Politics & Prose
Rabat, Morocco, 2007
THE MENU ON THE LEFT is an archive of Mike’s reporting and criticism. Mike was a 2006-2007 Fulbright fellow in Berlin, where he edits and writes for Spiegel Online. He’s also at work on his second novel, a documentary film about honor killings, and a book about the spread of surfing to odd corners of the world for Bloomsbury USA. He’s written about Europe in various capacities for The Atlantic Monthly, Salon, Slate, and the Los Angeles Times.
Mike also belongs to a small group of web editors devoted to preserving the shamefully unknown essays of Richard Mitchell, who for fifteen years published a brilliant and cranky pamphlet called The Underground Grammarian. Professor Mitchell thought of himself as a pamphleteer, but his self-published broadsides also make him a grandfather of the blog. So the other half of this Politics & Prose section — everything beneath “Underground Grammarian” on the left — is a Richard Mitchell archive.
By the end of its run, in 1991, The Underground Grammarian would be known as the first home-computer-designed pamphlet with subscribers on six continents. But it was born in 1976, before the Mac revolution, when Mitchell bought a printing press and installed it in his basement, where he learned to set type by hand. His burning lacerations of abuses of English by people in the 
public-schooling racket — their sloppy grammar, slippery logic, and bureaucratic doublebabble — are polemical classics. He started with satire of administrators at New Jersey’s Glassboro State College (now called Rowan University), where he taught, and ended with four expansive essays on the Eros and Psyche chapters in Apuleius’ Golden Ass. His theme, from start to finish, was education, and anyone interested in what’s wrong with American schools should read him.
Why a schoolmarmish name like “Grammarian”? Well, a passage from Ezra Pound c. 1929 touches what Mitchell is driving at: “It has to do with maintaining the very cleanliness of the tools, the health of the very matter of thought itself. Save in the rare and limited instances of invention in the plastic arts, or in mathematics, the individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws, without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati. When their work goes rotten — by that I do not mean when they express indecorous thoughts — but when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.”
Mitchell died of diabetes complications on December 27, 2002. Mike dedicated his first novel to him.
Our editor never took a course from Mitchell, but he did hear the old man give a fiery speech once in California, and afterwards he made a point of dropping in on Mitchell’s classes whenever he was near Philadelphia. One of Mitchell’s former students gives a good description of his “Adolescent Literature” class, which we guessed had more to do with happy stories of the birth of kings than with zits and slumber parties:
“Quite right — nothing adolescent about it!” answered Karen Nolan. “The focus was on the child’s search for his or her own fire, and then the struggle to keep it from being stolen. The same themes ran through all three classes I had with him, and those were all the big topics — freedom, the individual, love, happiness. He seemed to always be thinking of those things, and it didn’t matter if we were reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or Antigone. I loved that.”
Peter Hoh writes: “I remember his theory that books too dangerous to the established order always ended up bearing the stigma of ‘children’s literature.’ This was a way to keep the books from being taken too seriously, lest they actually prod adults to reexamine their lives, and the culture in which they lived. I think we were reading Huck Finn at the time.”
We stole this snapshot of Mitchell working at his printing press from a site called You Got Style:
OTHER LINKS:
Mark Alexander has the full run of Mitchell’s essays and most of his books.
Ursula Stange has visual reproductions of a few Underground Grammarians in Adobe Acrobat.
Torsten Seeman has a collection of (almost all) the books in several formats.
Robert Kern Curtis has a few later essays.
Mitchell’s books have also been republished in paperback by A Common Reader’s Akadine Press.
