About Scott
Scott Eric Kaufman is an English graduate student at the University of California, Irvine. He earned his B.A. from Louisiana State University and hopes to earn his Ph.D. sometime before his funding evaporates. He had one fancy title: Senior Instructor of Literary Journalism. He is currently working tirelessly on his dissertation. His scholarly interests include everything—and he means everything—pertaining to American literature and appropriations of evolutionary theory c. 1890-1910. His blather can also be read on The Valve.
Email Address: scotterickaufman@gmail.com
Website: http://acephalous.typepad.com
Posts by Scott
Monday, January 05, 2009
Teaching the Overdetermined Image
As anyone who teaches funny books or films knows, the task of convincing students that the scene before them is anything other than incidental would try Job’s patience. You show them a panel from the surprisingly awful Superman and Batman vs. Aliens and Predator like, say, this
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Sunday, January 04, 2009
It’s always already been the end of epic film.
Whether he knows it or not—and “he” being Adam Kotsko, I’ll bet he knows it—this Weblog post is less about the formal fit between epic and the television serial than the relation of film to the episodic form. I know that sounds backwards—what with MOVIES! being PRESENTED! on SCREENS! the SIZE! of WYOMING!—but the compounded facts of run time and the modern American attention span necessitate we consider film the proper realm of the self-contained episode. Even films which promise sequels announce their completion in terms of whatever -ology they embrace.
Films should be about something in the original, locative sense of the word. They should surround some subject matter, be “on every side” “wholly or partially,” as per the OED. They should be self-contained. Not that they shouldn’t be sweeping—you can frame Guernica or a sublimely panoramic view of the Hudson River and slap it on a gallery wall without robbing them of sweep—but they should recognize their formal limitations. Films can only intimate narrative epicness. They can’t achieve it.
“But!”
“But But But!"
Try me. Start listing epic films and I’ll start listing films with grandiose tableaux. The Lord of the Rings? Shot in that sewer of New Zealand. Blade Runner? The Lord himself envies Ridley Scott’s matte painters. With film we confuse the formal qualities of narrative epic for the GIANT! SCALE! presented by the movie screen. Cases in point: Iron Man and The Dark Knight.
Both were hailed as epic upon release, and yet both are far superior films on the small screen. Before you ask: I do remember what I wrote about The Dark Knight on IMAX, and inasmuch as it relates the experience of watching an obscenely high-quality image projected on the side of an eight-story building, I stand by it. Watching the film on a small screen—one on which a bug of a Batman glides between five-inch tall skyscrapers while Heath Ledger’s Joker licks human-sized lips and establishes human-sized eye-contact—it’s impossible to deny that this supposedly epic performance is better suited to the televisual medium. (This goes doubly for Iron Man, which barely passes for “good" on the big screen but shines when we connect with Robert Downey Jr. as a human actor in corporate world.)
Not that I think we should deny that the serial drama is also better served on the small screen. A solidly written, solidly acted television show can be a better film than most films. To wit: having finished the first four episodes of the blogosphere’s own Leverage, I can’t help but wonder what went so terribly wrong with Ocean’s Twelve and Thirteen.
(x-posted about.)
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Thursday, January 01, 2009
Congratulations, Mr. Bady
Aaron nabbed the 2008 Cliopatria Award for “Best Writer.” I say “nabbed,” but in truth, he earned it—I wouldn’t have asked him to contribute if I didn’t think he’d land us swag. Congratulations to Aaron and all the winners:
Best Group Blog: The Edge of the American West
Best Individual Blog: Northwest History
Best New Blog: Wynken de Worde
Best Post: Claire Potter, Tenured Radical, “What Would Natalie Zemon Davis Do?”
Best Series of Posts: Tim Abbott on Trumbull’s The Death of General Montgomery, Jan. 12, Jan. 13, Jan. 14, Jan. 17, Jan. 18.
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Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Happy Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment!
I pray neither you nor yours hear the squeak before having the opportunity to wear one for a few decades.
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Friday, December 26, 2008
Harold Pinter, RIP
Harold Pinter—Undeserving Laureate of a Prize that Doesn’t Matter Anymore Because Who Still Reads Literature Anyway?—died yesterday after a long struggle with esophageal cancer. He will be missed.
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Monday, December 22, 2008
A Pre-MLA Preview of the Annual Post-MLA Article
Every year more than 10,000 literature scholars gather at the end of December for the convention of the Modern Language Association, the 124th of which begins next week in San Fransisco.
Past conventions have yielded papers with titles that were rife with bad puns, cute pop-culture references and an adolescent preoccupation with sex, from “Neo-Victorian Buggery” to “Bambi as a Bottom” and the tragically hip “I Never Got Tenure (but I Owe My Job to Jay-Z): Capital-T Theory, Hip-Hop Culture, and Some Thoughts About the Role of Literature in Contemporary Literary Studies.”
Founded in 1883, the Modern Language Association barely registered on the public consciousness for its first century. Professors attended to doze through papers about Chaucer and Emerson, schmooze one another and lobby for posts at more prestigious campuses. But in the 1980’s the conference became the site of annual skirmishes between old-school traditionalists and the increasing powerful new breed of postmodernists, multiculturalists, feminists and queer-theory advocates.
Basking in this unaccustomed level of public notice, Modern Language Association scholars brought increasingly attention-grabbing papers to the convention through the 1990’s, “queering” the “canon,” some said, and championing the “postcolonial,” proposing wild theories about everything from comic books to hip-hop to television and movies. Last year, perhaps hoping to put a stop to the trend, the Chronicle of Higher Education announced its first Annual Awards for Self-Consciously Provocative M.L.A. Paper Titles (a k a the Provokies) but in 2004 the Chronicle decided to drop the awards. Scott McLemee, a senior writer at Inside Higher Ed, explained that “crafting titles to get them written about and attacked in the press used to be exciting.
“Now it’s become a reflex, and their hearts aren’t really in it anymore.”
Not only are titles no longer intended to amuse, from the looks of this year’s several thousand entries, absolutely nothing of any importance is studied by scholars who present at the MLA. From “‘Nabakov’s Self-Translations” to an entire panel devoted to African literature, these scholars embrace topics no right-thinking person cares about. Would Joe the Plumber attend a talk on “William Faulkner’s Rural Modernism”? Would Tito the Builder enjoy a twenty-minute talk on “History and Memory in [James Joyce’s] ‘The Dead’”? Does Joe Sixpack even know what PMLA is, much less want to be published in it? Why then would he attend the roundtable discussion “How to Get Published in PMLA“? While most Americans never bothered to acquaint themselves with old readings of Renaissance texts, the eggheads at the MLA insist on producing “New Readings of Renaissance Texts.”
And there’s much, much more. But all of it is about unimportant nonsense.
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Sunday, December 21, 2008
Combobulated: Being a Play in Which We Laugh at Arrogant Undergraduates
(In a small classrroom, a young professor is discussing an R.P. Blackmur essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets with a group of twelve or so students.)
TEACHER: Blackmur claims “the hues attract, draw, steal men’s eyes, but penetrate, discombobolate, amaze the souls or psyches of women.” What does he mean by that?
CLASS: ...?
TEACHER: Break his sentence down. What does “discombobulate” mean?
STUDENT #1: Bored?
TEACHER: So Shakespeare’s language penetrates the souls of women by boring them? (two engineering majors giggle) How do you amaze someone by boring them?
STUDENT #2: (confidently) It’s a technical term from Switzerland. Watchmakers call the tiny gears inside a watch “bobulates” (beaming) and what a watchmaker does is he brings the bobulates together, and “com” is the Latin for “together.” So the proper technical term for this watch here (points to his wrist), or any working watch, is to say it’s “combobulated.” But over the life of a watch, it gets knocked around, and the gears get unaligned, and when that happens the watch becomes “discombobulated.”
TEACHER: Not “disbobulated”?
STUDENT #2: That’s what I said, but he told me--
TEACHER: He who?
STUDENT #2: My rabbi.
TEACHER: I see.
STUDENT #2: He said the Swiss wouldn’t be taken seriously if they didn’t keep the Latin in there, because “bobulate” sounds silly enough without the Latin prefix.
TEACHER: Isn’t “dis” a Latin prefix?
STUDENT #2: I didn’t know that then.
TEACHER: So what do you think Blackmur meant?
STUDENT #2: ...?
I still don’t know what Blackmur meant--nor why my rabbi conspired with The Future to punk me--but as the MLA approaches, I’m increasingly convinced that the first time I ever spoke up in class foreshadowed some ominous end to my academic career.* So while I’m not exactly sure what end this start augurs, I take comfort in the fact that Dickens didn’t know what he’d foreshadowed for Pip when he wrote the first installment of Great Expectations.** (Or he wouldn’t have written two endings.)
*The other lesson? Never trust the Jews.
**Not that scholars have written much about this. The only exception I can think of is about Buffy--but that might be because I only dipped my toe in Dickensian waters. (Work on Wharton’s serialized novels focuses on how she altered the plot or how she mimicked James, so even though I should’ve encountered something about it researching my Wharton chapter, I didn’t.)
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Tuesday, December 09, 2008
“If you liked Annie, you’ll love Rags to Riches."*
Today I learned that as often as I throw around the phrase “Horatio Alger novels,” I’d be hard-pressed to list many works that fit the bill. There are, of course, novels written by Horatio Alger, but even they only qualify on a technicality. (Plus, not all of Alger’s novels rely on pluck and luck to drive the narrative.) Not that his novels weren’t enormously popular, as over 17,000,000 million copies were sold in the 1860s through 1880s. Nor was their uplifting ideology incidental, as the popularity of C. B. Seymour’s Self-Made Man (1858) and Freeman Hunt’s Lives of American Merchants (1858) attest.
But as pervasive as Alger’s rags-to-riches ethos is assumed to be, I can’t think of many novels which present—much less endorse—it. Literary scholars prefer to toss off references to humble bootstrappers as if hundreds upon thousands of novels described their ascent up the social ladder. Maybe there are, but most encounters with the phrase “Horatio Alger novels” are purely contrary. We have the first fifteen chapters of every Jack London novel. We have Robert Penn Warren calling Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier an attempt to modernize the Horatio Alger myth (Homage 56). We have Richard Wright identifying it as the locus classicus of capitalist mystification in Black Boy:
I dreamed of going north and writing books, novels. The North symbolized to me all that I had not felt and seen; it had no relation whatever to what actually existed. Yet, by imagining a place where everything was possible, I kept hope alive in me. But where had I got this notion of doing something in the future, of going away from home and accomplishing something that would be recognized by others? I had, of course, read my Horatio Alger stories, my pulp stories, and I knew my Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford series from cover to cover, though I had sense enough not to hope to get rich; even to my naive imagination that possibility was too remote.” (161)
What we have isn’t a robust literary tradition of Horatio Alger-type novels so much as a steady stream of anti-Horatio Alger-type novels beginning with the last chapter of every London novel and Dreiser’s Trilogy of Desire (about Frank Algernon Cowperwood) and continuing through naturalist eviscerations of pat moral didacticism in Wright and Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March. Whither the tradition they counter? Wright’s autobiography and Bellow’s autobiographical novel clearly respond to the narrative form of Alger’s novels, but that brings us back to Alger as the only author proper to his category.
I’m tempted to say that this is yet another case of savvy critics trying to account for the popularity of atrocious novels by appealing to a grand ideology that predisposed a given audience to swallow shallow tripe—but then my student, the one who humbled me this afternoon, wouldn’t know the names of any earnest iterations of the Horatio Alger narrative. Any suggestions?
*Being the tagline of NBC’s ill-fated attempt to hijack Annie‘s bandwagon.
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Tuesday, December 02, 2008
The stigma of sessional work
Given how lovely the market is this year, I wonder how faculty who earned tenure in the ‘50s and ‘60s and ‘70s will respond to up-and-coming scholars who slummed as adjuncts or lecturers during the Great Recession of the December 2007 and Counting. Will they convince themselves they marketed their wares when the state of the nation was equally bleak?
Jonathan Culler of Boston prepares to return home after successfully landing a job at MLA 1974.
Or will they admit that the prospects for the current crop of newly-minted doctorates are sufficiently dim that the ban on hiring anyone who deigned to take a position because he liked food and needed shelter should be lifted?
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Friday, November 21, 2008
How not to use Theory’s Empire
Scanning through the critical literature on Kafka—the dissertation finished, I’m free to pursue old ideas—I run into an essay which uses Theory’s Empire in the very manner the anthology’s critics assumed everyone would. I will, however, Google-proof my exasperation by replacing all mentions of Derrida and things Derridean with cognates of the word carrot. The essay begins:
The 2005 volume includes major reassessments of poststructuralist theory, notably [The Carrot’s] . . . . The emphasis on “undecidability” in Kafka can be viewed as symptomatic of the influence of [Carrot] Theory embraced by the American literary academy in the 1970s and 1980s . . . . But [lowercase-c carrot’s] skeptical effect undermined the certitude that Kafka was a politically important novelist. For its detractors, the [carrotist] view that there is “nothing outside of the text” ignores that texts like Kafka’s have shaped human lives and human history.
Reductive enough for you? No? How about this?
Wellek, who helped to introduce [Carrot] theory to American literature departments, now asserts that [carrots] have destroyed literary studies, while Frederick Crews argues that “[the Carrot’s] judgment that ‘there is nothing outside the text’ automatically precludes recourse to evidence.” In Crews’s view, “both [the Carrot] and his myriad followers think nothing of appropriating and denaturing propositions from systems of thought whose premises they have already rejected.” Thomas Nagel goes further in condemning “post-modern relativism” as a “quick fix” which puts reason to sleep. In Theory’s Empire, [the Carrot]’s language is described as a “maze,” a “prison house of language,” a “limbo of combined attention and nonassertion."
These assessments appeal to raw authority. Crews and Nagel hate on [the Carrot] and rightly so. Why? Because [the Carrot’s] language is as empty and invidious as that of Kafka’s bureaucrats:
[T]o what degree do [the Carrot’s] rhetorical devices and ingenious language games resemble the language of the Courtiers who torture Joseph K.?
Care to guess what conclusion the author draws? I take comfort in the thought that everyone will admit this is an awful appropriation of the thought forwarded in Theory’s Empire—that it is to academic argument what posts on Kos are to nuanced political thought—but remember that this sort of anti-intellectual response is exactly what the anthology’s detractors warned would follow if it ever gained traction. While I think this falls under “the abuses” instead of “the uses” of the collection, I still feel the queasy creep of wrongness starting to settle in . . . .
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Thursday, November 20, 2008
Bolaño’s 2666, Part I: “They supplied the stamp of ultraconcrete canonical literature . . .”
So submits Roberto Bolaño, in the universally praised 2666, about scholars like me. He falls prey here to the Robertson Davies’ romance of academic life, in which even minor disagreements are elevated to shrieks against creed as red in claw as they are long in the tooth. Scholars like myself and Bolaño’s “insignificant Serbian critic” argue passionately but ultimately purposelessly, for the “ideas, assertions, denials, [and] doubts” we don’t have are
free of any intent to serve as guide, [are] neither pro nor con, just an eye seeking out the tangible elements, not judging them but simply displaying them coldly, archaeology of the facsimile, and, by the same token, of the photocopier. (55)
That Bolaño flips Benjamin the finger here is obvious enough. A work of art emancipated from “its parasitical dependence on ritual“ bobs on the restless and relentless tide of technological progress, degraded first by facsimile, later by photocopier, today by scanner, by email, tomorrow by technologies of reproduction yet to be invented.
His academics drift aimlessly, a cult without a leader, dependent upon the ritual of reading Benno von Archimboldi (the author whose biography is as mysterious as his novels are spectacular) but incomplete without personal, unmediated contact with the him.
They coagulate into a cult and embrace its trappings, its curdled factions, apostasies, anathemas, the evidences of intellectual combat in extremis. Their soft solid masses attend conferences devoted to German literature, chair panels in which their opponents counter their “festive, Dionysian vision of ultimate carnival” by “[speaking] of suffering . . . civic duty . . . [and] humor” (12).
They do this often, eleven times by my count, across a Europe overteeming with conferences devoted to high modernist literature about which Bolaño only speaks of obliquely through a critical language emptied of everything but the academic clichés, brood references to solitary men and their signal women.
When this sullen lot “[meets] their Moses” (23), a Swabbian journalist who once spoke directly to their absent father, Archimboldi, they discombobulate like jealous underlings: Pelletier (male) and Espinoza (male) bed Norton (female), ignore Morini (cripple), contemplate polyamory and redirect their incestuous agresssion away from their totemized father and toward the hapless Pakistani cabbie disgusted by the frankness of the conversation. The cabbie confessed
that London was such a labyrinth, he really had lost his bearings.
Which led Espinoza [male] to remark that he’d be damned if the cabbie hadn’t just quoted Borges, who once said London was like a labyrinth—unintentionally, of course. To which Norton [female] replied that Dickens and Stevenson had used the same trope long before Borges in their descriptions of London. This seemed to set the driver off, for he burst out that as a Pakistani he might not know this Borges, and he might not have read the famous Dickens and Stevenson either, and he might not even know London and its streets as well as he should, that’s why he’d said they were a labyrinth, but he knew very well what decency and dignity were, and by what he had heard, the woman here present, in other words Norton, was lacking in decency and dignity, and in his country there was a word for what she was, the same word they had for it in London as it happened, and that word was bitch or slut or pig, and the gentlemen here present, gentlemen who, to judge by their accents, weren’t English, also had a name in his county and that name was pimp or hustler or whoremonger. (73)
Had but the cabbie been aware that these well-dressed gentlemen were Freudian primitives he might have been prepared for the violence of their ugly surprise,
the hail of Iberian kicks that proceeded to rain down on him, kicks delivered at first by Espinoza [male] alone, but then by Pelletier [male] too, when Espinoza flagged, despite Norton’s [female] shouts at them to stop, despite Norton’s objections that that violence didn’t solve anything, that in fact after this beating the Pakistani would hate the English even more, something that apparently mattered little to Pelletier, who wasn’t English, and even less to Espinoza, both of whom nevertheless insulted the Pakistani in English as they kicked him, without caring in the least that he was down, curled into a ball on the ground, as they delivered kick after kick, shove Islam up your ass, which is where it belongs, this one is for Salman Rushdie (an author neither of them happened to think was much good but whose mentioned seemed pertinent), this one is for the feminists of Paris (will you fucking stop, Norton was shouting), this one is for the feminists of New York (you’re going to kill him, shouted Norton), this one is for the ghost of Valerie Solanas, you son of a bitch, and on and on, until he was unconscious and bleeding from every orafice in the head, except the eyes. (74)
Here my sad parody collapses before the force of Bolaño’s prose. The slack parenthetical screams would sound forced or tinny were they deployed inexpertly or paced differently or not so damn distanced from the bloodied, beating immigrant body sprawled dumbly before character and reader alike.
Not that Bolaño nails acadmic life, what with his hammer being fixated on imaginary prey, and what with his romantic obsession with authenticity and unmeddled communion of artist and critic, but a complaint about how he depicts the chill aftermath of Espinoza and Pelletier’s outburst must be lodged by actual academics, the ones whose breath is caught and heart broken with every blow, because if I beat some ignorant fuck near to death I tell you now it wouldn’t matter how ignorant or much of a fuck he was, it would take two hands and a foot to count the decades before I could return to my “labors as fresh as daisies” or begin “writing and attending conferences again with uncommon energy” (85).
P.S. Not every post will fall to the thrall Bolaño’s prose quite so deep or earnestly. I have a problem, I admit it, a desire to emulate clumsily what I read, but if I have any ear for tone, and I’m not saying that I do, it owes a blood debt to this compulsion.
(x-posted.)
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Tuesday, November 11, 2008
The Golden Notebook Project
The Institute for the Future of the Book‘s Golden Notebook Project went live today. Here’s the Institute’s Bob Stein on it:
On November 10th, The Institute for the Future of the Book kicks off an experiment in close reading. Seven women will read Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and carry on a conversation in the margins. The idea for the project arose out of my experience re-reading the novel in the summer of 2007 just before Lessing won the Nobel Prize for literature. The Golden Notebook was one of the two or three most influential books of my youth and I decided I wanted to “try it on” again after so many years. It turned out to be one of the most interesting reading experiences of my life. With an interval of thirty-seven years the lens of perception was so different; things that stood out the first-time around were now of lesser importance, and entire themes I missed the first time came front and center. When I told my younger colleagues what I was reading, I was surprised that not one of them had read it, not even the ones with degrees in English literature. It occurred to me that it would be very interesting to eavesdrop on a conversation between two readers, one under thirty, one over fifty or sixty, in which they react to the book and to each other’s reactions. And then of course I realized that we now actually have the technology to do just that. Thanks to the efforts of Chris Meade, my colleague and director of if:book London, the Arts Council England enthusiastically and generously agreed to fund the project. Chris was also the link to Doris Lessing who through her publisher HarperCollins signed on with the rights to putting the entire text of the novel online.
Fundamentally this is an experiment in how the web might be used as a space for collaborative close-reading. We don’t yet understand how to model a complex conversation in the web’s two-dimensional environment and we’re hoping this experiment will help us learn what’s necessary to make this sort of collaboration work as well as possible. In addition to making comments in the margin, we expect that the readers will also record their reactions to the process in a group blog. In the public forum, everyone who is reading along and following the conversation can post their comments on the book and the process itself.
I don’t believe the effort’s entirely unprecedented, but it’s the sort of endeavor (and meta-endeavor, if you will) that we can and should throw our weight behind. I’ll say more as the project progresses, as the novel falls victim to the five year rule twice-over.
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Friday, November 07, 2008
“I have no literary interests; something else: I am made of literature.”
So wrote Kafka on LF 304 and BrF 444. No, I don’t know what those mean either. Princeton only posted Stanley Corngold’s introduction to Franz Kafka: The Office Writings, so the citations function as cryptic references to private files collected, collated, duplicated and made available to people in the employ of a vast bureaucracy.* (Apt, ain’t it?) Corngold likes to pair the titular quotation with nonce word from Br 384 and L 333: Schriftstellersein, which he translates here as “the being of a writer,” but elsewhere [.pdf] as “the condition of being a writer."**
His intention, here as at that elsewhere, is to create a continuum between Kafka’s Schriftstellersein and his Beamtensein, or “official self,” that is, between the literature he scratched out between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. and the sanctioned documents he produced at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. Intuitively, this seems as sound as “Petition of the Toy Producers’ Association” sounds like it could adorn one of his short stories. There’s a catch:
Kafka didn’t write “Petition of the Toy Producers’ Association,” but “Petition of the Toy Producers’ Association in Katharinaberg, Erzgebirge,” a title whose specificity ruins its effect. It’s a document Kafka never distilled, never labored over as he did his literary work. Not that he wasn’t an able lawyer: on 26 November 1912, he won a settlement of 4,500 kronen on behalf of the Institute, but he did so on a “maddening trip to Kratzau” (LF 64). Why “maddening”? Because it’d interrupted the proper composition of “The Metamorphosis”:
This kind of story should be written with no more than one interruption, in two ten-hour sessions; then it would have its natural spontaneous flow . . . . But I haven’t got twice ten hours at my disposal. So one has to try to do the best one can, since the very best has been denied to one. (LF 64)
Obviously, Kafka’s emphasis is formal, not rhetorical here--the flow of the story shaped by experience of its composition--but that’s my point: when Kafka stood before the District Court of Kratzau in November 1912, he read a document he’d written to persuade the Court to settle in his favor. It’s no more literary than the fifty-three letters he’d written Felice Bauer in November and December 1912 to persuade her that he would visit, couldn’t visit, wouldn’t visit, must visit, will visit never mind won’t visit her that Christmas. (That’s undecidability in action, folks.***) Not that it isn’t important. As an historicist, I value the documents in the same way I value the letters. But I don’t understand the desire for equivalence here.
Kafka may’ve written about and on behalf of bureaucracies, and there’s no small amount of interest in the intersection, but that’s no reason to collapse one into the other. This isn’t like David Foster Wallace’s notes for The Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, which are aimed at writers composed in his signature stylistic quirk. Or is it? Talk me down, people, lest I flatten every last bit of word by a genius into. That way lies madness.
(x-posted.)
*Sometimes I play coy. So shoot me, but then consult--if you can brave the German--Briefe an Felice, ed. Erich Heller and Jurgen Born. (Cowards can try their hand at Letters to Felice, trans. James Stern and Elizabeth Duckworth.)
**A distinction of interest to hardcore Heideggerians, no doubt, but me not so much.
***Not really.
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Wednesday, November 05, 2008
So I fared, dragging all precepts, judgments, maxims, creeds, like culprits to the bar.
Rick Brookhiser thinks he can fool us. He quotes a bit from Book XI of The Prelude so that American conservatives might better understand how their liberal counterparts feel tonight. Here’s some of the Wordsworth he cherry-picked:
O pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, us who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven! O times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!
Superficial readers of Great Books make this sort of mistake all the time. They half-remember some passage from their undergraduate Brit Lit survey and feel wicked clever. They think: "’The attraction of a country in romance’? Sounds like Obama. The world must know that I once read a Lake Poet. To the internet!" Then they post a passage from The Prelude in which Wordsworth mocks his younger self for the optimism he felt during the first days of the French Revolution. So what does Brookhiser think it’s like to be a liberal in America today?
It’s like being an old goat who’s spent decades rewriting an epic poem about his intellectual development while he’s deriding the only moment in his entire life in which he allowed optimism to enter his black heart. For a second I thought he might’ve claimed this on purpose, so that when liberals are fed up with an inadequately leftist Obama he can link to that post and say, "I told you! You didn’t realize it at the time, you uneducated twunts, but I told you!" Then he’ll insert the ellipsed bits:
In the main outline, such it might be said
Was my condition, till with open war
Britain opposed the liberties of France.
This threw me first out of the pale of love;
Soured and corrupted, upwards to the source,
My sentiments; was not, as hitherto,
A swallowing up of lesser things in great,
But change of them into their contraries;
And thus a way was opened for mistakes
And false conclusions, in degree as gross,
In kind more dangerous. What had been a pride,
Was now a shame . . .
He’ll claim: "I told them they would be disappointed in someone new! Did they listen? Of course not!" Once our "events brought less encouragement" and were "[w]orn out in greatness, stripped of novelty," Brookhiser’ll pop from the bushes and shock us with his erudite ellision and we’ll be forced to admit we’d been punked by a Joe Sixpack who happened to graduate from Yale.
Then I remembered the sort of mind I was dealing with and drew a bath.
(X-posted.)
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Wednesday, October 08, 2008
“This Sandworm anon let flee a fart, as gret as it hadde ben a thundir dent.”
On this day in 1920, Frank Herbert Jr. was born. Herbert devoted six years to “researching” what would become the most popular science fiction novel of all time. I’ve always wondered what counts as “research” when writing a novel. I can understand the need for writers of hard science fiction to familiarize themselves with the ins and outs of a particular field, but for someone like Herbert, wouldn’t “world-building” more accurately describe his efforts? I say this because Herbert describes a world in which the mysticism and magic have replaced science and technology.
This time I am lifting from Adam Robert‘s excellent History of Science Fiction, in which he claims “one of the book’s greatest strengths is its detailed and plausible rendering of the political context” (236). What Herbert spent six years “researching,” then, was the complex political environs of the interplanetary empire he’d invented because Dune‘s reputation as an environmental novel is undeserved. The overgrown extremophiles who inhabit Arrakis are humans from Earth, but somehow survive on a planet with no viable means to create or sustain an atmosphere. As Roberts writes:
We may wonder, for instance, how Dune’s atmosphere is oxygenated in the absence of planetary vegetation. In later books Herbert suggests that the sandworms fart oxygen, which hardly address the problem. [Edited to reflect my poor editorial skills, not Adam’s.]
Indeed, without an atmospheric density in the neighborhood of 1.2 kg/m³ it wouldn’t matter what element those sandworms farted--it would’ve drifted up and away. And where did all that sand come from anyway? The most efficient means of producing sand is wave action, but even if Herbert wanted to be inefficient, a little research would’ve taught him that sand requires big rocks and weathering processes. The geological history of a planet consisting entirely of sand is--will you let me get my geology geek on, please? The opportunities to do so are few and very far between. Fine then. I’ll be mysterious.*
I don’t mean to diminish Herbert’s accomplishments in Dune. So long as he was alive, the series educated science types about the nuances and niceties of medieval politics. (The process, if not the history.) That said, I always found Herbert’s forecast of future history more than a little pessimistic. Like the Terminator and Battlestar Galactica franchises, the Dune sextet pivots on a war between man and formerly enslaved machine, the result of which was a return to a pre-computational society. The mentats are bred--"Fancy meeting you here, dissertation. Please GO AWAY."--they are bred to be mathematical savants, and spice mystically allows for interstellar travel sans star-charts. So, no computers needed. However, Herbert’s novels seem to argue that a rejection of the modern technology entails a rejection of modern political systems--as if dispensing with the convenience of a calculator is the first sign of feudalism’s revival.
Besides the obvious problem with this--somehow those Athenians managed to be quasi-democratic before the Age of Apple--and despite Herbert’s obvious critique of hierarchy and messianic thought, I can’t help but think the novels engender a nostalgia for certainty in their readers. We might not know how spice works, but Our Dear God-Emperor surely does. (Despite having personally and purposely evolved into a human-sandworm hybrid--about which plot-point my dissertation rears its head like Giant Putin over unsuspecting Alaska. So I’ll stop now lest I invite insanity in, slap it on the back, and offer it a brew--which is, yes, how a body feels about a dissertation recently completed. I hear tell this subsides in time, but so far I’ve felt none of it.)
(x-posted.)
*By which I don’t mean anything like “I sat here trying to think what would have to happen for such a planet to come about--including, but not limited to, a cessation of mountain-building after a period of intense weathering by something other than water, since water poisons the marvelous beasts who produce the spice melange and whose evolution would’ve spanned untold eons.” I don’t mean anything like that. I know the answer, I’m simply not in the mood to share.
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