I apologize in advance, but i've been thinking about this all day since I first saw it.

http://www.thelifefiles.com/what-do-a-thong-jeans-suspenders-have-in-common/

Modernist Journals galore

Do you guys know about this?

http://dl.lib.brown.edu:8081/exist/mjp/mjp_journals.xq

Slow, Close and Out of Control

Mike Johnduff thinks about Derrida's way of reading.

Pretty!

I found this comparison of US and UK grad student culture very interesting.

That's all.

The intellectual as non-prophet

Pierre Bourdieu on Lévi-Strauss.

It's been way too long

(Fun fact: This is Lloyd Bridges' second appearance on this blog.)

Director's Cut

So I'm preparing my conference paper for the 26th, which is largely composed of quotations from letters by famous poets writing about little magazines, followed by tiny little commentaries from me. However, there a few choice quotes I'm not able to fit into the paper proper. Once again, legitimate academia's loss is the blogosphere's gain! Behold:

Randall Jarrell on the Partisan Review coterie:

“Although its politics are doctrinaire and academic in that funny New York professional-left way, they haven’t prevented it from printing other groups, Stalinists excepted. It’s an awfully shrewd, professional, competent magazine, so far as the editing is concerned. The worst things about it are its extraordinary limitations and lack of imagination: everything is looked at from the point of view of someone who’s semi-Marxist, fairly avant-garde, reasonably Bohemian, anti-bourgeois, cosmopolitan, anti-Stalinist, lives in New York, likes Mondrian, etc., etc., etc. It assumes that New York is the Paris of America, that the United States is Europe all over again, a backward Europe: in fact, it’s barely an American magazine, and always sinks with a sigh of joy into the friendly harbor of Sartre, Camus, [unreadable], the great European writers. (This Sartre-Camus isn’t my joke: I heard two of the editors said to me saying that American writers would be as good as Camus and Sartre if they had a movement like existentialism to organize and inspire them.)”


William Carlos Williams on Poetry:

“I have come to distrust the magazine Poetry. We are not fostering kindergartens and there’s no use paying good money for the sake of sentimentalizing over some new writer prodigy unless he produces. And if he does produce and is a prodigy there us [sic: is] no room for him in a mag like that because of ‘previous commitments’ with the young. It’s a rotten policy and produces unreadable drivel. The general criticism offered is litte [sic: little] better. Once in a while something does happen, of course, but that isn’t the point. The critical standards involved are woefully sophomoric. I don’t see any sense in paying good money for that. Perhaps such a first step should be retained because of its undoubtedly important history, perhaps there is no other way to serve the newcomer - keep the door open and all that. A hell of a lot of cheap stuff wanders in though. Certainly it’s unattractive to me.”


Edmund Wilson on The Kenyon Review:

“The Kenyon Review is indescribably awful.”

And on The Sewanee Review:

“Allen Tate, before he left the Sewanee, never succeeded in lifting the shadow of the influence of J.C. Ransom or being able to refuse filling its space with the writings of his cousins and aunts.”







Similarly, Kenneth Burke on Kenyon:

“I can’t discuss the matter at any length. For, honest to God, I just don’t know. Ransom gets all the farm boys to wiping the mud off their shoes in the name of ‘nice’ thinking – and the choice seems to be between that and muddy thinking.”





And, finally, Williams on better days:

“The vistas are limitless. But had damn well better be limited if any good is to be done.
“I think I’d vote for Whitman, in his time."

Beyond college rock

So I've been thinking recently about starting a new band, and I decided I want to give it the most pretentious, grad-school-damaged name imaginable. With that in mind, here's a provisional list Emily and I came up with over breakfast this morning (with the strongest candidates in bold). Additions welcome!

Here it is:

- Critical Theory
- The Arcades Project
- The Public Sphere
- Différance
- Hegemony or Survival*
- The Flaneurs
- Cultural Capital
- Philosophical Investigations
- Gender Studies
- Gender Trouble +
- Public vs. Private
- Separate Spheres
- Discipline and Punish*
- The History of Sexuality @
- Masters of Arts
- The Postmodern Condition
- Anti-Oedipus
- Ph.D.
- Tenure Track @
- The Long Revolution*
- Culture and Society*
- Learned Behavior @
- The Duck/Rabbit Problem
- Schrödinger's Cat
- Pass/Fail
- The Rise of the Novel @
- Modernism/Modernity
- Archive Fever @
- The Politics of Friendship @
- The New Criticism
- Aesthetics

* (would have to be a punk or metal band)
+ (would have to be electroclash or glam rock)
@ (might be more of a song title)

Voilà

My review of Pierrot le Fou is up now at Notcoming.

WTF WCW? (Part Deux)

“For this very reason I detest Eliot (personally) and fear his verse. He is as contagious in his measures as jazz, in fact to me, he is a kind of jazz. I think he realizes that himself and so has gone over into the Parsifal music of his present phase. He doesn’t know how to write any more since he is so badly based in his conception of what verse is. He simply doesn’t know and Aiken is not much different. They are thinking of something very dead and likely to be smelly very soon — one of the first things that is done at an autopsy is to measure and weigh the corpse."

— letter to R.P. Blackmur, November 11, 1940

Is it just me

or does this look like a hip-hop album cover?

This is beautiful. Now i feel like I don't even have to read the book. Thanks Stanley Fish!

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/french-theory-in-america/index.html

Trilling on Nabokov

Thank you you-tube

An interview of Trilling and Nabokov talking about Lolita

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ldpj_5JNFoA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ldpj_5JNFoA

I like how they change seats a little bit of the ways through from the book room to the parlor or something.

Good catch

Did you know that Yeats' "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" was originally published (in The Dial) as "Thoughts Upon the Present State of the World"? This has got to go down as one of the most fortunate title changes in literary history.