Archives | May 2006
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Heartless, Heartless, Heartless
I finally got a chance to read an essay plugged by Ray some time back, Debbie Nelson’s “The Virtues of Heartlessness: Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, and the Anesthetics of Empathy". It’s an excellent essay—eloquent and persuasive and refreshingly free of academese. (Disclaimer: I’m a friend and long-time admirer of Debbie.) The essay’s main contention is that Mary McCarthy’s famously stern persona was not solely a matter of temperament, but part of an Arendtian commitment to public virtue. Debbie suggests, without hammering too heavily, that critics have been slow to recognize the point because of the patronizing to which women writers are often subject—maybe especially writers like McCarthy who make no allowance for conventional expectations of femininity. Basically, it’s been too easy for everyone to call McCarthy a shrew, or worse.
As Debbie sees it, though, McCarthy was motivated by political and aesthetic conviction. She shared with Arendt not just a biting critical sensibility, but a preference for a solidarity rooted in public deliberation over the satisfactions of emotional bonding and identity politics. (As Ray emphasizes, there’s an aesthetic angle to the argument stressing the necessity of paying attention to, without sentimentalizing suffering.) Again without overstressing the point, Debbie clearly wants to defend their aversion to sentimentality. The essay is part of a work in progress called “tough broads.”
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Was it a Play or a Funeral? Terence Bellew MacManus on Abbey Street (Dublin, 1861)
While reading a book on colonial India at the California E-Scholarship Editions site, I browsed my way into Adrian Frazier’s Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman, and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre (1990; full text).
In the Preface ("Whose Abbey Theatre?"), one finds a discussion of an event that took place at the site of the Abbey Theatre forty-three years before it was actually opened by Yeats, Gregory, and company. The event is the burial of Terence Bellew MacManus, a rebel from 1848 who was sent to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). He and a compatriot escaped to California, where MacManus died in January 1861.
A small group of Fenians (including James Stephens) then organized a rather momentous bit of political theater, which Frazier suggests might well be read as theater proper—though his designation begs the question about what, if anything, ought to be called “theater.” Does theater exist as a kind of idealized, autonomous Form, or is the line between various kinds of spectacles (political, religious, theatrical) sufficiently blurry that any public performance using a theatrical presentation should be simply designated more generally (i.e., as “performance")?
What happened in 1861, according to Frazier (and corroborated in bits here and here): the Fenians disinterred MacManus’ body and moved it slowly, first across the continental U.S. to New York, then by ship to Cork, and finally by rail to Dublin. Barred from the putting the body on state in the Pro-Cathedral, they marched the coffin through the streets of both Cork and Dublin, with tens of thousands of supporters participating. MacManus’ coffin was then placed ‘in state’ at the Mechanics’ Institute on Abbey Street, given last rites by a renegade Dublin priest, and finally reburied at Glasnevin Cemetary in Dublin.
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Sunday, May 07, 2006
Early Bengali Science Fiction
I thought I might risk going out on the limb of historical obscurity and share an article by Debjani Sengupta (PDF) on early Bengali science fiction writing.
The article is from the journal Sarai, which is published in Delhi. Some of the articles offer some truly impenetrable jargon -– even with writing on familiar topics (Bollywood, Call Centers, and so on). But there are also a number of well-written and informative articles on things like Parsi theater in Bombay in the 1800s that I would recommend.
On to Bengali science fiction. Even the fact that it existed as early as the 1880s may be a little shocking, since most studies of Bengali literature tend to center around Tagore—who was extremely doubtful about modern technology. (Read his bewildered account of flying in an airplane here.) But the effects of the industrial revolution were being felt in urban India in the 19th century just as keenly as they were in Europe and the U.S., and at least some Indian writing reflected that. Probably the best, most enduring writing in this genre came from a single family –- Sukumar Ray (in the 1910s and 20s) and his son Satyajit Ray, who was a highly accomplished writer when he wasn’t making making world class art films.
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All My Communities Are Hermitages
(The bulk of an earlier version of this entry began as a private email message, and it should have stayed that way. Posting it was the worst mistake I can remember making in my years of offline and online publishing, and my having made such a mistake here may serve as proem to the portion that remains.)
... But you see the irony, right? Both parties caught in a more-unseeable-than-thou standoff; both trying to play God with Clifton Webb's voice and James Joyce's nailfile?
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Saturday, May 06, 2006
Ben Jonson and Samuel Beckett?
A few years ago Jonathan Post edited a wonderful anthology called Green Thoughts, Green Shades: Essays by Contemporary Poets on the Early Modern Lyric. It includes essays by Anthony Hecht, Peter Sacks, Alice Fulton, Heather McHugh, Linda Gregerson, Calvin Bedient, Robert Hass, William Logan, Stephen Yenser, and Eavan Boland.
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The Position; or, We Can All Go Home, Now…
...that Stanley’s figured it out. Don’t get me wrong: I love reading Fish with a passion equal in intensity to the vehemence with which I disagree with him. But how can any intellectual brawler dislike a man whose very titles “betray” aggressive condescension?
“Wrong Again,” opines the title of Fish’s 1973 article in the Texas Law Review. Still don’t understand? Stanley will say it again “One More Time“ (CI 6.4). Is it any wonder the likes of Walter Davis suffer from an acute “Fear of Fish“ (CI 10.2)? (If you think this fear related to his stature, a smiling Fish will enumerate the reasons “Why No One’s Afraid of Wolfgang Iser“ [Diacritics 11.1].)
I don’t mean to suggest that his prose never misfires. For example, the regular appearance of “my italics” in his parenthetical citations demonstrate—in direct opposition to the rationale behind the quotations themselves—how manipulative Fish is. Fortunately, his manipulation quickly becomes visual, what with every other word of the other fellow’s prose being italicized.
That said, his 1972 omnibus review of “Recent Studies in the English Renaissance“ is the only viscerally enjoyable example of the genre I’ve ever read. His deliciously causidical prose is worth its weight in bandwidth:
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Friday, May 05, 2006
Notes from Next/Text Rhetoric
What follows are my notes on the Next/Text meeting for Rhetoric and Composition. At first I was really vigilant about preceding people’s comments with their names or initials, you know, so they’d get credit for what they said. But then things got so rapid-fire that I got lazy about it. These notes represent what we, as a group, said, and each of us made contributions: myself, Cheryl Ball, Cindy Selfe, Daniel Andersen, David Blakesley, David Goodwin, Geoffrey Sirc, Janice Walker, Jeff Rice, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Karl Stolley, Kim White, Michael Day, Victor Vitanza, and Virginia Kuhn. To give a little background, Next/Text is one of the projects of the Institute for the Future of the Book, which is part of the Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California. Next/Text is focused on classroom textbooks in particular. Our meeting was devoted to imagining how we in rhetoric and composition would go about creating a completely new electronic textbook—new, as opposed to CD-ROM companions to print textbooks: your basic linear, text-with-images, PDF-esque, “take a book from the tradition of print, digitize it, and smack it up on the Web.”
As we started out, we briefly discussed institutional constraints and realities—the old hiring, promotion, and tenure. In any discussion of online/technological work, we can’t put those aside or dismiss them. Although this part was kind of bracketed after the initial comment, I suppose it was always in the background. For a while, we talked about generalities: basic needs, realities of textbook publishing, realities of online projects which someone starts (a faculty member) and others work on and contribute to (e.g., graduate students/T.A.s, non-tenure-track instructors, etc.). There was a stated need for what we, for lack of a better term, called a datacloud with portals and axes that help to organize content (which I’m going to call tags here, because that’s basically how they’d function). I kept smiling and thinking of a conversation I had once with (the brilliant) Geoffrey Sauer, who emphasized the need for me really to connect scholarship with what it is I do online. I was trying to offer ideas of what I thought he was driving at, and he kept saying, “no, it can’t be just another archive!” I relayed Sauer’s call for some new online endeavor that wasn’t just another archive to the Next/Text group, who agreed vigorously.
More basics about textbooks and online projects: With textbooks, the process is that you send a proposal to a publisher. They respond by saying “You’re pitching it too high.” You have to dumb it down for the teachers (not the students!), so that the teachers won’t be intimidated and afraid to take it into the classroom. With online projects, a grave and common mistake faculty and graduate students make is that they expect to get everyone on board on day one. Instead, we shouldn’t expect to hit a home run the first time. Another problem is having a lack of direction. One example that comes to my mind immediately would be a blank wiki. Suppose you don’t know anything about wikis—the philosophy about text and collaboration, the structure, the markup language—and someone just creates a blank wiki for you and says, “Look here, you’re going to create a wiki. Start putting stuff up there!” You wouldn’t have any kind of model to follow and would be not only lost but fairly irritated and frustrated. Needless to say, your motivation level wouldn’t be at its pinnacle. So the consensus reached was that a “big empty pot” works for some people, but not for others. Others need a few first principles—directions and paths to take (or not). New TAs, especially, need some scaffolding.
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Meat Dreams
Only normal people read the Valve. All normal people read BoingBoing. Therefore, you’ve already watched the prize-winning short film adaptation of Terry Bisson’s “They’re Made Out of Meat".
Now I know what I’m going to show on the first day of next semester’s “Philosophy and Film” module. So pardon me while I scribble some hasty lecture notes.
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Wednesday, May 03, 2006
On the Origin of Interdisciplinarity--a cost/benefit model
Just came across a passage I thought might make for a good follow-up to Scott’s Darwinian origins of jargon post. Actually, I don’t really have a particularly good reason for mentioning the passage. Just thought it offered a memorable analogy, packaged in the pleasantly astringent prose style that used to characterize the best mid-century social science. (Or maybe that’s just my impression.) The text is the preface to The Calculus of Consent (1962), James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock’s seminal work in the theory of public choice.
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I Don’t Speak Neaderthal, But Look! He’s Killing a Bison. Bison — Food!
Charles Piller, from today’s LA Times:
Roger Nelson has a simple and unequivocal message for the people of the year 12006: Don’t dig here.
As chief scientist of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant [W.I.P.P.], Nelson oversees a cavernous salt mine that is the first geological lockbox for the “fiendishly toxic” detritus of nuclear weapons production: chemical sludge, lab gear and filters laced with tons of radioactive plutonium.
Nearly half a mile underground, workers push waste drums into crystalline labyrinths that seem as remote as the moon. A faint salty haze glows in powdery beams from miners’ headlamps and settles on the lips like a desert kiss. Computer projections predict that within 1,000 years the ceilings and walls will collapse in a crushing embrace that seals the plutonium in place.
But plutonium remains deadly for 250 times that long—an unsettling reminder that some of today’s hazards will outlast the civilizations that created them. The “forever problem,” unique to the modern technological age, has made crafting the user manual for this toxic tomb the final daunting task in an already monumental project. The result is a gargantuan system that borrows elements equally from Stonehenge and “Star Trek.”
Communicating danger may seem relatively straightforward, but countless human efforts to bridge the ages have failed as societies fall, languages die and words once poetic or portentous become the indecipherable marks of a long-forgotten scribbler.
Interesting stuff, this is. Scientists empanelled by the government to produce scenarios in which the site could be compromised returned with the stuff of speculative fiction: accidental discharge due to massive climate change; a “gasoline-addicted tribe in a ruined society” desperate for an alternative fuel source; a future in which “feminist corporations” don’t believe the warnings on the W.I.P.P. because they were written by men; or one in which “robotic [mole miner] slaves are infected with a computer virus that compels them to override their safety programming as they compulsively drill and construct mine shafts.”
The task of creating something understandable 10,000 years in the future is daunting, to say the least. The analogue Piller produces?
To future generations, warnings about Nelson’s dump may seem as impenetrable as the 600-year-old Canterbury Tales are for all but a few scholars today.
The implication is that some future human society Scratch that, since, to quote Jon Lomberg, all “we can guess about the future inhabitants of the area near WIPP is that they are human—unless they are cyborgs. Once you have people with augmented brains or genetically engineered minds with enhanced perceptions, you can’t be sure how human they will be.”
So the implication is that some future humanish society will find “a 98-foot-wide, 33-foot-tall, 2-mile-long berm” embedded with “powerful magnets and radar reflectors” so “remote sensors can recognize the site as purposively and elaborately designed,” surrounded by “48 granite or concrete markers, 32 outside the berm and 16 inside, each 25 feet high and weighing 105 tons, engraved with warnings in English, Spanish, Russian, French, Chinese, Arabic and Navajo,” emblazoned with “pictures [denoting] buried hazards and human faces of horror and revulsion"—which our cyborg selves or mole-mining robotic slaves may of may not be able to recognize—and the implication is, that upon finding this artifact, these “people” won’t bother to spend the week or so required for an undergraduate to learn to read Chaucerian English before they pop W.I.P.P. open? I’m not sure “augmented” is the word we’re looking for here.
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Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Get Your Pretty Tired Act! Pretty Tired Act, Here! Pretty Tired Act!
Todd Gitlin on Eric Lott’s The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual:
He has reissued one of the oldest, stalest stories in the annals of left-wing heresy-sniffing. It goes like this: Marx’s “old mole” of “the revolution” is eternally burrowing upward toward the light, whatever obstacles “boomer-liberal nation-love” throws in its way. But misleaders slow it down. What Professor Lott calls “new social movements” (i.e., movements some 30 or 40 years old now), like “blacks, Chicanos, gays, lesbians, women, the disabled, and the working class” — “any one of these movements is liable to engage a dominant social formation at one of its weak points and spark a fire that will earn widespread solidarities.” Professor Lott awaits the bracing whiff of a cleansing conflagration in that revolutionary morning.
Eric Lott on Sean McCann and Michael Szalay’s Countercultural Capital: Essays on the Sixties from Some Who Weren’t There:
By now, blaming the counterculture for the “cultural turn” in left political theory so as to indict both is a pretty tired act. It carries the fetid whiff of Richard Rorty in the 1990s, Russell Jacoby in the 1980s, and Christopher Lasch in the 1970s, and you would think that at this point an entire volume devoted to such a critique would be supererogatory. In Sean McCann’s and Michael Szalay’s Introduction and concluding essay, “Do You Believe in Magic,” all the stops are pulled out—Norman Mailer is scarcely different from Lionel Trilling, who in turn resembles C. Wright Mills; and distinctions disappear between libertarianisms left and right. All proving, supposedly, that anti-institutional political excesses in the 1960s bequeathed a critical irrationalism that today hobbles the chance for a meaningful left.
Old, stale stories? Heresy-sniffing? Bracing whiffs? (Gitlin, sarcastically, of Lott.) Fetid whiffs? (Lott, seriously, of McCann, Szalay, Rorty, Jacoby, and Lasch.) Parallel rhetoric, anyone?
“Your arguments are not merely laughable and/or bourgeois, but airborne particles which enter my nose, excite my olfactory nerve and produce an unpleasant, emetic effect.”
Perhaps this is the reason such grudges are held so long?
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Monday, May 01, 2006
Stages on Life’s Way, part II
Part I got a huge response - well, one comment. So obviously you want more. A response, by Kierkegaard, to a review of The Concept of Irony:
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Geoffrey Chaucer Defends Himself Against Charges of Plagiarism
On his blog, Geoffrey Chaucer defends himself against the allegations of plagiarism that have surfaced recently, stating, “Ich dide turne yt from a foule Italienne loue poeme ynto an historiale werke of Englysshe ful of high sentence.” Frater Thomas Walsingham has described the alleged plagiarism and Chaucer’s response to it in a recent broadsheet:
Callynge hymselfe a “huge fan” of Mayster Boccacce his poesie, Mayster Chaucere dide adde, “Aware ich was nat of how much the wordes of Boccacce dide stikke in myn imaginacioun.” Mayster Chaucere dide apologise to the soule of Boccacce and dide saye that his was the laste tyme he wolde model eny wrytynge upon hym in tyme to come, “saue for a smal werke in a frame-tale that ich endite at presente."
(Via Language Log. Also on Language Log, check out this and this. Our colleagues over there are also using semi-quantitative approaches to analyze last week’s other big plagiarism scandal, including Google Book Search and Amazon’s “Search Inside this Book.” They scan for short phrases like “was my age and died” to refute Malcolm Gladwell, who has argued that such phrases are ubiquitous in teen fiction, so their borrowing might be excusable.)
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