If Gertrude Stein is ‘the mother of us all’ then Ezra Pound is our father. A strange couple, for sure, but essential to anyone coming into poetry in the second half of the 20th century with the intention to do more than write the traditional neo-romantic lyric. For me, Pound was there first – or rather right after I had found the Beat writers, Kaufman, Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs. His importance was immediately immense, and at least twofold. Starting to read the Cantos I realized that poetry was a life’s work of total dedication, not something one could do on rainy weekends when moved by the spirit. Pound also immediately made clear that a learned poetry, a poetry that includes not only history, but also various sets of knowledges, was not necessarily a boring ‘academic’ poetry. The range of his work was liberating. Everything from everywhere could enter the field of writing, to be energized into that multifaceted, multilayered construct called a poem. Amazing!

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But the French, I think to some extent wrongly, always look at Mallarmé as this completely abstract writer. The Coup de dés is a much crazier book in a way, and if I talked about it a lot recently, it is because my friend, the Moroccan poet Mohammed Bennis’s first Arabic translation of the Coup de dés came out. And that was also the occasion, late 2007, for the first edition of the book that actually conforms to Mallarmé’s directions. He had spent the last three or four months of his life writing down exactly how he wanted the book printed: the font, the size of the paper, binding, everything. The first edition was in 1914 by Gallimard, but they used the font that Mallarmé hated most: Elzevir.

I love the idea that it is the first Arab edition that occasions the first real publication of Mallarmé’s book the way he wanted it.

Interview with Peter Joris at Transitzone, courtesy Woods Lot

the trials of fresh publication

The fact is that when she was at her peak, she was so prolific that she had a publishing backlog, and a lot of work got left behind. Once she had moved on, in theme and genre, she lost interest in the older manuscripts. But she carefully preserved the work, arranged for it to be lodged in archives, and she always had a literary executor named and primed to deal with it. She frequently mentioned that she had a generous store of unpublished work. She did draw up several tables of contents toward a collection of the new stories. We don’t know for sure why she never got around to publishing that volume, but I think there were multiple reasons. She didn’t relish her fame, and once she had enough money to live on from the reprints and translations of the twenty or so books she did publish, she seemed to have decided not to expose herself to any more of the trials of fresh publication, even though she never stopped writing.

Pamela Gordon interviews Janet Frame's literary executor at the New Yorker's Book Bench

could try harder

Black children are being systematically marked down by their teachers who are unconsciously stereotyping them, it has been revealed.

Academics looked at the marks given to thousands of children at age 11. They compared their results in Sats, nationally set tests marked remotely, with the assessments made by teachers in the classroom and in internal tests. The findings suggest that low expectations are damaging children's prospects.

The study concludes that black pupils perform consistently better in external exams than in teacher assessment. The opposite is true for Indian and Chinese children, who tend to be "over-assessed" by teachers. It also finds that white children from very poor neighbourhoods were under-assessed when compared with their better-off peers.

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The issue of testing is top of the agenda this weekend as the National Union of Teachers urges its members to vote to boycott the Sats test for 11-year-olds this summer. They believe the external tests are distorting education and should be replaced by teachers' assessments. Yesterday, the union used its annual conference in Liverpool to threaten the next government with a "summer of discontent" over public spending cuts and national curriculum tests.

But Burgess, who is director of the Centre for Market and Public Organisation at the university, said his study showed that the tests were the only opportunity some children had to "prove their teachers wrong".

Anushka Asthana, Toby Helm and Tracy McVeigh in the Observer, the rest here.

a wonderful life

Economic fallacies are especially abundant in films designed to teach business to children (72, 125). In Mrs. Peabody's Beach (125) a group of eager teenagers help an elderly woman ration space on her "groovy" surfing beach. These burgeoning entrepreneurs raise prices several times during the film, but always after costs have gone up. Are we back to one blade of Marshall's famous scissors?

...

Children's filmmakers treat the inconveniences of barter with originality and good humor (22, 24, 54, 158, 199). Unfortunately, when it comes to explaining the origin of money, they miss a splendid opportunity to highlight the spontaneity of the market. Instead of following Menger and Jevons, and attributing the origin of money to "invisible hand" mechanisms, the filmmakers introduce a king, "Big Daddy," or some central planner to create money by fiat.

From Film and the transmission of economic knowledge: a report, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 2010, Laurence S. Moss (again via MR)

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5. Hurray to Barley Rice (꽁보리밥 만세) by Cho Gyu-Ik (조규익) (Age 15)

Hurray to Barley Rice is a collection of essays by Prof. Cho Gyu-Ik, who happened to be my father's friend. This book is not well-known at all; in fact, I would be surprised if there are more than 50 people in the world who read this book. I only read it because it was given to me for free from Prof. Cho himself.

But I loved this book. The essays are honest and humorous illustrations of Prof. Cho's childhood and everyday life. Although my parents experienced dire poverty growing up as did every Korean in their generation, they hardly ever talked about their childhood and just how different Korea was back then. When I read the witty but poignant discussions of how young Prof. Cho would deal with hunger while waiting for the barley crop to grow and mature, I gained a new perspective on Korea, and on my parents.

A Korean's 10 most influential books, courtesy MR, at Ask A Korean.

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What quickly became notable, however, was the scarcity of fiction. To a degree, this was determined by Cowen’s original list, but as the subject spread, the focus stayed relentlessly on non-fiction. Gradually, bloggers began to acknowledge the formative literature they had enjoyed as youngsters, so Tolkien and Asimov began making some appearances, as did the likes of Orwell and Conrad. Drama, meanwhile, was largely limited to Shakespeare, predictably enough.

If this trend had spread among literary bloggers rather than social scientists, of course, that would likely be reversed, but the trend was noteworthy all the same. One of the most animated conversations followed the list created by Kieran Healy, an Irish sociologist at Duke University who is a member of the academic supergroup blog Crooked Timber. “Everyone else is doing it, at least for ‘American/ white/ politics/ economics/ mostly libertarian type guys’ values of ‘everyone’,” he wrote, and his terrifically diverse list, which features works by Clive James, Pierre Bourdieu and game theorist Thomas Schelling, as well as books on biomechanics, the collective dietary habits of ravens and power dynamics in medieval German society, led to a long and engaging discussion about what it is to be shaped and influenced by books.

But the underlying premise that went largely unquestioned, the notion that books play a predominant role in shaping our intellectual outlook, was roundly rejected by the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, who came up with a non-list instead: “So much as I love my favorite books, the biggest influences in my thinking have been the continuous intellectual relationships I’ve had with blogs, periodicals and other people. Books aren’t even that close.”

Davin O'Dwyer (Irish Times) discusses responses to Tyler Cowen's 10 Most Influential Books post, the rest here.

off with their heads

Eight out of 15 of the Hefce board are university managers, the rest coming from business; nine out of 11 members of the research committee, ten out of 14 on the skills committee and 15 out of 18 on the access committee are senior university administrators. Working academics – teachers and researchers – are conspicuously absent. Hefce is, in reality, little more than a managerial oligarchy, and its power is extraordinary: no other country in the world hands out so much money (some £7 billion a year) to such a small group with so little external supervision over what it does. It answers to no one except the secretary of state for business, innovation and skills, and in effect is the means by which the government stranglehold over universities is maintained. This is spelled out specifically in the document detailing the role of the chairman, which is ‘to support the wider strategic policies of the secretary of state’. This represents a complete change of focus from the old University Grants Committee, which Hefce replaced in 1992. The UGC was set up in 1919 as a buffer, to prevent direct government interference in the universities. Hefce was set up to facilitate precisely that interference.

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Hefce’s style is mirrored inside the universities, which have been slowly converted into hierarchical, authoritarian organisations in which the last vestiges of accountability (e.g. senates with real supervisory power) have been degraded, and guarantees of academic freedom (tenure in particular) abolished. It goes without saying that this undermines researchers’ freedom. It is hardly conducive to fearless innovation if, as is currently happening at King’s College London, a head of department can decide which aspects of historical research are worthwhile (including his own, as it turns out) and close down others (King’s has proposed to get rid of the UK’s only chair in palaeography); or if administrators, using figures whose analysis they control, can denounce certain subjects as ‘sub-critical’ and axe them.

Such administrators identify themselves as the masters of the institution, not its servants, and come to regard academics who were once colleagues as employees to be managed.

Iain Pears, Letter to LRB on Ross McKibbin's article in the LRB (Feb 25, 2010) on proposals by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) for regulating university research. The rest here.

(I read this at a demoralizing time: had dinner last night with Nancy Bauer, a philosopher at Tufts, who said Obama's Race to the Top initiative is making university accreditation depend on (among other things) the identification of 'learning outcomes'. 'Learning outcomes' were one of the many intellectually indefensible requirements imposed on British universities - one of the chief reasons, in fact, that British academics have taken to looking for jobs in the the US. )