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.)
Note:Many old comments were lost in a database crash in 2008. Some conversations may seem to make less sense than they would have. A few will make more sense now.
41 comments on "What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?"You’ve spoiled the end of the book for me. Fucker.
Brilliant. Simply brilliant. I love the Kandinsky mural at the Student Union.
“following the trail of scaife foundation paychecks”...ah yes!
The Kandinsky mural was my favorite bit. Laughed out loud at that one.
C’est magnifique. M. Berube du Blog Berube sera fier.
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.
Acting quickly, he formed a committee to
investigate the issue.
For some reason this is the line that *slays* me with Teh Funny.
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.
*sniff*. I love you, man. That was beautiful! [breaks down in tears]
:lol:
(I especially love the part where they “struggle through the syllabus”!)
Social realism pose…good grief, that was too funny.
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.
For this, I tore myself away from a very touching spam email expressing concern about my erectoin?
Typical wooly-headed liberal revisionism. Morans.
Mmmm… Bamboo.
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.
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.
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.”
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
Fred, I had the same problem with Firefox, but it opened OK in IE. Sometimes, my crow’s not so soft.
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).
John, you’re conflating “respect” with “humorlessness.”
Ironically, in so conflating the two orthogonal concepts, you’re being hilarious.
Awesome. Plus, I love a happy ending. ::sniff::
I’m going to go strike a social realist pose now….
Not to worry, everyone! My (original and unillustrated) version of the book includes (and respects) both the little Dutch boy and Molly Pitcher.
You folks commenting have much too much time on your hands…get in the friggin fields and do some constructive work!
Comrade nzuckerman, some of us are capable of multi-tasking. Thanks to the wireless internet, I can post and be outstanding in my field.
I’m hoping for more T.S. Eliot take-offs. The Wasteland should keep Chris busy for a couple days.
“Emboldened by the adjunct’s praise, the two tackled a backlog of departmental procedure memos.”
Brilliant!
Another vote for the social realism pose. I just know I won’t be able to stop striking such for days after this.
People stealing your stuff without attribution? Say it ain’t so.
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.
I am annoying everyone with my cackling over this masterpiece!
One panel of this would have been funny. Six or eight would have been funny.
But the whole book? Gee whiz….
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 !
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.
Everyone (well, apparently not everyone) has a favorite line—mine is “The committee agreed to reconvene that evening at the Olive Garden.” Good stuff!
One panel of this would have been funny. Six or eight would have been funny.
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.
OK, that was funny.
seriously, i think we read this for 6th grade history at franklin school of the arts in berkeley, CA circa 1976.
Shouldn’t the apostatic/recidivist sheep have been named Jonah?
That is unbelievably awesome. I want a copy, small, and bound in red leather.