More Noted Things

Clive James,"Kingsley without the Women," TimesOnline, 31 January, reviews Zachary Leader, The Life of Kingsley Amis. Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily for the tip.

Manan Ahmed calls my attention to the fact that two of our academic colleagues, Sami al-Arian formerly of the University of South Flordia, now in the Northern Neck Regional Jail in Warsaw, Virginia, and James Sherley at MIT, have begun hunger strikes in protest of judgments against them. I don't know enough about their cases to evaluate their merits. I'm all too familiar with the personal sense of being up against an intractable system that drives a person to a hunger strike.

In the spring of 1994, I began a fast at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, when the president of the college refused to receive a petition signed by half of the school's resident student body. It asked the administration to reconsider a negative tenure decision against me. His refusal even to receive the petition violated all the institution's claims to democratic process. For six weeks through the late spring, until commencement, I lived on liquids, vitamins, and electrolytes. I lost 12 to 15 pounds, but I'll never forget the mockery by a dean's wife, who asked how my"diet" was going. Insofar as it hoped to reverse the formal judgment, my fast failed. But a fast or a hunger strike is about more than that. It's about reaching into the inner-resources of the self and appealing to whatever transcendent power there may be for strength to prevail in the face of death. Thirteen years later, in that sense at least, my fast succeeded. I lived to teach elsewhere and to publish freely. I hope that Sami al-Arian and James Sherley have that vindication, at the least.