After Monday's good test results, the rest of the week has been devoted to the tiling of the first of our two small bathrooms.  I had thought that job would take a couple of days, not a couple of weeks (and also that the price would be a third of what it turned out to be).  The guy doing the tiling is extremely garrulous and meticulous (i.e., easily distracted and slow).  Friendly is good, of course; budding friendship is not exactly what I contracted for.  Sometimes I ask myself, "Why bother?"  But answering that question with "no good reason" would lead to the inertia of not doing anything--and that's not good.

So I've been at home most the week and doing a lot of reading.  One of the most disappointing books--no, the most disappointing book--was Not for Profit, a defense of teaching the arts and humanities throughout the educational system, by Martha Nussbaum, a professor of law at the University of Chicago and prolific writer.  As someone who spent his life teaching literature, I certainly have no quarrel with Nussbaum's point, but the book is so feebly argued, so self-indulgent, and so badly edited that it hardly helps its own thesis.  Nussbaum's argument, endlessly repeated (even though the book is only 140 pages with wide margins) seems to be that 1) democracy is the best political system, 2) the most important goal of education is to create tolerant citizens who can think critically, and 3) a liberal arts curriculum is the best way to accomplish this goal.  Neither of the first two assumptions is examined; they rest just that: assumptions.  None of us wants to seem anti-democratic, but it's hardly reassuring when Nussbaum informs us that Athenian democracy is the purest ever to exist (with the brief aside "not to mention" that women, slaves, and foreigners were excluded).  Also not mentioned is the debate throughout American history about the limits of democracy and the protection of minority rights; there is nothing about our unease when Hamas is democratically elected in Gaza or our current worries about the outcome of the "Arab spring" in countries like Egypt, where democratic elections may bring a less pro-American government into power than that of Mubarak.  She also assures us, with no support, that people would rather be poor in a democracy than well cared for under a non-democratic leader.

Indeed, there is no support for any of her argument except anecdotes, which may or may not be representative, and endless allusions to her heroes: Socrates, Rousseau, and Tagore.  (In the first 60 pages we are told three times that Tagore won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913.  Had her editor dozed off?)  In general, no one wants to be seen as intolerant, but the liberal notion that we're all going to leave our beliefs at the door to join in an open discussion of ideas isn't the way the world works.  We can't step out of our beliefs; they're not like clothing.  Years ago, the GLBT group on campus was having a gathering celebrating diversity.  The flyer had phrases like, "Everyone is welcome" and "Come support inclusion."  After several similar lines, the last line read, "No homophobes allowed."  What tolerance, as poorly defined by Nussbaum as is democracy, seems to mean is tolerating the beliefs of people who already agree with us, which sort of takes the edge off the argument. 

If Nussbaum can't convince me, a liberal, tolerant, democracy-loving reader, I don't think she has much chance with those who are supposedly the audience for her argument.

On a happier note, there's a lovely appreciation of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying by E. L. Doctorow in the new New York Review of Books.  Although I may be prejudiced, I think Faulkner is the greatest American novelist of the 20th century.  With most authors, there's one obvious book to teach (Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter or  Twain's Huck Finn or Fitzgerald's Great Gatsy), but with Faulkner, there are so many great novels it's hard to choose.  In survey courses, I always did The Sound and the Fury while a colleague taught As I Lay Dying, but I've also taught Light in August, Intruder in the Dust, and The Hamlet when I had the opportunity.  I'm not sure what occasioned Doctorow's essay, but it's a thoughtful and enthusiastic introduction to this great, innovative novel.  Just to nitpick, though, the character Darl, Doctorow writes, is "suspected of being mental," a word choice that seems inappropriately current; Dewey Dell's name is misspelled as "Dewy Dell" midway through the article; and Doctorow writes, "Who lays dying is Addie Bundren, the mother."  I know that the conjugation of 'lie' and 'lay' is undergoing change.   There's lie/lied/lied for to prevaricate and lay/laid/laid for the transitive verb meaning to place something: those are stable.  But for the intransitive verb to recline, the traditional lie/lay/lain is smudged.  None of us, I would guess, have ever actually used the word 'lain.'  ("I had just lain down, when...")  Still, to use 'lays' as the present tense, as Doctorow does, confuses what Faulkner meant when he titled the book.  Addie's "as I lay dying" is past tense; she is dead throughout the novel (although she does get a surprising section as speaker midway through Faulkner's work with its multi-layered perspectives).  Quibbles aside, though, Doctorow reminds us of one of the masterworks of modernist American literature.