Lingua Franca (LF)

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

As some comrades might know from Henwood's email list, this
prestigious magazine is going out of business. Henwood wrote an
article on the anti-sweatshop movement for it a few months ago. Scott
McLemee, a CLR James scholar who I had a political falling out with a
while back, is on the editorial board. So is Rick Perlstein, who I
met through McLemee. Perlstein wrote a highly acclaimed book on the
student conservative movement of the 1960s that he interviewed both
me and Henwood for. He is also the author of an interesting article
on the pro-Afghan war left for the NY Observer that quoted Henwood
saying that we needed to get the "motherfuckers".

Lingua Franca was a combination of an higher education trade magazine
with faculty appointment announcements, etc. and a kind of popularly
written journal for discussion of controversies originating in the
academic world. For example, in the latest issue there is a highly
interesting article on the question of Eurocentrism, which speaks
highly of Jim Blaut.

(http://www.linguafranca.com/print/0111/cover.html)

LF was also the place where Alan Sokal spilled the beans on his hoax.
Generally speaking, the magazine is skeptical of postmodernism as
well as anything resembling old school Marxism. Given the Sokal
connection, it didn't come as a big surprise that they hooked up with
Denis Dutton's Arts and Letters website. Dutton is a New Zealand
professor who launched something called the Bad Writing contest that
gave awards each year to people like Judith Butler, etc. It was
created in the spirit of Mr. Blackwell's yearly 10 worst dressed
contest, I suppose.

Dutton is an interesting character who I've had some email contact
with off and on. To put it in a nutshell, he is coming from the same
place politically as the Spiked Website and Reason Magazine. He also
has ties to the Skeptics Institute, another hotbed of libertarian
ideology and corporate apologetics.

Although his website does contain pointers to interesting articles
that I've forwarded here, he has a disconcerting tendency to
highlight every single anti-environmentalist book that comes his way.
I told him once that he must be getting rich from all the Olin
Foundation grants that are coming his way.

In the latest development on LF, it turns out that Dutton is being
accused of accelerating its collapse through what amounts to shady
financial practices.

Go to www.mobylives.com/Lingua_Franca_demise.html for the whole
story. Here is an excerpt:

>>The Strickland suit, meanwhile, works hard to establish a pattern
of behavior for what it refers to as Dutton's "bamboozling." For
example, it says Dutton "manufactured 'tension'" between Strickland
and her predecessor as ALD executive editor, Harrison Solow (an
author of books about "Star Trek") in order to "prevent the two women
from comparing notes," so that Strickland would not learn Solow had
made similar complaints to Dutton about lack of payment. (The suit
quotes Solow saying Dutton "lied" to her and "betrayed" her.)<<

--
Louis Proyect, lnp3@xxxxxxxxx on 11/06/2001

Marxism list: http://www.marxmail.org



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