Last Monday night I decided to drop a film documentary class I had been taking at Columbia after getting my first assignment back from Jane Gaines, the professor. I had completely forgotten how bad a reaction I have to getting papers graded. Three months short of my 66th birthday, the last thing I need is to go through the humiliating experience of a professor giving me a C, or in this instance reading her barbs all over my submission. I was flabbergasted by her insistence that I use the term “motion picture” instead of “movie”. I used that term deliberately for the same reason that Harvey Pekar once told me he preferred the term comic book to graphic novel. Who needs that kind of snobbery? After, if David Bordwell, one of the top film scholars in the world, can title a book “The way Hollywood tells it: story and style in modern movies”, then why should Gaines object? Of course, professors are the final arbiters in such matters just as my project manager at work is the final arbiter of how I do my work. At least in that case, I am getting paid for my troubles.
It is not just classes that I have taken at Columbia that present such a problem. A few years ago, I finally resolved not to submit articles to leftist academic journals since I resented going through the process of peer review. My last experience with RRPE, the URPE journal, was particularly off-putting. I was told by one of the peer reviewers that an article about Max Frankel’s book on the Cuban missile crisis would be enhanced by the perspective found in a Socialist Workers Party book on Cuba. Who needs that shit, even if it came from a tenured professor at the U. of California? full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/10/22/dropping-a-film-class-at-columbia-university/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
