also thought of writers associated with the Austrian Jugendstil, especially Robert Musil, Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig, and Georg Trakl (associated with Der Brenner, influential in the revival of Kierkegaard in German-speaking lands, and a link via friendship to Ludwig Wittgenstein). The influence of both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are especially prominent in Barth's second edition of Romans, and has been studied thoroughly.

Barth used his expressive, nearly expressionist language to torpedo the discredited cultural, Protestant hegemony represented above all by his (respected) teacher Wilhelm Herrmann. A "Lutheran Neo-Kantian," Herrmann taught Barth to speak of God dialectically or in opposites: dogmatic/critical, Yes/No, veiling/unveiling, objective/subjective, in line with an emphasis upon the religious experience of the individual (from Friedrich Schleiermacher). So Barth did not repudiate everything that Herrmann taught him. But—Herrmann was one of the 93 signers of Manifesto "To the Civilized World" (An die Kulturwelt: Ein Aufruf), which unequivocally supported German militarism and military actions in 1914, specifically including the "Rape of Belgium" (in essence confirmed by later scholarship despite certain Allied fabrications). Herrman was not the only prominent Protestant theologian to sign An die Kulturwelt: so did Adolf Diessmann, Adolf von Harnack, Adolf von Schlatter, and Reinhold Seeberg (father of Erich Seeberg, the eventual Dean of the "German Christian" Protestant theological faculty in Berlin during the National Socialist régime). So Barth's demolition of the language of liberal Protestantism extended his cultural critique of discredited, compromised, fatally flawed accommodation of liberal Protestant theology with German militarism. Barth's citizenship and employment as a Swiss pastor allowed him both access to the German linguistic community and freedom from German war-time censors, however sympathetic the officially-neutral German-speaking Swiss may have been to the German side, and their consequential anxiety of about any kind of wartime dissent.

Barth began his project of demolishing the whole discredited line of Protestant piety focused on individual experience (and accompanying social and political irrelevance) in 1919 but by 1922 his second edition reflected his dismay with the disaster then unfolding in revolutionary Russia as it morphed into the early Soviet Union. Barth's demolition extended both to the right (socially mainstream, bürgerlich Protestantism), to the left (red to redder socialism), and the Roman Catholicism already susceptible to revanchist or restorationist, imperialial-fascist fantasies in Austria, Italy, Spain, and elsewhere). Safe in stable Switzerland, he nevertheless experienced (with the rest of Europe) the disorienting political and cultural shock of imperial crackup, and the cowardice of German wartime leaders, especially the Kaiser, Tirpitz, and Ludendorff. Nor did economic disaster spare Switzerland: the general strike (Landesstreik) in November 1918 strained civil society more than any time since the Sonderbund war of 1847-1848. The H1N1 "Spanish" influenza epidemic 1918-1919 hit Switzerland very hard, and the inadequate official response brought the nation to the brink of civil war.

Barth wrote his second edition, then, in a lightly industrialized (weaving) town in the midst of entrenched economic disaparities, national and international political dysfunction, and pandemic. This is not the same world as 2019-2020, but it seems eerily adjacent. Even more, the collapse of a public theological or religious rhetoric associated with denuded assumptions of political, cultural hegemony and the thorough discrediting of its moral authority (in Europe then), can only remind one of the cultural bankruptcy of American evangelicalism now, so thoroughly colonized or even weaponized by the current chaotic American régime. In America in 2020, as in Europe in 1922, all these deteriorating conditions reflect both acknowledged and unacknowledged wounds and diseases left festering for decades.

Barth's response was vigorous social critique and withering theological appraisal reflected his wide reading and wide-ranging cultural allusions that extend far beyond normal academic theological discourse. He speaks with a preacher's or prophet's voice, not the voice a professor (although he is certainly academically well informed). The world of his text —what it presumes, upon which it comments, whose pretensions it exposes—will be the content of further blog entries.

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By Wallace Steves, 1934/1935

A little less returned for him each spring.
Music began to fail him. Brahms, although
His dark familiar, often walked apart.

His spirit grew uncertain of delight,
Certain of its uncertainty, in which
That dark companion left him unconsoled

For a self returning mostly memory.
Only last year he said that the naked moon
Was not the moon he used to see, to feel

(In the pale coherences of moon and mood
When he was young), naked and alien,
More leanly shining from a lankier sky.

Its ruddy pallor had grown cadaverous.
He used his reason, exercised his will,
Turning in time to Brahms as alternate

In speech. He was that music and himself.
They were particles of order, a single majesty:
But he remembered the time when he stood alone.

He stood at last by God’s help and the police;
But he remembered the time when he stood alone.
He yielded himself to that single majesty;

But he remembered the time when he stood alone,
When to be and delight to be seemed to be one,
Before the colors deepened and grew small.

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Three very different books take a good look at our students’ experiences that they bring to the classroom.  The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes Us or Breaks Us by Paul Tough looks at the challenges  of applying to college, staying in, and finishing.  Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost by Caitlin Zaloom (a JSTOR digital book) looks at the family conflicts and stresses built into the high-stakes, high-cost  college experience. Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities by John Warner looks at now only how we teach writing, but the bigger issues at stake in almost any class assignment.  Read these books, and you will sit in our students' seats –tolle, lege, take and read.

Tough tells good stories, and his book is hard to put down. He shows in detail how well-off families game the system, and how the higher education system allows itself to be gamed.  He explores how different affluent colleges are from those which are insufficiently funded, and how at-risk students often do not possess the skills, tenacity, and good fortune to jump through arbitrary hoops and negotiate complicated financial circumstances.  You will understand how colleges work best for the affluent, the ambiguous role of the College Board, and how higher education winds up sustaining the many, present, socio-economic disparities that foster so many political and social divides.  Faculty may be particularly interested in Chapter 5, "Letting In" on the admissions-industrial complex, and subsequent "Staying In" and "Hanging On" on how students do or cannot complete their degrees, and what helps and hinders them. 

Zaloom's Indebted takes on the social and emotional realities families have to negotiate to sustain enrollment and expenses, and the "enmeshed autonomy" with its  "nested silences" that enable both students and parents not to discuss the levels of stresses that each endure.

"Today being middle class means being indebted.  It means feeling insecure and uncertain about the future, and wrestling with the looming cost of college, and the debt it will require.  It means being dependent on finance—and, crucially, on family—in ways that analysts of class, culture, and economy have not fully registered." (page 1) "I show how the system for financing higher education sets traps for students and their parents . . . . At its core, [this book] is about the largely unexplored ways that the financial economy has shaped the inner dynamics of American middle-class family life by forcing parents to confront the problems of paying for college." (page 3)

Why They Can't Write (discussed in a current series of lunch-time conversations in the CEIT) reads quite differently from the perspectives of Tough and Zaloom: student writing has become an extension of the academic-industrial complex that students negotiate to get a degree.  (Warner's discussions of student depression and anxiety are worth taking time to read.) Real learning can be overshadowed by test-taking, and the result is not only sub-standard writing but disengaged, distracted students (some with excellent reasons for their divided focus).  One cannot recommend these books highly enough --for summertime reading if not now.

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I finally got around to reading Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare years late, and after thoroughly enjoying the first part of his book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. I emphasis first part, because that book is really two texts: one is a thoroughly entertaining and engaging account of how Poggio Bracciolini found and published the sole sizable manuscript of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, a text that informed 15th-17th century skepticism towards Christianity. The second, less recondite and rather pretentious text, is essentially an anti-religious polemic from a rather tired point of view, that the so-called "Renaissance" bloomed with insightful and wise humanism and overcame centuries of superstition and dogmatism --in other words, Burckhardt's or Gibbon's point of view of the Middle Ages. This second text springs not only from a historically questionable point of view, but contains factual errors (such as ascribing the New Testament sentence, "Jesus wept" to Luke rather than John --an easy error any publisher's fact-checkers should have caught). The failure of the second part of Greenblatt's text do not overshadow the value of the first, but one does wonder, why bother?

Will in the World is an equally engaging reading of most of Shakespeare's works (poetry and theatre) to inform careful speculation about his life, inner life, and how he came to produce them. It does not seek to explain Shakespeare so that his achievement becomes merely quotidian --far from it! Insofar as facts about Will's life are known, but threadbare, due to the careful record-keeping of legal proceedings in Elizabeth's England, Greenblatt bases his account on well-received points of text well-known to scholars. What Greenblatt brings is careful but not over-fussy readings of Shakespeare's text themselves with an eye to what may have informed his imagination, such as the premature death of his son Hamnet in the period just before Will wrote Hamlet --an unsubtle play on names, especially since both orthography and pronunciation were not standard in Will's time. Consequently Greenblatt's text is noticeably furnished with careful speculations, verbs including must have, likely have, may have, and words such as probably and apparently —all in service of trying to pry beyond the veil of historical silence to ask what was going on in Will's mind and spirit.

Scholars may or may not approve of some, all, or any of Greenblatt's well-founded conjectures, and David Stenhouse justifiably would retitle the book Will in the Work. Greenblatt discovers no new facts, but does not disguise his conjectures. For a non-specialist reader, he conveys vividly the peculiarities of London ca. 1590-1610, odd legal features of property and time (such as "liberties," a legal trick by which the civic legal authority over formerly monastic lands, once held by houses long since dissolved, continued to be limited). Will's world is evoked very credibly in many places; in others not so much. Will's Catholic sympathies, or down-right Catholicism, seems less well-established than Greenblatt would make it. Will's utter silence regarding the leading source of social unrest and legal danger in his time still seems more prudential than protective: we just don't know what he thought about any questions of faith.

The problem is that for a figure in his time, Shakespeare leaves no letters, very few reliably autograph manuscripts, no diaries, few reliable, personal reminiscences remain from those who knew him, and few legal records beyond the barely factual. No wonder speculation remains that the figure of Will was a front for someone more notably connected or well-born, who however remains equally elusive, or more so. Compared even with earlier figures such as John Calvin or Heinrich Bullinger, figures at home in a different but equally litigious, dangerous, and ambiguous culture, Will left so little --but what he did leave was sometimes startling revelatory of human feelings that are still accessible, as well as affections and desires long since, often thought unworthy (such as same-sex desire), but now recovered and celebrated.

I'm glad I read it --it helps me to hear Will's works and words on stage. Where's Will? is a more serious game of where's Waldo? however -- and he's still hard to spot. Greenblatt's New Historicism serves him well in this case. The book is worthwhile to read, and if you wish a dive into Will's texts, I recommend it. His reading alone of Julius Ceasar in Elizabethan context is worthwhile —and in the current age of political lies, alternative facts, fake news, looming tyranny, and unbridled ambition, is highly topical.

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I have written previously about Matthew Battle's 2003 book Library: An Unquiet History (Norton)—see this link for text rescued from a previous blog, and page down to January 24, 2011 (or just page-search "Matthew Battles" and it's the second occurence). I took part in a recent informal conversation about this book at a recent library conference, and I enjoyed re-visiting it.

Battles seeks to "read the library" (page 14).

I explore the library's intertwined relations of fancy and authenticity, of folly and epiphany, of the Parnassan and the universal. My method . . . mirrors that of Eugene Gant [a character is Thomas Wolfe's Of Time and the River]: I pick up a volume . . . . [and] follow a trail. . . I drop on passage to follow another, threading my way among the ranges of books, lost among the shelves. . . . What I'm looking for are points of transformation, those moments where readers, authors, and librarians question the meaning of the library itself.

pages 20-21

Battles does not seek either a reductive account nor a comprehensive exposition of the history of libraries, but points out transformations of text, reader, author, and librarian. His pursuit takes him to ancient Mesopotamia and classical antiquity, ancient China, the Aztec realm and its predecessors and successor, Renaissance and early modern Europe, all the way to Nazi Germany and the ethnic wars of southeast Europe. His most recent example is probably the destruction of the Buddhist statues at Bamiyan, Afghanistan, by the Taliban which sought iconoclasm and destruction to enforce their lethal, ideologically pure, and ethnically cleansed mockery of Islam.

One of Battles' major points is that the same insight that has led some cultural, political, or military leaders to found, build, and sustain libraries is the insight that has led to their destruction: a library is a source of power, prestige, and memory, and when power changes hands, prestige is re-distributed, and memories (in the new leaders view) must be extinguished, libraries are destroyed. Whether or not the library of Alexandria was in fact torched by Romans, Muslims, or Christians, whether or not the First August Emperor (Shi Huangdi) of China in fact destroyed all records of previous states as well as élite or Mandarin writings, libraries have withered and been dispersed as surely as they have been built. Nazi German librarians made a Faustian bargain to preserve themselves, some of their books, and their profession by subordinating it to fictions of Volk, blood, and soil, only to see themselves even further marginalized in war and the subsequent re-founding of the German states (Jahre Null). Libraries have an unquiet history not despite their development and success, but exactly because of it.

The years since Battle's 2003 publication have only confirmed this, alas. Islamist insurgents fleeing Timbuktu before advancing French soldiers torched two library buildings in 2013, destroying priceless and unique Sufi manuscripts --the Sufis insufficiently Islamist in their view (many of the manuscripts were subsequently found to have survived). Many other manuscripts of this center of Islamic learning had been (or have been) moved and recorded elsewhere (and subjected to the dangers of humidity levels never occurring in Mali). In 2012 and after, manuscripts had to be protected again, in a remarkably multi-pronged and multi-part effort brilliantly described in Joshua Hammer's The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: and Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016) The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (or Syria, ISIL or ISIS or Daesh) destroyed many cultural artifacts of ancient civilization in their crude, terroristic, and bigoted reign, including the Central Library of Mosul, the University of Mosul, the library of a 265-year-old Latin (Dominican) Church, and the Mosul Museum Library. The Peoples' Republic of China has determined to destroy Uighur culture and many artifacts and collections of Kashgar and elsewhere in Xinjiang, a remarkable example of Han Chinese racism and bigotry that goes hand-in-glove with Han Chinese destruction of Tibetan culture.

Digital destruction is also certainly possible of a kind that marginalizes Nicholson Baker's carefully enacted, idiosyncratic, and self-hyped outrage at the "loss" of newspapers that were already acidifying (Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, 2001). By "digital destruction" I mean the promulgation of (anti-) social media and its assault on any concepts of truth, such that cultural memory is relegated to the memory hole. The infuriating, bland shallowness of Mark Zuckerberg leads as example one, but many others follow, including Jack Dorsey of Twitter, and Steven Huffman and Alex Ohanian of Reddit, who celebrated "freedom from the press." These panglossian, superficial, and flashy developers with the sketchiest, and most desultory, slap-dash notions of "freedom of speech" and neo-liberal deregulation have unleashed hordes of edge-lords whose only real goal is to burn it all down: language, truth, discourse, respect for other points of view, and tolerance for disagreement. They join the insufferably woke of right and left to rend any democratic policy and polity, and to worship authoritarian ideologies masquerading as enlightened thinking. Their red pills become the cyanide tablets concealed by the romantic spies of the thrillers. All this digital destruction is as assuredly an assault on the web of language, concepts, habits, skills, and dispositions that build and enact libraries and inquiry, as the depredations of Communist Chinese, Islamists, and fascists of every stripe and country, an assault that moves forward 24/7/365.

What might save libraries? Ironically: burial, or going off-line, inaccessible, and impossible to locate. What goes around comes around, in the long run, but it can be a very long run. The arc of history may or may not bend towards justice, but it does oscillate between truth, power, brutality, and lies, and in the end the truth is surprisingly durable. How else did anything at all survive from antiquity, whether classical, Asian, or Meso-American? One of the keys is librarians —who remain slightly suspect and patronized by academic leaders because they know, deep down, that librarians don't only work for them and their institutional goals and objectives. Librarians have something bigger in mind —as Michael Moore knows, and said ten years ago when HarperCollins attempted to intimidate him, and require a re-write of his book Stupid White Men to tone down his criticism of George W. Bush.

I really didn't realize the librarians were, you know, such a dangerous group.
They are subversive. You think they're just sitting there at the desk, all quiet and everything. They're like plotting the revolution, man. I wouldn't mess with them. You know, they've had their budgets cut. They're paid nothing. Books are falling apart. The libraries are just like the ass end of everything, right?

Daily Kos, October 20, 2009

Well, not the ass end of everything. Rather like Balaam's Ass (Numbers 22:21-39): inconvenient both to Balaam and the rulers of the Moabites, seeing an angel blocking the narrow passage to the future, and pointing out injustice, inaccuracy, and lies. It's a tougher job than many might think, rarely recognized, and frequently obscured by librarians' own professional commitments —but speaking through the unlikely and the disparaged, and shining a light on truths, nevertheless. Caveat lector.

In self-defeat is written the story of our national decline. How then is the next generation to live?
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Audra Melton for The New York Times

Monica Potts' beautiful In the Land of Self-Defeat in today's New York Times (October 6, 2019) accurately portrays the fragile realities of community in a very small place: Clinton, Arkansas. Self-defeated is a way of describing the lives and attitudes of many people there: just about anything a governmental body can do is a sad waste of money. Potts describes a fight over library financing and the salary of a librarian (that would have paid her $25 per hour or about $42,000 per year) as a step too far for the residents, whose median household income is often not more than $25,000. Self-defeated is about much more than finances, but about an entire attitude and expectation of individual lives and community life that the word describes.

Particularly telling is one resident's dismissal of the value of the librarian's degree or the work of the library. “Call me narrow-minded but I’ve never understood why a librarian needs a four-year degree,” someone wrote. “We were taught Dewey decimal system in grade school. Never sounded like anything too tough.” That remark is not about Dewey. It is a willful dismissal of what the library there does: provide a portal to so much of the world beyond Clinton for those who cannot afford it or even imagine it. The evocation of Dewey itself is a telling dismissal: a nineteenth century system of relative shelf location is taken as the be-all and end-all of what can be known --not just a library, but what a library can point to.

In Potts' telling, the politics and mind-set of scarcity defines Van Buren County, Arkansas, and "people didn’t want to pay for something they didn’t think they would use." The Chair of the library board points to a conversation, "They’d say, ‘So-and-so has a big farm and they may not even use the library,’” (The Chair pointed out that he doesn't have children and never uses the public school.) Social discourse becomes even more impoverished than community finances. In Potts' words:

A considerable part of rural America is shrinking, and, for some, this means it’s time to go into retreat. Rather than pitching in to maintain what they have, people are willing to go it alone, to devote all their resources to their own homes and their own families. . . . They believe every tax dollar spent now is wasteful and foolish and they will have to pay for it later. It is as if there will be a nationwide scramble to cover the shortfall just as there was here with the library.

I was left thinking, "what about the children? What about the young people? Is there any hope here for the future? How is the next generation to live?

One of the premises of all education is that somehow things might become better, smarter, wiser, more effective, from theory to very practical results. When education is seen as strictly a private good, that benefits only the person enrolled, and strictly as job training, to do work that is done right now, then any sense of hope for betterment has vanished. And a school or university becomes simply a credential mill, properly certifying new workers to do what is done now. This is wildly dissonant with ideas about innovation (disruptive or incremental) or any kind of increased efficiencies or synergies. "Self-defeated" portrays those withdraw, pull back, turn aside from any hope that things could be better than they are in any way whatsoever.

Potts' writing haunts me (I look forward to her book) because I know these people, and grew up with them in Bridgeport, Michigan. Bridgeport is or was probably a step above Clinton, Arkansas, but only a small one. In the 1950s and 1960s the attitude there was one-dimensional: work in the automobile plants, get 30-and-out, and retire early. Maybe the UAW can help, maybe not. In retrospect many people regard those times as better than they were; in reality the economy there was heavily boom/bust and the busts were not pretty. (See Daniel Clark's Disruption in Detroit, Univ of Illinois Press, 2018) In this decade Bridgeport is a shadow of its former self (which wasn't much to begin with), and the same mindset of withdrawal and going-it-alone is pervasive throughout the township. Saginaw County's population has declined dramatically since 1980 from 228,000 to 190,000 (while the USA grew from 226 million to 327 million). The neighboring school district went bankrupt, was taken over by the state, and dissolved; the local school district was in similar difficulty but seems to have become more stable in the past few years.

Potts quotes a resident of Clinton, Arkansas, "“If you want to make $25 an hour, please go to a city that can afford it." Many from Clinton took her advice and left; many from Bridgeport, Michigan have taken similar advice, as did I. The potential for a life at anything more than just above the poverty line are very limited in both places. More than that statistical, financial poverty line is the poverty of spirit, a refusal to see what could be possible, a reluctance to band together to fight for what could be better, and a real willingness to disparage any achievement elsewhere as a sad waste of money and time.

I try to balance Potts' article with the blogs by James and Deborah Fallows that look at places in America that are re-inventing themselves, Our Towns. I try to square the demoralized, self-defeated residents of many rural corners with the attractive idea that needs further research, that some young professionals are intentionally moving away from expensive urban centers to places where life is both more affordable and more relaxed. Potts article warns: those places are not just everywhere or anywhere. For a community to re-invent itself, to fight against the self-defeatism that reigns in Clinton, Arkansas, or Bridgeport, Michigan, such a community needs a core of dedicated people, both leaders and followers, who see what an area could be, what it could offer, how it could be better --in short, a set of people who can hope and then get to work. In too many rural communities, those people simply have left, frustrated with the poverty of mind, imagination and spirit.

Potts does not mention a curious fact about Clinton, Arkansas: it has seen another, useful government intervention (with private assistance). A 1982 flood of the Archery Fork of the Upper Little Red River severely damaged the town and a subsequent channelization project sought to prevent another one. In 2012 the Nature Conservancy and the state Game and Fish Commission supported a cantilevered stream bed, a trail, and habitat restoration. I can't imagine that anyone in Clinton would be in favor of another 1982 flood (but I can imagine, "That project. What a sad waste of government money.") I can definitely imagine a familiar dismissal of the later re-engineering to provide better habitat, so that flood control would divide the community less sharply, even though I imagine few would want the old channel back. It must be an improvement, but will be dismissed as a waste. If my suspicions are correct, this is a prime example of how a community can defeat itself: a refusal to hope, a willing refusal to work together. No wonder anyone who can gets out. How poorly these people are served by the very ideology and individuals they select to preside over their local, state, and national communities.

In self-defeat is written the story of our national decline. How then is the next generation to live?

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I just finished --very much behind the curve--Eric Klinenberg's Palaces of the People, and of course I liked it. It gives pride of place to libraries in the evolving social structure of the 20th century in the United States, and of difficulties since. So why wouldn't I like that? I was still left with some questions (and maybe Klinenberg will continue on this subject in his future work).

Klinenberg focused on public libraries, and that's an important feature and caveat at once. My sister (now retired) was director of an urban public library in Michigan for twenty-four years, and I saw first hand how physical infrastructure, service commitments, political savvy, and sheer determination assisted in revitalizing Muskegon, Michigan --still a town with difficulties, but with a splendid public library. Deborah Fallows has noted that libraries are where you need to go if want to find out what is really happening in a town, that libraries often are the first institutions that take action to fill gaps in a community." I've seen this truth with my own eyes in a wide variety of locations. The three locations of Hamden Public Library (CT) are centers of the whole community, and alive with activity.

What about academic libraries? As Joshua Kim noted, "Klinenberg knows that academic libraries are under a quiet attack from every quarter of academia." I suspect that the old saw the "we don't need libraries now that we have the internet (or Amazon)" has finally begun to wear out, but there are many challenges to academic libraries, not just budgets.

In reality, libraries have made their services and technologies so seamless and transparent that users are often unaware that libraries have contributed to their success. I have heard some of my own faculty say, "I don't use the library; I get everything I need on the internet," blissfully unaware that they are finding things exactly because librarians did a lot of work behind the veil, as it were, to make sure that our users have access to expensive resources.

Then there's another old saw, "Students don't read books anymore." Funny --I remember faculty complaining about the growing lack of student reading in the early 1970s. I suspect t'was ever thus, and without doubt the advent of digital distractions has cut into paper book circulations. But if public library circulations are up, and printed book sales are up, where are all those books going? Pew Research surveys have shown that young people are more likely to use libraries and borrow books than many of their elders --but not college students? huh?

On a university campus, what I see is this: students use the library physical space both to stay on task, and to do so in the proximity of their friends. It is social capital, in Klinenberg's sense, but indirect. The good students want to keep up with the other good students: they do that through their studies, and many of them do that in the library, regardless how they interact (or don't) with library resources and services. The library also provides access to workstations and printers that some students lack: it is a relative leveller in an academic society that, like wider society, continues to stratify.

The question, do "good students" use the library, or do they become (and remain) "good students" because they use the library? What does "using" the library mean --space, context, resources, services, technology, or some personal amalgam of all the above? And what is a "good student" anyway? --is that just a proxy for academic high achievers, or can a student be "good" in a way not wholly described by grades? What about the student whose mind or heart is actually changed by something she learns through study, regardless how that is measured in cumulative academic assessment? (Is there any way even to know this?) Those spaces need not be "palaces" --a slightly misleading metaphor, though well-intentioned. But the spaces need to be adequate. Not every campus can afford a library space that wins architectural awards, and not every campus should.

I think that an emphasis upon cumulative academic assessment --GPA, etc.--and the question, how much of that is influenced by library services and resources and spaces?-- is too narrow. What an academic library might best provide is a space to be in process, to be different, really to grow or learn, to project or experiment with new ways for a student to be in the world, in the future. This is almost impossible to measure and so falls by the wayside of an academic culture increasingly dominated by numerical assessments, evidence-based practice, and "closing the circle" from assessment to improvement, "excellence and innovation in teaching" as my institution puts it. Good academic library spaces can offer (in an economic metaphor) affordances for such assessment, but so much more.

The digital library space can offer something similar --diluted or strengthened--to distance learners as well. I take Joshua Kim's reproof that online education is much more than MOOCs. At my library we work very hard to make sure that our services to online services match what we do for on-ground students, both in quality and resources. Some of our students taking online courses are in fact enrolled in on-ground university curricula. We have done online consultation sessions with students who are physically located upstairs or in the neighboring buildings. It is a challenge and a growth point to figure out how to be library fully in the digital space, a conundrum because these days no one is in the physical library space without interaction with the digital. No one is using a paper-only library on a university campus these days.

Campus social infrastructure is evolving, as well as off-campus. Different kinds of spaces on campus (maker-spaces, for example) are thriving and fostering a social capital in a manner not quite seen before --similar to what has gone on, but also different, and better (I hope!). I agree with Kim, Klinenberg, Barbara Fister that libraries are an essential social infrastructure. The question remains whether those who control the institution's fiscal resources will agree. One of the principle weaknesses of academic libraries lies in that dissonance: those who make the most important decisions about the level of funding for an academic library never actually use the academic library themselves. When did you last seen a President or Provost in the stacks, or reading, or even interacting with others in the building? What senior staff leadership sees, and what users see, can be quite different.

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source: applift.com

Two recent articles or reports, published completely separately but oddly complementary, give shape to the ominous information landscape today, so hostile to expertise and alien to nuance. The first is published in Nature, "Information Gerrymandering and Undemocratic Decisions," by Alexander J. Stewart et al.; the other (.pdf) is Source Hacking: Media Manipulation in Practice, by Joan Donovan and Brian Friedberg, by the digital think tank Data & Society, founded by danah boyd (lower case). Donovan and Friedberg have roles in the Technology and Social Change Research Project of the Shorenstein Center of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

"Information Gerrymandering" reports results of an experiment in which people were recruited to participate in a voting game, involving 2,500 participants and 120 iterations. The game divided participants into two platforms, purple or yellow, and the goal was to win the most votes (first past the post). Would-be winners had to convince others to join their party; in the event of a deadlock, both parties lose. The authors writes, "a party is most effective when it influences the largest possible number of people just enough to flip their votes, without wasting influence on those who are already convinced." When willingness to compromise is unevenly distributed, those who have a lot of zealots, who in principle oppose any compromise, have an advantage. When both sides use such a zealous strategy, however, deadlock results and both sides lose.

To seed the game the authors added influencers, whom they dubbed "zealous bots" to argue against compromise and persuade others to agree with them. They ran the test in Europe and America (whether purple or yellow was better), and then ran similar analyses in UK and USA legislative bodies. They write,

[O]ur study on the voter game highlights how sensitive collective decisions are to information gerrymandering on an influence network, how easily gerrymandering can arise in realistic networks and how widespread it is in real-world networks of political discourse and legislative process. Our analysis provides a new perspective and a quantitative measure to study public discourse and collective decisions across diverse contexts. . . .

Symmetric influence assortment allows for democratic outcomes, in which the expected vote share of a party is equal to its representation among voters; and low influence assortment allows decisions to be reached with broad consensus despite different partisan goals. A party that increases its own influence assortment relative to that of the other party by coordination, strategic use of bots or encouraging a zero-sum worldview benefits from information gerrymandering and wins a disproportionate share of the vote—that is, an undemocratic outcome. However, other parties are then incentivized to increase their own influence assortment, which leaves everyone trapped in deadlock."

Information Gerrymandering and Undemocratic Decisions, p. 120

This is oddly synchronous with current events (August-September 2019), which seem turbo-charged to attract attention and conflict, and to deflect persuasion and obfuscate any nuance. Zealotry is a strategy to maximize attention and conflict, and to discourage the nuance that makes compromise and persuasion possible. Those who shout the loudest get the most attention. Zealous bots, indeed!

That's where the second article comes in, Source Hacking. Zealots can now use online manipulation in very specific ways with extremely fine-grained methods on very narrow slices of online attention or "eyes." Donovan and Friedberg call this "source hacking," a set of techniques for hiding the sources of misleading or false information, in order to circulate it widely in "mainstream" media. These techniques or tactics are:

  • Viral sloganeering, repackaging extremist talking points for social media and broadcast media amplification;
  • Leak forgery, creating a spectacle by sharing false or counterfeit documents;
  • Evidence collages, consisting of misinformation from multiple sources that is easily shareable, often as images (hence collages);
  • Keyword squatting, strategic domination of keywords via manipulation and "sock-puppet" false-identity accounts, in order to misrepresent the behavior of disfavored groups or opponents.

The authors ask journalists and media figures to understand how viral slogans ("jobs not mobs" was a test case), and to understand their role in inadvertently assisting covertly planned campaigns by extremists to popularize a slogan already frequently shared in highly polarized online communities, such as Reddit groups or 4chan boards. "Zealous bots" indeed!

Taken together, these two articles vividly delineate how zealots can take over information exchanges and trim their "boundaries" of discourse (gerrymander them) to depress any and all persuasion, nuance, or complexity. These zealots do so by using very precise tactics of viral sloganeering, leaking forged documents, creating collages of false or highly misleading evidence pasted together from bits of truth, and domination of certain keywords (squatting) so as to manipulate algorithms and engage in distortion, blaming, and threats. Taken together, such communication reaches a "tipping point" (a phrase used by Claire Wardle of First Draft News in 2017) in which misinformation and misrepresentation overwhelm any accurate representation, nuanced discussion, persuasion, to meaningful exchange.

Those who wanted to "move fast and break things" have certainly succeeded, and it remains to be seen whether anything can remain whole in their wake, outside of communities of gift (scholarly) exchange explicitly dedicated to truth and discernment. Libraries have to house, encourage, foment, and articulate those values and communities --hardly a value-free librarianship, and one that does risk sometimes tolerating unjust power relationships because their alternatives are even worse.

The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation is to live! It is only from this question, with the responsibility towards history, that fruitful solutions can come, even if for the time being they are very humiliating.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "After Ten Years," 1943, translated and published in Letters and Paper from Prison

(And no, that is not a nod to a certain court evangelical who pretends to understand Bonhoeffer, but who can't speak a word of German, and is simply a shoddy scholar.)