Friday, July 03, 2009
Public Enemies
I don’t ask this out of envy, or because I’m jealous my wife has such a crush on the actor; I ask in the disinterested service of cinema criticism. Is Johnny Depp just too handsome to play Dillinger?
Thursday, July 02, 2009
Reminder: Villette Reading Starts Next Week
Just a reminder: The Valve’s Second Annual Summer Reading Project, on Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, starts up on Tuesday, July 7. Discussion will open then for the first eight chapters. For the full proposed schedule, see here. (To review last year’s Adam Bede event, start here or here.) Last year’s was, overall, such a good experience that I propose adopting the same simple guidelines for our discussions this time:
1. Let’s be cautious about “spoilers.” Some of us have read the novel before, or have read enough about it to know the story. Others are new to it. I’ve found that opinions are often divided on the issue of “spoiler alerts.” Personally, I think it’s nice to allow other readers to enjoy suspense and surprises, especially in a long book when curiosity about what happens next can be both pleasurable and motivating. Others see little or no value in such deference to plot, or argue for the interpretive benefits of knowing key developments ahead of time. Perhaps we can compromise by alluding to events beyond the ‘assigned’ material obliquely or elliptically, if the occasion arises.
2. By all means let’s bring in critical or contextual knowledge from “outside” the novel if we think it bears interestingly on our reading. But let’s avoid doing so in a way that shuts down discussion--by, for instance, implying that everything we might think of to talk about here has already been said, and better, by others--or that we can’t talk intelligently about this book unless we’ve read 86 others.
3. It’s summer: let’s have fun and not be snarky.
As before, the pace or format of the weekly posts can be changed if a consensus emerges that we are going too fast, or too slow, or would benefit from better defined starting points for discussion, or whatever.
Hope to see you here on Tuesday!
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
The Figure of Writing and the Future of English Studies
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
A short piece forthcoming in the tenth anniversary issue of Pedagogy (Duke UP).
For me the most compelling question in English studies today is the tension between the figure of reading and the figure of writing, especially as it plays out in what David Downing calls managed disciplinarity, the disciplinary division of labor between writing and literature.
Nearly everyone thinking about this question acknowledges that it’s a distinction serving to justify the division of resources and rewards—time, salary, prestige, power—rather than a coherent intellectual division. This wasn’t always the case, but it was for much of the twentieth century. So long as the literature curriculum remained central to sustaining nationalist and imperial projects, faculty working under the sign of “literature” were steadily more likely to be associated with research-intensive, or at least tenurable, appointments; to control institutional resources; shape the disciplinary agenda of the field; receive funding and media recognition, etc.
As James Berlin, Robert Connors, Sharon Crowley, Bruce McComiskey, Stephen North and many others have observed: the emergence of “literature” as a synecdoche for the many concerns of English sometimes came at a heavy price for faculty whose research or teaching encompassed such concerns as rhetoric, composition, philology, english education, creative writing, even critical theory and cultural studies. Many faculty with these concerns simply abandoned English departments, joining schools of education or departments of linguistics, communications, or philosophy; others seceded en masse, forming departments, programs or even new disciplines of their own. Where faculty with these concerns remained under the administration of English, many were relegated to teaching-intensive, generally nontenurable appointments.
By the late twentieth century, however, a “long-term decline in the cultural capital of literature” was spectacularly in evidence, as part of a larger decline in the role of the humanities in reproducing the professonal-managerial class for whom, as John Guillory bluntly observes, “technical and professional knowledge have replaced the literary curriculum.”(139)
At its most basic, this shift means that members of the educated classes are today far less likely to hail each other at cocktail parties, tennis matches and job interviews by using such forms of call and response as dropping a book title—say, Moby-Dick—in order to elicit such appropriate responses as “Ah, Melville,” “Call me Ishmael,” or “Oh, I never finished that!”
Today the circuit of recognition—sign, countersign; challenge, password—is completed for the majority of professionals and managers just as efficiently by class-specific tastes in music, television, film, or the massive discourse of management theory (“’Management by objectives’? Ah, Drucker.”) One could easily argue that increasingly the management curriculum is “the” undergraduate curriculum, except for the vocational and STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) workforces, while the liberal arts generally have been redefined as, effectively, extracurricular. (Or at best peripherally preprofessional for such fields such as communications, law, and teaching.)
Even from the bleak perspective of the arts and humanities as a whole, the outlook for literary study per se is especially grim. Along with half a dozen other figures in English studies, I’ve previously written about broad changes in the academic workforce, especially the shifting of employment away from tenured faculty to a contingent workforce.
As of Fall 2007, contingent faculty outnumber the tenure stream by at least 3 to 1, roughly the inverse of the proportions forty years earlier. Across the profession, this trend line will drive the percentage of tenure-stream faculty into single digits within twenty years. It is hard to imagine that the trend line for English could be worse--but it is-- and the outlook for literature is worse yet. A 2008 MLA analysis of federal IPEDS data (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) shows that between 1993 and 2004, the hiring of nontenurable faculty continued to dramatically outpace tenure-track hiring in the profession as a whole.
However, in terms of absolute numbers most disciplines actually gained a modest number of tenure-track lines, or at least held steady. Political science gained 2.5 percent new lines; philosophy and religion packed on 43 percent. English, however, lost over 3,000 tenure-track lines, an average annual loss of 300 positions. This amounted to slightly more than one in every 10 tenurable positions in English — literally a decimation. If that trend proves to have continued — and all indications are that it has — by early 2010 English will have shed another 1,500 lines.
The decimation-or-more of the field hardly begins to tell the story of the losses to literary study in particular, however, since there’s been notable growth in tenure-track hiring in some of the subordinated fields, especially rhetoric and composition. (Though as I’ve observed before, to less than universal acclaim in the rhet-comp discourse, much of this growth has to do with the need for low-level administration of a vast army of the nontenurable: while only a minority of the research produced by rhet-comp specialists is about program administration, I’ve argued that the lower-managerial subjectivity shapes the discourse of the field.)
In addition to the continuing trend of rhet-comp specialists doing more and more administration—in institution-spanning positions across the curriculum, in digital media labs, writing programs, writing majors and minors, and offering new graduate degrees--there is quite substantial new tenure-track hiring in all writing-related fields--creative, technical, and professional writing, including scriptwriting, creative nonfiction, and composing for digital media. Some of the most interesting new hiring addresses the growing support for civic engagement in pedagogy by fostering socially engaged writing and rhetoric.
In the limited space of this forum, I’d like to zero in on the question begged by that last observation: with all of these new justifications for hiring, why isn’t the story of English more optimistic? From a macro perspective, or an outsider’s standpoint, what’s the fuss? So literature is less interesting, but old standbys like rhetoric and writing have unprecedented traction along fascinating new paths of inquiry and practice, and many research scholars under the sign of “literature” have rapidly and willingly shifted their research objects to nonliterary texts (often in close relationship with cultural studies, women’s studies, and ethnic studies).
Reasonable observers from other disciplines or professions can fairly shrug and ask, what’s the big deal? With stunning new justifications for its activities that far outnumber the reasons to shrink, English should be experiencing a renaissance (at least relative to other disciplines), not a collapse.
There’s no single answer to this question. A big part of the problem is structural, as I’ve suggested, so that new hiring in all fields is overwhelmingly nontenurable. But English has experienced this structural change with particular ferocity in connection with a crisis of dominance internal to the discipline—a crisis of dominance that’s at least twofold.
From the declining node of dominance we see an anxious response by the research faculty still operating under the sign of “literature,” to whom a recent disturbing MLA report speaks. Under the sign of literary studies, this faculty still maintains administrative control over most departments and the more prominent disciplinary channels: the result, in many departments, has been a growing flight to the reactionary postures exemplified by the MLA/Teagle report—a willingness to trade almost anything (tenure, wages, courseload, especially when they are someone else’s) in defense of a vision of English studies that peaked in the 1960s.
At the the same time, the rising rhet-comp mainstream has invested heavily in what Richard Miller memorably dubs “the arts of complicity,” or the world view of education administration. Rhet-comp’s “complicity” is in accepting a majority nontenurable workforce in exchange for gains that have steadily built a new discipline within English studies. Some of these gains have been impressive—new programs, degrees, and departments, and it is increasingly clear that rhet-comp has opened productive, often healthy relationships with communities, disciplines, and institutions over the past four decades.
On the other hand, a less palatable element of rhet-comp’s bargain with power, including some of its most dramatic institutional successes, is that it is granting doctorates structurally similar in some ways to doctorates in education, producing a tenured class of lower administration—as well a graduate faculty producing both the PhD-holding supervisory class and at least some of the subdoctorally-degreed teachers. (Though many of the latter are trained in literary studies and creative writing; rhet-comp supervisors commonly function to provide on-the-job training to persons with literature degrees who have been trained to have contempt for rhetoric and composition).
As I’ve previously written, from the point of view of large trends in higher education employment, rhet-comp’s successes are too often and too complacently the avant-garde of the administrative imaginary, with as little tenure for non-administrators as possible: at its worst, it resembles the worst form of K-12 teaching, in which a stratum of administrator-researchers sets the curriculum and mission for a subordinated teaching force.
To outsiders, it’s generally obvious that English departments have much to gain by investing heavily in the figure of writing. The near-universal digitization of professional, academic, commercial, personal and creative writing represents a world-historical shift in textuality, communications and creativity. Over the past two decades, tens of millions of us have been engaged in the massive shared project of composing for hypermedia, the collective bringing into existence of a massively multi-authorial electronically-mediated textual object—the not-quite worldwide artifact known as “the web” or “the Internet.”
Leaving aside the narrower, readerly questions of what to do with changing and disappearing digital texts (how and whether they should they be read, valued, interpreted, archived, canonized, attributed, and monetized) English has a profound and inevitable investment in the process of their composition: countless acts of assemblage, interpretation, expression, analysis, debate, and persuasion.
As a broad spectrum of observers from outside of English agree, hypermedia composition represents a powerful intersection of research, teaching, and service: not only is the accelerating evolution of hypertextuality a gripping research object in its own right, it represents absolutely fascinating possibilities for the mediation of other research, and the relationship between archival texts, critical texts, and the discourse of learners, appreciators, imitators, and appropriators of those texts. There are enormous hopes for the democratization of cultural production—this is my special hope and interest—the re-democratization of producing culture, not just consuming it.
There’s also much to say about how those enormous hopes are exaggerated or, where viable, being rapidly foreclosed by law, convention, the increasingly naked class struggle from above. If there is only one thing to be said regarding the expensive and complex literacies represented by hypermedia composition: democratization is too often taken for granted, as if everyone’s kids and everyone’s grandparents are doing it, when that’s not at all true. It seems to me that faculty in English have not just an opportunity, but an obligation to be in the front lines of arguing for public support of this literacy so that it becomes in actuality a democratic literacy.
Despite this efflorescence of extracurricular composition—writing, writing, everywhere!--disciplinary trajectories in English have reduced the figure of writing to the figure of student writing, or first-year composition. This is unfortunate, though not because student writing is uninteresting. To the contrary, student writing has become more interesting than ever: the soaring quantity and diversity of contemporary writing by students and the institutional and social possibilities for that writing more closely than ever resembles the ever-less-obviously “literary” research objects of research scholars in English studies (those who have taken the cultural turn at least: in my own department, some of the most interesting work is being done on economic writers; Pacific revolutionary discourse; nineteenth-century elocution and reform; contemporary management theory; self-help, leadership, and spirituality; eighteenth-century sermons and other religious speech, and headmistress memoir—and evidently headmistresses with the souls of accountants, not poets).
To anyone outside of English, it would seem abundantly reasonable to say that all of these interesting researchers are interested in writers and writing, rather than litterateurs and literature.
Only the disciplinary division of labor makes sense of shoehorning these research agendas into work done by “literature faculty” with “literature doctorates.” Indeed, these are interests also being worked on by faculty in the other fields of English, including, especially, rhetoric and composition, where research into student writing is just one of many possible paths of inquiry. What this work by our “lit faculty” and persons with “lit PhDs” underscores is the false but useful-to-power distinction of “literature” versus “writing” where faculty under both signs do work steadily more inflected by cultural studies, women’s studies, ethnic studies and critical pedagogy, with a shared interest in questions of theory, interdisciplinarity, civic engagement, democracy, education, and literacy.
Embracing the figure of writing could represent a tremendous opportunity for expansion of mission, disciplinary healing, and employment justice in English. This would mean actively working to heal and transcend how the figure currently functions in the disciplinary division of labor and rewards--a task of considerable magnitude, but with comparably significant rewards, including pragmatic considerations for departments on the ground in day-to-day university politics.
My own view is that as an intellectual matter we have already long settled the major questions: we’ve historicized the emergence of literary and cultural value and the emergence of specific forms enjoying the designation “literature” and understand the contingency of those forms and related practices such as literary criticism. (Much of this work was accomplished in the late 1980s and early 1990s by faculty working in critical pedagogy and cultural studies; some were based in literature, like Pat Brantlinger, and others in composition, like James Berlin, who in 1996 considered that “research projects in literary studies attempted by those presently working in a rhetorically constructed English studies” showed “striking parallels” to the work at Birmingham, even where there had been “little or no communication between the two groups”{180}).
Much more slowly, but inevitably, we are moving toward pragmatic disciplinary and curricular accommodations of that decades-old recognition, so that eventually someone currently designated a literature scholar might feel comfortable saying, “I study writers and writing, some of which has enjoyed the designation ‘literature’ at one point or another, and much of which did not. Everybody in my department, whether they are on research-intensive or teaching-intensive appointment, is interested in writers and writing.” My sense is that we will get to that place eventually, and that getting there sooner and willingly would represent a happier, healthier, and more productive journey for us all.
Secession, Fusion and Compromise
There is a substantial tradition of thinking about this problem from below—especially from the most subordinated position, of writing. Most of the more prescient and convincing accounts come from scholars attempting to re-imagine English studies from the disciplinary location of rhetoric and composition.
The most circulated analysis in this vein is Stephen North’s account of a mid-nineties reform of the doctoral program at SUNY Albany, which presents a taxonomy of prescriptions for disciplinary change (principally by way of reorganizing graduate study) going back to a 1984 summit meeting at Wayzata, Minnesota.
As the accounts by North and others have it, discussants representing the major disciplinary associations in English studies made three sorts of proposal for the future: secession, in which disaffected faculty would establish programs and departments of their own (or else join established departments and programs that would treat them better); compromise, in which the discipline and individual departments would seek a unifying term for tactical and pragmatic purposes (“rhetoric” was especially favored in the eighties); and fusion, in which departments and possibly the profession would go beyond a merely rhetorical unification and transform themselves “into a single new entity, one quite distinct from any of the original components” (73). The result of the “fusion” effort at Albany was the department’s much-reported PhD Program in “Writing, Teaching and Criticism.”
One of the more useful subsequent commentaries on North is Bruce McComiskey’s immensely approachable introductory essay to English Studies: An Introduction to the Disciplines. McComiskey updates North by discussing additional fields and adding a fourth possible prescription, integration, by which he means a strategy of acknowledging that the various fields have increasingly developed different methods and interests—different disciplinary or proto-disciplinary discourses, hence the plural disciplines----but nonetheless may have a mutual interest in the health of an umbrella field, ie, “reimagining English studies as a coherent community of disciplines”(41).
Rather than fusion, McComiskey proposes something more like a federation, in which the different fields recognize methodological and intellectual autonomy but in a relationship of rough equality--which might mean, he points out, rearticulating the relationship between the disciplines in the many departments where literary studies holds most of the power.
What’s most attractive about McComiskey’s proposal is the unifying rubric he offers: “the goal of this integrated English studies should be the analysis, critique and production of discourse in social context”(43).
What’s missing from McComiskey’s account, on the other hand, is the critical analysis of disciplinarity itself offered by David Downing, by Stephen North, by James Berlin, and many others, including myself, especially with attention to labor practice.
I personally prefer to read both McComiskey and North’s taxonomy not as prescriptions for the future, but as reasonably good descriptions of four different tactics that have been utilized by many departments over the past three decades, often in very different flavors and combinations, sometimes as the result of reflection and planning, sometimes organically, frequently in a series of ad hoc decisions arising out of externally -framed opportunities, strictures and imperatives.
McComiskey’s federated model of English studies, for instance, turns out to be a decent description of where North’s SUNY Albany PhD ended up. The fusion represented by North and Knoblauch’s doctoral program in “Writing, Teaching and Criticism” lasted over a decade, but in recent years gave way to a more conventional “PhD in English” with four tracks or concentrations, roughly: literature, theory, writing, and cultural studies. Some of the fusion language of the 1992 effort survives in the program and university documents.
Discipline-wide, however, probably the most important form of “fusion” has taken place in the research and teaching of individual faculty, where cultural studies, theory, women’s studies, and ethnic studies easily pass across the border that “writing” and “literature” have fortified against each other.
These four tactics have been used in different mixes at institutions of all types, not merely at doctoral institutions. Among the most common iterations of McComiskey’s federation or integration strategy, for instance, is the rapid proliferation of writing tracks, minors, and concentrations at undergraduate institutions, even undergraduate-only liberal arts colleges.
The 2100 students of Allegheny College (Meadville, Pa), for instance, can choose from four separate writing tracks in the English major--technical and professional, journalism, creative—even a new environmental writing track.
Similarly, though by way of a secession from English of a stand-alone writing program, any of the 18,000 students at the University of California Santa Barbara can elect a minor in professional writing offering distinct tracks in multimedia, editing, and business communication. Brown’s undergraduate English department has a concentration and honors program in nonfiction writing.
There are literally hundreds of such “integrations,” some of them involving elements of secession—many of the growing number of stand-alone writing programs remain functionally integrated with English departments on multiple levels, from joint appointments and initiatives, to administering teaching fellowships for English graduate study.
There is just as much diversity in the forms of secession. Some of the secessions are of the deplorable sort that feature a wholly untenurable labor force, as at Duke, Princeton, and Stanford, though these too can be integrated with English departments at a variety of levels—eg, Stanford, where the English department hosts the tenure of the “stand-alone” program’s administrator (but no one else with a research profile in rhet-comp). In stark contrast, the secession of the Syracuse writing program led to department status, a substantially tenured faculty, an exceptionally well-conceived writing major and minor, and a respected doctorate.
It’s not at all clear that the English department at Syracuse has done well from this secession. While the department features a string of notable scholars in literature and cultural studies, it has just over a dozen doctoral candidates and somewhat fewer students in its master’s program; the departmental self description is an object lesson in how difficult it is to describe English without the frame of writing, and gives the sense of manning the barricades “We are a dedicated group of faculty and students who represent the complex discipline that “English” has become in the contemporary university and in today’s society.”
By contrast, the new Writing major is framed in terms I’d call confident and clear:
The Writing and Rhetoric Major focuses on different genres and practices of writing as enacted in specific historical and cultural contexts. Students write in a wide range of genres: advanced argument, research writing, digital writing, civic writing, professional writing, technical writing, creative nonfiction, and the public essay. In the process of exploring and practicing these genres, students study and analyze the interaction of diverse rhetorical traditions and writing technologies and assess how these factors shape the nature, scope, and impact of writing in a variety of contexts. The major also asks students to examine writing and rhetoric as embedded in culture, and looks at writing identities, their emergences in cultures and subgroups, and the relations among writing, rhetoric, identity, literacy, and power. Graduates of the Writing and Rhetoric Major will be well equipped for public and private sector careers that require knowledge of advanced communication strategies and writing skills. The major is open to any SU student, and may be especially useful to students pursuing careers in teaching, the law, business, public advocacy, and editing and publishing.
I don’t mean to suggest that the Writing Program is “better” than the English department, and I think it could be easily argued that they’d be stronger as a unit—if they could ever “re-integrate” as McComiskey proposes. On the other hand, it is abundantly clear that the achievements of the Syracuse writing program would have been utterly impossible in a literature-dominated department.
Other secessions offer mixed narratives—Derek Owens’ Writing Institute at St. John’s began with a wholly nontenurable (but full-time and unionized) faculty, but within three years had succeeded in a mass conversion of all of the appointments to tenure-track assistant professorships—this in 2009, a year when nearly every institution of higher education was cancelling tenure-track hires.
Secessions at some institutions produce marriages of convenience, as at the Michigan State’s 2003 shotgun merger, the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures, offering one BA in American Studies and another conceptually unrelated BA in Professional Writing, as well as all “Tier 1” writing courses--while the English department holds onto English Education, most American literature faculty, including specialists in Chicana/Chicano culture, and creative writing, as well as the graduate programs (though sending many of them to WRAC to fund their studies).
Other English departments have seen multiple spin-offs, as at MIT, where linguistics long ago formed a happier partnership with philosophy; drama bunks down with music; and digital media have three homes (Henry Jenkins’ department of comparative media studies, the program in Science, Technology and Society, and the graduate studio program in Media Arts and Sciences).
Literature at MIT stands alone, but the “program in writing and humanistic studies” administers no less than three majors (science writing, creative writing, digital media), as well as three minors in the same fields, a concentration in writing that can be adapted to any field of study, the entire first-year writing program, and a graduate program in science writing.
I’ve said the least about North’s “compromise” option, which is a bit of a misnomer. As a prescription, it sounds the least appetizing, because it involves one field taking managerial responsibility for the others, but at least—when framed as a deliberate choice—it sounds like a negotiation of complex circumstances between stakeholders.
On the other hand, considered as a description, it’s probably the most accurate account of what’s taken place over the long term: after literary criticism’s ascent, as McComiskey and many others observe, it remained perpetually in control through most of the last century in most departments, with “the ‘other’ disciplines as trailers” (42).
There have been prospective discussions about choosing another unifying term—rhetoric, cultural studies, literacy, textual studies, etc—and numerous deployments of these alternatives, especially in connection with acts of secession. However, these are the exceptions, and emergence of literature into its present position as the governing term didn’t occur as an act of deliberation or negotiation.
Similarly, if some other governing term replaces literature, it will likely occur without the consent of literature faculty. Such a replacement is far from certain, of course. Literature, literary study, and the practice of criticism aren’t disappearing. In any reasonable estimation, literature will retain substantial cultural capital with large groups of disproportionately wealthy and influential people for centuries to come. For the foreseeable future, it will continue to do enormous diversity work and revisionist cultural history, and remain a centerpiece of great works, core and juvenile curricula.
It’s hard to imagine that the large and evidently growing number of students who enjoy writing won’t continue to read widely in the sort of imaginative works presently acknowledged as literary. And, already—in innumerable acts of fusion by individual faculty--what counts as literary is being changed under our feet.
There’s no reason not to expect hundreds more thoughtful, deliberate acts of integration by departments and colleges. Some of these integrations will be motivated by the achievements of secession. Other integrations will be motivated by fear of community-college style consolidation into generalist “humanities” or “liberal studies” departments.
But if literature’s continued survival is not in question, the terms under which it survives certainly are. It may well be the case, for instance, that literature survives under the sign of “teaching,” and writing becomes the figure under which research-intensive appointments are distributed.
Whether voluntary, forced, or negotiated, most of those changes will be to a balance of disciplinary power over which literature’s grip is slipping—and most will involve the figure of writing.
Works Cited
Berlin, James. Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Refiguring College English Studies. Parlor Press, 2003 (repr of 1996 NCTE edition with response essays).
Bousquet, Marc. How The University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. NYU Press, 2008.
Connors, Robert. Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997.
Crowley, Sharon. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998.
Downing, David. “Beyond Disciplinary English: Integrating Reading and Writing By Reforming Academic Labor.” Pp 23-38 in David B. Downing, Claude Mark Hurlbert, and Paula Mathieu, eds. Beyond English Inc.: Curricular Reform in a Global Economy. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2002.
----. The Knowledge Contract: Politics and Paradigms in the Academic Workplace. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.
Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. University of Chicago Press, 1995.
McComiskey, Bruce, ed. English Studies: An Introduction to the Disciplines. Urbana, NCTE, 2006.
Miller, Richard. “The Arts of Complicity: Pragmatism and the Culture of Schooling.” College English 61.1(September 1998): 10-28.
Modern Language Association. Education in the Balance: A report on the Academic Workforce in English. Web publication, 10 December 2008. Available at: http://www.mla.org/pdf/workforce_rpt02.pdf Accessed June 1, 2009.
----. Report to the Teagle Foundation on the Undergraduate Major in Language and Literature. Web publication, February 2009. Available at: http://www.mla.org/pdf/2008_mla_whitepaper.pdf Accessed June 1, 2009.
North, Stephen. Refiguring the PhD in English Studies: Writing, Doctoral Education and the Fusion-Based Curriculum. Urbana: NCTE, 2000.
Syracuse University English Department. “Home Page.” Available at: http://english.syr.edu/ Accessed June 1, 2009.
Syracuse University Writing Program. “Description of the Writing Major.” Available at: http://wrt.syr.edu/major/ Accessed June 1, 2009.
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.”
Strunk and White, Yuk!
Missed this one when it first appeared. Linguist Geoffrey Pullum trashes The Elements of Style on its 50th anniversary: “Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense.” On the passive voice: “What concerns me is that the bias against the passive is being retailed by a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they don’t know what is a passive construction and what isn’t.” On not splitting infinitives, S & W are wrong wrong wrong. And so forth.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Shameless Literary Tourism II
My own recent perambulations around London were not quite as focused as Amardeep’s “Joyce-tinted” day in Dublin, but I thoroughly enjoyed the sites and sights I saw. Top literary-historical experience: Carlyle’s house in Chelsea.
Thomas and Jane lived there for over 40 years (though, I learned, they always rented, never bought). According to the very helpful National Trust staff, 90% of the contents of the house are authentically theirs, and everything is arranged pretty much as they had it, so you get a very vivid sense of what their daily life was like. Carlyle’s “soundproof” attic study was particularly evocative. Among the items on display are a fragment of the original manuscript of The French Revolution (the one famously burnt by John Stuart Mill’s maid), some extremely--surprisingly--sentimental Valentine’s cards from Thomas to Jane, and a wonderful 80th birthday notice signed in 1875 by every living literary luminary including George Eliot. Although the Dickens House Museum also has many fascinating and even moving artefacts, including Dickens’s annotated reading copies of a number of his novels, Dickens did not live on Doughty Street for very long (long enough, mind you, to finish The Pickwick Papers and write Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby) and much of the furniture is “period” but not his (though there’s the “Cruikshank chair,” which is cool). So you don’t get quite the same feeling of stepping back into another life and time as you do at 24 Cheyne Row, where you can stand, as I did, right where Carlyle is posed in Robert Tait’s famous painting “A Chelsea Interior."
On our ramble through Chelsea we paused at George Eliot’s last home, 4 Cheyne Walk, just down the street from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s house (where, apparently, his menagerie caused so many problems for his neighbours that there is still a rule against peacock ownership in the area). We went past Oscar Wilde’s house on Tite Street and paused outside another interesting looking house only to be invited in and shown around by the kind and enthusiastic current owner: it turned out to have been the painter John Collier’s home and studio. Another good place for a Victorianist to wander was down Chancery Lane and around past Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where the shade of Mr Tulkinghorn seemed ominously nearby. And of course there are the shady squares of Bloomsbury, including Tavistock Square, where both Dickens and Viriginia Woolf lived, and Gordon Square.
Recently at The Floating Academy, Eddie Kent raised some interesting questions about the commodification or commercialization of literary sites. I can see that there is something at least potentially discomfiting about the way England’s cultural history is packaged and marketed, but at the same time I think it’s wonderful to come so close to the reality of the past, to be reminded as tangibly as the Carlyles’ house reminds us that, as Carlyle himself said, “the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men, not by ... abstractions of men.”
Addendum: It was very interesting to learn that Carlyle’s house was among the first literary sites established as a tourist destination. On display in his attic study is one of the early guest books, open to the page signed by Vanessa and Virginia Bell.
Muldoonery
A better poet than interviewee, I think.
“Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini” [The Irish Times, April 19, 2003]. I guess he means that poetry achieves a kind of marvellous escape act from the apparent restrictions of its form, but that’s not what he has said. What he has said invites the reply: ‘so form ... is a prop, is it?’
“The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away” [Princeton University Library Chronicle, Spring 1998]. I assume he means that poetry should fuck with our heads, which is quite right; but this emphasis on the unpleasantry of poetry looks lopsided to the point of masochism. Why would I want to hang out with a bully?
“Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect” [Interviewed in Thumbscrew, Spring 1996]. Paul? Meet Entropy. Entropy, Paul. I’ll leave you two together.
Or ... or ... maybe I’m just a sad little pedant? Could that be the truth of it?
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Ev Psych on the Ropes?
No less a figure than David Brooks has declared that “Evolutionary psychology has had a good run. But now there is growing pushback. Sharon Begley has a rollicking, if slightly overdrawn, takedown in the current Newsweek.” Evolutionary theorist David Sloan Wilson rushes to the defense in the Huffington Post (worth reading, more so than the take-downs).
Is this the beginning of the end?
I’m not inclined to assign any great importance to superficial journalistic take-downs of evolutionary psychology than I do to journalistic take-downs of Theory, though I’m not a devotee of either intellectual constellation. But I do think the study of psychology has changed in the last three for four decades, and irreversibly so. One aspect of the change is associated with the phrase “cognitive science” while “evolutionary psychology” signals another aspect. The former reflects the influence of computation as a metaphor and model for mental processes while that latter weds the former to a biological base. The lines between the two are not clear.
In 1978 I filed a disseration on “Cognitive Science and Literary Theory.” Since cognitive science was a rather new development at that time – the term itself was coined by Christopher Longuet-Higgins in 1973 – I devoted a chapter to explaining what cognitive science was. My account was necessarily idiosyncratic as cognitive science has never been more than a loosely associated congerie of themes and interests ultimately impelled by the idea of computation. I argued that cognitive science was about investigating a five-way correspondence between: 1) computational mechanisms, 2) behavior, 3) neuroanatomy and physiology, 4) ontogeny, and 5) phylogeny. Cognitive science, in fact, has tended to focus on 1 & 2 while evolutionary psychology has been concerned with 2 & 5. Both recognize the importance of 3 and, to a lesser extent, 4. I have no idea when we will have the psychology we need, one that is well-integrated across all 5 (for a very preliminary sketch of such a psychology, look here).
Friday, June 26, 2009
O Zinga! Klapwrath! Psein!
Moderately rare as a first edition:
Landor, Walter Savage. ANDREA OF HUNGARY AND GIOVANNA OF NAPLES. London, Richard Bentley, 1839. 1st edition. Bound in publisher’s original paper boards, rebacked in new paper with a new paper spine label. Unopened. Worn at the extremities, otherwise very good condition. USD 227.30
I’ve not got a first edition, mind; I have it as part of a multi-volume Landorian Collected Works, which I’m reading in train of writing something on his whole body of work. And I’ll say this: though he’s neglected now there’s an enormous amount to love about Landor’s poetry and his prose. Even some of his plays aren’t bad: Count Julian: a Tragedy (1812), say, though wayward, has powerful moments and a weird cumulative potency. And (this is the last of my mealymouthed caveats, I promise) the whole subgenre of 19th-century unacted pastiche-Elizabethan blank-verse, static-literary tragic dramas is a little literary phenomenon in its own right, with its own aesthetic parameters; and a reader prepared to suspend her usual criteria of judgement for a while can find numerous interesting and beautiful things therein.
But, that said, Andrea of Hungary is more than bad; it’s so bad it’s almost as if Landor were specifically trying to write a sort of Acorn Antiques of the c19th-dramatic-poetic world.
Supposedly set in Naples in 1342, just after the young Hungarian prince of the title has married the teenage Neapolitan queen Giovanna and been crowned king, the play details the plotting of Andrea’s diabolic confessor, Fra Rupert, straight from the anti-Catholic school of offensive caricature, who resents that his charge has escaped his influence and plans to assassinate him. A nice, tense little piece of historical theatre could have been written about this premise. Landor didn’t do that. Never mind that his characters make reference to such early 14th-century essentials as drawing rooms [III.ii.17] and guitars [IV.ii.54] and say things like ‘O the delight of floating in a bath’ [IV.iii.48]; never mind that he leeches all the tension from the situation, such that nothing at all happens except prolix speechifying until the very end of Act V. Put all that on one side. The clincher is the sheer badness of the writing: either Stuffed Owl pentameters of this sort:
The smell of melon overpowers me quite. [IV.i.11]
or
And dignity! O Zinga! Klapwrath! Psein!
Becomes it me to praise such men as you! [IV.iii.2f.]
or
Anger is better, as pomengranates are. [IV.v.33]
or
How the stars twinkle! how the light leaves titter! [IV.vi.9]
Or else of a stylistic deadness and clumsiness that is quite remarkable. Here is Landor in cod-Shakespeare mode, with his version of ‘tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’, or ‘to be or not to be’. Evil Fra Rupert speaks:
Nay, rather let the bubble float along
Than break it: the rich colours are outside.
Everything in this world is but a bubble,
The world itself one mighty bubble, we
Mortals, small bubbles round it! [III.vi.46f]
Bubbles, bubbles, bubbles. His interlocutor, Caraffa, actually replies: ‘Thou art a soapy one!’ and continues the meditation. ‘If these were solid/As thou, most glorious bubble who reflect’st them,/Then ... the world and all within the world were bubbles.’ Lots of soapy bubble blowing, was there, in Sicily in 1342?
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Sita Sings the Freakin’ Gorgeous Blues
Quite possibly I first heard about Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues in a January 2008 post at Cartoon Brew. The film had been selected to premier at the Berlin International Film Festival but Paley had to scrounge up $35,000 so she could have a 35mm print made. “Fat chance,” said I to myself. But she did it and I kept reading more about Sita here and there, watching clips, getting interested. Finally, Mike “The Curmudgeon” Barrier saw it on DVD and said “It’s one of the very few animated features of the last few decades that I can recommend enthusiastically.” And he’s seen Pixar, and Miyazaki!
That cinched it. I went link link z00m! on the internets, gave up a credit card number, and a couple of days later had my very own DVD (you can also stream it or download it free of charge).
Yes, it’s all that: imaginative, gorgeous, seamless, original, art.
Since the DVD contains a press kit, I’ll save myself some think-write time and simply copy the synopsis:
Sita is a Hindu goddess, the leading lady of India’s epic the Ramayana and a dutiful wife who follows her husband Rama on a 14 year exile to a forest, only to be kidnapped by an evil king from Sri Lanka. Despite remaining faithful to her husband, Sita is put through many tests. Nina (the filmmaker Nina Paley herself) is an artist who finds parallels in Sita’s life when her husband – in India on a work project – decides to break up their marriage and dump her via email. Three hilarious Indonesian shadow puppets with Indian accents – linking the popularity of the Ramayana from India all the way to the Far East - narrate both the ancient tragedy and modern comedy in this beautifully animated interpretation of the epic.
In her first feature length film, Paley juxtaposes multiple narrative and visual styles to create a highly entertaining yet moving vision of the Ramayana. Musical numbers choreographed to the 1920’s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw feature a cast of hundreds: flying monkeys, evil monsters, gods, goddesses, warriors, sages, and winged eyeballs. A tale of truth, justice and a woman’s cry for equal treatment. Sita Sings the Blues earns its tagline as “The Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told.”
Now you know roughly what Sita’s about. And if your inner geek is thinking “ancient text + contemporary story = Ulysses,” well then your inner geek’s ahead of mine, because I didn’t think that until 10 or 20 minutes into my first viewing. But I wouldn’t count that as any more than a casual observation, one with a non-casual corollary.
By the ordinary method of reckoning such things, the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome are in the direct ancestral line of 20th Century European culture, which would necessarily include Joyce’s Dublin. The same mode of reckoning sees little relationship between ancient India and contemporary America, thus both Hindu nationalists and post-colonial Theorists have been criticizing Paley’s cultural miscegenation. Alas for them, cultural miscegenation has been the way of the world since whenever and it’s only accelerating in our era.
So that’s one thing.
And then there’s the mixture of narrative and visual styles the press synopsis mentions: What about that? Well, Nina’s story is presented in one visual style and more or less tells itself. Sita’s story is presented in several different styles and much of it is told, as well, by those “hilarious Indonesian shadow puppets with Indian accents” – who seem to function a bit like the chorus of Greek tragedies. Much of the emotional burden of both stories is conveyed in Annette Henshaw’s vocals, except when it isn’t. And there are other things as well.
All of which is to say that you’ve got to be on your toes when you watch this film. You can’t just lay back and let it wash its magic over you. You have to work with it, you have to think about what you are seeing and hearing. And you have to experience it, not just as a narrative, but as, shall we say, an invocation, a ceremony.
Consider this frame, which occurs roughly five minutes into the film:
The moon-chariot is to the left, the sun-chariot to the right. They’re moving around the earth-mother in the center. This frame is preceded by a three minute sequence that presents the birth of the universe from some kind of big bang, followed by a parade of Hindu deities and then the beating heart of the universe. Now consider this frame, roughly nine minutes from the end of the film:
There is Mother Earth to the right. The small dark figure at the center is Sita, running to rejoin Mother Earth. Once again, she’s proving her purity, at least that’s what the story says. But if that’s the earth, then where’s Sita while she’s running? That’s obvious; she’s on the surface of the earth. See? Ceremony. Symbols. Myth. Also: that this image from the beginning of the film now returns at the end, as does the parade of deities, such repetition is the inner logic of ceremony. But the context now is different. As Sita goes running into Mother Earth, so – in a sense – the whole narrative follows her into this symbolic transformation.
Or something.
Ceremony.
About 50 minutes in, the action stops for a three minute intermission – long after the first appearance of earth-mother, well before the her last appearance – in which we see our players go out for refreshments and take bathroom breaks. Here we see a deity returning with a hotdog – just what kind of meat is in that dog?
Now, if you’re thinking something like “ZOMG! self-consciousness, meta-commentary, Verfremdung, postmodernism” well of course my dear child, of course. Where’ve you been for the last hour? That train left the station during the last century.
Something else is going on. Just what, I don’t know. What I do know is that when the intermission’s over we see (cartoon) Nina sitting at her desk, getting dumped by email, and we hear Rudresh Mahanthappa’s alto sax wailing on the sound track and then, Wham! we’re into another domain. We hear Reena Shah singing and we see her dancing, like so:
That’s her, in outline, with whatever superimposed and peeking through. I won’t pretend those frames are representative of this three minute sequence; they’re just what I decided to grab. This is the dramatic climax of the narrative, the ceremony. And it’s different from everything else you see and hear in Sita Sings the Blues.
Ceremony.
Yes, there is a story; it’s up there in the press-kit synopsis. More or less. But following that story, knowing who did what to whom, that’s the least of your responsibilities, or pleasures. Dare I say it, that cliché: It’s in the Journey.
Ceremony.
* * * * *
EDIT: Now that that’s written and posted, I’ve been wondering whether or not Paley has, in effect, taken the many-worlds variousness of Fantasia and deployed it in service of a single narrative. Looks like it to me.
* * * * *
Here’s an interesting interview with Nina at Bordwell’s site.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Filching and Owning Culture
David Shields and Siva Vaidhyanathan discuss these matters on bloggingheads.tv. Artists have always built on materials created by their predecessors but current copyright laws put that practice under pressure. Shields and Vaidhyanathan make extensive reference to an article Jonathan Lethem published two years ago in Harpers Magazine, The ecstasy of influence:
The Walt Disney Company has drawn an astonishing catalogue from the work of others: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, Song of the South, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Robin Hood, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Mulan, Sleeping Beauty, The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book, and, alas, Treasure Planet, a legacy of cultural sampling that Shakespeare, or De La Soul, could get behind. Yet Disney’s protectorate of lobbyists has policed the resulting cache of cultural materials as vigilantly as if it were Fort Knox—threatening legal action, for instance, against the artist Dennis Oppenheim for the use of Disney characters in a sculpture, and prohibiting the scholar Holly Crawford from using any Disney-related images—including artwork by Lichtenstein, Warhol, Oldenburg, and others—in her monograph Attached to the Mouse: Disney and Contemporary Art.
This whole business is put in an interesting light by the case of animator Nina Paley and the brilliant film she created over the course of five years mostly by herself: Sita Sings the Blues. Sita’s soundtrack is built around jazz recordings made by Annette Hanshaw in the 1920s. While the recordings themselves are in the public domain, the underlying songs are not. Rather than incur heroically burdensome licensing fees, Paley has made the film available free over the internet. The New York Times ran a feature on Paley and Sita back in February.
The Sort of Book You Actually Want to Write: “Big Sid’s Vincati”
A friend of mine from graduate school, Matthew Biberman, whom I knew primarily as an ambitious and driven Milton scholar, has written a memoir, not about Milton but motorcycles. The book is called Big Sid’s Vincati: The Story of a Father, a Son, and the Motorcycle of a Lifetime. His book, which has not had a lot of publicity yet in the general media, has come out at the same time as a second memoir about the power of physical involvement in mechanical problems (incidentally also involving working on motorcycles), Shop Class as Soulcraft, by Matthew Crawford. Crawford’s book has gotten quite a bit of attention, including a long excerpt in The New York Times Magazine, as well as Kelefa Sanneh’s review in The New Yorker. And Stanley Fish, in his blog at the New York Times, put together a lengthy blog post last week, where he considered Biberman’s book alongside Crawford’s, while also addressing Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values. Here I’d like to attend to Biberman’s memoir on its own terms, though I’ve also added a brief consideration at the end of this blog post that gets at the obvious ‘meta’ question of why this particular kind of knowledge seems to be so satisfying to people who started out their lives with a passion for the abstract liberal arts—literature and philosophy.
1. Vincatis
Since I know many readers will be wondering, I should probably start by explaining the “Vincati”: a “Vincati” is a hybrid bike, with a Ducati frame and a Vincent engine. It brings together the best features of two legendary motorcycles, the 1970s Ducati’s widely praised chassis, and the 1950s Vincent’s powerful twin engine, immortalized by Richard Thompson, in “1952 Vincent Black Lightning.” Creating a hybrid bike using largely original parts is a particularly challenging project, both in terms of tracking down the necessary vintage parts and as a matter of mechanical skill. In the case of Matthew and his father, Sid, putting one together after the latter had a nearly-fatal heart attack became a labor of love and a reason for his father to go on living.
The memoir resonated with me in part because Biberman, like myself, came into literary studies from a rather unlikely background – his father was a motorcycle mechanic who never went to college, while he went to elite schools on scholarship, only to struggle somewhat in the early years of life as a “grown-up” in a tenure track academic job. Being a hungry outsider in English studies can give you the motivation and hustle to get through college and graduate school with flying colors, but it’s when you settle down into a tenure track job that you realize that sheer scholarly hustle alone may not make you happy in the intensely bourgeois culture of academia, nor does it give you the continued motivation to keep up the intellectual pace you set in graduate school. Academia has many perks, but for many people it can be a difficult profession to remain passionate about, and a curious sort of disconnection sometimes sets in for people about half-way to tenure. I’m not sure there is any single explanation for it—though, admittedly, the institution of tenure might be part of the problem—so let me just say this: it does not seem entirely an accident that many academics have passions outside of their teaching lives that animate them more than their primary work.
In Matthew Biberman’s case, that outside passion entailed rediscovering the love of motorcycles he grew up with in the first instance, but which he had put away for many years as he tried to make it first as a novelist and then in literary studies. Big Sid’s Vincati is clearly primarily a motorcycle enthusiast’s book, with some rather technical accounts of the innards of vintage British and Italian motorcycles. It is not a book full of literary metaphors for motorcycle culture, and there is nary an allusion to Shakespeare or Milton anywhere.
Still, since the book is first and foremost a personal memoir, Biberman can acknowledge the development of his career, and the tension that begins to build between the hobby he loves and the academic career he’s committed to professionally. The following dialogue is one that resonated in particular with me as I read it:
While I worked, I told Sid that I had come to a decision about the donor motor. ‘I’ll agree to hopping up the Vincati if you make me a promise.’
‘I’m listening,’ he said.
‘First, you need to know that I am playing a dangerous game of chicken professionally. If I spent too much time out in the garage and lose my tenure, there goes my regular paycheck, plus my benefits, and with Lucy’s condition I just can’t lose my health insurance. But I also know we can’t stop our work out here. So I have to thread the needle and do both: get tenure and be a grease monkey.’
‘Understood,’ Sid said in his gravest tone. ‘What do you want from me?’
‘You have to promise me you will stop asking me about what I am writing.’
This request surprised Sid. It had been going on for months. When we worked, he continually made me talk about Shakespeare and Milton. I’d been working on a dry tome of literary criticism and for some reason Sid was fascinated by it.’
‘Look, I never wanted to write this book in the first place,’ I explained. ‘But now I have no choice. No book, no job—that’s how you get tenure. And when I come out here I just don’t want to think about it.’
‘How can talking about Shakespeare and Milton depress you?’ he said. ‘You always loved books. You always wanted to be a writer—now you are writing a book. How can that be depressing?’
‘Because I never wanted to write this kind of book, okay? I wanted to write the great American novel, be the great American writer. Not become some professor who writes incomprehensible criticism that no one wants to read. Look at you. You wanted to set a record at Bonneville. Well, sometimes our dreams don’t come true. Just leave me alone when it comes to that stuff and let me do what I have to do.’
I looked at him and knew: now he got it. (169-170)
I think many people who have struggled with projects that become professional obligations rather than really rewarding intellectual writing experiences will know where Biberman is coming from at moments like this. In effect, the divide between a literary studies career and an intensely involving hobby involving motorcycles, which Biberman asks his father to accept above, becomes the rule for the memoir as well. Literature and motorcycles are on somewhat separate tracks in Big Sid’s Vincati.
That said, there are some literary reference points in Big Sid’s Vincati here and there. One is Thom Gunn, a poet Biberman writes about encountering while in college. Here are a couple of verses from Gunn’s “On the Move,” which is mentioned (but not quoted) in the memoir at one point:
On motorcycles, up the road, they come:
Small, black, as flies hanging in heat, the Boy,
Until the distance throws them forth, their hum
Bulges to thunder held by calf and thigh.
In goggles, donned impersonality,
In gleaming jackets trophied with the dust,
They strap in doubt—by hiding it, robust—
And almost hear a meaning in their noise.Exact conclusion of their hardiness
Has no shape yet, but from known whereabouts
They ride, directions where the tires press.
They scare a flight of birds across the field:
Much that is natural to the will must yield.
Men manufacture both machine and soul,
And use what they imperfectly control
To dare a future from the taken routes.
Actually, some beautiful writing there. But as I say, Biberman doesn’t really get into the aesthetics or philosophical attractions of motorcycles all that much (and this is what differentiates his book from something like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, or for that matter, Matthew Crawford’s, Shop Class as Soulcraft).
Rather, his is a true insider’s appreciation of motorcycles and biker culture, as an end in itself, rather than as a vehicle for an argument about Kant. The following passage might be a representative moment of motorcycle enthusiasm:
Sid forgot all about his plan to order parts and wandered over to the tent instead. Inside he was surrounded by rare models, special factory projects, and race bikes, both solo and sidecar. He saw a rare Series A twin, a ‘sectioned’ Series A Comet motor, and an ultrarare model W two-stroker, complete with leg shielding. To its right sat a Picador motor, a modified Vincent motorcycle engine developed to propel a drone aircraft, as well as another war ministry project, a Uniflo air-sea rescue lifeboat motor. . . . But it was the tent’s center attraction that brought sweat to Sid’s palms—the legendary works racer, Gunga Din. That bike held more records than any other machine in England, and quite possibly the world. Sid had only read bout it in the magazines, where it was written that if regular rider George Brown wasn’t flung off, he was just about sure to win. (21-22)
Biberman does a very good job transmitting what’s so pleasurable about the world of fast, classic bikes at moments like these. Though I came to this book knowing nothing at all about this stuff, I must admit I’ve slightly caught the bug. (And no, I’m not thrilled about a British racing motorcycle named “Gunga Din,” even affectionately. Try “Mangal Pande” next time, Vincent enthusiasts…)
But the true poetry in Big Sid’s Vincati is not enthusiasm for motorcycles in general, but the precise mechanical language lovingly applied to describing the Vincent’s engine in particular. Some of Biberman’s technical descriptions of the work he and his father did while working on their five-year labor of love left me wanting to see diagrams, to help me visualize better what he’s talking about. For example:
Here it helps to know a little more about a Vincent motor. The bottom half is called the crankcase and it is compared of two matched pieces, a left and a right, that are bolted together by studs that run horizontally. The front of the crankcase is symmetrical but the rear is not. The left side is longer, extending straight back beyond the clutch housing where it accepts the swingarm pivot shaft. This shape is not matched by the right crankcase. That piece ends earlier and sweeps in to expose the front drive sprocket around which the rear chain runs, so it can turn the back wheel of the bike. Sid had spotted gouging on the longer left-hand side and now wanted to lay a flat file on that surface and reduce it by a few thousandths of an inch. (205-206)
It will remain a little vague in my mind until I see either a detailed 3D diagram or the machine itself, but I admire the mechanical knowledge behind this explanation of a Vincent motorcycle motor.
One has to feel that, through this book, Biberman has been able to reconcile his stated adolescent desire to write the “great American novel,” with the real circumstances and problems he’s faced in life (besides his father’s illness, Matthew and his wife had to deal with a daughter born with a serious congenital heart problem, during roughly the same period he and his father were working on this bike).
Big Sid’s Vincati will undoubtedly appeal to motorcycle enthusiasts, but I suspect it might also appeal to many non-enthusiasts who know what it is to be passionate about something that won’t help you get tenure, and are, consequently, willing to go along for the ride.
2. A Thought on Technical Knowledge vs. Liberal Arts Knowledge
Here we might take a look at Matthew Crawford’s excerpt from Shop Class as Soulcraft, up at the New York Times Magazine. Unlike Matthew Biberman, who is a tenured academic at a respected research university, Crawford left academia shortly after completing his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, aided by the bleak job market. While suffering through that period, he often took recourse to working on motorcycles as a way of focusing his energy productively He then landed what was presumably a high-paying job at a think-tank in Washington DC (probably considerably more lucrative than academia would have been!), but walked away after saving enough money to buy the tools that would enable him to set up his own small motorcycle repair shop. Here is a little bit from Crawford’s description of the work he does now:
The business goes up and down; when it is down I have supplemented it with writing. The work is sometimes frustrating, but it is never irrational.
And it frequently requires complex thinking. In fixing motorcycles you come up with several imagined trains of cause and effect for manifest symptoms, and you judge their likelihood before tearing anything down. This imagining relies on a mental library that you develop. An internal combustion engine can work in any number of ways, and different manufacturers have tried different approaches. Each has its own proclivities for failure. You also develop a library of sounds and smells and feels. For example, the backfire of a too-lean fuel mixture is subtly different from an ignition backfire.
As in any learned profession, you just have to know a lot. If the motorcycle is 30 years old, from an obscure maker that went out of business 20 years ago, its tendencies are known mostly through lore. It would probably be impossible to do such work in isolation, without access to a collective historical memory; you have to be embedded in a community of mechanic-antiquarians. These relationships are maintained by telephone, in a network of reciprocal favors that spans the country. My most reliable source, Fred, has such an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure European motorcycles that all I have been able to offer him in exchange is deliveries of obscure European beer.
The question I have while reading passages like this is whether the approach to knowledge and problem-solving is really absolutely different from what one does, say, in sitting down to put together a close-reading of a novel.
Isn’t there, in literary studies, also a technical base of knowledge that is acquired partly through exposure to savants ("Fred" in Crawford’s example above could be “Fred Jameson” for an aspiring literary theorist), and partly simply through long experience? Admittedly, most literary critics today de-emphasize technical aspects of literary analysis in favor of historical, contextual, and political thematics. But that doesn’t mean the option to engage in more technical analysis of literary tropes and forms isn’t there for those who are interested in it.
In other words, a possible counter-diagnosis to Crawford’s alienation from first academic, and then white-collar, intellectual labor, might be simply to try doing a different kind of intellectual labor, rather than condemn intellectual labor as a whole as inherently alienating.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Jump Cut 51
Jump Cut styles itself as A Review of Contemporary Media. Issue 51 has more articles than I care to list, but you can find the TOC here.
There are a number of articles on matters that have been taken up in The Valve or that strike me as being of interest to Valvesters. Running down the TOC from top to bottom: three articles on documenting torture; The Wire as narrative and metanarrative; Battlestar Galactica; Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (a bit heavy on the Marxism, but nonetheless perceptive and interesting); a documentary about Samuel R. Delany (more on sex than SF); Children of Men; two articles on The Dark Knight; WALL-E; a section on horror films. And much more.
Check it out.
Anxieties of Affiliation: The Creative Writing Program and Transnationalism
There are many intriguing conversations that could be started with almost any few pages of Mark McGurl’s brilliant (and tremendously interesting) The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, but the one that I want to try to start is about the way he brings his massive project around to take a look at transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and diaspora studies. McGurl reminds the reader on many different occasions of the international scope and influence of U.S. creative writing programs, while also insisting on the exceptionalism of this cultural formation. While U.S. programs have long recruited talent from abroad (Iowa most aggressively) and are of late beginning to be imitated in parts of the globe (mostly Anglophone nations so far), McGurl draws up the Program Era as a phenomenon as exclusive to America as it is to the university, unthinkable outside of the nesting of those two institutions--the university in America, the American university.
In the chapter titled “Art and Alma Mater,” McGurl begins by noting what has been implicit for most of the book: the nature of the creative writing program can lead to an acute case of the anxiety of influence on the part of the writer/student, which McGurl rephrases as an “anxiety of affiliation” (taking the term from Gilbert/Gubar’s No Man’s Land). What is craved is artistic autonomy, disaffiliation ("filia" - daughter) from the Alma Mater. McGurl compares this craving to Pascale Casanova’s assertion (in The World Republic of Letters) that
the collective concern of literary artists across the centuries-long sweep of global modernity has been to “invent their literary freedom” by disengaging their work from the compromising contingencies of national politics and addressing themselves to the world. “Denying their difference” and “assimilating the values of one of the great literary centers,” modern writers have been rewarded for this sometimes painful process of national self-alienation with admittance to a notionally autonomous realm of notionally universal literary value. (McGurl 326)
McGurl criticizes Casanova for being a little credulous on the question of whether this “autonomous realm” (the “notionally"s are his) ever existed, or could have existed, but agrees with Casanova that it is undeniable now that whatever the case may have been in the age of Goethe’s dream of Weltliteratur, the World Republic of Letters has become something completely different from what was once meant by the term.
what has replaced Casanova’s unified world literary space is what we might call a global literary pluralism, a World Pluribus of Letters. Here a writer is valued by readers in the developed world not for her transcendence of cultural particularity, but rather as a compelling aesthetic vehicle for its [that cultural particularity’s] appreciation. These writers, and the cultures they are understood to represent, are thereby “given their due” of intercultural esteem in a way utterly undisruptive of the mechanisms of global capital, which are happy to organize world culture under the (as it turns out) profitable sign of “difference.” Just as the international division of labor distributes different economic activities to different parts of the globe, so does world literature look to various regions and localities as reassuring repositories of cultural diversity and authenticity. (McGurl 329-330)
Engage counterargument to Walter Benn Michaels in 3… 2…
No, just kidding.
McGurl sees this World Pluribus of Letters as interacting with the institutional support structure of creative writing programs in order to facilitate the idea of disaffiliation from the nation-state and a re-affiliation with a sub-nationalism ("African- or Asian- or Mexican- or… Native-America") that is symbolically connected to international struggles for freedom and autonomy (e.g. decolonization). He believes this process operates in the same way that the citizen of the old Republic of Letters disaffiliated from the nation-state to re-affiliate with the autonomous realm of art. And he suggests that this new impulse toward disaffiliation/re-affiliation is also a little chimerical: “Of course, to describe these subnational-to-international links as ‘symbolic’ is to admit that in many if not most case they have been as fictional, in their own way, as the fictions of innocent autonomous literary value that Casanova so ably strips away (331).” McGurl mentions in particular the Chicano Movement “which was closer in a literal geographic and demographic sense to the ‘other’ nations, Mexico on the one hand, the quasi-mythical Aztlan on the other, to which it was transnationally linked but from which it was still, as a practical political matter, fairly far removed.” He continues:
What this meant, and what it still means, is that the literary technology of disaffiliation from the U.S. cultural mainstream can only really function if it has supplementary social institutional supports. Little magazines, urban-based cultural organizations, and small publishing houses have of course been crucial to this task… [but] it was above all the U.S. university that would sustain the symbolic connection of minority writers to a global pluralist space. (331)
McGurl has also made strong claims earlier about the importance of the university’s patronage to experimental writers (whom he calls technomodernists) and to Carver-like minimalists (whom he calls lower-middle-class modernists)--that they are sustained if not entirely at least predominately by being used (taught/assigned/read) in universities, particularly in creative writing programs. Yet his claims about minority writers (or the writing he calls high cultural pluralism) are much stronger: the university assures them not just of a readership, but of existence in a more complete sense: the university is the only site (or at least the preeminent site) in which this disaffiliation/re-affiliation can occur. McGurl describes the particular context in which this process now takes place:
In recent years, as the appeal of metaphysical belonging in the United States of America has dramatically diminished among the educated elite of the world, this conceptual pivot between internal and external difference from the nation has become an active site of cultural- and identity-political theorization. Hence the irresistible rise of critical discourses of cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, and diaspora in the U.S. academy, all of them geared, like the cultural nationalisms of the past, for spiritual and intellectual disaffiliation from what was once naively and unironically called “America.” At the same time, of course, these discourses have become a new way of accumulating symbolic capital in the fervently globalizing U.S. academy, pointing scholars toward valuable bodies of expertise they might claim as their own and offering a rationale for the inclusion of certain creative writers in an emergent canon of world literature. In this context, the question posed to itself by fiction in the Program Era is whether and to what degree one can disaffiliate from the nation-state while still being affiliated with educational institutions located there. (333-334)
There are a number of lines that strike me as somewhat odd in these big chunks of text, but I hope I have given enough of a sense (and an accurate enough sense) of the overall argument to be able to talk about them coherently. First, there’s the line, “Just as the international division of labor distributes different economic activities to different parts of the globe, so does world literature look to various regions and localities as reassuring repositories of cultural diversity and authenticity.” What does this mean--that outsourcing and feeling good about reading a book by a Zimbabwean are functionally the same? If he’s going to make this argument that “cultural difference” is completely amenable to global capital, then he should probably be arguing instead that “cultural diversity and authenticity” isn’t really a property of labor in the first place, it’s a property of the product, of the commodity. But this sentence doesn’t make sense to me--outsourcing isn’t about “diversity and authenticity” and “world literature” isn’t about a division of labor. And this is what I don’t get about McGurl’s certainty that the Pluribus of Letters prizes subnational affiliation over artistic/universal affiliation--it doesn’t really work as a system of “giving [culturally particularized writers] their due” because it is endlessly redundant, and it is the redundancy that actually drives publishing--follow-up hits that aren’t about “giving writers their due” but rather about piggybacking off the success of another writer. Take for example, the Bolaño phenomenon. Maybe we can say that Bolaño’s popularity has been a question of giving Latin America its due: it’s time we had another big author from south of the border—the Boom’s viejo, we’re ready again to remember that there’s a second hemisphere. But does this explain the increased coverage of many Latin American writers in the past two years—would Guillermo Martínez have been published in the New Yorker the other week if not for Bolaño? And can we really say that he was published there because the NYer thought it was Argentina’s due? What we’re seeing is just a general practice of short-term capitalization, not some ordered global system of “intercultural esteem.”
Secondly, McGurl’s use of “symbolic” in “to describe these subnational-to-international links as ‘symbolic’ is to admit that in many if not most case they have been as fictional as…” is really odd, as if symbolism does no work other than fancy; being ‘merely’ symbolic can still be much more than being ‘merely’ fictional, and is, at any rate, not synonymous with it.
But I’d like to return to the question that McGurl ends with, because I think it’s a really crucial question and one that turns his project (along with many others) inside out. As I said, McGurl is fairly resolute throughout the book at insisting on the national exceptionalism of the Program Era: it’s an American thing. And yet he also demonstrates in many cases that creative writing programs, especially the elite ones, have pulled in foreign cultural capital quite effectively; Paul Engle, the driving force behind the Iowa Program for many years, was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. But if we can’t fully see this foreign cultural capital as being affiliated to the U.S. by being mediated through or by writing programs, I think we can at least see it being brought into a more narrowly ‘American’ circuit--the circulation among programs or among universities. And this is true as well for the quasi-foreign (to the institution) capital of minority writers, who are also brought into new affiliation with the intensely ‘American’ ambit of creative writing programs; while the university secures for minority writers access to a “global pluralist space,” it also supports continued access to a domestic pluralist space in the form of the classroom. This is not terribly different from what it does for experimental fiction like Barth or Barthelme, but it is a significant function.
The programs, then, are the opposite of transnationalism studies--not because they aren’t themselves often transnational in scope or influence, but because while (according to McGurl) transnationalism takes disaffiliation from the nation as the enabling structure for the amassing of domestic cultural capital, the creative writing program takes the amassing of foreign (or quasi-foreign) cultural capital as the enabling structure for an affiliation to the U.S. (or rather, to a sub-circuit thereof).
That is, I think, either an answer to or a restatement of McGurl’s question, “whether and to what degree one can disaffiliate from the nation-state while still being affiliated with educational institutions located there,” but it takes the question someplace within McGurl’s project that I hope is productive.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Shameless Literary Tourism in Dublin: Bloomsday 2009
It’s rather striking how much of a commodity James Joyce is in Dublin; there’s nothing comparable to it in any American city. You hear mentions of Bloomsday activites on Dublin radio stations, and see events described in some of the newspapers. There are two Joyce museums in the city, a proper statue of Joyce on one of the biggest commercial streets in the city, and plaques on the ground and on buildings all over the place. Every other pub has a picture of Joyce or Yeats somewhere; there is even something called a “James Joyce Pub Award” (for “being an authentic Dublin pub"). On Bloomsday there are performances at big as well as small venues all over the city related to Ulysses. We saw a flyer for an actress doing a solo show as Molly Bloom, and we even saw something about the dramatization of a brief dialogue between Ned Lambert and J.J. O’Molloy at St. Mary’s Abbey (from “Wandering Rocks") – a rather minor incident in the novel.
That said, some of the events not involving pubs didn’t seem to be all that well attended. And while there were a fair number of knowledgeable readers of Joyce on the two tours I went on (many of them American college students, interestingly), there were plenty of people who came out apparently because their guide book recommended it as something to do in Dublin.
The only dissenting voice I heard on James Joyce was in a pub in a village called Bunratty, north of Limerick. There, at a place named “Durty Nelly’s,” I was accosted by a rather inebriated Irishman who wanted to tell me all about his time at the Kumbh Mela in India. When Joyce came up in the conversation later (this man knew a fair bit about literature), he scoffed: “Joyce was a lackey, he was nothing but a lackey.” I didn’t have the presence of mind to ask him why he thought so, and now I wonder what exactly he meant.
As an intellectual exercise, I’m not sure whether there was much value in spending a day walking around Dublin with Joyce-tinted glasses on; it’s admittedly tourism, not scholarship. But it was certainly fun to see Dublin this way.
1. Sandycove and Howth
On the morning of the 16th, I took the DART train out to Sandycove early in the morning, leaving Samian asleep at the hotel in central Dublin. It’s a pretty long ride from Tara Street Station in central Dublin, which surprised me a little in itself; I had always envisioned Sandycove, where Buck Mulligan is staying in the novel, in the Martello Tower, and Dalkey, where Stephen has been teaching, as a relatively short hop to central Dublin. In fact, it’s a forty minute commute at rush hour, even in a fast subway train. How long would it have taken by tram in 1904?
I was pleased to see a handful of people, men and women, bathing in the water by the tower, now a James Joyce Museum. There were people in period costume, though not many who were identifiably a particular character in the novel (elsewhere, in the city we did see people dressed as “Leopold Bloom,” “Stephen Dedalus,” and even one guy with an eye-patch who seemed to want to be the “Cyclops”; the Molly Blooms, I’m guessing, stayed home).
A Dublin-based actor and writer named Barry McGovern did a brilliant reading from “Eumaeus” at the top of the tower, with about twenty people crammed in around the small circle. I thought the choice of passages was great – it would be tempting to just do “Telemachus” at the top of the Martello Tower in Sandycove, but in fact the dialogue between Stephen and Bloom in Eumaeus walking through Dublin on their way to the cab shelter has some really poignant moments; it works especially well as a passage for recital. In terms of seeing Ulysses’ as a living text, this was the high point of the day for me.
Incidentally, if you watch this slideshow of the event at the Irish Times, you’ll see a picture of me along the way, and hear a little of Barry McGovern reading. Proof that I was there!
I decided to forego the “Bloomsday Breakfast” (focusing on pork kidneys, and “snotgreen soup” – really) at a local restaurant in Sandycove. I didn’t have all that much time, and anyway, 18 Euros is a little too steep for me for breakfast.
All in all, things were pretty quiet out at Sandycove. I noticed a couple of families with young children at Sandycove’s little beach (i.e., the actual cove at Sandycove), playing in the sand, as I walked back toward the train station. They were there for the beach on a warm, sunny morning, not related to Bloomsday. There was a serious-looking man in a black turtleneck who spoke halting English in an Eastern European accent there, frequently consulting what appeared to be a Polish or Russian translation of the novel, and another man (a nurse by profession) who had flown in from Leicester, England, that morning, just to participate in Bloomsday.
A week earlier, we had gone to Howth, on the north side of Dublin Bay. In fact, it was an accident – not literary tourism, but plain old tourism. (We had been given, as a present from relatives, a gift certificate for dinner at a nice seafood restaurant called “Aqua,” on Howth Pier –a gift given with no connection whatsoever to Joyce.) Howth is a pretty little fishing village, with some upscale restaurants, working fishing boats, and a few places selling takeaway fish and chips a bit more cheaply. The view of Ireland’s Eye to the north is pretty spectacular at sunset from the “Nose of Howth.” Here is what happens in Ulysses at Howth:
Glowing wine on his palate lingered swallowed. Crushing in the winepress grapes of Burgundy. Sun’s heat it is. Seems to a secret touch telling me memory. Touched his sense moistened remembered. Hidden under wild ferns on Howth below us bay sleeping: sky. No sound. The sky. The bay purple by the Lion’s head. Green by Drumleck. Yellowgreen towards Sutton. Fields of undersea, the lines faint brown in grass, buried cities. Pillowed on my coat she had her hair, earwigs in the heather scrub my hand under her nape, you’ll toss me all. O wonder! Coolsoft with ointments her hand touched me, caressed: her eyes upon me did not turn away. Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweetsour of her spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft warm sticky gumjelly lips. Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes. Pebbles fell. She lay still. A goat. No-one. High on Ben Howth rhododendrons a nannygoat walking surefooted, dropping currants. Screened under ferns she laughed warmfolded. Wildly I lay on her, kissed her: eyes, her lips, her stretched neck beating, woman’s breasts full in her blouse of nun’s veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me.
It’s a memory both Leopold Bloom and Molly Bloom hold fondly and come back to at various points in the novel, as representing the emotional core of their relationship. The scene is very, very intimate. After seeing the place, all I can say is: I hope they were warmly dressed; to us, it felt a little cold and desolate out there. (Perhaps it was just a windy day.)
2. Daytime in Central Dublin
We decided to skip the obligatory lunch of a Gorgonzola cheese sandwich and a glass of burgundy at lunch, though half the pubs in the Temple Bar district were advertising it as a special, including of course, Davy Byrne’s, on the 16th of June. (I think people don’t really realize that Bloom, though he had an intense reaction to the Burgundy, didn’t really respond much to the Gorgonzola Cheese.) Instead, we had a much more satisfying meal at the Joy of Cha on Essex Street East, near Meeting House Square.
The biggest crowd we saw was about 200 people at noon, at Meeting House Square, where there were readings and performances related to Ulysses for three hours in the middle of the day. We walked in on the tail end of an operatic performance of one of the Italian songs mentioned in Joyce’s novel (I couldn’t quite figure out which one), but after that the various speakers weren’t particularly exciting. After a little while, they turned it over to audience members to come up and read favorite passages from the novel. Unfortunately, it seemed like people were reading quite badly, and without explaining why such-and-such passage might be important for themselves personally. The adjacent Irish Film Institute was screening John Huston’s film version of “The Dead” on the night of the 16th, but it was sold out. We moved on.
Later in the afternoon, we did the Bloomsday walking tour that starts at the James Joyce Centre on North St. Georges Street (just a couple of blocks from Eccles Street, on the north side of the city). The guide presented himself as Stephen Dedalus, and in his opening spiel he announced, I thought quite cleverly, that while he was going to show us around some of the landmark sites in Ulysses, it wasn’t really his favorite book by Joyce. (Obviously, if you’re Stephen Dedalus, your favorite book should be Portrait of the Artist.) He also made an appropriately irreverent comment about the deification of Joyce as follows: “we’re here to celebrate the author James Joyce, the creator of everything, the father, the son, and the holy ghost…”
The spots in Ulysses on the Bloomsday tour aren’t really that thrilling to see, unless you’re the kind of Joyce reader that obsesses over the little details in Joyce’s novel. The spot that would have been Dlugacz’s butcher (always a fictional store, but a real address), is now a dry cleaners’ – wow, thrilling. Still, to see the church clock tower, and be able to visualize the streets and topography does help give a better picture of some of the key events in the book. The red light district (“Night-town”) is completely gone; today, that neighborhood has a big bus station and a train station. I also found, at several points in the Bloomsday tour through north central Dublin, that the mundane activities of the city – passing buses, construction work, routine traffic – overwhelmed our tour. If it was anything like this in 1904, Dublin at mid-day was a loud, busy place in which to walk around.
For me, the most poignant shift between the Dublin of Joyce’s day and the present moment entails the disappearance of Nelson’s Pillar on O’Connell Street, mentioned particularly in connection with the “Parable of the Plums” in the Aeolus episode. In 1966, the IRA blew up the pillar, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Uprising. Dublin has replaced what was once a symbol of British Imperialism with a 500 foot tall, abstract metal spike, which now stands anomalously (and ominously?) above the rest of the skyline of central Dublin.
On the tour, I met two Chinese women carrying the Chinese translation of Ulysses with them. The mother was a big Joyce fan, while the daughter seemed to be cramming a little bit to try and understand what the fuss was about. I asked them what the translation is like – is it full of neologisms, words borrowed from other languages, and so on? But they didn’t seem to understand the question; they simply said they’d never looked at the original in English, so they couldn’t make a comparison.
3. Evening
Davy Byrne’s was too crowded in the early evening with people in period costume eating cheese sandwiches, so we went to the Duke, across the street. All of the action is at Davy Byrne’s, since it’s still there, but people generally neglect to mention that Burton’s, the first pub Bloom had walked into in the same episode of the novel, is now a travel agency.
We ended our evening with the “Dublin Literary Pub Crawl,” as part of a group of overwhelmingly American tourists. The actors who run this popular evening tour do really good (and funny) short bits from Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” James Plunkett’s “The Risen People,” and a winningly fey enactment of one of Oscar Wilde’s letters from America (the letter they used was Wilde writing from Leadville, Colorado). They also pepper their anecdotes about literary Dublin with quotes and references to a number of Irish writers and historical figures. Some of the people cited that I can remember included Brendan Behan (the “drinker with a writing problem” quote), Oliver Goldsmith, Jonathan Swift, Eavan Boland, Seamus Heaney, and the labor activist Jim Larkin.