glums ii, & something much happier!

Much of yesterday was burned up in a university level promotion "workshop." A little background (consult last post if necessary): when one applies for promotion to a higher grade at Our Fair University, one's massive packet of materials ascends thru a number of bolges: a review at the department level; at the college level; at the university level; by the Provost; and then by the President himself. (By the way, just to make things the slightest bit more uneasy, every one of these reviews up to & including that of the Provost is technically merely "advisory": one is promoted, that is, at the will of the President – who of course is more than willing to take the Provost's word for it, happily.)

Anyway, this "workshop" consisted largely of a recap of the procedures that had been far more usefully spelled out at the college-level meeting last week, & an opportunity to get to see & hear from the university Promotion & Tenure committee, which consists of representatives from every college in Our Fair University. And they seem to be mature, level-headed folks, for the most part, all looking to make fair decisions. The one really unsettling moment of the proceedings, however, was when the representative from another college rather grandiloquently announced that he made a habit of never reading the lengthy self-evaluative narratives that candidates are supposed to produce: you know, those walk-thrus of one's work that serve the purpose precisely of explaining the value & relevance of your intellectual labor for members of other colleges who might have no idea of what you're doing. Oh my, I thought; I can't wait until I get on this committee, so I can judge the physicists & biochemical engineers without bothering to listen to their explanations of what they do.
***
On a far happier note: Michael Dirda reviews The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky in tomorrow's Washington Post Book World. This one's a dandy, paying attention (if perhaps too briefly) to both LZ's career & poetry & to the form & strategy of the biography itself. The money words this time around: "splendid"; "speed, clarity and zest"; "scholarly yet down to earth, full of good sense and useful information." Now who wouldn't want to buy that book?

The Poem of a Life: Review

No sooner am I back in south Florida than I find myself in the midst of thesis-defense season – MFA theses, that is, the sort of documents that you can't really contest on the grounds of argumentation or density of citation, but have to find real live aesthetic critiques to make about. One down today (Monday), another scheduled for Wednesday, & I believe a couple (I'll have to check my datebook) coming up next week.

Our defenses are technically open affairs, which means that one or two friends and family members of the defendant show up and nod along with the proceedings; I sometimes hanker after the old-style European system, where one would have to defend in a big auditorium, in full academic regalia. None of this lounging around the seminar table and chatting friendly-like.
***
On a more depressing note, the benighted Florida legislature seems on the verge of castrating the Board of Governors, the body that runs the state university system, & reshaping it as a rump group with no more than "advisory" powers: in short, doing away with the only body in the state capital that has a clear idea of what a university actually is & opening the state universities to direct political control from Tallahassee. This will be a nightmare, something far worse than the periodic budget crises we suffer (we're in the midst of a doozy right now). If the legislators get their way (& I suspect they will) I predict a wholesale exodus of active research faculty from the state. I imagine a lot of folks are polishing up their vitas even as I write this.
***
While I was delighted that Marjorie Perloff reviewed The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky (link to amazon.com on the right, if you haven't yet ordered your copy) in the TLS ("incisive") & that Dan Chiasson called it "terrific" in the New York Times Book Review, I'm majorly pleased to learn that Nicholas Manning, who edits the excellent Cosmopolitan Review and maintains the blog The Newer Metaphysicals, has written about the book – at length – in a forthcoming issue of John Tranter's Jacket.

It's not merely that Jacket allows reviewers a rather more expansive space in which to examine books, but that Manning – addressing an audience who already knows something about Zukofsky, and who doesn't need to have the salient facts of his career repeated to them – has paid close attention to the form, the rhetoric, & the procedures of the biography, & has made some really lovely points about them. It's a nice review, & I'd consider it nice even if it weren't as positive about the book as it is.

(The money word this time around: "extraordinary.")

[for academics only...]

I've been neurotically searching the web for news of The Poem of a Life [Amazon & publisher's links to the right, as always] – what, me neurotic?? – & have noted with disquiet that only a single score of libraries, according to Worldcat, which is supposed to be the authority on these things, have acquired copies thus far. (Okay, so the book's only been out about 4 weeks, but it's been available for preorder forever...)

I'm worried, that is, that having been published by a trade house rather than a university press, the Zukofsky bio might end up falling thru one crucial crack: the academic library market. In the long long run, while it'd be nice if the book sold as many copies as Stephen Colbert's I Am America (And So Can You!), it's probably more important that academic libraries have it on their shelves. So it'd be a wonderful holiday gesture if those of you with university connections, however tenuous, would suggest to your librarians that they ought to acquire this book.