My
editors at the Chronicle last
week declined to permit me to publish my last piece on the same-sex marriage
debate. They pointed out, reasonably enough, the topic is “too far afield from and
tangential to academe and academic policy to run on Innovations.” That
topic has, of course, had plenty of play on another Chronicle blog, Brainstorm, but I
understand the skittishness of the post-Naomi opinion section of the Chronicle when
it comes to dissent from
the prevailing norms of academic opinion, and I quietly slid the article over
to Minding the Campus, where
its academic anchor held fast.

With
that out of the way, I turned to issues that I was pretty sure wouldn’t set off
tsunamis of protest: the importance of teaching the history of Western
civilization; my own multicultural undergraduate education; and the creative
side of coming to terms with cultural loss. I am rather enjoying this placid
stretch, and rather than rush to re-join the debates over student financial
aid, the higher-education bubble, governance at UVa, the role of technology on
campus, the latest sustainalunacies from last month’s conference at UC
Davis, and the like, I’m sticking with the theme that higher education is
relaxing deeper and deeper into banality. Not just any kind of banality but a
banality that artfully and sometimes pleasingly combines the detritus of
popular culture, the ersatz sophistication of the opinion elites, a consumer
ethic, random bits of globalized commerce, and the jumbled fragments of the old
civilization. We recline in the shade of those ruins. And it is not so bad.

Alien vs.
Predator

Maybe
the best exemplar of this happy combination is the poet Michael Robbins, who
leapt to fame on the publication in The New Yorker in
January 2009 of a short poem, Alien vs. Predator. The
title refers to the 2004 horror movie mash-up that united two franchises: 
the carnivorous Alien stowaway saga that began with Ridley Scott’s
1979 movie, and the trophy-hunters from outer-space series that began with the 1987
Arnold Schwarzenegger pic. Uniting the two fantasies must have seemed like a
good idea, but the result was sadly lackluster.  It did, however, offer a
metaphorically rich title. Which is the greater monster: appetite or ego?

Not
that that battle is necessarily what Robbins’ poem is
about. The poem appears as a mélange of pop – culture allusions mixed
with bits of high-culture tradition. The opening line, “Praise this world, Rilke says, the jerk,” refers to Rilke’s “Duino
Elegy, No. 9,” (“Praise this world to the Angel.”)  Rilke’s poem is a
trembling meditation on the evanescence of life, calling us to pay attention to
the here and now. Why is does this make Rilke “a jerk”?  I have no idea
except that Robbins has more fun excoriating this world–the
world of 21^st century American
consumerism–than he has praising anything. But I’m not sure Robbins’ poem lends
itself to close explication. The immediate pleasures he offers are off-tilt
rhymes (“…the jerk/ We’d stay up all night. Every angel’s/ Berserk…”), cascades
of references to rap lyrics, comic books, and advertisements, verbal glissandos,
puns, and a general high-spiritedness.

“Alien
vs. Predator” takes the form of competitive boasting between the monsters, as
if they were playground rivals or perhaps the two keelboatmen from Chapter
Three of Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi,
who exhaust themselves trading grandiose taunts and never actually get to
trading blows:

“Whoo-oop! I’m the old original iron-jawed,
brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw!–Look at
me! I’m the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a
hurricane, dam’d by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related
to the small-pox on the mother’s side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators
and a bar’l of whiskey for breakfast when I’m in robust health, and a bushel of
rattlesnakes and a dead body when I’m ailing!’

Robbins’
antagonists are more succinct than Twain’s but the rambunctiousness is the
same: “I set the controls, I pioneer/ the seeding of the ionosphere./ I
translate the Bible into velociraptor.”  “I fight the comets, lick the
moon,/pave its lonely streets.”

Unlike The Wasteland, with its retinue of footnotes, Robbins’
poems leave the reader to his own devices to figure out where all that cultural
detritus originated. Eli Lehrer, reviewing Robbins in The Weekly Standard, dubbed him “the Wiki-Poet” since his
“work can be appreciated only with an Internet connection.” Truth be told, the
Internet connection isn’t that helpful. A
site that tries to unravel the rap references in “Alien vs. Predator”
doesn’t offer much. I think you either enjoy Robbins’ poems for their sheer
verve or you give them up as mostly incomprehensible. They are certainly open
and easy to read for several lines at a time, where they are often hilarious.
In “The Learn’d Astronomer,” he writes:

Even then, I was so skillful a lover

That when I said, “Life is wasted on the living,”

The rivers ran for days with suicides.

Occasionally
he turns his hand to something perfectly lucid, as in “Space Mountain,”
twenty-three couplets of oath-like curses along the lines of:

By the millionaire playboy’s cape and his cowl,

By that wise old Zen master, the Tootsie Pop owl,

Which
concludes, falsely, “I am a man of few words, each one a thrown switch,” and a
promise to name the “mouth-breathers” he execrates.  “Then pull up a
chair.  This could take a while.”

Robbins
is a poet of what I have called “new anger”–the show-off, look-at-me anger in
which most of the point is the pleasure of performance. So what is Robbins
actually angry about? You can read his collection of 55 short poems several
times closely and not really know. Some of the poems start angry:

“You homicidal bitch…”  [Appetite for
Destruction]

Or
ugly:

“Every last one of my thirty-eight years

Would fit inside Jeffrey Dahmer’s
freezer.”  [Affect Theory]

But
they are pretty soon captured by the giddiness of exuberant play. Robbins is
having enough fun that he doesn’t mind putting a little Ogden Nash doggerel in
the mix:

“My fish, fast and loose, shoot fish in a kettle.

The boys like the girls who like heavy metal.” [I Did This
to My Vocabulary]

I
am nominating Michael Robbins as a poet whose poems capture the spirit of the
academy. I concluded that before finding him in two interviews declaring his
perfected academic disdain for America. Here he tells a writer for Vol. 1 Brooklyn who asks him about his “strong
ambivalence in [his] poems about late capitalism.”

I wouldn’t call it ambivalence as much as a
contradiction. I think that I’m drawn to the Marxist critique of capitalism,
because of its dialectic. I feel like a douchebag saying a sentence like that,
but you know, Marx is not simply bashing capitalism, he’s extoling [sic] its
liberating aspects. At the same time he’s urging that the contradictions that
it contains are oppressive and ultimately will lead it to its ruin. I feel a
similar contradiction in late capitalism insofar as I’m wholly antagonistic to
it as a form of economic life. Right now it’s a way of producing apartheid and
slums. I feel like there’s no sensible person who could not see capitalism as
an immensely destructive force that produces immiseration on mass scales. I’m
completely opposed to capitalism politically, but I’m at the same time as
attracted to its products as anyone else.

And
he tells an interviewer from the Paris Review:

My poetry is partly about how everything is for
sale. It seems astonishing to me that we accept that as normal. At the same
time, I love Taylor Swift and it would be ridiculous for me to not listen to
Taylor Swift or to not see Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, which I
just saw, because they are consumer spectacles that disguise the actual
relations of production. So yeah, I think the sense that those phrases are
completed for me by capitalist vernacular, by advertising, by jargon and cliché
is a way of thinking about language and my relationship to it. I want to
register my antagonism while also registering my complicity.  

                                                                         A Whale on Stilts

I
rather like Robbins’ poems, but when interviewers speak without irony of “late
capitalism” and the poet strides right ahead in the language of Marxist
“contradictions,” dialectic, and “relations of production,” I hear a man more
besotted with the junk of campus pseudo-intellectualism than he is troubled
with the disorders of his society. Robbins the poet has a bit of Mark Twain in
his DNA. Robbins the visiting professor (most recently, the University of
Southern Mississippi) is, to borrow a phrase, “a whale on stilts.”

Artful
banality ceases to be artful and becomes a lot more banal when the poet
subsides into these sorts of clichés. Whether, when I hold up Robbins as a
mirror of the contemporary university, the university will catch a glimpse of
itself, I don’t know. But it is that time of year when it seems allowable to
offer a metaphor instead of an argument.  Something like throwing
marshmallows to the alligators. So which is the greater monster?  Appetite
or ego?  “Whose whales these are/I’ll never know. They lawyer up. I’m
lying low.”