Author Archives: jkcohen

12/29/15

Parson Weems and the Enemy

I am currently reading Parson Weems’s Life of George Washington, in order to present a simplified and abridged version to my student. Weems is oft-remembered for having made Washington appear to have said and done various impressive things which were not actually the case — for example, his confession of having chopped down a purely notional cherry tree. But there are words in Weems’s Life that stand out as transcending their time and author, and as applicable today.The Hessians were German mercenaries who fought on the side of the Crown during the Revolutionary War, and they committed what today might be called “war crimes.”

Weems:

“To make them fight the better, it seems they had been told that the Americans, against whom they were warring, were not (like the Europeans) Christians and gentlemen, but mere savages, a race of Cannibals who would not only tomahawk a poor Hessian, and haul off his hide for a drum’s head, but would just as lieve barbecue and eat him as they would a pig. “Vat! Vat!” cried the Waldeckers, with eyes staring wild and big as billiard balls, “Vat! eat Hessian man up like vun hock! Oh mine Got and Vader! vot peoples ever been heard of eat Christian man before. Vy! shure des Mexicans mush be de deble.”

“This was Hessian logic: and it inspired them with the utmost abhorrence of the Americans, to whom they thought the worst treatment much too good.”

I think we can see both British and Hessians in our own community — our community of Americans, who were the butt of such logic and such treatment centuries ago. So soon we all forget.

12/19/15

I’m Not Going

I knew that something was seriously wrong when KUSC, the classical radio station in LA, devoted yesterday to the music from Star Wars. Every hour on the hour, some evidence of John Williams’s inept theft from Wagner, Holst, and Walton was brought forth. Is there a difference between the Throne Room music from No. 4 and Walton’s Spitfire Prelude? Yes. The former does not even appropriate the latter;  it just despoils its chords. Handel showed composers how to appropriate when he took an undistinguished Italian Magnificat and turned it into the eight-part antiphonal choruses of the latter part of Israel in Egypt.

But this whole Star Wars phenomenon is manufactured consent, mass games (in the North Korean sense) — the clutch of mass marketing to create a sacramental event, one which is partaken in by everyone the way we all partake of Christmas, whether we are co-religionists or not. Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 6 are pilpul — worthless commentary and padding on Nos. 4 and 5. Fans talk about “the expanded Star Wars universe” — which is essentially midrash, the agglomeration of prosaic explanatory content. In the same way as we do not need to know that Moses’s speech impediment was due to an angel’s providentially guiding him towards putting a hot coal in his mouth, we do not need to know that the spongy mystical Force of the universe is actually due to a physical factor in someone’s blood. The appeal of the first two movies was that they explained very little, being so very visual in their idiom and in debt to the laconic Western. Children could use their imaginations to fill in the gaps. Very little was left to the imagination by the end of the prequels. It had all been spelled out, in video games and novelizations and fan fiction, so that now it was a canon that could be believed, taught, and confessed. There are few devotees now able to say “Credo quia absurdum” in the Augustinian sense. They may be reminded by the science popularizers of what kind of unit a parsec is, but since they are unaccustomed to measuring distances in parsecs, the word reverts to the way it is used in the script.

I think I am going to take a pass on this one and go to a Met HD broadcast before its audience dies out.

10/22/15

Persuasive Writing

Earlier this week, Kathryn Stott, a junior New Yorker writer, experienced the most amazing succès d’estime. Her takedown of Henry David Thoreau, some 153 years dead, was so effective that virtually everyone of my Facebook acquaintance now has a visceral hatred of the man. It’s as if he had committed some unspeakable crime, like marriage with one’s own granddaughter. To mention a passage I had actually read – say, the one about “sleepers” from Walden – was akin to liking Woody Allen films. Needless to say, I made no friends that day or since on the basis of my getting through both volumes of the Library of America’s Thoreau, even though I was willing to admit that his poetry was not of the best.

I’m not going to make a pro-Thoreau argument, other than to say that if you have not spent a Sunday morning in a sunny alcove reading A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, you are missing out on a very pleasant and edifying experience. Rather, what all this brings up is mob mentality – I doubt that any of my acquaintances had his or her mind changed about the books – and the evergreen question of, if we have Thoreau cop a plea on Stott’s charges, can we allow the contributions of Bad People into our culture or our canon?

My sense is that if we expunged the Bad Chaps, we would have such holes in the tissue of our culture that all those missing Greek tragedies would seem a trifling loss. Certain high-achieving people, be they poets or CEOs, have a “Why do I care what other people think?” mentality, and that can lend itself to brilliant originality, despicable sociopathy, or both. Richard Wagner comes to mind. But just think of a world without musicians like Schwartzkopf, von Karajan, or Orff – or a world in which the U.S. had neither missiles nor a space program, courtesy of a von Braun who had been justly executed as the outcome of his denazification proceedings.

A Bad Chap, politically unsound, beyond the pale of civilized behavior – haven’t we seen these kinds of purges before? In Russia and China, they have been state-sponsored, but they have been taken up as amateur sport on the Internet and in academia. Eventually, when deciding to expunge someone’s work, you get to the same hollow justifications that they came to in Russia and China – “because he was in a textbook”; “because the previous generation valued him”; “because he told people what to do with themselves.” And at that point, it will be up to posterity to find the holes in the historical record.

For now, I am taking a vacation from Facebook and taking up my Thoreau again. “O Death, where is thy sting, O Stott, thy victory?”

04/20/15

My good opinion, once lost, is lost forever.

Dr. Elizabeth Bennett
Registrar
University of California, Irvine
Irvine, CA 92697

Dear Dr. Bennett:

In the course of job applications, I have recently requested transcripts from my undergraduate institution, Yale, and my graduate school, UCI. Both were obtained through the National Student Clearinghouse. The Yale transcript cost $7, without a convenience fee. UCI’s cost $17, with an additional convenience fee of $2.65.

I realize that it may be a point of Anteater pride, but surely you do not believe that UCI’s transcript is worth two-and-a-half times the price of Yale’s! Insofar as I can tell, the quality of the data, paper, and ink is the same. Given that I may require a dozen of these documents in the next six months, the added expense is both real and onerous. Please consider this when setting your fees.

Respectfully, Jonathan Cohen, MA ’91

 

[I have received no response to this message.]

04/6/15

Dicta

1. The things that make life most worth living are “cost centers.”

2. One is human exactly insofar as one does not fit into someone else’s “business model.”

03/11/15

Loyalty Oath

A little over two decades ago, I signed a loyalty oath. In exchange for employment by the University of California, I pledged to “protect and defend the Constitutions of the United States of America and the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” The loyalty oath was a relic of the McCarthy era, and there is an entirely unpleasant episode in University of California history, from 1949-1951, in which non-signers were dismissed. It was entirely clear to me that to HR, the oath was a formality I was supposed to sign in an instant and hand over. But I thought for a long time about whether I could sign it in good faith, “without mental reservation.” In the end, I signed. Allegiance to a Constitution is allegiance to a principle, although I did not foresee the possibility of future amendments with which I might disagree. Allegiance to a flag is trickier — we are taught to pledge it every morning of our elementary school life, although I suspect for many children it is just a succession of syllables that one has gotten right if one has mastered the intonation. (I think Messaien, who notated birdsong, could have gotten a creditable piece out of the raw pitches of the Pledge of Allegiance.)

Loyalty to a flag is the subject of a kerfuffle at my alma mater. Some students in UCI student government patched together and passed a very poorly written piece of legislation removing all flags, but pointedly that of the United States, from a display area. What seemed like an enunciation of principle to them was anathema to others; I think that high in the minds of administrators was the awful prospect of being a Fox News headline for weeks or months. The Chancellor wrote the only letter he could have written, castigating the students and promising more and better flags at UCI “before too long.” Fox News approved. Unfortunately, its viewers did not get the message, and are now threatening the students with death.

Obviously, the students had their principles, enunciated them, and could do so freely — although their bill, once passed, was vetoed by another committee. But the question I have is counterintuitive: by choosing to go to a public university, did the students incur any obligation, however small, of loyalty to the institution, the State, or its symbols? If that obligation existed, was it large enough to be given any place in their thinking? Or was their attending UC a consumer choice, like selecting Levis jeans over Wranglers, and where one doesn’t give the jeans a second thought unless one has an unusually positive experience? Is attending a state school — the only Federal colleges and universities are military — any different in its requirements on the conscience than attending a private school?

The University of California has done its best to make the relationship between it and its students purely commercial. Its financial exactions on students are so great that there can be no reservoir of good will out of which loyalty might spring. Instead, students hand over their money (whether their own or the banks’), wash their hands, and move on. In exchange, say the Governor and the President, they will get a meal ticket to capitalist society. It is a quid pro quo transaction all the way; I can foresee a time when you can buy that meal ticket directly without the hindering formalities of professors and classes. As for the human emotion of loyalty, if it should still exist, the University has subcontracted its handling to its athletic department and its alumni association, both of which are here to extract still more money from students.

Because of this economic relation, which stunts the emotional relation, where can one find loyalty? In a world where the Presidentially lauded STEM disciplines do not, in fact, lead to jobs as a certainty — think of engineers after the “peace dividend,” or computer programmers deracinated and displaced by hungry H1-B visa-holders — is there really even an economic contract between student and university?

So, I think that there is a generational gap between me and the drafters of the anti-flag bill. Even before I signed the loyalty oath, I had a sense that the University had given more to me than I could possibly give it in return. If the United States and the State of California made it possible, I owed something to them. Despite the idealism of the drafters of the flag bill, I don’t think they felt they owed anything to the University, the State, or the United States. Thanks to institutional greed and governmental defunding, the drafters felt themselves to be free agents. That is a heady jumping off point from which to mount a critique — one from which it is too easy to fall.

 

09/15/14

Hard Cheese

Tim Parks is a man who is pissed off because he had to do the footnotes for his own book. Big whoop. “It’s all available on the Internet, so why give page numbers?” Answer: Do you know how many dead sites there are on the Internet? Do you know how many “big” sites we all relied on are either gone or will be gone? Do you know how terrible the Internet Archive’s coverage really is once you start trying to use it for something useful? Do you know how often the “redundant,” “distributed” cloud services like Amazon AWS fail? Do you remember when Google just dropped its news reader service, used by countless millions? You probably don’t, Mr. Parks. Books are the original distributed database, seeded throughout the world in “austere libraries.” Wipe out one library, burn one book, the rest are still there. So put in those page numbers, and STFU.

08/29/14

But many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first.

While flying late this summer, I noticed while boarding that most of the passengers were frequent flyers, of the Gold, Silver, Platinum, Titanium, Molybdenum, Diamond, Sapphire, Emerald, Ruby, and Peridot varieties. They all boarded first, followed by customers of various airline alliances, followed by people who had paid $21 to follow them, followed by the ragtag rabble such as myself. My brother, who just missed out on Platinum this year, has explained that because all the airlines have merged, all their frequent flyer programs have merged as well. This has the effect of creating a permanent underclass of infrequent leisure travelers. I suppose, if there is anything to be thankful for, it is that the airline I flew did not arrange for passengers to deplane in order of rank, as I would have surely died of apoplexy.

08/19/14

How We Ended Up Doing It Ourselves

When we first moved to Southern California, one of the biggest challenges was finding a synagogue. We found to our dismay that a great deal of the problem centered around money. Synagogues are not like churches, where the plate is passed every time worship happens. Rather, you give all your money up front, in the form of a membership, which includes the right to enter the synagogue and worship on the holiest days of the year: the High Holidays. We did not have that kind of money as graduate students — thousands of dollars — and so we were at pains to find someplace to worship on the High Holidays. The synagogue with which we have been affiliated since then was good enough to give tickets outright to those with university IDs. But on graduation, we ran into the same problem. Luckily, by that point, we had found the synagogue choir, and were enthusiastic participants. There were a few years of pushback from the Rabbi, as my wife is not Jewish, but we had a wonderful time singing with other members, who became our friends. Once we put on the white robes, no one asked us for tickets. But there were the occasional attempts to “make us legal” — to take us on as scholarship cases to whom membership was donated. I accepted this — it seemed to make people happy — until one night, the synagogue secretary called and said that we needed to send money — that the synagogue had been keeping track of the money it had spent on us and wanted more of a contribution from us. To my disturbance, I found out that our seats did not have a marginal cost, which was next to nothing, but that the charity the synagogue had extended to us was in “real money.” In other words, real donors had put in real money to pay for the synagogue’s list price for the seats. And at some point, we would be expected to pay the synagogue back. It was an impossible situation, but our friends in the choir smoothed it over, in the interests of our staying. So we stayed for a few more years. But one year, the nature, function, and experience of the choir changed in a permanent way, one which we could not accept. And my wife was simply too tired, after so many years, to get through the rehearsals. I struggled on for a couple more years, for my friends’ sake and for the sake of the seats, but I couldn’t do it. What finally ended it was that I lost my sense of pitch, and I could not hold a tune anymore.

In this way, our affiliation with the synagogue tapered off. One year, one of our friends asked the Rabbi why we weren’t there, and the next year we got tickets, but I am tired of living off charity. We’ve asked whether there’s some way of earning back our tickets in kind, but they are not set up for it. The truth is that we do not belong there; we will never have enough money to belong there and to pull our own weight. Everyone has been very, very kind to us — the Rabbi, the Cantor, our friends in the choir — but in the end, everything really is dependent on the money the synagogue brings in. They cannot operate the synagogue at the high level it’s attained, with a religious school, social action programs, a beautiful building, etc., if people get in for free more than once in a blue moon. We were in the choir for 15 or 16 years, but you can’t rest on your laurels forever.

So, this year, we’re going to do it ourselves, as we did in the past. We have the prayerbooks, we have the order of service, and we know where the singing goes, as choir members do. It is difficult to have the illusion of a communal experience, which these holidays truly must be. It is hard to pray alone, and to have a sense that it means what it did in the synagogue. But the fact is that charity, no matter how kindly offered, is double edged, and that someone always pays, somehow. We have gotten used to an experience that is better than we deserve, and now it is time to make our way according to our own deserts. In the end, perhaps we will be less distracted by the externals, and find in our own hearts and spirits that which we require. The U’netane Tokef prayer says, “But repentance, prayer, and righteousness may avert [God’s] severe decree.” One does not need infrastructure for any of those things, only an open heart and a willing mind. And it may be that God’s severe decree is coming for us, no matter how good our intentions, where we celebrate, or how much we pledge in the Kol Nidre Appeal. It would be so much simpler if we were an upper-middle-class or lower-upper-class all-Conservative-Jewish family with two great jobs and two kids. But if God had meant us to do things the easy way, and come in by the front door, he would have surely led us along that path. Our path is different.

https://printculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/HIGH-HOLIDAYS-5775-Do-it-Yourself-2.pdf

08/16/14

The Grey Lady Chooses Sides

It is a little disturbing when the Grey Lady chooses sides. In the old days, “without fear or favor” was the journalistic watchword, as was the adoption of whatever could approximate “reportorial objectivity.” But such things must have disappeared with the rise of “advertorials,” the general enmeshing of the news and financial departments, and the desperation caused by the implosion of print newspapers in general. For we see that in its coverage of the labor dispute at the Metropolitan Opera, the Times has become the unashamed mouthpiece of the Met’s director, Peter Gelb. It is just too bad.

To me, the conflict is very simple. The musicians, choristers, and stagehands are being paid wages which were adjudged as fair at the last contract negotiations. When I hire someone to fix my refrigerator, he charges me $100 for labor and we agree, that is the price of the repair plus parts. If he comes back two years hence to do the same repair, I might foreseeably pay him $125 for labor. But under no circumstances would I try to force him down to $75. That is ungentlemanly and likely to get me a knock in the head for my troubles. If I feel the impulse to plead poverty, I need to either do the repairs myself or consider putting the repairman’s fee toward the cost of a new refrigerator. Impugning the character of the repairman — claiming that he lives a life of ease and sufficiency and therefore neither needs or deserves his wages — is beside the point and should garner me another knock in the head.

The job of the choristers, musicians, and stagehands at the Met is to put on operas. This they have done with surpassing skill, no matter what dogs of productions Gelb throws at them. (I am thinking in particular of the most recent Ring Cycle, with an undulating, erratic, mechanical stage floor that seemed to have been designed by a defense contractor in terms of both its functionality and its cost overruns.) It is Gelb’s job to fill the seats and get the donors to write checks. If he cannot do this in a way that meets payroll, he has failed, and should get out of the way in favor of someone who can do the job. Sadly, the Met’s board has given Gelb’s approach a vote of confidence with a ten-year contract extension and millions in bonuses.

I imagine that looming in the minds of all parties are the events at the Minnesota Orchestra, which just barely survived a year-long lockout but only did so because the musicians had allies on the board. Even so, it has emerged in a weakened state, and might not have emerged at all. But instead of taking this to heart, both sides believe that they can play “chicken” with it. If a lockout comes, it will put a stake in the heart of the institution. Unless Gelb believes that he can transport the Met to Shenzhen and outsource the duties of the Met’s performers and stagehands to Foxconn, where they can be automated and/or performed by starving wretches who will rehearse for fourteen hours a day without food, that will be it. We will have to put our ticket money into CDs or a subscription to the Sirius Metropolitan Opera Channel, and relive the past instead of cultivating the future. What a prospect! And yet, through all this, the Times issues a sussurrus of rewarmed Gelb press releases and lets flow the voices of pundits who will tell you, as Necker once did, that the peasants are insufficiently taxed. The Times is the very voice of reason to the faithful readers who see it as their main source of information. When the Met falls, this will be laid to the workers. The alternative — that an equitable settlement will be reached — seems less likely daily.

06/11/14

Keep On Keepin’ On

I sometimes wonder why I ever went to school and why I ever put so much money into books. I had a Mellon fellowship when I began school, and I was richer than I had ever been in my life. Naturally, the money all went for books — a complete Arden 2nd Shakespeare, a Kleine Pauly, the Revels series, a German-Latin Spinoza, a Colli-Montinari Nietzsche, and so on. But now, I am in a job that doesn’t use that part of my Ausbildung, and my wife and I sometimes wonder whether we could have fewer than fourteen bookcases.

Bad idea. This past week, I was asked to help write a paper on client communications modules — the software that lets real estate agents and clients communicate online about what houses the client would like to investigate or buy. I thought of this wonderful passage from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception:

In the experience of dialogue, there is constituted between the other person and myself a common ground; my thought and his are interwoven into a single fabric, my words and those of my interlocutor are called forth by the state of the discussion, and they are inserted into a shared operation of which neither of us is the creator.

And I put it in, certain that it would be taken out as being too high-flown for the purpose, even though it seemed ideal for expressing the relationship I had in mind. For whatever reason — probably the patience and tolerance of my boss — it stayed in.

So, don’t toss your books, even when you think you need the space. Your past is a part of you, and it should not be thrown away lightly. As Curtis Mayfield once said, “Keep on keepin’ on.”

04/1/13

The Superlative Horse

In Lieh Tzu, chapter 7, we read the famous passage:

Duke Mu of Chin said to Po Lo: “You are now advanced in years. Is there any member of your family whom I could employ to look for horses in your stead?” Po Lo replied: “A good horse can be picked out by its general build and appearance. But the superlative horse — one that raises no dust and leaves no tracks — is something evanescent and fleeting, elusive as thin air. The talents of my sons lie on a lower plane altogether; they can tell a good horse when they see one, but they cannot tell a superlative horse. I have a friend, however, one Chiu-fang Kao, a hawker of fuel and vegetables, who in things appertaining to horses is nowise my inferior. Pray see him.” Duke Mu did so, and subsequently dispatched him on the quest for a steed. Three months later, he returned with the news that he had found one. “It is now in Shach’iu” he added. “What kind of a horse is it?” asked the Duke. “Oh, it is a dun-colored mare,” was the reply. However, someone being sent to fetch it, the animal turned out to be a coal-black stallion! Much displeased, the Duke sent for Po Lo. “That friend of yours,” he said, “whom I commissioned to look for a horse, has made a fine mess of it. Why, he cannot even distinguish a beast’s color or sex! What on earth can he know about horses?” Po Lo heaved a sigh of satisfaction. “Has he really got as far as that?” he cried. “Ah, then he is worth ten thousand of me put together. There is no comparison between us. What Kao keeps in view is the spiritual mechanism. In making sure of the essential, he forgets the homely details; intent on the inward qualities, he loses sight of the external. He sees what he wants to see, and not what he does not want to see. He looks at the things he ought to look at, and neglects those that need not be looked at. So clever a judge of horses is Kao, that he has it in him to judge something better than horses.” When the horse arrived, it turned out indeed to be a superlative animal.

The late J.D. Salinger liked this passage so much that he appropriated it, in its entirety and word-for-word, from the 1912 translation by Lionel Giles, for his novella, “Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters.”

But to me it brings to mind the dangers of embarking along Kao’s path. It is possible to conceive of a generation trained to detect and track down superlative horses, ignoring the accidents of sex or color. With the death of Duke Mu, the rationale for the superlative horse goes away; perhaps there are now a few cars or motorcycles. And all people now want are horses qua horses — brown ones, female ones, strong ones — which the seekers of superlative horses are incapable of detecting, distinguishing, or delivering. Instead of Kao’s talent being the path, as the passage implies, to preferment, it is a path back to his origins, as a hawker of fuel and vegetables.

01/27/13

Done

Behind “business,” the most popular major at my school is accounting. This is because it seems to lead to a medium-status profession directly following a degree. No student I know has a passion for accounting. It is simply a series of rules to memorize that will lead to the correct representation of a person or organization’s financial status. There is no connection between accounting and other fields of study. As a result, the students view everything else they have to study as baffling impediments to their degrees. They struggle with writing assignments that assume that they know about other areas of knowledge or share the background of the instructor.

We are turning out a generation of these students, student who do not know what they are missing or understand that there was once another way to be a student.

For about the past two years, I have done what I could to bring my students — learning-disabled, low-income, low English proficiency — back into contact with my decades-old way of doing things, the way that I “believed, taught, and confessed.” That seems to be coming to an end, with the de-funding of my institution’s “learning center.” It’s unclear what I will do next. I have been thinking about volunteering my hours there, to try to keep some of what I have done alive. I can ill afford it, but if it is a choice between being unemployed and helping students while unemployed, the logic is not so foreign.

All I can say is that without the alternative I and my colleagues had to offer, we will see a long line of unhappy, single-minded accounting majors stretching into the future like Banquo’s descendants. They will view being taught by computer as a relief.

 

11/9/12

The Dog Ate My Homework

Justifications for the Republicans’ failure this week have been coming thick and fast, but I think I like this one best of all: their computers weren’t working. Their candidate, ideology, policies, and strategy would all have been fine if it hadn’t been for those darn computers messing things up.

(Of course, as some of the linked commenters have pointed out, the results of an IT project based on the management style of Bain Capital may have been foreseeable.)

10/29/12

The Late Bookstore

A couple of people have let me know that my piece on the demise of the former UCI Bookstore has readers in the outside world, something I never would have guessed from the comments section here. Their reaction has been, “This is terrible! I never knew about this! How do we get our UCI Bookstore back? Do we protest, boycott, Occupy? You tell us to ‘despair.’ That can’t be right.”

The short answer is that it’s simply too late. There was a period of so-called “public comment” about a year ago which had a small number of takers. I think that the people who commented were, like me, ignored and put off, but that would have been the right time to raise a hue and cry.

At this point, the store has sold off practically all of its extant book inventory — tens of thousands of books. (I think there may still be a few hundred book SKUs (items) in the system that aren’t textbooks.) Some titles were sold to customers at reduced prices, some more recent titles were returned to the publisher at their original cost, and everything else went to a jobber who paid pennies on the dollar. The store has doubtless taken a big loss on those books, but consigning them has meant the store can free up shelf space for more profitable inventory, like plush anteaters.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that a Save The Bookstore movement coalesced, and had at the top of its list of demands: “Bring back our books!” From a business perspective, this cannot be done. You cannot liquidate inventory at pennies on the dollar and then bring back the exact same inventory in at the regular wholesale price of 25-40% off list. If I were the Associate Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs, I would fire the Bookstore director who did such a thing. The only way out would be if a director could make a compelling case that the store could sell, say, at least three copies of each book every year. That is far in excess of the sales rate of the average trade book at the former Bookstore, which was .75 to 1 copy per year.

If the director were to commit to selling three copies of every title every year, the customers of the store would have to make a commitment to buy them. I could see a sort of Kickstarter-style campaign, where people would agree to reserve $25, $50, or $75 book gift certificates, good for one year and not redeemable for cash, in their names. If the inventory were funded up to or over a certain level, say, $75,000, the donors would be charged, the certificates issued, and the inventory purchased. Without such a setup… we know what that looks like already, where well-intentioned people loved the Bookstore so much, they bought all their books online. When I think about the Bookstore in this respect, I think of Abie Glassman, the Jewish peddler from John D. Fitzgerald’s Great Brain children’s books. Glassman came to stay and sell notions in Fitzgerald’s fictional Mormon community. He cared about his customers, and he was beloved. Nonetheless, he starved to death because nearly everyone went to the official Mormon ZCMI store; it was simply more expedient for them to do so.

The idea of a crowdsourcing campaign gets to the bottom of “how to get our store back.” The argument for the destruction of the Bookstore was economic; any counter-argument, at least in the current reality, will have to be economic as well. A university bookstore is a business. It brings money into the University. When that money dwindles, it means that there is less to support University programs, and, especially when State money keeps getting scarcer, administrators have to fill the gap, period. Anyone who wants to bring the UCI Bookstore back will have to come up with a realistic business plan of his or her own, one that fills that gap over the long term, or comes very close.

I said, “at least in the current reality.” In the world of principles, which is where many readers reside, things are — or, should be — different. Access to books, and the promotion of higher forms of literacy, should be parts of a university’s mission. Libraries, by their nature, go only so far with this mission; every book acquired must be argued for, and every book acquired must help develop a collection. A real university bookstore is not under these constraints; people are exposed to the streams of fiction and non-fiction in real time, and they can get what they want without contending with someone else’s loan period. What is that worth? Could a university bookstore be operated, not as a profit center, but as the part of the educational enterprise that encouraged reading? Those who play the zero-sum game would ask, “Which would you rather have: a real university bookstore or more students getting financial aid?” I invite you to think your way out of that question.

***

This is, perhaps, too harsh a place to end, so I will return to an earlier time. When I was a graduate student and entry-level worker at the Bookstore, there was a frequent customer from the English department named Professor Homer Obed Brown. He was known at the store both for his benevolence and amiability, and for his besottedness with books. When, in my capacity as a graduate student, I would go into his office, every horizontal surface would be piled four or five feet high with books, the library’s mingled with his own. When, in my capacity as a Bookstore worker, I would walk with him through the store, we would talk, and he would absentmindedly slip books into his basket, until at last he would present himself at the register with some twenty-odd books at a time. I would like to think that, if he were alive today and had known of the Bookstore’s problems, he would have solved them by buying up the literary criticism section outright.

10/9/12

De Minimis

It is strange to be inside a system in which I am to an adjunct what an adjunct is to a tenured professor.

10/6/12

My Bookstore

From the second year of graduate school until about five years after I left, I worked for my university’s bookstore. I did a variety of things, ranging from heaving medical textbooks onto the shelves for $6.15 an hour to working as the “Internet Projects Manager,” which basically meant that I was a one-man web development shop in direct competition with Amazon.

It was a wonderful place, with visionary people. We had a classical music CD department, an anime department, and about 100,000 books on the shelves in academic and non-academic subjects. We had an ongoing reading series with authors from our MFA program, like Maile Meloy, Glen David Gold, Aimee Bender, and Michael Chabon. My bosses turned me loose on web technology a couple of months after the final bits were dry on the first web browser, NCSA Mosaic. We were one of the first bookstores to try e-commerce, and my bosses and I wound up on the cover of the June, 1996 cover of American Bookseller and in the LA Times.

Amazon put an end to our nascent, at times Rube-Goldberg-like efforts, and I struggled with the limitations of being one person trying to fight an e-commerce battle I had no chance of winning. One boss left in frustration, then I left, and the second boss retired a couple of years after that.

After that, the focus of the store shifted away from strategy and towards operations. By the time a few years had passed, without anyone at the store completely realizing how quickly it was happening, Amazon had eaten our store’s lunch. Together with its competitors, it had peeled off too many of our textbook customers. It was because of a monopoly on textbooks and their profits that we’d been able to do all this great stuff; without that monopoly, the number of students coming through our doors started to dwindle and our margins started to thin.

The end of the store soon followed, brought from on high by administrators who were frustrated that the store was no longer a cash cow. There was a sham of “consultation” with the University community — my letters were met with form letters — but management consultants were brought in, and they made the brutal suggestions that you would expect. My friends there who cared about books and literary values were forced out, along with all the employees over 50. The store has now been emptied of books. It is now selling textbooks, plush animals, and sweatshirts. It has been, in a word, deconsecrated; the word “Bookstore” has been taken out of the name.

So here is a photograph of the shelves that used to hold literary criticism and philosophy, now filled with plush anteater mascots. Look upon it and despair.

Shelf of Anteaters

Shelves where the books used to be: UCI Bookstore, now “The Hill.”

 

NOTE: I’ve published a follow-up piece to this article at https://printculture.com/the-late-bookstore/.