The Classroom Conservative

Leonard Cohen In Calgary, Alberta

I have thought, on occasion, as the wheels lifted off the ground at some exotic location, that I would never again set eyes on whatever sight presented itself to me through the widow of the airplane. From the very top of the Jack Singer Concert Hall in Calgary, I had on Sunday night the same thought: I was watching Leonard Cohen give the single greatest concert I have ever seen.

One need not be ghoulish to imagine that Mr. Cohen, who turns 75 in September, will never again undertake as punishing a tour as that with which he is currently engaged. Running through a deep catalogue of genuine classics, he demonstrates consistently the value of singing ones own songs; when he proclaims "Ain't No Cure For Love," you really believe that he means it. You are reminded, as he recites his lyrics, that the man is a poet of the first rank -- and that by embracing the ballad form he did nothing to tarnish his early legacy. In fact, crafting a song as bittersweet as "Famous Blue Raincoat," conscious of the lyrical demands of something as mundane as the repetition of a chorus, Mr. Cohen affirms that true artisans can tailor their art to the rigors and discipline of form.

The reedy high baritone of Mr. Cohen's early career has collapsed, of course, and from under its rubble emerges a more agreeable bass that breathes new life into his catalogue. As a result, "Chelsea Hotel, No. 2," "Sisters Of Mercy," "Suzanne," and "Who By Fire" are revived. Songs from his "middle period," like "Dance Me To The End Of Love" and "Hallelujah," benefit from arrangements fleshed out by his full and accomplished backing band. (Indeed, perhaps only "Bird On A Wire" and "The Gypsy's Wife," with lush new arrangements, suffer overkill.) Both generous and gracious, tolerating constant camera flashes from the gloom of the auditorium, Mr. Cohen introduced on two separate occasions all of the individuals whose talents compliment his own, the most impressive being, perhaps, Spanish guitarist Javier Mas.

I am not sure that you could describe the show as the resurrection of a ladies' man, as I sensed from my perch none of the sexual chemistry you imagine these songs once engendered. I acknowledge that such flirtation was never intended for me, but one cannot help but think that his banter with singers Sharon Robinson and Charley and Hattie Webb lacked the danger that it might once have had. Then again, was the mood broken by the persistent yob who marched up and down the far isle on the floor, shouting? Or how about the guy who proclaimed himself a senior citizen but who felt he had to scream an adolescent answer each time Mr. Cohen spoke to the crowd?

In the end, I think, I came away from the show most in awe of how productive Mr. Cohen was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, of how well the material from I'm Your Man (1988) and The Future(1992) stands up, today. "Anthem," "Closing Time," "Everybody Knows," "First We Take Manhattan," "Take This Waltz," "Tower Of Song," and "Waiting For The Miracle" all come from a period that culminated in his being awarded the 1993 Juno as Vocalist of the Year. But no one at the Singer longed for the early 1990s, on this night; we were instead treated to evidence of the master in full voice and in top form.

Magazines Are Called "Little" For A Reason

I just sent, dutifully, my letter of protest to Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore, copied to my local Member of Parliament, in which I express my concerns about the proposed Canadian Periodical Fund. The long and the short of the issue is that a number of Canadian government funding initiatives for magazines will be combined in the future and, unfortunately, it looks as though circulation will be used to judge applications. This is a bad idea.

The most troubling detail of what we are hearing is that a circulation of five thousand copies might be a magic number to qualify for funding. John Barton at The Malahat Review has done an excellent job getting the word out about this issue. While advertising revenues are down everywhere, magazines with circulations above five thousand qualify, in my mind, as commercial ventures that probably do not need government support.

But the real problem I see is that we are approaching this fund as a threat to the support of "little" magazines. Traditionally, as someone who studies the field, I can tell you that while "little" has become synonymous with "literary," little magazines are really startups with circulations under one thousand. Most of these magazines do not persist, and when they thrive as has Malahat, with its circulation of four thousand, they generally are generally no longer seen as "little."

I believe that we need to consolidate support for literary magazines in Canada, publications that often bring to a select audience the early work of writers who find wider acclaim and, sometimes, commercial success. It would be fabulous if there was some way to lend a hand to those smaller periodicals that aspire to the success of Malahat, but I wonder if there are not two different arguments developing here, their individual strengths weakened by weighing them together?

Bookstore Blues, Part One

Here is a business for you: how would you like to run a university bookstore? It used to be, at least, that it had a captive audience. Every student at school would have to come to that location for an algebra textbook because no "mom and pop" operation had pockets deep enough to keep such specialty material around town. There are precious few "mom and pop" operations in anyone's town anymore, as we know, but students can now often buy their books online at deep discounts. The web-savvy and organized student can easily find a used copy of the right edition long before a class even starts. The university bookstore is competing in the dark, fighting off phantoms of the so-called "grey" market.

To compete on pricing, the university bookstore must get its orders early, so as to track down its own used copies from students fleeing campus for the summer or from textbook wholesalers. This often means having to harangue professors to make book decisions six months before a class starts. In anticipation of finding used copies, the bookstore orders insufficient quantities of new books. Should it fail to get the desired number of dog-eared, shelf-cocked, and defaced texts from these alternate distributors, it disrupts classes by having inadequate stock during the first week of the new semester. When students pick up a new copy on the bookstore shelves, they often discover a higher price than they anticipated, the publisher or wholesaler having passed along some of its own volatility to campus. While book prices are often atrocious, university bookstore margins remain small.

One way any business might curb its costs is to keep around a little overhead, of course. In the books business, there are potential savings in shipping and returns, and bulk discounts could hedge against inflation. Unfortunately, university bookstores come up against a pretty unusual space crunch: I challenge you to find me a campus with a stockroom not already converted to a dry lab. Moreover, unless a book is used every semester, no one wants to take the risk of getting stuck with an edition that has just gone out of print.

Only a bookstore selling Harry Potter books exclusively will experience certain demand, so imagine how much more pronounced uncertainty is on campus. If a faculty plans on a class of 180 students and only 50 show up, the university bookstore will have a lot of returns. What happens if half those students bought online or pinched a copy from a friend who took the class last semester. Throw another dozen back on the truck. If a class of 150 fills completely, challenging the bookstore to get exactly right the mix of new and used books it has ordered, how might a faculty deciding at the last minute to add 30 new seats affect further that fine balance? What happens when a student, living from paycheque to paycheque waiting tables, ambles into the bookstore in the last weeks of the semester to finally buy the last book taught in a course, only to find that book returned?

As you probably know, the approach to stock diversification in university bookstores makes Heather Reisman look like an amateur. Indeed, there is more justification for this activity on campus than there is in your average Indigo outlet: school spirit is essential to any university. As I recall, the "bookstore" at the University of Texas no longer sells books, just branded merchandise. Insofar as sweatshirts and binders and clocks with school logos can subsidize book retail, I am a strong advocate. But diversification has its limits; I believe the battle has been lost on back catalogue. If I survey the last 50 books I bought, our bookstore carried but one or two. And really, who could blame them? Do I expect our campus bookstore to get involved in the "Where's the most recent Harold Bloom/Harold Bloom is old-fashioned" debate?

Personally, I like the people who run our campus bookstore, and I do everything I can, within reason, to support them. (My professional allowance is not ample enough to support a thirty or forty percent premium on prices, though, to be clear.) But we are, to some extent, working against each other. I try, as much as is pedagogically responsible, to keep book costs in each of my courses to around $100 a term. I post, in advance, the titles and ISBN numbers of the editions I am using, as well as our bookstore prices (new and used). This kind of transparency may well send my students to "grey" suppliers, but I think it would be unfair to the students to do otherwise. The students know (or at least hope) that the bookstore will have adequate stock of the books I use, at those prices, but I suspect that many of them use that information to shop around.

As a result, I surely contribute to the volatility that makes difficult the work of a university bookstore. I will have to make it up in branded coffee mugs, I guess.

In Praise Of National Public Radio

Last month, I responded to the cries for more funding at the CBC with a cranky evaluation of how it has gone wrong on the radio, in my view, at Mother Corp. After spending Easter weekend in the United States, permit me to suggest how the CBC could learn a thing or two from NPR.

I would like to begin with two caveats. First of all, I am not an apologist for all things American. I teach American Studies, and I am all too aware of the problems south of the border. Just because it is American does not mean it is, necessarily, better. It just happens that National Public Radio (and PBS, for that matter) does some things that might well be emulated up here. Second, there is nothing much new in what I will say here. Many of you will have heard much of it before from Jeffrey Dvorkin, who has held positions with both organizations. Just because he has been largely ignored does not mean that these ideas should not be repeated.

1. NPR supports regional programming. Now, I know that CBC has regional programming, too. In fact, most of what I still listen to on the radio is produced in Calgary and Edmonton. But when budgets get tight, it is the local programming that feels the pinch. What I really mean, though, it that there should be more national exposure for regional programming, and that goes for television, too. (Why can Newsworld, for example, not broadcast supper hour newscasts from across the country instead of endless repeats of The National and The Hour? When I am visiting another Canadian city and it is convenient, I try to catch their local news. What a wonderful nation-building exercise this could be.) There is no reason why more national arts programming cannot be produced in Saskatoon or Halifax, is there? How about a news show from St. John's or Thunder Bay? Unlike American talk shows that must be in New York or Los Angeles to attract guests, the joy of radio is that the host does not have to be in Toronto or Vancouver. The best parts of Sook-Yin Lee's remounted and pared-down DNTO are those things that feel like they really grow out of a Winnipeg mindset. NPR programming never feels like Washington "beltway" thought.

2. NPR does not rely on big personalities. For many of you, your favorite NPR program will still be associated with its host. (For me, I love the podcast of Bob Boilen's All Songs Considered.) But this is less so than it is with CBC. My earlier post was really about how difficult it has been to replace Finkleman, Gzowski, and Young. There are fewer titans under NPR's decentralized model, and so there are more voices. I happen to enjoy Michael Enright and Stuart McLean, for example, but where would your Sundays be if you did not feel this way?

Now, that said, I have to admit that the moronic behavior of Billy Bob Thornton last week was a timely reminder that I should have complimented, in my original post, Jian Ghomeshi for his Q program. It surely represents the kind of savvy cultural analysis that I value, and I should have written about it. CBC Radio needs more of the same.

3. NPR has advertising, kind of. NPR allows its programs to be "sponsored," in much the same way as PBS handles advertising. When listening to National Public Radio, I do not find these sponsor announcements, read by hosts, to be at all intrusive. There is, after all, a big difference between having the name of a local business announced and having some corny script performed. (Think Bad Boy Furniture's "Noooobody beats our prices," for example.) While there could be national sponsors with deep pockets on the CBC, of course, I imagine that entrepreneurs from our smaller cities and provinces should have the opportunity to step forward and support public broadcasting. I will admit: when deciding where to shop, I would like to be able to separate the takers from the sharers. If done right, some level of advertising on CBC Radio could strengthen our communities, as well as providing a new revenue stream in tough times.

Re-Embracing Custom Learning Resources

On short notice, I have been called upon to offer again a course on American autobiography, a seminar I last taught in 2005. I am not complaining; now I get the chance to teach my own book. One of the reasons scholars write books is because they believe there is nothing else available to take into the classroom.

But I also need other materials, of course, and so I looked to see what primary works are currently in print. There is no problem finding the cornerstones of "Lost Generation" life writing: Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return, Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, and Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Unfortunately, I have discovered that Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle's Being Geniuses Together is no longer available. Originally published by McAlmon seventy years ago, the book was republished in 1968 in an edition that included alternate chapters penned by Boyle. As a "dual autobiography," it is a fascinating text -- and one that is essential to my seminar.

The solution available to me is to have a coursepack prepared for my class. After paying copyright and printing costs, each student can resurrect a book that should never have gone out of print. There was a time that finding interesting and forgotten texts was often a cheaper option than using books from a scholarly publisher, but current copyright and printing costs now bring the price up to the average price of any other book.

But if there is no real financial advantage to custom learning resources anymore, at least there is still the flexibility they bring. Originally touted as the opportunity to build your own anthologies, coursepacks lost some luster when the impediments to reselling them became apparent: used book markets rely on demand across multiple campuses. Honestly, I find it just as easy (and inexpensive) to pick and choose from a publisher's anthology that students can then resell at the end of term.

So, I plan to use the flexibility to give students more choice. Over the years, I have taught -- and the university has digitized -- Bravig Imbs's Confessions of Another Young Man, Alfred Kreymborg's Troubadour, Harold Loeb's The Way It Was, and Samuel Putnam's Paris Was Our Mistress. If our "on demand" procurement system works properly, students in my class should be able to order, in the first weeks of next semester, a copy of McAlmon and Boyle and one of the other four texts bundled in one coursepack. The second book would give them something on which to base their term papers.

Obviously, in a perfect world, I would like the students to buy and read all these books. With this plan, though, I can encourage a range of term paper projects and still offer the primary texts necessary for the seminar.

Discretion At The Curb

In Edmonton on business this weekend, I found myself driving west on Stony Plain Road when I entered, lawfully, a busy intersection. A large diesel pickup traveling east cut into the intersection to turn left. I hit my brakes. Had there been a collision, there would have been significant damage. But that was not even my first thought: by the time I moved again, the light had turned red.

Was this an intersection with a camera?

We are told that cameras are a deterrent to running amber and red lights, and in spite of their expense they are excellent investments in road safety. But I had to wonder, as I drove away, where is the discretion in this new approach to policing traffic? Any human being could have confirmed that I was not speeding, that the light was green when I entered the intersection, and yet a camera aimed west might single out my car for a ticket.

We talk a lot about human error and assume that mechanization improves consistency. Even when we cannot find a machine to do our work, we encourage people to behave mindlessly. How often do we hear of someone following the letter rather than the spirit of regulations? How often does that inflexibility cause problems?

One of the things I try to do in my dealings with students is to encourage them to use their discretion. I wonder if the world into which they will emerge will even value it?

And I wonder, of course, if I will soon get a nasty surprise from the province in my mailbox.

Assessing Collaborative Research Teams

I still imagine scholarship as the solitary vice of the lonely researcher. Much as I did as a graduate student, I spend long days in the stacks, dragging books and journals back to the carrels. I have come to appreciate how important it is to disseminate my conclusions, however, and I am always eager to talk about my work with others. But I find it difficult to imagine a collaborative approach to research, personally, and I am not sure I will ever find myself part of a research team.

Like my elementary school teachers said, I guess I do not play well with others. But this approach clearly works for some people.

In an attempt to encourage more collaborative research, granting agencies emphasize funding opportunities for groups of scholars working together. That is fine, other than the fact that, in many cases, these groups draw on the same funds set aside for individual researchers. So, imagine that $1,000,000 exists with an agency, and this money could, potentially, fund a couple of dozen projects for three years. What happens if a team of eight scholars spoons $250,000 out of the pot off the top, though? Perhaps this is fair, especially if eight people can write a proposal eight times better (or even twice as good, say) as an individual researcher. But, in my experience, there is no reason why the group would have a better idea, and when it comes to assessing a budget it is harder to spot duplications in such a request.

A more serious objection might be that while individual researchers are often prohibited from holding multiple grants from the same agency, there is often no restriction on participating in multiple teams. While someone could get funding from ten different projects, is there really time to work on them, simultaneously?

But, for me, the real problem is assessing the past achievement, or "track record," of a research team and comparing it with the dossier of the individual researcher. How can you score the average of eight resumes, especially when many of the works listed therein are co-authored? How can you be sure not to overvalue any single publication? Moreover, what do you do when some of the team members have underperformed? Do the stars inflate the scores of their weaker colleagues?

I am not advocating two solitudes, by any means, but some thought must be put to preserving fairness in a granting system that could, easily, shift to discriminate further against that lonely figure in the library carrels.