Present and future reading

obituary

Arguelles and others take their cue from the ancient Maya, according to whose remarkable calendrical system we are now living in the fourth world, which began on August 11, 3114 B.C.(E.) (with proleptic Gregorian conversion) but will conclude, having reached the 13th “baktun” (i.e., 13.0.0.0.0), on next year’s penultimate Friday. Among the popular visions of what we have in store for us — on the word of folks today, I stress, and not anything contained in the Mayan “Popol Vuh” — is an apocalyptic collision, or near-collision, between Earth and a planet that goes by the catchy Babylonian name Nibiru. Another vision, involving the construction of a series of rescuing arks in the Himalayas, can be seen in Roland Emmerich’s disaster movie “2012” (which came out in 2009, presumably so that it would have time to make $770 million).

Those who believe and promote such things outside the theater are often labeled pseudoscientists. As it happens, I know a lot more about pseudoscience than I did at the start of the semester, thanks to my colleague Michael Gordin’s wonderful book “The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe,” which Gordin finished last month and which the University of Chicago Press is deliberately releasing next year to take advantage of what is sometimes called “the 2012 phenomenon.” Velikovsky (1895-1979), a Russian emigre who lived in Princeton for nearly three decades and whose papers are now housed in our Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, might be described as the most notorious pseudoscientist of the second half of the 20th century. Sixty-one years ago, in April 1950, he published what would quickly become his best-known and best-selling book, “Worlds in Collision,” which proposes that the plagues described in the Book of Exodus were the result of a near-collision in historical times between Earth and Venus, which had been ejected from Jupiter in the form of a comet. For this and numerous other proposals, especially about astrophysical phenomena, Velikovsky was for many years the main punching bag of establishment science. His story is fascinating in itself and can be used, as Gordin shows, to help demonstrate the larger matter — one of evidently great importance, both theoretical and practical — of just how difficult it in fact is to distinguish pseudoscience from science.

Since I am neither (I hope) a pseudoscientist nor, like Gordin, a historian of (pseudo)science, you may well ask why I was reading his book at all, much less in pre-publication manuscript. The simple answer is that Gordin is a colleague and friend, and I enjoy reading the works of colleagues and friends — and the sooner the better. In recent months I have prevailed on David Bellos to let me have a go at his delightful soon-to-be-bestseller “Is that a Fish in your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything” (out in the fall) and persuaded Brooke Holmes GS ’05 that even someone who has preferred in his hidebound way to reserve the term “gender” for grammatical discussions might have something to say about “Gender: Antiquity and its Legacy” (to be published early next year). Holmes’ book turns out to be an exceptionally lucid weaving together of Plato and debates in contemporary gender theory, the latter an academic area in which lucidity has not played much of a role. I will adjust my use of the g-word accordingly.

In general, I read pretty much everything the classicists and linguists write (Bob Kaster’s membership in the rarefied Book-of-the-Month Club adds significantly to the pleasurable load) and make an effort — severely limited, of course, by time and competence — to read as many monographs, articles, novels, poems and columns as I can by people across the University. The fact is that every person’s work is, well, personal, and it is interesting to hear people’s voices on the page and to gain from their writings some insight into their personalities, into why they seem to behave as they do in day-to-day campus business.

Why am I telling you this? It’s because I am regularly surprised by how little interest students appear to take in the work of their teachers. I’ve known seniors who had the privilege of working with Jim Richardson but haven’t even considered reading through his poetic oeuvre, much less his studies of such Victorian figure as Tennyson, much less still Tennyson himself. There are Ph.D. candidates in my own department who have not read all the articles of even those big-name professors — Harriet Flower and Andrew Ford, for example — whose work they claim most to admire. And why on earth would anyone associated with Princeton avoid Shirley Tilghman’s recent essay “It’s all about the Talent,” even if you don’t think you can quite manage her groundbreaking “CTCF Mediates Methylation-sensitive Enhancer-blocking Activity at the ‘H19/Igf2’ Locus”?

Go read. You have twenty months.

Joshua Katz is a professor in the Department of Classics. He can be reached at jtkatz@princeton.edu.