Over at Big Questions, Heather Wax makes the connection between David Goodstein’s book On Fact and Fraud and the recent controversy surrounding Marc Hauser in a post titled “When Scientists Lie… and why they do it.”

She draws on Michael Shermer’s review of the book in Scientific American to argue that Goodstein’s book “helps explain the Marc Hauser story.”

Goodstein’s experience as vice-Provost at Caltech and head of their fraud squad gives him an inside track on what fraud is, who is likely to commit it, and why. In fact, as Shermer notes in his article, Goodstein identifies three risk factors for fraudsters:

The perpetrators, he writes, “1. Were under career pressure; 2. Knew, or thought they knew, what the answer to the problem they were considering would turn out to be if they went to all the trouble of doing the work properly; and 3. Were working in a field where individual experiments are not expected to be precisely reproducible.”

The conversation took place in the bat cave deep beneath Andrei’s secret castle
in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. As usual, he was kicking back in his vintage
velvet Prussian throne and I was sitting on a pile of petrified guano. Around us,
our ghost companions were watching the discussion in various states of
indifference. On Andrei’s side, Ted Berrigan and Francois Villon were chilling
out with Tzara and Pasternak. On my side, Rimbaud was pretending to ignore
Edward Abbey and Bukowski, who were becoming increasingly intoxicated.
Meanwhile, the walls oozed with the literary perspiration of the Earth.

Spitzer: I’ve read pretty much all your works, but I was stuck by The Poetry Lesson in particular. I think it’s the funniest, most intriguing, organically satisfying Codrescu-concoction out there. In a way it reminds me of Céline’s Conversations with Professor Y in that it’s a novella-sized conversation that plunges in and out of various discussions on literature and aesthetics while incorporating regular tangents in which you contemplate the lives and deaths of poets. These threads then take the reader other places, a lot like the “chautauquas”—or contemplations or meditations—which Robert M. Pirsig used in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as philosophical detours from the main narrative. In a way, the construction is similar to the first half of Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, where you’ve got all these sexy stories inside sexy stories, but you always shoot back to the plot—which is basically this: it’s the first day of your last Intro to Poetry class of your teaching career and you are assigning students ghost companions to study and “enter into psychic communication with.” Anyway, what I’m trying to do right now with this run-on question is to set the stage for future readers of The Poetry Lesson as to what the book is about and how it goes about doing a very unusual thing in contemporary lit: you’ve either invented a new form of storytelling or you’ve innovated on an old one—I’m not sure—but at one point you write “This is not a novel, but then neither is it poetry . . . and it’s no essay or memoir either.” So what is it?

At this precise spot, The Poetry Lesson began.

Andrei: This is a wonderful review/question that places me most flatteringly in the vicinity of your own heroes, Mark, so I’ll say this: you’re great. As for what this book is, I’m convinced that I invented a new form. I wrote it at Highlands Coffee in Baton Rouge, after my three-hour undergraduate poetry seminar. In the morning, before class, at the same coffee house, I wrote The Posthuman Dada Guide. After class, I had fun using the class to expand into a kind of synthetic expression of all my classes and teaching poetry for a quarter of a century. I shouldn’t even call it “teaching poetry,” because it was mostly playing and instructing students in the poetic mode, in thinking poetically, and even living that way if they had strong livers. I used some composite of youths of the 21st century and wrote without fear of digression because I would inevitably return to class the next week and come back to my characters. So, it’s a lived piece of reportage, in one sense, an autobiographical invention on the other, and a meditation on poetry scenes that had a bearing on the “lesson.” Writing this it occurred to me just how boring “teaching creative writing” is these days, and how many unimaginative drones who were themselves “taught” by unimaginative drones are fouling the air in our institutions of so-called “higher” learning. Most teacher-poets of the last four decades in America were dull bastards who nearly destroyed the art. Maybe they did.

Read more after the jump.

Following her readings of two poems from The Eternal City, Graber is interviewed by Anthony Carelli who will author a subsequent book of poems, Carnations, in The Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets.

Princeton Global Science endeavors to bring all of the various scientific fields of our publishing program together under a single umbrella. We couldn’t do this without including the new(ish) cognitive science list spearheaded by Eric Schwartz. Eric performs double duty at the press as both cognitive science editor and sociology editor. Here he answers some questions about his plans for the cognitive science list. Read more after the jump.

Continued »

Over at UCLA Today they are featuring the work of one of their own — Bill Roy, author of Reds, Whites, and Blues: Social Movements, Folk Music, and Race in the United States. If you click through, you will be able to listen to exclusive music from their archives and view some archival material.

Here a quick sampling from the interview that captures the early days and looks to the future:

UCLA Today: What was the first progressive cause in America to use what you’d consider to be folk music?

Roy: That was probably the American Revolution with “Yankee Doodle” and other songs spread by revolutionary soldiers. But the abolitionists were the first to use music that was embraced as authentic and moving because it came from common people. Abolitionists would bring slaves up from the South and have them sing spirituals at big meetings in the North. Many northerners had never met African Americans. Abolitionists were trying to vividly demonstrate the humanity of slaves, who had been compared to animals in the race-baiting imagery of the day.

These concerts featured such classics as “I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” But even though slaves had sung these songs in church, in the fields and in their homes, the abolitionists didn’t call them “folk music.” That recognition didn’t come until later.

…

UCLA Today: What is the prognosis today for folk music and social movements?

Roy: Folk music today is just a niche market that has a handful of followers — mostly singer- songwriters. The music contains a fairly mild critique of modern life and a certain amount of nostalgia about how life was before cities, big industry and big corporations, but it’s pretty tame. Music plays a different role now that’s much less powerful. I don’t see that there’s much potential to return to anything like the civil rights movement. One reason is we no longer grow up singing together. We grow up with Ipods.

Here is the review from Publishers Weekly in which they call Create Dangerously a “lean collection of jaw-breaking horrors side by side with luminous insights.” They also note that “in Danticat’s many remarkable stories and pensées from the gut, one locates the inimitable power of truth. Authorship becomes an act of subversion when one’s words might be read and acted on by someone risking his or her life if only to read them.”

And as if this praise wasn’t high enough, Create Dangerously is also listed here as a sleeper hits for 2010.