Up the Academy – How and Why Academia is Often an Intellectual and Artistic Desert
By
David Gottfried
Academia is at times very much a dunce. Very simply, people with doctorates spend so much time studying a certain field and making a career of what they have studied that they are loathe to question the deficiencies of what they have studied. Questioning their education can come perilously close to questioning their income. By the time they are in their mid-Twenties, they are old men: Their thought is ossified, sclerotic, and they are afraid to entertain any ideas which might challenge the dogmas of their doctorates.
In college, one of my professors said that the ideas taught in college were culled from the most advanced ideas of a generation or two in the past. A few examples: Academia was wedded to Freud and strict sex role polarization long after our society questioned patriarchal privilege. Today, academic is so severely under the spell of feminism that it is deaf, dumb and blind to the growing realization that feminism has been getting out of hand. Teachers of political science subscribed to the stodgy, cowardly, liberal anticommunism of Hubert Humphrey long after their bearded students realized that it was a subterfuge to maim the people of South Vietnam (Which we were allegedly defending) with crop defoliants, napalm, anti personnel weapons and other assorted tortures.
In this posting, I will aim my fire at academia’s boring, tired way of teaching Literature. Although my highest honors were in Math and Science (When I was 15, and received the highest score in a key Stuyvesant High school math test – and Stuyvesant was a public school reserved for the most gifted students in NYC – I was invited into the international Math Olympics), English was the repository of my fondest hopes. However, English profs always hated my guts. Invariably, they found me too angry, too logical, too caustic and too argumentative. (In their defense, it might be because I can’t proof read to save my life. For every 5 minutes of writing, I spend 20 minutes of proofing – and I still can’t catch the missing articles, conjunctions, etc.)
What can I say? I never thought that writers were obligated to be whimsical, dreamy petunias. Actually, I think some of the finest writers would agree: Norman Mailer was a relentlessly logical macho son of a bitch whose pen was a pugilistic dagger. Hemmingway did not write heaps of meandering blubber.
And I remember that Leonard Woolf – he was Virginia Woolf’s husband – in his review of the acclaimed British Poet Alexander Pope, said that Pope was “screaming at us in his poems.” Someone on substack criticized me for being too angry. Well, some of the finest writers were angry SOBs.
In any event, I hate the lords and ladies of the poetry establishment. Survey some of my poetic diatribes for the privileged pontificators of the Ivy League:
ROLL OVER LORD BYRON, ENGLISH PROFESSORS HAVE TAKEN OVER
Extract the sweetness of the rhyme
And the hot spice of immediacy
And bread with whole wheat esoteric metaphors
that you can't understand without five years of
advanced English study
And taste the studious soup of good poetry
The drippy porridge of upright character
Gray and white like scholarly bodies
that never see the sun
Clumpy and mushy like the verse
that never got up to dance
Inventively insipid
It will make the most voluptuous orange a tidy
Literate affair
Consisting of measured and mannered aggregations
Of every constituent compound, from citric acid to orange
dye, except the
Zest.
Is there a songster left.
THINKING OF THE JUDGES OF WRITING COMPETITIONS
We are the lords of poetry
We’re smug and snide, unkind
Submit your works and you will see
How winners are assigned
We spit on writers quite unknown
It makes us feel so strong
And with polemics overblown
We chastise what is wrong
If your verse has rhyme and meter
And tries to sing a song
We’ll recommend strong saltpeter
Music doesn’t belong
We are academics sworn
To uphold an arid faith
A Byron would be quite forlorn
A ridiculed mere wraith
In our world so new and sterile
We’re doctors of all ills
We expunge things manly, virile
And castrate writing skills
So do pay us a reading fee
And we’ll review your verse
With unctuous grace and amity
We ready you for your hearse
THE CURSE OF THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENTS OF AMERICA
We deign to condemn David Gottfried
We award flat and flaccid floundering verse
Rather prolix, never terse
Meandering musings are our curse
The author of this belongs in a hearse
We hope to see him feeling worse
To aspiring writers we’re averse
Their ascension seems perverse
Ask for grants; we close our purse
We love odd things, all things diverse
But certain rules we won’t traverse
Rhyming bards we will not nurse
Their rants we won’t reimburse
These haughty edicts we won’t reverse
No solace will we disburse
With David Gottfried we won’t converse
Into solipsism we submerse
Lose your Dreams or You Could Lose Your Mind, In Life unkind
Lose your dreams or you could lose
Your mind, in life unkind
Jagger/Richards Ruby Tuesday 1967
The rubies and Tuesday afternoons
Of the Moody Blues and the headiest Stones
The scarlet sunsets of blood shot eyes
The love that shined and its demise
Weed and Cream and the jagged Jeans
Frayed and framing the butt and the crotch
The plaintive voice, the foolhardy choice
To plant your lips on the bravest boy
To strive to seek to never yield
So Camelot, convincing, so Kennedy, so dead
And your fair and golden hair
Blushes with red, fleeting and fair
That ass, that alabaster mast
That muscles your way into the port
Uncorking the wharf’s kegs of beer
All cops as impotent as a steer
The sun also rises and falls
The horizon bleeds with softer reds
The oxygen was poached and preyed
Starved of love and the lustful shade
The Burning Bush of G-d
I wanted to kill every poet of the academy who told me not to speak
In the first person
Because I am the first person
After Adam and G-d
My neurons do not cross
The walls of my skin
I will never feel your pain
I am, I am, I am the lord Iambic
Gorgeous and gushing with reddish blond locks
Astride my steed with a sword so long and silver
Gouging out the innards of the beastly boorish mob
The top of my car is resolutely down
And the wind makes my hair the burning bush of G-d
Behold a stunning psychotic with make-up and a gun
It’s Thrilling, It’s Thrilling, There is Another Trilling
Prefatory Note:
In "An Unfinished Woman,"
Lillian Hellman relates that
Theodore Roethke once asked
her to complete a poem which
started with the line, "It's
Thrilling, it's thrilling,
there is another Trilling."
To my knowledge, Hellman
Declined. This poem is my stab
at Roethke’s request.
About the two characters named
in the poem: Lionel Trilling
taught English at Columbia
University; Diana was his wife
It's thrilling, it's thrilling, there is another Trilling
Her name's Diana and she's meek Lionel's wife
A lioness, a loud mouth, licentiously she's swilling
Bourbon, by the bucket, and contemplating strife
That cabal, of commies, in Columbia so willing
To disrupt and corrupt a civilized, sweet life
Of gardened, partied, prickly prose instilling
An aristocratic posture, cutting like a knife
She glares and flares at the rebels' top billing
The student dissidents, bursting, beaming, blithe
It's clear, their politics, is making quite a killing
Turning staid ivy halls into rallies downright rife
Sorely shocked, Diana defrocks the “Maoists” who are milling
In the dorms, with lower forms, where the pot-smoking’s rife
She exclaims, with great disdain, why are these slobs not marching
To a military beat replete with drums and fife
Sent to savage and ravage in a jungle, toxic teeming
Vietnam, after the prom, for a blue collar life
Diana bitches, like a witch, that those boys were always erring
Should have bellowed "tally ho" and killed red wildlife
We weren't nice, mincing mice, Hegels for Hubert Humphrey
Exalting all the wars like obedient German Boors
We believed, were not deceived, and were vehemently free
You may kvetch, like a wretch, but our surging spirit soars
The Music
When Jimi Hendrix went down on his guitar
Ecstatic squeals leapt like leopards dueling for love
My brain was so inflamed
And this lamb became a lion
When the stones sang “Street Fighting Man”
I thought I would burn my neighborhood down
I screamed. I singed. I severed all connection with right and wrong and Law
My hair swirled like potions boiling in a flask
I became a Communist comet
When the Beatles played “Helter Skelter”
I shot up in a rocket straight to the moon
I learned war from Mars and Kingship from Jupiter
I danced on Saturn’s saucers and sauntered through sin
I drank celestial wine in goblets made of Pluto’s diamonds
I glittered like Bowie floating between the sexes
Like a spirit springing between life and death
Screwing the world and screwing myself
I declaimed my dominance and danced to defeat
And when I heard John Lennon Sing
I heard David pleasing G-d
I saw Abraham sparing Isaac
I saw Ishmael given his due
But this bird has flown
Copyright, David Gottfried, 1996 to 2021