Restructuring
Friends, the clockwork regularity--not to mention the almost freakishly prolific output--of The Swill once rendered us the Wunderblog of the onlineworld. You came here seeking informational balm for the wounds that ailed ye. Perhaps you sought puckish remarks upon the quality of local haberdashers? Maybe you needed qualified analysis of matters that were otherwise offered only to Beltway insiders under cover of darkest night. Wonder what we ate for breakfast, whether we prefer three- or ten-speed bikes, or if we attended Junior Prom? Sweet Christ, someone's life depends on knowing the difference between Harris and Donegal tweeds!
Whatever the case, you knew that The Swill to Power offered a safe and reliable information haven, a lighthouse of answers amid a slavering sea of poor imitations and imitators. Yes, Christians occasionally needed to be reminded of their complicity--however unwitting--in the horrors of our day; occasionally we had to remove a remembrance if it we unwittingly violated a privacy or hurt a feeling. But, as indicated by your letters, cards, emails, and telegrams, the Swill nonetheless provided a wittingly vital service, and our striking silence in past weeks did not go unnoticed.
What, you have asked, gives?
What gives are some rather drastic changes in both the personnel and the purpose of the Swill as a practice and as an institution. Our long-standing commitment to The Humanities--if not humanity itself--has long led us to focus a large portion of our limited resources on maintaining a well-staffed Department of Literature. With a number of talented linguists, exegetes, hermeneuts, scholars, critics, and readers, the Department of Literature was intended to perform a very basic task: to render matters literary in manners broadly admirable.
Hewing to the broadest tenets of literary pluralism, we in management kept our noses clear and clean, preferring to let the literary types ply their trade freely and according to their own consciences and compasses. Neither the writers nor their writings were groundbreaking, but they were more or less inoffensive, and rarely gave us cause to re-evaluate their basic mandate. That is, until December of that foul year of Our Lard, 2005. After so much seamless interaction with the lasses and lads of the Literature Department--so chock full of pleasure and profit--what could possibly have occured that would demand such a shake-up?
The answers are manifold and invariably unpleasant, but we'd rather not weigh your doubtlessly burdened lives with tiresome newsroom minutiae. For the moment, allow us simply to delineate the bare facts of a case that is nauseous at every level. Lest you think us venal, first note that we learned these facts only after months of suspicion, after which we finally resorted to the tapping of wires, the intercepting of mail, the occasional nut-punching of witnesses. The most incriminating evidence, however, came after we assigned a trusted operative to observe the Head of the Literature Department at his favorite annual fistfuckfest: The Convention of the Modern Language Association. In coming days, we will elaborate on each of the charges, but for now a simple list should suffice:
1) Attending a professional conference where discussion of increasing salaries and decreasing work occurred roughly eighty-five times as frequently as anything remotely "literary."
2) Approvingly uttering the words "radical politics" while wearing $300 shoes and drinking $6 bottles of Budweiser.
3) Approvingly uttering the words "social change" and "Marxian analysis" while drinking a bottle of 1995 vin jaune (the famed "yellow wine" of Jura).
4) Engaging in a conversation that included the words "Roth IRA".
5) Violations Various.
This is not a show trial, friends. We gave our manager of Literature an opportunity to respond to the charges, to which he offered only the following remark, with the promise of a detailed "defense" as details emerge:
Whatever the case, you knew that The Swill to Power offered a safe and reliable information haven, a lighthouse of answers amid a slavering sea of poor imitations and imitators. Yes, Christians occasionally needed to be reminded of their complicity--however unwitting--in the horrors of our day; occasionally we had to remove a remembrance if it we unwittingly violated a privacy or hurt a feeling. But, as indicated by your letters, cards, emails, and telegrams, the Swill nonetheless provided a wittingly vital service, and our striking silence in past weeks did not go unnoticed.
What, you have asked, gives?
What gives are some rather drastic changes in both the personnel and the purpose of the Swill as a practice and as an institution. Our long-standing commitment to The Humanities--if not humanity itself--has long led us to focus a large portion of our limited resources on maintaining a well-staffed Department of Literature. With a number of talented linguists, exegetes, hermeneuts, scholars, critics, and readers, the Department of Literature was intended to perform a very basic task: to render matters literary in manners broadly admirable.
Hewing to the broadest tenets of literary pluralism, we in management kept our noses clear and clean, preferring to let the literary types ply their trade freely and according to their own consciences and compasses. Neither the writers nor their writings were groundbreaking, but they were more or less inoffensive, and rarely gave us cause to re-evaluate their basic mandate. That is, until December of that foul year of Our Lard, 2005. After so much seamless interaction with the lasses and lads of the Literature Department--so chock full of pleasure and profit--what could possibly have occured that would demand such a shake-up?
The answers are manifold and invariably unpleasant, but we'd rather not weigh your doubtlessly burdened lives with tiresome newsroom minutiae. For the moment, allow us simply to delineate the bare facts of a case that is nauseous at every level. Lest you think us venal, first note that we learned these facts only after months of suspicion, after which we finally resorted to the tapping of wires, the intercepting of mail, the occasional nut-punching of witnesses. The most incriminating evidence, however, came after we assigned a trusted operative to observe the Head of the Literature Department at his favorite annual fistfuckfest: The Convention of the Modern Language Association. In coming days, we will elaborate on each of the charges, but for now a simple list should suffice:
1) Attending a professional conference where discussion of increasing salaries and decreasing work occurred roughly eighty-five times as frequently as anything remotely "literary."
2) Approvingly uttering the words "radical politics" while wearing $300 shoes and drinking $6 bottles of Budweiser.
3) Approvingly uttering the words "social change" and "Marxian analysis" while drinking a bottle of 1995 vin jaune (the famed "yellow wine" of Jura).
4) Engaging in a conversation that included the words "Roth IRA".
5) Violations Various.
This is not a show trial, friends. We gave our manager of Literature an opportunity to respond to the charges, to which he offered only the following remark, with the promise of a detailed "defense" as details emerge:
"I tried, friends. I really did try. But I don't think I have much more trying in me. Like Zevon said, 'I had the shit 'til it all got smoked, I kept the promise 'til the vow got broke.' Anyone who knew me shoulda known shit was gonna get broke."
Res Ipsa Loquitur. Stay tuned.
Res Ipsa Loquitur. Stay tuned.
posted by Swill to Power at 10:03 PM
1 Comments:
It's a tough question, phredward, and it doesn't involve U.S. News and World Report.
Phredward. Like Fred Ward, great american character actor who, along with Gene Hackman, turns the otherwise blase "Uncommon Valor" into a heady meditation on trauma, loss, memory, and warfare? Or a mushed and mashmouthed Freud, mein Onkel? Perhaps a clever anagram for Red Dwarph, suggesting an imminent cosmological breakdown in a characteristically sunny disposition, if not a simple pain in the solar plexus?
Leaving integers aside, let's say that there's a group (tier?) of programs from which my school historically and consistently hires new faculty, and then there's a group of schools that selects its hires from my school (and others like it), and while there may not be a list, and while the tiers may be malleable in a number of ways, Prof. Potter Stewart knows the three when he sees them.
None of this, of course, changes individual variables such as dissipation, laziness, identity politics, procrastination, gluttony, overweening self-seduction, and mere market caprice.
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