Naiveté and Greatness

Yes, another post about myself.  Remember, "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."

I am exceedingly naive.  Especially when it comes to reading and understanding books--whether philosophy, literary theory, or pure fiction.  I often love or hate a book, phrase, thought, or image without any knowledge whatsoever about the author.  Sometimes this gets me into trouble.

For example: I am an unabashed fan of Martin Heidegger.  I decided to bring in a comment about Heidegger and "Being" during a conversation (admittedly sophomoric) about sub-strains of generic existentialism in modern Christianity.  I was consequently shunned from the rest of the conversation for sympathizing with a Nazi.

Please remember that I qualified the discussion as sophomoric, so you can't really give much credit to the crowd or the conversation that ensued, but it is an example of my common way of thinking.  Another time, in a Graduate class on Shakespeare's Tragedies, while discussing the "Rape of Lucrece", I brought up something about the Neo-Platonic imagery in the poem and was immediately shot down, as that seems to be an observation that has been made about 30 trillion times in the great land of Academia.

Well, I don't care.  I would prefer to be somewhat naive about the things I read (not knowing that Emerson was a Transcendentalist, Marquez and Rushdie Magical Realists, etc.) than know about it going into the story.  I don't like carrying prejudices into my reading.  If I do, I will judge the material based on what I know going in and not on its own merit.  I guess this goes against more mainstream literary criticism, but even if I were to critique a work of literature or poem, I would rather not know the history.  I don't want to know that Ginsberg was a homosexual before I read "Howl".  Not because I will judge it more positively or negatively on that basis, but because I will begin to read things into it even in the first line.  It is extremely difficult to break myself of knowledge if I do have it.

People of Refinement and an Old-School Blonde Joke.

People of refinement have a disinclination to colours.  This may be owing partly to a weakness of sight, partly to the uncertainty of taste, which readily takes refuge in absolute negation.  Women now appear almost universally in white and men in black.

The female sex in youth is attached to rose-colour and sea-green, in age to violet and dark-green.  The fair-haired prefer violet, as opposed to light yellow, the brunettes, blue, as opposed to yellow-red, and all on good grounds.

Theory of Colours - Goethe, #841 & 840

Satire's Bleak Outlook

At first blush, it may seem that Bleak House is a satire.  Let us see.  If a satire is of little aesthetic value, it does not attain its object, however worthy that object may be.  On the other hand, if a satire is permeated by artistic genius, then its object is of little importance and vanishes with its times while the dazzling satire remains, for all time, as a work of art.  So why speak of satire at all?

The study of the sociological or political impact of literature has to be devised mainly for those who are by temperament or education immune to the aesthetic vibrancy of authentic literature.

--Vladimir Nabokov on Bleak House

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.

New Subtitle and Unpredictably Irregular Poetry Exposure #14

Scratch that last note, my new subtitle will be "How To Pretend To Be A Genius".  What do you think?

TURN OFF THE NEWS

anxiety gallops through chatter
fading century’s martial insanities
brain struggles to sum up “shut up”
articulation fails
walking shadow slides across faces

dusk over epitaphs
ash hair rusty litanies

dead friends and rain
paradise is an idiot
bones vines cold day
old vulture in airlock

scorpion dust
sneeze

-Anselm Hollo (Poet Anti-Laureate of the U.S.)