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What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?
It’s been a couple weeks since I finished Michael Bérubé‘s new book, What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? I didn’t find anything in the last hundred pages or so to make me change my mind about the praise I bestowed in my premature, sidelong review. It’s a very good book, and you should read it.
But I was looking through the recent Scientific American today, and found a disturbing study that indicated literacy in the US may be much lower, for all practical purposes, than any of us had imagined. When researchers tallied not only the people who were profoundly illiterate — able to read stop signs and such, but not much else — with people who were what you might call socially illiterate — able to extract the information they need from, say, an owners’ manual, but incapable of acquiring and retaining moderately complex concepts in written material — it turns out that as many as a third of Americans can be considered illiterate.
Of course, my first thought in reading this disturbing news was concern for Michael’s book. It’s a complex book, what with its references to literature and politics and academia and such, and likely to be intimidating at first glance to conservative readers or to others who are at all insecure about their literacy.
This cannot, obviously, be allowed to stand. Something must be done, I thought, to promote Michael’s wonderful book to a new audience.
And so, in the spirit of bridge-building, I present to you What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? The Graphic Novel. (4MB PDF.)
(Updated again: I’ve moved the file. The internet just ate twice my monthly allotted bandwidth in six hours. Let Apple take the hit.)
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Note: A database glitch in 2008 ate a bunch of archived comments. Don't be offended if yours isn't here, or confused if the conversation seems disjointed. Thanks!
You’ve spoiled the end of the book for me. Fucker.
By: By Roxanne on 2006 09 18
Brilliant. Simply brilliant. I love the Kandinsky mural at the Student Union.
By: By g on 2006 09 19
“following the trail of scaife foundation paychecks”...ah yes!
By: By sarah on 2006 09 19
The Kandinsky mural was my favorite bit. Laughed out loud at that one.
C’est magnifique. M. Berube du Blog Berube sera fier.
By: By Violet Socks on 2006 09 19
Nineteen pages of the same feeble joke repeated over and over?
For this you desecrate a truly beautiful and inspiring children’s book, based on the story of two very real and very brave and hardworking young girls.
Yes, I’d say you have indeed done a fine job of adapting your source text.
By: By John M. Burt on 2006 09 19
Acting quickly, he formed a committee to
investigate the issue.
For some reason this is the line that *slays* me with Teh Funny.
By: By Doctor Science on 2006 09 19
Je suis trés fier! Et trés flatté aussi. Ce roman “graphique” est fort, fort amusant. And even though I too deplore the fact that a beautiful and inspiring children’s book had to die so that Chris Clarke’s wicked, polyphonic humor might live, I object to John Burt’s counterrevolutionary suggestion, by implication, that the teaching assistants of the People’s Revolutionary State University are not very real and very brave and hardworking. This petty-bourgeois commodity fetishization of the “original text” is precisely what our work seeks to eradicate, especially when, as here, it is mobilized on behalf of the exploiters of mental labor.
By: By Michael Bérubé on 2006 09 19
*sniff*. I love you, man. That was beautiful! [breaks down in tears]
By: By Timothy Burke on 2006 09 19
:lol:
(I especially love the part where they “struggle through the syllabus”!)
By: By Rana on 2006 09 19
Social realism pose…good grief, that was too funny.
By: By sly civilian on 2006 09 19
I am pleased to report that the original text, Little Sisters of the Grassland has not died at all, but rather occupies the honored spot on my wife’s bookshelves where she has kept it well since her childhood.
And John, welcome. It’s thrilling to find that there are still a few Mao Thought followers surviving, much like pandas, in the protected confines of US institutions. Have some bamboo.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2006 09 19
For this, I tore myself away from a very touching spam email expressing concern about my erectoin?
Typical wooly-headed liberal revisionism. Morans.
By: By Rob G on 2006 09 19
Mmmm… Bamboo.
By: By John Protevi on 2006 09 19
The transitory problem with my htaccess file that might have kept some of you from seeing the document has been fixed, I think. If you’re still having trouble, clear your cache. That is all.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2006 09 19
That may have been the funniest thing I’ve seen all week. I only wish you’d gotten in a slightly sharper jab about grad student unionization.
By: By jacob on 2006 09 19
Aside from the fundamental improbability that an adjunct would have TWO TAs, even for such an important course, there is much to admire here.
My own favourite moment was:
“And four hours later, when their benefits
under the Graduate Student Union health plan
had been used up, he returned to take them
back to work.”
By: By jim on 2006 09 19
All I get is a blank screen. If I try to download the PDF file by right-clicKing, I’m told that my evil megacorporate browser cannot open or access the file, and that the requested site is unavailable or does not exist. I cleared my temporary internet files. What’s up? Thanks, Fred
By: By Fred Levitan on 2006 09 19
Fred, I had the same problem with Firefox, but it opened OK in IE. Sometimes, my crow’s not so soft.
By: By Rob G on 2006 09 19
Strange. Why would you give a “place of honor” to a book which can only be appreciated and admired by a follower of Mao Zedong Thought, so that I must obviously be one? There seems to be a deep internal contradiction here.
Of course, I understand that courage and self-sacrifice, and worse yet, courage and self-sacrifice to the benefit of a co-operative organization, is contemptible in this enlightened modern world of ours, but surely some token respect should be shown to the quaint values of obsolete cultures.
And those two girls are real (unlike that little Dutch boy) and probably both still alive (unlike Molly Pitcher).
By: By John M. Burt on 2006 09 19
John, you’re conflating “respect” with “humorlessness.”
Ironically, in so conflating the two orthogonal concepts, you’re being hilarious.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2006 09 19
Awesome. Plus, I love a happy ending. ::sniff::
I’m going to go strike a social realist pose now….
By: By tikistitch on 2006 09 19
Not to worry, everyone! My (original and unillustrated) version of the book includes (and respects) both the little Dutch boy and Molly Pitcher.
By: By Michael Bérubé on 2006 09 19
You folks commenting have much too much time on your hands…get in the friggin fields and do some constructive work!
By: By nzuckerman on 2006 09 19
Comrade nzuckerman, some of us are capable of multi-tasking. Thanks to the wireless internet, I can post and be outstanding in my field.
By: By Rob G on 2006 09 19
I’m hoping for more T.S. Eliot take-offs. The Wasteland should keep Chris busy for a couple days.
By: By Rob G on 2006 09 19
“Emboldened by the adjunct’s praise, the two tackled a backlog of departmental procedure memos.”
Brilliant!
By: By Kansas Anarchist on 2006 09 19
Another vote for the social realism pose. I just know I won’t be able to stop striking such for days after this.
By: By tigtog on 2006 09 19
People stealing your stuff without attribution? Say it ain’t so.
By: By Roxanne on 2006 09 20
Yeah, I know. There was a time when you could steal images from something and then add text to them that riffed on another guy’s hard work and put the result somewhere and people would respect your property.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2006 09 20
I am annoying everyone with my cackling over this masterpiece!
By: By Hattie on 2006 09 20
One panel of this would have been funny. Six or eight would have been funny.
But the whole book? Gee whiz….
By: By John M. Burt on 2006 09 20
Is good. Now I must be off to burn a flag in effigy, corrupt some youth with some good ‘red’bud and sing ‘The Internationale’ before nationalizing some capitalist running dog’s property.
Bloggers of the World U.N.ite !
By: By KevinHayden on 2006 09 20
Well, as usual, I see that hemp has been ignored. If hemp was legalized, all of our problems would be over.
Yours in Ire-Green, B.D.L.
By: By bdaggerlee on 2006 09 20
Everyone (well, apparently not everyone) has a favorite line—mine is “The committee agreed to reconvene that evening at the Olive Garden.” Good stuff!
By: By Charles on 2006 09 20
One panel of this would have been funny. Six or eight would have been funny.
My dear young man, don’t take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It’s quality work. And there are simply too many <strike>notes</strike> panels, that’s all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect.
By: By Emperor Joseph II on 2006 09 20
In view of the comment above, I wish to disassociate myself from Emperor Joseph II, lest people leap to the conclusion that I am a monarchist.
By: By John M. Burt on 2006 09 21
OK, that was funny.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2006 09 21
seriously, i think we read this for 6th grade history at franklin school of the arts in berkeley, CA circa 1976.
By: By r@d@r on 2006 09 23
Shouldn’t the apostatic/recidivist sheep have been named Jonah?
By: By pbg on 2006 09 25
That is unbelievably awesome. I want a copy, small, and bound in red leather.
By: By flea on 2006 09 26
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