About Scott Eric Kaufman
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 Eric Kaufman
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
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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Friday, May 29, 2009
What I can (and can’t) say about Jenny Davidson’s Breeding.
They say that when you’re writing a dissertation, every cultural artifact you consume because grist in its conceptual mill—and they are correct. Because when you’re writing a dissertation, everything seems relevant. So even though I’m courting cliché by saying it, I’m going to say it anyway: everything in Jenny Davidson’s Breeding seems relevant to my research. Why?
Because it is.
For those who only know me as the guy who does those posts on film and comic pedagogical strategies, behold my credentials. Why am I talking about myself instead of Jenny’s book? Because understanding my one quibble with her argument requires you understand something of mine.
The short—and I mean it—version is that non-Darwinian theories of evolutionary and social development survived in and were desseminated by works of literature irrespective of their status in the scientific community. You can see why I might consider Jenny’s book (published by Columbia University Press) a prequel to my dissertation (available for download via a database very few people can access). Given that my dissertation focuses on these debates raged ninety-five years after Jenny’s century ended, I’m not really qualified to speak to—much less certify—the validity of her evidence. But to address John’s concerns, I can say that every time she recounts a theory or debate I’m familiar with, she does so in a way no charitable reader would find fault with.
That’s not to say that I always agree with her, if only because she often suggests points I want forcefully asserted. Her reluctance to do so may merely be rhetorical: in a book that lets primary works speak for themselves, forceful assertion might not seem simply out of place, it could result in the casting of suspicion on the curiously adament claim. For example, she concludes her discussion on resemblance in Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story by claiming:
When the old problems [relating to the heredity basis of resemblance] resurface late in the nineteenth century, most scientists are ignorant of the earlier theories: Thomas Huxley is an exception, as are a few others, but Darwin knew little of nothing of the seventeenth- and eighteenth century controversies alluded to here. Literary texts, though, retained a palimpsest of these arguments, providing one means by which Darwin and others could gain access to the knowledge of earlier generations. (36)
This would be the weak version of an argument whose strong version would look something like this: given that Jenny earlier indicated that Darwin read Inchbald’s A Simple Story alongside Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park in 1840, why not try and verify whether Darwin recognized the palimpsest as such and took something from it? Because a quick search of his notebooks reveals there might be something to it.
In 1840, Darwin was writing “Old & Useless notes about the moral sense & some metaphysical points.” It contains notes on books like Louis-Aimé Martin’s De l’éducation des mères de famille (1837) like “I suspect conscience, an heredetary [sic] compound passion, like avarice” (601), which in essence means Darwin was investigating whether greedy children resembled their greedy mothers. It stands to reason that Austen might have something to say about that.
But I would say that. Eighty percent of my dissertation involves sussing out just those sorts of connections: the lines of argumentation—some acknolwedged, most not due to the arguer being unaware of their continued influence on his or her thought—that persist, despite scientific progress, largely on account of their presence in popular literary culture. In short, my complaint is that Jenny didn’t write the book I would have written, which as complaints go is fairly universal. But to return to John’s qualm, the fact that the claim she suggested might bear fruit seems like it will indicates that our trust in her is not misplaced. Whether this is because the discipline has done it job—rewarded a scholar whose knowledge of the field is such that her suppositions are more likely to bear out than not—I can’t say.
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Thursday, May 28, 2009
Some Methods of Breeding
This is a guest post by David Mazella, an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Houston, and a co-founder and managing editor of the scholarly blog, The Long Eighteenth. He is the author of a cultural and conceptual history of cynicism, The Making of Modern Cynicism (University of Virginia Press, 2007).
I’m going to follow Jenny Davidson’s lead, and offer a “partial”* criticism of this remarkable book, which is, after all, subtitled a “partial history of the eighteenth century.” And for those puzzled by the precise meaning of “partial” on the title-page, Davidson glosses the term in her Introduction, where she justifies her own critical approach with the figure of Austen’s “partial, prejudiced, and ignorant Historian.” With this nod towards Austen’s extraordinarily concentrated narration, Davidson hints that this book, like Austen’s, will abjure the usual, chock-a-block style of academic narrative, and cultivate instead a listening-pose, in which she hopes to overhear the “echoes and responses and recapitulations [that] emerge from a congeries of voices” (12).
Consequently, this book is conceived as a “nuance exercise” (11) that is linked with the characteristic strengths of both historical scholarship in the humanities and literary studies in its Barthesian, writerly mode. In its close attention to the nuances of language, rhetoric, and historical change, this book opposes itself to the broader, more continuously narrated accounts of the nature/culture divide found in the history of science, cultural studies and critical theory. Whether she has left these rival accounts behind, however, or simply swerved around them, remains to be seen.
Nonetheless, in the spirit of Austen’s devotion to the single detail that has the potential to tell the whole story, we should think further about this “micronetwork” or sequence of terms, and consider how they might apply, ironically or not, to Davidson’s own project. “Partial” seems an apt way to describe her fondness for the literary, philosophical, and scientific writers she handles with such deftness and care. “Prejudiced” might be the term you’d want to apply to this book, if you were interested in finding more critical treatment of these writers. Ignorant? Not a chance. In a book that repeatedly revisits the role of “selection” in a variety of natural and cultural contexts, Davidson seems hyper-aware of the manifold resemblances and potential filiations of the writings she describes. So it seems best to assume that any omissions here are strategic, part of the way that she cuts rapidly from one scene to the next, as a “partial historian” who can afford to leave things unsaid.
The disciplinary priorities, then, of this “partial historian” are fairly clear, and fairly lopsided. She will subordinate the literal to the figurative, the scientific to the humanist, the argumentative to the narrative, the historical to the literary, and the whole to its parts. She argues, for example,
There’s something to be said for the worm’s-eye view, and I have more or less deliberately adopted the trope of synecdoche—taking the part for the whole, operating by means of contiguity and association—over the more accepted modes of analogy and argument, though I will pay my courtesies (to borrow an eighteenth-century image) to those interpretive modes. (12)
The elegance of this passage, its figurative brilliance and its deliberate echoes of eighteenth-century polite usage, however, put me in mind of another voice, that of the late historian E.P. Thompson, who once observed, “no one is more susceptible to the charms of the gentry’s life than the historian of the eighteenth century . . . . The historian can easily identify with his [sic] sources: he sees himself riding to hounds, or attending Quarter Sessions, or (if he is less ambitious) he sees himself as at least seated at Parson Woodforde’s groaning table” (17). Though I do not think that Breeding ever falls into this kind of morally complacent identification with its sources, this seems to me like a real danger with its self-consciously literary approach. I’m curious whether other readers (or Davidson herself) would be interested in discussing this issue of writerly identification and the ideological operations that dictate their own logic of “parts for the whole.” And isn’t one of the points of an interdisciplinary approach is that it cuts across the fantasies of disciplinary self-sufficiency offered by, say, literature on its own?
The presence/absence of Thompson in this book also made me wonder about the function of Raymond Williams, and more generally social history, in its historical frameworks, which seem largely tacit, but which pop in from time to time to do their explanatory duty (see, for example, p. 33). I’m familiar with this problem of assigning historical causes to longer-term semantic shifts, because I faced a similar problem myself in my discussions of cynicism’s historical evolution, but I was also curious whether others felt that her intermittent references towards, e.g., broad social changes” (33) provided as much explanatory force as they were supposed to?
So those would be the questions I’d put to the other readers (and Davidson herself): how does this book’s literariness, its determination to resemble its literary parents, affect its view of its subject-matter, especially when it seems intent on ventriloquizing eighteenth-century voices and attitudes? And how do social history, and broader issues of collective linguistic usage, fit into an historical account that focuses primarily on individual, literary examples?
*I’m using “partial” in the OED’s senses of “favourably disposed, sympathetic”)
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Tuesday, May 26, 2009
On the form of Jenny Davidson’s Breeding
Odd as it may seem, I want to kick off this book event not by discussing the book’s argument—I’ll address that on Friday—but by focusing on its form. Consider page 44:
The print’s too small to read there, but you don’t need to be able to read it to understand what’s so unusual about Davidson’s argument: the trailing paragraph from 43 consists entirely of a quotation and is followed by a block quotation. In fact, 301 of the 409 words on that page belong to Locke, which means that the “[s]tory-telling of the kind [Jenny does] in this book” (41) is largely done by other people. In allowing the subjects of her analysis to define their terms at such length, she cedes the voice of the book to her interlocutors, which makes for an odd, yet somehow familiar, reading experience.
Rarely do you finish a secondary work feeling like you read the primary sources, but that’s precisely the impression created by Breeding. It took me a long while to realize why Jenny’s long citations were both familiar and compelling, but I finally did: Breeding is less like a scholarly monography and more like John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World. I confess that finding in an academic book qualities similar to those of one of your favorite books sounds suspiciously like discovering the germ of your dissertation in a Disney cartoon, in that you tend to see what you’re looking for when you look for it. But I really believe the analogy holds. McPhee drove back and forth across the country alongside the brightest geological minds in order to tell the story of how America came to look like America, and he let the monologues of his companions dominate his book; similarly, Jenny and her interlocutors guide us through the 18th Century, and she allows voices of her companions to dominate her book. In short, both provide sharp analysis under the guise of judicious narration.
Given the premium placed on demonstrations of original thought—be it at conferences or in articles and books—her decision to use her book as a vehicle to tell other people’s story seems like an unnecessary risk, but as Breeding demonstrates, it’s one more of us should consider taking.
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Monday, May 25, 2009
Book Event: Jenny Davidson’s Breeding
Beginning tomorrow, The Valve will be hosting a book event on Jenny Davidson‘s Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century. Peter Gay has already reviewed the book for Bookforum, which is rather remarkable when you consider this was an academic book published by a university press—then again, it’s a rather remarkable book.
The introduction and first two chapters are available online.
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Sunday, May 03, 2009
BREAKING NEWS: John Cheever not remotely like a character in a John Cheever story, actually.
From “How Cheever Really Felt About Living in Suburbia,” published in today’s Times:
[His] writings suggest that he seemed to take a jaundiced view of so manicured and lovely a setting.
But there is evidence in a new biography of Cheever that he relished his life as a suburban burgher and did not disdain his fellow suburbanites as a class. Cheever was “crazy about the suburbs,” said Blake Bailey, whose book, Cheever: A Life, published in March by Knopf, was written with apparently unrivaled access to Cheever’s journals.
“He loved the natural beauty of the Hudson Valley,” Mr. Bailey said. “He loved walking through the woods along the Croton Aqueduct. He liked his neighbors.”
I’m not sure how someone can have “unrivaled” access to materials held by Harvard and The New York Public Library, but that’s neither here nor there. This article—from the hard-hitting Connecticut desk—is a full-scale assault on the body of Cheever’s work by people who insist that, in truth, they were all quite normal, thank you very much. Cheever himself was a conventionally quaint exurban alcoholic:
Mrs. Cheever casually took care to point out that her husband wrote only in the mornings because by the afternoon he was often drunk on gin.
“In those days, people did drink ever so much more than they do now,” Mrs. Cheever said with a chuckle. “It sounds shocking now, but it was not shocking then.”
Not to mention boyish and civic-minded:
“He once got to drive the fire truck, and that was a big thrill,” Mrs. Cheever said.
His family were old-fashioned:
“We were old-fashioned,” she said. “We were brought up in private schools.”
He was old-fashioned:
“He was that old-fashioned,” she said.
He was utterly unlike a character in a John Cheever novel, except when he wasn’t:
Yet at the same time, Cheever could say in ["The Housebreaker of Shady Hill"], “If you work in the city and have children to raise, I can’t think of a better place.”
Note that “say” there. Cheever didn’t write that sentence, because if he had, it’d be a sentence written about a character in a Cheever story and we can’t have that, now can we? It would be inaccurate in the way all the unhappiness Cheever wrote is and will forever be inaccurate.
How deeply pathetic is it that the Times tries to deny Cheever ownership of his insight by doing to him what he undid to his characters? It was all very fine, the Times implies, like in that famous story of his that ends:
The place was dark. Was it so late that they had all gone to bed? Had Lucinda stayed at the Westerhazys’ for supper? Had the girls joined her there or gone someplace else? Hadn’t they agreed, as they usually did on Sunday, to regret all their invitations and stay at home? He tried the garage doors to see what cars were in but the doors were locked and rust came off the handles onto his hands. Going toward the house, he saw that the force of the thunderstorm had knocked one of the rain gutters loose. It hung down over the front door like an umbrella rib, but it could be fixed in the morning. The house was locked, and he thought that the stupid cook or the stupid maid must have locked the place up until he remembered that it had been some time since they had employed a maid or a cook. He shouted, pounded on the door, tried to force it with his shoulder, and then, looking in at the windows, saw that the place was empty.
Then everyone yelled, “Surprise, Neddy Merrill! It is your birthday and the place looked empty because we cleared the room so we could dance!” Neddy’s daughters approached him, one after another, and planted a kiss on his cheek and a tie to his chest. “I love these ties,” Neddy exclaimed. Everyone at the party drank judiciously and no one died on the way home. It was the best day of Neddy’s life.
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Monday, April 27, 2009
Concerning the inherent superiority of printed text to irresponsible online drivel.
Is it absolutely necessary for the image gracing the cover of the most recent issue of the official mouthpiece of my professional organization to depict something that, when seen on my desk by a colleague from another department, compelled her to ask where a viper fish would even get a detachable penis to whack off against a shrimp-wielding toucan? Do other departments not laugh at us enough already?
Why does this same issue contain a write-up of a forum from the 2007 MLA convention? Did it really take two years and change to transform that panel into something print-worthy? So I take it the first sentence is supposed to read:
In contributions to this 2007 panel of the division on Comparative Studies in Romanticism and the Nineteenth Century, titled “Untiming the Nineteenth-Century: Temporality and Periodization,” periodization, a venerable mainstay of comparative literarature safeguarded by its apparent neutrality, is critically arraigned.
Lest you think I’m mocking the author of this sentence, Emily Apter, let me make this absolutely clear: Apter’s introduction is lively and interesting—historicists like myself tend to be interested in arguments about or against periodization even when we disagree with them—but how well is her intellectual project of two years previous served by appearing so belatedly? How well is her intellectual integrity represented by an error so basic only a typesetter could have made it? These are the standards against which necessarily inconsequential (because) online conversations should be judged?
Maybe I’m still in a foul mood, but I don’t think so.
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Thursday, April 23, 2009
Because, of course, Jack London sucks harder than many comics, Part II
(My commenters wrote my first response to Bill’s post for me. They nailed it so accurately posting what I’d originally written seems unnecessary. I’m neither kidding nor, it seems, necessary. So in the [likely] event of a [hilariously hi-jinxed] tragedy, Acephalous can [and should] live on.)
Let me start with a statement that will annoy everyone: if a close-reading reveals that a work flirts with the formal elements of its genre or genres—whatever they may be—that work should be canonized. Not that works that fail to engage the formal limitations of their genre are uncanonizable, mind you, but works that succeed both as an example and a critique of a given genre deserve canonization.
But canonization into what?
In an age of inexpensive and practically limitless storage, the question of canonization need not be hidebound to the idea of preservation. Within its first month of operation, Google digitized the 99 percent of the Western Canon, and even though some of those works are too recent to be viewed, they’ll all eventually be released as copyright expiration rolls forward. When I began my Mark Twain chapter in late 2005, for example, only the 1894 edition of Pudd’nhead Wilson was available through Google Book Search; by the time I began revising the chapter in the summer of 2008, I could track revisions of the novel over the span of two decades. Because Twain is culturally significant and canonical, the saturation of Google Books with variant editions of his most important works was inevitable.
When I began working on The Youth of Washington (1904), I had to order it through interlibrary loan. It took three months to arrive. Henry Cabot Lodge’s George Washington (1889), Paul Ford’s The True George Washington (1896), Woodrow Wilson’s George Washington (1896), Worthington Chauncey Ford’s George Washington (1900) and Norman Hapgood’s George Washington: A Biography (1901) trickled in. Had I held off on writing my chapter until I’d looked over all 140 of the novels of English Colonial or Revolutionary America published between 1895 and 1908, I’d still be waiting for interlibrary loan. Now all those Washington biographies are available, as are most of the historical novels I wanted to read for deep background.
Are those novels good? No. Do they deserve canonization? No. Is it significant that as tensions between Spain and America strained and Americans became uncomfortable with the imperial pretensions of their leader, an appetite for works relating to Revolutionary figures or set in the Revolutionary period become incredibly popular? Might that not have something important to say about what Americans thought it meant to be American at the time? Is that not a viable object of study? Do I not ask a shitload of rhetorical questions when I get polemical?
For a few of generations, English professors claimed that cultural knowledge was the provenance of the literary (what with perceptiveness being the core feature of literary sensibility). So when a scholar wanted to know how things stood between America and Europe at a given time, they would not turn to any of the countless travel narratives written by Americans in Europe and Europeans in America, but to the most acutely literary accounts of the current state affairs. To wit:
The problem with Lucy’s account of the canon and cultural knowledge should be obvious: however you define the literary, it is not the same thing as cultural knowledge. An alternate canon, based on how a text registers and reflects the conventions of its time, is required; a subset of that canon would include texts that fought against their cultural constraints in order to articulate something convention had difficulty accommodating. No matter what you call those texts, they are the ones deserving of close-reading.
Note that I slipped from speaking of genres in the first paragraph to cultural conventions in the last. I did that on purpose. Genre focuses too intently on what a thing made from words looks like. ("My novella’s a long short story in 10-point Times Roman and a short novel in 14-point New Courier,” says the aspiring writer.) From the get-go, however, these things made from words contained stuff like this. Texts have always had visual components, and while those components are sometimes abstracts (as with the afore-marbled page), the introduction of visual representations of the world into the textual economy of a novel alerts readers to the presence of a realist ethos. But remember:
Verisimilitude is not an end. It is an always imperfect—because always filtered—means. What matters is not the presence of supplementary gestures of verisimilitude but the manner in which they interact with the text. For example, this comic sucks:
(x-posted.)
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Sunday, April 19, 2009
How awful have these past few months been for contemporary letters?
Here’s a paragraph from the late David Foster Wallace’s review of the late, as of today, J.G. Ballard’s 1991 collection War Fever:
J.G. Ballard is not a great fiction writer, but he is an important one. If that seems like an inconsistent judgment, be advised that American readers who know Ballard only via his moving, Spielbergable memoir Empire of the Sun do not know the real J. G. Ballard. The real Ballard has since the early ‘60s been a pioneer of a certain sort of literary science fiction I like to call Psy-Fi. Psy-Fi, often parodic, surreal and grotesque, and almost always set in some near and recognizable future, seeks to explore the psychopathology of post-atomic life, stuff like high technology, mass-media, advertising, PR, totalitarianism, etc.
When he wrote this in 1991, Wallace himself had just started writing an “often parodic, surreal and grotesque” novel “set in [the] near and recognizable future” that sought “to explore the psychopathology of post-atomic life, stuff like high technology, mass-media, advertising, PR, totalitarianism,” and more than a little et cetera. I’d never considered my passion for both novelists related until I stumbled across this review a few months back. The coldness Wallace speaks of in Ballard’s prose is utterly unlike anything you find in Wallace’s own work. Even when his narrators speak, as he claimed Ballard’s do, in a “flat, scholarly narrative voice, [with] an air of lab technicians looking at stuff under glass,” the result never resembles the clipped, clinical speech of which Ballard was a master—for in Wallace, such disinterested precision is always affected. But without Ballard, there would have been no Wallace; in fact, without Ballard, contemporary literature would look very different.
A British friend once told me that Ballard was “Our [meaning English-speaking] Borges.” I’m not sure he was right, but I’m not about to argue that he was wrong.
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Friday, April 17, 2009
“Things like severely beating men dressed as fetish bats are all that keep me sane, some days.”
I received an email in response to this comment on John’s latest post, but because my explanation required images, I decided to throw it online; however, because it contained so many images, it would take me hours to reformat it to display properly over here. So if you’re interested in how I teach a subject dear to my heart (historical context) in a rhetorical vein via a single funny book (Warren Ellis’s Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth), you can do so here.
(Title taken from the book. Be glad I didn’t go with an alternative.)
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Tuesday, April 14, 2009
What’s wrong with Reading Comics? Quite a bit, actually.
Because late to the party is better than never, I’m reading Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics. When I’m not maybe being mocked, the book is a compelling read. This is a problem. Since tradition dictates picking nits with blurbs, I’ll start with the quotation from the Los Angeles Times printed on the cover:
Deliciously quotable.
Of all the Times blurbs to pick with nits, this one may not even be the best. From the back cover:
Everything is here.
If everything is there and there is deliciously quotable—but let me begin with the second blurb, because it concerns a minor point. No matter how you define “everything,” Reading Comics does not contain it all. Wolk periodically informs the reader of this fact:
There are . . . several very big names I’m barely mentioning or neglecting outright in the following pages: Jack Kirby, Robert Crumb . . . (137)
And we can ellipses away there because this is a book about comics that barely mentions or outright neglects Jack Kirby and Robert Crumb. Why the Times would make claims the author explicitly rejects I don’t know—but I suspect its decision relates to the tone of casual expertise Wolk displays throughout the book. Every reference I catch—about half of the ones Wolk drops—complements his argument; however, the way you wear your erudition lightly on the web differs from how you do it in print. The book’s delicious quotability is a byproduct of its learned chattiness, and if the medium is ever to attain academic respectability, its expositors will need to try a little harder than this:
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Tuesday, April 07, 2009
Justifying comics as legitimate objects of study, Part II: HELL STALKS ON FOUR PAWS!
I concluded the previous post with a nod to William Blake as someone who explored the word-picture relationship and I will get to that, but first I should clarify a few issues I raised without fully addressing yesterday:
- Vance rightly noted that titles of paintings were often left to benefactors and history, so putting that much interpretive weight on such thin ice might not be the best idea. I agree. I fully intend on leaving this series of posts immersed and hypothermic.
- JPool noted that treating paintings like panels could be a category error and Miriam and Gene implicitly agreed, suggesting I might be better served by a Hogarth or one of his ilk. I agree. But I chose to go with Caravaggio and Blake over Giotto and Hogarth because I wanted to focus attention on an individual image before I moved to discussing the interaction between multiple images arrayed in narrative.
- Andrew liked the arrows and will be disappointed with this post.
Now that I have well and cleared my throat, let us venture forward to William Blake and “The Tyger” from Songs of Experience (1794). It reads:
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Where to start? Should I go full Keats and spend a day on each stanza? Probably . . . especially when you consider that 1) his manuscript looked like this:
Because 2) he spent tedious years perfecting the placement of every word on every line. Maybe I’ll declare next week Blake Week and do just that. But tonight I want to focus on the general impression of feline bad-assedness created by the text of the poem. What we have here is a TYGER! MADE OF FIRE FORGED BY DREAD HANDS AND SHARP TOOLS OF METALLURGY TO HAVE DREAD PAWS. So FEROCIOUS is this FIRE TYGER! that the poet cannot even imagine THE ABOMINABLE FOUNDRY in which SOME DEMENTED LORD created SO GRIM A BEAST.
TRIGGER WARNING: IF YOU ARE NOT PREPARED TO LOOK INTO THE BRUTAL MAW OF HELL ITSELF DO NOT CONTINUE READING THIS POST BECAUSE I AM ABOUT TO POST THE PICTURE OF THE FIRE TYGER! BLAKE INCLUDED WITH THE POEM. SERIOUSLY IT’S WAY TOO MUCH FOR YOU I MEAN YOU CAN BARELY EVEN WATCH R-RATED MOVIES THIS WILL BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU TURN AWAY I TELL YOU TURN AWAY!
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Sunday, April 05, 2009
Justifying comics as legitimate objects of study, Part I
Were I to muster a defense of comics as potentially serious objects of rhetorical analysis in, say, a textbook, I would begin by pointing out that while there may not be a ready-made critical apparatus for comics as a genre, there exists a robust tradition of analyzing visual narrative. Consider Caravaggio’s “Calling of St. Matthew”:
I present the whole painting here so you can see what occupies the center of the painting. (Many reproductions of “The Calling” crop the upper third off. I will too to save bandwidth below.) If we assume that the eye of the viewer is drawn to the center, it becomes evident that Caravaggio didn’t intend his static painting to be experienced as such. We light first on the boy’s eyes and follow them:
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Sunday, March 29, 2009
Standards? Who needs them? Or, Thomas Urquhart & That Which Is Infinitely Superior to Cricket.
Teaching composition exclusively leads to (1) a greater appreciation for the pedestrian complexity of correctly subordinated clauses and (2) a bone-tiredness for the unmerited praise of student peer reviews. As someone with a penchant for paragraph-length sentences, I find (1) wholly salutary; but (2) irks me endlessly. Why? In one of my undergraduate History of the English Language course, the professor handed out slips of paper on which he had written a single sentence and told everyone to decipher what it meant, because he wanted us to present the sentence and the paraphrase to the class in ten minutes. My sentence read:
Another thing there is that fixeth a grievous scandal upon that nation in matter of philargyrie, or love of money, and it is this: There hath been in London, and repairing to it, for these many years together, a knot of Scotish bankers, collybists, or coine-coursers, of traffickers in merchandise to and againe, and of men of other professions, who by hook and crook, fas et nefas, slight and might, (all being as fish their net could catch), having feathered their nests to some purpose, look so idolatrously upon their Dagon of wealth, and so closely, (like the earth’s dull center), hug all unto themselves, that for no respect of vertue, honour, kindred, patriotism, or whatever else, (be it never so recommendable), will they depart from so much as one single peny, whose emission doth not, without any hazard of loss, in a very short time superlucrate beyond all conscience an additionall increase to the heap of that stock which they so much adore; which churlish and tenacious humor hath made many that were not acquainted with any else of that country, to imagine all their compatriots infected with the same leprosie of a wretched peevishness, whereof those quomodocunquizing clusterfists and rapacious varlets have given of late such cannibal-like proofs, by their inhumanity and obdurate carriage towards some, (whose shoe-strings they are not worthy to unty), that were it not that a more able pen than mine will assuredly not faile to jerk them on all sides, in case, by their better demeanour for the future, they endeavour not to wipe off the blot wherewith their native country, by their sordid avarice and miserable baseness, hath been so foully stained, I would at this very instant blaze them out in their names and surnames, notwithstanding the vizard of Presbyterian zeal wherewith they maske themselves, that like so many wolves, foxes, or Athenian Timons, they might in all times coming be debarred the benefit of any honest conversation.
That would be from the EKΣKYBAΛAYPON of Thomas Urquhart, best known for his translations of Rabelais.* In Urquhart, Rabelais found less a translator than a kindred spirit; but in Urquhart’s prose, I found an unparaphraseable wall of words, before which I stood befuddled but impressed. Granted, I should have been impressed, so the analogy to peer reviews is imperfect; but my comprehension and subsequent paraphrase of Urquhart amounted to what I abhor in peer reviews: salivation at the sight of a dependent clause containing multiple polysyllabes and a “Good!” slapped in the margins—as if knowing big words and including them complex sentences means someone’s saying anything meaningful. But now that I teach composition exclusively, I see similar instances of unmerited praise everywhere:
When most former major leaguers write memoirs, you wonder why they bothered; with Ron Darling—Yale graduate, former New York Met and Oakland A, and current Mets broadcaster—you wonder why it took him so long. What other former athlete could write a sentence like this even with assistance from a professional writer (Daniel Paisner): “This right here [his legendary college pitching duel against St. Johns star Frank Viola**] was one of the great epiphanies for me as a competitive athlete, only it took a while for it to resonate.” Most former pitchers can’t resonate even with help.
Just so you know, my love of béisbol knows no limits; moreover, my love of the Mets generally, and Ron Darling in particular—both as a player and announcer—is unimpeachable. But for the San Fransisco Chronicle to praise a Yale graduate who double-majored in French and Southeast Asian history and who speaks both Chinese and French fluently—to praise him (if it was him and not his co-writer) for using the words “epiphany” and “resonate” makes me want to quodlibetificate into demission this clusterheaded intelligentry, the miserable baseness of whose expectations ought to debar them from the profession of letters.
(x-posted.)
*But who should be remembered for titling the second volume of his Logopandecteision; or an Introduction to the Universal Language thus: Chrestasebeia; or, Impious Dealing of Creditors Wherein the Severity of the Creditors of the Author’s Family is Desired to Be Removed, as a Main Impediment to the Production of this Universal Language, and Publication of Other No Less Considerable Treatises.
**The bracketed link takes you to 95 percent of Roger Angell’s “The Web of the Game,” a contender for the best essay about baseball ever written.
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Tuesday, March 17, 2009
271 notes (two hundred and seventy-one) from a novel I don’t remember reading.*
Before I could return The Damnation of Theron Ware to my beloved library, I had to remove all the notes I’d stuck to its pages. It took me a while:
The resulting note wheel is as lovely as it is meaningless, because I remember absolutely nothing about The Damnation of Theron Ware. From my notes, I can almost reconstruct why I read it:
Theron enjoys the “primitive” pleasures of Catholic picnics; contrast to earlier (235-6) image of it as orderly machine; no, from sociological & intellectual perspective it’s orderly, from internal is primitive
If only I knew the antecedent of “it” I might be able to reconstruct my reason for reading the book. Am I the only one for whom the Five Year Rule applies? (And do I really want that question answered?)
*Notation borrowed from a letter Joyce wrote to his mother after arriving in Paris: “Your order for 3s 4d of Tuesday last was very welcome as I had been without food for 42 hours (forty-two).” How’s that for passive-aggression?
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