SALON

Mark Luce

Monday, Mar 1, 1999 8:00 PM UTC

Lord Of The Barnyard

Mark Luce reviews 'Lord of the Barnyard' by Tristan Egolf

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Before starting Tristan Egolf’s “Lord of the Barnyard,” you would do well to arm your imagination with a hockey goalie’s pads and mask, because from the riotous face-off on, the rocket-fueled young author bombards you with sardonic slap shots, point-blank wrist shots and linguistic spin moves. Although he barrels recklessly along the slippery ice of a first novel, his deftness at negotiating the risks creates a bold and original debut.

Egolf devotes his story to one John Kaltenbrunner, a young man who lives, works and fights his way through the hypocrisy, hatred and caste system of Baker, a stateless Midwestern town populated by bands of toughs who punch first and don’t even bother to ask questions later. At the age of 9, John already runs the family farm with amazing drive, trading chicken-incubation banter with the old-timers. But his peers don’t take kindly to the scraggly kid they call “chicken boy.” As he grows older and drives his tractor (“Bucephalus”) to school, he suffers unspeakable beatings and insults and triples the local record for hours in detention.

Eventually the tightly wrapped boy snaps: He fights off “Methodist crones” who want to swipe the farm from his widowed mother and burns the compound of a local dope-dealing family. “He still may have been every bit as loathed and abhorred as before,” the nameless narrator comments, “but, thenceforth, no one dared even look at him the wrong way.” At this point, John is only 15. There are several years, a couple of greased-pig chases, a handful of bar brawls, a sanitation strike and an ending befitting Revelations still to come in this tornado of a novel.

Egolf’s energy makes for a fascinating and frustrating read: Why use two adjectives, he seems continually to ask, when you can use six? He practices a form of shotgun writing — aim in the right direction and spray words on the page — always searching for another country-fried turn of phrase that will one-up his last one. Even when the prose is overwritten, though, it sizzles. Egolf mixes fable, metaphor and pure anger to attack mob mentality, class warfare, the mindless media and the just-under-the-surface madness of the Midwest. His brilliantly warped, pedal-to-the-metal vision has the obsessive quirkiness of a Pynchon, the rough-and-tumble bad-assness of a Daniel Woodrell and more than a malignant touch of the Faulkner who created the Snopeses.

Late in “Lord of the Barnyard,” Egolf mischievously predicts the ways people might respond to his story: “The East-Coast critics would label it a ‘redneck inferno.’ Charity collections would pour in from south of the Mason-Dixon. West-Coast independents would prattle on about negative Karma in the Corn Belt.” He doesn’t speculate, though, about Midwestern critics. As a lifelong denizen of the nation’s breadbasket who grew up armed and aware in a town not unlike Baker, I can say that out here that kind of lame labelin’ and pious prattlin’ would most likely lead to a swift pool cue — the Corn Belt’s version of a hockey stick — to the back of the head. So I will keep it simple. In a seedy bar in one of those seedy towns a few years ago, I heard a tough guy exclaim what, in hindsight, is the highest praise anyone could give an artist such as Egolf: “Shit-fire, Delbert. That thar boy can shore spin a yarn.”

Wednesday, Jan 20, 1999 7:00 PM UTC

Word Virus

Mark Luce reviews 'Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader'

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More than a year after his death, the literary reputation of William S. Burroughs remains obscured by the image — fedora, shapeless gray suits, weathered face and a voice that out-Tom Waitses Tom Waits — that for more than 20 years has overshadowed his output. Like so many counterculture figures, Burroughs the writer has taken a back seat to Burroughs the icon, the grand old man of American letters featured in hipster movies, Nike and Gap ads and even a U2 video.

“Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader” finally brings the author’s actual writing back to the forefront. In their selections, editors James Grauerholz and Ira Silverberg highlight the many faces of Burroughs: the narrative pioneer, the sardonic stand-up, the asexual Tiresias-like seer and, in what may be a surprise to many, the humanist.

Stylistically, Burroughs is often lumped with the Beats, but even a cursory reading of “Word Virus” shows he was never a Beat in form or vision. Burroughs is a better writer than his storied companions, more intellectually nimble, skeptical, multifaceted and subtle. While Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg cruised self-promoting highways and smoky jazz clubs searching for the beatific, Burroughs was a homebody, traveling the globe only as a logistical concern, to escape the law, his own demons or the terrible grip of heroin. Burroughs’ vision was more sinister than the Beats; he warned of the mechanisms of control, whether through language, drugs or the government. He ridiculed the sanctimonious while playing a straight-shooting tour guide to the post-atomic-bomb landscape of America.

The first collected edition of his work, “Word Virus” traces Burroughs’ career more or less chronologically. Primarily a fiction writer, Burroughs borrowed heavily from himself, and with the sections of “Word Virus” broken up by surprisingly balanced biographical commentary from Grauerholz, Burroughs’ longtime assistant, the volume contains significant splashes of autobiography if only small amounts of nonfiction. And through the various excerpts and routines we come to see a different Burroughs, not necessarily kinder and gentler, but more complex, harder to pigeonhole as strictly misanthropic or misogynistic. Certainly those elements still exist in his writing, and Burroughs will never be too welcome in feminist literary circles. Some pieces here aren’t deserving of any literary circle, such as the juvenilia of the previously unpublished (for good reason) manuscript “And the Hippos Were Buried in Their Tanks,” and a few of the many bureaucratic satires/critiques, such as “The American Non-Dream” (from “The Job”), fall flat, victims of political schizophrenia and language overkill.

But in a collection such as this, one has to consider the whole. And underneath all Burroughs’ social aberrations, needles, shysters and graphic violence lies a human and — gulp! — even moral writer. In the wry rants against the apparatus of control in “Twilight’s Last Gleaming” (from “Nova Express”), “The Name Is Burroughs” (from “The Adding Machine”) and “From Here to Eternity” (from “Exterminator!”), readers see the classic Burroughs. But in the later work, such as his 1985 introduction to “Queer,” where he directly addresses the psychological impact of shooting his wife, Joan Vollmer, and his Red Night Trilogy (“Cities of the Red Night,” “The Place of Dead Roads” and “The Western Lands”), Burroughs wrestles with larger questions of mortality and spirituality. This late push toward cosmic reconciliation serves as a logical culmination of his career-long search for meaning amid the chaos. As the excerpts further demonstrate, the twilight trilogy may be his best work, more sophisticated and evocative than the vastly better known and more influential “Naked Lunch.”

Apocalyptic, carnal and raw, Burroughs’ work bridges the epiphanies of modernism with the Foucaultian cool of postmodernism. He stretches modernist forms and grammar like narrative silly putty, prefiguring the sly mischief of postmodern writers such as Thomas Pynchon and William Gibson. But even in the early work, he cajoles, upbraids and mocks everyone and anything in order to call attention to the dangerous paths humans have constructed for themselves in this century. He accomplishes this with a cast of the disenfranchised: mad scientists, carnival con men, gay schoolboys, bumbling bureaucrats, desperate junkies and maniacal medicine men. Through it all Burroughs eludes easy literary classification; by turns he is a poststructuralist Dashiell Hammett, T.S. Eliot on the nod, Mark Twain with a gun.

In his adopted home of Lawrence, Kan., Burroughs lived on Learnard Street, which he spun into “Learn Hard.” Ultimately, his writing, especially in the accessible form of “Word Virus,” provides the fruits of just that: life lessons the hard way, stern messages and warnings not to repeat the mistakes he made in fighting against any system that attempts to control. While it may sound macabre, “Word Virus” fuses the many faces of Burroughs into a death mask, a fantastic, weird, disturbing and intriguing tribute to an inimitable American voice.

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Thursday, Jan 7, 1999 5:14 PM UTC

Bartering brains for bread

Can the institutions of higher learning escape the long arms of their corporate sponsors?

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Nancy Shore could not believe what she saw. In the Quad Dining Hall at
Grinnell College stood a man in a Cap’n Crunch outfit, flanked by a PR
flack. The duo implored students to lobby the campus dining service to add
the sucrose-laden children’s favorite to the college’s breakfast offerings.

Shore, a sophomore, doesn’t have a political beef with the
good Cap’n (even at the Iowa school chock-full of granola-crunching
lefties), but she has a philosophical problem with what she sees as
the corporate invasion of traditionally sacred spaces. Shore has started
her own zine, “FREK,” to
address exploitative commercialism and her next target is the new corporate
playground, the college campus.

“I came to Grinnell because I liked the small community. I wanted to
get away from the city while I was being intellectually formed,” says
Shore. “Now I am being told that the goal is to make money and buy
things, not to learn. It’s easier here to find an application for a
credit card than it is to find a recycling bin.”

Shore is not alone in her dismay at encroaching commercialism on campus. Over the past decade, the strip-malling of student unions,
bookstores, athletic events and even classrooms has gradually begun to stir
controversy among students and faculty. Appearances of Cap’n Crunch pushers
notwithstanding, most of the corporatism operating on college campuses is
of a far deeper and less visible kind. Academic departments —
predominantly in engineering and the sciences — have begun to negotiate
with specific companies to fund student research for access to patenting
rights. Last fall this trend reached a new low when Swiss biotechnology firm Novartis struck a groundbreaking deal with UC-Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources. College deans and presidents have zealously pursued corporate partnerships — from endowed chairs to underwritten research programs to building sponsorships — often inventing new ways for corporations to sow and reap the benefits of higher education.

To be fair to the administrators, the courtship with corporate America
hasn’t been a capricious dalliance so much as a marriage born of convenience and sometimes hardship. According to “The Condition of Education 1998,” a report from the National Center for Education Statistics, federal and state outlays for higher education have dropped precipitously, while tuition has skyrocketed. For example, in 1977, state spending made up 52.4 percent of public university revenues; by 1995, that percentage dipped to 40.6. Concurrently, in 1977, tuition and fees made up 16.4 percent of public university funding; in 1995 tuition and fees accounted for 24 percent of public university funding.

With dwindling public outlays for higher education and the ever savvy student/consumer demanding more non-academic services, colleges and universities have often entered into business deals with the private sector to ensure they remain competitive with other institutions. If universities turn a cold shoulder to fiscal suitors, the quality and quantity of higher education could suffer drastically.

Ostensibly as a result of such fears, the Business-Higher Education Forum, an arm of the nonprofit American Council of Education, is promoting more face-time between businesses and universities. Judy Irwin, acting director of the forum, sees the new corporate interest in universities as a kind of survival instinct on the part of corporations as well. Many companies are dissatisfied with today’s graduates, she maintains. If colleges aren’t preparing students for the work force, the knowledge chasm that results could harm American businesses.

“Businesses need to have college graduates who are coming into their
employment of a certain caliber. They are not going to change the
curricula, they may make suggestions because businesses are increasingly
concerned that the college graduates they are getting are
technologically competent, but don’t have good communications skills,
can’t do analytical thinking, can’t work in teams and don’t have the
same work ethic as they have seen in prior years,” Irwin says.

Irwin’s own eloquence notwithstanding, her emphasis on economic competitiveness, training and research and development partnerships is disheartening, and even antithetical to the notion that education is to better oneself and, in turn, the greater society. When those who claim to support students start recasting graduates as products, and when universities become the middleman whose job is to deliver the products in four years, the message sent is undeniable. Businesses are, in Irwin’s words, “suggesting” that they want the “critical thinking” of liberal arts education — but will they embrace critical thinking that becomes explicitly anti-corporate? Unfortunately, institutions of higher education seem to be increasingly willing to take suggestions from corporations, especially when it involves what universities used to call dollars, but now call “revenue enhancement.”

For all the bridge-building doublespeak offered by Irwin, some companies involved say there are serious risks as they scurry to find niches in the academy (and the academy scurries to make room for them). Cybermark, a high-tech business in Tallahassee, Fla., develops smart cards, student identification cards that can also provide banking, long-distance, library, dining hall and, in the case of Florida State University, credit card services. Some schools pay for the smart cards’ installation, which can range from $100,000 to $1 million, by contracting out portions of the card. The card seems promising, a fairly unobtrusive way of offering students convenient service, reducing theft and fraud and saving money.

“There is a risk if administrators don’t take great care and
responsibility in these relationships,” says Chris Corum, a
spokesman for Cybermark. “Where it can be successful is where the card
is looked at first as a student service and second from a financial
perspective. If it is just a business or financial decision, then probably
there are serious risks, because the institution risks selling its soul to
help a budget crisis.”

Too late, says David Noble, a professor of history at York College in
Ontario. Higher education has already moved on to purely financial
considerations — especially with the burgeoning of research and development deals that are changing the face of intellectual property. Since control, ownership and copyright of the fruits of academic labor have entered the marketplace, Noble argues that the losers are faculty, students and the ideals of disinterested inquiry. If that inquiry carries a corporate logo, the time-honored claim of university independence is compromised.

Noble, who has written two scathing articles about the shotgun wedding of higher education and corporations (the first, “Digital Diploma Mill,” was commissioned by the Nation, but spiked), says schools have left behind education in the constant chase for dollars. The commodification of university research is nothing new, helped by deep corporate pockets and the University-Small Business Patents Procedure Act (commonly known as the Dole-Bayh act), a 1980 law allowing universities to sell the
findings of government-sponsored research. But Nobel warns that university
instruction — the very thing that makes college college — is following
the same route.

Prepaid professorships — known as endowed chairs — are increasingly being funded by corporations that have a stake in the outcome of the research. At Oregon State, the Nor’Wester Brewing Company sponsors the “Nor’Wester Professorship in Fermentation Science” in the Department of Food Science and Technology. In the same vein, the Carlson Travel Tour and Hospitality Professorship is designated to research issues of interest to the travel industry at the University of Minnesota.

Sometimes corporations attempt to influence who holds endowed professorships. When United Parcel Service and the University of Washington were in negotiations in 1996 for a $1.5 million endowed chair in occupational orthopedics, UPS proposed Stanley J. Bigos, a researcher who studied back-injury claims against the Boeing Company in 1991. Bigos claims that it was not working conditions — i.e., lifting heavy objects — that had fueled those claims. For a company whose workers lift constantly, Bigos was UPS’s dream candidate. But negotiations broke down when Washington said Bigos would have to be approved through normal channels. A year later, UPS dropped the proposal, saying it was no longer interested.

“The commercialization of the university signals the end of the
university,” Noble says. “The commercial ethos will obliterate the heart and
soul of the institution.”

According to Lawrence Soley, a communications professor at Marquette and author of the 1996 “Leasing the Ivory Tower,” a corporate mind-set in higher education could lead to a surrender of academic freedom, even higher tuition rates and an indirect subsidy for corporations by taxpayers. Soley also predicts an intellectual rich-poor gap in schools, with professors pulling in money teaching less and less, while instruction continues to be taken over by overworked and underpaid adjunct professors and graduate student teachers. Play these trends out to their logical conclusion, he says, and you are providing companies with state facilities to train future employees and the ability to determine what classes are worthy of teaching. Forget liberal arts, these will be technical schools.

“The indications are that universities are becoming more a part of the
commercial marketplace instead of a marketplace for ideas,” says Soley.
The business logic of the partnerships is impeccable, he adds, but when
university chancellors and presidents start referring to themselves as
CEOs — as they increasingly do — the days of teachers and scholars are gone.

Whether chancellors, presidents or CEOs, the leaders of institutions of
higher education, especially public ones, say their hands are tied by
recalcitrant state legislatures that tell schools to do more with less.
And if the schools want to survive, they have to go trolling for
dollars.

University of Kansas Chancellor Robert Hemenway recognized this and has
orchestrated a series of moves to combat budget shortfalls during his
three-plus years at Kansas: a $21 million, 10-year pact with Coca-Cola for
exclusive beverage rights, a $3 million pact with Nike to outfit the
school’s athletic teams and the introduction of a smart card featuring
banking, long-distance, concession and bus services. Hemenway says such
deals are carefully negotiated and do not affect the academic integrity of
the school. Further, such decisions are the province of the
administration, not the faculty.

But Hemenway may be splitting hairs. On Christmas Eve the University of Kansas announced that its school of
business and Farmland Industries Inc., North America’s largest farmer-owned
cooperative (its 1998 sales were $8.8 billion), established an intensive
management education program for the Kansas City corporation’s middle
managers. Farmland paid for it, although the amount has not yet been
publicly disclosed. In a twist that illustrates Noble’s concerns, for five
weeks over 10 months, the institute will use six KU professors and Farmland
managers to teach at the institute. Nevertheless,
Hemenway says, “We are exploring together new management techniques and
achieving a model university-corporate partnership.” But no matter what one
may think of such a practice, it happens at business schools all the
time, and has for years, with little press coverage. It’s called “executive
education,” and most people outside of professional schools have never heard
of such a thing.

“The university is not an isolated ivory tower. It participates in the
market every day. It buys, sells, negotiates, it is a part of the
commercial activity that one would expect having to take place in a $700 million
or $800 million enterprise,” says Hemenway, who also presided over the
creation of a nonprofit corporation to consolidate and streamline the
university’s grant process and helped transform governance of the
school’s hospital from state bureaucracy to an independent public
authority, thus freeing the hospital to compete in the managed care
industry.

“I think it would be disingenuous of us to say we don’t want anything to
do with corporations because we are this pristine, idyllic and pastoral
entity called the university. If you take that position to its logical
end, we would be like a bunch of monks in a monastery resisting
progress, because we wouldn’t have any computers. If we are going to
have computing in the university, we are going to have to deal with
Microsoft. That is just a reality.”

But this thinking is precisely what bothers dissenters like David
Katzman, professor of history and American studies at the University of
Kansas. It isn’t a question of stopping the university from entering into
partnerships with companies such as Coke or Nike, he says, but rather to get away from a
top-down decision-making process.

“If the deal coincides with the university’s mission and values and we
insulate ourselves from some of that impact, then it is very
appropriate. But when there are strings attached, when it changes our
priorities, then it becomes very dangerous to us.”

And strings are often attached, although surreptitiously. When
Wisconsin signed an agreement with shoe manufacturer Reebok in 1996, hidden
deep in the contract was the following: “The university will not issue any
official statement that disparages Reebok [and] will promptly take all
reasonable steps to address any remark by any university employee, including
a coach, that disparages Reebok.” Although Wisconsin administrators avoided talking about that specific part
of the contract, before the contract went to the Board of Regents for
approval, the rider became public. The public outcry over the school’s attempt to subvert free speech forced Reebok to withdraw that section of the contract.

Faculty protest at KU about the partnerships had been muted until September,
when Katzman gave a public speech decrying the moves as monopolistic,
noncollegial and robbing the university of its most cherished asset —
openness.

“We are being made into tools for commercial wars fought in the
marketplace,” Katzman says. “And we are allowing them to fight those commercial wars here. Is that in our best interest or not? Let’s hear about that, let’s debate whether that should be the function of the university.”

Whether that debate will be heard is another question. As colleges and universities continue to suckle at the corporate teat, they will increasingly rely on spreadsheets loaded with cash to demonstrate that the reliance on a corporate model is the only way to survive. And as chancellors and presidents become corporate yes-men and turn campuses into company towns, the notion of learning and thinking for oneself may become a quaint relic of days gone by.

Intelligent citizenry? Overrated. Student-teacher relationships? We prefer consumer-seller partnerships. The individual quest for knowledge? Been there. Conflict of scholarly (dis)interest? Our lawyers beg to differ.

But don’t we risk turning colleges into factories that build workers to company specifications? Don’t ask so many questions. And while you’re at it, enjoy your Cap’n Crunch.

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