Four Down...

The Guardian recently published an article about a list of ten books named the ten most difficult books ever written.  The compilers of the list (for the literary website the Millions) looked for "books that are hard to read for their length, or their syntax and style, or their structural and generic strangeness, or their odd experimental techniques, or their abstraction".  The lucky final ten are, in no particular order:

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift
The Phenomenology of Spirit by GF Hegel
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardsom
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
Being and Time by Martin Heidegger
The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spencer
The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein
Women and Men by Joseph McElroy

Personally I would have had Infinite Jest, Portnoy's Complaint, Gravity's Rainbow, Go Down, Moses and anything by Dickens (not because his work is difficult but because it is so mind numbingly boring) on the list.

Looking at the list I realized that I have read four, avoided one and never heard of the other five.  So as a thought experiment (and a new and creative way of avoiding working on my dissertation) I have decided to read the six I have not yet read before the end of the year. 

I started with Nightwood.  It is wierd and the prose is pretty bizarre but it is not what I would call one of the ten most difficult books ever written.  But then maybe I just don't get it.

In the bullpen warming up, A Tale of a Tub.

Sex, God and Hyperbole

Sex and God at Yale:

Porn, Political Correctness, and a Good Education Gone Bad

 

By Nathan Harden

ISBN 978-0-312-61790-5

 

Thomas Dunne Books  301p

 

Nathan Harden has written what might have been an important book.  The recent Yale graduate and self-appointed proclaimer of all things wrong at America's third oldest university stumbles onto matters of truly great importance in modern academia.  Unfortunately these occasional glimpses are surrounded by Harden's puritanical tantrums about "Sex Week", political correctness and very bad art.

Between his mini-tantrums, Harden draws the reader's attention to some questionable events at Yale.  Among them, lifting up a hardcore porn producer as a model of entrepeneurism, corporate sponsorship of "Sex Week" by a sex toy company and the disconnect between classroom antics and institutional disapproval of student behavior that mirrors the same sort of boundary pushing.

 

One of the most under-recognized yet potentially dangerous trends of the last quarter century is the rise of fundamentalist agnosticism on university campuses.  Recalling one particular event during his years at Yale, Harden writes about an incident surrounding the invitation of a controversial conservative Christian speaker.  Several student groups protested the invitation on the grounds that the speaker was insufficiently inclusive in his worldview.  In the name of inclusivity, his point of view was excluded.  One of the most important roles university and college campuses play in a free society is being a place of near absolute freedom in thought and study.  As some of the more abused aspects of liberalism begin to collapse in on themselves, principles of inclusion and academic freedom have been reduced to the laughable paradox that declares that one voice must be silent in the name of letting every voice be heard.  This is perhaps most evident in the case of traditional (or even non-traditional) religious voices.  The prevailing view is that reason and revelation are somehow incompatible in an academic community.  The irony that this is the case at the alma mater of Jonathan Edwards is surpassed only by the fact that this sort of secular fundamentalism is the mirror image of the very religious fundamentalism it claims to be resisting.

 

As he paints his picture of today's Yale, Harden also draws the reader's attention to the very real dangers of allowing a pervading cultural ideal of consumption and materialism to define how two people interact intimately.  The comodification of sex and the elimination of any vocabulary of virtue or morality about sex reduces intimacy to the mere exertion of power or control.  Recalling several dubious events on the Yale campus, Harden demonstrates how this reductionism has led to women (and one must assume men at least occasionally) being dehumanized.  The claim that this is the result primarily of extreme feminist ideas is not persuasive.  But that the creation of an environment frequently defined by a victim economy and reductionist sexual ethic has led to troubling patterns of behavior is.

Much of Harden's book is boilerplate contemporary social conservative talking points about moral decay and the "good old days."  Overblown prose aside, there are glimpses of some important and worthy topics for debate and discussion in and about the modern university campus.