Book Log - Aug. 27, 2006 - Jan 10ish, 2007


Vulgar Modernism - J. Hoberman - Like learning forgotten pieces of '80s political trivia by reading period Doonesbury, this collection of vintage '80s Hoberman (disclosure: read it because I'm the great man's current research assistant/intern, and everyone was getting on my case for only having read his recent work) gave me a great background on what the avant-garde and less popular pockets of foreign film were up to; nowadays, it's just random MoMA revivals of barely remembered ancient prize-winners for the latter and the Anthology's insular circle-jerk for the former, where you're never sure if it's actually good or just a friend of Jonas Mekas's. Hoberman's impassioned writing swirls into a fever dream, culminating somewhere at the intersection of Baudrillard (whose rhapsodic treatment of America he makes short work of), Reagan (his constant bete-noir) and film. Informative and entertaining, if at times it leads you away from the films and into the prose. It's been months since I read it, so that'll have to do.
(Aug. 27 - Oct.?)

Adventures in Academia
So, after two years of being a film production major, I finally obeyed my better instincts and became a full-bore English major, giving my erratic leisure-team reading habits an even more crippling blow than when I developed a social life senior year of high school and had to start updating this log bimonthly rather than monthly. Taking 4 English classes a semester practically guarantees reading nothing outside the curriculum in that time, which was both frustrating and edifying: I feel like I just had 4 years worth of British public-school education crammed into me in 3 months. Some notes on my four classes, discussed in preferential order.

Shakespeare I - A survey course, anchored by the lectures of the thoroughly estimable Richard Horwich. Shakespeare I covered 10 plays, both ones I'd read before (Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Henry V) and new to me (As You Like It, Richard II, Henry IV Pt. 1, The Taming Of The Shrew). We began with the comedies, kind of half-stalled on the histories, and skidded triumphantly through to tragedy; Romeo and Juliet, wisely, was clustered in with the comedies. An old-school lecturer, Horwich throughly deepened my understanding of all the plays; aware of Derrida et al., he's not terribly thrilled by them (and indeed, the Shakespeare Studies lot don't seem terribly impressed with current academic theory). It would take too long to list all the things I learned, but they're engraved in my memory. (Favorite bit, albeit Horwich quoting another article: "Julius Caesar is a play about meat." So true.) Also I finally, finally, finally learned the significance of Fortinbras' appearance at the end of Hamlet. I've been wondering about that for years.

Major Texts In Critical Theory - This is the kind of thing you have to do when you've taken one too many classes where people reference Bakhtin and Foucault and heteroglossia and eventually you wonder if they've learned all these things through preternatural osmosis and years of academic immersion or if it can be done systematically. This valuable course introduced me to a lot of stuff and, at the very least, debunked the myth that all academic writing is unreadable gibberish jargon; that's only true of truly awful people like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who uses the term "cultural macrology" when, as the footnote explains, she means "prolonged discourse." Actually, one of the most important things I learned in this class is the importance of specialized "vocabulary": academics not content with the number of words and fixed meanings in whatever language they're using can make a whole academic word from an obscure or jargon-y word and investing it with new meaning. (In a moment of candor, the lecturer said he'd been talking to a post-colonial studies professor who said that there hadn't been a new buzzword in the field for a while, and whoever came up with it would probably be assured of a career for life.)

Generally, I value the detached, lucid, and (optional:) acerbic theorists more than the others. This includes, for example, the fantastically dorkily-named tag-team of William K. Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley, who gave us two seminal essays, "The Intentional Fallacy" (which argues against trying to interpret literature based on what the author might have been reading, intent, or any kind of context, and sticking instead strictly to what's in the text) and "The Affective Fallacy" (which advises against confusing what a text does with any emotional impact it might have on readers). Wimsatt and Beardsley are fun, bitchy and quotable guys ("Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work."), and yet one of the weaknesses of theory is that a "seminal" text need not actually, you know, change anything: just walk into any English class and you'll be hard-pressed to find the teacher that doesn't contextualize the reading at hand with biographical tidbits. It's because of weird things like this that I find theory more of a fun game for mental training than anything.

Without bothering to slag on any other terrible academics than Spivak (and also ignoring some of the truly risible bits of feminist/queer theory in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, on account of these are very much burgeoning fields that need to work some misplaced, overwrought activism out of their systems first), and also restraining myself from giving the Romantics the ass-kicking they so richly deserve collectively, stuff that stuck with me and is vaguely noted on the Future Reading List, with apposite quotes when appropriate:

Friedrich von Schiller: "Only through individual powers in man becoming isolated, and arrogating to themselves exclusive authority, do they come into conflict with the truth of things, and force the Common Sense, which is otherwise content to linger with indolent complacency on outward appearance, to penetrate phenomena in depth. ... One-sidedness in the exercise of his powers must, it is true, inevitably lead the individual into error; but the species as a whole to truth. ... Thus, however much the world as a whole may benefit through this fragmentary specialization of human powers, it cannot be denied that the individuals affected by it suffer under the curse of this cosmic purpose. ... the keying up of individual functions of the mind can indeed produce extraordinary human beings; but only the equal tempering of them all, happy and complete human beings." ("Sixth Letter, On The Aesthetic Education of Man")

Matthew Arnold: well, c'mon. Be disinterested. 'Nuff said.

Ferdinand de Saussure is a badass. But completely unquotable.

T.S. Eliot: "It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is any way remarkable or interesting. ... Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things." ("Tradition And The Individual Talent." This essay really annoyed all the creative writing majors, who apparently have been taught they are all very special unique etc. people. Also Eliot isn't really on the "further reading" list - I'm not big on poetry - but this essay is essential, and I keep it religiously by my side and so on.)

Roman Jakobson: "This set for contact, or in Malinowski's terms Phatic function, may be displayed by a profuse exchange of ritualized formulas, by entire dialogues with the mere purpose of prolonging communication. Dorothy Parker caught eloquent examples: " 'Well!' the young man said. 'Well!" she said. 'Well, here we are,' he said. 'Here we are,' she said, 'Aren't we?' 'I should say we were,' he said, 'Eeyop! Here we are.' 'Well!' she said. 'Well!' he said, 'well.' " The endeavor to start and sustain communication is typical of talking birds; thus the phatic function of language is the only one they share with human beings. It is also the first verbal function acquired by infants; they are prone to communicate before being able to send or receive informative communication." ("Linguistics and Poetics." This reminds me of half of the conversations I hear daily, which is maybe why I'm no good at socializing with strangers at parties unless I'm drunk. Also this got me to read the story - "Here We Are" - which is brilliant but uncomfortable. Ms. Parker also added to the reading list.)

Georges Poulet: [on what reading does for him] "It might be rather called a phenomenon by which mental objects rise up from the depths of consciousness into the light of recognition." ("Phenomenology of Reading." He beat me to the punch by 50 years. Bastard.)

Michel Foucault I'm not gonna bother to quote. Apparently I have to read him just to say I went to college, but what I read was a kind of bastard history-theory hybrid that was actually pretty entertaining.

Jean Baudrillard I'm also not going to quote, although his anger and sarcasm is immensely entertaining, if best taken in small doses. Also, see above re: Hoberman.

Edward Said I'm also not quoting, but I do hope to read Orientalism sometime relatively soon besides just the introduction. I was expecting a straightforward condemnation of British colonial attitudes and instead I got a nuanced consideration of why they're bad but also why they're compelling and seductive. Which is good news for me, cuz I grew up with that shit, and I still feel guilty about it.

Yeah, that'll work.


British Literature I - The lecturer was beyond awful, but the curriculum was full of poems that were being alluded to in Wodehouse without me ever catching on to their origin. In that sense the class was valuable, although I rapidly forgot who wrote what, and I still think Paradise Lost is a pain in the ass. ("Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure." Damn right Dr. Johnson.) Besides the poetry, major landmarks I knocked out included Beowulf — whose terse, Lee-Marvin-esque ultra-masculine vibe I rather enjoyed — Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, 4 stories from The Canterbury Tales (I can see why it fascinates, but English majors really get way get too excited by dirty jokes that are over 200 years old — these are the same people that look down on gross-out comedy, but if it's ancient it's brilliant, transgressive, etc.) half of famed morality play Everyman, and ... yeah. Lots of poetry.

American Literature I - American Lit I goes from Native American oral stories to Moby Dick, unsatisfactorily attempting to fold Howard Zinn-esque politics into a class at least ostensibly dedicated to aesthetics. This means pretending that translations of Anasazi poems that have massive amounts of repetition that should be told out loud anyway are equated with Melville. Sorry, but no: by all means, teach a class which teaches American history through primary historical documents, but let's not pretend that it's the disinterested study of literature. Professor B. W_______ came of age in the late '80s PC culture wars and appears indelibly scarred by it: not only does he make obligatory indie-rock references to put us all at ease, he refused to tell us anything. Instead, he used phrases like "I want to suggest that..." or "I think this complicates the text by...", as if to divest himself of any responsibility or, god forbid, the insinuation of patriarchal authority. YOU ARE THE TEACHER. TAKE SOME DAMN RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR THOUGHTS. THIS IS NOT A GIVE-AND-TAKE FORUM. YOU ARE PRESUMABLY THE LEARNED SCHOLAR. GET TO IT. My recitation teacher was even worse: she used phrases like "The dark side of the Enlightenment" to remind us that OMG RACISM WAS A BIG DEAL BACK IN THE DAY. Thing is, I already did Howard Zinn in 8th grade, and a whole semester of being reminded that the past was not exactly "Schoolhouse Rock" squeaky clean (and yes, we actually watched a video from that series and critiqued its historical inadequacy) seems like a sub-adult worldview to champion. We never quite got around to "White man bad, Indian good," but it was close.

Aside from the pedagogical inadequacies, the curriculum is a mixed bag of Puritan diaries, anti-slavery speeches, bad but anti-slavery (and therefore "good") poetry, etc. The usual landmarks of The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick I enjoyed immensely, both of which I'm far too weary at this point to do justice to (although I'll note that, with its emphasis on interpolating huge amounts of technical detail and slowing a narrative to a crawl, Moby Dick seems to be one of the first post-modern novels). Other stuff that stuck in my craw: the super-awesome New England Primer of 1683, designed to teach children the alphabet in a Godly fashion ("X: Xerxes the great did die, / And so must you & I") and supremely snotty early settler William Byrd II, whose dual volumes The History of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina and The Secret History of the Line (a volume written for Byrd's friends detailing all the sexual indiscretions left out of the official history of the dividing line's expedition) is full of awesome asides: "From Kiquotan they extended themselves as far as James-Town, where like true Englishmen, they built a Church that cost no more than Fifty Pounds, and a Tavern that cost Five hundred." I fully intend to read the whole thing someday. Also one of Frederick Douglass' early autobiographies was quite eloquent, and I must read more Ben Franklin at some point: his Autobiography is quite a canny peace of work.

Most of that class was an immortal pain in the ass though. At 9:30 a.m. too.




Naked Lunch - William Burroughs - Boy endures hardcore semester of Major Works, celebrates by picking up staple of rebellious youth he should've read a long time ago but was never actually rebellious enough for. And what have we learned? Academia actually helped prepare me for Burroughs' Harvard-stewed frame of reference: he's constantly saying he "will unlock my word hoard," which is the phrase separating those who've actually read Beowulf from those who've merely heard of it. There's a corrupted Whitmanesque fervor to Burroughs' many catalogues (entirely representative sample, taken from a randomly opened page: "The blood and substance of many races, Negro, Polynesian, Mountain Mongol, Desert Nomad, Polyglot Near East, Indian, races as yet unconceived and unborn, passes through the body"), which makes sense (both are gay, well-read, and prone to raptures and transcendent experiences at the drop of a hat). But where Whitman sees American potential surging up everywhere, Burroughs sees only that suggestive coined adjective "junk sick" coloring the world.

There are great moments of talent flashing out here: the best is in "The County Clerk," which does Kafka better than Kafka (favorite sentence of the book: "They watch his approach with pale blue eyes, turning their heads slow on wrinkled necks (the wrinkles full of dust) to follow his body up the steps and through the door." The parenthetical makes it work.). But there's also pages upon pages of boys masturbating, "jissom" spraying all over the place, repeated violent sex and/or rape (the constant ejaculating has a 50% chance of being the byproduct of a hanging) — stuff that's basically unadulterated sexual fantasy as filtered through a drug haze, and after a while it's hard to care. Maybe the reason rebellious punk kids like this so much is because, as Burroughs writes towards the end, "You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point." Point being it doesn't really matter where you stop or start reading: it's all pretty kind of the same after a while, and obviously insanely visual that reading too much at once seems too dense, which is perfect for delusions of intellectual value as well as excusing slow or minimal reading while still insisting one cares about books. Sometimes funny, but seriously, this exercise is best left to people who are genuinely shocked to learn that someone's writing about gay sex and heroin without caring too much how it all goes together. I'll take Trainspotting, thanks, which is another Punk Teen Classic, but, you know: it's actually a good read.
(Dec. 18ish - Jan. 10ish)