> > Dennis: [Academic] "hatreds develop for the opposite reason... i.e.
> careers are
> > at stake and somebody, somewhere, when you least expect it, can shoot
> > you down with a review of your work, among other means."
>
>No doubt; but careers are at stake in the corporate world
>too, and there's plenty of jostling for the plums and
>backstabbing there as well. Yet in my experience of the two
>worlds, the level of deep personal hatred and malice is
>considerably less in the corporate than the academic.
speaking of the horrors of academia, read an interesting book recently that occasionally reminded me of you: Secret Historian: the life and times of Samuel Steward, professor, tattoo artists, and sexual renegade.
It was fascinating enough for me to have that feeling you get reading fiction: you get wrapped up in another world, can't wait to find out what happens next, and sad at the end of the book. Michael Pollak once described it wonderfully on his facebook page.
Anyway, this guy - Steward - could turn a phrase every so often, even in his journals and letters, the erudition was hilarious becuase he'd drop some Latin expression + reference to ballet all while describing his latest encounter with his "toilet penpal": a relationship he struck up with a flaming heterosexual who wanted to exchange dirty stories, anonymously, droppiing them off at the toilet for Steward, Steward living him his latest piece of porn. Or, Steward would add an entry to his "Stud File" (a file draw devoted to documenting every fuck he ever had) and he'd come up with some play on a Latin word to use as abbreviation/code. (he wrote it in code, to protect the IDs of his partners)
I mean, the guy had a name for the daisy chain parties he hosted: spintriae. It "was based on the first declension masculine noun sph(h)intria, the nominative plural of which is spintriae or, literally translated, sphincters. Tacitus has been the first to not the Latin word, which had been borrowed from the Greek under the reign of Emperor Tiberius, who had enjoyed having sex with young men. The word spintria had thus entered Latin usage as a word describing a particular kind of male who had sex with other males. Steward's spintriae, by extension, meant a group of men who had sex with other men." (p 118)
He also called them partousies - which was americanization of the French, partouze - as in "We decided to ring up Al and Beau and have a douzy of a partousie."
At any rate, the eruridtion and well turned phrases reminded me of you Michael. His utter hatred of academia also reminded me of you. (What turned out to be hilarious though was alhtough he hated it, it turne dout his students loved him. He taught at the working class dePaul, where students loved him fro being demanding but also for introducing them to opera, ballet, etc. etc. He never understands this reaction at the time - he's too drunk during these years to experience it. He only realizes that he had an effect on their lives many years later when letters poured in after he published a book. He ended up dropping out of academia - he'd never been given tenure in spite of a phd - to become a tattoo artist.
A fascinating look into the life of a gay man during one of the most repressive periods of u.s history. Steward was raised in the world Kinsey documented, where farm boys regularly had sex with one another, and it was common working class men to have sex with other men, where this was an accepted part of life, though certainly not discussed in great deal. It was just seen as what boys would do as boys - among the working class at any rate. But raised in that world - on the outskirts of it - he came into adulthood in a middle class world where all such talk was severely repressed - and it would get even worse throughout the McCarthy-era.
Steward gives you a different look at what McCarthyism meant: a mere outgrowth of the mid-western politcal racket. Very specifically, it was the initial move made by republicans to consolidate power. You could see this in Steward's daily life, where the first experience with the increasingly crack downs and shakedowns against homsexuality took place in local politics. Where we speak of McCarthy, we think of hearings in DC and the repression of artists and writers and intellectuals. We don't think of McCarthy in terms of the petty local politics of the party machine.
It's also interesting in so far as instead of seeing one pendulum swing, the author describes something else: first the opening up of ideas about sexuality - with Freud, etc. - and then a pendulum swing against it --> McCarthy -> backlash against McCarthyism --> sexual revolution. Normally, what's described is a world of unilaterally horrible Victorian repression - > sexual liberation -> backlash. What the author describes is more complex.
Steward was good friends with Kinsey and was an informal informant. Kinsey had, at one time, harbored the notion that a great sexual liberalization would come about because of his work. He was horrified when, instead, there was a backlash, especially in response to his publication on women's sexual lives.
Anyway, more if I have time. If so inclined, it's a good read.