Of Course Not and Other Conundrums

Fundamental to this view of the relation between text and culture, then, is a refusal to allow any rigid distinction between the inside and the outside of a work.  To study literature is to study culture, but, conversely, to understand literature, we have to understand a culture.  Literary study is of value in this account because it leads to a fuller cultural understanding but, equally, it is this understanding that informs the reading of the literary text.  There may appear to be a certain circularity to this explanation, but it is better to think of it as another version of the chiasmus that I quoted from Louis Montrose in the 'Why Greenblatt?' chapter.  Greenblatt's thinking here may be rendered as: culture produces literature and literature produces culture.  Thinking of literature in terms of culture allows the critic to see the ways in which culture may be seen as both inside and outside literature.

-From Stephen Greenblatt by Mark Robson...and of course there is no "circularity to the explanation", rather, it is the explanation that encircles the thing explained.  Conversely, it is Greenblatt's very understanding of culture that helps us to understand Robson's explanation of the understanding.

More Erudite Ramblings

I am thinking of changing the subtitle of my blog to match that of my friend, bjorniavelli, who is "Less Humble Than Others", with a slight change.  It would then read, "So Vastly and Supremely More Humble than You, You Just Wouldn't Believe It."

Since I am so well learned in the ways of becoming and maintaining the status of household Genus, I will enlighten you with some of my hard-earned and always humble wisdom:

To be, or to be believed to be, a Genus, you must adopt an objective viewpoint of the world...and a rather subjective viewpoint of yourself.  Take for example a young man, say in his mid-or-early-twenties, who works in a rather affluent suburb.  He often sees middle-aged women in Cadillac or Lexus SUVs in the drive-thru of his local Starbucks and thinks to himself, "Why are all these women so obnoxiously self-absorbed and stupid to be buying coffee from this company every day?  I mean, their coffee is so notoriously bad and their atmosphere is so blatantly anti-rational (I mean for crying out loud, they sell Sufjan Stevens, The Beatles, and A Charlie Brown Christmas all on the same counter!) and so unbelievably corporate, yet hypocritically "socially-concious", and faux-artsy, and--" then he interrupts his thoughts to pay for the coffee.

See, it is the innner conundrums of the Genus' mind that make him what he is.  He is not a hypocrite; a hypocrite is one who uses the same rules to mean different things in different situations.  He is a realist--he understands he can't expect everyone to live by the necessarily objective rules of life, rises above the despair of the nihilist, simultaneously denounces the Absurdist absenteeism, and becomes what can only be known by one who is also a Genus: that Other, which other than which cannot be thought not to exist (take that Anselm the blunderer!).

Plans for the Future

When one's significant other adopts the status of impregnation, one tends to reflect in ways that are not necessarily common to his nature.  In some cases this takes the form of planning for the future.  I have compiled a list of things to be accomplished by my offspring in chronological order.  Assuming I do not perish in childbirth or the assistance thereof, I will provide this list to the little growth upon its ingression.  I may return to the subject after further reflection, but as my mood stands, the chemical depository must:

1. Speak in full sentences before it can walk
2. Swim at least 2 legal strokes before it is weaned
3. Sleep 8 hours a night or learn to cry "mama", not "aaah"
   
4. Recognize the difference between a trope and a theme before it recognizes the difference between milk and juice
5. Learn to read before it learns to change the channel
6. Potty train itself by age 1
7. Know how to mix a good drink or to open a beer
8. Select an appropriate mate
9. Select an appropriate pre-school with fast-track liberal arts focus and college choices posted on the wall
10. Learn to fail in appropriate circumstances so as to undermine and disguise its inherent genius
11. Learn to cheat only when it already knows the answers, but has more important things to do in life than simple mathematics or scientific equations
12. Learn to appreciate the plight of the lunch-lady, yet despise her insolent ungratefulness
13. Stay out of petty arguments by means of erudite sarcasm cleverly disguised as "pussying out"
14. Know the appropriate moment in which to establish dominance in social situations
15. Graduate Kindergarten in the middle of the class
16. Read every book in the house before getting a new one from the Library
17. Be able to adequately explain in concise detail the central purpose of any book or be forced to read it again
18. Spend all of second grade in silence and learn the distinction between false humility and vain conceit
19. Successfully accomplish the requirements for the USA Junior National Team
20. Describe in detail the intricate relationship between Farmer and Samurai in Kurosawa's films
21. Build a little empire out of some crazy garbage called the blood of the exploited working class.
22. Skip fourth grade
23. Learn not to ask why everyone else is so slow to realize that it is indeed the rightful ruler of the world out loud
24. Spend the next twelve years in college studying and appreciating the minute pleasures of life.

By this time, the brood will be of age and wisdom enough to return to its mate and determine its path of success.  At this point it will have many options:

1. Become the first great American author
2. Write an exposition of the modern English language that reveals how inferior it is in comparison to modern Russian
3. Win 9 Gold medals at the Olympic games
4. Become a hermit
5. Birth a child
6. Take over the world
7. Destroy the world

Any final realization, or all of them, is acceptable.

Bauerlein's Irony

Maybe he was serious.  Maybe he was up late downing pots of coffee because he felt obligated to squeak out some form of intellectual commentary on the state of higher education.  Maybe he knew what he was doing and knew it was flippin' hilarious.  Whatever the case, Mark Bauerlein of the Chronicle of Higher Education made me chuckle this morning.  In an article about the apparent lack of aesthetics in the ever-increasing vocational age and college students' inability to write palatable sentences, he writes this:

With college campuses becoming ever more preprofessional and vocational, it's getting harder for humanities teachers to get freshmen and sophomores to appreciate the aesthetic side of things.  That goes for both their interpretation of texts and for their creation of texts. They read everything for the kernal of fact and value, the information, the point, not for the expression (whether beautiful or vulgar or flat or conventional . . .).  And they write sentences that have no flair, no element of balance, rhythm, metaphor, or other aesthetic feature.

(emphasis mine).  I find this last sentence utterly hilarious in its own right, but the entire article is like this--short, pointless sentences with no imagery, flair, metaphor, or balance...

Cure for the Swine Flu!

I am going to a TMBG concert on the 10th of October (do what you will with their lyrics, I just like them), and this was on their website recently.  At this concert, they will be playing the entirety of their album "Flood".  I have never heard this album, and, though tempted, will not be purchasing it on iTunes before the show.  Why?  I like the idea of going to a concert and being interested, not singing along and bobbing my head.  Do you think Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov had his audience listen to a pre-recorded portion of his music:



(By the way, this, along with part 5, is my favorite song of ALL TIME!!!  Take the time to listen.  I don't care what you are doing, this will improve your life more.)

Slavophilism Only Goes So Fa-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ar

I am a self-proclaimed part-time Slavophile.  I can't help it.  If you offered me an American Cheeseburger or Russian Borscht, I'd take the Borscht--not because I like borscht (I've never actually tasted good borscht), but because its Russian.  I would rather say "dos vidanya" than "goodbye".  I didn't live through the Cold War and don't really care about Gorbachev (except that he was Russian).  But I think I've reached my limit here.

Last Saturday I went with my wife to see Russian immigrant, Regina Spektor, in concert.  Before then I was only passively in disdain of her songwriting style.  I think, over the past few days, as I have heard the concert replayed on our iTunes account over 15 times, that disdain has grown into an active hatred.  Let's check out her most popular song, one that has gotten over 12 million views on YouTube:



Really.

Let's follow the lyrics and ask logical questions of them.  "I never loved nobody fully..." Hmmm...  My ability to analyze lyrical writing just decreased dramatically by way of deficient brain function.  What poetic ploy was she trying to pull by inserting the double negative?  I am not very well versed in my Russian, but I think even an immigrant would resist the urge to bludgeon the listener with the first line.

"And by protecting my heart truly,/I got lost in the sounds."  I am going to start protecting my heart falsely from now on, how about you?  I also think if I were to write a song that garnered 12 million hits on YouTube I would avoid blinding cliches like getting lost in the music (or is it merely the random beating of your psychotic heart that you get lost in?).

We are intentionally skipping over the whole part about schizophrenia (by the way, one time Alex and I (and Liz) were trying to figure out which one of us was the true person and the others just parts of their personality, this after watching Identity).  Although, I think she may just be coming out about her Idiot-Savant tendencies...

Then we come to the greatest lyrical moment of the song: "And it breaks my hea-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-art/When it breaks my heart."  I think one of her personalities is a broken record.  Or maybe she is just giving them each a chance to vent.  Whatever the case, I think she is very correct in saying that this "it" (by which I am going to assume she means either the music (very fitting) or the lack of love?), breaks her heart when it breaks her heart.  I think.  The last time something broke my heart, it didn't break my heart.  Maybe I didn't experience the right "it".

So, did anybody else think of the line in The Mummy Returns, where the guy says, "This is cursed, that is cursed!  What is it with you and curses?"  Suppose this, suppose that, what is it with Regina and suppositions?  Well, I suppose I should never ever try to analyze a Regina Spektor song.

"All my friends say that of course/It's gonna get better" betta betta betta!  Ah yes, those voices in her head give very good advice, don't they!  If the voices in my head were all a bunch of yes-men, I would get some new imaginary friends to play with, but that's just me.

Well, after that we get to hear more of the beautiful ar-ar-ar-ar-ar-arting (coincidentally, I sing along to this part in a harmonic "and I break my fa-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-art".  I am such a hypocrite!).  There is a theme in Regina's songs where she likes to echo herself in random-m-m-m-m locations.

So maybe we are supposed to ignore the lyrics and just go for the nursery-style bouncing rhythm and childish tune.  I dunno.  Honestly, my Slavophilic tendencies led me to expect more out of an internationally trained daughter of Russian musicians.  I am convinced she was a genius before they forced her to move to New York.

While I love Russia, I have a secret (and not uncommon) vendetta against Canada.  Yet recently I've been replaying the history of Spain's expatriate king, who apparently has chosen to reside in the unfortunate Great White North.  Maybe the stick-in-your-head kind of tune (reminiscent of my dad's 80s A Capella records) helps keep Regina's bleating out.



Maybe I like it just because I have always wanted to joke around with the OPEC leaders, or drive a Zamboni.

On a side note, Regina's music seems to be somewhat "anti-folk" indie-pop, a style that almost recalls Keane, yet she cannot legally be clad in indie armor, as she has signed with both WB and Disney (she had a song in the Prince Caspian disaster last year).  Definitely defines "sold out".

Going into The Gloom

In Timur Bekmambetov's (Nightwatch, Daywatch, Wanted, and interestingly enough, a Tim Burton children's film this summer!) Nightwatch, only spiritually gifted "others" can enter into what is called "The Gloom", wherein spiritually light or dark actions carry significant clout and affect the state of the world.

In Met. Jonah's recent speech to an ACNA (Anglican Church in North America) convention concerning unity, he quippingly described Orthodoxy as "a bunch of people who like to gather for colorful quaint rituals in the sacred gloom."

Funny, but it seems as though I remember overhearing many of the visitors to my parish describe it that way as they were leaving...

Another Pangramatic World News Update!!!

While Suez sailors wax parquet decks, Afghan Jews vomit jauntily abaft.

The Somali Pirates really had a jolt when they ran across a ship packed with a random conglomeration of Egyptians and recent Jewish converts. Puzzled, they sailed on, leaving the bunch to their own wiles. Convincing the captain of the "Akiiki Benjamin" to sit down for an interview was impossible, but a few of the sailors and passengers offered words that explained unequivocally their experiment.

"We began this voyage as an attempt at brotherly union, a sort of imposed peace," said Joseph Abrahamas, "I think it has worked out quite--excuse me!" His rush to the stern was cut short by a torrent of violent hurls that left the recently waxed decks covered with last night's lamb stew.

Shenti Wakashem rolled his eyes and exclaimed, "These Jews won't stop vomiting! We wax on, we wax off, and they uncontrollably find the one clean spot to puke on!"

Etherealization

In college, a friend of mine wrote a paper on how society seeks to etherealize every aspect of life--communication, hardware, even human interaction reduced, reduced, and reduced again, with the end goal being what software is, a mere "specter", or imaginary thing. In a response to Derrida's Specters of Marx, Antonio Negri began to analyze from the perspective of the "Marxist-Deconstructionist" divide:

When the analysis passes from the hermeneutic and ontological viewpoint to the experience of the political, the picture given is terrible. The conspiracy against Marxism and the world evangilization of the free market, the construction of the global power 'without place' and 'without time', the structuring of the 'end of history', the media's colonization of consciousness and the impoverishment in the quality of work, the emptying out of meaning from the word 'democracy'--within individual countries and in international relations--these represent only a few of the hegemonic orders of capitalism in one phase of the spectral reconstruction of the real. How does one circulate within this new determination of being? .... It's at this crucial point that a discourse on ethical resisitance unravels, one that reflects on the experience of the gift and of friendship, that feels a certain affinity with the messianic spirit and reaffirms the undeconstructability of the idea of justice.

"The Specter's Smile" - Antonio Negri, in Ghostly Demarcations - Derrida, Eagleton, Jameson, Negri et al

While I don't agree with all of Negri's commentary (particularly his insistence upon the exploitaion and suffering of the Marxist agenda, though there is a certain worldwide sense of fear towards the extreme leftist end of things), one can empathize with a certain spirit of hesitancy to do away with that which is tangible. For me this was a semi-nostalgic desire to retain my cd collection and resist the wave of ipodification that swept the world in the past 5 years.

Honestly? Twitter takes on Dickens. And Christ.

Classics by Charles Dickens, JD Sallinger and Jane Austen are among the novels to have been boiled down to a sentence by bookish readers of the micro-blogging site.
...
"What it is really good for is live-blogging events as they take place, and that can work for historical events too. Over Easter a church in the US re-created the death and Resurrection of Christ through tweets."

Read the rest of the article.

The Foreknown

When you approach a work of literature, is it necessary to know everything about the topic that the author discusses? Do you have to have an intimate knowledge of the political background in order to experience the true depth of Richard II or Henry V? I don't think so. Yet if you follow the link on the right hand side of this page to the David Jones Society website you will find that those who run the society are more concerned with the atmosphere, life, and place of Jones' content than about the literature itself. They even offer a tour of David Jones' birthplace and places of interest in his literature. These founders and administrators of the society are considered the foremost scholars on the literature of David Jones (William Blisset, Thomas Dilworth, etc.), yet they seem very concerned with discovering the background and life of the works. This is quite bothersome.

I had hoped that Randy Malamud in this article would make a strong argument against "Literary Tourism", but it seemed as if he was afraid to confront the issue head-on and caved in to the whimperings of the masses who romanticize the places of an author's birth or his culture. Fuck culture. The true literary artist does not evoke culture, but the beauty and truth that are inherent in the subject. The place, the culture, the history is a medium of truth, not the truth itself. That's not all though: the artist portrays what he sees, not what is there. So even if you were to stand on the exact same spot, reenact the exact same scene, and set the exact same tone, would you experience the same truth as you would by reading the literature itself.

Okay, so literary tourism is overkill, but is it acceptable or even necessary to discover the history of a piece or understand the political background? Yes, in a sense. If you know the story of King Henry V, then you will more fully understand Henry V, why certain characters are significant, and the setting will be easier to grasp. But you cannot go back in time and find Falstaff, you can't return to the globe and see Prince Hal, and you certainly cannot recreate the experience of 1415 in such a way as to "truly feel and see" what Shakespeare depicts in the character of Pistol.

Property Relations in Mickey Mouse Cartoons

Property relations in Mickey Mouse cartoons: here we see for the first time that it is possible to have one's own arm, even one's own body, stolen.

The route taken by a file in an office is more like that taken by Mickey Mouse than by a marathon runner.

In these films, mankind makes preparations to survive civilisation.

Mickey Mouse proves that a creature can still survive even when it has thrown off all resemblance to a human being. He disrupts the entire hierarchy of creatures that is supposed to culminate in mankind.

These films disavow experience more radically than ever before. In such a world, it is not worthwhile to have experiences.

Similarity to fairy tales. Not since fairy tales have the most important and most vital events been evoked more unsymbolically and more unatomospherically. There is an immeasurable gulf between them and Maeterlick or Mary Wigman. All Mickey Mouse films are founded on the motif of leaving home in order to learn what fear is.

So the explanation for the huge popularity of these films is not mechanization, their form; nor is it a misunderstanding. It is simply the fact that the public recognizes its own life in them.

-from Walter Benjamin's "Mickey Mouse", 1931

Randosel

Besides walking in lines while holding hands, wearing matching colored hats, or raising their arms as high as possible while crossing the street, Japanese school children also all have the same backpack: the Randoseru (or Randosel).

A commercial for the Randoseru:

A Perfect Circle with 3 Points

In my one semester of grad school, I began researching a paper on a Southern New Critic of the Vanderbilt era. I was writing about the origins of the Southern Ballad and the responsibility of the ballad collectors, especially in the heyday of ballad collecting in the 1920s, to maintain the tradition of cultural authorship. I investigated theories of authorship and attribution as well as copyright law for this paper. When I went to look up information on this guy (whose relation to the ballad and authorship comes in the form of his novel, The Big Ballad Jamboree), I merely typed in his name, Donald Davidson, and checked out the books that sounded interesting. Unfortunately I ended up with a slew of books by and about a more contemporary linguistic theorist. I read through them a bit and found them extremely interesting as related to the paper I had in mind. Then of course I realized my naivete. However, there were a few things I retained from that brief reading of the linguist Donald Davidson that remain intriguing.

Davidson described the formation of language as "triangulation." When two individuals communicate, they form a certain understanding of one another and the others' starting point to the conversation. They each contribute to the other and create a direct link of communication in a very intimate way. Imagine a person's relationship to his or her best friend; they speak together and understand each other in a way that almost makes for its own language, one that others either don't understand or don't find of interest. What forces their communication to adapt, to change, is the interruption of a third party. Neither of the original two can connect with the newcomer on an individual basis without disrupting their own relative distance in the newly formed communication triangle.Another way of thinking about this, and this is the approach I was planning on taking with my paper, is to imagine an insular culture where everyone within the culture can communicate and interact with everyone else on the common basis of being involved with the culture. Yet when someone new arrives in the area, it disrupts the active connection between the participants in the culture and forces them to adapt in their communicative efforts. This, Davidson argued, forms the basis for all linguistic development.

On a similar note, three members of the former Ante-Occidents once raised their legs together, resting one leg on top of another, and began to spin in a circle, thus forming a perfect circle with three points.

Symbiotics

All truth is organic. That is to say, truth does not exist in a stagnant form, rather it is active and living. According to Adorno's theory, language is merely our attempt to communicate that which is, to make the not quite cognizable into sense. For him, language is the process by which we become "disenchanted" with the unknowable, the way of de-mystifying that which is beyond our ken.

A Little Late

I was listening to the radio today, as I do on the way to work usually, and I had the station turned to NPR, where I heard this interview. I was instantly reminded of an old professor of mine, Bill Jenkins, a man whom I would describe as an Anglophile. He often spoke to the class in reference to the poor state of Britain's morality and religious decay. Also today, I read on the online Guardian of the changing face of the British novel.

Those of you who like Neil Postman, Graham Greene, Dorothy Sayers, or any other British writer of the past century or who are interested in the demographic change that has become virtually global might begin to feel a bit of alarm at noticing the rapid rate of decline in people associating with any form of Christianity in Britain. The BBC did a piece on this back in 2000 called "The UK is 'Losing' its Religion".

In 2007, Vexen Crabtree wrote an article citing multiple statistical sources in which these statistics appear:

"66% of the UK population have no connection with any religion or church3.
18% of the British public say they are a practicing member of an organized religion4. "

Read the entire article here.

A bit selfishly, while being quite depressed by the situation as a whole, I was happy to note the thriving Orthodox community in Britain. The problem with that is the same as in America: while the Orthodox Church is growing in America, England, Australia, and other countries where it was relatively late in appearing, it is rapidly dissapearing in such "home countries" as Russia, Ukraine, and Greece.

While noting the worldwide rise of Islam, also pay very close attention to the terrifying numbers of Jedi Knights in Europe (390,000 in the UK alone!), with even the Pope partaking in this growing sect.

Related Topics

Back in June of 2008, Chase (of former Ante-Occidental renown) posted a piece on the state of human depopulation. While we never saw his followup work, the issue is still at large in this year's global perspective. Though I was hoping for a longer and more drawn out discussion of the pros and cons of God's greatest invention, Nicholas Eberstadt gives an interesting discussion of the current Russian dilemma here. I'm pulling for the Slavs in this case, but it seems as though the national direction set by Russia's Great Prince has long since disappeared.

Cultural Views of Work and Vocation

My perspective on my occupational status is rather uncommon in this country. Without addressing any like or dislike of one's profession, it is quite rare to find someone who sees what they do as something other than "work" or a "job". Perhaps it is my propensity towards laziness and procrastination, but those particular words don't jive with my personal philosophy.

When being introduced to someone, one is often asked the question, "What do you do for a living?" or, "Where do you work?" Personally, I prefer to answer, "I am a swim coach" or "I am a student" as opposed to "I coach an age group swim team" or "I study English literature".

When I lived in Japan, I was struck by the way the Japanese lived from day to day. If you were to follow the average middle-aged man from 6:30am-7:30pm, you would probably find him at an office for much of the time. Yet the attitude towards the work he does at the office (from my perspective) seems rather apathetic. He does not seem to dislike his occupation nor would he probably complain about it if you asked him. He works seemingly incessantly to improve the company, the corporation, to meet the goals within his sight. Yet the apathy stretches to this aspect of his life as well. It almost seems as though he typifies a paradox: he does not merely do his job, he makes it his life, yet at the same time he is as disinterested in the job as someone who hates his job--he does not derive any personal pleasure from it. This kind of worker is one that I would describe as vocationally masochistic.

The American Ideal, of course, is to achieve your own personal pleasure in life. The average view of one's line of work is that it is a means to an end--it allows the person to have the house, the car, the funds for mountain climbing or traveling. He or she may actually spend as much or more time at the office as the Japanese person, but the attitude towards the job is filled with passion, usually negative. He is equally masochistic, as he seems to derive pleasure from a source of pain.

I looked at the OED for some background on the words "job", "work", and "vocation", but I really don't think I need to go into the etymological implications of them. Rather, I think it is sufficient to say that each of these scenarios lacks a sense of attachment that used to exist in one's vocation or profession. The Japanese have it right in that they make the job a part of their life; the Americans have the sense of desire down pat. Yet they both separate their idea of "the good life" from their work.

Regardless of what position I hold in life, that position will become for me, not a part of my life, but integral to my life. I do not necessarily look for deriving pleasure from what I do, nor do I see it as something to complain about any more than I would complain about another aspect of who I am.

While I have thought about this subject before, my recent reading around about "dispassion" and "disinterestedness" and the difference between these things and apathy has made me think about the need to incorporate these things into every aspect of my life. This thought process has also made me realize that this is much different than merely being "content", because there is a sense of drive in each of these ideas. Rather than seeing my position in life as "fact", I prefer to see it as "condition", a state of being, and one which is dynamic.

New Book

This is a relatively new book about my favorite poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins was, as far as I know, the first decisively Modern poet and the first of three English-Welsh poets whom I absolutely love, followed by David Jones and Dylan Thomas. A pretty decent review, I must say, though I don't know how I feel about the idea of writing a biography in the present tense.

Addendum

I think I need to add an addendum to the last post. Perhaps it was somewhat unclear what my idea of aesthetic appreciation includes. I am not entirely sure myself, but I do know that, unlike the impression I probably gave in the last post, desire does not play THE central role. Desire is one of the many steps that one must take in learning to appreciate art, but it is merely a step. Ultimately, according to Kant, etc. one should reach a state of disinterest. I will not go so far as to suggest that aesthetic disinterest is the same as the Orthodox ideal of dispassion or apatheia, but there are some similarities, just as there are similarities to the Stoic idea of the same. Really it means to be able to be fully immersed in contemplation, yet not affected.