I’m on vacation for most of August, sitting by Lake Erie enjoying the breeze, reading, and (at the moment) writing a bit. Among the books I’ve been reading are three that couldn’t be more different: Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media, Roger Kimball’s The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia, and the Everyman’s Library edition of George Orwell’s Essays. I’ve been enjoying them all in different ways, which I think makes me more Orwellian than Chomskian or Kimballian (if those are the proper adjectival formations).

Manufacturing Consent and The Fortunes of Permanence are politically opposite but  methodologically almost identical, which might surprise people familiar with only Chomsky or Kimball. Both books focus only on the worst of their enemies and ignore any mitigating evidence or circumstance that doesn’t suit their purposes. With Manufacturing Consent, I can almost forgive this, as the injustices committed by the U.S. Government at times are considerably greater in scope than those committed by the leftist academics Kimball demonizes. Herman and Chomsky do a pretty good job of explaining how the U.S. Government and Big Business use the mass media as tools of misinformation designed to bolster the image of the U.S. and American corporations at the expense of anyone who criticizes them. Someone would have to be hopelessly naive to believe that governments and powerful interests worldwide are always trying to make their side of the story the story, but the analysis of specific cases is powerful evidence for the how.

When reading it, though, I have to wonder how naive someone has to be to believe that it could be otherwise, or that the U.S. Government and American corporations are especially wicked because they act in the way they do. What’s missing isn’t the proof of how they act, but the corrective attitude that acknowledges that the U.S. Government is no more wicked or duplicitous than other governments, only more powerful. I’m inclined to believe Lord Acton that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Were all the communist regimes the U.S. illegally overthrew themselves the picture of perfect justice? The implicit tone and focus throughout the book is that if the U.S. Government interacts with any other countries or people it is almost always in the wrong, with the concomitant assumption that the other countries or people are therefore always in the right. Can this really be true? Is the world really made of perfect heroes and villains? The saving grace is that Herman and Chomsky occasionally admit that some truthful news and information manages to struggle through their Propaganda Model and they are providing an  important alternative point of view on the injustices of a government that would prefer not to admit them.

Not so with The Fortunes of Permanence, which displays both the best and the worst that Kimball has to offer. Kimball is great on cultural topics but ridiculous on political ones because of his Manichean worldview and limited scope. Get him going on John Buchan or The Dangerous Book for Boys or Rudyard Kipling and he’s lively and perceptive. Even letting him have a go at the knee-jerk relativism pervasive in our culture can be fun. But when he starts ranting about the enemies of permanence (in values, traditions, etc.) and he’s either willfully naive or completely blinded by faith in the Republican Party and all it stands for. Since Kimball seems like a very smart man to me, I have to wonder. For example, his enemy is almost always the same: “academic multiculturalists.” (And no, this book is from 2012, not 1988.) Relativism is destroying all our values? Terrorists are attacking us? The culture is awash in vulgarity? Traditions and values are eroding? Blame those darned academic multiculturalists. From what I can tell through reading a number of his books, Kimball encountered a bunch of frivolous intellectual popinjays during a sojourn in a humanities grad program and was scarred for life. I can sympathize. I put up with the same uncritical, relativist nonsense in grad school as well, but I had enough perspective to know that academic multiculturalists don’t rule the world because first, they don’t even dominate academia or the humanities, and second, outside of academia no one pays any attention to them except, apparently, Roger Kimball.

It’s especially peculiar that in a book about the erosion of what T.S. Eliot called “the permanent things” Kimball ignores the elephant in the culture that drives innovation and change in everything from values to automobiles at a relentless pace: an economic system that survives only by developing new everything all the time. Oldfashioned conservatives understood that one of the most powerful forces against traditional values and culture was capitalism and its constant need for novelty. After a brief analysis near the beginning of the way an HBSC bank ad campaign promotes relativism, economic concerns disappear from the book. The U.S. Government is always good, corporations are always beneficent, and all would be right with the world if we could just get rid of those all-powerful academic multiculturalists! Compare T.S. Eliot in The Idea of a Christian Society, pondering the aftermath of the Nazi invasion of Poland, which left him and others shakened with “a doubt of the validity of a civilisation. We could not match conviction with conviction, we had no ideas with which we could either meet or oppose the ideas opposed to us. Was our society, which had always been so assured of its superiority and rectitude, so confident of its unexamined premisses, assembled round anything more permanent than a congeries of banks, insurance companies and industries, and had it any beliefs more essential than a belief in compound interest and the maintenance of dividends?” Eliot had enough sense to know that a devotion to finance was more dangerous to “the permanent things” than a devotion to academic multiculturalism, however one happens to define that beast. Kimball knows this, too, but rarely mentions it. When it comes to his criticism of cultural or intellectual relativism, Kimball has a compelling subject; it’s just that he lays all the blame on his favorite bugaboos while ignoring other much more likely sources. What I like about Kimball is his intellectual seriousness and cultural criticism, but the implication that everything bad in our culture is somehow the fault of leftist intellectuals strikes me as willful blindness.

After those hopelessly partisan though enjoyable books, how refreshing to turn to Orwell’s essays. If you know Orwell only through Animal Farm and 1984, then you don’t know Orwell well enough. He’s long been something of an intellectual hero of mine. The best virtue of George Orwell, aside from his delightful prose, is his unflagging intellectual honesty, a virtue appallingly absent in most political writers. Orwell was a committed socialist and a staunch critic of totalitarianism, in a time when being a member of the British left often meant going along with the party line from Moscow and licking Stalin’s bloodstained boots while judging the Soviet Union by its intentions and Britain by its worst results (does the rhetorical ploy sound familiar?). To criticize Stalin over, say, starving millions of his own people or the Moscow show trials, was to play into the hands of the enemy, i.e. the capitalist British government. A good socialist just doesn’t do those sorts of things. To show, as Orwell did in An Homage to Catalonia, that the communists fighting against Franco in the Spanish Civil War were basically a bunch of ruthless bastards willing to betray anyone to get their way was itself a betrayal. That’s because political fanatics don’t believe in honesty, only victory, whether they’re fanatical warmongers who think the road to American greatness lies in invading countries that haven’t attacked us or fanatical communists who think that any means, no matter how horrible, justifies the end of communist utopia. Orwell wouldn’t hide from the fact that there are bad apples in every lot, even your own.

Orwell differs from most political writers in that he criticizes the unjust or ridiculous wherever he finds it, not just if it’s caused by someone on the “other side.” Comparing Kimball and Orwell on the British Honours is instructive. Here’s Kimball:

But what seems at first to be an effort to establish cultural parity turns out to be a campaign for cultural reversal. When Sir Elton John is put on the same level as Bach, the effect is not cultural equality but cultural insurrection. (If it seems farfetched to compare Elton John and Bach, recall the literary critic Richard Poirier’s remark, in Partisan Review in 1967, that “sometimes [the Beatles] are like Monteverdi and sometimes their songs are even better than Schumann’s.) It might also be worth asking what had to happen in English society for ther to be such as thing as “Sir Elton John.” What does that tell us about the survival of culture? 

I found this passage slightly amusing and outrageously pompous. “Recall” that 1967 article in the Partisan Review! Um, yes, I’m recalling that, because a 45-year old article on the Beatles is exactly the sort of literary classic I make sure to keep in ready memory, especially since no publication ever had a more profound impact on the American psyche as the Partisan Review. Notice that no one has actually put Sir Elton John on the same level as Bach. Even so, what relevance to the discussion does some critic 45 years ago claiming that sometimes the Beatles wrote better songs than Schumann’s have? The analogy is terrible. My god, Kimball, are you implying that some Schumann lieder are to be considered on the same level as the works of Bach? The Mass in B Minor alone could kick the stuffing out of all of Schumann’s lieder and the St. Matthew’s Passion could sweep along behind and take out the symphonies! By the time the Brandenburg Concertos and the cello suites were through monkey-stomping what was left of Schumann’s ouevre anyone with a conscience would recall the glory days when all Schumann had to contend with were the Beatles. And why pick on Elton John’s knighthood? I find it very hard to believe that Kimball is unaware that plenty of scoundrels have been knighted for doing considerably less than raising over $30 million for charity and giving us Madman Across the Water.

Here’s Orwell on the 1944 Honours List:

Looking through the photographs in the New Years Honours List, I am struck (as usual) by the quite exceptional ugliness and vulgarity of the faces displayed there. It seems to be almost the rule that the kind of person who earns the right to call himself Lord Percy de Falcontowers should look at best like an overfed publican and at worst like a tax collector with a duodenal ulcer.

And the next paragraph, just because it’s funny:

But our country is not alone in this. Anyone who is a good hand with scissors and paste could compile an excellent book entitled Our Rulers, and consisting simply of published photographs of the great ones of the earth. The idea first occurred to me when I saw in Picture Post some stills of Lord Beaverbrook delivering a speech and looking more like a monkey on a stick than you would think possible for anyone who was not doing it on purpose.

Kimball goes after Sir Elton and Orwell after Lord Percy de Falcontowers. However, Orwell also had the intellectual honesty to criticize the failures and shortcomings of his political comrades, something you will rarely if ever find in Kimball or Chomsky. Orwell escaped the flight from complexity in a way few writers do.

Okay, back to my reading.

Today I read a lot of Dilevko and Gottlieb’s Reading and the Reference Librarian: the Importance to Library Service of Staff Reading Habits (which I’d never heard of but found out about here). It shares some perspectives (as well as the LCSH "Librarians — Books and Reading") with Peter Briscoe’s excellent Reading the Map of Knowledge: the Art of Being a Librarian, though the former analyzes survey results while the latter is more a personal manifesto on being a librarian. Both advocate wide reading as a goal to become a better librarian. Dilevko and Gottlieb focus, in my opinion, too narrowly upon the reference librarian and on the specific effect of reading habits upon library reference service, but then again they do what they do well, and it’s unfair to criticize a book for not doing something its authors never intended to do just because I would have liked to see them tackle other areas of librarianship.

The first chapter deals with the deprofessionalization of reference, especially with the rise of the reference call center of the LSSI model and the way it deliberately focuses on the simplest and most common queries and ignores the rest as a way to reduce professionally trained and educated staff and cut costs, and compares that desire to the way Amazon.com ran their organization until they outsourced everything to India. The  Amazon call centers sound harrowing, with loud buzzers and lights flashing when workers weren’t answering emails fast enough, or forced overtime with managers giving out candy bars to motivate and infantilize employees. At least now when we buy from Amazon we can all be relieved that the harrowing and humiliating jobs are  done in some foreign country by people totally unlike us for a tenth of the cost, so we don’t have to feel bad about them. The book was published in 2004, based on research done in 2000-01, and I wonder if that’s still as much of an issue. I know LSSI is still around, but I haven’t heard much of a buzz about outsourcing reference for several years. However, that could be because it’s become so common as not be worth mentioning.

Divelko and Gottlieb argue that wide reading of newspapers, magazines, journals, books fiction and nonfiction improves reference service for both public and academic librarians. Some chapters focus exclusively on academic librarians and the benefits to professors and students when librarians read broadly as well as deeply in some academic discipline. A little knowledge of a lot of topics and a lot of knowledge on a few topics help in reference, instruction, collection development, and liaison activities, and the professors interviewed recommended taking classes, earning degrees, reading journals, learning languages, or at the very least reading introductory textbooks in the areas they work with so as to know something about the organization of knowledge in the discipline. In other words, professors want academic librarians to act like academics, to have academic fields of inquiry and an intellectual engagement with the world of scholarship. Go figure.

Sometimes the expectations seem unrealistic. The ideal librarian would be as knowledgeable as every professor about every subject. At some point I made a mental list of the ideal candidate for my job. That librarian at a minimum would have PhDs in philosophy, religion, and history, as well as fluency in Greek, Latin, German, French, Italian, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, and Chinese. When that candidate comes along, I’m doomed. Good thing I have my quasi-tenure. Nevertheless, in general, I think the point is that the more academic an academic librarian the more successful that librarian will be in several areas of librarianship, and I wholeheartedly agree.

The final chapter, "Reading as a Species of Intellectual Capital," analyzes changes in reference work through the lens of Bourdieu. "To use Bourdieu’s terms, advocates of digital reference services are deploring their ‘species of capital’ — their belief in the efficacy of technological innovation as represented by the call center model — in order to render less valuable the ‘species of capital’ of reference librarians whom they accuse of being concerned only with ‘"reviewing the professional literature" and other odd tasks’…." The authors conclude that these "supposedly valueless tasks" contribute a lot to a successful library experience for the users, but that some librarians are attempting to discredit ‘"the form of capital upon which the force of [an] opponent rests.’" Ignoring call centers for the nonce, does this strategy seem familiar? "Techonolgical innovation has become a weapon allowing one group of individuals to exert power and influence on their own behalf while marginalizing the contributions of those who are skeptical of the ultimate value of such technological advances. It allows the first group of players to paint themselves as innovators in the profession, and it renders the second group a ‘negligible quantity’" (211).

Dilevki and Gottlieb are not impressed, and clearly articulate the point of this familiar rhetorical strategy: "The terms of the debate thus permit any skeptic of technological innovation to be branded an opponent of progress and thus an impediment to the field’s survival" (211-12). These accusations, though often in mild enough form befitting librarians, seem rife enough in library discourse. The advocates of constant technological innovation often look for any sign that library users are moving in their direction, while ignoring the overwhelming organization of a considerable portion of academia. In the humanities, those might be the librarians who praise and wonder at a tiny flowering of "digital humanities" while ignoring the undeniable able fact that most humanists do now and have always engaged in the study of texts without accompaniment of multimedia. Confirmation bias is rampant in this company. However, at least in the humanities, how easy might it be to turn the tables? To reply, when challenged about the latest technological innovation or sad, shallow method of connecting people, "No, I’m unfamiliar with that tool, but tell me, what’s the last scholarly book or article you read, or what academic field of study do you have any mastery of?" Since it’s clear that faculty and students benefit from having librarians with subject knowledge of academic fields, it’s quite possible that the current terms of debate do a disservice to our users and ourselves by urging librarians to be computer support and keyword searching specialists rather than academic subject specialists.

I almost put a question mark after the title. This morning I received one of those ALA Editions emails advertising three recent reader’s advisory titles. The whole concept seems very foreign to me. Certainly I get the idea – helping people find books they want to read, probably based on what they’ve liked in the past – but it doesn’t seem to be anything we do in academic libraries as a matter of course.

Once a few years ago I did get a question that was almost reader’s advisory like. It’s the only time I’ve ever gotten it, so I even remember. Someone was looking for books with musician characters because they were assigning a research essay and wanted to suggest books to students. For a minute or so I wondered how I was going to help the person, but then realized some public reference librarian had probably already done my job for me. Sure enough, within a couple of Google searches I found several reader’s advisory lists of novels with musician characters. At the time I thought to myself, how do they do that?

On the other hand, I guess some of us do reader’s advisory of a sort. In a research consultation, we’re definitely dispensing some advice on what to read. "Peer-reviewed, scholarly books and articles are just the thing you need!" In the technical sense of the phrase, this is reader’s advisory, right? We’re advising readers.

I have a feeling that the public librarians get more satisfied patrons, though, or at least patrons with a different sort of satisfaction. I would imagine (and I could be wrong) that the people who come away from a good reader’s advisory consultation are looking at all the copacetic books on their list bursting with anticipation, whereas often after a successful consultation with me a student goes away with a list of great looking sources but not necessarily with a gleeful look in their eyes as they contemplate reading the stuff. I want the gleeful look; I’m just not sure how to get it.

I don’t know why, but I seem to be a sucker for books on cultural decadence. Give me a provocative book showing that the Western or American Civilization has been going to hell in a handcart since the fall of Rome or the Reformation or WWII or the beginning of the Reagan era, and I’ll probably at least skim it. Tell me that we’re amusing ourselves to death, or dumbing down our educational system, or that we live in a vulgar, violent mass culture “rooted in the cash nexus of corporate capitalism” and I’ll probably be entertained for a while.

That last quote is from the Choice review of America’s Meltdown: the Lowest-Common-Denominator Culture by John Boghosian Arden. I know nothing about this book other than the table of contents and what I read on the website, so I’m not recommending it. I picked up for holiday reading while browsing the stacks this afternoon in the American culture section. I’m sure I’ll spend an enjoyable couple of hours finding out in more detail about the melting down of America.

Why the trope of cultural decline is so appealing, I don’t know, but I do know I’m not alone in this. This theme has been appearing in Western literature and literature that has influenced the West since there was such literature. By Homer’s day, men were not what they had been in the heroic age. Then Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden. Talk about cultural decline! Certainly some of these concerns have been realistic, no matter what one thinks of the particular cultures. Roman culture did in fact decline. Christendom did in fact disintegrate. The culture of the Old South of Gone with the Wind has in fact gone with the wind, whatever there was of it that really existed outside the nostalgic minds of unreconstructed Southerners.

Nostalgia is often an underlying motivator behind tales of decline. Back in the old days things were always simpler or cleaner or purer or calmer or safer. Locally, there’s no doubt this is true. Trenton, New Jersey, where I live, was most likely safer 60 years ago than it is now. On the other hand, the air and water in many factory cities in Britain are probably cleaner than they were 150 years ago. Protecting the environment requires eternal vigilance, but on the other hand it’s been a long time since the Cuyahoga River caught fire. Nostalgia is so untrustworthy, though. Nostalgics always seem to remember only what was good in the past and only what is bad in the present. Some parts of America might have been better to live in in the 1950s, say, as long as you were white and middle class. (That’s still true today, I suppose). But the conservative nostalgia for the fifties ignores the conflicts of the time as well as the potential for not being in the advantaged classes.

I certainly have my own nostalgic eras about which I like to read. There have been times when I felt more comfortable with 16th or 18th century literature than I do with that of my own time. Like the nostalgic, I can easily see what might have been appealing in any given celebrated era, the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome, the supposed cultural and religious unity of the Middle Ages, the excitement of creating a native poetry in 16th century England. But I wouldn’t want to live in any other era. Issues of hygiene, health care, and indoor plumbing aside, it’s easy to forget that until very recently the lives of most people even in the best off countries were hard, short, and poverty stricken, just like the lives of billions of people today. Nostalgics always seem to think they would have been aristocrats with all the advantages of modern medicine and technology, just like those who claim to be reincarnated all seem to be reincarnations of famous people of the past. Everyone is a reincarnated Napoleon. No one seems to be a reincarnation of the guy who emptied Napoleon’s chamberpot.

Librarians in general don’t seem to be very nostalgic, at least about libraries. How many of us long to return to the innocent days of print indexes or card catalogs? How many of us would want to eliminate the Internet because of the information revolution it has created? I would no more want to get rid of the Internet than the flushing toilet, though I’m glad I don’t have to face that choice. And the day we manage to remove the card catalog from the choicest space in Firestone Library will be a day of celebration, for me if not for the likes of Nicholson Baker.

It would seem that one can enjoying reading about cultural decline without being particularly nostalgic, then. I couldn’t point to any era that I would rather live in. The past doesn’t seem like it was better, but the future still looks like it might be worse. The contradictions of the unnostalgic view of decadence. I suspect for many critics of decadence the feeling of decline is simply the juxtaposition between cultural ideals–Arnold’s “sweetness and light,” culture as the best that has been thought or said that leads us to perfection–and the mass culture around us, forgetting that, as far as I can tell, the mass culture of every era has similarly fallen short of any ideal. Our culture may be declining or disintegrating as the doomsayers chant, or it may be that the decadent interpretation of culture merely shows the health of our ideals. If we ever stop producing criticisms of the declining culture around us, that would probably signify the death of our cultural ideals, thus the irony that when we stop critiquing our declining culture it will be because the culture has declined so much that we are no longer capable of critique.

So because I want to encourage and celebrate the health of our cultural ideals, I’ll spend some time this holiday season reading about how our society is hopelessly corrupt and decadent, basking in the warm glow of knowing that someone, somewhere, still thinks there’s something worth saving.

Indulge me a bit if you will. I’ve been sick for the past week or more, and spent several days doing little more than sleeping, reading, and watching the Addams Family. I’ve had to go without solid food, caffeine, or alcohol, thus without, some might say, necessary accouterments of civilized life. To make up for that, I read some short stories and reflected upon popular versus scholarly editions.

Lately I’ve been reading Philip K. Dick, H.P. Lovecraft, and M.R. James. Most of my fiction reading is confined to vacation time and now sick time, when I want my brain to relax. That may sound like I think fiction is a lesser read, but it’s probably my reaction to several years spent studying English literature. I read more widely for fun than I did in college, but I don’t take literature as seriously as an academic subject. It took a long time before I could read fiction or poetry without trying to find something clever to say about it or applying some critical theory to it.

It’s also rare that I find anything I like. My favorite literary genre is the essay, and there’s something I find very satisfying about a good writer exploring a small subject in a thoughtful way. For popular fiction, I prefer P.G. Wodehouse and the British detective novelists of the thirties and forties (Nicholas Blake, Naigo Marsh, etc), but usually I return to the same writers again and again, especially Henry James. However, when I noticed recently that the Library of America had given its imprimatur to Dick and Lovecraft, I thought I would give them a try. To save my valuable reading time, I usually wait for authors to die and for a cultural movement to establish them before I bother reading them, and the Library of America does a great job of this usually. (I’m still hoping they publish an edition of Robert Benchley and pay me to edit it.) I’ve been an M.R. James fan for years, and I recently bought the Penguin 2-volume complete short stories of M.R. James, annotated by S.T. Joshi. They arrived just in time for sickbed reading.

With Dick, I actually began with Selected Stories, the Pantheon volume edited by Jeremy Lethem. As the the stories themselves, I thought they were okay. I don’t know how they rank as science fiction, since they might be the only science fiction I’ve ever read, but they were entertaining and thoughtful for the most part. The non-literary thing that struck me most about the stories is how bad Dick was at predicting the future. He has characters hop from their interplan rocket ships and sit down to typewriters. The future world of some stories has a victorious Soviet Union and lifelike robots, but no personal computers. This gave me another sort of pleasure, as I compared what by now is the present of some of these stories to the world around us. The unvirtual materiality of Dick’s vision interested me in a way I wouldn’t have expected. But this led to scholarly disappointment. I then wanted to know when these stories were published, preferably with dates of composition as well. Obviously these were Cold War-era stories, but the “about the texts” page was woefully inadequate, and there were no notes. I was viewing Dick as a writer who needed to be historicized, and Lethem let me down.

Contrast the LoA Lovecraft edition. All the LoA books are beautifully bound and printed, joys to hold and read, and all the ones I have are annotated more or less heavily. (The Henry James set is almost complete with 14 volumes so far. The five volumes of short stories make great Christmas gifts.) The Lovecraft edition was no exception, though the editor, Peter Straub, relied upon both the texts and the notes that S.T. Joshi had provided in three other editions of Lovecraft’s work that he edited. It makes one wonder why Joshi wasn’t asked to edit this. Straub may be more famous, but would that be relevant for someone buying the LoA edition? I wonder. Still, it had the chronology of the author, notes on the texts, and annotations I’ve come to expect. I didn’t rely on them much, expect to figure out how “Cthulhu” might be pronounced, but some were interesting to read, and they let me date the story accordingly. This isn’t as important for Lovecraft, since he seemed to be deliberately archaic, anyway. If you read both Dick and Lovecraft in tandem, you would probably be struck by the dichotomy of styles. Dick’s prose is spare and lean and he’s often trying to understand what it is to be human. Lovecraft never met an adverb he didn’t like, or a foreigner he did. He certainly can evoke a mood of horror, but I’ve never read anyone so incapable of empathy. Still, the edition was perfect.

Then comes the James edition annotated by Joshi. This would seem to be my sort of edition, heavily annotated, semi-scholarly introductions with bibliography, appendices with juvenilia. But what I found instead was that the scholarly apparatus crushed the delicate stories. The introductions strained to be scholarly, but had little to work with. The annotations provided historical tidbits on people and places real and fictitious, but none of this helped illuminate the stories for me at all. Joshi seems to have made a career of editing and writing about the better popular fiction of the twentieth century, and I’m not maligning his work. It just seemed so unnecessary in this case. Unlike Dick, where I wanted to place the stories in their historical context because of the odd future expectations, and unlike Lovecraft, where some explanation of broader themes that apparently evolve in scattered works help illuminate slightly the stories, the James scholarly apparatus added nothing. The stories stood by themselves. Except for a couple of added stories, my old Wordsworth Classics M.R. James Collected Ghost Stories (available used for $1.99) was just as good.

Maybe I’m being uncharitable to both Lethem and Joshi, though. I probably shouldn’t have been evaluating scholarly editions on an empty stomach.