The Canadian Left and U.S. Culture Criticism

Mar 242010
 

In 1968, an American assistant professor at York University observed to me that in terms of political spectrums, the Canadian Right begins somewhere left of the leftiest American Left. Here’s an essay by Stan Persky on Naomi Klein in the online magazine Dooney’s Cafe. Klein used to edit This Magazine where I once or twice published stories (I suspect this was before Klein was even born). There are a couple of interesting message vectors here. The first is that these are people who come from a Canadian Leftist tradition which, in many ways, has its roots in a Prairie Protestant religious movement of community and co-operation (unlike the U.S. where Protestantism is mostly on the Right). The second is that Canada also has, through Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis, another tradition of culture criticism that rises from a study of the social and cognitive effects of technology. These two threads seem to coalesce in Naomi Klein and her critiques of market capitalism. Oddly enough, as Persky points out, Klein is getting some traction on the American Right, which seems paradoxical and fascinating. All this talk of Right and Left doesn’t mean that much any more since both sides seem to assemble slogans without giving much attention to underlying consistency or purpose. It’s strange to think that Tea Baggers and anti-globalization demonstrators actually agree on some things. Anyway this is a interesting article, not the least because it’s about how to write a bestseller against the idea of bestsellers.

dg

Plays, movies, and aphorisms

Mar 212010
 

Last night I watched a movie called A Good Woman adapted from Oscar Wilde’s play Lady Windermere’s Fan. Very witty, packed with aphorisms. But it was also fun to look at the play and the script (this is not a movie script but a transcript just to give you an idea). The movie doesn’t seem to have gotten such good reviews, but the side dialogue crackled on occasion. Take a look at it if you get the chance.

Here are a few aphorisms I lifted from the play this morning:

I can resist everything except temptation.

Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out.

Crying is the refuge of plain women but the ruin of pretty ones.

But my experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don’t know anything at all.

…nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion.

dg

What I’ve been readin’

Mar 202010
 

For research on a story (sorry Doug, I’m tipping my hand), I spent last week reading Lemay, The Life and Wars of General Curtis Lemay, by Warren Kozak. Lemay rose rapidly through the Army Air Corps as WWII raged.  He became the youngest two star general in the army, and later commanded the Strategic Air Command.  Lemay coined the phrase “MAD”, or Mutually Assured Destruction, the theory which justified the arms race in the name of the Cold War ‘peace’.  The premise of this policy, infamously being: if you attack us, we attack you, and everyone (literally) dies.  He is often considered the inspiration for General Jack Ripper in “Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”   Of course my understanding of the man changed considerably after reading the biography.  My grandfather fought in the Pacific during WWII, and used to tell me that had we invaded Japan, a lot of people would have died, meaning, more or less, that I wouldn’t be here, one way or the other…but I digress.

I also picked up 19 Knives, by Mark Anthony Jarman, The Shell Collector, by Anthony Doerr, and a craft book recommended by our own Robin Oliveira, Writing for Story, by Jon Franklin.  The Jarman frustrates me (in a good way, if possible)…he seems to get away with so much in his compact stories.  How do you write a story about a guy who changes oil?  Yet there it is:  “Song from Under the Floorboards.”  Doerr writes with a very wide grasp for such a young writer.  I admire his skill and his touch.  The Franklin book has challenged my understanding of structure in stories.  More to follow…

—Richard Farrell

A Brief Note on Aphorisms

Mar 192010
 

Dog

An aphorism is a rhetorical structure that more often than not functions as a balanced antithesis. This against that. There are many sub-varieties. Wit is introduced through surprising twists or juxtapositions, puns, and homophones.

E.g. “Obliquity of style leads straight to the Purgatory of vagueness.” (This I wrote in a student packet letter.)

“Separation gives one a chance to be a new person, but the new person has to take this huge, mangy, bloody, limping, rabid, mongrel dog on a leash everywhere he goes — this dog is the old person.” (This was a fugitive autobiographical thought.)

Here is one model exemplified by the Marquis de Sade. “There are two positions available to us–either crime which renders us happy, or the noose, which prevents us from being unhappy.”

And here is one of my own written after de Sade’s example. I wrote it to a student in a packet letter not so long ago. “There are two kinds of readers–the adventurers who glory in the breathtaking audacity and risk of a well-turned aphorism and the weenies who, lacking courage themselves, find it affront in others.”

Here is a Lawrence Durrell variant from his novel Clea: “‘There are only three things to be done with a woman,’ said Clea once. ‘You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.'”

And here is one of mine using the model: “Three people become famous as a result of any new artistic movement: the one who invents it, the one who does it best, and the one who parodies it.”

Here is an aphorism by Montaigne: “The world is but a school of inquiry.”

And this is one of mine using the same model. It’s from my story “Bad News of the Heart.” “Love is an erotic accident prolonged to disaster.”

This is from “The Indonesian Client.” “All sex is the manipulation of guilt for pleasure.”

Here is another from my story “Woman Gored by Bison Lives.” “Life is always better under the influence of mild intoxicants.”

There are many more variants of the form. Finding them and identifying them is a little like bird watching.

dg

See Numéro Cinq‘s First Ever Aphorism Contest below.

A Discovery

Mar 152010
 

During our packet discussion this weekend, Doug and I had a long conversation on critical thinking as a writer. I also read last night and this morning his essay “The Novel as a Poem” from Notes Home from a Prodigal Son (and also Cynthia Huntington’s “Poetic Technique in Nonfiction Writing” from the VCFA anthology). I think I might have made a breakthrough, or at least found a foothold. In his essay Doug mentions two types of patterns, patterns of verisimilitude (or “aboutness”) and patterns of technique. This distinction is one I think I’ve reacted to a bit emotionally in the last couple of months, and I think I might know why – in my non-fiction work, I think I’ve focused almost exclusively on patterns of verisimilitude. I think this might be because of the form itself. Until the last three or four years, I wrote almost exclusively fiction and poetry. My transition to non-fiction has been one I didn’t necessarily consciously make – people told me I needed to write about my crazy family, and I also was getting more publications in online media for the more journalistic work. Perhaps, in this not-entirely-conscious transition between forms, I made some assumptions, one being that, since non-fiction is about things that actually happened, it was more important to tell them as they happened (or at least how I remember them happening) rather than imposing structural forms on them. I’m starting to think this was a grave error. Two of the people in my writers’ group have said they like my fiction better than my non-fiction, that it just seemed to get to the “heart” of human experience better – I’m starting to think now that they were reacting to the “completeness” of the form, as they also said my fiction “pays off” better. I’m not sure what this says about the direction my non-fiction is heading, but I am now having a bit of a renaissance of formal introspection. It makes writing a bit less fun right now, but as Doug says in the essay:

Getting the balances right in any given work is part of the art of art and its mystery and is a skill that cannot be taught. It leads to a feeling…of submission, of loss of freedom, of loss of expressiveness. But there is a point in the process of writing a novel  [or personal essay – my note] at which you must submit to the strictures of pattern that you have chosen.

—John Proctor

Field Notes from the Edge: The man-who-had-no-name

Mar 142010
 

There was Claw-fingered Kitty and Windy Ike
living the life of shame,
When unto them in the Long, Long Night came
the man-who-had-no-name…

So yesterday I drove Jonah to the woods of Middle Grove west of Saratoga Springs where he spent three hours with this amazing musician named Russell Slater. Listen to Slater at motherbinary.com. While Jonah fondled synthesizers and midi guitars, I wandered over to the Ballston Spa Antique Center where I stumbled upon a copy of Ballads of a Cheechako by the Scottish writer Robert Service; you probably all know “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” Service spent a good deal of time in Canada and became world famous for his poems about the Yukon. His brother joined the Canadian army and was killed in action in the First World War. Service’s poems are comic but have this mysterious edge, like dream figures coming out of the darkness. I love the lines above. He works with types instead of metaphor, but the types seem mythic, rock-hewn, and silly all at once. Take the phrases by themselves (notice the capitalization):

  • Claw-fingered Kitty (I can’t get much traction with Windy Ike)
  • living the life of shame
  • the Long, Long Night
  • the man-who-had-no-name

dg

“…let her rave,” Keats & thoughts of suicide

Mar 132010
 

I was just looking through Keats’ “Ode on Melancholy.” It had never occurred to me to think of it as a poem about the aftermath of a fight with your significant other, the massive, hugely depressive feeling you get when things go south in the kitchen or the bedroom and the person you thought was your nearest companion turns out not to have the faintest clue about your inner being and no sympathy whatsoever. But, of course, that couldn’t be what the poem is about, right? Compare with D. H. Lawrence’s “Kissing and Horrid Strife” discussed in an earlier post.

I love the train of poisonous medicaments in the opening stanza, the piling up of death. This appeals to the baroque and macabre side of my nature which, as you know, doesn’t come out much.

dg

A Note on Nietzsche’s “experiments” as technique

Mar 122010
 

I was rereading Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche last night, focusing on the bit about Nietzsche’s “style of decadence.” This should be interesting to any of us but especially to writers of nonfiction. Like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche is an anti-system thinker; he attacked the idea that the classic philosophical ideals of system, coherence and completeness were a guarantee of truth (recall how Kierkegaard mischievously titled his great work Concluding Unscientific Postscript). His style of decadence was aphoristic and fragmentary. Each piece was a thought experiment, not necessarily meant to reveal a truth. He called them Versuche, experiments or attempts (reflect on how this resonates with Montaigne’s essais, the root of which is the verb essayer, to attempt or try), and they varied in length from a line to several pages. He’s difficult to read because he is playful and ironic and because of this open and hypothetical quality. His style is also dialectic in the sense that he often approaches a topic by critiquing the assumptions of conventional philosophical arguments, thus trying to find a negative or backwards path to a substantive claim.

Kaufmann:

Each aphorism or sequence of aphorisms–and in Nietzsche’s later works some of these sequences are about a hundred pages long, and the aphoristic style is only superficially maintained–may be considered as a thought experiment. The discontinuity or, positively speaking, the great number of experiments, reflects the conviction that making only one experiment would be one-sided. One may here recall Kierkegaard’s comment on Hegel: “If Hegel had written the whole of his Logic and then said… that it was merely an experiment in thought…then he would certainly have been the greatest thinker who had ever lived. As it is, he is merely comic.” (Journals, ed. Alexander Dru, 134). Nietzsche insists that the philosopher must be willing to make ever new experiments; he must retain an open mind and be prepared, if necessary, “boldly at any time to declare himself against his previous opinion” (FW 296)–just as he would expect a scientist to revise his theories in the light of new experiments.

Think how liberating it must be to imagine each piece of writing as an experiment, as a trial balloon, as inquiry instead of conclusion; too many writers inhibit themselves by trying to stake out their territory, by trying to tell the truth. Instead of writing, This is what happened; you write, Is this what happened, or this, or this?

Theodor Adorno practiced Nietzsche’s dialectical and aphoristic style in spades. See his Minima Moralia. Ludwig Wittgenstein invented one totalizing systematic philosophy in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and then turned around and invented a fragmentary anti-systematic philosophy in the Philosophical Investigations (fragments and thought experiments on the nature of language). See also E. M. Cioran’s books of aphorisms. e.g. The Trouble With Being Born.

dg

Venice Death Trip 2008 (Thomas Mann up to date)

Mar 112010
 

I went to Venice with a doughty band of Vermont College of Fine Arts students in the summer of 2008. Unlike most visitors to the sinking city, I did not hang out on the beach looking for young Polish boys. In fact, I did not see the beach. Faced with large, confusing situations (life, for example), I try to focus on tiny goals. I went to Venice intending to find one bar and one painting; my friend Karen Mulhallen (see her poem in an earlier post) had suggested both. Right away, I could not find the bar. I got separated from the group. I wandered aimlessly in foetid, miasma-ridden back alleys that always seemed to end at a canal. I saw black clad beggar women, a sinister blind accordion player with a wedding party, chess sets in the shapes of animals or Saracen armies. Sometimes in the distance I would see VCFA students who would wave wanly in my direction. The heat was terrific. I felt as if I were in a Thomas Mann story. I felt as if there wasn’t enough passion in my life. I drank too much coffee. After many hours of wandering, I found what I was searching for, the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, a sort of guild hall for Slovene immigrants (long ago). It was closed. I wandered in the old Slovene quarter, saw a woman walking away from me down an alley that led to a canal who seems, in the photo I took, not to be wearing underpants. I saw stray dogs and a couple making out on a bench in a weedy square. The sun was hot. By chance (I later realized) I took a second photo of the woman. I felt that she was my Tadzio, that she would lure me to some malarial doom. At a stall that sold fine, ancient works of art to discerning tourists, I bought a kitchen apron with Michelangelo’s David on the front and a Venizia baseball cap. I returned to the Scuola which was now open. The inside was like a large square chapel with huge paintings on the walls, all by Vittore Carpaccio depicting the truly exciting life of St. Jerome. The last on the right as you come in showed St. Augustine in his study (how St. Augustine comes into the life of St. Jerome I don’t know). St. Augustine sits at his writing desk amid piles of books, pen in hand. He’s staring off to his left, slightly amazed. You can’t quite tell what he’s looking at. There’s a window; perhaps he’s spotted a woman going by without any underpants. But his eyes aren’t aimed at quite the right angle. He could be looking at that the orrery suspended above the window. Mostly he’s just looking. The painting is called “Vision of St. Augustine” which makes me think, you know, that it’s meant to imply that he was short-sighted or perhaps myopic. The study seems outsized and empty. Books along the wall, a special reading chair with a lectern (looks like a piece of exercise apparatus). At the back, there is some sort of home entertainment centre. In the middle of the bare floor sits a diminutive, fluffy, white dog staring up at the saint. Unlike the saint’s eyes, the dog’s are focused, deliberate, curious and intelligent. The dog looks just like Karen’s dog Lucy. As I was examining the painting, two beautiful Venetian women came in with plastic sheets and ladders and covered it up “for restoration.” They climbed ladders, put on attractive white masks that made them look even more beautiful, mysterious and Venetian and set to work with tiny instruments. I stumbled out into the blazing sunlight with my precious Michelangelo art work under my arm. There is another Carpaccio in the city, with the same dog. I could have gone on, but time was late and my students, no doubt, had been missing me.

dg

Leitwort, a technique

Mar 102010
 

I am back from the dead, er, I mean packet flu, er, I mean the really enjoyable weekend I had reading through your wonderful packets.

I was reading a bit in The Portable Nietzsche last night; Jacob is writing an essay about Beyond Good and Evil. Anyway I noticed a passage I had marked years ago, and it reminds me to remind you that technique can be discovered anywhere.

This is a paragraph from Walter Kaufman’s introduction to The Portable Nietzsche.

Taking their cues from Wagner’s leitmotifs, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig have pointed out, in connection with their remarkable German translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, that the style of the Old Testament often depends on Leitworte, words which are central and particularly emphasized in one passage and then picked up again elsewhere, thus establishing an unobtrusive cross reference–an association which, even if only dimly felt, adds dimension to meaning. Perhaps no major writer is as biblical in this respect as Nietzsche.

And here’s Kristian Evensen’s site explaining Wagner’s leitmotifs. Leitmotifs in Der Ring des Nibelungen – an introduction

See also Wagner’s Use of Leitmotifs on The Horn.

dg

Chekhov & Munro: A Note — Julie Marden

Mar 012010
 

Here’s a note Julie Marden sent me in an email. Julie is a former student, a VCFA graduate. You can see her lecture on Chekhov in the Class Resources folder. dg

Alice “Antonovna” Munro, a note on echoes and influences

Doubtless I’m not the first to notice this connection ( I know everyone likes to call Munro a modern Chekhov, and didn’t Cynthia Ozick even call her “our Chekhov”?), but I couldn’t help being struck by a particular relationship between two passages — one by Chekhov, one by Munro — a few days ago, driving to visit some cousins in Maine and listening to a cd of The View From Castle Rock in my car. Maybe the Munro-like aspects of my trip  had something to do with my imagination taking up with this.  Night had fallen.  I was driving on a paved, country road, passing through the outskirts of small towns, on my way to visit rural relatives, with the words of The View From Castle Rock‘s title story filling up the darkness.   The day after I got home,  I rushed to the library to get the actual book, only they didn’t have it, so I had to take dictation from the cd (hence any spelling  or punctuation mistakes).  I also looked up the Chekhov.

Here are the passages that struck me:

They sewed him up in a sailcloth and to make him heavier they put in two iron fire bars.  Sewn up in a sailcloth he looked like a carrot or a horse-radish; broad at the head and narrow at the feet. . .
The seaman on watch tilted the end of the plank.  At first Gusev slid down slowly, then he rushed head foremost into the sea, turning a somersault in the air, then splashing.  The foam enclosed him, and for a brief moment he seemed to be wrapped in lace, but this moment passed and he disappeared under the waves.

He plunged rapidly to the bottom.  Did he reach it? The sea, they say, is three miles deep at this point.  Falling sixty or seventy feet, he started to fall more slowly, swaying rhythmically, as though hesitating, at the mercy of the currents, sliding sideways more quickly than he sank down.

Then he fell among a shoal of pilot fish.  When they saw the dark body they were astounded and rooted to the spot, and they suddenly turned tail and fled.  In less than a minute they came hurrying back to him, quick as a shot, and they began zigzagging round him in the water.

Then still another dark body appeared.  This was a shark.  It swam below Gusev with dignity and reserve, seeming not to notice him; and when he, descending, fell against the back of the shark, then the shark turned belly upwards, basking in the warm transparent water and lazily opening its jaws with their two rows of teeth. The pilot fish were in ecstasy; they stopped to see what would happen next.  After playing around with the body for a while, the shark calmly laid its jaws on it, tapped it with its teeth, and ripped open the sailcloth along the whole length of the body from head to foot; one of the fire bars fell out, frightened the pilot fish, struck the shark in the ribs, and sank rapidly to the bottom.

— Anton Chekhov, “Gusev”

‘There was a child had died, the name of Ormiston, and its body was thrown overboard, sewed up in a piece of canvas, with a large lump of coal at its feet.’

He [Walter Laidlaw, Munro’s Scottish forebear, fictionalized version of] pauses in his writing to think of the weighted sack, falling down through the water. Darker and darker grows the water, with the surface high overhead, gleaming faintly like the night sky. Would the piece of coal do its job?  Would the sack fall straight down to the very bottom of the sea? Or would the current of the sea be strong enough to keep lifting it up and letting it fall, pushing it sideways, taking it far as Greenland, or south, to the tropical waters full of rank weeds, the Sargassos Sea?

Or some ferocious fish might come along and rip the sack and make a meal of the body before it had even left the upper waters and the region of light.

He has seen drawings of fish as big as horses, fish with horns as well, and scores of teeth, each like a skinner’s knife. . . .

-Alice “Antonovna” Munro, “The View From Castle Rock”

It’s interesting how these passages differ in length, detail, and function.  In “Gusev,”  the scene is part of the climax; in the Munro story, the passage appears early on and offers a quick first glimpse of a child’s death (quite a few more to come in this story) and in this case it’s a child we never  knew, whereas Gusev – the character, of course —  we come to know intimately.  Also, in “Gusev,” the underwater scene actually happens; there’s that oft-noted POV shift away from the people on board the ship right after the body goes underwater.  In the Munro story, the underwater scene is all conjecture, the narration continues from the mind of the observing passenger (Walter), who has been writing in his journal. The story itself does not go underwater.  Still, Munro seems to have absorbed “Gusev,” not only the main detail of the sea-buried corpse itself,  but especially the questions (compare Chekhov’s ” Did he reach it?” to Munro’s “Would the piece of coal do its job? Would the sack fall straight down to the very bottom of the sea?), the descriptions of the current, and the mentions of predatory, sharp-toothed fish.

I’ve also been wondering about the character Walter as a kind of literary stand-in himself. Certainly he’s an explicit example of one of Munro’s real ancestors who took to the pen.  She says so.   But could she also have been thinking of a more figurative ancestor — Chekhov himself — when she gave to Walter this experience of observing the burial? It’s hard for me to believe that she wouldn’t be aware of the famous letter Chekhov wrote after witnessing a passenger’s dead body being tossed overboard, on his journey back to Moscow from Sakhalin.  He wrote “Gusev” shortly after this trip.  At any rate, whether she deliberately meant for Walter to channel Chekhov or not,  it’s almost impossible for me to believe she wasn’t deliberately thinking of  that passage from “Gusev” when she wrote the passage quoted above. She seems to play with the Chekhov a bit like the current, in her variation, plays with the child’s corpse.  I think of it as an homage that is completely original.  And momentary;  Munro sticks to her necessities and moves on.

Julie Marden

Character Thought (technique)

Feb 282010
 

Capture2

Here’s a note on what I call “novel thought” or “character thought.” It’s an excerpt from a letter to a student.

Novelists use character thought to sew the novel together. Novel thought is very stylized and systematic, unlike real thought. Characters are 1) always looking back, always remembering where they have been and why they have come to where they are. This happens over and over, repetitiously, so that the reader is always being reminded of the past story of the novel/character and the current motivation; 2) always assessing where they are now, what am I doing, why am I doing it, why is that other character doing what he is doing, what does this look like, what does it remind me of? (Thought is action: your characters don’t have to necessarily be right in their assessments, they just have to be true to themselves in the context of what’s gone before.) 3) always looking ahead: given what’s just happened what do I want to do next, what plan can I make, what do I think the other character(s) will do next, how will I react to that?

These sorts of thought should be in the text all the time. Characters should always be connecting events in their own heads (so the reader can remember and see the connection). Every chapter should have some memory or reference to previous chapters, especially the one just before. And every chapter should look ahead, have reference to what’s coming up. All in the character’s mind. Over and over in novels you’ll find a pattern. Chapter opening, then a tiny bit of backfill connecting this chapter or plot step to the last once, maybe a summary of the steps to this point, and a clear sense of what the character plans to get out of the coming scenes, then the event/scenes, then as the chapter closes a bit of reflection on what has just happened and a moment of decision or plan-making, where do I turn next. A novel is always making connections.

For an expansion of this idea with examples from novels see my essay on novel structure  in my book Attack of the Copula Spiders and also in the relevant section of my book on Cervantes The Enamoured Knight.

—Douglas Glover

Gyury & Irma

Feb 232010
 

Capture

This is a revisiting of the post on Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen and the essay Georg Lukacs wrote about them. When I read the essay last week, I saw it as a cunning proto-deconstruction (ie. deconstruction before deconstruction was invented) of Kierkegaard’s gesture of renouncing Regine to ensure her future happiness. Over the weekend, I discovered a biographical essay about Lukacs, “Georg Lukacs: The Antinomies of Melancholy” by Levee Blanc in Other Voices, v.1, n.1 (March 1997). What we find out here is that while Lukacs was writing about Kierkegaard’s “real” reasons for dumping Regine, Lukacs himself was dumping Irma Seidler for the same reasons he attributes to Kierkegaard, ie. that happiness and domestic union might interfere with his philosophical work. In his notes from this period, Lukacs wrote:

Scruples: the impossible nature of marriage…Dread of the destructive influence of happiness, dread that it is beyond my capacity to get my bearings in a broader-based life.

And in a letter to Irma that positively reeks of the freshman romantic poseur and macho intellectual bravado, he writes:

There are people who understand and do not live, and their are others that live but do not understand. The first kind cannot ever really reach the second even though they understand them, and the second can never understand the essence, but then, it doesn’t matter. The feeling of love or hate, the liking somebody or the possibility of learning to like someone, exists, but the categories of understanding do not exist for them.

The message loop then is that in the Lukacs essay on Kierkegaard, Lukacs writes Kierkegaard as channeling Lukacs, but who knows what Kierkegaard really thought?

Regine Olsen eventually married and survived Kierkegaard. Irma Seidler was not so fortunate. Just a few years after Lukacs dumped her, she killed herself by jumping off a bridge in Budapest.

I am trying to draw some lessons from this.

  • No matter how hard we try, we never leave high school behind.
  • There is still something to Lukacs’s critique of the gesture, the pose: all tragic heroes will have terrible home lives because their grand gestures never take into account close human relations. Think, King Lear. Think, Oedipus.
  • There is, on the other hand, something insidious about the barely tacit premise that women and marriage somehow interfere with a man’s ability to think. I am reminded how in one of his novels Lawrence Durrell has a character say, “Women are incapable of categorical thought.” Lukacs seems to be coming close to this in his letter to Irma. There is some evidence here that testosterone causes brain damage. Many women, I think, have remarked on this in the past.
  • And this is not to mention the broken symmetry of Lukacs’s argument about gesture. Somehow deciding to renounce a woman so you can think better is a gesture, a heroic self-creating choice, while the alternative, opting to hang with a someone and think at the same time, is not a gesture, not a heroic self-creating choice, but a kind of muddled life-chaos. There is something fuzzily tautological about what he gets to call a gesture. And this is one of the basic problems with Existentialism as a philosophy; it cheats by surreptitiously applying a secondary value system. Existentialism says choice creates value. But then some choices are better (more authentic) than other choices. (Not, of course, that Lukacs was an Existentialist, but his analysis of Kierkegaard and gesture is about the roots of Existentialism and he works within the premises.)
  • Finally, avoid bridges.

dg

My latest foray into global affairs (an epigram)

Feb 222010
 

Copernicus

THE THROW OF FICTION these days is decidedly dystopian. Novels and movies are chock-a-block with images of the Ends of Times, wherein humans scurry about in shadows, while machines run amok, or the Earth heats up or cools down with catastrophic suddenness, or the undead rage in the streets for healthy blood. The future is a Mad Max movie on hyper-drive, and the stupid and brutal shall rule…

Read More at Global Brief–>

“On the Coming Order, Looking for the new century’s Copernicus”

dg

Feeling blue

Feb 202010
 

My favourite part is the girl who says, “I see you. I see you. I see you.”

Though I can’t quite put my finger on it, there is something ineffably sad about this (aside from the obvious comedy). It’s a parody of a reality TV show about really stupid people re-enacting a really obvious Hollywood reiteration of the Romance of the Noble Savage old-style Euro-colonial racism, thus a parody of an imitation of an imitation of a bad idea. It reminds me of Don Quixote, of course, who is imitating characters in a romantic adventure novel about knights in armour long after people had forgotten what those thugs-in-chain mail  were really like. And Dostoevsky said Don Quixote was the saddest book of all.

Maybe it’s this: our inability to feel real unless we are acting a role, our need for a gesture or form that gives us substance. When we see this in others, it’s comic. But it’s the kind of comedy that expresses a latent fear, in this case the fear that if we look too closely the Self will seem unbearably empty.

dg

Søren & Regine & The Decline of Gesture

Feb 192010
 

Regine Olsen

A few posts and comments back, I counseled people to step back from taking sides in certain sorts of public cultural debates, to take the Hegelian approach and rise above and restructure the argument itself. I just reread Georg Lukacs essay “The Foundering of Form Against Life, Søren Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen” which, as you might expect given Kierkegaard’s antipathy toward Hegel, suggests the opposite view, or at least constructs an opposite view. (Full disclosure: Lukacs was an Hegelian.)  The opposite view is that the gesture (form) can crystallize or shape life, or attempts to do so, while mostly life presents itself as a muddle of motives and options. This is the germ of the  Existentialist idea of creating value by making choices, by committing oneself. The bulk of the essay is an analysis of Kierkegaard’s gesture of renouncing his beloved Regine Olsen. Not only did he renounce her, but he pretended to be a cad, an inveterate seducer, so that she could more easily give him up in her own mind and get on with her life. If there was a chance that she thought Kierkegaard really loved her, she might wait for him or be uncertain about getting into another relationship. Kierkegaard loved her all the while. The gesture was a concrete act, a kind of heroic pose, and a choice he made. But Lukacs is cagey about tracking the uncertainties and ambiguities in the situation (this is where life beclouds the gesture). Kierkegaard performed the gesture because he thought he would ruin Regine’s life, but it seems also clear that he realized that she might clutter his life with pleasure (possibly happiness) and domesticity. So the gesture wasn’t entirely self-sacrificing. Through the rest of his life Kierkegaard waffled in his heart. He never wanted to see Regine because he didn’t ever want to remind her of the happiness they had hoped for or in case she might doubt that he was a cad and seducer; but it seems clear Regine never really quite bought his story and at least sometimes suspected that it was all a pose (Kierkegaard starts to look a bit comic). And once Kierkegaard wrote her a long letter explaining everything (was he hoping to reignite the old passion?), but Regine discussed the letter with her husband and decided to send it back unopened. So the gesture, examined in its particulars, seems less monolithic, less heroic, and less pure than when viewed from afar.

Reading this story from a contemporary standpoint, one is also surprised at the male comedy of Kierkegaard presuming to decide what is right for Regine without, um, actually talking to her. We don’t ever do that today, do we?

Also this is my sly way of introducing Lukacs who was an interesting thinker. See his book The Theory of the Novel which he tells you himself not to think of as a guide.

—Douglas Glover

Post-Structuralism, Spelling Lessons and Rats.

Feb 162010
 

I’m still reading Eagleton and have moved into the post-structuralism chapter.  I wish I had more time to spend studying theory.  I also wish that I had studied it before now.  Watching my daughter (she’s in third grade) work on her spelling lessons tonight made me think about the idea of signifier and the thing signfied.  There is something very powerful about watching Maggie work out parts of speech, about watching her form the connections with language in this very basic, very primal sort of way.  Store.  Order.  Board.  These were some of the words tonight.  I was also reading E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel this morning. His humor surprised me, and the discussion of cavemen sitting around listening to the first stories again makes me think about how we (humans) acquire language and how our desires for stories is so deep-rooted in our consciousness.  Now it’s time for reading…Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIIMH.

—Richard Farrell

Pileated Woodpeckers and Gombrowicz

Feb 162010
 

Lucy checking possible fox hole just before Pileated Woodpeckers appeared

Walking Lucy in the woods behind my house on the weekend, I found a pair of Pileated Woodpeckers, male and female. I’ve seen single males from time to time but never a pair–and in the same tree, the male making that strange clucking sound. This was about 15 seconds after my camera ran out of battery.

I read Witold Gombrowicz’s short story “Lawyer Kraykowski’s Dancer” (from his collection Bacacay). A weedy little semi-invalid (he suffers from epilepsy) tries to jump the ticket line at the opera. A wealthy, handsome lawyer drags him back. The semi-invalid, surprisingly, becomes obsessed with the lawyer. He stalks him, tries to imitate him, even tries to help him bed the married woman he is pursuing. When the lawyer finally manages a clandestine kiss with his sweetie in a secluded park, the narrator has a (very literary) grand mal seizure (the “dance” of the title) and is hospitalized. The lawyer escapes to the country. Deep shades of Dostoevsky and Gogol here. Notes from the Underground and “The Overcoat.” But it also, very interestingly, echoes some of the things René Girard says about the triangulation of desire in Deceit, Desire and the Novel, for example, the idea that the self is created when it identifies with the desire of the other (which is the principle upon which all modern advertising works). What is fascinating about the story is the power it generates from the protagonist’s surprise reaction to being yanked back into line. Instead of feeling anger and resentment, he falls under a kind of spell of obsequious adoration for his persecutor. Shamelessly, he debases himself, courts public humiliation. Very mysterious.

dg

Failure & Other Happy Thoughts for the Weekend.

Feb 122010
 

Perhaps in relation to the aftermath of packet one, I spent part of the morning reading Michael Dennis Browne’s essay, “Failure,” which examines failure in writing.  (This essay is found in The True Subject: Writers on Life and Craft, an anthology of essays edited by Kurt Brown, and part of at least 3 volumes published by Graywolf Press.)   Browne borrows ideas about failure from a number of writers as he explores the potential usefulness of failing in the artistic process   He looks at his own ‘failures’ too, and how they have guided him as a poet.

Might every book have to seem to be a failure to the writer so that the next one becomes necessary?  Is there a way in which we can see acknowledgement of a books’ ‘failure’ not as something that quenches the imagination, that robs the writer of confidence for future work, but rather as an incentive to—forgive the hearty phrases—do it better, to get it right, the next time.

He cites the Irish poet, Eavan Boland, whose quote follows. I happen to really like this quote…it makes me feel somehow hopeful about learning and toiling.  From Boland:

I always think of myself as working at a rock face.  Ninety days out of ninety-five, it’s just a rock face.  The other five days, there’s a bit of silver, a bit of base metal in it.  I’m reasonably consistent, and the consistency is a help to me.  It helps me to stay in contact with my failure rate, and unless you have a failure rate that vastly exceeds your success rate, you’re not really in touch with what you’re doing as a poet.  The danger of inspiration is that it is a theory that redirects itself toward the idea of success rather than to the idea of consistent failure.  And all poets need to have a sane and normalized relationship with their failure rate.

I love the notion that there is danger in moving toward the concept of success.  Little of my education, my work life, or my social life accepts this notion of failure.  I do not yet have a ‘sane and normalized relationship’ with failing, but I’m working on it.  This semester should help!  The idea of accepting failure runs so counter to our society’s notions of bottom-line success.  I also respond strongly to the idea of the rock face.  That writing is not only about learning to live with the failure but continuing to toil, to chip away despite the ninety days of failure.   As I’ve heard repeated so often in Montpelier, worry about the process, not the product.

Brown quotes at length a variety of other writers on this topic:  George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Isaac Newton, T.S. Eliot, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Boris Pasternak, Robert Lowell, and William Butler Yeats.  He also uses examples from his own writing, and shows how his mistakes have led him deeper into his own poetic imagination.   This is Browne toward the end of the essay:

It is an old idea that the end is the journey itself, and that in the experiencing and accepting and embracing of failure we become most fully human.  Through daily personal and artistic discipline we can work to be more receptive, even if we often come to realize that the maps we have made are not the territory, that our persistent examining leads us to the conviction that, as Auden says, the truth is a silence towards which words can only point.  We can see this as pathology, a problem, or as a mystery, one to live as fully as possible.

—Richard Farrell

Night thoughts of an insomniac reader

Feb 122010
 

I finished re-reading Gombrowicz’s A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes. G was sick with heart disease and his wife realized the only thing that could take his mind off his trouble was to get him to talk about philosophy. So she and a friend sat through these little talks and, I guess, took notes or these are G’s notes. Apparently, some of the original was unreadable hence the dropped lines indicated in the text. G’s main idea is that the history of philosophy is the story of the step-by-step reduction or narrowing of our conception of what can be accomplished by reason. He can be pretty acerbic. Here he is on Nietzsche:

In order to understand Nietzsche, it is necessary to understand an idea as simple as that of raising cows.

A cattleman is going to try to improve the species in such a way that he will let the weakest cows die and will keep the strongest cows and bulls for breeding.

All of Nietzschean morality finds its basis here.

Then I read the first and last stories in James Purdy’s 63: Dream Palace. Purdy is something else. He works to create a patina of anxious ordinariness that he then ruptures with violence. A young father grapples with his little son, forcing him to spit out something metallic concealed in his mouth. The object turns out to be the father’s wedding ring (the mother/wife had run off with someone else shortly after the boy was born). The boy (he really is little, sleeps with a stuffed crocodile–now that I think of it, that should have been a clue) kicks the father in the balls and leaves him weeping on the carpet.

I went on reading into the morning.

dg

The end of everything as we know it, but then I never made any money out of writing anyway

Feb 112010
 

Here’s a smart piece about the future of book publishing by Susan Piver called “Book Publishers, Stop Scaring me.” I notice posters, pundits and journalists talking about the similarities between publishing now and the music industry just before digital music hit. Piver used to be a music exec. Here‘s her take on Amazon v Macmillan and the history of the music industry.

After this I am going to take a break from the terrifying implications of the meltdown of the publishing industry and think only happy thoughts.

dg

Snowstorms & Croquet

Feb 092010
 

My trip to Amsterdam was delayed due to the poor weather in Philadelphia.  My daughter and I are supposed to leave on Thursday now, for a really fast trip.  I spent the suddenly free afternoon reading Notes Home From a Prodigal Son, (author??) and a few more sections of Eagleton.   I wish I had more to offer on the ongoing Theory discussion, but I’m still catching up with my theoretical knowledge.  I also was reading the article Doug posted from Peter Kalkavage titled, “Four Essays on Writing Sentences.”  Kalkavage is (was?) a professor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD.,  a small liberal arts college directly across the street from the Naval Academy, but light years away in terms of curriculum.  The “Johnnies” and the Midshipmen were the polar opposites of the academic universe, one studying the “Great Books” with no tests or grades, the other (me) studying naval sciences, electrical engineering and four semesters of calculus (and I was a history major!) with rigid academic standards…”2.0 and go”‘ was our motto, but sadly many of my friends failed to meet that meager standard.  I wonder if two more different schools exist in such geographic proximity.   But the Johnnies and the Mids gathered each spring for the annual croquet match.  Both schools organized a team of elegantly dressed athletes and did battle on the lawns of alternating campuses.  The Johnnies were distinguished by an abundance of piercings and facial hair, and the mids, well, were distinguished by the opposite.  (I never played, though I once received a croquet set for Christmas from my godparents.)  I remember thinking that if I could live another life, I would go back to Annapolis, but go to St. John’s College in my next life.  I think VCFA might be close second, minus the croquet match, so this essay really closed the circle of my karmic desires.  Four years at USNA = 1 English lit course.   My hours not learning electrical engineering could have been better spent reading the canon (if one exists) of Western Lit.  Alas, I’m now victim to The Shredder, and all my weaknesses are exposed.   My only, and fleeting, hope for redemption lies in the distant possibility of a faculty vs. student croquet match this summer.  But damn it, I’m going to Slovenia!  Maybe next winter.

—Richard Farrell

A Rainy Weekend in San Diego

Feb 082010
 

On Saturday night, my wife and I went “The Ink Spot,” an artist’s loft in downtown San Diego run by San Diego Writers, Ink.    My friend Tammy Greenwood was reading from her recently released sixth novel, The Hungry Season.    Tammy was my first writing teacher at UCSD and has recently moved back to California from DC.   I used to drive two and a half hours (each way) to attend her classes.  Needless to say, she was/is a very good teacher.  The event was well-attended, especially considering that San Diego was besieged by rain, which usually grinds the city to a halt.  SD Writers, Ink. runs workshops, classes and other literary events on a regular basis out of this converted loft in the artist district downtown.  It was inspiring to walk by studio spaces on a Saturday evening and see a dozen students busy at work.

—Richard Farrell

Strange Juxtapositions: Literary Theory in Aisle 3.

Feb 042010
 

I spent all morning at the USD Law Library with my head buried in Terry Eagleton’s book, Literary Theory.  Really interesting stuff.  Some mind-blowing ideas, like what is literature, or more properly, Literature?   I liked this quote in particular:  “Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.”   And this:  “Literature, by forcing us into a dramatic awareness of language, refreshes these habitual responses and renders objects more ‘perceptible.'”  (He’s paraphrasing Shklovsky’s essay in this quote.)  Then he turns all of these definitions on their heads and begins to show how none of these things can accurately define Literature.  (That’s when my head began to hurt.)  Departing from these lofty heights, I descended to attend to the daily rituals of being a stay-at-home spouse: the chores from my wife.  I spent the next two hours wandering around the grocery store, chanting “Thou still unravished bride of quietness.”  I think I’m still suffering from the post-packet flu.

—Richard Farrell

The Subjectless Subject and the Death of the Author

Feb 032010
 

Funny how ideas seem to develop threads of their own. The theoretical subject is important to writers because it has an impact on ideas of self, soul, character, and society. The subject here is what we used to call the self, Descartes’ thinking self, that which is conscious (of something). More and more it is thought of as a relation and not an thing itself. That’s because it is difficult to imagine being conscious without being conscious of something. Hence consciousness (the subject) somehow resides in the object (the thing you are conscious of). I come into focus the moment you (the Other) are on the scene. This is much like what happens in a story or an essay in which characters come to life as soon as they are in action (relation, conflict) with other characters or society (or some force or rule which begins to define the subject in opposition).

“I don’t think there is actually a sovereign founding subject, a universal form of subject that one might find everywhere. I am very skeptical and very hostile towards this conception of the subject. I think on the contrary, that the subject is constituted through practices of subjection, or, in a more autonomous way, through practices of liberation, of freedom, as in Antiquity, starting of course, from a number of rules, styles and conventions that can be found in the cultural setting.”

Michel Foucault. (1996) [1984]. An Aesthetics of Existence. In Foucault Live. collected Interviews, 1961-1984. Sylvère Lotringer (Ed.). New York: Semiotext(e), p. 452. Translation modified.

In this regard, here’s a link to the famous Roland Barthes’ essay about the Death of the Author.

I got set onto this little meditation looking at Andrew Gallix’s blog. See the blogroll for the site.

I also realize we seem suddenly to be descending into Theory in a big way. Not to worry–it is a temporary fever that will pass.

dg

The subjectless subject & point of view from the point of impossibility: Insomniac obsessions

Feb 022010
 

Interestingly, from the point of view of a writer creating an objective correlative, there are places language can go that are impossible actually to think. They are like Black Holes in the text, haunting, uncanny. Fascinating to contemplate and try to get into a piece of fiction not just theoretical nonfiction as here.

“All theoretical projects require a subject that can conduct the project. At least this is a marker of all successful theoretical projects. One can imagine a theory which cannot be conducted by a subject, but any elucidation of this project would be–in Austin’s terms–infelicitous.” Geoff Wildanger See full post here.

“And this brings me to a possible Lacanian definition of auratic presence: it is simply the fantasm, the fantasm as – for Lacan – an imaginary scenario which stages an impossible scene, something that could only be seen from the point of impossibility.” Slavoj Zizek. See full excerpt from Lacanian Ink here.

dg

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