Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976) Magnolia Bud, 1929, gelatin silver print, museum Purchase, © 1929, 2012 Imogen Cunningham Trust.
Belmont Park Air Meet, New York, 1910
How has your decision to write affected your health? Has it had negative effects on your personal life?
Basically, they seem to be encouraging writers to complain about how terribly hard it is to be a writer and how much suffering writers endure. Some of them comply, but most, to their credit, do not.
The problem with the question is that it lacks context: “the decision to write” as opposed to doing what else? You’d answer the question one way if instead of writing you imagined being unemployed, another way if instead of writing you imagined being a firefighter. Ditto with “negative effects”: How do I even know whether writing has had negative effects on my personal life? Maybe I would have been a jerk no matter what I did, and my being a writer at least keeps me in a room by myself so I can’t bother other people as much.
I was sitting in a grandstand seat behind the third-base-side lower boxes, pretty close to the field, there as a Giants fan of long standing but not as yet a baseball writer. Never mind the score or the pitchers; this was a trifling midseason meeting—if any Giants-Dodgers game could be called trifling—with stretches of empty seats in the oblong upper reaches of the stands. Robinson, a Dodger base runner, had reached third and was standing on the bag, not far from me, when he suddenly came apart. I don’t know what happened, what brought it on, but it must have been something ugly and far too familiar to him, another racial taunt—I didn’t hear it—that reached him from the stands and this time struck home.I didn’t quite hear Jackie, either, but his head was down and a stream of sound and profanity poured out of him. His head was down and his shoulders were barely holding in something more. The game stopped. The Dodgers’ third-base coach came over, and then the Giants’ third baseman—it must have been Sid Gordon—who talked to him quietly and consolingly. The third-base umpire walked in at last to join them, and put one hand on Robinson’s arm. The stands fell silent—what’s going on?—but the moment passed too quickly to require any kind of an explanation. The men parted, and Jackie took his lead off third while the Giants pitcher looked in for his sign. The game went on.
Simon Russell Beale is fond of describing acting as three-dimensional literary criticism. And in my personal experience, the most mind-expanding insights into Shakespeare have come from actors in the rehearsal room, usually without the long introductory preamble with which directors generally preface even the most banal of suggestions. As a tribe, we can barely ask an actor to move to the left without making a speech about it – but actors just get on with it. One day in rehearsal, without warning, David Calder – who played Polonius in Hamlet – approached the end of his speech of advice to Laertes and flinched. He seemed to dry. And then, under the heavy weight of what felt like deep personal shame, he said: “This above all: to thine own self be true,/ And it must follow, as the night the day,/ Thou canst not then be false to any man.” From the heart, like many fathers, Polonius wants his son not to make his own mistakes. But, mired in a corrupt court, he is incapable of dealing truthfully with others, and of being true to himself. And Calder’s Polonius knew it.It would be equally plausible to present the Polonius of tradition, a man devoid of self-knowledge, puffed up with self-regard. But I was electrified by Calder’s illumination of three lines worn thin by their relentless repetition, out of context, often by habitual liars. I knew immediately that the Calder Polonius had helped Claudius assassinate the old king, and was tortured by his own treachery. I started to think that the old king was probably a disaster for Denmark, that – like Richard II – he had to go. This was the real Shakespeare: an actor who provides for other actors a myriad of ways of telling his stories and of being his characters. His intuitive openness to interpretation is mistaken for complexity. His relish for ambiguity is taken as a challenge to those who would pin him down. But they are functions of his calling: he writes plays.
No, they aren’t right about the Gosnell story. If you’ve never heard of the Gosnell story, it’s not because of a coverup by the liberal mainstream media. It’s probably because you failed to pay attention to the copious coverage among pro-choice and feminist journalists, as well as the big news organizations, when the news first broke in 2011. There would be something rich, if it weren’t so infuriating, about these (almost uniformly male, as it happens) reporters and commentators scrambling to break open this shocking untold story. You know, the one that was written about here, here and here, to name some disparate sources.
Just a few notes:
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Though the New York Times ran three brief stories when the Gosnell story broke in 2011, they have, as of this writing, only mentioned the trial in one story just when it started, on March 18: not a word since.
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The Washington Post’s health issues reporter directly says she’s not covering the Gosnell trial because it’s just a local issue with no broader significance.
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As for the commentators on the lack of coverage of the Gosnell trial being “almost uniformly male,” well, there’s this woman and this woman and this woman and this woman and this woman and this woman. And that’s just the result of two minutes’ googling.
So so ahead, Irin Carmon, just say stuff. Your audience won’t bother to find out whether any of it is true.
But Carmon is right about one big thing: that seriously left and passionately pro-choice people have covered the story. As Ross Douthat tweeted earlier today: “Gap in Gosnell coverage between lefty blogs and MSM reflects the difference between consistent pro-Roe view and pro-choice self-deception. In consistent pro-Roe view, Gosnell just makes case for having more doctors trained/willing/brave enough to perform safe late-term abortions.” And Matt Frost added, “One side sees the Gosnell case, thinks: ‘abortion is an atrocity.’ Other side says, 'abortion is too unsafe.’ The 'center’ just can’t look.”
Landing signal officer and assistant wear experimental ear protection aboard the USS Midway, August 1955.
Photograph by Luis Marden, National Geographic
Typically, I tell people not to go to grad school. That’s the advice I give, generally. And I do rather stridently. But when I do, I make it actual advice, by which I mean, it comes from a place of respect and a sincere desire to help. I don’t pretend to offer advice when I’m actually offering contempt and mockery. And I also recognize that the vast majority of PhDs are in fact in far better shape than the national average. They have an absurdly low unemployment rate of 2.5% and weekly earnings twice the national average. As with any statistics, there’s plenty of individual variance within there. But the data are unambiguous: the vast majority of PhDs end up fine. Many or most of them won’t end up as TT professors, and for many of them, that’ll be a disappointment. But in a country with such vast poverty, unemployment, and general economic hopelessness, PhDs are doing fine. My general advice stands: don’t go, unless you are merciless in your self-criticism, if you are mercenary in how you pursue particular fields and research interests, and if the program has a very high placement rate. My own program (not department), for instance, has a 100% TT hiring rate in the history of the program, a time-to-degree of 5.4 years, and better than 90% graduation rate for people who finish their preliminary exams. (Could I easily be one of the people left without a job, though? You betcha.)To assert that you are offering employment advice for PhDs, without considering data like this, is either deeply misguided or deeply dishonest.
There are smart and stupid ways to pursue graduate school. I laid out my version of the smart way here. But I certainly understand that I could end up on the outside looking in. And you know what? I’ll figure that out. As someone who has endured actual human hardship, I guess I just don’t see that kind of rejection as the pit of despair that Schuman does. My natural response to her talking about the spiritual death of not getting a TT job is to say, first, I think she needs to readjust her definition of suffering. And, second, what a terribly narrow, sad definition of the world, or of success.
Fishing nets dry in the early morning sunlight in a Macao harbor around 1931, the year photographer W. Robert Moore began his career at National Geographic.
Photograph by W. Robert Moore, National Geographic
The Medieval Latin word universitas has no reference to the scope of the curriculum of studies; it stands for the whole gathering, the whole body, of a particular class of persons, and indeed stands very near in meaning to the modern ‘union’ in the term 'trade union.’ It is all but synonymous, for legal purposes, with the Latin term collegium, and for social comparisons, with the old English word guild. The universitas was first of all the whole body either of the masters or of the students, and then very naturally came to mean their self-governing guild or society. The word did not gain its local or educational connotation till the last phase of the middle ages.