KAFKA @ SoCalled U
Note: Hello Substack readers! I haven't posted here in awhile, but I wanted to share this essay with you all, which was written awhile ago. — CMD
I knocked on an unmarked and locked door on an upper floor of the USC Administration building. I was punctual, showing up exactly at the time noted on my “invitation”. Out of the blue had come its terse accusation - that I had “bullied and harassed” students in the doctoral program in Creative Writing and Literature in the department of English.
I was amused by this accusation. Obviously, they (whoever “they” were) had the wrong “perp”! I had always been a devoted teacher of my students, both undergrad and graduate. My doctoral students knew me as head of their dissertation committees, overseeing their reading, advising and supporting them. I had even helped one or two find places to stay when they arrived at USC from out of town. I hosted them for dinner at the faculty club and at my home. I had invented new courses and written endless letters of recommendation, even when asked for a letter at the very last minute. Perhaps most significant, I had founded, singlehandedly, the PhD program in question.
I was proud that the Creative Writing/Literature doctoral program referred to in my “invitation” was entirely my own creation. Inventing it was part of the “retention” negotiation that had kept me at USC back when I had been offered a job as Chair and Director of Creative Writing at another university years earlier. It was a perk, among others, designed to “keep” me and to strongly validate my presence at USC. The then-Dean of the College (only one dean back then!) told me, on my acceptance of the generous terms, that I now had the authority to create an autonomous graduate creative writing program, linked to the English Department but “free” of it.
That “free of it” however, had led to a brutal struggle between me and threatened academics, mainly the “boys”, of the English department. I’d naively thought that establishing a doctoral hybrid of critical and creative emphases that included the literature of scholars (the English department) yet retained autonomy and freedom to hire its own- its own writing faculty (a necessity for hiring writers) -- would be a gift for all. Especially students lucky enough to be chosen for CW/Lit fellowships.
The response from English department members: Creative Writing/Lit PhD students would likely be “the intellectual inferior of our English graduate students”.
Our Creative Writing students were, of course, in no way “inferior” to any other students – quite the opposite. The many applicants from all over the world to our program turned out to be a superlative diverse cohort, gifted as both imaginative writers and critical thinkers attracted by the generous fellowships and the writing faculty itself. The ugly reaction about “inferiority” reinforced what was a longtime prejudice against creative writers on the part of academics. What seemed hardest to accept, however, was that writers in the Creative Writing “emphasis” – were far more “visible” - in reputation, awards and publications, etc. This rankled the backroom.
But sitting across from my two “interrogators” – a sallow nervous youngish fellow in a cheap ill-fitting suit and his “sidekick” – a distracted nervously-smiling woman– I sensed that the time (in fact five endless hours) I would spend being grilled by this pair was just the beginning of a campaign meant to discredit me – my teaching, my reputation as a writer, my character.
I had been informed that I could not have a lawyer or any other companion with me for this interview (why would I need a lawyer, I wondered?) but here were two attorneys confronting me, unidentified and un-introduced at that time. But they were ready, each with a large binder in hand, to interrogate me.
What was in that binder? Complaints against me, all anonymous. I was not allowed to know my accusers and was left to guess – as I tried to piece together context from what Cheap Suit and Sidekick began to flash at me from the binder pages – heavily redacted (blacked out) email fragments -supposed “proof” that I was guilty. Of what? Somehow violating the Faculty Handbook it appeared, by “harassing” students.
From “The War on Academic Freedom” by Arthur Willner, (attorney):
“Among universities, their hot embrace of academic freedom however is often served with a side dish of cold warnings. For example, the University of Southern California’s Faculty Handbook’s commitment to academic freedom… USC exists for the common good… The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition. Academic freedom protects all faculty... and is fundamental for the protection of the rights of the teacher in teaching and of the student to freedom in learning.” (My italics)
To further quote: “Three sections later… the same USC Handbook states that the “thought-provoking ideas” that students hear may challenge their beliefs and lead them to ‘claim that an educational experience is offensive’. Therefore, ‘The faculty member should carefully consider the class climate and ground rules around academic discourse, so that student learning is promoted but students are not unreasonably exposed to conditions in which harassment could easily occur.”
Arthur Willner asks “So what the hell does this mean?”
What it means, as he goes on to clarify, is that professors had “best weigh their words carefully” so that no student or administrator with zero teaching experience can charge a teacher with “harassment”. He goes on, “The chilling effect on the speech of faculty and students alike cannot be overstated.”
Where did this “chilling” language originate? This language (echoing, in style and tone, kidnappers’ ransom notes) starts with corporate lawyers (translation: hired-gun “fixers” paid to protect the “corporation-that-may-refer-to-itself as a university”) who then pull the strings of the ever-expanding parasitic body of so-called administrators (“vice-twits and crypto-deanlets”) – whose main occupation is crushing the life from freedom of thought and expression in academia. These puppet “administrators” compete to define “faculty handbook” harassment of professors and adjuncts -- read current “employees” who were, once upon a time, self-governing, back when universities were bastions of free thought – and teaching meant teaching, not acquiescence to dictated standards of pre-authorized threats. The cynicism behind the hypocrisy of public expressions of commitment to social justice, by these adminis-traitors, would be hilarious if it weren’t entirely tragic.
It is mostly tragic for the students, tuition-generators, treated like “influencers” by these cynics – these students, most of whom will find themselves jobless in the future, after having been indulged as consumers and cultivated as censors.
Cheap Suit (CS) had attempted to set a prosecutorial tone at the top of the interrogation – when he’d fixed me with an all-knowing smirk: “So you refuse to teach men?” I tried not to laugh. All he’d had to do was check my course enrollment stats – where it was documented plainly that I taught men regularly. “Of course I teach men.”
Later, in his Report of Investigation, CS stated that he’d asked me how many “male advisees” I’d had – and that I “could not answer”. This was a lie. But it turned out that CS was sole author of the ROI – he could say whatever he wanted – he now controlled the narrative about me.
I was a full professor with tenure, I had taught for years, the phased retirement plan papers I had signed a few months earlier, (also signed by the Dean and Provost) praised me for bringing “acclaim” to the university, for teaching and changing the lives of “myriad” students. I had been lauded, given awards. I always felt secure.
But I was not secure. It seems obvious now that no professor, no teacher, is. Not since Kafka-inspired administrative “bots” took over U.S. campuses. Not since a university chose to note in its bylaws that it was “a corporation that could refer to itself as a university.”
After USC paid a billion dollars to a rogue gynecologist’s victims to avoid trial and any administrator accountability, it began to move against its faculty, outspoken and otherwise. Clueless investigators, like CS and Sidekick, who knew nothing about academia, teaching or professors’ individual history, joined ex-cops, former sheriffs and trained back-room interrogators in the deflective tactic. A memo from the Provost’s office bragged about its new acronym agency, OPE, Office of Professionalism & Ethics, dedicated to investigating any complaint by anyone against faculty, yet neglecting to report on any wrong-doing by administrators.
Student complaints on social media. about professors were immediately deemed “credible”.
The five or so grad students (and a single professor) whom I could identify among my anonymous accusers – lined up against me for inexplicable reasons. Some of the same students who had recently praised my teaching in a USC News Service article about a “poetry and art” collaboration at the nearby Broad museum that I had put together as an innovative course – now condemned me.
As I tried to make sense of the heavily-redacted and bizarre “charges” in the binder before me, I had to wonder how I had turned overnight into a “monster” roaming free on campus?
The complaints were mainly laughable –but they had shown up in a “official” binder attacking my character. I was asked to answer an accusation that I had demanded a student “drive me around” and run many errands – as if this had happened at USC. In fact, this complaint was from a grad student of mine who was also an “assistant” at a writers conference in New York where I was a featured writer in summer of 2018. Her official job, (which she did cheerfully and with super affectionate deference to me at the time)– fulfilled her duties by “driving me” and helping me with minor details. But here she had lied to make it appear as if, as her grading professor,– I had forced her into my unpaid employ at SC.
To prove further that Cheap Suit was controlling the narrative against me– this “invention” later appeared magically returned to the NY writers conference (where the student listed me as an “attendee” rather than a featured teaching writer) in the Report of Investigation. This seemed proof of CS’s “orchestration of complaints, but CS’s published report was the sole basis for my “conviction”.
Other complaints were that I sent “excessive emails” to students, that I strongly urged them to come to a reading by a visiting (Pulitzer Prize winning) writer, that I had made one of this group feel unsafe in the classroom by correcting her mis-use of a Greek word - in other words, I had committed the crime of teaching?
A student from out of town, who was over-the-top grateful for my help when she inquired repeatedly about her candidacy and acceptance into the PhD program and whom I offered to help when she said she had no accommodation in L.A. by suggesting that she stay a night or two in my guest room if she had nowhere else to go – now implied that I had “come on” to her by offering this hospitality.
A student who had asked me to write (one of many) recommendations (which I had always provided for her no matter what the pressing deadline – in this case, the night before I was to have surgery) accused me of threatening not to write the letter unless she complied in accepting a lucrative book advance I’d negotiated for her. Considering that I would never refuse to write a letter for a student based on some unrelated “issue” – my always-dependable generosity in writing letters and my further generous efforts on her behalf - made this complaint one of the most insulting (and utterly false) attacks on my character.
I tried off and on to talk to CS and Sidekick about how I had devoted myself to my students, their hard-working nonstop advocate for decades. They kept flashing The Binder.
But the irony: my efforts for students included trying to find justice for the ones who came to me over years with complaints of sexual misconduct– from fraternity date rape to predatory behavior by professors. Years earlier, when a young woman, a creative writing undergrad, one of my best students, knocked on my office door, distraught and weeping, I comforted her and listened to what she had to say.
She told me (and a colleague of mine, also a woman) that when she’d shown up for a conference in the office of a male professor –he had closed the office door leaving her “no escape” from the alleged predation, which happened behind that closed door. She was devastated and although my colleague and I finally managed, after much difficulty, to get the then-Provost to schedule a hearing – this young woman, a brilliant poet, had dropped out of school, in shame. The “accused” was given a tap on the wrist at the hearing (and the joke of “peer counseling” with me, which he laughed off) – but the damage to this student, was lasting.
Of course I never forgot her, as I watched the “accused” ascend to power in the department, through buddies in the Boys Club and back room. Justice continued to look like a joke, a tap on the wrist, a laugh, for the following decades. I harbored a Me Too expose – but I was silent for years, out of (ridiculous) deference to the “accused”. However, when he shielded a professor who was his friend, who had been charged with misogyny and racism (the student had complained to me and Title IX) – I knew I had to finally speak out. He appeared to realize that justice had caught up with him – and he quickly set up counter moves.
The national headline scandals revealing the culture of sexism and secrecy at my school ensued – that billion dollars was paid out to the female victims of sexual assault by a student health center gynecologist - to avoid the bad publicity of a trial. Many more students came to me, with more stories, over years – as date rape continued on The Row and male professors continued to close their office doors.
Administrators who had ignored (and punished) whistle-blowers - in particular a supervisory nurse at the student health center where the gynecologist abused patients – were never questioned, investigated or sanctioned (as faculty members were) – for trivial offenses like profanity or excessive emails. Nor were promised “reports” pertaining to the shocking national scandals – ever forthcoming.
My focus had now changed from the time when all I could do was send those who complained to me to the Office on campus that was supposed to help. It did not help, it was involved in cover-ups and its director was eventually “let go” – and some of us knew why. At my Interrogation I brought up this former director of Title IX – but was told I could not mention her name or refer to her. (CS & Sidekick again lied and later denied they’d said this.)
The AAUP (Association of University Professors) surveys showed our campus, in alarming ongoing statistics, as a campus rife with sexual misconduct and “nonconsensual sex” – read rape. The university was investigated by the Office of Civil Rights.
When one of my grad students (now in The Binder) came to me complaining about a professor who spouted racist and misogynist comments in class and advised her to “write to please men” I recommended, as usual, that she try the office of “do-nothing” --- which did nothing - then she asked me for further help. I suggested writing a letter to the president – which she did-- and nothing happened. By then the professor who had been complained against, had approached a new grad student who was my advisee in the CW/Lit PhD program and I shared with her, to protect her, the eloquent letter the first student had written to the president. The first student now reacted in fury in response to my decision. I apologized for sharing her letter to the president with the new student, to warn her about the bad news professor. But because of my decision, the first grad student accused me of harassment, dropped me as head of her doctoral committee and suddenly, mysteriously, “disappeared” her complaint against the professor about whom she had previously alleged racism and misogyny.
Her fellow student charged me with harassment as well, for encouraging her too strongly to accept a six-figure book advance offer I’d made happen for her with a New York publisher, a friend of mine.
I believed that these complaints against me were organized because I had spoken out as a whistle-blower about the prevalence of campus sexual abuse and violence – not by the students themselves - but by those who stood to be exposed. Who could now hide behind the Faculty Handbook “harassment” policy and the so-called commitment to DEI.
What if the professor who “closed the door” on a student's writing career years earlier, had fueled his own career over years by energetic ongoing cover-ups of his own and colleagues' transgressions? What if he informed on the "conduct" of others, initiating investigations in his fake pursuit of a fake justice? His metamorphosis devolved downward from Kafka's cockroach. He was contagion that the cockroach wiped from its antennae. He was a virus in academia.
But the students had changed too. I had founded the CW/Lit PhD program based on a humanities vision. But since the academic take-over, most students sought a different path - some only to use the degree to secure a job. Ironically, this happened at a time when jobs for advanced graduate students have all but disappeared. Now interest in literature has faded. Some published their writings as chips to be parlayed into a hire, into progress along a tenure track. This was their choice, though the reality is that tenure is close to gone now and all that remains are adjunct positions – demanding shocking teaching loads and minimal pay.
My teaching, which had always been tough-minded, also seemed to fall out of favor. Though I was a rape survivor and though my own daughter attended USC after her father’s death and though I had many students to protect – I remained adamant about preserving free expression. No trigger warnings – no “exaggeration” of “trauma” except in fiction writing. The importance of confronting adversity on the page and acknowledging the power of words – prepared students to face “real life” adversity, not as victims, but as spokes-people for their own lives.
But as CS and Sidekick grilled me in a prosecutorial manner, I began to understand how wrong I’d been about everything. I was a dinosaur, still believing that the humanities, that creative writing, that creative scholarship –that reading itself and openminded thought - remained the central vision of higher education. What a laugh.
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A “university” that is, in fact, a corporation (CORP U) - despite its constant proclamations about DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) –has no credible commitment to social justice. Its only “authentic” commitment is to its bottom line: the preservation of its billion dollar endowments and its continuing intake of federal funds. This is why it spends millions on a phalanx of corporate lawyers and consulting firms like McKinsey: Do the math.
Instead of accountability and transparency after major scandals, after ignoring whistleblowers, CORP U chose, for example, to pay a billion dollars to the victims of a rogue gynecologist who had sexually violated students in the health care center to keep itself out of court, to shield itself from the publicity and public awareness of a trial.
It is also why it chose to deflect guilt “downward” onto outspoken faculty – to move the spotlight re culpability. And in an unwitting gesture to Kafka – CORP U deflected guilt onto faculty via pop-up “Acronym” investigative units (OPE, COPR, OED) following up on any social media or other complaint as credible and putting “on trial” those accused.
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In the past, I could have charged that Creative Writing had been “colonized” by English and the department had always planned to continue to reap benefit from CW’s undergraduate “cash cow” popularity, keep tuition coming in and fill courses – but also keep CW subservient and silent as a mere “emphasis”, certainly not a graduate program.
I was neither subservient or silent and, after a lengthy deeply shocking struggle - during which the College Dean who had retained me was hired away to be President of another more prestigious university - and, unthinkably, my husband, an acclaimed actor, died suddenly of a heart attack on a film set – I was shown no mercy, by my colleagues.
Though I was offered substantial time off for bereavement, I staggered back to teach two weeks after my husband died – concerned about my students. Also, one of my writer-colleagues who had promised to take over my classes, had, despite pledges of undying compassion and care, never bothered to show up to teach my courses.
I knew that the same Boys Club colleagues who longed to be writers themselves (my late husband called two of them, “the limping assassins”) thought me vulnerable, with the Dean who had supported me gone and my husband dead – and began a campaign against me as “unstable” (in my grief) and set out to undermine the phd program I’d founded. I out-manuevered them, appealing to the university president (a secret poet) and the general counsel – and won the day for the program.
Even in my grief, I was not excused -- for having had the gall, as a non-PhD, non-academic, wise-ass upstart writer, (and a woman!) to have made something happen by sheer imagination.
Irony increased: the new CW/Lit PhD was suddenly awarded a top rating by visiting appraising scholars in an External Review. My once-enemies suddenly spun a “180”, now claiming the program as their own – usurping our students and making “academic” hires over writerly choices. They bumped me forever as director, though I was allowed to stay on to teach – and allowed to continue helping to admit some of the most extraordinarily talented students in the department’s history, laying all charges of “inferiority” to rest. But the English department now controlled all aspects of a program meant to be free of their oversight on hiring and admission.
But on June 12, 2019, as I faced my “interviewers”, I was confident that these charges against me would be waved away.
Not a chance. A group of senior women, accomplished professors, later got in touch with me – it turned out that we had all been accused of. trivial “violations” – (including using profanity in a private phone conversation, slamming a door, sending excessive emails) and had been investigated, some by former cops. We had all also spoken out against the cover-ups by administration.
Some of us also went through the joke of the so-called “grievance” process – my then-lawyer suddenly disappeared, and I was stuck representing myself against the shocking severity of my sanctions – I was suspended from the university for an entire semester, my annual salary was slashed by half and I was forbidden to enter campus or teach or advise or talk to any students. I had to undergo counseling – luckily I chose my own therapist who sustained me – and I refused to say that I was remorseful and “re-educated” when I was allowed to return to teaching.
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Now the university, or the corporation, leaned “vocational”.
Now the top majors were business, engineering, technology, video gaming and even real estate. As Jacqueline Rose noted, an “education untainted by a consideration of human and social value.”
In my graduate course on poetry and art, the conversation turned to the painting of Emmett Till in his coffin by Dana Schutz. The class roundly condemned the white artist for “appropriating” Till’s body. Out of curiosity I asked if she had perhaps painted in “empathy”. I was told that “empathy” was white privilege and elitist. (I believe that empathy is the fulfillment of imagination.)
To be outspoken is to know intimately its opposite. To know what it’s like not to speak out, to remain silent when you might have opened your mouth, begged to differ. Or agreed with a minority opinion.
Self-expression in creative writing is undeniably the foundation of the art. If a university imperils this foundation, puts in jeopardy the free thought that once was central to the university’s existence, there remains little possibility that instruction in the creative arts or other creative disciplines can survive.
I now am retired, but I also found it nearly impossible to teach at the end of my time in place.
I have taught wonderful brilliant students – some with obvious talent, some unsure of themselves – but clear about expressing the self, then learning to shape that expression. (With exceptions.)
As I sat through hours of relentless interrogation I saw that I was going to need a lawyer myself. It became clear that I was going to have to fight to clear my name. That fight is still ongoing.
A medical school dean who cooked meth in a Pasadena hotel room with a female escort who OD’d and other drug related offenses, received a million dollar “golden parachute” on resignation and was never charged with any crime. The gynecologist who sexually abused female students and occasioned the billion dollar trial avoidance was also was provided with severance payment. Other alleged sexual predators have gone unpunished or walked away from “peer counseling”.
For sending “excessive emails” connected to teaching, and obtaining, for a student, a lucrative advance based on a book idea and, finally, for attempting to protect a new student from a disturbed professor by sharing another student’s letter including warnings against the professor – I was suspended from the university, my annual salary cut by 50 % and I was forbidden from teaching or even entering campus. Sound fair?
Censorship is criminal. It stunts the growth of a mind and imagination. Censoring a student’s mind by predatory actions - or by limiting student imaginations by imposition of “gotcha” Faculty Handbook clauses, leading to faculty self-censorship – or reading only along closed paths or ideology remains censorship - with its ugly cousins, book banning and book burning.
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A Postscript: Think Again?
Perhaps you think, if you think about it at all, that a successful writer would quite naturally make an effective teacher of creative writing.? Think again. If a list of super-stellar writer-teachers materialized, it would be a very short (and of course disputed) list indeed.
There would also be a long long list of writers who are winging it. And winging it, in the teaching of this craft and art, ironically, is the only way to ride the Trojan horse – or to keep improving instruction in an art made of consciousness.
Given that it’s a commonly-held belief that creative writing cannot be taught - how do writers still manage to walk the walk or teach the teach? What, after all, constitutes success in a pedagogical environment for which there are no guidelines, no methodologies and no standard of success?
(Though now censorship…)
Most “CW” graduates who manage to acquire a book contract or a creative writing position are grateful for whatever inspired or whoever mentored their writing style. But, as in any teacher-student “dance” – the pas de deux leads to the EXIT sign. Goodbye and don’t look homeward, angel! – except perhaps to offer, on a penultimate page, a small print wave of thanks?
However, it is also true that many CW instructors share their connections – at publishers and journals – to promote student writing in a challenging time. I was committed to this process, especially with an occasional student writer of undeniable talent.
The reality is that most CW majors do not go on to become writers, just as most MFA’s or PhD’s don’t end up as professors of writing. Majoring in Creative Writing involves learning from writers who are teaching “themselves”, like the “living books” of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. This seems urgently terrifyingly apt, in this nightmare-surreal age of book banning and. book burning. Most writers carefully provide their knowledge of the art and craft -- as readers, writers and editors. If this seems to imply that every writer is a brilliant instructor or that the workshop dynamic is failure-proof –think again.
There is, in reality, a number of writing instructors who can’t manage to open up student consciousness (admittedly a challenging task) to individual imaginations or describe commitment to the lifelong work of writing and reading. (There are also the “gurus”, who structure their workshops on their own embarrassing egos, even “teaching” their own writings, littering conversation with “insider” name-drops.) Beware the Ass-kissers, who can impart only that literary butt-nuzzle. Inevitably, thankfully, the workshop process points back to the resources of the autodidact. Instructors at some point become irrelevant, as they are meant to. On the way to that long goodbye, the workshop can accelerate, through group effort, both insight and stylistic improvement as the imagination attains voice. What is done with this knowledge and insight – leading to the exhilaration of free expression, access to one’s own inventiveness – may not open a conventional career path, but can make a workshop-trained reader a creative thinker for life.
Of course all this can be done without an institution. Especially when the institution is a corporation. The making of literature can only happen if, as Orwell says, there is little repression - either ideological or (what Orwell in the past could only intuit) a compromise with corporate ‘values”, influencing, “marketing” - whose opposite is creative writing - “an individual thing, demanding mental honesty and a minimum of censorship.”
This is the doctrine of perfectibility on which CW workshop culture depends -- teetering alongside its proven opposite. A talented young student can still emerge as a writer -- whether or not she attends an MFA or a PhD program – learning how to self-edit in workshop -- or learning the same thing by reading and writing solo.
In this new corporate world, professors are identified as employees, serving students solicited as reporters on social media of “infractions.” Professors find themselves reduced to apologists for their “conduct”, their course content and teaching techniques - for their use of “harassing” language. As if their responsibility is to serve the emotional life of their students.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) has now become an evaluative standard for tenure, hiring and other reviews of professors. FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression) makes the case that judging profs on their contributions to DEI impinges on academic freedom.
Here’s an international “workshop” of ideas: the PEN America Emergency World Voices Congress of Writers, which gathered 80 writers from different countries at the United Nations recently. There was open debate and discussion of freedom to write in an age of book banning, (books by Mark Twain and Toni Morrison banned in the academy and books face actual bonfires on the right.)
The novelist, YiYun Li, born in China, described how as a teenager, she wrote propaganda for the Chinese military. Not long ago, she overheard her son, born in America, discussing with a friend how they could not win a school poetry contest unless they included certain pre-vetted key words in their poems, like “injustice” and “police brutality.” YiYun Li made it clear to her son and friend “that they don’t have to write the keywords, as I did when I was in China.”
Once universities looked benignly on creative writers as a welcome enemy within: truth tellers, quasi-renegades who were tolerated, even celebrated, in a different time on campus. Academia is now a test lab, as the corporate university continues to impose its limits.
Orwell has the last word. He warns: “In the future a totalitarian literature will arise, but it will be quite different from anything we can now imagine. Perhaps it’s not that different than what we now find tragically “real”.
The world of “totalitarian literature” or the totalitarian death-blow to literature -- is imagined in “They”, a novel by the British writer, Kay Dick, first published in 1977, just re-issued and praised by Margaret Atwood. In the novel’s dystopia, unlicensed enforcers of government policy seek to brutally eradicate “individualism” and anyone suspected of “being creative.” Everything imaginative, all of art, is “samizdat. Even opera is thought to be dangerous because it “suggests too many freedoms,” as a reviewer observes. Further, “the barbarians are not at the gate, but already through them, burning books, paintings and musical scores, and mutilating those who produce them.”
Back to Orwell, seeing into a future that may have already arrived – and to Kafka, who already imagined CORP U.
And language remains the battlefield.
It wasn’t written that long ago. A few months. It wasn’t posted right away because I wasn’t sure it was done.
Carol. re: >>>...how did you know I wrote the piece a while back?<<<
In your introduction to Kafka at SoCalled U, you wrote, "... which was written awhile ago."
Summoning Faulkner in a different context, "The past is never dead. In fact, it's not even past."
Some parts of our lives just won't agree to play dead. Looking forward to your next post. Dan.