It has always been thus.

Should those who lament the corporatization of the University--I'm looking at you, Lars Iyer, among many others--take heart from the fact that Malcolm Bradbury's Eating People Is Wrong (1959) reminds us that it's been going on for a long, long time? Or should it be yet another source of distress? From the novel:

Treece had never really wanted to come to the ball in the first place. It was the Vice-Chancellor, who spent the weeks before these student occasions in indefatigable effort, gathering up members of the faculty to go along in order, as he liked to express it, "to put up a bit of a show," who had tempted him here. The Vice-Chancellor, like all vice-chancellors, had clear ideas of what a university should look like, and taste like; vice-chancellors all share in common a Platonic ideal for a university. For one thing, it should be big. People should be coming to look at it all the time. There should be a special place for parking Rolls-Royces. There should be big sports grounds, a science building designed by Basil Spence, and more and more students coming every year. There should be new faculties--of Business Administration, of Aeronautical Engineering, of Sanitation, of Social Dancing. Vice-chancellors want big universities and a great many faculties; professors want small universities and only the liberal arts and pure sciences. Vice-chancellors always seem to win.

It's not quite Iyer's nightmare-born "Faculty of Sport," but it's close.

Out, damned damp!

Despite reasonably good intentions, I find myself once again up against it tonight, without the time I'd hoped to set aside to blog. Fortunately, however, I have in hand more good bits from Exodus, the newest novel in Lars Iyer's Spurious trilogy. Herewith, in hopes of convincing anyone who's ever worked in even the fringes of academia (or even, say, culture in general) that they should buy these books, one of my favorite bits thus far:

Spital Tongues, Newcastle. There it is, W. says, as we walk past the allotments. There it is, the terrace where my flat is buried. The dampest row of flats there ever was, W. says. The dampest Tyneside flats, built atop a culvetted river, atop a coal tunnel now used for sewage, atop old mine workings, now full of water. The dampest, most rat-infested flats, which should have been demolished a hundred years ago, but have been allowed to survive in their degradation. The last of the slums after all the slums have been cleared . . .

And then there’s my flat, the centre of the catastrophe, W. says. My flat, a swamp in the shape of a flat, a flat-plague, interred in its pit. My flat that the sun doesn’t reach, deep underground like a mausoleum to the world’s greatest idiot. My flat, like a barrow for the greatest of imbeciles. . .

‘What possessed you to buy an underground flat?’ W. says. To be close to the earth, he says, was that it? To be close to the toads and the worms, to the creatures of the earth?

Slug trails along the floorboards. . . Curled up woodlice in room corners. . . — ‘The flat’s being taken back by nature,’ W. says. He’s right. The walls are green. Mushrooms grow from the ceiling. And then there’s the damp, of course. The ever-present damp. Is it alive? Is it dead? It’s beyond life, and beyond death, W. says. They should send scientists out to study it, my damp, W. says. They should try to communicate with it, like the scientists in Solaris. It’s more intelligent than us, W. says, he’s sure of it. My damp has something momentous to say, something profound. In fact, isn’t it speaking now, to those who have ears to hear? Isn’t it rumbling in the darkness? I should know, W. says. I live with it.—You understand the damp,’ W. says. Or rather, the damp understands itself in me.

. . .

What next?, W. wonders. What will be the next plague? There are the slugs, of course, but they’re scarcely a plague. There are the ants — and the mushrooms. But he believes something more dreadful is gathering itself in my flat, W. says. Something Lovecraftian. Something cosmic.

It's barely even February, but I suspect I can already mark this one down as the funniest novel I'l read this year. And the most entertainingly biting.

Lars Iyer is not getting any more hopeful.

The gray and drippy depths of winter are the perfect time to read Lars Iyer. His new book, Exodus, the third volume in his Spurious trilogy, was just published, and in honor of that I'll share a brief piece about the middle book, Dogma, that I wrote a while back for a year-end-favorites wrap-up at my office that we didn't end up needing.

---

"You should never learn from your mistakes, W. says. He never has, which is why he associates with me."

That's how Lars Iyer opens his novel Dogma, and that's the tone—lacerating, ironic, dismissive, fatalistic—that runs through the whole book. An account by a low-rung British academic (named Lars) of his friendship and intellectual collaboration with W., a professor of philosophy, the book largely consists of W.'s caustic enumeration of Lars's many failings as a thinker, friend, and human being. But what other than failure, W. suggests, can we expect other in this decrepit world of hollowed-out universities ("The rumour is they're going to close down all the humanities, every course. . . . They'll probably make me professor of badminton ethics."), sham intellectualism ("All our books, all our philosophies, are only articles in some gossip magazine"), and commercial pseudoreality ("Pigeon Forge. The end is nigh.")? Like a demented, brainy cousin of Withnail and I crossed with the early, blithe and vicious Waugh, the book is hilarious, rude, and deeply pessimistic, yet at times moving and even profound, the kind of satire that razes our sordid reality and then takes the extra step of salting the earth, lest we take it in our heads to let any of that nonsense grow up again.

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Spurious was one of my favorite books of 2011, Dogma of 2012, and I fully expect Exodus to hold a similar position for 2013. Hell, I'm only about twenty-five pages in and I'm already quoting it in e-mails. The following went out to a friend this morning:

My living room. W. takes his place on the Chair of Judgement: "Bring me gin!" It's going to be a long night. He has a lot to get through, W. says, leaning his chair back against the wall.

My failings, my failures: the usual topic. The failure of my life, of my thought. The failure of my books. Familiar topics. My past failures, my present one: yes we know about those, W. says. but my future failings . . . that's what W. wants to talk about tonight.

"Where will you have gone wrong?", he says. "What will you have done? What crimes have you yet to commit? How will you have managed to have failed anew?"

It's quite a tense, isn't it, the future perfect?, W. says. Who will I have disappointed? Him, of course, W. says. Whose hopes will I have defiled? His, of course, W. says. His hopes.

Ah, what will I have done to him, W., in the future? What terrors await him? -- "Will you have written another book? Will you have come up with another escape plan? Ah, but he know what will have happened. I know. We'll have been sacked, and living on the dole.

If that's whetted your appetite, you can get more of Iyer's inimitable writing at his blog--and after a bit of wandering there, I expect you'll want to make unseemly haste to your nearest bookstore and buy up the trilogy.

The sacred and profaned library

On Wednesday, I quoted a letter from Machiavelli about how he dressed up before entering his library, as an act of appreciation for the thought and learning it provided him. Today, a counterpoint, from the ever-caustic Lars Iyer, creator of the blog Spurious, which became the book Spurious and, now, a second volume, Dogma. I'll have more to say about the many pleasures of Dogma soon, but for today I'll just share a passage about a personal library, appropriate dress, and respect.

The library belongs to Lars's friend, interlocutor, and abusive rotten conscience, W., whom Lars is visiting.

Up another flight to the top floor, and the holy of holies: W.'s study. His bookshelves--not too many, since W. gives away most of his books ("I don't hoard them, like you," he says), but enough for all the essentials. His Hebrew/English dictionary. His volumes of Cohen. His collected Rosenzweigs.

W. is terrified that he will soon have to leave his house--that the humanities at his university are on the brink of being crushed by the overwhelming need to demonstrate value, that they'll soon be replaced by yet another Department of Sport. So he is attentive to his house now, savoring his moments there.

Nonetheless, he doesn't feel the same duty that Machiavelli does to wear his finest robes:

How does he dress himself for scholarship?, I ask him. He wears his dressing gown, W. says. He sits in his dressing gown and reads, looking up difficult German words (which is to say, most of them), in the dictionary.

But such a space can still be profaned:

This is the room where I sleep when I stay. W. pulls out a camp bed and makes it up. He has to fumigate his study after I've slept in it, he says. It has to be re-consecrated, his temple of scholarship.

This, this must be what the ancients meant when they wrote paeans to friendship!