Bauerlein's Irony

Maybe he was serious.  Maybe he was up late downing pots of coffee because he felt obligated to squeak out some form of intellectual commentary on the state of higher education.  Maybe he knew what he was doing and knew it was flippin' hilarious.  Whatever the case, Mark Bauerlein of the Chronicle of Higher Education made me chuckle this morning.  In an article about the apparent lack of aesthetics in the ever-increasing vocational age and college students' inability to write palatable sentences, he writes this:

With college campuses becoming ever more preprofessional and vocational, it's getting harder for humanities teachers to get freshmen and sophomores to appreciate the aesthetic side of things.  That goes for both their interpretation of texts and for their creation of texts. They read everything for the kernal of fact and value, the information, the point, not for the expression (whether beautiful or vulgar or flat or conventional . . .).  And they write sentences that have no flair, no element of balance, rhythm, metaphor, or other aesthetic feature.

(emphasis mine).  I find this last sentence utterly hilarious in its own right, but the entire article is like this--short, pointless sentences with no imagery, flair, metaphor, or balance...

As Predicted

Remember back when I wrote about the posthumous publication of Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura?

This is the most ridiculous marketing ploy in the history of mankind.  People will do what I am doing now--they will berate the publishers, tear apart the novel before they have read it, then read it and pine for the last wishes of a great and dead white man--and the publishers will use it to make more fatuous and puerile productions to draw in those who have never before thought about reading a 500 page novel.

Well, now it's been released, and every publisher and reviewer out there is following my predictions to the  letter, viz.:

Before Nabokov's death in 1977, he instructed his wife to burn the unfinished first draft—handwritten on 138 index cards—of what would be his final novel. She did not, and now Nabokov's son, Dmitri, is releasing them to the world, though after reading the book, readers will wonder if the Lolita author is laughing or turning over in his grave.

Every review I have read concerns the nature of the release more than the actual content of the book.   I am dismayed, but not surprised.