Women

Women don't make it to the top because they don't deserve to.  They're crap....  They inevitably wimp out and go suckle something.

 - Neil French

Vuvuzelas in Golf?

I think golf would be the perfect game to introduce the Vuvuzela--lots of men with grimaces and focused looks playing with long sticks and wrinkly balls, occasionally grunting or vocalizing deep-throatedly as others stand around staring at their postures, the length of their "drive" and their ability to put the balls in the holes--definitely makes me want to toot a phallic horn...

Also, the nature of my last two posts somewhat worries me.

With Boldness and Italicization

I am no longer involved in extensive academic writing nor reading others' essays, however I was writing something this morning and was horrified at my lack of linguistic integrity.  I seem to have forgotten my freshman rhetoric course which emphasized the fact that words, if used correctly, speak for themselves.

Basically, I was writing something and felt like I needed to put a particular phrase in bold or italics.  WTF.  If your main emphasis in a paragraph, sentence, or 20 page essay is placed correctly and properly surrounded by appropriate language, the words will rise to the top.

Take for example my last sentence, "If your main emphasis in a paragraph, sentence, or 20 page essay is placed correctly and properly surrounded by appropriate language, the words will rise to the top."  This sentence ends in a major letdown.  I begin by highlighting the subject of the sentence, the "main emphasis".  I follow it by examples and secondary premises, leading to a crescendo after the final comma.  Then I end with a lack of precision in the word choice.  It would be more effective to end with a concise conclusion, reiterating the knowledge that the audience has already discerned.  Instead, I use a semi-metaphorical cliche that leads the reader's mind in another direction.  I could have used any number of conclusions, like "the meaning will become apparent."

However, my lack of experience in writing and continued inability to express myself concisely sometimes leads me to write like I speak.  I try to slip in commas and semi-colons, hyphens and periods when they are not needed.  I bold or italicize words and phrases that I want the audience to remember.  Of course, I refuse to fall into the horrid trap of using three exclamation points or all CAPS when making a point, but what I do is almost worse.

So how should I solve it?  First, I should use less words whenever possible.  Why expound on something without a rhetorical purpose?  Yes, sometimes it is necessary to repeat in a different form what you say in order to re-emphasize your point.  At the same time, a simple 7 word sentence in the midst of 4-line monsters can stand out perfectly.

Second, every word should be considered in all its purposes.  Does the word rise or fall phonetically?  Is it a stop, plosive, or fricative?  Do the following words complement the focus?

Third, consider all points of grammatical structure, punctuation in particular.  Is the main purpose of the sentence separated by a comma, led into by a run-on phrase, broken by hyphens, followed by a period, ended with a question mark?  How do I want the phrase to be read?

There are many other ways to emphasize a point or word, but the reality is that the audience will be ultimate receptor.  They will discern by means of their experience and faculty of logic.  How much grammatical hand-holding do they need?  Many times what I think is the "purpose" of the paper/essay/sentence will be entirely moot to the audience, but I can influence their decision.

As Predicted

Remember back when I wrote about the posthumous publication of Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura?

This is the most ridiculous marketing ploy in the history of mankind.  People will do what I am doing now--they will berate the publishers, tear apart the novel before they have read it, then read it and pine for the last wishes of a great and dead white man--and the publishers will use it to make more fatuous and puerile productions to draw in those who have never before thought about reading a 500 page novel.

Well, now it's been released, and every publisher and reviewer out there is following my predictions to the  letter, viz.:

Before Nabokov's death in 1977, he instructed his wife to burn the unfinished first draft—handwritten on 138 index cards—of what would be his final novel. She did not, and now Nabokov's son, Dmitri, is releasing them to the world, though after reading the book, readers will wonder if the Lolita author is laughing or turning over in his grave.

Every review I have read concerns the nature of the release more than the actual content of the book.   I am dismayed, but not surprised.

Dystopia in Kentucky

 A few miles west of Cincinnati, near the northern Kentucky town of Petersburg, there’s a gleaming new monument to Christianist ideology called the Creation Museum. It was built by an Australian Biblical literalist named Ken Ham, the founder of Answers in Genesis, at a cost of twenty-seven million dollars, raised mostly in small donations. It opened over Memorial Day weekend with a blast of media attention (Edward Rothstein wrote two pieces about it for the New York Times), and since then ten thousand people a week have been flocking to its exhibits. Last Sunday, on a visit to my in-laws in Lexington, I joined them.

More here.

Tempestuous Procedures

Sometime around 1610, Shakespeare penned The Tempest, one of his most famous and interesting works.  Except he didn't really write it.  At least not the whole thing.  On his own.  I dislike as much as anyone bickering and arguing about whether Mr. Shaxpere or Sir Bacon, or whomever the hell else might be involved actually wrote one play, sonnet, line, or word, but evidence in The Tempest is overwhelming.  Yet this work remains, without the Author's explicit signature, one of the great literary masterpieces of all time.  The work, whether we like it or not, is a great work, with or without Shakespeare's involvement.  If it was completed by a court jester or a plebeian patch worker, or a bourgeois land-owner, our Marxist critics will have a bit of a time reading it, but they cannot deny its beauty (actually, the New World allusions, the dis-Utopian and power-play tendencies of the play make it quite a Marxist mayhem!).

I assume that I do not need to argue the point that The Tempest is a great work.  Nor should I need to argue that it stands apart from its author(s).  But consider this:

A new wave of posthumous books by iconic authors is stirring debate over how publishers should handle fragmentary literary remains. Works by Vladimir Nabokov, William Styron, Graham Greene, Carl Jung and Kurt Vonnegut will hit bookstores this fall. Ralph Ellison and the late thriller writer Donald E. Westlake have posthumous novels due out in 2010.

How can I logically read a Graham Greene or Vladimir Nabokov novel I know has been tampered with?  Do I want to read it?  I have become familiar with the authors based on the books I have read previously, and now it is quite difficult to overcome my desire to reject these posthumous offerings.

My reasons for not wanting to read these books are different than you may think.  It is not because I want to preserve an aura of health and holiness around the author's oeuvre.  I have come to terms with the fact that someone I have never heard of, who was chosen at random by Knopf's low-ranking no-name publisher, will finish Vlad's book.  Nor do I really care whether he or Twain or Kafka requested that their stuff be burned (they should have burned it themselves, a fact which reduces their intelligence in my mind) after death.  I don't want to read the books for the same reason I have never liked Michael Jordan--it's all a publicity stunt.

The Original of Laura, will cause more debate over its construction and publication than over its literary content.  That pisses me off.  The publisher is going to put the 138 index cards that the novel was penned on in perforated sheets so you can reconstruct the novel yourself.  WTF.  Lolita was written the same way.  Can you imagine putting Humbert Humbert's reflections on innocence after his final encounter with Lola?  Didn't think so.  This is the most ridiculous marketing ploy in the history of mankind.  People will do what I am doing now--they will berate the publishers, tear apart the novel before they have read it, then read it and pine for the last wishes of a great and dead white man--and the publishers will use it to make more fatuous and puerile productions to draw in those who have never before thought about reading a 500 page novel.

As Prospero says in the Epilogue to his play,

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint: now, 'tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

I hope to God that the writings of average authors will stand above their stories and give good credit to the only name that will appear on the dust jacket (besides Alfred A. Knopf pub., or HarperCollins).  That they may say, "What strength I have's mine own."

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".

Reporting Folly

I generally avoid reading newspapers and current events stories, but a few days ago I unintentionally clicked on a link on my wife's homepage and was taken to an article about the recent helicopter tragedy. This piece of reporting, if it can be called that, is horrific in its pure absurdity. The first sentence of the article, where the poor New Jerseyans were forced "to scamper for cover" evokes frightened mice in a Godzilla-style mishap. The need to report the Mayor's prognosis that "the collision...was 'not survivable'" almost seems like a line from Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, especially for the poor "thousands of people enjoying a crystal clear summer day." Then, as if it couldn't get any worse, the reporter insists that "this time, there was no miracle," and the Mayor chimes in with, "This is not going to have a happy ending." I am truly appalled.

NEW YORK – A small plane collided with a sightseeing helicopter carrying Italian tourists over the Hudson River on Saturday, scattering debris in the water and forcing people on the New Jersey waterfront to scamper for cover. Authorities believe all nine people aboard the two aircraft were killed.
...
The collision, which Mayor Michael Bloomberg said was "not survivable," happened just after noon and was seen by thousands of people enjoying a crystal-clear summer day from the New York and New Jersey sides of the river.
...
But this time, there was no miracle.
"This is not going to have a happy ending," Bloomberg said. Hours after the collision, he said he thought it fair to say "this has changed from a rescue to a recovery mission."

Do you think Phelps is Sexy?

Admit it, you've looked at the body of a swimmer at the Olympics and either said to yourself "I want to be that" or "I want that." No one can argue that swimmers have the best, most natural bodies in the world. Runners tend to be more legs than arms, weightlifters are grotesquely over-featured, baseball players and football players eventually get fat, but swimmers are the main course. So what about the last Olympics? Was everyone disappointed that the swimmers all wore big body suits that covered everything?

I noticed that all the major highlights all involved Phelps with his suit rolled down to his hips...

The World Championships are going on right now and Swimming's international governing body (FINA) has decided to (yes in the middle of the most important competition outside the Olympics!) eliminate all full body suits from international competition FOREVER. So get your TVs adjusted, the guys will be rolling out the six packs (or eight packs) again. The males will now be limited to a Jammer, or tight shorts.

Unfortunately, Fina will still allow women to wear "knees to shoulder" coverage, sorry no Bikinis, guys.

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.

And the Fastest Way Between Two Points is...

Chapter 1, dimension two, is very elementary. Secondary school students should be able to appreciate it, but we think that, even if you know already what meridians and parallels are, you will enjoy the spectacle of the Earth rolling like a ball !
...
Mathematician Heinz Hopf explains his "fibration". Using complex numbers he constructs pretty patterns of circles in space.

My friend the Teddy Bear pointed me to this site on his Facebook account (god I hate that site!)

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

Nostalgia

The Japan post brought back some more fond memories:

The little prince sat down on a stone and looked up at the sky.
"I wonder," he said, "if the stars are lit up so that each one of us can find his own star again. Look at my planet. It is right above us...But how far away it is!"
"It is beautiful," said the snake; "why have you come here?"
"I am having some difficulties with a flower," the little prince replied.
"Oh!" said the snake.
And they remained silent.
"Where are the men?" said the little prince, at last resuming the conversation. "One feels rather lonely in the desert."
"It is just as lonely among men," said the snake.
The little prince gazed at him for a long time.
"You're a strange animal," he said at last. "You are as thin as a finger..."
"But I am more powerful than a king's finger," said the snake.
The little prince smiled. "You do not look very powerful...you don't even have paws...you cannot even travel."
"I can carry you farther than a ship," said the snake.
He twined himself around the little prince's ankle, like a golden bracelet.
"Whomever I touch I send back to the earth from which they came," he added. "But you are pure and innocent and come from a star."
The little prince said nothing.
"I feel sorry for you, so weak on this earth of granite. I may be able to help you one day, if you become too homesick for your own planet. I can..."
"Oh! I understand you perfectly," said the little prince. "But why do you talk in riddles all the time?"
"I solve them all," said the snake.
And they both fell silent.

This from the beautiful book by Atoine de Saint-Exupery.

New Sites

I have added two sites to my blogroll, BookNinja and 3QuarksDaily. Both of these are interesting in their daily engagement with current culture while not neglecting the classics of Great Literature. Mostly, both of the sites just link you around the web, something that can help with web exposure. Just this morning, 3Quarks posted an article concerning GMH, mostly good because it contains "Carrion Comfort", a great poem. Edward Thomas is there too, along with a poem about Smokey The Bear. Check them out.

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.

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.

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.