July 02
Reminder: Villette Reading Starts Next Week
Just a reminder: The Valve’s Second Annual Summer Reading Project, on Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, starts up on Tuesday, July 7. Discussion will open then for the first eight chapters. For the full proposed schedule, see here. (To review last year’s Adam Bede event, start here or here.) Last year’s was, overall, such a good experience that I propose adopting the same simple guidelines for our discussions this time:
1. Let’s be cautious about “spoilers.” Some of us have read the novel before, or have read enough about it to know the story. Others are new to it. I’ve found that opinions are often divided on the issue of “spoiler alerts.” Personally, I think it’s nice to allow other readers to enjoy suspense and surprises, especially in a long book when curiosity about what happens next can be both pleasurable and motivating. Others see little or no value in such deference to plot, or argue for the interpretive benefits of knowing key developments ahead of time. Perhaps we can compromise by alluding to events beyond the ‘assigned’ material obliquely or elliptically, if the occasion arises.
2. By all means let’s bring in critical or contextual knowledge from “outside” the novel if we think it bears interestingly on our reading. But let’s avoid doing so in a way that shuts down discussion--by, for instance, implying that everything we might think of to talk about here has already been said, and better, by others--or that we can’t talk intelligently about this book unless we’ve read 86 others.
3. It’s summer: let’s have fun and not be snarky.
As before, the pace or format of the weekly posts can be changed if a consensus emerges that we are going too fast, or too slow, or would benefit from better defined starting points for discussion, or whatever.
Hope to see you here on Tuesday!
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July 01
The Figure of Writing and the Future of English Studies
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
A short piece forthcoming in the tenth anniversary issue of Pedagogy (Duke UP).
For me the most compelling question in English studies today is the tension between the figure of reading and the figure of writing, especially as it plays out in what David Downing calls managed disciplinarity, the disciplinary division of labor between writing and literature.
Nearly everyone thinking about this question acknowledges that it’s a distinction serving to justify the division of resources and rewards—time, salary, prestige, power—rather than a coherent intellectual division. This wasn’t always the case, but it was for much of the twentieth century. So long as the literature curriculum remained central to sustaining nationalist and imperial projects, faculty working under the sign of “literature” were steadily more likely to be associated with research-intensive, or at least tenurable, appointments; to control institutional resources; shape the disciplinary agenda of the field; receive funding and media recognition, etc.
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June 30
Infinite Summer: Morbid? Culturally Imperial? Morbidly Culturally Imperial?
Am I alone in finding the whole idea of Infinite Summer a little morbid? The renewed interest in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is an obvious Good Thing—a first step toward popular as well as academic canonization—but having lived through the recent Michael Jackson Media Event, I can’t help but wonder whether the desire to read Wallace’s novel is akin downloading Thriller because Some Important Someone died. Do I sound like I’m thwacking some straw man with shovel? Because I’m not:
I have a confession to make. I don’t even like David Foster Wallace. And I don’t mean that I found Infinite Jest too lengthy on the first run-through. I mean his accessible stuff. His tales from cruise ships and lobster festivals and tennis matches and radio studios . . . So why am I here?
The short answer is that David Foster Wallace died.
That’s Ezra Klein, writing at A Supposedly Fun Blog. I’m not complaining because famous bloggers (Matthew Yglesias and Julian Sanchez among them) are horning in on my territory—although I will note that the first thing I ever published online was a mediocre seminar paper titled “Demand and the Appearance of Freedom: The Role of Corporate Media in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,” but only just to note it—nor, despite the above, am I really even complaining that Klein’s interest was piqued by Foster Wallace’s suicide, as a more charitable excerpt shows his interest to be far less morbid:
The slightly longer answer is that David Foster Wallace died and I cared. That was, to me, a surprise. Lots of people die. Just the other day, Ed McMahon died. It hardly registered. But Wallace was different. I read everything I could about his final days. I posted a memoriam on my site. I watched readings on YouTube. It affected me. I don’t know if it’s because he was a young writer who was felled by the violent bubble and froth of his own mind and that a small part of me relates to that. I don’t know if it’s because he was, in some way, unique to my generation, and as such, one of my own.
In the end, what’s interesting about the 25-year-old Klein’s post about the 46-year-old Foster Wallace’s novel is the notion that someone who was 18 years old when the Clash first performed in America and someone who was 18 years old the year Joe Strummer died can be said to belong to the same generation. How does that work? I’m tempted to blame it on the Internet:
Once you could identify someone’s taste by the cut of their concert tee—London Calling vs. Combat Rock, The Clash vs. Operation Ivy, Operation Ivy vs. Rancid, &c.—now that all these these bands (mostly) belong to the past tense, they’re part of that enormous cultural pool from which more recent generations sample freely. For example, someone Klein’s age will never experience the pain of the endless, fruitless search for something like the first Clash album (which, contrary to that link, has not been in print continuously since 1979), as CDNOW was in decline during his formative years. To people for whom almost everything has always been immediately available, the idea of what constitutes a culturally-determined generation is bound to be a little fuzzy.
Note that I’m not criticizing Klein for being born in a time of cultural plenty—I would rather not have spent the better part of a decade searching for this in vain—I’m merely pointing out that his inclusion of Foster Wallace among his contemporaries dumbfounds me . . . unless I chalk it up to the novel instead of the man. Wallace might not be Klein’s contemporary, but Infinite Jest could be. Now that I’m reading it again, I’m struck by how contemporary it feels. Everything that annoyed me about it in 1996 still annoys me now—the footnotes, subsidized time, the too-frequent self-indulgent sentence—but everything that felt new in 1996 still feels new now.
Given how we imagine ourselves into an intimacy with our favorite authors, it makes sense for people twenty-five years younger than Foster Wallace to feel a generational affinity for him on the basis of his novel; but that doesn’t really work, now does it? I mean in the academic sense, the means by which we identify Author X as belonging to Period Y and analyze his or her work in light of the aesthetic of Period Y. We don’t, in other words, seriously consider historical feelings of contemporaneity the way we experience our own, inasmuch as I’m fourteen years younger than Foster Wallace but, like Klein, count him as “one of my own.”
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Strunk and White, Yuk!
Missed this one when it first appeared. Linguist Geoffrey Pullum trashes The Elements of Style on its 50th anniversary: “Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense.” On the passive voice: “What concerns me is that the bias against the passive is being retailed by a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they don’t know what is a passive construction and what isn’t.” On not splitting infinitives, S & W are wrong wrong wrong. And so forth.
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June 28
Shameless Literary Tourism II
My own recent perambulations around London were not quite as focused as Amardeep’s “Joyce-tinted” day in Dublin, but I thoroughly enjoyed the sites and sights I saw. Top literary-historical experience: Carlyle’s house in Chelsea.
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Muldoonery
A better poet than interviewee, I think.
“Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini” [The Irish Times, April 19, 2003]. I guess he means that poetry achieves a kind of marvellous escape act from the apparent restrictions of its form, but that’s not what he has said. What he has said invites the reply: ‘so form ... is a prop, is it?’
“The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away” [Princeton University Library Chronicle, Spring 1998]. I assume he means that poetry should fuck with our heads, which is quite right; but this emphasis on the unpleasantry of poetry looks lopsided to the point of masochism. Why would I want to hang out with a bully?
“Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect” [Interviewed in Thumbscrew, Spring 1996]. Paul? Meet Entropy. Entropy, Paul. I’ll leave you two together.
Or ... or ... maybe I’m just a sad little pedant? Could that be the truth of it?
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June 27
Ev Psych on the Ropes?
No less a figure than David Brooks has declared that “Evolutionary psychology has had a good run. But now there is growing pushback. Sharon Begley has a rollicking, if slightly overdrawn, takedown in the current Newsweek.” Evolutionary theorist David Sloan Wilson rushes to the defense in the Huffington Post (worth reading, more so than the take-downs).
Is this the beginning of the end?
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June 26
O Zinga! Klapwrath! Psein!
Moderately rare as a first edition:
Landor, Walter Savage. ANDREA OF HUNGARY AND GIOVANNA OF NAPLES. London, Richard Bentley, 1839. 1st edition. Bound in publisher’s original paper boards, rebacked in new paper with a new paper spine label. Unopened. Worn at the extremities, otherwise very good condition. USD 227.30
I’ve not got a first edition, mind; I have it as part of a multi-volume Landorian Collected Works, which I’m reading in train of writing something on his whole body of work. And I’ll say this: though he’s neglected now there’s an enormous amount to love about Landor’s poetry and his prose. Even some of his plays aren’t bad: Count Julian: a Tragedy (1812), say, though wayward, has powerful moments and a weird cumulative potency. And (this is the last of my mealymouthed caveats, I promise) the whole subgenre of 19th-century unacted pastiche-Elizabethan blank-verse, static-literary tragic dramas is a little literary phenomenon in its own right, with its own aesthetic parameters; and a reader prepared to suspend her usual criteria of judgement for a while can find numerous interesting and beautiful things therein.
But, that said, Andrea of Hungary is more than bad; it’s so bad it’s almost as if Landor were specifically trying to write a sort of Acorn Antiques of the c19th-dramatic-poetic world.
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June 23
Sita Sings the Freakin’ Gorgeous Blues
Quite possibly I first heard about Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues in a January 2008 post at Cartoon Brew. The film had been selected to premier at the Berlin International Film Festival but Paley had to scrounge up $35,000 so she could have a 35mm print made. “Fat chance,” said I to myself. But she did it and I kept reading more about Sita here and there, watching clips, getting interested. Finally, Mike “The Curmudgeon” Barrier saw it on DVD and said “It’s one of the very few animated features of the last few decades that I can recommend enthusiastically.” And he’s seen Pixar, and Miyazaki!
That cinched it. I went link link z00m! on the internets, gave up a credit card number, and a couple of days later had my very own DVD (you can also stream it or download it free of charge).
Yes, it’s all that: imaginative, gorgeous, seamless, original, art.
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June 22
Filching and Owning Culture
David Shields and Siva Vaidhyanathan discuss these matters on bloggingheads.tv. Artists have always built on materials created by their predecessors but current copyright laws put that practice under pressure. Shields and Vaidhyanathan make extensive reference to an article Jonathan Lethem published two years ago in Harpers Magazine, The ecstasy of influence:
The Walt Disney Company has drawn an astonishing catalogue from the work of others: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, Song of the South, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Robin Hood, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Mulan, Sleeping Beauty, The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book, and, alas, Treasure Planet, a legacy of cultural sampling that Shakespeare, or De La Soul, could get behind. Yet Disney’s protectorate of lobbyists has policed the resulting cache of cultural materials as vigilantly as if it were Fort Knox—threatening legal action, for instance, against the artist Dennis Oppenheim for the use of Disney characters in a sculpture, and prohibiting the scholar Holly Crawford from using any Disney-related images—including artwork by Lichtenstein, Warhol, Oldenburg, and others—in her monograph Attached to the Mouse: Disney and Contemporary Art.
This whole business is put in an interesting light by the case of animator Nina Paley and the brilliant film she created over the course of five years mostly by herself: Sita Sings the Blues. Sita’s soundtrack is built around jazz recordings made by Annette Hanshaw in the 1920s. While the recordings themselves are in the public domain, the underlying songs are not. Rather than incur heroically burdensome licensing fees, Paley has made the film available free over the internet. The New York Times ran a feature on Paley and Sita back in February.
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The Sort of Book You Actually Want to Write: “Big Sid’s Vincati”
A friend of mine from graduate school, Matthew Biberman, whom I knew primarily as an ambitious and driven Milton scholar, has written a memoir, not about Milton but motorcycles. The book is called Big Sid’s Vincati: The Story of a Father, a Son, and the Motorcycle of a Lifetime. His book, which has not had a lot of publicity yet in the general media, has come out at the same time as a second memoir about the power of physical involvement in mechanical problems (incidentally also involving working on motorcycles), Shop Class as Soulcraft, by Matthew Crawford. Crawford’s book has gotten quite a bit of attention, including a long excerpt in The New York Times Magazine, as well as Kelefa Sanneh’s review in The New Yorker. And Stanley Fish, in his blog at the New York Times, put together a lengthy blog post last week, where he considered Biberman’s book alongside Crawford’s, while also addressing Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values. Here I’d like to attend to Biberman’s memoir on its own terms, though I’ve also added a brief consideration at the end of this blog post that gets at the obvious ‘meta’ question of why this particular kind of knowledge seems to be so satisfying to people who started out their lives with a passion for the abstract liberal arts—literature and philosophy.
1. Vincatis
Since I know many readers will be wondering, I should probably start by explaining the “Vincati”: a “Vincati” is a hybrid bike, with a Ducati frame and a Vincent engine. It brings together the best features of two legendary motorcycles, the 1970s Ducati’s widely praised chassis, and the 1950s Vincent’s powerful twin engine, immortalized by Richard Thompson, in “1952 Vincent Black Lightning.” Creating a hybrid bike using largely original parts is a particularly challenging project, both in terms of tracking down the necessary vintage parts and as a matter of mechanical skill. In the case of Matthew and his father, Sid, putting one together after the latter had a nearly-fatal heart attack became a labor of love and a reason for his father to go on living.
The memoir resonated with me in part because Biberman, like myself, came into literary studies from a rather unlikely background – his father was a motorcycle mechanic who never went to college, while he went to elite schools on scholarship, only to struggle somewhat in the early years of life as a “grown-up” in a tenure track academic job. Being a hungry outsider in English studies can give you the motivation and hustle to get through college and graduate school with flying colors, but it’s when you settle down into a tenure track job that you realize that sheer scholarly hustle alone may not make you happy in the intensely bourgeois culture of academia, nor does it give you the continued motivation to keep up the intellectual pace you set in graduate school. Academia has many perks, but for many people it can be a difficult profession to remain passionate about, and a curious sort of disconnection sometimes sets in for people about half-way to tenure. I’m not sure there is any single explanation for it—though, admittedly, the institution of tenure might be part of the problem—so let me just say this: it does not seem entirely an accident that many academics have passions outside of their teaching lives that animate them more than their primary work.
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June 19
Jump Cut 51
Jump Cut styles itself as A Review of Contemporary Media. Issue 51 has more articles than I care to list, but you can find the TOC here.
There are a number of articles on matters that have been taken up in The Valve or that strike me as being of interest to Valvesters. Running down the TOC from top to bottom: three articles on documenting torture; The Wire as narrative and metanarrative; Battlestar Galactica; Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (a bit heavy on the Marxism, but nonetheless perceptive and interesting); a documentary about Samuel R. Delany (more on sex than SF); Children of Men; two articles on The Dark Knight; WALL-E; a section on horror films. And much more.
Check it out.
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Anxieties of Affiliation: The Creative Writing Program and Transnationalism
There are many intriguing conversations that could be started with almost any few pages of Mark McGurl’s brilliant (and tremendously interesting) The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, but the one that I want to try to start is about the way he brings his massive project around to take a look at transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and diaspora studies. McGurl reminds the reader on many different occasions of the international scope and influence of U.S. creative writing programs, while also insisting on the exceptionalism of this cultural formation. While U.S. programs have long recruited talent from abroad (Iowa most aggressively) and are of late beginning to be imitated in parts of the globe (mostly Anglophone nations so far), McGurl draws up the Program Era as a phenomenon as exclusive to America as it is to the university, unthinkable outside of the nesting of those two institutions--the university in America, the American university.
In the chapter titled “Art and Alma Mater,” McGurl begins by noting what has been implicit for most of the book: the nature of the creative writing program can lead to an acute case of the anxiety of influence on the part of the writer/student, which McGurl rephrases as an “anxiety of affiliation” (taking the term from Gilbert/Gubar’s No Man’s Land). What is craved is artistic autonomy, disaffiliation ("filia" - daughter) from the Alma Mater. McGurl compares this craving to Pascale Casanova’s assertion (in The World Republic of Letters) that
Continue reading "Anxieties of Affiliation: The Creative Writing Program and Transnationalism"the collective concern of literary artists across the centuries-long sweep of global modernity has been to “invent their literary freedom” by disengaging their work from the compromising contingencies of national politics and addressing themselves to the world. “Denying their difference” and “assimilating the values of one of the great literary centers,” modern writers have been rewarded for this sometimes painful process of national self-alienation with admittance to a notionally autonomous realm of notionally universal literary value. (McGurl 326)
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June 18
Shameless Literary Tourism in Dublin: Bloomsday 2009
It’s rather striking how much of a commodity James Joyce is in Dublin; there’s nothing comparable to it in any American city. You hear mentions of Bloomsday activites on Dublin radio stations, and see events described in some of the newspapers. There are two Joyce museums in the city, a proper statue of Joyce on one of the biggest commercial streets in the city, and plaques on the ground and on buildings all over the place. Every other pub has a picture of Joyce or Yeats somewhere; there is even something called a “James Joyce Pub Award” (for “being an authentic Dublin pub"). On Bloomsday there are performances at big as well as small venues all over the city related to Ulysses. We saw a flyer for an actress doing a solo show as Molly Bloom, and we even saw something about the dramatization of a brief dialogue between Ned Lambert and J.J. O’Molloy at St. Mary’s Abbey (from “Wandering Rocks") – a rather minor incident in the novel.
That said, some of the events not involving pubs didn’t seem to be all that well attended. And while there were a fair number of knowledgeable readers of Joyce on the two tours I went on (many of them American college students, interestingly), there were plenty of people who came out apparently because their guide book recommended it as something to do in Dublin.
The only dissenting voice I heard on James Joyce was in a pub in a village called Bunratty, north of Limerick. There, at a place named “Durty Nelly’s,” I was accosted by a rather inebriated Irishman who wanted to tell me all about his time at the Kumbh Mela in India. When Joyce came up in the conversation later (this man knew a fair bit about literature), he scoffed: “Joyce was a lackey, he was nothing but a lackey.” I didn’t have the presence of mind to ask him why he thought so, and now I wonder what exactly he meant.
As an intellectual exercise, I’m not sure whether there was much value in spending a day walking around Dublin with Joyce-tinted glasses on; it’s admittedly tourism, not scholarship. But it was certainly fun to see Dublin this way.
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June 17
Stylistics: New York Social Diary
A few years ago I stumbled on New York Social Diary, and I’ve been visiting it periodically ever since. It’s what its name implies, a site that chronicles social and civic life among New York City’s rich and powerful, five days a week (with the weekends off). Although gossip and rumor do show up on its pages, it’s not quite a gossip rag – too circumspect. Or, if you will, it’s rather more than gossip. Interestingly so.
Daily stories about lunches, dinners, parties and galas are its journalistic main course, with photo upon photo upon photo and long lists of bolded names as essential ingredients. These reports are accompanied by restaurant reviews, shopping trips, profiles of houses, articles on social history, and a bit of this, that, and the other as appropriate and available.
NYSD is the brainchild of one David Patrick Columbia. As far as I can tell – he does reveal a bit about his own life from time to time – he’s spent much of his adult life around august social circles, but he is not himself a man of wealth and privilege. He has to work for a living, and NYSD is his gig. Many of his subjects also work, but they are more highly remunerated than Columbia is.
But this is by way of background. I’m interested in Columbia’s writing style. Consider this short paragraph perhaps two thirds of the way into a recent story:
Continue reading "Stylistics: New York Social Diary"It is true that there are people in this town who have what is generally recognized as power. Can they kill people? I don’t know about that. Maybe with kindness or a harsh Fifth Avenue froideur.
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