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An Interview with Dr. Laura Penny, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Kanye by Jaime R. Brenes Reyes and Jamie Rooney

Dr. Laura Penny teaches legions of students up from the ruins” (More Money Tan Brains eager to demystify society and its contents. 124). During her sojourn in London, Ontario, Currently a “contract-mode” (post-adjunct, Penny kindly allowed us (Jaime and Jamie) to pre-tenure-track) assistant professor in interview her on behalf of Te Public Humani- Contemporary and Early Modern Studies at ties @ Western. Te Public Humanities aims to Te University of King’s College in Halifax, she address common problems as well as opportu- publishes columns for major newspapers such nities that arise between the campus and com- as the Globe and Mail and the National Post and munity, thereby cultivating a renewed spirit of has written two books: Your Call is Important to citizenship through arts and humanities. Penny Us: Te Truth About Bullshit (2005) and More is also a major contributor to Halifax Humani- Money Tan Brains: Why School Sucks, College ties 101, a program that teaches the liberal arts, is Crap, and Idiots Tink Tey’re Right (2010). opening the way for “disadvantaged people to Her work reminds us that, despite sustained at- begin to participate in the life of the commu- tacks from every front, the arts and humanities nity, to engage in the political life in the widest are here to stay. sense.” As Penny discusses in the lines below, In mid-November 2013, Penny, an alum- the anti-elitist, contra-classist mission of the na of the Centre for the Study of Teory and Halifax Humanities 101 centres on ofering an Criticism, returned to Western under the aus- accessible liberal arts education to those who pices of Te Society of Graduate Students to de- are “outside” the traditional university orbit. liver her conversational lecture: “Full Fees and As a self-described “hood-rich” assistant Empty Pockets.” Penny noted the post-1996 professor (raised “prole,” currently living on a additions to the Western campus, especially bourgeois income), Penny is perfectly poised the new Richard Ivey School of Business; as de- to address our questions on the complex inter- tailed below, she has proposed an initiative to relations between Kanye West (pop culture), “burn down all the business schools and salt the stock market (anti-intellectual corporate the ashes so no more MBA-lings could spring values), and bullshit (the challenges facing

Issue 3: “Pop/Corn” 27 Te Word Hoard Interview with Dr. Laura Penny

academia). In this interview, Penny elaborates to do other things as well. Te idea of greater on what she would alter/amend if she were bullshit is that everyone should be an engineer, crowned Queen of Pop Culture. From the pop or that everyone should be a commerce stu- to the cultural, Penny adds critical theory to dent. And, if anything, I actually think that we the mixture without leaving behind the trendy [in the liberal arts] get a hard time for not be- and smarty. ing rigorous, which I don’t think is fair; other Her ofce door brandishes quotes from more careerist disciplines are a lot less rigorous Montaigne, Nietzsche, Deleuze, and of course— than we are. Kanye West. Tese intertexts are to hedge fund managers as garlic cloves are to vampires (she JBR/JR: In Te Star’s synopsis of your book, also teaches a course on vampires at King’s). More Money than Brains, they say that, “To- Kanye’s entranceway quote is “the greatest trag- day’s emphasis on training, money, and jobs edy of my life is that I will never get to see myself means the real purpose of higher learning— perform live.” If the Dionysian and Apollonian critical thinking and literacy—has been lost to birthed tragedy, Kanye is the baby-daddy of its the corporate agenda” (Robertson). At Western rebirth. (Penny might smile that “baby-daddy” University, many professors argue for the is in the OED.) As Penny argues below, Kanye maintenance of civic values “in the face of in- belongs in the academy; Homer belongs to the tense pressure to capitulate to corporate log- masses. But, beyond popularizing “high art” or ic” (Alison Conway, qtd. in Samu-Visser and legitimizing the scholastic critique of “low art,” Budabin McQuown 67). Within the univer- Penny is annihilating the distance between art’s sity, when are these civic values at odds with highbrow, lowbrow, and no-brow. Tere is no corporate values? brow that is safe from her—she’s interrogating LP: I’m not wholly compelled by the argument or furrowing them all, one by one. For that rea- that civic values are a given, because it makes us son, it’s a great tragedy that she will never get to sound like missionaries. And, I don’t think that interview herself. kind of missionary position—to be puckish—is necessarily a winning argument or that it’s nec- Jaime R. Brenes Reyes and Jamie Rooney: Is essarily true. As for the corporate values, the big there “bullshit”—to use your term—in the lib- problem is that corporate values tend to be val- eral arts? ues of short-term expedience. Temporality as Laura Penny: No, I actually think there’s a lot we know it has been telescoped to the next fscal more bullshit in other more explicitly careerist quarter or, politically, the next election. So, ac- departments. At least in the liberal arts most of tually the thing I like about the liberal arts and us now are fairly frank about the fact that this that I think is valuable about the liberal arts is may not qualify you for a job, and you may have the “long-term.” Making kids read the Greeks,

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the Romans—get acquainted with the Middle would say—cancerous growth of administra- Ages, get acquainted with the Renaissance and tion at every university. I do think that empha- the Enlightenment—gives them a sense of just sis on experience is something that comes from how short-term our values are. Tat’s the ac- administration, and it usually means buildings tual value of the liberal arts—seeing how many and services. It never means instruction; it never times we’ve made civilizations and destroyed means we’re going to pay people lots of money them is a good way to realize that what’s hap- to teach you. It never means how little they’re pening is contingent, is provisional, that this is willing to pay to teach people even though this not the only way to live and this is not the only is what they always talk about on the website. way people have organized themselves. Tey don’t talk about the fancy dorms on the Te empathy argument and the citizenship website; they talk about “how committed our argument, both of which are kind of moral- teachers are, [and] how much they love teach- izing, would also disclude a lot of our syllabi. ing you.” So, experience is just a code word for If you’re going to follow Martha Nussbaum’s aspects of university life that are not scholastic. argument—“Te humanities are important be- Tis is the kind of thing that administrators cause they teach us to be good citizens”—well think of when they think of experience—ba- then why are you getting your kids to read the sically the experience of everything peripheral Marquis de Sade? I would have to change my to learning. syllabus a lot if that was the goal of the liberal arts. So, it’s more again a sense of the long term JBR/JR: In your 1998 MA thesis in Critical rather than the short term; the corporate agen- Teory, “Spent: On Economic Metaphor in da at the university has to do with fulflling our Post-Structuralist Philosophy,” you propose a short term needs in a way that is going to be demystifcation of “the economic” as “the frst ultimately self-defeating. step towards revoking its dangerous deifcation” (7). In Canada, have the economic and business JBR/JR: I wanted to know about your own ex- elements of universities taken on a sacred sta- perience at Western, because the Western mot- tus, making them beyond legitimate critique to is to provide the best student experience in and judgement? Canada. And, they want to be global . . . LP: Economic language is essentially for us LP: Best student experience in the world! Suck what the Catholic Church would have been for on that U of T! the Middle Ages. It’s the main type of interpre- tative mode; it’s the thing to which all things JBR/JR: What do you think Western means by must appeal. I do think it demands demysti- experience here? fying because, on one hand, it does have this LP: Tis is something that has everything to do power and authority precisely because it doesn’t with the growth of administration, with the—I make much sense to people. In a lot of ways the

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right market fundamentalists are much better the general public thinks of as being the pri- postmodernists than any liberal arts person: mary functions of the university are falling to all market values are absolutely relative; a lot adjuncts, grad students: the underpaid. of them are fundamentally simulacral. So, my I’d say here is that if you look at things like basic argument in More Money Tan Brains is the dialogue on Massive Open Online Courses that a lot of things that people say about the lib- (MOOCs), that there is, on the one hand, they eral arts are actually much more applicable to want the university experience to be more bou- the fnancial class which, like the administrative tique-esque, to compete with MOOCs, but on class in the university, has grown precipitously the other hand, the actual job of dealing with and has gone from being managerial to being a undergrads is not one that the university val- parasite that’s eating its host. ues as much as it should. When I started tell- ing people how much money I made, they were JBR/JR: Tenured faculty appear as a fgure we shocked: A) Tey were shocked that I would tell need to demystify, at least to the public. At the them, because it’s Canada—you can talk about same time, adjunct faculty is on the rise; peo- your colonoscopy, you can talk about your sex ple don’t know about the percentages, but at life, you can’t talk about how much money you the same time student satisfaction is not going make, which only benefts the wealthy, and only down. So, what the hell is happening? makes people blame themselves for structural LP: One of the things that I’ve found repeatedly problems and for wage erosion; B) Tey were is that there is this assumption that everyone shocked at how little money I made. I do think who works in a university makes 100 Grand. there is this culture of wanting to blame indi- People read “sunshine lists,” they see professors viduals for structural problems, and we at the on them, and they just assume that if you’re a university don’t seem to be doing a better job professor, you are making good money. I fnd of dodging that than the rest of the culture. people are consistently shocked [about] the ac- Even though a lot of people here have read tual situation of adjuncts, it’s the best kept se- Karl Marx, that doesn’t seem to change the cret in education. Again, no university website deeper situation. ever sells anything to parents and students but JBR/JR: As a follow-up question, your dis- high quality teaching. I’m sure if I looked at sertation proposes the demystifcation of “the Western’s website right now, they would be like: economic” as “the frst step towards revoking “Our teachers are the best, they care so much, its dangerous deifcation” (7). More recently blah, blah, blah.” But, increasingly, because most in your book, More Money than Brains, and in tenured faculty are hired on the stats based on interviews, you have proposed an initiative to their research more so than their teaching, in- “burn down all the business schools and salt creasingly those functions of the university that the ashes so no more MBA-lings could spring

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up from the ruins” (124). Are the kernels of that I’m pretty sure J.K. Rowling doesn’t regret your books and works found in your MA and her liberal arts degree. I can do that and I’m PhD work? happy to do that because that’s one of the fanks that we have to defend ourselves on, but I also LP: Te reason I wrote that MA thesis was I think that we should be asking why this is the was really struck by the fact that afer May 1968 system through which we interpret everything. did not work out as people like Deleuze—my When people talk about the ‘real world,’ what hero—had hoped, that immediately you have they generally mean by that is the economy, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Deleuze, and Guattari, all but so much of the economy is purely notional writing these books with these sustained eco- and purely emotional, that even Keynes wrote nomic metaphors. So, why is it that that’s the about the animal spirits, that things are valu- language that they choose to talk about this able because we think they’re valuable, things “Why do revolutions fail?” problem—which is are valuable because we feel they’re valuable. still a huge problem. I’m very lucky; my campus So, I always fnd it really strange when people at King’s is actually pretty political. We have the say, “Tat won’t work in the real world,” when lowest rate of student debt in Nova Scotia, be- they mean an economy that is so fabulated in cause we do get a lot of afuent students from so many ways. Toronto. But, we also have the highest turn-out for things like tuition protests, because even if JBR/JR: From the marginal perspective of the students aren’t in debt, they see this as a real liberal arts, should we take a kind of “guer- problem, they see this as an intergenerational rilla” tactic or should we just ignore what the inequality, which is a huge issue, which is what critics say? I’m writing about in my next book. I’ve been interested in economics for a long LP: Ignoring is never good, especially when time just because I think that again, this is kind they have so much of the mainstream press in of our primary way of assigning value to things. their clutches. You can make the argument that I’m defnitely on “Team Nietzsche”; we’re com- in fact a liberal arts degree is not a life sentence pulsive value assignors, that we cannot but inter- to “baristadom,” and what’s more is that this is pret things, that we cannot but make meaning all a totally post hoc ergo propter hoc argument— the time, wherever we go. And, it’s curious that problems with youth unemployment are struc- this is the system that we’ve chosen to be the big tural problems with the labour market, structur- system, the one that all the other systems have al problems of intergenerational inequality—to to account for and answer to, ultimately. So, I come along and be like, “’Cus you like English can do a good job of making arguments about that’s why you can’t get a good job.” First of all, the liberal arts from an economic perspective, that’s again reducing a structural problem to an that culture is a multi-billion dollar industry, individual choice. Second of all, it’s also just not

“Pop/Corn” 31 Te Word Hoard Interview with Dr. Laura Penny

empirically true. If you look at the history here, diferently, if we can’t have diferent shapes of people in the humanities generally have a couple thought, and the only way we can think is hi- of rough years when they frst get out of school erarchically, then how are we supposed to live where they have to fnd a career, because they’re diferently?” Tis is one of the reasons that I’m not as immediately legible to human resources so madly in love with Deleuze, is because his departments as a commerce grad, or an engi- whole career is devoted to this question of “How neering grad. But afer that, their earnings catch do we make diferent ways of life possible?” up, and what’s even more signifcant is a recent study in the States: Te American Academy of JBR/JR: Your work focuses on a contempo- Arts and Sciences said that 84% of people were rary “campaign against intellectualism,” espe- happy they’d done a humanities degree (3). So, cially in the arts and humanities. On one side I do think that you have to make the argument of the argument, Margaret Wente has repeat- that kids are going to have to invent their jobs edly written articles such as “Fries with that increasingly. If there’s no guaranteed prizes at BA? Te declining value of a degree,” arguing the top of the greasy pole then kids are going to that a BA in English is “not the wisest choice have to be a lot more inventive and fexible, and of major” and associated with widespread un- again this is one of the things that the liberal deremployment (1). As a counter-point, Te arts is good for. Atlantic recently published, “Te Best Argu- Tat there is an economic value to studying ment for Studying English? Te Employment the liberal arts, I think is an argument we have Numbers.” Te article uses employment sur- to make. But, also, there’s a way that it allows vey data to demonstrate the pragmatic value you to criticize the notion that economic value of a liberal arts degree. What are the best ways/ is the only value. Tis is one of the other things means for arguing for the legitimacy of the lib- that you get from the “long-term” in the liberal eral arts within the university and a broader arts: the notion that this economy that we have public intellectualism? is just one way to put together people. Because LP: Well, the frst thing you have to do is es- the imagination defcit, the poverty of imagina- tablish that Margret Wente is an obsolete privi- tion, the fact that it’s hard to think of other ways leged boomer. I remember when I frst started of doing things—this is a serious problem. Tis at the Globe, because I used to write a little bit is as big of a problem as fscal defcit and politi- for them, one of the things that a lot of Globe cal defcit. A couple of weeks ago I was teaching columnists would do before everybody had the my homeboys Deleuze and Guattari and one of Internet was just rewrite something that had my students was like, “I’m not sure how this is been in the New York Times last week. Now that political.” We were doing “Te War Machine” we have the Internet we don’t need her to do essay and I was like, “Well, if we can’t think that anymore. She is literally obsolete. She is a

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Walkman. She is an eight-track cassette tape. traps. You give this course a cool title, and then She’s everything I hate about that generation in I actually make them think and read things that one smug package. She’s a typical “pull the lad- are really hard. And, again, it’s very easy to as- der up behind her.” Tis is a woman who has an sume that kids coming in know nothing, but MA from U of T in English. She’s had a very fne you’re absolutely wrong to think that. Tey are career as the editor of Te Report on Business. not tabula rasas at all. I’m not sure how her MA in English qualifed What I want to say here is that a lot of pop her to do that, according to her own arguments. culture is actually quite sophisticated. On the And, again, she’s one of those people—this is door of my ofce, I have a quote from Michel what bad boomers do—who cannot abide the de Montaigne, a quote from Nietzsche, a quote notion that other people are young. She cannot from Deleuze, and a quote from Kanye West. abide the idea that anyone else protests things: Te quote from Kanye is, “the greatest tragedy “O, we did that in the ’60s, we ended racism, of my life is that I will never get to see myself sexism, and homophobia by fucking in the mud perform live.” I love it. It makes me laugh ev- at Woodstock so whatever you’re doing now is ery time I look at it. I actually just had a discus- just derivative.” And, I do think that she’s a great sion with the school paper about his new album example of pseudo-contrarianism. I would put Yeezus. Kanye is really smart, and that we see [Kevin] O’Leary in the same camp, where you a lot of the dismissal of anyone under 40, the have the tone of a contrarian, like, “I am speak- infantalizing of black people, the failure to un- ing truth to power,” except that you’re saying derstand hip-hop culture—which is really the everything that power wants to hear. only new culture produced in the last twenty years, unless you want to count the Internet— JBR/JR: You have made suggestions for post- but that’s more of a recycling of what has ever 1 secondary education as Queen of the Colleges. been, as Marx says of capitalism. So, I like pop If you were instead Queen of Pop Culture, how culture as it is, and I think that pop culture is would you alter/amend the popular vision of complex and sophisticated in ways that oth- universities or pop culture itself? er things we’re giving to young people aren’t. LP: I actually think that this is something we do Again, it has failed kids far less than the gov- a fair amount at the university I work at. Like, ernment, far less than most schools. If you are right now, I am teaching a course on vampires. I a kid growing up in America right now, there is don’t actually have a lot of Twilight kids, merci- more of a chance that you’re going to develop fully—although we did talk a bit about Twilight an acquaintance with high art through Kanye last night—it’s great to start where the kids are. or Jay Z, than there is through your failed, crap- So, we have other courses on things like Pirates, py, underfunded schools. Blaming pop culture for example. And these courses are wonderful for social problems is just wrong. Tere are lots

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of things that are mercenary in pop culture, lots trouble, but I didn’t care. And so we were doing of thing that are sexist, racist, homophobic, but Terza Rima, and this kid could turn anything again, pop culture is a lot more honest in some into Terza Rima; it was amazing. Afer I showed ways than mainstream media, than what cur- them what Terza Rima looked like, everyone in rently passes for education. the class had to write down a non-explicit sin that they had committed recently, and he was JBR/JR: So, are we talking here about cultural just converting them into Terza Rima on the top studies, or the integration of pop culture within of his head. English, or literature, or education? I had this argument going on with one of LP: Te big thing in education, or this is the my favourite colleagues, a very friendly and way that I see it, or how I try to do it, is get- afectionate argument, that it’s actually easier ting students from where they are to where you to teach poetry now than it was twenty years want them to go. And, so, it’s always good to ago because of rap music. Students are habitu- start from where they live, to say this is what ated to the idea of rhythmic language; they’re you think about vampires, but there is an actual habituated to the idea of a rhyming language. history of this metaphor, and this is how it in- Te other thing I needle him about is that he’s tersects with sexuality, this is how it intersects one of these “all men are pantywaists now” with the Catholic Church, and there is a lot of people: rap music is the only cultural expres- overlap between vampires and Jesus that is ex- sion where verbal dexterity is wedded to an tremely anxiety-making in the 17th century for aggressive, abrasive masculinity, like, “Why do certain Catholic bishops. We have to give the you not love Kanye?” Te new Pusha-T album kids some credit for what they already know. If is incredible! So I’m slowly winning him over. you treat the kids like they don’t know anything, I really love hip-hop and that we are living in that’s patronizing, and patronizing is never a its golden age, and a golden age of television. good way to start educating anyone—you can- All these declinist narratives about pop culture not teach anything if you’re going to condescend are from old people who cannot get over Te to them. I taught in Bufalo, when I was doing Beatles, old people who are entirely too suf- my PhD there, and I had a student from Balti- fused with nostalgia to see that there’s a lot of more who was a free-style rapper, and we were good stuf out there. It’s very easy to assume that doing Dante, even though my boss told me not things were better when you were young. Tere to because it’s too hard. Tat’s me fipping the are a lot of golden ages happening right now bird for the recording. I had a huge fght with that give me great hope. So, yeah, I love pop cul- her. Te minute you decide that something is ture. It’s a good way to help explain old stuf, but too hard, you’re not teaching anymore—that it’s also a good place to start with your students you’ve just given the fuck up. And I got in because they’re already soaking in it. It’s not like

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they come to us with no culture; they come to are—you get a very diferent interpretation of us with a host of diferent assumptions that we “Te Waste Land” from an eighteen-year-old have to engage. who is fresh out of high school. One of the things that is really great about JBR/JR: Can you tell us more about the Halifax Halifax Humanities is a lot of programs for poor Humanities 101? people are about trying to make them economi- LP: It’s such a great idea. One of the things we cally viable: they are job-training programs. We have to be vigilant about is appearing as an are emphatically not that. Many of the people ivory tower and that you can only study the we deal with are people who are physically ill, liberal arts through the great books if you are or mentally ill, or older, or single-parents and bourgeois and have leisure. Halifax Humanities will never be proper capitalist units. But, it’s is actually a version of something called the really amazing to see how they bond between Clemente Program that is all over North each other, because another problem with be- America. Tere are eight in Canada: there is ing poor is isolation, that you feel that you’re the one in Vancouver, there is one in Calgary, some only one in this situation and that it’s your fault, in Ontario, and they are trying to start one in that it has nothing to do with the structure that New Brunswick. We have been doing ours for you live in, that it has nothing to do with being eight years. I’ve coordinated Section 4, which is physically ill, or mentally ill, or, again, a single- roughly the eighteenth to nineteenth century, mother. “It’s your fault,” is what the economy where we read things like Kant, and I have also wants to tell you ever repeatedly, to individu- done Section 5, where we read things like Elliot, ate this or to protect this—as Margaret Tatcher Nietzsche, De Beauvoir, Arendt, and it’s great. once said, there is no such thing as society. One We are actually having next weekend a fund- of the great things about it is that I have never raiser, which we have done before, where had a professor go in there and come out disap- we have 24 teams read all 24 books of Te pointed. Most of the professors I’ve asked to do Odyssey, because we are not fun-run people, we this are like “Oh my God, they are really into it.” are reading-people. Yeah, people really get into Tey can just talk about it without the pressure it, and one of the things I love about it is that to get a good grade, or to get a recommenda- we have a lot of our former students, we have tion for grad school—there is no kind of end. current students, we have “old money” who are And it’s exactly at the point at which we have to good enough to donate to us, so it’s a great way start a second year seminar for them, because to break down those class barriers. It’s amazing, they didn’t want to leave. And, then, we had frst of all, how interesting the readings of stuf this seminar where they decide the topic every

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year. Tis year they’re doing religion—I haven’t novel called Te Rise of the Meritocracy, which been in there yet because it’s not where I shine. I was about the fact that a certain phylum of peo- guess I’ll teach Nietzsche—maybe later! ple who were really good at taking tests, and re- Halifax Humanities, I love it, because it’s a ally good at getting into elite schools, and really good example, frst of all, that the humanities good at becoming stockbrokers, were running need not be elite. Again, people that society the world. He actually had this great article in routinely dismisses are actually quite brilliant, Te Guardian, just before he died, where he says if you give them a chance to read and to speak. that at least in the good old days when people Te conversations they have with each other got by on nepotism, they had a certain measure and the fact that they have this community now, of humility: they knew that part of why they I am deliriously happy about it, and I’m really had a job was chance or that they knew some- looking forward to reading Te Odyssey with body. So, I feel so sorry for Michael Young, be- these people again next weekend. cause people constantly use meritocracy as, you know, “this is what justice would look like,” and JBR/JR: One last question, the fnal one: if a that is not how he meant it at all. He meant it popular culture of meritocracy or mediocrity as a pejorative. And, he was writing in 2008 in fourishes, are we more likely to become a so- Te Guardian about the fnancial crisis; afer ciety of bullshit (bluf, fakery, and phoniness) the fnancial crisis you have this whole narra- or corniness (unsophisticated, ridiculously tive, again of “we almost blew up the world, but old-fashioned, and sentimental)? Where does we’re the only people who know how to fx it . . . ‘truth’—from the title of your book—ft into you cannot expect people who study English or this dynamic? philosophy to understand credit default swaps.” LP: You mention meritocracy, and I want to So, he was talking specifcally about this kind of take advantage to tell you the coolest thing I competence that we constantly reward. Imagine, learned when I was researching for my last making up a pejorative term and then everyone book, and that’s the reason why I write books: to thinks that that is the way things should be. learn stuf, as well as to try not to explode with What I want to say about mediocrity is that rage—to try to convert as much of my ressenti- there is a lot of pop culture, which is genuinely ment into jokes as possible. It’s all about how to excellent. I see a lot more well-compensated manage the ressentiment. One of the best things mediocrity amongst the managerial class. One about meritocracy is that the guy who invented of the arguments I make in More Money than the word didn’t intend it in the way that every- Brains is that I never get mad about Miley Cyrus body uses it—that the cream rises to the top, or athletes making a squillion dollars, because: the best get the best. Te guy who invented A) they are genetic freaks; B) they have no the term meritocracy was a British sociologist private lives whatsoever. Tey are being canni- named Michael Young who wrote a dystopian balized by TMZ and things like that on a daily

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basis—and I say that as someone who loves a bad thing. Sophistication can be almost like TMZ. I think gossip is intensely pro-social a guarantee that you’re getting your “cultural and ethical. Tey are the people who are earn- kale,” like “we’re going to the symphony now ing their money in a lot of ways, if for no other because that’s what sophisticated people do.” It’s reason than giving us all objects to talk about a terrible reason to go to a symphony. I don’t in our ofces. Tere is a certain sort of brutal mind unsophisticated. I do not like sentiment. I democracy in pop culture: if you make a bad am not a big fan of sentiment. Tis is probably record, if you don’t please your audience, you’re because I am intensely sappy. Tis is defnitely fred. On the other hand, you can drive a cor- a self-loathing position on my part. But I do poration into the ground, and still get a multi- think that sentiment is manipulative, and that million dollar golden parachute at the end of it, sentiment always goes hand-in-hand with that and you get that from a board of twelve moth- kind of calculation. Tere is that great passage erfuckers exactly like you. Tis managerial class in Adorno’s Minima Moralia, that you cannot reproduces like spores and has infltrated our give kids presents anymore because they are world and is now cannibalizing us. wondering what your angle is, that gifs are now ways to sell toothbrushes and soap. I do have JBR/JR: Tat outstanding pop culture—is its intense suspicions about any movie that wins enemy bullshit or corniness (unsophisticated, an Oscar, for example, that sentiment is a way old-fashioned, sentimental)? for us to pretend that we are doing something LP: I don’t mind unsophisticated. Unsophisti- about all the damage wrought by calculation. cated can be very good. Again, I love Kanye, I But we are not. We are just feeling in someone’s love my Basquiat, and a lot of rap that people general direction, again in this condescending may see as unsophisticated—which is wrong. and patronizing kind of way. So, yeah, if we are So, unsophisticated doesn’t bother me as a talking corny-sentimental then thumbs down, “prole” (proletarian), because sometimes so- but if we are talking corny-crude or apparent- phistication can be a way of concealing vacuity, ly-unsophisticated then thumbs up, because like a lot of art-house movies that I never want this is where a lot of interesting things actually to see again as long as I live. Tere are certain come from. types of literary fction that are “middle-age- person-has-problems” and “frst-world-prob- University of Western Ontario lem” at that; unsophisticated is not necessarily

1 In More Money Tan Brains, Penny provides her platform as the hypothetically coronated “Queen of the Colleges” (124).

“Pop/Corn” 37 Te Word Hoard Interview with Dr. Laura Penny

Works Cited

“Humanities Report Card.” American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 2013. Web. Penny, Laura. More Money Tan Brains: Why School Sucks, College is Crap, and Idiots Tink Tey’re Right. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2010. Print. ---. “Spent: On Economic Metaphor in Post-Structuralist Philosophy.” M.A. Tesis. Te University of Western Ontario, 1998. UMI Dissertations. Web. ---. Your Call Is Important To Us: Te Truth About Bullshit. New York: Crown, 2005. Print. Robertson, Patricia Dawn. “More Money than Brains: Te Cult of Stupidity.” Te Star. 23 April 2010. Web. Samu-Visser, Diana, and Nina Budabin McQuown. “Leadership and Pedagogy in the Arts and Humanities: An Interview with Alison Conway and Joel Faflak.” Te Word Hoard. 1.1 (2012): 64-74. Print. Wente, Margaret. “Fries with that BA? Te declining value of a degree.” Te Globe and Mail. 9 April 2013. Web.

WH, Issue 3, 8 January 2015