Cultural wars and more in "On Beauty"

- Culture wars - the Right (classics, canonical) and the Left (liberal, non-canonical)

- Now, the Academy says its suspicious of how the word beauty has been deployed, because it's an exclusionary term - as with the word genius. The Academy is not so certain that traditionally-canonized work is all that there is to know.

- In "On Beauty", Smith writes a bleak picture of the Left and Academics; is Zadie Smith anti-Left? Harold Belsey is snide, elitist, when he speaks to the museum curators hiring for a lecture on Rembrandt. Page 117, "'Well,' he said loudly, hoping to finish it off with a daunting display of academic pyrotechnics, 'what I meant was that Rembrandt is part of the seventeenth-century European movement to... well, let's shorthand it - essentially invent the idea of the human.'"

- page 127 - Elaine Scarry - Universities as defenders of beauty; and at right, The Anatomy Lesson by Rembrandt

- Next: Zora talks to the Dean and bullies - even threatens - him to go to the board with discrimination if she didn't get into Claire's poetry class. She wants the class and the credentials it'll provide, and she will point out the details of the affair to get them.

- Carl - what does he do in this chapter? He wants to be in class for the status and perceived society-given kiss of acceptance it provides. He doesn't want to be in college because he had bad experiences in the classroom for so long, and because, so long as he is not in college, he's not a college student, and that's impossible to get past. Being around University-people puts him on the defensive, but he wants to reach out and communicate.

He went to the Mozart concert because he wanted to hear good music and he's a musician - he wants to cultivate his abilities as a musician. "Do I look like I'm on the swim team?" translates to "To I look like I go to school here, lady?" "It's not poetry-poetry, but it's what I do." A classmate noted that, in the conversation between them two, Zora sounds stupid and Carl sounds smart. It's not because that's the case, but because it's (in Mandell's words) a structural corruption.

- "The structure predisposes people not to be like Carl" - even if he were a college student, Carl
would be unusual.

- Forms of corruption: Zora bullies & threatens the Dean; Kiki told Warren about the affair

- Beauty is a ruse, a mask power wears - what Howard says in his Rembrandt class. The way he treats it, though, makes the material a routine - he doesn't have to pay attention to it anymore. His work life, not just his married life, is dead.

Is there anything special about the University - anything to preserve? Is it still worth having a place to play with ideas?

For fun - Book art!

- ISN'T THAT COOL?? It's like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea came alive in book form! And in the middle - books, squashed! Far, far right - it's a carved column, I have NO IDEA how the artist did that!!