About Joseph Kugelmass
Joseph Kugelmass blogs at The Kugelmass Episodes. He is a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine. He joined the Valve in September, 2006.
Email Address: kugelmass@me.com
Website: http://kugelmass.wordpress.com/
Posts by Joseph Kugelmass
Monday, June 01, 2009
A Dream I Had After Watching Star Trek
In this scene, young James Kirk is fighting, wenching, and drinking his way across Iowa, when suddenly...
OLD GUY WHO GETS THE BRAIN LEECHES LATER: We need you to be a starship trooper! Your standardized test scores are way off the charts!
JAMES KIRK: I don’t remember taking any standardized tests!
OLD GUY / BRAIN LEECHES: Of course not! You were totally drunk! But your noble, starship trooper blood sort of took them for you when you were passed out, thus proving to millions of teenagers—once again—that if they don’t perform well on the SATs, they should kill themselves!
JAMES KIRK: Are you saying that I have mitochondria in my blood, like Anakin and the annoying, nerdy kid from A Wrinkle in Time?
OLD GUY / BRAIN LEECHES: Probably!
JIM KIRK: Well, that sounds kinda derivative, but...Wait a second, if I become a starship trooper, am I going to have to take that test designed by Spock? It’s totally unbeatable.
O.G. / B.L.: Don’t worry, you’ll kick that test’s ass!
JIMSTER: How?
O.G. / B.L.: By cheating.
JIM-BOB: Does that mean I cheated on the earlier standardized tests, too? Because cheating against Spock seems like a normal thing for a hot-blooded kid from Iowa to do. That Spock! He’s so crazy! The token woman/black person wants to have his baby! But on the other hand, cheating on these standardized tests from my mysterious past would pretty much just make me a cheater, which is sort of lame.
O.G. / B.L.: So let’s just assume that you only cheated when it was awesome to do so. Oh God! The brain leeches! I can feel them attaching themselves!
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On Breeding, Post VII: In Which Our Hero Resolves the Nature vs. Nurture Question
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes)
Nature versus nurture, Lodge. Nature always wins.
--Secretary William Cleary, Wedding Crashers
Jenny Davidson’s new book of cultural criticism, entitled Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century, is one of the strangest and most elliptical works of its kind I’ve ever read. I say this because, unlike traditional works of historicist criticism, Breeding never makes an overt argument about how modern readers should feel about its subject, the nature vs. nurture debates of the 18th Century. It risks seeming purposeless in order to pit Steven Pinker, a contemporary researcher and author on matters of cognition and evolution, against William Godwin, a pedagogue and Romantic who died in 1836. This fundamental comparison seems to be more an effect of the text than something Davidson consciously intended; she spells out her intentions in the Introduction, citing W. G. Sebald and Roland Barthes as inspirations for a text that seeks only to explore the “grid” of an issue and to present its nuances in a tolerant, dispassionate fashion.
In so doing, however, the text is bound to leave us mildly disappointed. It is not that it lacks erudition or insight; in fact, as the great diversity of responses published on the Valve indicates, its plentiful supply of both encourages readers to enter this debate as one might a house preserved from that time, lingering over those artifacts that they, for their own reasons, find most compelling. But I think that, even despite ourselves, we come to a book like Breeding in the hopes that we might end up a little closer to answering those same raw and troubling questions that inspired Locke and Rousseau. That remains, in this case, the road not taken. Still, Davidson’s book suggests, if only by what it chooses to include, some important ways of cutting the Gordian knot of nature and nurture.
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Saturday, May 02, 2009
A follow up: the university as it could be
x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes
I thought I’d give us two glimpses of what higher learning might look like if we followed Mark Taylor’s excellent advice about “ending the university as we know it” in favor of a non-specialized, interdisciplinary series of collaborations. These are based on experiences from the past two days. In the first example, we have a situation that brings together business smarts, game theory, wellness, the study of ancient cultures, and an in-depth knowledge of the Federal bureaucracy. In the second example, we have an interdisciplinary conversation that calls upon history, psychology, “guerrilla marketing,” the World Wide Web, advanced strategy, economic modeling, and metaphysics.
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Friday, May 01, 2009
An op-ed so bad, we had to post on it twice
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes)
Dear readers: every time I try to get out, they keep pulling me back in. I don’t know why the New York Times published Mark Taylor’s op-ed on “ending the university.” If they hadn’t done so, I could have kept on with the work of figuring out how to write my dissertation without a teaching position, as UCI will probably not renew its TA contracts for seventh-year graduate students.
But instead, I have to add to Marc Bousquet’s characteristically wonderful reaction piece my own observations about Taylor’s faddish and wrongheaded plan for academic “reform.” Thankfully, Bousquet has saved me the trouble of responding to Taylor’s calls for the end of tenure, and to his off-the-cuff, factually incorrect statements about the job market and probable compensation for so-called “contingent” faculty (who do not have tenure and are not on a tenure track).
I am throwing in my own two cents because still more of Taylor’s arguments compel a response: first, his proposal for re-inventing the dissertation; second, his ideas for re-designing the disciplines, ideas that are very subtly and very insidiously political.
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Monday, February 23, 2009
A Music Post: To Fix The Gash In Your Head
(Cross-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes.)
You know when you get so tense and anxiety-ridden that all the nerves at the back of your neck snarl up into one burning ball? Well, if that gland could make music, it would sound like this album. –Lester Bangs, from “Monolith or Monotone? Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music”
It took me a while, but finally, after dipping my toes in the water by attending a mash-up party, I gathered the courage to go to a rock show. I have been semi-avoiding rock shows literally for years, and the blame falls primarily on an indie rock group called Mates of State…
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Friday, February 20, 2009
I’m Simply Wild About That Sled
(Cross-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes.)
So you know how Citizen Kane, over time, with the exception of that White Stripes song that quotes it, has slowly boiled down to the fact that “Rosebud” is the name of his sled?
Well, a friend referenced that fact today, and it struck me that the greatest spoiler in history is a lot darker than I had previously thought. I’d always intepreted the film pretty straightforwardly: Kane’s life of power drives him to madness and sorrow, and in his secret heart, he longs for the innocence of his childhood, an innocence symbolized by the sled.
But that doesn’t keep the revelation from being somewhat anti-climactic; whether or not you know in advance what’s coming, you do spend three hours getting there. It’s much ado about a sled. That, it seems to me, is precisely the point. The thing that is supposed to represent pastoral innocence is a thing, a fetishized object, not different in kind from all the objects that litter Kane’s private castle. In other words, the mystery of the sled, like the embellished memory of it that Kane constructs from within Xanadu, is there to convince you that Kane has undergone a fall, that his life is fundamentally tragic because of it, and therefore that it has the grandeur of tragedy. But in fact the bathos of the revelation confronts us with the triviality of his life, and with the fact that the sled is little more than wallpaper covering a gaping hole. He did not fall—Kane rose, as history records. The horror of his life was that there was actually no riddle to it at all, and into those flames, along with the riddle, goes any meaning, any permanence a life might contain.
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Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Those Obscene Octuplets
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes)
Greetings from California, where, as is now very widely known, people do crazy things with the help of doctors, up to and including giving birth to children 7 through 14 at the same time.
Since most people’s interest in the Guinness Book of World Records begins to wane by age 11, it’s surprising to me that the Suleman octuplets have created such an enormous scandal. They are an inescapable subject across completely different workplaces, social settings, and social classes. The story has been told by nearly everyone, major media included, in an emotional register that goes all the way from outrage to very angry mockery.
How will she (Nadya) pay for the family? Why is she so “obsessed” with having children? Why would she have more children if it meant that her mother would speak disapprovingly of her? Why would a doctor assist with the process, despite having taken some kind of Greek oath early on? Where’s Dad?
At first, this story struck me as merely another case of something small getting a lot of media time, a category that also includes sensational murders and descriptions of how the First Family relaxes. That was my initial reaction; as I continued to bump into the story again and again, I was struck by the fact that it is really obscene, in the sense of an event or practice that attracts hatred and disgust exceeding any legitimate objection. Suleman certainly strikes me as foolish, but why does her decision strike so many Americans as obscene?
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Tuesday, December 23, 2008
The Rhet/Comp Article “At Least It’s An Ethos…” picked up by Inside Higher Ed
I like my original title pretty well, but otherwise a much improved version of my recent post “At Least It’s An Ethos” is up at InsideHigherEd, along with an up-to-the-minute stream of commenters in various kinds of apoplectic states. God bless them, every one.
Many thanks to IHE for picking up the article, and for their invaluable editorial advice. Here’s the link.
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Saturday, December 13, 2008
At Least It’s An Ethos: Why Merging Rhetoric With Composition Is A Mistake
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes)
Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, dude, at least it’s an ethos.
-The Big Lebowski
After almost five years teaching writing, English, ESL, and humanities survey courses to high school students and undergraduates, I have come to the conclusion that it is a serious mistake to ground undergraduate instruction in writing in the basics of Aristotelian rhetoric. I believe doing so is increasingly common, and that it is increasingly normal for universities to reframe composition jobs as being in “rhetoric and composition.”
This is a discussion somewhat rooted in the practicalities of teaching first-year undergraduates to write, but it has much broader implications. It is part of a larger conversation about what, exactly, the humanities are supposed to mean at a historical moment when college-level reading and writing skills are quite valuable, yet also when the political and economic conditions put “anti-ideological” pressure on institutions of higher learning. In other words, universities increasingly see themselves as preparing students to write fluently on any topic, from any perspective. This is not the “end” of ideological instruction, naturally, since its final consequence is to encourage students to write for the highest bidder, making every young writer into a copy writer. But it is worth examining how rhetorically themed instruction in writing—especially in ethos, pathos, and logos—arose as a natural way of resolving political conflicts between Western institutions, and to consider the consequences of this paradigm shift for our students. My objection is not merely political; it is also pedagogical, since “rhetoric and composition” forecloses many other valuable ways of teaching reading and writing.
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Thursday, November 13, 2008
A New Blog For You To Read; Also, Mad Men and the Office
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Epsiodes)
I utterly recommend the blog Blographia Literaria, if you aren’t reading it already. I just discovered it, courtesy of an interesting and kind (though ultimately critical) response to my previous post on summarizing theory.
Via that post, I found Andrew’s reflections on the television shows Mad Men and The Office, which, by incredible coincidence, I am watching concurrently while reading Andrew’s post on why one might watch them concurrently.
(More below the fold.)
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Sunday, November 02, 2008
Derrida’s Obituary, or, Is Literary Theory Too Abstruse?
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes)
REPORTER: How do you answer the charge that you’re a fascist?
WILSON: What?
REPORTER: Your band, Joy Division, named after a group of women recruited by the SS for the purpose of breeding perfect Aryans. Isn’t that sick.
WILSON: Have you never heard of situationism, or postmodernism? Do you know nothing about the free play of signs and signifiers?
-24 Hour Party People
One time after class I actually went up to the TA and asked him what postmodernism was. “Nobody really knows the answer to that,” he said. I think he’s teaching at Princeton now.
-A friend, to me, five days ago
Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Philosopher, Dies at 74
-The New York Times, 10/10/2004
When I was in my second year of graduate studies at Irvine, Jacques Derrida died. The New York Times chose to summarize him as an “abstruse” philosopher, prompting many people at UCI and elsewhere to sign a petition of protest. Given Derrida’s immense philosophical legacy, as well as his devoted efforts as our teacher and colleague at Irvine, it seemed offensively callous to sum him up in such a dismissive way.
I did not sign the petition. I thought it a fair assessment, though one that sits poorly on the day after a man’s death. The Times could have used many other words—radical, groundbreaking, influential—that would have been kinder and just as apt. Yet as long as Derrida continues to be read, he will continue to be a puzzling and frustrating read, albeit a dazzling and seductive one for certain types of readers. That quality in his work leads us to a question that never seems far from the surface in discussions of literary theory and criticism: what are we to make of the last fifty years in criticism? Can it be summed up? Can it be comprehended fully? Must we refrain from “calling out” Derrida on the thicket of his prose?
In the comments following my post on Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, Valve contributor Rohan Maitzen asked the following:
There’s a lot of lit-blogging (and reviewing, and publishing) that goes on that disregards or is even openly disdainful of the conventions, contributions, or (dare I say) rigor of academic literary scholarship and criticism. But refuting (or complicating, or qualifying) literary judgments or interpretations is (or is it?) a different kind of game than ‘refuting specific factual inaccuracies’--though factual inaccuracies may sometimes be involved. Maybe these discussions, because they don’t have the same public stakes (not to mention audience) as “political scholarship” like Goldberg’s, should just be left alone--but then, do we professional lit-crit types not think there are better and worse (more or less responsible and legitimate) ways to do our kind of thing as well? Do we have any responsibility to get in the game, then?
Bill Benzon, also of the Valve, responded:
That’s a very good set of questions, Rohan. Has there been any attempt to present the results of academic literary criticism and scholarship to the general public? Sure, Harold Bloom has written about Shakespeare and about the Western canon, but he wasn’t presenting a popular synthesis of scholarship; he was presenting Bloom on those topics. Marjorie Garber has published a big fat book on Shakespeare that’s pretty general in nature, but based on a wide range of scholarship. But that’s one author, albeit, a central one.
Just around the corner from here I have a post presenting J. Hillis Miller’s reflections on how the profession has changed in 50 years. Has anyone attempted to lay out what we’ve learned about literature in the past 50 years? For surely we have learned a lot. And it would take more than one or three books and a dozen magazine articles to set that before the public. And, of course, there’s considerable contention within the profession about what we’ve learned. But that’s OK.
The discussion continued apace for a while; in response to a later comment by Bill, I wrote:
The problem here is language about language (e.g. literature). If somebody dumbs down Heisenberg and quantum mechanics enough for me, sure, I can see that the observer cannot be separated from the observed, and I can worry over the death of Schrodinger’s cat. But what I can’t do is important work in the field of quantum mechanics. Whereas that seems to be exactly the desire with synopses of literary criticism and theory: to reduce things down to inarguable truisms or clichés, and then to believe that’s actually preparation for reading in depth.
Bill answered: “If this is so, then reading ‘in depth’ has no value to anyone but the critics who do it. Might as well be Stanley Fish. BTW, language about language is built-in to language; Jakobson called it the metalingual function. Literary critics didn’t invent it in the 1960s.” As the discussion continued, tomemos wrote in to suggest that a primer on literary studies
would amplify our cultural misunderstanding of what the humanities are supposed to produce: when are we going to roll up our sleeves and get something done? Bill talks about a book that would “present the results of academic literary criticism,” but obviously literary criticism does not have “results” in the scientific sense, and so a book that pretended that it does would not just be dumbing down the ideas of the field; it would be a complete distortion of the field itself.
Tomemos raises important questions. What is the nature of the field of literary criticism, given that it does not make “progress” in the same way the sciences do? Why do we consider summaries or popularizing explanations of theory and criticism to be inherently distortive? Why is there so much demand for less technical, summary accounts of theory? The demand goes well beyond immediately affected graduates and undergraduates working on deadline.
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Monday, October 27, 2008
A post in which we go from graffiti to meta-graffiti and maybe meta-infinity
The meta-graffiti is below the fold.
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Academics, Political Scholarship, and Jonah Goldberg
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes)
Over at Acephalous (and at The Edge of the American West), Scott Kaufman has posted the text of Friday’s panel presentation on Jonah Goldberg (Liberal Fascism) and the right-wing version of what we might call “political scholarship,” a genre that (taken loosely) might also include K. C. Johnson’s Until Proven Innocent (which Scott also tackled), and that, interestingly, comes in both cases from the desks of committed bloggers. I write “political scholarship” rather than “political science” because of the deep strain of revisionist history in Goldberg and Johnson’s work.
First of all, as his political posts so often do, this puts Scott once again at the forefront of academic blogging. He is carving out a niche for himself as a defender of liberal fair-mindedness and plain old scholarly integrity.
I am also glad that Brandon Gordon, the UC Irvine grad student who corresponded with Goldberg, refused Goldberg’s Facebook request and that Scott reported it. The creepy pretense of affability that characterized William F. Buckley’s unctuous conservatism will, I hope, go to rest with him in the grave.
Scott raises a valuable question: what role ought academics to play with respect to middlebrow political scholarship of this kind?
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Saturday, October 18, 2008
Time Must Have A Stop
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes)
At least three ABD students, myself included, are currently working on James Joyce at UC Irvine; all of them are working on Joyce’s representations of time, particularly the tension in his novels between diachronic (linear) time, the usual sort, and synchronic (simultaneous) time.
I expected, of course, that when I arrived at graduate school I would find a lot of interest in the philosophy of time, both because of its consistent fascination for thinkers in the 20th Century, and because of the games that fictions play with it. But despite the many ways of cognizing time, simultaneous perceptions get all the limelight: why? Why should it be that Walter Benjamin’s description of history “shot through with chips of Messianic time” now strikes so many critics so forcefully? In my last post, I asked readers for examples of vast alien intelligences, and maybe half of all the passages recommended to me dealt specifically with simultaneity (for example, “Story of Your Life” and Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End).
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Monday, October 13, 2008
Question for our readers: Intelligences vaster than our own?
Dear readers,
The following is a question from a colleague of mine, one that perhaps you are itching to answer: “I’m looking for literary examples of an individual and/or ‘man’ coming into contact with an alien intelligence so far beyond comprehension that human life becomes, by comparison, insignificant and beyond morality to the point of absurdity. The examples might be from Sci-Fi, but they might be from French Existentialism, Borges, Conrad, what have you. The nature of the alien intelligence can be conceived broadly: machine, organic, gassy clouds, whatever. The point is only that we get glimpses of something so far beyond human categories, that it renders the mind and soul without purpose.”
I suggested the Martians from Stranger in a Strange Land, as well as the Borg. He wrote in a follow-up note: “I’m after a more or less subjective account of the shock that comes from experiencing that vast intelligence beyond yourself and humanity. So I’m less interested in a vision of what extraterrestrial or alien beings actually might be (Ents, etc.), than in passages that describe the moment when you grasp something far in excess of human categories. These are sublime moments, but unlike the sublime, don’t support a compensatory moment when the human mind reasserts its cognitive powers. Also keep in mind that the examples don’t have to be from Science Fiction. They can be accounts of a primitive people experiencing a volcano and thinking its God, or accounts of the sea in Conrad--any account of shock and awe in the face of what seems to be something vast beyond the power of the human mind, something that is presumed to see humans as wholly insignificant.”
What would you recommend?
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