Let's Read and Find Out!

2011-10-20T23:48:00.001-04:00

www.bananastan.com

Where the Action Is

2011-05-29T14:52:00.002-04:00

Pretty much anything I'm doing of any interest these days can be found either here or here.

Notes on Twee from Abroad

2011-04-30T09:48:00.002-04:00

Courtesy Jeffrey Kindley.

Eating Disorder

2011-04-03T11:45:00.004-04:00

"The old forgotten Danish of her childhood began to come, awkwardly at first, from her lips, under their agreeable tutelage."

— Nella Larsen, Quicksand, 64

Notes on Twee returns

2011-03-30T15:13:00.001-04:00

“In that age, too, began the doubt as to whether this man or that was ‘grown-up,’ which has ever since occupied so deeply the minds of those interested in their friends. Macaulay complains somewhere that in his day a man was sure to be accused of a child-mind if no doubt could be cast ‘either on the ability of his intelligence or the innocence of his character’; now nobody seems to have said this in the eighteenth century. Before the Romantic Revival the possibilities of not growing up had never been exploited so far as to become a subject for popular anxiety.”

— William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 21

An aside

2011-03-16T13:21:00.002-04:00

"(He who says he is tearing up his prepared address to talk to you extemporaneously about what it is like to address you or what it is like to write talks, or to formulate sentences in the first place, has torn up the wrong prepared address.)"

— Erving Goffman, "The Lecture" in Forms of Talk, 162

Sage hack

2011-02-17T16:31:00.005-05:00

"The eccentricity of Johnson's writing is that of a resoundingly public discourse which is nevertheless profoundly self-involved … Johnson is both grandly generalizing sage and ‘proletarianized’ hack; and it is the dialectical relation between these incongruous aspects of his work which is most striking. The social alienations of the latter can be found in displaced form in the involuted meditations of the former; and not only in displaced form, for one of Johnson’s recurrent motifs is precisely the hazards and frustrations of authorship in a literary mode of production ruled by the commodity. Stripped of material security, the hack critic compensates for and avenges such ignominy in the sententious authority of his flamboyantly individualist style. Moralistic, melancholic and metaphysical, Johnson’s writing addresses itself to the social world (he had, Boswell reports, ‘a great deference for the general opinion’) in the very moment of spurning it; he is, as Leslie Stephen notes, the moralist who ‘looks indeed at actual life, but stands well apart and knows many hours of melancholy.’ The sage has not yet been driven to renounce social reality altogether; but there are in Johnson ominous symptoms, for all his personal sociability, of a growing dissociation between the literary intellectual and the material mode of production he occupies.”

— Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism, 32

Menthol Mountains

2011-01-22T18:37:00.001-05:00

Since I rarely post here any more, let me refer you to someone who does.

On Justification

2011-01-01T11:55:00.003-05:00

"What choice can we claim over the writing, or the voice — sometimes it is manifested in a phrase — that carries conviction for us? It is not much help to say: Conviction should not be taken seriously that is not justified by argument. That sounds more like a threat (in my hearing it has typically been more than that) than like part of an argument. And then there lingers the feeling that those who recommend the look of argumentation often regard themselves as already knowing the conclusions for which they are inclined to argue. Where is the intellectual adventure, or advance, in that?"

— Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory, 344

Leftovers

2010-12-28T10:07:00.005-05:00

"I think it was this early that I first heard the bewildering formula, and intimidating admonition, when I had not cleaned my plate, 'There are children starving in India.' How was my fortune in having food related to their terrible misfortune in not having food? I would love to send them this food right now that I could no longer possibly eat. If in the future I eat less, will they have more? Why speak to me about this when it is too late to do anything about it? Why has this food just here just now become a rebuke to me? Are there not other grown-ups — and why not all grown-ups — who care about this? Am I ungrateful for having food? Is any contentment of mine a sign of my ignorance and of my badness? I am in no doubt that the seeds of such thoughts, as I stared at the unfinished food on my plate, became an inextinguishable part of my sense or emblem of the world's wrong. This is as clear to me as the memory seems to be of the smell and feel of the checkered oil cloth, with several small cracks in it, that covered the kitchen table where the family ate supper together. It is almost enough to make one crave philosophy."

— Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory, 131

Struggling to Hear

2010-11-10T01:57:00.006-05:00

"Each art form has its own unique advantages and limitations. Words and music unfold successively, through time. Photography is about an instant. By analogy it can ask the impossible: in this case, what if you could hear every note of Beethoven's sonatas in an instant? What would that look like? And when we think of a piece of music that we know well, don't we sometimes remember it not phrase by phrase, but in its amorphous entirety?"

— Geoff Dyer, "Idris Khan" in Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews, 84

A truce with life

2010-11-01T21:59:00.005-04:00

"If Kael looks better than she actually is, it is in no small part due to the quality of the competition. The nature of the film critic is to pump himself up. One critic's cant is another's Kant; the game is less one of taste than of ego and exhibitionism. It is exhibitionism, however, at a dispiriting level. One does not set out in life to become a movie critic; it is where one ends up. A truce is made with life, an armistice with ambition: it is far easier for the manqué litterateur to explain why he has not made a movie than why he has not written a book."

— John Gregory Dunne, "Pauline" in Regards: The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne, 252-253

So much to answer for

2010-10-16T11:52:00.014-04:00

"On September 22nd, amid a diatribe about House, Beck cited a passage from Secrets of the Federal Reserve, by Eustace Mullins. The book, commissioned in 1948 by Ezra Pound, is a startlingly anti-Semitic fantasy of how a Jewish-led conspiracy of all-powerful bankers established the Federal Reserve in service of their plot to dominate the world."

— Sean Wilentz, "Confounding Fathers," The New Yorker Oct. 18, 2010, p. 36

Juvenilia

2010-10-07T15:14:00.004-04:00

"Newman got a tune into The Lively Set, a 1964 beach movie starring Doug McClure and James Darren (there was a soundtrack LP on Decca; somewhere, a copy survives); "Galaxy A-Go-Go! (Leave It to Flint)" turned up in Our Man Flint in 1966, though not on the soundtrack album. As a moonlighter he contributed background music to the CBS series The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. He composed background rock functionals for the ABC series Peyton Place ('Something for Betty and Rodney to dance to'); in 1965, without Newman's knowledge, but no doubt with the hope the public might confuse Randy with his famous film-scoring uncles Alfred and Lionel, the results were assembled into Original Music from the Hit Television Show Peyton Place by the Randy Newman Orchestra (Epic LP). Reports that Newman also wrote theme music for the 1963 Girl Scouts Cookie campaign, the 1964 Republican convention, and a December 7, 1965, meeting of the Croatian-American Benevolent Society ('Dead Serb Blues') have never been verified."

— Greil Marcus, "Notes and Discographies" in Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock'n'Roll Music, 301-302

Foreword

2010-09-17T18:01:00.003-04:00

"Considerable interest has been aroused as to the proper spelling of the name of the hero of these stories. The careful reader will note that there is no official spelling, that in the nature of things there could not be since if the name were written twice alike, both author and readers might forget to forget what he's spelled like — which would be quite fatal.

"Since no authentic picture of the Tajar is available a species of near-Tager common to China where these tales are published has consented to pose on the cover in his place."

— Jane Shaw Ward, The Tajar Tales

The pit of what has been said

2010-09-14T10:45:00.003-04:00

"And yet if you go back and look at old editions of The Nation or The New Republic, which published a lot of poetry back in the day — or if you go farther back, to Reedy's Mirror or The Century magazine — and if you hunt around for a while in some of those periodicals, you'll find that most of the poetry in them is just there as decoration. It's a form of ornament, like a printer's dingbat. A little acorn with a curlicue. Or the scrollwork on a beaux-arts capital. It's just a way of creating a different look on the page, and creating the sense on the part of the reader that he's holding something that is a real Kellogg's variety pack.

"The magazine is going to have some kind of big thoughtful political piece about Teddy Roosevelt, say, and then it's going to have a bit of serialized fiction, and it's going to have some 'cuts' — that is, some art — and a few color pages tipped in, maybe, if it's The Century magazine, maybe by Maxfield Parrish, and it's going to have some poems. The long nonfiction piece comes to an end, and it's about being a stevedore in Baltimore, something like that. And then at the bottom of the page is this poem in two columns, with six stanzas, and each stanza has indentations, and the conventionality and vapidity of it will stun you. 'The shades of summer's bosky hue, o'erlie thy modest floobie doo.' The editors of The Century didn't expect you to read that poem with your full mind. They knew it was just some rhymes thrown pell-mell together with cornstarch. They knew full well, because this is America, land of bad poetry. Yes, sir! Bad poetry, sir! Loads of it in the back, sir! Just keeps coming. Tipped in. The shovel eases the soft tonnage of poetry over the rim, and it just pours into the pit, pluth. The pit of what has been said. And the lost gulls are flapping and calling — peer! peer!"

— Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist, 70-71

Injustice

2010-09-08T12:54:00.005-04:00

Counter-revolution

2010-09-07T11:08:00.003-04:00

According to a reliable third party, this blog is banned in China.

2010-09-07T00:25:00.000-04:00

Didion's signature mode: lyric exasperation.

Drawing a blank

2010-09-06T23:50:00.009-04:00

"'People in the East pretend to be interested in how pictures are made,' Scott Fitzgerald observed in his notes on Hollywood. 'But if you actually tell them anything, you find … they never see the ventriloquist for the doll. Even the intellectuals, who ought to know better, like to hear about the pretensions, extravagances and vulgarities — tell them pictures have a private grammar, like politics or automobile production or society, and watch the blank look come into their faces.'

"Of course there is good reason for this blank look, for this almost queasy uneasiness with pictures. To recognize that the picture is but the by-product of the action is to make rather more arduous the task of maintaining one's self-image as ([Stanley] Kauffmann's own job definition) 'a critic of new works.' Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lecture fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place. A finished picture defies all attempts to analyze what makes it work or not work: the responsibility for its every frame is clouded not only in the accidents and compromises of production but in the clauses of its financing…

"Nor does calling film a 'collaborative medium' exactly describe the situation. To read David O. Selznick's instructions to his directors, writers, actors and department heads in Memo from David O. Selznick is to come very close to the spirit of actually making a picture, a spirit not of collaboration but of armed conflict in which one antagonist has a contract assuring him nuclear capability. Some reviewers make a point of trying to understand whose picture it is by 'looking at the script': to understand whose picture it is one needs to look not particularly at the script but at the deal memo.

"About the best a writer can hope to do, then, is to bring an engaging or interesting intelligence to bear upon the subject, a kind of petit-point-on-Kleenex effect which rarely stands much scrutiny. 'Motives' are inferred where none existed; allegations spun out of thin speculation. Perhaps the difficulty of knowing who made which choices in a picture makes this airiness so expedient that it eventually infects any writer who makes a career of reviewing; perhaps the initial error is in making a career of it. Reviewing motion pictures, like reviewing new cars, may or may not be a useful consumer service (since people respond to a lighted screen in a dark room in the same secret and powerfully irrational way they respond to most sensory stimuli, I tend to think much of it beside the point, but never mind that); the review of pictures has been, as well, a traditional diversion for writers whose actual work is somewhere else. Some 400 mornings spent at press screenings in the late Thirties were, for Graham Greene, an 'escape,' a way of life 'adopted quite voluntarily from a sense of fun.' Perhaps it is only when one inflates the sense of fun into (Kauffmann again) 'a continuing relation with an art' that one passes so headily beyond the reality principle."

— Joan Didion, "In Hollywood" from The White Album, 164-166

Family History

2010-09-01T15:44:00.003-04:00

"There is a naive conception of social history that is extremely popular. People with different viewpoints give it different slants, but the basic story is much the same. The leading character is called Technology, or sometimes Science; very sophisticated storytellers have twin leads called Science and Technology. They are the active agents in the drama. In some versions, they are the heroes; in others, the villains. In all, they are endowed with overwhelming power.

"There are some other characters, too. One of them is called Modern Society, who is more or less the dutiful wife, following where Technology leads her. In some accounts she drags her feet; in others she eggs him on. But it does not make very much difference one way or the other because they are married, for better or worse. There is one other character, a kind of stepchild called the Individual. His job is to fit into the family as best he can. This requires him to be diligent and skillful. Since the family is changing, getting more scientific, technological, and complex all the time, this can be a hard job.

"There are a lot of dramatic possibilities here, and our writers have exploited them all."

— Randall Collins, The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification, 1

On message

2010-08-31T11:28:00.004-04:00

"And Huey Newton would comment. 'Yes. Mandate Number Three is this demand from the Black Panther Party speaking for the black community. Within the mandate we admonish the racist police force…' I kept wishing that he would talk about himself, hoping to break through the wall of rhetoric, but he seemed to be one of those autodidacts for whom all things specific and personal present themselves as mine fields to be avoided even at the cost of coherence, for whom safety lies in generalization."

— Joan Didion, The White Album, 30

Second-rate

2010-08-27T10:16:00.001-04:00

"'The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.' I've always disliked the unnecessary comma in the middle of this famous Fitzgerald dictum, suggestive as it is of an inability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time while still retaining etc."

— David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, 135

Worn Copy

2010-08-21T11:42:00.005-04:00

"Science is on a long-term campaign to bring all knowledge in the world into one vast, interconnected, footnoted, peer-reviewed web of facts. Independent facts, even those that make sense in their own world, are of little value to science. (The pseudo- and para-sciences are nothing less, in fact, than small pools of knowledge that are not connected to the large network of science.) In this way, every new observation or bit of data brought into the web of science enhances the value of all other data points. In science, there's a natural duty to make what is known searchable. No one argues that scientists should be paid when someone finds or duplicates their results. Instead, we've devised other ways to compensate them for their vital work. They're rewarded for the degree to which their work is cited, shared, linked, and connected in their publications, which they don't own. They're financed with extremely short patent monopolies for their ideas, short enough to inspire them to invent more, sooner. To a large degree, scientists make their living by giving away free copies of their intellectual property. What is this technology telling us? Copies don't count anymore; copies of isolated books, bound between inert covers, soon won't mean much. Copies of their texts, however, will gain in meaning as they multiply by the millions and are flung around the world, indexed, and copied again. What counts are the ways in which these common copies of a creative work can be linked, manipulated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, enlivened by other media, and sewn together in the universal library."

— David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, 29-30

Look at that mountain, look at those trees

2010-08-19T19:58:00.004-04:00

"The week before I leave, I listen to a song by an L.A. composer about the city. I would listen to the song over and over, ignoring the rest of the album. It wasn't that I liked the song so much; it was more that it confused me and I would try to decipher it. For instance, I wanted to know why the bum in the song was on his knees. Someone told me that the bum was so grateful to be in the city instead of somewhere else. I told this person that I thought he missed the point and the person told me, in a tone I found slightly conspiratorial, 'No, dude…I don't think so.'"

— Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero, 193

The Sense of an Ending

2010-08-18T18:42:00.003-04:00

R.I.P. Sir Frank Kermode.

Game recognize game

2010-08-18T13:48:00.006-04:00

"The petit bourgeois do not know how to play the game of culture as a game. They take culture too seriously to go in for bluff or imposture or even for the distance and casualness which show true familiarity; too seriously to escape permanent fear of ignorance or blunders, or to sidestep tests by responding with the indifference of those who are not competing or the serene detachment of those who feel entitled to confess or even flaunt their lacunae. Identifying culture with knowledge, they think that the cultivated man is one who possesses an immense fund of knowledge and refuse to believe him when he professes … that, brought down to its simplest and most sublime expression, it amounts to a relation to culture ('Culture is what remains when you've forgotten everything'). Making culture a matter of life and death, truth and falsehood, they cannot suspect the irresponsible self-assurance, the insolent off-handedness and even the hidden dishonesty presupposed by the merest page of an inspired essay on philosophy, art or literature. Self-made men, they cannot have the familiar relation to culture which authorizes the liberties and audacities of those who are linked to it by birth, that is, by nature and essence."

— Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice, 330-331

Break On Through

2010-08-17T16:03:00.011-04:00

Via Wikipedia:

"Between 1959 and 1963 Sternberg taught a course on film aesthetics at the University of California Los Angeles, based on his own films. His students included Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek, who went on to form the rock group The Doors. References to Sternberg films appear in some songs by the group, and Manzarek describes Sternberg as "perhaps the greatest single influence on The Doors."

It's Money That Matters

2010-08-10T15:29:00.003-04:00

The CFP for the 2011 EMP conference has been released. It's going to be in Los Angeles this year (!) and the theme is: "Cash Rules Everything Around Me: Music and Money."

Recovery

2010-08-05T21:31:00.004-04:00

Dozens of extraordinary photos taken in America between 1939 and 1943 at the Denver Post's website.

She is Greek, she is great

2010-08-04T17:50:00.003-04:00

In recent weeks I've written reviews of three Agnès Varda films for Not Coming to a Theater Near You's "Viva Varda!" retrospective: Uncle Yanco, Mur murs, and Jacquot de Nantes. What have you done?

Death and

2010-07-31T01:04:00.003-04:00

"Littlefield leaned closer to him. 'You're a young man, you can still learn. Pay attention to this. You can steal in this country, you can rape and murder, you can bribe public officials, you can pollute the morals of the young, you can burn your place of business down for the insurance money, you can do almost anything you want, and if you act with just a little caution and common sense you'll never even be indicted. But if you don't pay your income tax, Grofield, you will go to jail.'"

— Donald E. Westlake, writing as Richard Stark, The Score, 55-56

2010-07-21T12:07:00.002-04:00

"So his novels lead double lives, in which the sophistication of his ideas is constantly overwhelming the rather primitive narrative and stylistic machinery; the reader has to learn to switch voltages, like a busy international traveller."

— James Wood on Richard Powers in The New Yorker, October 5, 2009

Danger in the Past

2010-07-18T12:42:00.003-04:00

“When a word like dangerous is applied to ideas, language or art, it immediately signals a desire to return to the past. It means that the speaker is fearful … the speaker fears all innovation, which he denounces on each occasion as ‘empty’ (in general that is all that can be found to be said about what is new). However this traditional fear is complicated today by the contrary fear of appearing anachronistic; suspicion towards the new is combined with a few nods in the direction of ‘the call of the present’ or the necessity to ‘rethink the problems of criticism’; ‘the vain return to the past’ is dismissed with a fine oratorical gesture. Regressiveness appears shameful today, just like capitalism. Whence come remarkable jerks and abrupt halts: there is a pretence for a while of accepting modern works, which one ought to discuss since they are being discussed; then, suddenly, a sort of limit having been reached, people proceed to a joint execution. These trials, set up periodically by closed groups, are thus in no way extraordinary; they happen at the end of certain disturbances of equilibrium. But why, today, Criticism?”

— Roland Barthes, Criticism & Truth, trans. Katrine Pilcher Keuneman, 32-33

Need to Know

2010-07-15T12:44:00.006-04:00

"Once you know the answer you can see that the cross-word puzzle was set quite fairly. But why should we be given a guessing game at all — why can't he tell us? The mood seems to be that of a professional man who must guard the interests of his client, and only one word is his client at a time."

— William Empson, "Dictionaries" in The Structure of Complex Words, 405

Pilgrim's Progress

2010-07-12T18:45:00.006-04:00

"Some of those who had known Christian in his great days as a teacher were sorry, after the war, to see him becoming involved in the administrative side of the University. I remember his saying to me one day, in the early stages of this, 'I've just sent off a lot of letters, and I said to myself as I mailed them, "There are seventeen letters to people who don't interest me in the least."' But the job of the dean's office did interest him — though it seemed to us that it did not take a Gauss to rule on remiss or refractory students. He had never liked repeating routine, and I suppose that his department was coming to bore him. He made, by all accounts, a remarkable dean — for his card-catalogue memory kept all names and faces on file, even for decades after the students had left; and the sensitive feeling for character that had been hidden behind his classroom mask must have equipped him with a special tact in dealing with difficult cases. His genius for moral values had also a new field now in which it could exercise itself in an immediate and practical way, and the responsibilities of his office — especially in the years just after the war, when students were committing suicide and getting into all sorts of messes — sometimes put upon him an obvious strain. Looking back, since his death, it has seemed to me that the Gauss who was dean of Princeton must have differed almost as much from the Gauss with whom I read French and Italian, as this austere teacher had from the young correspondent in Paris who had paid for Oscar Wilde's drinks. The Gauss I had known in my student days, with his pale cheeks and shuttered gaze, his old raincoat and soft flat hat, and a shabby, mongrel dog named Baudelaire which had been left with him by the Jesse Lynch Williamses and which sometimes accompanied him into class — the Gauss who would pass you on the campus without speaking, unless you attracted his attention, in an abstraction like that of Dante in Hell, and who seemed to meet the academic world with a slightly constrained self-consciousness at not having much in common with it — this figure warmed up and filled out, became recognizably Princetonian in his neckties and shirts and a touch of that tone which combines a country club self-assurance with a boyish country-town homeliness. He now met the college world, unscreened, with his humorous and lucid green eyes. He wore golf stockings and even played golf. He interested himself in the football team and made speeches at alumni banquets. Though I know that his influence as a dean was exerted in favor of scholarships, higher admission requirements, and the salvaging of the Humanities — I cannot do justice here to this whole important phase of his career — the only moments of our long friendship when I was ever at all out of sympathy with him occurred during these years of officialdom, for I felt that he had picked up, a little, the conventional local prejudices when I found him protesting against the advent in Princeton of the Institute for Advanced Study or, on one occasion, censoring Lit for publishing a 'blasphemous' story. One was always impressed, however, by the comprehensive and lucid way in which he seemed to have absorbed the business of the University."

— Edmund Wilson, "Christian Gauss" in Masters: Portraits of Great Teachers, 20-21

2010-07-06T19:34:00.003-04:00

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Filesharing

2010-07-05T16:17:00.005-04:00

"Without examining all the directions in which Puritanism exercised influence, let us just recall that the degree of toleration afforded to pleasure in cultural products serving purely aesthetic or sporting indulgence was limited by one characteristic factor: they must not cost anything. Man was merely the steward of the gifts granted him by God's grace; he, like the wicked servant in the Bible, must give an account of every penny, and it is at the very least dubious whether he should expend any of this money for a purpose which serves not God's glory, but his own pleasure. Which of us with eyes to see has not met people of this persuasion right up to our own time? The idea of the obligation of man to the possessions entrusted to him, to which he subordinates himself as servant and steward or even as 'moneymaking machine,' lies on life with its chill weight."

— Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism, trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells, 115

Is it even remotely possible that this was at all intentional?

2010-06-25T23:47:00.003-04:00

Disco Tex and His Sex-O-Lettes and Its Discontents

2010-06-18T20:22:00.002-04:00

Poetics Rethought!

2010-06-18T11:37:00.004-04:00

I was sorry to miss the big Rethinking Poetics conference at Columbia this past weekend, but airfare doesn't grow on trees. Here are some eyewitness and participant accounts of the proceedings to make me feel all right about it.

2010-06-17T15:15:00.003-04:00

"All studies are, at bottom, the study of aging."
— Many Moon System Proverb

Après les avant-gardes

2010-06-15T13:29:00.008-04:00

One of many perfectly phrased lines in Peli Grietzer's (ultimately quite moving) Tumblr essay on the attraction of the contemporary avant-garde:

"If the history of Avant Garde really is a history of failed revolutionary quests, it is a failure so total it can't even be called that — it would be like saying I failed to become fluent in Italian by re-watching The Godfather. Wouldn't it be better to say I was just watching The Godfather? In the absence of any sufficiently appropriate action there is no sense of speaking of intention."

Flying fish

2010-06-09T14:47:00.003-04:00

"The greatest misfortune of a man of letters is not perhaps being the object of his confreres' jealousy, the victim of the cabal, the despised of the men of power; but of being judged by fools. Fools go far sometimes, particularly when bigotry is added to ineptitude, and to ineptitude the spirit of vengeance. The further great misfortune of a man of letters is that ordinarily he is unattached. A bourgeois buys himself a small position, and there he is backed by his colleagues. If he suffers an injustice, he finds defenders at once. The man of letters is unsuccoured; he resembles a flying-fish; if he rises a little, the birds devour him; if he dives, the fish eat him.

Every public man pays tribute to malignity, but he is paid in honours and gold."

— Voltaire, The Philosophical Dictionary, trans H.I. Woolf

PR for Poetry

2010-06-06T13:40:00.005-04:00

A weird and wonderful manifesto of sorts from Stan Apps at Action Yes.

Disinterest

2010-06-04T00:20:00.004-04:00

"Out on tour with the Smashing Pumpkins
Nature kids, I/they don't have no function
I don't understand what they mean
And I could really give a fuck"

— Stephen Malkmus on the Kantian aesthetic

Ruse of Reason

2010-06-03T14:44:00.003-04:00

I've put in so many professors that it will keep the enigmas and puzzles busy for centuries meaning things for them to argue over.

Farewell to an Idea

2010-06-02T10:51:00.004-04:00

"They used to be the leaders of the avant garde, but now they just want to be understood, and so farewell to them."

— Lyn Hejinian, My Life, 53

The Critical Machine

2010-05-30T17:40:00.008-04:00

"Let a communication be formed between any number of learned men in the various branches of science and literature; and whether the president or central committee be in London, or Edinburgh, if only they previously lay aside their individuality and pledge themselves inwardly, as well as ostensibly, to administer judgment according to a constitution and code of law; and if by grounding this code on the two-fold basis of universal morals and philosophic reason, independent of all foreseen application to particular works and authors, they obtain the right to speak each as the representative of their body corporate; they shall have their honor and good wishes from me, and I shall accord to them their fair dignities, though self-assumed, not less chearfully than if I could inquire concerning them in the herald's office, or turn to them in the book of peerage. However loud may be the outcries for prevented or subverted reputation, however numerous and impatient the complaints of merciless severity and insupportable despotism, I shall neither feel nor utter aught but to the defence and justication of the critical machine. Should any literary Quixote find himself provoked by its sounds and regular movements, I should admonish him, with Sancho Panza, that it is no giant but a windmill; there it stands on its own place and its own hillock, never goes out of the way to attack any one, and to none and from none either gives or asks assistance. When the public press has poured in any part of its produce between its millstones, it grinds it off, one man's sack the same as another, and with whatever wind may then happen to be blowing. All the two and thirty winds are its friends. Of the whole wide atmosphere it does not desire a single finger-breadth more than what is necessary for its sails to turn round in. But this space must be left free and unimpeded. Gnats, beetles, wasps, butterflies and the whole tribe of ephemerals and insignificants may flit in and out and between; may hum, and buzz, and jar; may shrill their tiny pipes, and wind their puny horns, unchastised and unnoticed. But idlers and bravadoes of larger size and prouder show must beware how they place themselves within its sweep. Much less may they presume to lay hands on the sails, the strength of which is neither greater nor less than as the wind is which drives them round. Whomsoever the remorseless arm slings aloft, or whirls along with it in the air, he has himself alone to blame; though when the same arm throws him from it, it will more often double than break the force of his fall."

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 239-240

Keywords

2010-05-25T23:03:00.003-04:00

"Ambiguity is one of the favorite principles of the modern critic, but this one has backfired rather badly, killing quite a few graduate students. The critic sees the poem through the dictionary, as if the poet had taken the twenty-three definitions of green and used them all at once. But the way the poet uses green does not appear in any dictionary. (Incidentally, someone should analyze the dictionary, if analysis is the order of the day. The dictionary is a kind of large bad poem, or rather a fine piece of science fiction. And the card catalogue of the library is surely the most romantic epic of modern man…)"

— Karl Shapiro, "The Critic in Spite of Himself" in In Defense of Ignorance, 16

Itching tongues

2010-05-24T17:08:00.004-04:00

"First, truly I note not only in these … poet-haters, but in all that kind of people who seek a praise by dispraising others, that they do prodigally spend a great many wandering words in quips and scoffs, carping and taunting at each thing which, by stirring the spleen, may stay the brain from a through-beholding the worthiness of the subject. Those kind of objections, as they are full of a very idle easiness, since there is nothing of so sacred a majesty but that an itching tongue may rub itself upon it, so deserve they no other answer, but, instead of laughing at the jest, to laugh at the jester … Marry, these other pleasant faultfinders, who will correct the verb before they understand the noun, and confute others' knowledge before they confirm their own — I would have them only remember that scoffing cometh not of wisdom. So as the best title in true English they get with their merriments is to be called good fools; for so have our grave forefathers ever termed that humorous kind of jesters."

— Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, 49-50

Behind

2010-05-17T14:24:00.003-04:00

"Behind every successful artist is a new historian who says it's all just a symptom. Behind every successful new historian is an artist who says you forgot to mention my work — and, boy, is it symptomatic!"

— Charles Bernstein, "What's Art Got To Do With It?" in My Way: Speeches and Poems, 48

Fishing

2010-05-16T14:25:00.008-04:00

"What Pound passed on … seems less a teaching of technique than a technique of teaching. The point may be clarified by looking at his favorite anecdote, Agassiz and the fish, which begins the ABC of Reading (1934). The great zoologist hands a postgraduate student a small fish and tells him to describe it. The student returns with some textbook definitions. Again Agassiz tells him to describe the fish. The student produces a four-page essay, and is told once more to look at the fish. 'At the end of three weeks the fish was in an advanced state of decomposition, but the student knew something about it' (p. 18). That, for Pound, exemplifies the method of modern science and ought to be the basis of all teaching. But what exactly has been taught? Nothing, apparently, except the necessity of looking. The last section of the ABC, its 'Treatise on Meter,' preaches a similar moral: 'The answer is: LISTEN to the sound it makes' (p. 201). One should not underestimate the value of this technique, in the hands of a respected master who convinces disciples that they too will be ruthlessly looked at and listened to. Yet the method is also very coercive, laying claims to objectivity while actually forcing the student to guess what sort of answer will satisfy the teacher. For teachers do want a specific something (not how the fish smells, for instance), and students find what they go looking for. To pass the course, Pound's disciples had to discover modern poetics. They learned how to do this less by grasping principles than by imitating Pound."

— Lawrence Lipking, "Poet-Critics," in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism Vol. 7, 455

Trial balloon

2010-05-04T14:56:00.003-04:00

Criticism, bitten by philanthropy, longs to be freed from administration.

2010-04-28T19:28:00.002-04:00

"A wide and open field gives us agoraphobia."

— Kenneth E. Boulding, "A Theory of Philanthropy" in Collected Papers Vol. 2, 242

The agoraphobic kleptomaniacs

2010-04-27T18:48:00.006-04:00

From Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, David Lipsky's book-long interview with David Foster Wallace (a thirty-first birthday present):

…you said you saw yourself as "A combination of being incredibly shy, and being an egomaniac, too"?

I think I said "exhibitionist, also."

But exhibitionist too?
Yeah.

Meaning?

Well, I think being shy basically means being self-absorbed to the extent that it makes it difficult to be around other people. For instance, if I'm hanging out with you, I can't even tell whether I like you or not, because I'm too worried about whether you like me. It's stressful and unpleasant or whatever. And I have elements of that shyness in me.

And yet at the same time, I mean it's sort of like the agoraphobic kleptomaniacs. At the same time, I think that most people — and stop me if you disagree, because I'm talking to somebody who's in the trade — somebody who's writing, has part of their motivation to sort of I think impress themselves and their consciousness on others. There's an unbelievable arrogance about even trying to write something — much less, you know, expecting that someone else will pay money to read it. So that you end up with this, uh… I think exhibitionists who aren't shy end up being performers. End up plying their trade in the direct presence of other people … And exhibitionists who are shy find various other ways to do it …

But there's also, the shyness feeds into some of the stuff that you need as a fiction writer. Like: Part of the shyness for me is, it's very easy for me to play this game of, What do you want? What will the effect of this be on you? You know? It's this kind of mental chess. Which in personal intercourse? Makes things very difficult. But in writing, when I think a lot of what you're doing — there are very few innocent sentences in writing. You've gotta know not just how it looks and sounds to you. But you've gotta be able plausibly to project what an alien consciousness will make of it. So that there's a kind of split consciousness that I think makes it difficult to deal with people in the real world. For a writer. But that actually comes in handy.

And one of the reasons why I think when I'm really working hard, that I'm not around people much, isn't that I don't have time. It's just that, it's more like a machine you turn on and off. And I, the idea of sitting here and being completely wrapped up in what piece will result, what your impression of me is, how I can manage that, would be so exhausting that I just don't want to do it. That's what's kind of weird — is this process of being interviewed kicks that machine. Except, now I don't have control over it, right? Now I've gotta manage it, and trust that you, that you — when writing the piece — that you are concerned about how it's gonna come off to the people who are then gonna manage it as well. So the three are actually kind of interestingly — there's writing, there's innocent interaction with other people, and then there's this interviewing stuff.

What I would love to do is a profile of one of you guys who's doin' a profile of me. It would be way too pomo and cute, to do. But it would be very interesting. It would be the way for me to get some of the control back. Because if you wanted — within the parameters of, you can't tell outright lies that I'll then deny to the fact checker. But if you wanted, I mean, you're gonna be able to shape this essentially how you want. And that to me is extremely disturbing. Because I want to be able to try and shape and manage the impression of me that's coming across. And it might be why writers are such shitty interviews. (16-18)

2010-04-25T23:48:00.003-04:00

"What is an age but something to complain about?"

— Randall Jarrell, "The Age of Criticism"

To All Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats

2010-04-25T04:58:00.005-04:00

A letter from T.S. Eliot to his godson, 1931.

The Last Metro

2010-04-23T20:50:00.003-04:00

My final review for the François Truffaut series, which ends this weekend, is up now at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

Swapping

2010-04-21T20:17:00.004-04:00

"Life, for them, and their circle of friends, was often a whirlwind.

"There was a whole crowd of them, they made a fine bunch. They knew each other well; taking a lot from each other, they had common habits, common tastes and shared memories. They had their own vocabulary, their own marks, their special ideas. Too sophisticated to be perfectly similar to each other, but probably not sophisticated enough to avoid imitating each other more or less consciously, they spent a large part of their lives swapping things. They felt irritated by that often enough; but even more often they found it amusing."

— Georges Perec, Things: A Story of the Sixties, trans. David Bellos, 44

Altered state

2010-04-14T13:04:00.004-04:00

I'll be at the Experience Music Project Pop Conference in Seattle this weekend, giving a paper called "'I Do Alterations': Sammy Cahn and the Business of Parody."

Risk Society (No. 2)

2010-04-13T10:19:00.000-04:00

"One runs little to no danger in speaking of the weather, or writing about the weather, or in repeating what others may have said on that subject. It is safe to conclude that people discussing the weather may be doing so in order to avoid a more controversial subject, one that might irritate, annoy, or even anger someone, anyone, within earshot. He was past avoiding risks."

— Walter Abish, How German Is It, 11

2010-04-11T16:44:00.000-04:00

And here is The Wild Child.

2010-04-06T14:00:00.002-04:00

Voìla! My take on The Soft Skin, part of the ongoing series on François Truffaut.

Love on the Run

2010-03-29T13:45:00.004-04:00

Love on the Run: The Films of François Truffaut, a month-long feature I'm overseeing for Not Coming to a Theater Near You, launches today.

2010-03-09T11:51:00.002-05:00

I forgot to mention, I wrote a review of Spartacus last week.

Explications

2010-03-07T01:07:00.006-05:00

"I have always been most curious about the process of production, the structure of a piece of work, the way people reach a specific intellectual goal. As an amateur musician, I find my enjoyment of music considerably enhanced if an expert explains the theoretical structure of a quartet. Knowing little about belles lettres, I am indebted to the 'new criticism' because its internal analysis of a piece of writing opens an experience to which I would not otherwise have access. This interest in 'explications' was reinforced during my student days. It was in that period that the theory of relativity had come to the fore. We were greatly impressed by the fact that it came about not just through substantive findings, but also through the conceptual clarification of basic notions. I remember vividly the delight in discovering that it is not obviously clear what is meant when one says that two events, one on the sun and one on the earth, occur 'simultaneously.' I should add that reading a mathematical paper reinforces this tendency. Hours are spent on one page, trying first to guess what the author is driving at, then why he is concerned with this objective, and, finally, the understanding of his proof."

— Paul F. Lazarsfeld, "The Sociology of Empirical Social Research" in On Social Research and Its Language, 262

Risk Society

2010-03-06T14:36:00.003-05:00

"The artist, in a sense, creates himself, makes himself interesting, and then places himself on display. It is a fabulous privilege, but only provided he accepts the opposite side of the coin: the risk involved in being studied, analyzed, notated, judged, criticized, disagreed with.

"Those who do the judging — I testify from experience — are cognizant of the enormous privilege of the act of creation, of the risks incurred by the one who exposes himself thus, and in turn feel a secret admiration and respect which would at least partially restore the artist's peace of mind if he could know it. 'You cannot write a great article on what someone else has created; that's criticism,' said Boris Vian.

"In the relations between artist and critic, everything takes place in terms of power, and curiously, the critic never loses sight of this fact that in the power relationship he is the weaker even if he tries to hide the fact with an aggressive tone; while the artist constantly loses sight of his metaphysical supremacy. The artist's lack of perspective can be attributed to emotionalism, sensitivity (or sentimentality), and certainly to the more or less powerful dose of paranoia that seems to be his lot."

— François Truffaut, "What Do Critics Dream About?" in The Films In My Life, trans. Leonard Mayhew, 13

Inconstant conjunction

2010-03-05T20:08:00.006-05:00

"It is our senses that impose this belief in causality upon us, not thought. Thus, it would seem that a more judicious approach to the problem of the causal connection would begin on the basis of the evident falsity of this connection, rather than on the basis of its supposed truth. In any case, it is astonishing to note how in this matter, philosophers, who are generally the partisans of thought rather than of the senses, have opted overwhelmingly to trust their habitual perceptions, rather than the luminous clarity of intellection."

— Quentin Meillassoux, "Hume's Problem" in After Finitude, 91

2010-03-04T12:12:00.004-05:00

My review of The Killing for the new Stanley Kubrick feature at Not Coming to a Theater Near You has now been posted.

Way to go

2010-02-28T15:08:00.003-05:00

"That [Henry Horace] Williams succeeded in salvaging a place for religion in student minds is clear from the cult that flourished around him for decades. (He is probably the only American philosopher to have an airport named after him — the one in Chapel Hill.)"

— Jon H. Roberts & James Turner, The Sacred & the Secular University, 109

Canis economicus

2010-02-15T20:43:00.005-05:00

"[Exchange] is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals, which seem to know neither this nor any other species of contracts. Two greyhounds, in running down the same hare, have sometimes the appearance of acting in some sort of concert. … This, however, is not the effect of any contract, but of the accidental occurrence of their passions in the same object at that particular time. Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. Nobody ever saw one animal by its gesture and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, this is yours; I am willing to give this for that."

— Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, quoted by Luc Boltanski & Laurent Thévenot in On Justification, 47

Sociology

2010-02-08T01:10:00.000-05:00

2010-02-07T20:36:00.001-05:00

"No man is just an island."

— John Ashbery, "Surprising Announcement"

Hypocrite lecteur

2010-02-06T18:30:00.004-05:00

By the way, Internet, I will be speaking at this conference in Santa Cruz next month. My paper is entitled "Unreal City: T.S. Eliot Between Oxford and Cambridge." I'll have to thank the organizers for putting together a conference on my dissertation topic!

Followers

2010-02-05T22:00:00.003-05:00

"…one also sees that it has almost never happened that any of [the great philosophers'] followers had ever surpassed them, and I am sure that the most impassioned of those who now follow Aristotle would believe themselves fortunate, if they had as much knowledge of nature as he had, even if it were on the condition that they would never have any more. They are like ivy, which never stretches any higher than the trees supporting it, and which often even descends again after it has reached their tops, for it seems to me that they too are redescending, that is, they are making themselves somehow less knowledgeable than if they abstained from studying; not content with knowing all that is intelligibly explained in their author, they want in addition to find the solutions there to many difficulties about which he says nothing and about which he has perhaps never thought."

— René Descartes, Discourse on Method, trans. Donald A. Cress, 39

Delay in connection

2010-02-05T12:55:00.004-05:00

"[Facebook offers] the comfort of only having to talk to someone in little bursts, when most internet-based technology provides, fundamentally, too-instantaneous of a connection. It's as if these people are trying to work out a new form of technologized familiarity, one that works on the level of weeks rather than seconds, and lets you live side-by-side across huge distances — like future astronauts on the way to a distant planet calling home, only not minding at all that delay of a few minutes... since the delay in connection has become not a feature of the technology but of our lives themselves, which are pauses in the flow."

From Mike's thoughtful post on how, and why, to get off Facebook.

Each drifted in its own way

2010-01-30T21:33:00.006-05:00

"Doc got out and strolled under a Byzantine archway and into the seedy vastness of the main gaming floor, dominated by a ruinous chandelier draped above the tables and cages and pits, disintegrating, ghostly, huge, and, if it had feelings, likely resentful — its lightbulbs long burned out and unreplaced, crystal lusters falling off unexpectedly into cowboy's hatbrims, people's drinks, and spinning roulette wheels, where they bounced with a hard-edged jingling through their own dramas of luck and loss. Everything in the room was lopsided one way or another. The ancient bearings on the roulette wheels made them spin erratically faster and slower. The classic three-reel slots, set long ago to payout percentages unknown south of Bonanza Road and perhaps to the world, had since each drifted in its own way, like small-town businessfolks, toward openhanded generosity or tightfisted meanness."

— Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice, 236

Rainstorm in L.A.

2010-01-20T18:05:00.004-05:00

"Even before they reached the airport, something about the light had begun to go weird. The sun vanished behind clouds which grew thicker by the minute. Up in the hills among the oil pumps, the first raindrops began to fall, and by the time Doc and Shasta got back to La Brea they were in the middle of a sustained cloudburst. This was way too unnatural. Ahead, someplace over Pasadena, black clouds had gathered, not just dark-gray but midnight black, tar-pit black, hitherto-unreported Circle-of-Hell black. Lightning bolts had begun to descend across the L.A. basin singly and in groups, followed by deep, apocalyptic peals of thunder. Everybody had turned their headlights on, though it was midday. Water came rushing down the hillsides of Hollywood, sweeping mud, trees, bushes, and many of the lighter types of vehicle on down into the flatlands …

"The rain beat down on the car roof, lightning and thunder from time to time interrupting thoughts of the old namesake river that had once run through this town, long canalized and tapped dry, and crippled into a public and anonymous confession of the deadly sin of greed … He imagined it all filling again, up to its concrete rim, and then over, all the water that had not been allowed to flow here for all these years now in unrelenting return, soon beginning to occupy the arroyos and cover the flats, all the swimming pools in the backyards filling up and overflowing and flooding the lots and streets, all this karmic waterscape connecting together, as the rain went on falling and the land vanished, into a sizable inland sea that would presently become an extension of the Pacific."

— Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice, 165-166

2010-01-18T22:57:00.003-05:00

"Yes: everything could be this way or that. The point of doing research is the pleasure of using the indicative."

— Franco Moretti, "Relatively Blunt" in Critical Inquiry 36 (Autumn 2009), 173

Pierre and Bruno

2010-01-15T12:43:00.006-05:00

I've now completed a little trilogy of posts at We Have Never Been Blogging on the complicated relationship between Bourdieu and Latour.

Death By Water

2010-01-14T10:59:00.004-05:00

My review of Peter Greenaway's Drowning By Numbers is up now at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

Decadence

2010-01-11T23:54:00.008-05:00

Because the aforementioned NCTATNY feature includes aggregated poll data but not individual lists, I thought I'd post my Best Films of the 2000s list here. In alphabetical order:

1. 25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002)
2. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron, 2006)
3. The Class (Entre les murs) (Laurent Cantet, 2009)
4. Dogville (Lars Von Trier, 2003)
5. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)
6. The Fog of War (Errol Morris, 2003)
7. Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005)
8. Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, 2008)
9. Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)
10. Inland Empire (David Lynch, 2006)
11. Kings and Queen (Rois et reine) (Arnaud Desplechin, 2004)
12. Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)
13. My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, 2007)
14. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Coen Brothers, 2000)
15. The Piano Teacher (La Pianiste) (Michael Haneke, 2001)
16. Russian Ark (Russkiy kovcheg) (Alexander Sokurov, 2002)
17. Songs from the Second Floor (Sånger från andra våningen) (Roy Andersson, 2000)
18. Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi) (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
19. Talk to Her (Hable con ella) (Pedro Almodovar, 2002)
20. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)

Bona fide

2010-01-11T01:03:00.002-05:00

Not Coming's long-awaited Decade in Review feature is now up, including my essay on the Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou? Be sure to watch the snazzy video introduction on the main page first!

In passing

2010-01-07T09:42:00.003-05:00

I don't have time to fully check it out while I'm on the road (hello from Albuquerque, New Mexico!), but this site looks like an excellent resource for news and information on Michel Serres.

Another Latour Blogger

2009-12-16T11:38:00.001-05:00

Paul John Ennis of Another Heidegger Blog joins the discussion at We Have Never Been Blogging. The actors are multiplying!

Seeing the consequences of a thought

2009-12-10T14:56:00.010-05:00

Two very knowledgeable Michaels (Johnduff and Wood) with some useful and interesting notes on what literary theory does.

When It's Sleepytime

2009-12-08T19:55:00.009-05:00

"Using extremely standardized conventions, artists can coordinate their activity under the most difficult circumstances. When I played the piano in Chicago nightclubs in the 1940s, we typically played seven or eight hours a night. Toward the end of an evening, players got quite tired and sleepy. I discovered that the extreme conventionalization of the popular songs we played meant I could play when I was half, or more than half, asleep. I would often wake up in the middle of a song, getting lost only when I realized that I had been asleep and consequently had no idea where I was. Until then, I must have made use of my knowledge that all the phrases of the song were eight bars long, that they used only a few chords from the many possibilities available, and that those were arranged in a few standardized ways."

— Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds, 58

Lost in the Supermarket

2009-12-03T10:49:00.011-05:00

"I have argued that most often in social sciences, 'social' designates a type of link: it's taken as the name of a specific domain, a sort of material like straw, mud, string, wood, or steel. In principle, you could walk into some imaginary supermarket and point at a shelf full of 'social ties,' whereas other aisles would be stocked with 'material,' 'biological,' 'psychological,' and 'economical' connections. For ANT … the definition of the term is different: it doesn't designate a domain of reality or some particular item, but rather is the name of a movement, a displacement, a transformation, a translation, an enrollment. It is an association between entities which are in no way recognizable as being social in the ordinary manner, except during the brief moment when they are reshuffled together.
To pursue the metaphor of the supermarket, we would call 'social' not any specific shelf or aisle, but the multiple modifications made throughout the whole place in the organization of all the goods — their packaging, their pricing, their labeling — because those minute shifts reveal to the observer which new combinations are explored and which paths will be taken (what later will be defined as a 'network')."

— Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social, 64-65

(Lots more Latour here, bien sur.)

Rather life-like

2009-12-02T00:13:00.004-05:00

I'm stealing this from Will Evans, because it's too good not to disseminate as widely as possible:

"Satan then jumps over the wall into Paradise, already watched by Uriel because the passion of his soliloquy has betrayed him. Evidence of confusion has been found in 'Uriel once warned' (IV.125); but it only means that Uriel after being asked the way by this character felt enough curiosity to follow his later movements. The idea of a soliloquy being observed has been found absurdly theatrical or literary, so I make bold to remark that it once happened to me. I had landed at Los Angeles on my way from China to England, and there is a park in that city which rises to a fairly bluff summit. I went to the top of it and screamed; this was in 1939, so my feelings need not all be blamed upon Los Angeles. After I had been screaming for a bit I found I was being shot at by boys with air-guns; this satisfied me in some way; I came down the hill, and took the train to San Francisco. The incident on Niphates' top strikes me as a rather life-like thing to have happened to Satan."

— William Empson, Milton's God, 67

The eternal reverse succession of contemplated entities

2009-12-01T12:25:00.013-05:00

As part of my continuing back-and-forth with Mike Johnduff over at We Have Never Been Blogging, I offer a comparison (or, maybe better, an association) between Bruno Latour and Kenneth Koch.

2009-12-01T02:26:00.008-05:00

"…We all know that we have to live for a certain time and then
unfortunately we must die, and after that none is sure what happens. Accounts vary. But we
most of us feel we'll be made comfortable for much of the time after that, and get credit
for the (admittedly) few nice things we did, and no one is going to make too much
of a fuss over those we'd rather draw the curtain over, and besides, we can't see
much that was wrong in them, there are two sides to every question. Yet the facts
fascinate one, we become one of those persons who are only satisfied with thoroughly
reliable information — the truth, if there could ever be such a thing. Our journey
flows past us like ice chunks, maybe it is that we are stationary.
O so much God to police everything and still be left over to flatter one's
harmless idiosyncrasies, the things that make us us, which is precisely
what is fading like paint on a sign, no matter how much one pretends it's the same
as yesterday. And children talk to us — that, surely, must be a plus?"

— John Ashbery, Flow Chart, 35

2009-11-30T00:50:00.008-05:00

"…It took
two weeks to lead up to this. The stores are quiet now.
I say lie down in it. I already asked Santa about it.
And then, you see, it became part of our cultural history. We can't ignore it
even though we'd like to, it's so mild and hurtless. And you thought
you had it bad, or good. With as many associations as that
to keep thumbing through, one winks at the legal filigrane that penetrates every
page of the mouldering sheaf down to the last one, like a spike
through a door. Somebody dust these ashes off, open
the curtains, get a little light on the subject: the subject
going off on its own again."

— John Ashbery, Flow Chart, 20

2009-11-28T02:55:00.008-05:00

"…Even though you thought
everything you touched was doomed to fall apart or not start, time has
a few surprises up its sleeve and deserves to be spat on for not having more,
or would, if it didn't. Yet it does."

— John Ashbery, Flow Chart, 15

Quote unquote fantastic

2009-11-27T21:07:00.002-05:00

A few choice words on Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox over at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

Dads going digital

2009-11-27T15:10:00.007-05:00

My friend Sam has three poems up at the new web magazine Monsters & Dust (which also features work by Cass McCombs). They have a nice autumnal melancholy thing going on. I particularly like "Store Policy."

Up to something

2009-11-25T12:03:00.008-05:00

Good old Michael Wood on Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice in the NYRB (from September 2009; I'm a little behind):

"A new gourmet health-food restaurant opens 'off Melrose.' It is called the Price of Wisdom, and located above a seedy bar called Ruby's Lounge. This allows the owners to put up 'a hand-lettered sign reading, THE PRICE OF WISDOM IS ABOVE RUBY'S, JOB 28:18.' Inherent Vice also has a collision and repair shop called Resurrection of the Body. There is something touching about jokes one has to work so hard for, and Pynchon has a special tenderness for the mode, memorably signified, in Gravity's Rainbow, by the Hobbesian law firm of Salitieri, Poore, Nash, De Brutus and Short.

"These gags and allusions are fleeting instances of cultural thought at work, failures of seriousness that are prodigies of connection … No thought is banal if it is up to something, and the novelist's task, and ours, is to watch the thinking as it happens and before it fades, not detach or prejudge the style or the content." (70-71)

Un Cadavre

2009-11-24T12:26:00.002-05:00

"Comparison and analysis need only the cadavers on the table; but interpretation is always producing parts of the body from its pockets, and fixing them in place.”

— T.S. Eliot, "The Function of Criticism" (1923)

You could see the sea out there, if you could see it

2009-11-19T12:28:00.004-05:00

Here's a beautiful trailer, put together by Mark Franks, for Not Coming to a Theater Near You's screening of Los Angeles Plays Itself on November 21st at 92Y Tribeca.

Taking history personally

2009-11-17T09:43:00.005-05:00

In anticipation of the 92Y Tribeca screening of Los Angeles Plays Itself on Saturday, here's my interview with director Thom Andersen.