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!

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. 

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.”

“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?

Is this the beginning of the end?

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.

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.

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.