new app kicks my butt; or, I only intended apples & oranges

I'm happily using a new iPhone application that works pretty seamlessly with blogger. I can't imagine what real advantage this gives me or anyone other than sheer speed and super-presence or ridiculous immediacy. Yet isn't blogging already so immediate (at least in tone and diction) as to be ridiculous? Yet again I can imagine real live-blogging - for instance from a reading or art event. I'll try it soon so stay tuned. The photo below I found just now in my phone's camera log - taken during the reception last week at our Silliman celebration. Erin Gautsche and the KWH students went through "The Alphabet" looking for food references and then served us only items mentioned in Ron's poetry. I was never gladder than at that moment that Ron had spent so much time in California. He is by no means a foodie poet (an understatement) but the New Sentence does tend to grab up a few of the nutritions in the environment. "I don't mean to presume uh if you could it seems that is I only intended apples and oranges" (from Garfield, p. 49).

a few notes on the cultural cold war

Here's my introduction to a session featuring readings for the Rothenberg/Joris Poems for the Millenium back in 1998. In my 11-minute intro I tried to do something a little more than my usual short get-out-of-the-way segue to the main presenters. I wanted to say something in particular about Jerome Rothenberg's passage (as a young poet) through the cultural cold war. I make reference, for instance, to his discovery at the University of Michigan that in the 1950s Whitman was definitely on the outs. (To get to my comments about Rothenberg in the 50s, you can go immediately to a point halfway through the recording.)

remembering the objectivists

In the fall of 2005, Harvey Shapiro and Norman Finkelstein came together - to read their poems in tandem, and to talk about the objectivists, which, in Harvey's case, entailed remembering them through years of personal as well as aesthetic interaction. Bob Perelman moderated the discussion about the objectivists, and here are some audio recordings of a few highlights:

[] on the Jewishness of the objectivists

[] on reading Zukofsky

[] on Lorine Niedecker.

And there's more. Consult our Shapiro-Finkelstein page.

cheap images seen between bars

Readers of this blog will know that I am a fan of Erica Baum's photography. Well, good news: we can see her new work at Dispatch, 127 Henry Street (NYC), until March 22. Below at left is one of the new photographs, and here's a short review from Artforum by Robin O'Neill-Butler:

The red-, blue-, and green-stippled book edges in Erica Baum’s new photographs bring to mind the paperbacks that encumber used-book stores, thrift shops, and family libraries: faded film adaptations, celebrity biographies, and the occasional art monograph. In this exhibition, she walks a fine line between documentation and concealment, presenting pictures of eight such books fanning out and close-up, open but not completely exposed. Fragments of text and cheaply reproduced images––Goldie Hawn in a scene from Shampoo (1975), Art Garfunkel, Richard and Pat Nixon––are evident between the bars. Although these images appear to mine a specific American decade, the 1970s, Baum shirks nostalgia for abstraction. Previously her work (in black-and-white) examined card catalogs, from which she derived a form of clinical and concrete poetry (SEX DIFFERENCES—SHIRTS, reads one). Here, the pulsating hues create geometric patterns, which appear painterly from a distance and recall a colorful version of Gerhard Richter’s “Vorhang” (Curtain) series from the mid-’60s. The fine red vertical lines in Art, 2008, for example, neatly frame the seated, youthful musician and echo the saturated crimson blocks in Nixon and Pat, 2009, which seem to split the image in half. Without entirely displacing the subjects of these photographs, Baum shrewdly extracts image and text from source, pushing language, both visual and verbal, to unstable, higher ground.

See this earlier entry.

left-right battle in history department becomes art

In 1974, the History department at CCNY erupted into a bitter political dispute in which older faculty members Stanley Page, Edward Rosen and others accused their younger colleagues of disruptive leftist agitation.

In a work called "Accused" (1975) Charles Bernstein performs the 1975 CUNY Faculty Senate report on the matter.

Available at PennSound is the entire 45-minute recording of this piece: MP3.

we're all in the big glass

This of course is Marcel Duchamp's "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)," 1915-23. The materials include oil, lead foil, lead wire and (say the people at the Philadelphia Museum of Art) "dust" also. All on (or in) two glass panels. A box of papers that are the drawn plans and other writings about the project, by Duchamp, is displayed nearby. (The box makes me think of Robert Granier's Sentences, and although I'm no expert on Sentences I have to guess that Grenier was in part thinking of and positively influenced by these sorts of boxes-of-papers-as-art projects Duchamp undertook.)

Bride Stripped is hard to photograph, even by good photographers (I am not that). I try to see it at least once a year at the PMA and always try my hand at snapshots. This time I didn't wait for people also looking at the work to move away and decided just to let them be part of the transparency. Without knowing this as a matter of fact, I'm certain that Duchamp would want them to be included in the view.

the poet as novelist

I just spent a wonderful two days with Robert Coover, visiting us as a Writers House Fellow, our first of three this spring (next up is Joan Didion). The reading Bob gave last night was riveting. He read all languagy stuff - prose-poems, really. Antic, thick with sound, featuring some of his many imitative American voices. I wanted him to do an encore of "The Fallguy's Faith," his brilliant 1.5-page piece about Humpty Dumpty, which reads like a gone-awry thesaurus of American idioms around falling and fallen. Fortunately Bob Coover came back this morning and I had the opportunity to interview him and moderate a discussion with others, both there at the House and about 35 people watching the live video stream. And I asked him to read the Humpty piece this morning. Here are your links:

[] our Coover page with links to video of the reading and the interview, and audio-only mp3's of both;

[] a few photographs from Coover's 3-hour session with the students in my Fellows seminar;

[] the text of Vince Levy's introduction to Coover at the Monday night reading.

[] photographs of the visit (by John Carroll)

don't be a Henny Penny about texting

I'm quoted in today's Washington Post - in a story about text messaging. The writer, Donna St. George, with whom I spoke the other day, is smart and nice, but let's face it: if the "story" was that these new forms of succinct writing were modestly or significantly beneficial, the Post would never run it. But Henny Pennyism runs amok when a new technology is so rapidly embraced by the young while parents and teachers are left somewhat behind. And maybe it's not specifically technology at all - but change of this sort generally. To be sure, Ms. St. George's article is full of moderate comments and no evidence even close to conclusive that any damage is being done. There's the usual anecdotal nightmare-scenario remark by an expert that the reading of Shakespeare might be interrupted by a message from some acronym-obsessed best friend, but, c'mon, in the 1930s the Shakespeare assignment would have been interrupted by the neighbor banging on the window with an urgent request to come out and play or the sneaking out from under the covers of the girly mag, or in the '70s by a quick listen, big headphones over the head, to a cut from the latest LP...or, in any era, by nose-picking, doodling, phone-calling, etc. If the interruption is the writing of more language, that in fact seems better to me, by far, than the time-honored proscrastinations of what we now call our golden ages of childhood. And why does high-culture Shakespeare always appear as the positive object of attention? (Well,because it makes the story about a skirmish in the culture wars. High = Shakespeare, low = texting. Stop the low, save the high! Cause, effect.) What makes inattention to one's homework new here? And what makes this kind of inattention (but really it's multiple attentiveness) ipso facto bad? Or inattention to anything one is ought to be doing? I suggest that those concerned about all this read John Ashbery's pre-internet poem, "The Instruction Manual." The speaker is doing exactly what he shouldn't be doing, and possibly he's multi-tasking with greater focus on the daydreamt Other. And he's writing as a brilliant means of avoiding responsibility. And what comes of that? Oh, imagination...art.

Lenny, Allen, Dustin

Yesterday Lawrence Schwartzwald photographed Dustin Hoffman on Madison Avenue reading Allen Ginsberg's selected interviews. Lawrence reminds me that Hoffman played Lenny Bruce and that in the famous Ginsberg-William Buckley Firing Line debate of September 1968 Lenny Bruce was discussed. The transcript of that encounter is on pp. 76-102 of the book, and presumably Lawrence asked Dustin to take a look at it here, so one of those circles gets turned all the way around in a single image. Click on the image above for a closer view.

Earlier I posted Lawrence's great shot of Patti Smith reading about Wallace Stevens.

(c) Lawrence Schwartzwald

the before took us right up to the after

"Preposition," by Sally Van Doren, from her book, Sex at Noon Taxes.

a web site that doesn't function as a page

Roderick Coover's hyper-narrative "Voyage into the Unknown" program traces John Wesley Powell's journey down the Colorado River in 1869. River-like, the site moves horizontally rather than vertically. You can take side trips. Etc.

function as form

Jane, who has a fabulous eye for such things, loves this particular view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art just as much as anything hanging from the walls in this corridor. (It's the corridor just outside the Walter & Louise Arensberg modernist art rooms.) The tall white ELEVATOR lettering in contrast to the elaborate elevator doors. As if the entrance to some deco baptistry. Anyway, it surely all gets to count among the artwork there, yes?

NASA's Nazis

Back in the 90s, Linda Hunt (who had been with CNN) was writing a book about all the former Nazi scientists who had then come to the U.S. and worked at NASA. She was particularly irked by the NASA distinguished service award being presented to Arthur Rudolph who later left the country rather than face charges as a Nazi war criminal. I posted her short article about this to my Holocaust site years ago, and just this morning re-read it.

I don't see that Hunt published a book on this but I do find these two articles:

[] Linda Hunt, "U.S. Cover-up of Nazi Scientists" Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. April, 1985. [4]

[] Linda Hunt, Arthur Rudolph of Dora and NASA, Moment 4, 1987 (Yorkshire Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament)

alphabet review

Here's a video of Rachel Blau DuPlessis' statement about Ron Silliman's The Alphabet, which she (with the help of Phillip Barron) prepared for the Silliman celebration earlier this week at the Kelly Writers House. An entry I made a few days ago gives you a little more information about the event and a link to that video.


Rachel Blau DuPlessis on Ron Silliman's The Alphabet from Phillip Barron on Vimeo.

Rimbaud

We've just uploaded a recording of Wyatt Mason talking about Rimbaud. The event took place in November 2005, and the audio is here.

Wyatt is a contributing editor of Harper's where his essays regularly appear. He also writes for the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the London Review of Books. Modern Library has published, in three volumes, his translations of the complete works of Arthur Rimbaud. Translations of Dante's Vita Nuova and Montaigne's essays are in progress, as is his book of essays about American fiction.

Oh, yes, and I'm proud to say that Wyatt was once my student here at Penn.

(Here too the beginning of the recording is over-run by the intro music we used to use at the Writers House before programs began. Sorry about that. Be patient.)

funk talk

Naomi Beckwith considers funk a language. Listen to her 2005 talk, with lots of musical samples. (Don't be put off by the beginning of the recording; the music is too loud at first.) For more about Naomi and the program, click here.

elders and youngers

Belladonna Books has just published the fourth in a series called The Belladonna Elders Series, featuring Susan Bee, Marjorie Perloff and the late Emma Bee Bernstein (with an introduction by Johanna Drucker). You can buy a copy of the book here. This is Belladonna's bio on Emma:

Emma Bee Bernstein was born in 1985 and grew up on the upper west side of Manhattan. She graduated in June 2007 from the University of Chicago with a BA with honors in Visual Arts & Art History. She wrote her senior thesis on feminism and fashion in contemporary photography, and showed her Masquerade series as part of her senior thesis show. She also exhibited her photographs at A.I.R. Gallery in NYC, the Smart Museum in Chicago, and in numerous student exhibitions at the University of Chicago. She was featured in the New York Times for her work in Vita Excolatur, a University of Chicago erotica magazine and wrote an article on feminist art for M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online #4. Emma was the star of the film Emma's Dilemma, directed by Henry Hills, in which she interviews dozens of artists from the downtown NYC scene. She worked as a curatorial assistant in the Photography, Contemporary Art, and Prints & Drawings departments at the Art Institute of Chicago, at the Renaissance Society, and was a docent at the Smart Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum. She worked as a Teaching Artist at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and was an involved mentor and teacher for Step Up Women's Network. With Nona Willis Aronowitz, Emma conceived the GIRLdrive project: a cross-country trip to interview and photograph a multitude of diverse women, reflecting on the present state of feminism and social activism. GIRLdrive has a blog and is a forthcoming book from Seal Press. Emma died in December 2008 at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy, where she had an internship. Emma is survived by her parents Susan Bee and Charles Bernstein and her brother Felix.

Earlier related entries: 1 2

regarding and beholding

Each January, at our "Mind of Winter" event, I lead a communal interpretation of Wallace Stevens's "The Snow Man." This year we caught it on video, and here it is.

her Emily Dickinson

Charles Bernstein hosted the "Linebreak" radio series, which, in digital form, was originally presented in RealAudio format and then converted to mp3. (MP3 of course is PennSound's and many others' preferred format - downloadable, nonproprietary, free.)

In the spring of 1995, in New York, Charles conducted an interview with Susan Howe that has all along been my favorite of the Linebreak shows. We've now segmented it - by topic - and created what amounts to a table of contents. Above is a snapshot from the freshly revised Susan Howe PennSound page.

Ron Silliman reading at KWH earlier tonight

Ron read a sampling from the 1000-page The Alphabet, taking sections in (why not?) alphabetical order. He ended with a beautiful piece from VOG about Larry Eigner. I don't think I've ever heard him read so well. He was on.

Here's the video recording of the event.

when words peel away

Screen is a short video that shows the 3D-text-based, virtual reality experience of hypertext in a "CAVE" at the University of Iowa. Click here to watch the video.

visiting the kiss on V-Day

On Valentine's Day, Jane and I paid a visit to the great Arensberg rooms at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and stood for a long while in front of Brancusi's "The Kiss" (1908). If you glance at it, it seems (by this point) a cliche. But that tiredness is of our own making. Stay with it long enough and its revolutionary qualities come back at you. They did for us indeed. I took this photo with my iPhone (the lowest-quality aspect of that otherwise beautiful device), so forgive me.

KWH-TV 2/24 10:30 am (eastern): Robert Coover

I invite you to join experimental novelist Robert Coover and me in a conversation on Tuesday morning, February 24, starting at exactly 10:30 AM (eastern time). We will be at the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia, but the session will be available as a live video. Our internet audience will be able to pose questions to Mr. Coover by email or by telephone.

If you would like to watch - and/or participate - please RSVP to this address

whfellow@writing.upenn.edu

Once we've registered you for the event, we'll send you detailed instructions, including the web address for linking to the live video stream.

If you would like to test KWH-TV's streaming video, please click here.

- - -

ABOUT ROBERT COOVER

Robert Coover is an avant-garde novelist, critic and playwright lauded for experimental forms and techniques that mix reality and illusion, frequently creating otherworldly or surreal situations and effects. A leading proponent of hypertext fiction and metafiction, Mr. Coover is known as a true revolutionary in contemporary American literature and language.

Mr. Coover's first novel, The Origin of the Brunists, won the William Faulkner Award in 1966. He is also the recipient of the Brandeis University, American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Endowment of the Arts, Rhode Island Governor's Arts, Pell, and Clifton Fadiman Awards, as well as Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Lannan Foundation, and DAAD fellowships. His latest honor is the Dugannon Foundation's REA award for his lifetime contribution to the short story.

His most recent books are The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Directors' Cut, Stepmother, and A Child Again. Other works include the collection of short fiction, Pricksongs and Descants, a collection of plays, A Theological Position, such novels as The Public Burning, Spanking the Maid, Gerald's Party, Pinocchio in Venice, John's Wife, Ghost Town and Briar Rose.

the end of books

From Robert Coover "The End of Books" (June 21, 1992, NYT):

As Carolyn Guyer and Martha Petry put it in the opening "directions" to their hypertext fiction "Izme Pass," which was published (if "published" is the word) on a disk included in the spring 1991 issue of the magazine Writing on the Edge:

"This is a new kind of fiction, and a new kind of reading. The form of the text is rhythmic, looping on itself in patterns and layers that gradually accrete meaning, just as the passage of time and events does in one's lifetime. Trying the textlinks embedded within the work will bring the narrative together in new configurations, fluid constellations formed by the path of your interest. The difference between reading hyperfiction and reading traditional printed fiction may be the difference between sailing the islands and standing on the dock watching the sea. One is not necessarily better than the other."

Here's the link to the original article.

Folkways liner notes

In 1967, Mark Van Doren made an LP record of his poems - at Folkways. We at PennSound, for a year or so, have had this recording available on our Mark Van Doren page. Just yesterday we added a link to a PDF of the whole 6-page liner notes, a sheaf of stapled 8.5x11 mimeographed pages that were tucked into the LP sleeve--a fairly rare document. None of this would have come about without the kind involvement and permission of Mark's son, Charles Van Doren.

book as sculpture

TypeBound is the name of an exhibit curated by Craig Saper at the University of Central Florida. It consists of books as sculpture from Florida collections, and a number of typewriter poems borrowed from the great concrete & visual poetry collection of Marvin and Ruth Sackner (of Miami). "Two of the book’s most fundamental elements—-its bindings and its type—-are separated and examined for creative possibilities as they are freed of their basic, traditional functions."

Listen to a 5-minute podcast interview with Craig Saper, originally recorded at WUCF-FM or Orlando.

PennSound on facebook

If you use facebook, click on this link and see the PennSound facebook page.

poetics of fairy tales

Tisa Bryant and Rachel Levitsky, at the Writers House, a few hours ago. Tisa read from her critical fiction, with its "poetics of fairytales" and tons of structures borrowed from somewhat randomly watched movies.

HBO dialogue c. 2004

Wild Bill Hickok: You know the sound of thunder, Mrs. Garret?

Alma Garret: Of course.

Wild Bill Hickok: Can you imagine that sound if I asked you to?

Alma Garret: Yes, I can, Mr. Hickok.

Wild Bill Hickok: Your husband and me had this talk, and I told him to head home to avoid a dark result. But I didn't say it in thunder. Ma'am, listen to the thunder.

history of the future of narrative

Robert Coover on the history of the future of narrative - a video recording of a recent lecture: LINK. Coover will be here February 23-24. You can go here at 6:30 PM on 2/23 or at 10:30 AM on 2/24 and watch by live video stream.

pot banger from an early age

Our perception of space depends as much on what we hear as on what we see.--Max Neuhaus

Neuhaus died last Tuesday at 69. He was the creator of site-specific works of sound sculpture. On the "audio and video recordings" page of his web site, you can click on a link and watch a wonderful eight-minute video about his famous piece, Times Square, which is installed under a street grate where Broadway and 7th Avenue converge. Seems to passersby like a steeam hatch, but as you walk over it you hear a deeply resonant and wavery body-piercing drone.

Here's a little bit of Neuhaus on Ubuweb.

The Times obit, facing its apparent responsibility to say something about Neuhaus' childhood, quotes his sister thus: "He was a pot banger from an early age."

describing language

Joseph Kosuth, No Number #6 (On Color, Blue) (1991), neon tubing with argon gas and mercury. In the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art's permanent collection: "I am only describing language, not explaining anything." (neon on wall, circa 1997, displayed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the original neon is blue) A succint definition of Conceptual art, in "Inquiry into the foundations of the concept 'art', as it has come to mean," given by Joseph Kosuth, requires "a linguistic rather than plastic context."

Lisa New

On Thursday evening, Lisa New returned to Penn to read from her forthcoming memoir, Jacob's Cane: One Family's Journey from the Four Lands of Lithuania to the Ports of Baltimore and London, A Memoir in Five Generations, which is being published by Basic Books in the fall. But it was more than a reading. Lisa left Penn about 10 years ago (been that long?) to join the faculty at Harvard. She had and has lots of ties to Philly, and the room was full of family. And Erin Gautsche (KWH program coordinator) did her magical thing, producing (with help from the students) a fabulous Mediterranean spread for the reception. All in all, a memorably warm evening inside 3805 Locust on a bitterly cold night outside. The Writers House web calendar entry describes the event further, and provides links to the video recording as well as to the audio-only recording (mp3). And I took some photos also--not great in quality but they give you a sense of the spirit of the gathering.

Above at right: Nancy Bentley, Lisa New, and Jim English.

reads good, bad & ugly--all of it

Michael Davidson's positive review of my recent book is being published in CLIO. Here is a link to a PDF copy.

Citation: Davidson, Michael. [review of The Counter-Revolution of the Word]. Clio 38.1 (Fall, 2008): 117-122.

freedom is a light

Linh Dinh snapped this photo yesterday, during a long jaunt around Philadelphia with two visiting Chinese poet-scholars. Zhimin Li gave a reading at KWH the other night as part of the Writers without Borders series.

local TV news covers....advising

Oh it seems to be Archiving Old Media week here. Well, we found another item. This was a local TV news spot on the all-online pre-matriculant advising I was doing in the 90s. Innovative in those days. Not innovative now, but--amazingly--rarely practiced. Huh? Yes, students are admitted to colleges and universities beginning in mid-December but the faculty who will work closely with them don't really interact with them in any meaningful way until September. I can understand why people balk as such an "extra assignment" when the students are random admits, all across the board of interests, passions and talents. But the kids I advise are those who are writers and who are going to be, or in a sense are already, a part of the Writers House community. Start with them early, watch them flourish all the more when they set physical foot on the property. In '99 the local news "discovered" this "story" and did one of their personal-interest angles on it. But you get the gist. Click here and watch the video.

"raging online debate"--yes, and it's about poetry

"Teaching Revolution" 2001-style. That was the topic of a Philadelphia Sunday Inquirer Magazine story by Jim O'Neill, then the higher-ed beat reporter for the Inquirer. Jenny Lesser has kindly prepared a PDF of the article, which is now linked to a page that presents the article's text.

dystopian music

In 1999, several Kelly Writers House regulars (among them Andrew Zitcer and Kristen Gallagher--both of whom are still involved with us in one way or another), created a second radio program out of the Writers House. The first, of course, was and still is "Live at the Writers House," which continues to this day to air monthly on WXPN 88.5 FM. This second show--meant as an experimental alternative--was called "Dystopia." At least several of its shows aired on XPN 88.5, and maybe they all did (Andrew and Kristen can tell me otherwise). Recently we found recordings of all seven Dystopia shows and, with the help of Andrew Zitcer, put them back together. And just today Mark Lindsay did the work of uploading them and linking them to a new KWH Dystopia page: HERE.

the c that precedes the choir

The newest PoemTalk is out now. Episode #14, a discussion of Wallace Stevens' late poem, "Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself." Have a listen!

you are free except to be restricted

In 1949, Raymond B. Allen (pictured at left), then president of the University of Washington at Seattle, published an article titled "Communists Should Not Teach in American Colleges." (It appeared in a magazine called Educational Forum in May of that year.)

Allen did not mean that people actively involved in plots to overthrow the American government by violence should be banned from teaching at American colleges and universities. He would have meant it had that been an issue, but it wasn't. No, he meant those whose beliefs are determined (by him or by a panel of administrator and faculty) to be communist should be pulled from the classroom. Since bona fide members of the CPUSA in those Cold War days were not typically open about their membership, this wasn't simply a matter of ascertaining membership. Real communists might not even be formal members. So beliefs (what they did, what they said, whom they met with) could be used to determine such status.

Anyway, surely the most interesting sentence in this essay is this one:

The University's insistence upon academic freedom goes beyond the traditionally held concept that academic freedom can be abridged only by the institution and asserts that members of the faculty must likewise be free from other restraints that may restrict their freedom.

It means that faculty are free in the usual way that academic freedom guarantees but, at the same time, that faculty must be free from "other restraints." Must be. Those other restraints are ideologies that tend to make one unfree in one's thinking. So, having academic freedom, you are not free to engage in a way of thinking that limits your thinking. Of course this was a vague way of referring to communist ideology. A faculty member, Allen thought, could proceed intellectually and pedagogically under any set of principles or ideas, even those--let's say one's Catholicism even if one is a biologist exploring conception--that otherwise limit one's exploration of research topics...any set of principles except this one (communism).

In other words, academic freedom is the granting of freedom but it is also a demand that one must be free from an unfree worldview determined by the university to be such.

My position that Communists are not qualified to be teachers, Allen also wrote, grows out of my belief that freedom has little meaning apart from the integrity of the men and women who enjoy that freedom....The Communist Party, with its concealed aims and objectives, with its clandestine methods and techniques, with its consistent failure to put its full face forward, is a serious reflection upon the integrity of educational institutions that employ its members and upon a whole educational system that has failed to take the Communist issue seriously.... The classroom has been called "the chapel of democracy." As the priests of the temple of education, members of the teaching profession have a sacred duty to remove from their ranks the false and robot prophets of Communism....

Here's to whole article from '49.

The photograph of Allen above at left was printed in the Washington Post on March 27, 1949.