Reading How The Strand’s Stand: How It Keeps Going in the Age of Amazon over at Vulture, I came upon this description of a prior New York:

This tableau was left intact when the store was renovated in 2003. Until then, the Strand had been a beloved, indispensable, and physically grim place. Like a lot of businesses that had hung on through the FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD years, it looked broken-down and patched-up. The bathroom was even dirtier than the one in the Astor Place subway. You got the feeling that a lot of books had been on the shelves for years. The ceiling was dark with the exhalations from a million Chesterfields. There were mice. People arriving with review copies to sell received an escort to the basement after a guard’s bellow: “Books to go down!” It was an experience that, once you adjusted to its sourness, you might appreciate and even enjoy. Maybe.
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That New York is mostly gone, replaced by a cleaner and more efficient city—not to mention a cleaner and more efficient Strand.

and then another version:

The Basses have also tapped into New York’s great subsidizing resource: the global rich. If you’ve bought $15 million worth of living space on Park Avenue, it probably has a library, so what’s another $80,000 to fill those shelves? Make a call to the Strand with a few suggestions — “sports, business, art” — and a truckful of well-chosen, excellent-condition books will arrive. (Fred recalls that when Ron Perelman bought his estate on the East End from the late artist Alfonso Ossorio, the Strand had just cleared out Ossorio’s library; Perelman ordered a new selection of books, refilling the shelves.) In more than a few cases, the buyers request not subject matter but color. In the Hamptons, a wall of white books is a popular order, cheerfully fulfilled.

smh.

What will they look like if you spill coffee on them?

Haiku Tunnel is one of my favorite movies about San Francisco, but it also has this rather wonderful scene in which a the rather neurotic, temp secretary, Josh,self-sabotages, screws something up (to Wagnerian levels of drama), goes in to quit with a boss he has framed in his mind, to be a terrible, evil guy…only to find out that said boss is a mild-mannered, pleasant sort of chap.

We are entering that portion of the semester when things are insanely busy and I am buried in both class prep and grading and grading and grading and in all my wisdom, I decided to have a departmental seminar on a paper that perhaps I shouldn’t be writing. So this bit from the Guardian chatting with writers on failure seems to be pretty apt to me, as I grapple with thinking about myself now as a bit of a middle-aged failure.

Diana Athill:

“Success in old age, when things have stopped really mattering, has a frivolous sort of charm unlike anything one experiences in middle age. It feels like a deliciously surprising treat. Perhaps as one advances into second childhood one recovers something of first childhood’s appetite for treats. Whatever the nature of the feeling, it allows me to state that it is possible to recover from failure: to digest it, make use of it and forget it. Which is something to remember if you happen to be experiencing it.”

Margaret Atwood:

But such adolescent slippages come within the normal range. Something more epic, perhaps? A failed novel? Much time expended, many floor-pacings and scribblings, nothing achieved; or, as they say in Newfoundland, a wet arse and no fish caught.

There have been several of those.

Julian Barnes:

I went to the funeral. Some of his early, highly skilled poems were read out, and I was saddened again by the subsequent offence against his talent. Then others spoke. Finally, his son and daughter addressed the small gathering. They had turned out well; both were charming and intelligent. They spoke with proper roundedness and affection for their father; the daughter described how he had coached her to get into Cambridge, how patient and helpful he had been. It was very touching. And I had been wrong, or had only partly understood. As I left the crematorium for the wake, I was saying to myself – and to him – “No, you didn’t fuck up after all.”

Anne Enright

“If you keep going and stay on the right side of all this, you can be offered honours and awards, you can be recognised in the street, you can be recognised in the streets of several countries, some of which do not have English as a native language. You can get some grumpy fucker to say that your work is not just successful but important, or several grumpy fuckers, and they can say this before you are quite dead. And all this can happen, by the way, whether or not your work is actually good, or still good. Success may be material but is also an emotion – one that is felt, not by you, but by the crowd. This is why we yearn for it, and can not have it, quite. It is not ours to hold.”

Howard Jacobson

Success for him didn’t mean making money or excelling at anything in particular – it simply meant being at home in the world and fearing nothing. So it wasn’t because he wanted me to be a footballer or a cricketer that he objected to the notes my mother wrote every Wednesday, requesting I be excused from games. He would just have liked me to be everybody’s friend, the way he was. And I failed him. I failed my mother too by taking far too precocious an interest in sex. And I failed myself by not knowing how to get any.

Will Self

“On the contrary, it often occurs to me that since what successes I do manage are both experienced and felt entirely in solitude, there must be many others who are the same as me: people for whom life is a process to be experienced, not an object to be coveted. There may be, as Bob Dylan says, no success like failure, but far from failure being no success at all, in its very visceral intensity, it is perhaps the only success there is.”

Lionel Shriver

“Yet most people fail. In the big picture, few of our careers live up to the dreams we nursed when we were young. In fact, one underside of success is that it’s nearly always penultimate, and so every accomplishment merely raises the bar. Each new success conjures new standards we can’t meet, thereby inventing ingenious new ways to fail.”

David Perry does an excellent, and very polite, job of responding to this piece in the Chronicle by Mark Braude. Perry’s description of the whole genre Braude is entering is refressing:

Higher Ed pubs, in general, publish many of these essays in which the author takes his or her individual academic experiences and generalizes them as “here’s how I did it” advice. They “bootstrap,” telling a story about how with just hard work and good spirit the author faced down the odds and made his or her own American dream possible. hey aren’t my favorite genre. Too often, they ignore privilege and other unseen factors (like luck, especially luck) that made the positive outcomes possible. For example, this “Confessions of a Prolific Academic” is the worst kind of bootstrappy writing.

Already, you gotta love Perry. Comrade. Yes, yes, yes, just be like and you’ll succeed like me. Only it doesn’t really seem to work that way, and there seem to be different rules for different people, if you are fat or thin, black or white, pretty or not, have family money and WASPy manners, and yeah-fck-all.

(I’m not nearly as polite as Perry).

Perry’s discussion is well worth reading for yourself, but he winds up here, on a wonderful note about us wanderers:

I want graduate school to reward and encourage the driven people, like Braude, who have a plan and the means to execute it, even if his plan did develop over his six years.

But I also want room for the wanderers. Go talk to your colleagues and you’ll find many scholars who you respect, whoever you are, who did not have a clear plan and a narrow vision when they entered graduate school. Instead, they constructed it slowly, with many mistakes, over the years.

Too much emphasis on speed would remove those scholars – would have removed me – from the profession. So let’s be clear about the consequences of that emphasis as we move forward, re-designing graduate studies in an ever more fraught academic environment.

There is more than one way to be, as a scholar, and in the world. Don’t let anybody tell you differently.

Kareem Abdul Jabbar discusses the conditions of college athletes in this piece in Jacobin: One key point:

Life for student-athletes is no longer the quaint Americana fantasy of the homecoming bonfire and a celebration at the malt shop. It’s big business in which everyone is making money — everyone except the eighteen to twenty-one-year-old kids who every game risk permanent career-ending injuries.

And the part that really sets me off:

• The NCAA rakes in nearly $1 billion annually from its March Madness contract with CBS and Turner Broadcasting.
• The NCAA president made $1.7 million in 2012.
• The ten highest paid coaches in this year’s March Madness earn between $2,627,806 and $9,682,032.

Jeez, people. Do the right thing and pay the kids creating the value you are selling.

I’m in my 40s, and starting the slide down the hill, and at times I seem, to myself, to be handling it well. At other times, I am not handling it well. In the first few years of my professorship, I scrambled, as everybody does, for the tenure bar. I’ve been keeping this blog since before that time, so my younger self is on display here if you care to look at it.

After tenure, I tried various gambits to take on leadership roles in my department, all of which were thoroughly rejected among my colleagues. They just didn’t and don’t see me as somebody they care to have lead. I have grieved this reality, and accepted it, and instead I turned in the afternoon of my career to idea of what to do with all that extra energy and problem-solving verve I thought I would bring to whatever challenges the institution put before me.

I decided to retool and try to invent a new field, or a new way of thinking about urbanism–hence urban ethics–and read and write books. I do not know how well I am doing this, and I won’t until I either finish the book or die from trying to write it, both of which are possibilities. But I do enjoy working on it, and the work matters to me, redefining and changing.

I have been reading in my free time Alan Rusbridger’s Play It Again: An Amateur Against the Impossible , the memoir of his time trying to learn to play Chopin’s breathtakingly difficult Ballade #1 in G-Minor. It’s an inspiring book; Rusbridger is the editor of the Guardian, and there are times when his casual name-dropping gets on my nerves, but he’s an elite, so, of course, he has elite friends, and well, even elites need friends, and elites are likely to be friends with other elites because that’s what makes them elites.

There is so much to love about this book, but one of the most important quotes that appears comes from Carl Jung, early on:

The afternoon of a human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage of life’s morning. The significance of the morning undoubtedly lies in the development of the individual, our entrenchment in the outer world, the propagation of our kind and the care of our children. This is the obvious purpose of nature. But…whoever carries over into the afternoon the law of the morning must pay for doing so with damage to his soul. Moneymaking, social existence, family and posterity are nothing but plain nature. Culture lies beyond the purpose of nature. could by any chance culture be the meaning and purpose of the second half of life?

The book itself is lovely, with Rusbridger’s frank account of going forward, going backward, getting swept up in the many, many major news stories coming out of the Guardian at the same time (Wikileaks being one), having meetings from breakfast until 2:30 am, and squeezing in 15 minutes here and there. If Rusbridger has time to do something that feeds his soul, well, the rest of us probably do, too.

When my colleagues rejected my overtures to leadership, I rather stepped back and decided to see what would develop with what Cicero referred to as otium cum dignitate. Otium in Latin means leisure, but it’s a particular kind of leisure–a stepping away from the worries and hurly burly of offices. Cum dignitate is what it sounds like–with dignity. Of course, Cicero is imagining the country estates of his fellow moneyed friends when he thought of productive leisure, but for me, it’s been a matter of simply letting go of ambitions that, for whatever reasons, were never going to happen for me. I no longer want what I don’t have, and the silence created by the end of yearning has presented me with its own magic, and its own challenges.

I always try to point people to the good free content that pops up over at Foreign Affairs, and this issue, it’s an essay on Greek politics from an Oxford law, Pavlos Eleftheriadis. Go read. Here’s a teaser quote:

Yet the recent comeback masks deep structural problems. To tidy its books, Athens levied crippling taxes on the middle class and made sharp cuts to government salaries, pensions, and health-care coverage. While ordinary citizens suffered under the weight of austerity, the government stalled on meaningful reforms: the Greek economy remains one of the least open in Europe and consequently one of the least competitive. It is also one of the most unequal.