What do they teach them at these schools?

Ah my dears, Clio and La Musette are still struggling with computer problems. It's a great pity, and we apologise to faithful readers who are wondering why we have disappeared, and when we might be back.

Here's a bit from a piece in The New Atlantis, via Arts and Letters Daily, arguing that concern for the effect that google-reliance has upon our ability to "read deeply" seems misplaced in an age when students are taught not to read deeply, but to take apart what they read:

Likewise, although [Bauerlein] sees and spends quite a lot of time on the denigration of tradition, he doesn’t see that it is part of a larger ahistoricism that not only denies the relevance of the past but, effectively, teaches that the past never existed except as an imperfect version of the present. What Herbert Butterfield called “the Whig interpretation of history,” taken to its extreme, is now revealed as what it always was: a denial of history. That is a very big subject, and this is not a very big book. Yet what it does do it does well, which is to serve as an essential if difficult and depressing guide through the increasing profusion of survey data which suggest an affirmative answer to the question of Nicholas Carr’s title in The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”—and to show that it is our children and grandchildren who are preceding us in stupidity. But once that process is complete, presumably we won’t care any more that culture and tradition are not being transmitted to the next generation.

It seems odd that so many people object to the effects of deconstruction, the "linguistic turn" and all the other trends that are loosely grouped under the label of postmodernism, that these trends are in fact rather tired and threadbare, and that, as yet, nothing has come along to replace them.

I suppose part of the problem is that the professors who have the skill to do so are elderly and on the verge of retirement, and their immediate juniors are the baby-boomers, many of whom lack both the skill and the desire to find another way to teach students about the past. Although it must be said that, whatever their limitations, the baby-boomer professors of the humanities still received a better education than the one which they chose to hand down to those who came after them.

Here's a bit of Donne, to refresh the spirits, and below it is a bit from an online essay-writing (cheating) service, showing just how far the tentacles of Deconstruction have spread:

Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy,
Until I labor, I in labor lie.
The foe oft-times having the foe in sight,
Is tir'd with standing though he never fight.
Off with that girdle, like heaven's Zone glittering,
But a far fairer world encompassing.
Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear,
That th'eyes of busy fools may be stopt there.
Unlace your self, for that harmonious chime,
Tells me from you, that now it is bed time.
Off with that happy busk, which I envie,
That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.
Your gown going off, such beautious state reveals,
As when from flow'ry meads th'hills shadow steals.
Off with that wiry Coronet and show
The hairy diadem which on you doth grow:
Now off with those shoes, and then softly tread
In this, love's hallow'd temple, this soft bed.
In such white robes, heaven's Angels us'd to be
Receiv'd by men: thou Angel bringst with thee?
A heaven like Mahomet's Paradice, and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we eas'ly know,
By this these Angels from an evil sprite,
Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.
License my roving hands, and let them go,
Behind, before, above, between, below.
O my America! my new-found-land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man man'd,
My mine of precious stones: my emperie,
How blest am I in this discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.
Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth'd must be,
To taste whole joyes. Gems which you women use
Are like Atlanta's balls, cast in mens views,
That when a fool's eye lighteth on a gem,
His earthly soul may covet theirs, not them:
Like pictures or like books gay coverings made
For lay-men, are all women thus array'd.
Themselves are mystick books, which only wee
(Whom their imputed grace will dignify)
Must see rever'd. Then since that I may know;
As liberally, as to a midwife show
Thyself: cast all, yea, this white linen hence,There is no penance due to innocence.
To teach thee I am naked first; why than,
What needst thou have more covering then a man?

My dears, don't do this if you wish to preserve your sanity and your intelligence intact:

John Donne's poem "To His Mistress Going to Bed" (Donne, 1986: 124) fuses imagery of sexual exploration with the global colonialism of the seventeenth century. It is, as George Saintsbury suggests in his essay on Donne "a piece of frank naturalism redeemed from courseness by passion and poetic completeness." (Saintsbury, 1961:18), however it also stands, as we shall see, as an example of the ways in which the male literary psychology continually draws parallels between feminine sexuality and the conquering of other worlds.

In Donne's poem, the exploration of the lover's hands mirrors the ships and the passages of the adventurer:

"Licence my roving hands, and let them go Before, behind, between, above and below. O my America, my new found land, My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned." (Donne, 1986: 124)

The symbolism here becomes not only one of exploration and the pushing of boundaries but of deflowering - the woman's uncharted territories matching the unmapped landscape of the Americas and Africa, recently discovered and written about with suitably masculine bravado in such books as Walter Raleigh's The Discovery of Guiana and the Journal of the Second Voyage Thereto (Raleigh, 1887).

For Donne, exploration and conquering becomes a facet of masculinity, we suspect his mistress' protestation and eventual acquiescence is an integral part of the sexual excitation just as an important part of exploration is the hardships faced on the journey.