The Tropes of Tenth Street

The Hunger Games

2012-01-22T10:49:00.000-08:00

I finally, over a period of ten days or so, read Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy (actually I read them interspersed with a reread off Gibbon's Decline and Fall... which made it even more interesting). I really liked them: not for the style, which is unremarkable, but for the plot and ideas--and yes, novels can be good-plot no-style and make a contribution just as a ballplayer can be good-field no-hit and do so. I was intrigued by the clear American Idol metaphor, which obviously has really reached today's generation of children. Kids today are so suffused with competitiveness, whose injunctions to "race to the top," to do well in school as training for adult jostling for money, status, sex, power, all seen in the most quantifiable, calculated terms, much as it is very clear who is the winner or loser in the Hunger Games. I think Laura Miller's analysis really falls short in not understanding that what motivates this sort of response among readers of Collins's trilogy are the fundamental inequalities of neoliberalism, not just a frisson of danger in an overprotected world that, as describes by Miller only describe the most privileged of today's children.

It is interesting to think about the readership of the book, in that, in line with a predominant trend of recent years, it is more female than male, and is perhaps the final seal in the undoing of the stereotype that males like science fiction and fantasy, female readers realistic, domestic narrative. The combination of hairstyles and outfits with hand-to-hand street fighting, and a strong female protagonist Katniss Everdeen, who is highly principled and energetic, speaks to a further undoing of the gender binary in fiction readership that to an extent has been there since the eighteenth century In teaching Eighteenth Century Fiction at Lang last term, and discussing the differently gendered readerships of, say, Fielding and Richardson--, I mentioned this syndrome--the new female readership or genres such as sf, fantasy, historical fiction, military fiction that used ot be exclusively male--and suggested that it represented a 'solution' to issues that had clustered around the novel form since its inception.

Of course, one of Collins’s points is that all the strands that go into the Hunger Games--fashion, war, sports--are various kinds of spectacles, media events, and Collins captures very well her fictional dystopia of Panem's employment of the 'society of the spectacle'. One of the most moving moments in Mockingjay, the third book, is when Beetee from District 3 manages to override the Capitol's propaganda machine and inert counter-propaganda, so it becomes a mode of dueling spectacles, dueling media articulations. Also interesting is the highly 'postmodern' way that the Panem government is at once strengthened and weakened by this media spectacle it uses the Hunger Games to chastise and admonish its victims, but also creates a kind of media fiction that can to a certain extent be 'gamed,' as Katniss and Peeta do by threatening to ingest the berries (a very romantic, Pyramus and Thisbe style moment at the end of the first book, but also a manipulation of the frame of the Hunger games against their devisers).

Subjectively, I liked The Hunger Games much better than Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (and find Katniss far more tolerable as a heroine than Lyra). For one thing, it read easily and was exciting, whereas Pullman's trilogy was very ponderous, burdened not only by his leaden, polemical anti-Christianity but also by his apparent belief that hoary schemata such as the neo-medieval alternate history frame were at all original. I liked The Hunger Games about the same as I did the harry Potter books, but the feel was very different. For one thing, the Harry Potter books had a strong sense of the tug of tradition and were in many ways a testimony to the power of tradition and its institutions, even if these we 'of magic The Hunger Games has none of this, no nostalgia in its future-verse for our own world or certainly for the ancient Roman world it evokes (more on that later0 but hardly sees as idyllic or sustaining. Secondly, I, as a reader, was constantly distracted when reading Harry Potter by my knowledge of Rowling's sources or allusions; obviously, this is not a problem for the primary reader but if not a problem, is certainly at the very least a readerly effect for the secondary reader. In contrast, The Hunger Games read seamlessly. Of course, I thought of other authors--Collins's statement (that she took inspiration fro the story of Theseus and the Minotaur (which I would not have seem unless she had said it) made me think of Mary Renault--further afield, but palpably there, were China Miéville with his use of mutation as a metaphor for social oppression and renewal (the mockingjay as mutated, positively viewed animal could come right out of Perdido Street Station) and Stephen R. Donaldson with his self tormenting protagonists, of which Katniss is a worthy successor. The surname of Katniss Everdeen made me think of Bathsheba Everdene in Thomas Hardy' Far From The Madding Crowd---Katniss is far more admirable than Bathsheba, but both are at the center of a love triangle, and Hardy's somber vision is not far from Collins's. But these literary reverberations were not distracting; and whereas Harry Potter was in a sense a tribute (I guess a loaded word in a Hunger Games context) to the very possibility of allusion, The Hunger Games is far more interested in just telling the story.

The Roman theme is obviously a major one in Collins's trilogy. I like the way Collins waits to explain the origin of the name Panem in the phrase panem et circenses (she does not identify Juvenal as the coiner of this phrase, although she does mention that it was an individual; presumably Juvenal is too nasty even for a dark fantasy, which would have delighted him). But, importantly, she does tell the reader where Panem comes from; she does not just let only the knowing in on the origin. This is a very democratic use of allusion that is empowering to the reader.

Generally when sf/fantasy books evoke Roman themes, there are three valences. One is the 'decline and fall' topos (which made my rereading of Gibbon’s book so apropos) that uses the Roman metaphor to talk about the collapse of an often-unjust empire--the basic conceit of Collins's trilogy is 'the Christians in the catacombs versus the Romans in the forum.’ A second, related, aspect is an idea of America as Rome, a long-established metaphor in American culture recently explored by Cullen Murphy, and certainly Collins's Panem, in so many ways a direct extrapolation of the America of our own time (as some online commentators have noted, no other nation in the Panem universe is ever mentioned) is not far from the writer’s present. But a third aspect is the ready availability of Roman nomenclature to serve as a familiar but other tongue, a different sound, an alternate register. Thus the names in the book are not everyday, but also not totally unfamiliar--Seneca Crane, Plutarch Heavensbee, and perhaps most ingeniously Cinna the stylist.

As the reader can tell, I got very into these books. My one qualm is about the ending of the third book. (Spoiler alert.) I had no qualms about the death of Prim; that is just narrative technique--modifying an essentially happy ending by someone beloved dying at the end--as was the denouement of the marriage plot, Gale obviously being St John Rivers to Peeta's Mr. Rochester. Mot difficult aspect of this sort of book is the transition into a new order--partially because there are such incongruities of scale between the individual effort of our point-of-view characters and the social change prerequisite to or at least concomitant with such an upheaval. For my money, I would much rather have had Coin succeed Snow--notwithstanding her severity and coldness--but then again I spent eight months volunteering for Hillary Clinton, her obvious model, just as George W Bush, one of whose press secretaries was named Snow, is an obvious model for her predecessor. Coin is imperfect, but it is the "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" syndrome--in a fallen world, even the good authorities will have structural resemblance, as political actors, to the bad ones. It is not Collins’s fault that she finds this dilemma difficult to negotiate; it is a problem of the genre; but the metamorphosis of Katniss into an assassin is stretching it a bit. I understand, though, that Collins did not want Katniss to become an 'official' or 'state' figure, and desire dot render her triumph a private one. And of course, no matter who else dies, Buttercup the annoying but indestructible cat (reminds me of some I have known :) ) must survive...

In its infectious readability and its ability to spin an engrossing tale, The Hunger Games provides rich entertainment; in its serious critique of the way our values have run amok, it may well represent a moral turning point.

Chat With An Editor

2011-12-10T08:52:00.000-08:00

Chat With An Editor is a wonderful service, offered each year at the MLA, that offers graduate students and beginning professors the opportunity to confer with editors of major journals in several fields about the questions that arise in submitting and evaluating a learned journal article--how to prepare articles, the nature of the referee process, the state of the field and the relevance of different paradigms and approaches. Please see the schedule of available slots below

CELJ’s “Chat with an Editor” Schedule, MLA Convention, Seattle, Washington
January 6 and 7, 2012
Room 2A, Washington State Convention Center
To reserve a time to speak with an editor, please email Richard Kopley at rxk3@psu.edu.
Thank you!

Fri., Jan. 6           9 a.m., Marshall Brown, MLQ—reserved

                                9:20, Marshall Brown, MLQ--reserved

                                9:40, Marshall Brown, MLQ

                                10, Batya Weinbaum, Femspec

                                10:20, Batya Weinbaum, Femspec

                                10:40, Batya Weinbaum, Femspec

                                11, Caroline Hong, Journal of Transnational American Studies—reserved

                                11:20, Caroline Hong, Journal of Transnational American Studies--reserved

                                11:40, Caroline Hong, Journal of Transnational American Studies

                                12 noon, Jana Argersinger, ESQ and Poe Studies

                                12:20 pm., Jana Argersinger, ESQ and Poe Studies

                                12:40, Jana Argersinger, ESQ and Poe Studies

Sat., Jan. 7           9 a.m., John Bryant, Leviathan

                                9:20, John Bryant, Leviathan

                                9:40, John Bryant, Leviathan

                                10, Nathan Grant, African American Review

                                10:20, Nathan Grant, African American Review

                                10:40, Nathan Grant, African American Review

                                11, Cat Tosenberger, Jeunnesse--reserved

                                11:20, Cat Tosenberger, Jeunnesse

                                11:40, Cat Tosenberger, Jeunnesse

                                12 noon, Malcolm Compitello, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies

                                12:20 p.m., Malcolm Compitello, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies

                                12:40, Malcolm Compitello, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies

Consoling a Cardinal fan on the loss of Albert Pujols

2011-12-09T06:15:00.000-08:00

I wrote to a Cardinal fan: "As a Met fan, having just lost Reyes, I feel very similarly; losing a homegrown player who had really bonded with the fans. I think you do root for the tradition, the retired numbers, the people in the organization (who if you follow a team for a long time you come to know and have a meaningful relationship with). Also, in practice, the Cardinals in 2017 are not going to have t pay a declining Pujols and will have a lot of payroll flexibility. The Cardinals are really one of the three storied franchises in baseball, along with the Dodgers and (ack) the Yankees, and the departure of one player will not change this."

I have had to write a few of these, it is like writing condolence letters when a loved one has died. It is astounding how psychologically important relationships are with these people, whom we have never met, do not affect the practicalities of our lives, but are important to us....

Reading the Other

2011-11-20T13:35:00.000-08:00

I just finished Carol de Dobay Rifelj’s Reading the Other. This is a fascinating book applying the question of how truly we can ever know the world, others, and ourselves to an intriguing mix of novelists--Anglophone popular fiction (Arthur Canon Doyle and Dashiell Hammett), French fiction of intricate psychology (Mérimée, Villiers de L'Isle Adam, and Proust) and a writer who oddly might be said to syncretize the above: Anthony Powell. I paid the most attention to the Powell chapter, but the entire book is worth noting, as an instance of philosophical criticism done rigorously but lucidly, in a way useful for a class. (I occasionally teach The Maltese Falcon, and next time I do I will make sure my students are exposed to Rifelj's analysis of Sam Spade and his "incapacity to trust"). Rifelj is to some extent a disciple of Stanley Cavell, and, through him, Wittgenstein, but what I liked about her work is that, unlike the first and popular costructions of the second, she does not see skepticism or the evincing or encouraging of radical doubt as inherently limiting to our ability to live in community sometimes we need, precisely to sustain ourselves as a community, a sense of enigma, encryption, the asymptotic: some ties, as Robert Frost put it (meaning to operate in the realm of epistemology as well as property) "Good fences make good neighbors." Private mysteries and the public weal can sometiems fruitfully co-exist.

Although I recommend the entire book, I am going to concentrate on Rifelj's treatment of Powell, the author with whom I have been most concerned with professionally.

I think Powell himself would have very much liked being in a book largely devoted to French writers, especially Proust, the one writer who he openly acknowledged as a model. I think Powell would have also appreciated how the theme of other people, how much we can ever really know them, and the cognitive uncertainty attendant on that is both in itself an interesting philosophical problem and a manifest theme in Powell’s works. One does not feel a philosophical agenda is larded over the characters of Dance, but that Rifelj is reading the philosophical implications of Jenkins’s musings of how much we can ever know about the lives (marriages, goals, hopes, inner promptings) of others. (Again, one has to say that Rifelj is one of the few critics to deploy the theories of Cavell without becoming a captive to them and without seeing skepticism; as the enemy; she concludes her analysis of Powell by saying Powell’s goal is not to overcome skepticism but to help us to live with it, which is refreshing given that when most critics mention Cavell they seem to want to force us into a homey, prematurely consensual post-skepticism). She shows how Jenkins, and the narrative he marshals, is curious about others but not pruriently so, wants to know as much as possible about others but respects their essential mystery. I think Rifelj’s book is very welcome in Powell studies since it is not just a guidebook, but also a treatment of a specific, complex theme in which Powell is seen as on a par with other great writers. As said before, that it is in a comparative and transnational literary context makes it all the more valuable. To my mind, Rifelj exceeds Robert Selig’s nonetheless fine and valuable narratological study published at about the same time, Time and Anthony Powell, in that, whereas Selig ingeniously analyzed the text’s narrative modes in the style of Gérard Gentte, Rifelj, who also cites Genette's work on Proust, sees the cognitive implications of those modes. (For another book that discusses the cognition of rhetoric, see Raphael Lyne's excellent new book on Shakespeare and cognition). For instance when Rifelj mentioned “second-degree speculation,” when Jenkins cites what other people say about still other people, she does not just note it as a procedure but shows how that technique impacts our sense of how other people are known. Rifelj explicitly distances herself from seeing Dance as social history, but given the importance of gossip—what we say about others and to what degree it is true—her speculations on how we can ever possibly know others provides the basis for seeing how the sequence’s social history works.

As with any good piece of criticism, Rifelj’s treatment of Powell made me recognize aspects of the text I had not noticed before, What Rifelj, following John Russell (the literary critic, not the art critic) calls “dialogue scrolls”—those five to ten line exchanges of staccato, stichomythic dialogue so characteristic of Powellian conversatiins--are particularly exemplified in Jenkins’s relationship with Jean Templer. In reading Rifelj's quotation of them, I realized a) Jenkins often has similar dialogue scrolls with his eventual wife, Isobel b) although very similar in form, they are very different in tone, and that tells us something about why one relationship failed and the other succeeded, information that, as Rifelj points out, is not at all manifest in the text due to Jenkins’s reserve and reticence. In addition, it was not until Rifeljs' analysis of Pendry's suicide that I realized both Pendry and, in the next book, Biggs killed themselves during the war. This not only testifies to the emotional ravages or wartime pressures—and makes Powell into a more nuanced and tragic observer of war than is usually thought—but also intersperses the ‘mobilized’ deaths—the deaths of people like Priscilla and Chips Lovell that tally with the narratives overall frame—with less mobilized, more random deaths, as if even tragedies are divided into events which fit into a pattern and those which, cruelly do not.

To look again at the company into which Rifelj placed Powell, to take Mérimée, Proust, Conan Doyle, and Hammett together, one gets a group of writers that are both storytellers and philosophers, diagnosing in different ways the mysteries of life. Rifelj's work (which I was unaware of until Joe Trenn of The Bookshed mentioned it to me, and which thus I lamentably failed to include in the bibliography of Understanding Anthony Powell) is just the kind of work on Powell we should be seeing more of--not an introductory overview, unafraid to go outside his immediate social and generational context to put the writer up against more transverse and broadening contents. I regret Rifelj, who taught French at Middlebury and died in 2010, never had a chance to attend an Anthony Powell Society meeting or conference. But her work is major, and it will continue to reverberate henceforward.

Anthony Powell's Afternoon Men

2011-11-06T13:17:00.000-08:00

I feel I have come to a more 'lyrical' view of what Powell himself thought was his most 'lyrical' novel--one which gets to the heart of what’s afoot in the book rather than skips and starts in response to the many distractions that a book so short surprisingly offers. Does the author approve of 'afternoon men' or not? And is he an 'afternoon man?' We know what an afternoon man is, someone (as indicated in the quote from Robert Burton, a seventeenth-century author just, in the early 1930s, beginning to be noticed again in the wake of the new, post-Eliotic interest in that century) who is lazy (but not deliberately so), hedonistic (but not foolishly so), and aimless, although, as Powell himself said of his Third at Oxford, without the reassurance to having worked hard to have an aim. Roughly, it is a synonym for "Bright Young Things." It is one of four of Powell's novels--Agents and Patients, The Military Philosophers, Temporary Kings being the other, about a 'set' of people. (The Kindly Ones does not qualify, as Furies are presumably not 'people'). In all four cases, I would argue, Powell's stance towards that set is observant, not judgmental, neither propagandizing for or against the set, merely registering it as a part of life. Yet part of the book's tacit mission is "generational": the young first novelist recently down from Oxford and living a bohemian life in Shepherd's Market, taking stock of his own generation, as with most accused by its elders of being slack and having thrown out too many of the previous cohorts' absolutes.

Most times it is fairly clear, when a novel has a title denoting a set of people, whether the author is or is not included in the set. Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans is obvious; Kerouac was a subterranean. So is C. P. Snow's The New Men: Snow was a new man. On the other hand, Dostoyevsky was certainly not one of the possessed (or the devils), although insightful enough to know their psychology. Nor was Balzac one of the Chouans, although there is historical distance involved. Throughout his career, Powell seems to want to avoid the sort of novel that delves into the depths of a single character. But how to create a point of view and also describe a set of people? Dance proffers the ultimate Powellian solution to this, but the experimentation towards this goal begins in Afternoon Men.

But it is unclear whether the novel means to celebrate afternoon men, excoriate them, rib them, or something in-between. The novel clearly shows the influence of Hemingway and a generally stripped-down, austere syntax. Whereas John Galsworthy and Hugh Walpole and Somerset Maugham were clearly the next step on from the Victorian novel, as in a different, and less admitted, way were E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf. Powell's style, though, is not just a further step, another generation down, of the sort that can be seen in the work of Snow and of Sir Angus Wilson, who remain in recognizable, continuous touch with Victorian modes. With this novel, there is deliberate severance. The social tableau has been atomized into shards and fragments, and at the end of the book is still not remotely put together. When Powell does re-stitch the fabric in Dance, it has been totally disassembled and reassembled. This is how and why Dance is not just a slightly later Forsyte Saga, and why Jenkins cannot share General Liddament's love of Trollope.

There is no nineteenth-century omniscience in Afternoon Men, no general assertions about society or life. In a sense, the book is reportage, not opinion or summation, and none of the other prewar novels have quite this quality of reporting on a 'scene.' In a sense, there is more naturalism here than elsewhere in Powell's 1930s oeuvre, although comic and/or metafictive elements, such as Pringle's reappearance after his presumed death, the Wodehousian quality of names like Nosworth, militate against this.

Two longstanding critical questions can now be seen as conclusively settled: the book is not anti-Semitic; just because Verelst is said to be a Jew does not mean the author who created him is anti-Semitic. Indeed, Atwater--not any overarching narrator, but Atwater, the man who did not get the girl, concludes that Verelst deserves Susan, at least to an extent. The only mildly anti-Semitic remark is made by Mr. Nunnery, an older man of a stodgier generation, not particularly thrilled to see his daughter go off with a Jew, and Atwater’s even milder assent to that may just be to get through the conversation with this difficult old chap. In the first printing, 'jew,' along with all other adjectives, was not capitalized in e. e. cummings style, but that does not make it anti-Semitic either. Similarly, when Fotheringham speaks of wanting to find "something that brings me into touch with people who really mattered, authors and so on," this is clearly the final form of the line in the Writer’s Notebook to the effect that "I want to meet Chesterton, Belloc, writers who count"--exempting Powell from the conclusion of having had Roman Catholic tendencies otherwise unevidenced (which some reviewers of Writer's Notebook thought he was actually professing.) In other words, this phrase was meant to be dialogue (given to a minor character, Fotheringham), not avowed utterance. In general, Afternoon Men is ideologically uncommitted--in a way that Dance is not--and books and ideas do not play a large role in the character's lives, even though several are involved in publishing or the arts. We are far from the elevated, intellectually plugged-in world of Powell's postwar sequence.

The most important difference between Afternoon Men and Dance, though, is that Dance is a first-person retrospective narrative by someone who has 'gotten the girl', Afternoon Men a limited, third-person account of someone who has not 'gotten the girl.' The book is an intense chronicle of unrequited and futile love from the point of view of a character who experiences little but futility in his life. "And so she was gone, ridiculous, lovely creature, absurdly hopeless and impossible love who was and always had been so far away. Absurdly lovely, hopeless creature who was gone away so that he would never see her again and would only remember her as an absurdly hopeless love." The repetition here captures both clinical distance (as in the manner of Hemingway and even Gertrude Stein) and melancholy abandonment, as this is just how someone suddenly desolated in love would muse and mourn. Susan Nunnery is comparable to Barbara Goring in Dance; but as compared to the portrait of Barbara there is far more of a wistfulness, even at times a passion, about how Susan is evoked. For all the book's stoic detachment, and all its complete eschewal of melodrama or self-pity, these emotions are vividly present, and, for all the Cubist or Art Deco style of the characters--surface-oriented, parodic, mordant, well captured by, sixty years apart, both the Misha Black and Susan Macartney-Snape covers--there is real feeling here. Some of this feeling is redolent of the book's immediate precursor, Michael Arlen's The Green Hat, whose finest quality is a delicate, bittersweet lyricism. But Powell's more severe style makes it different here. The lyricism, though, is in sharp contrast to the acrid, bitter tone of Powell's great contemporary, Evelyn Waugh, who in books like the brilliant Vile Bodies and Decline and Fall mounted one of the few twentieth-century satiric efforts to truly merit the Swiftian tag of saeva indignatio. Waugh's fiery, early books, it must be said, are far more laugh-out-loud funny than Powell's reserved ironies, although Afternoon Men does have the hilarious set-piece of Pringle's 'death.'

Afternoon Men has a great many characters for such a short novel. Scheigan, Verelst, Atwater, Pringle, Dr. Crutch, Nosworth, Lola, Trimble, Susan Nunnery, George Nunnery, Barlow, Wauchop, Spurgeon, Brisket, Naomi Race, not to mention the nameless Welshman and Czech. This is a far broader set of characters than the other prewar novels have, especially since there is no real distinguishing, Atwater and perhaps Pringle and Susan aside, between 'major' and 'minor,' background and foreground. In the breadth of characters, Powell was gesturing to the wide social canvas eventually achieved in Dance, and indeed Powell's comment, in the Journals, that Afternoon Men (presumably more than the other four prewar novels) was the germ of Dance must take its bearing from this aspect. In general, Afternoon Men seems to have been an important book for Powell, as much so as any of the subsequent 1930s novels; it was not simply a novice's first effort, but an indicative formulation of Powell's early idiom, as analyzed by Powell's first, highly percipient critic, Geoffrey Uther Ellis (in Twilight on Parnassus). Even in his late Journals, Powell was still thinking and musing about this book written in his mid-twenties.

Here is a photo of my more than slightly foxed original 1970s paperback; I can say I have been reading this book for well over three decades. It is in very much a mass-market format; on the back pages, many other novelists are advertised (including my mother's romance-writing college classmate, Susan Hufford) but of these Anne Tyler is the only one that can be considered at all high-literary, the rest romance or gothic or adventure writers. This shows that the early Powell books were, in the 1970s, thought to have potential to sell well and to please a wide audience in the United States, though I am not sure on what basis (perhaps people who liked Upstairs, Downstairs or The Forsyte Saga on TV--but the bohemian London of Afternoon Men is a far cry, and not only temporally, from the core Edwardian milieu of both of these). I doubt this 1970s reprint of Afternoon Men sold more than moderately well at best. Again we are back to the most salient feature of early Powell--that it is not Galsworthy, and in fact eschews the Galsworthian social canvas even more than Dance did. This is perhaps why some readers of Powell's generation or the subsequent one, such as the late Sir Frank Kermode, preferred the prewar novels, in their austerity and irony, to Dance.

Mobility Shifts

2011-10-20T12:49:00.000-07:00

I had to miss far too much of the Mobility Shifts conference (yes, I know, it had a fancier title). organized last week at the New School by my colleague Trebor Scholz. But I did see John Willinsky's talk on open access, and workshop, Cecilia Rubino's wonderful play (featuring my former student Brian Lewis), the panel on the scribal; and the digital featuring Michael Pettinger, Dan Visel, and Elaine Savory, Henry Jenkins and Liz Losh's dialogue on participatory culture, and some of the Policy Day sessions featuring Obama administration officials including Asst. Sec'y Eduardo Ochoa (I was most impressed both by the innovativeness of their policies and the intelligence of the personnel enacting them). It was a very inspiring conference and I was particularly pleased by the sense that the liberating expansiveness of digital possibility is being manifested in a very specific socio-economic world still dominated by neoliberalism.

Willinsky's point was that people have been afraid of open access because of proprietary reasons and fears about devaluing information by making it too available. Ingeniously, Willinsky turned to John Locke and utilized Locke’s theory that the only way value is added to property is through the owner improving it (a backbone assumption of the US Homestead laws in the nineteenth century, I might add). As intellectual capital, argued Willinsky, is gained by disseminating work—not by letting it, as it were, remain in the bank and collect interest—so it goes ot waste unless it is communicated. Open access allows academics to maximize the value of their work; it really is a form of capital investment. As much exposure can be gained by publishing one's articles on a free e-journal maintained by a university liberty as a journal behind a pay wall such as those maintained by Taylor and Francis, Reed Elsevier, and so on….

I asked Willinsky, this may be all very well and good, but what about tenure and promotion? Recent cases at various universities with which I am familiar have shown that administrations still tend to value very traditional channels—a book from Oxford, a book from Cambridge-and as exciting and genuinely efficient in information distribution as free library e-journals might be, one can’t see them counting for tenure as much as an article in (in my field) PMLA or ELH. Willinsky's answer centered around increasing awareness and reminding the administrations that they also are stakeholders in any gain to be made from an o-en-information discursive realm, but certain troglodytic administrations may, I am afraid remain unconvinced.

Jenkins and Losh were both great, discussing how 'participatory culture' (a term made famous by Jenkins) could manifest itself in public schools and highly institutionalized universities. Although Jenkins was billed as the advocate of popular culture, Losh of critical theory, there was not much daylight between them; they both gave a realistic sense of pervasive possibility in familiarizing teachers and students with new learning structures. Streamlined textual poaching, perhaps? My own colleagues, Pettinger and Savory, were both outstanding, both commenting on moments of transition between writing technologies, with orality not far from the background: Franciscus Junius’s seventeenth-century editing of an Anglo-Saxon manuscript into a printed book and Kamau Brathwaite’s shift from composing his experimental Caribbean epics with a typewriter to a computer, which led Brathwaite to develop his ‘video’ style’. Visel talked of computer pioneer Ted Nelson, to a degree like Brathwaite a cranky visionary who has tread an eve more solitary path as he grows older.

The policymakers on Saturday were, again, all outstanding, and made one feel the Obama administration’s achievements were not being trumpeted. (As did the scandalously low attendance, although partially explained by concurrent sessions). Richard Culotta of the Senate Suzanne Hall of the Sate Department and Hal Plotkin of the Department of Education (who was very funny) all illustrated, in concrete, non-euphoric ways, how digital communication is enhancing opportunities and possibilities, both here and abroad, There was no sense that the internet was a mantra that would solve all our problems, or would be seamlessly tied in with an ever-triumphant neoliberalism: where the discourse went wrong in the 1990s. It was good to see the New School’s own president, David Van Zandt, there exchanging ideas very nimbly with Secretary Ochoa, which augurs well both for the New School’s integration into the wider educational world and for the capacity of the university to maximize its greatest wealth—the intellects associated with it.

This panel also discussed the issue of open badges,” which had come up earlier at the Losh/Jenkins panel. At first, I somewhat misunderstood this term, thinking this meant people who wanted to attend conferences affiliated with specific institutions and could do so without obtaining credentials, much on the order of Willinsky's open access arguments. In fact it meant something different: a program, spearheaded by Mozilla, to credential people, as refereed by a team of volunteer experts, as having put together knowledge in specific areas, thus qualifying them for jobs and promotion and professional advancement without having to pass through the mesh of a specific prestigious or hallowed institution. This is wonderful in its non-hierarchical and democratic aims. It has the potential to empower people worldwide. As with Willinsky and open access, though, I feel open badges may work very well in a truly meritocratic sphere like technology, but in the humanities, where meritocracy and sociocultural capital have always coexisted, challenging the credentialing effect of e g. Ivy League or Oxbridge institutions is a habit that will die hard. I am all for it, but realize that an open badges approach would require a redefinition of the humanities in the direction of total meritocracy, which as of now certainly does not prevail, at least in the US and UK, where the place you go to school still matters.

I love the Internet, but I am honestly an outsider to discussions of digital culture, and for all that I enjoyed the conference I still felt disconcerted at times by the corporate sponsorship, the insider-y talk of personalities and filiations, and the comparative lack of emphasis (the Savory/Pettinger panel being an exception) on analyzing texts. I am very curious about these things, though, and this will be shown over the next few months as I turn over my CELJ responsibilities to Cheryl Ball of Illinois State, one of the foremost advocates of open access and the Internet in literary studies, and as, at the Seattle MLA, I introduce Kathleen Fitzpatrick of Pomona, the MLA's head of Scholarly Communications, for our CELJ keynote address. Listening to the talks at Mobility Shifts, I see I do a lot of the things in the classroom that people were talking bout, even if I did not know them by their designated terms of art. One issue that I almost brought up before the public policy panel: I worry that a lot of our classroom practices are residual. As I observed in 2009, our online teaching is not always fully online, and certainly our on-site teaching is not; we assign print books to our students, are encouraged to place bookstore orders. Why do we need to? Is not everything either free on the Web or downloadable to an e-reader for less than the cost of the physical book? I am all for preserving the physical book as a communicative mode, but, as I explained to Joseph Owens of Grey Sparrow a few weeks back, I see no need to be wedded to teaching Shakespeare in a cheap Signet edition when one can teach him online. I am not labeling those who continue to use physical books as Luddites, just stating that we need to own these practices, do what we would if the university was starting off from scratch. What is the point of recent developments both in literary theory and technology—recent meaning say from 1970—if we keep on assigning Signet paperbacks and handing out print syllabi? The slogans and formulations are great; if it is truly worthwhile for the reality to catch up with them, then we should start moving….

The Henry VI plays

2011-10-18T10:40:00.000-07:00

In the midst of all the hubbub of Mobility Shifts (to be blogged about eventually) and of teaching three classes and doing who knows what else, I took three hours or so to see the New School for Drama's production of an abridged version of the three Henry VI plays. These are famously under-discussed in Shakespeare criticism; the late plays have an entire critical apparatus about them, centered around ideas of 'romance' and more recently 'late style,' ideas that can encompass even plays of debated quality and authorship like The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII. Early Shakespeare, by contrast, has little constituency, despite some classic treatments by scholars such as Theodore Weiss; although the early comedies, A Comedy of Errors and Two Gentlemen of Verona, have thrived in performance (and musical adaptation) they have not always attracted the most rigorous criticism. The Henry VI trilogy does not even have the crowd--pleasing aspect of these comedies. Full of referents--people, places, contexts--that still meant something to Shakespeare’s audience, where the times described were on more distant than those of the 1880s re to us, but that mean little even to the most historically acculturated. Whereas Shakespeare’s other history plays can get by on their psychology and dramatic action and a sprinkling of knowledge, the Henry VI plays cannot. And this is after Shakespeare has smoothed to the chronology considerably by not including, in the material covered by the third play, Warwick’s turnabout and Henry VI's brief re-ascension of the throne.

Moreover, Henry VI is such an uncharismatic figure--sickly, pious without really being holy, somebody whose inability to effectively occupy the space of the monarchy allows for the excessive sway of the regent, Humphrey of Gloucester, in the first play; the rebellion of the peasant leader Jack Cade in the second; and the rebellion of the Duke of York and his offspring in the third play, couched in terms of legitimacy (that become increasingly mechanistic, as every royal aspirant whom somebody or other does not like is deemed illegitimate and a usurper, slightly in the manner of the Obama 'Birther' controversy) but in fact conceived in terms of competence. if Henry VI had been competent, the Yorkist cause would have had no place to stand; it is not comparable e.g. to the Carlist cause in the Spanish nineteenth century which was certainly based on legitimacy.

Thus one cannot cast Brad Pitt as Henry IV; one wither has to have an ineffectual-looking male actor or a female, which also raises interesting issues of gender politics, The director of the new School production, Casey Biggs (who I saw, superbly, play Claudius in the 2009 Theater for a New Audience Hamlet (with Christian Camargo as Hamlet) uses nontraditional casting both to comment on the King’s inherent unkingliness and also to make the tableau more dynamic, make it less historical and more dramatic. The bare- Butoh-influenced staging and the sense both of bleak despair and dark melancholy the stage's white tableau suggested added to a deracination necessary to take the play out of a strict referentiality. Surprisingly the abridgment into a manageable three hours' traffic did not damage the play appreciably; its three parts--that centering of Humphrey’s regency and the slow war of attrition, elevated by the stunning, unpredictably emergence of Joan of Arc, that made the formerly heroic English invasion of France into a quagmire, that centering on Jack Cade’s rebellion; and that centering on the Lancaster-York rivalry--were intact. The Cade play has always been my and most critics' favorite, and its cadences and attitudes are noticeably Shakespearean, so much so that, admittedly intuitively, I do not think he had a collaborator for it, I see it is largely by Shakespeare’s own hand. Not only are the humorous byplay and linguistic riffing on the dramatic situation consummately Shakespearean--and absent in plays I consider falsely ascribed to Shakespeare such as Edward III—but Shakespeare’s skepticism of the fickleness of the crowd and populist leader’s seen in plays such as Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Troilus and Cressida, is manifest here. It is too much, though, to say Shakespearean takes the side of King against peasant, the establishment versus anarchy. He recognizes that the ineffectuality of the king is what has provoked this, and generally that the reign of Henry VI, with its inexorable slide from the glories of Agincourt into civil strife and desuetude, is some sort of karmic payback for the arrogance of the English monarchy’s overreaching in its claim to the French throne. Moreover, he is worried about the anti-intellectualism of Cade’s populism, with its desire to kill off all the lawyers and clerics, worried that a rage against the establishment will kill off high culture as well. Cade himself is confused about his relationship to the establishment, being a populist leader proud that his father was a bricklayer, yet simultaneously claiming descent from Edward III and the status of Ear of Mortimer. Cade challenges the personnel of the monarchical institution, but not the idea of monarchy--he does not have the imagination to do it, and in all the above plays Shakespeare's biggest critique of the crowd over and above its caprice and inconstancy, is its lack of imagination.

The New School production, which had begun with reciting the “O for a muse of fire’’ invocation of heavy V, ended with the scowling Richard of York, made no happier by his brother’s ascension to the throne, snarling, "Now is the winter of our discontent….” Although Edward, as the legitimate son of the Duke of York, inherits the throne which would have been his father's had not the Lancastrians gotten to him, Richard, in the last part of 3 Henry VI, asserts that he has the same name as his father, so is in some sense the real heir. Legitimacy has been boiled down to a farrago of interlocking and almost nonsensical assertions; the genie that has been taken out of the bottle by the overthrow of Richard II cannot be re-sealed; the very idea of royal legitimacy has been splintered into a multitude of improvable claims. By showing us the arc of history between Shakespeare’s toe most famous history plays, Biggs and the New School for Drama actors have shown us how daring it was for Shakespeare to write these plays, among the first depicting an attested historical event in English drama (thus going very much up against the Aristotelian tradition), and how they should receive far more attention in the context of Shakespeare’s overall achievement.

Eulogy for Samuel Menashe

2011-10-16T05:24:00.000-07:00

I first heard of Samuel Menashe in the mid-1980s through reading British poetry periodicals such as PN Review and Agenda. I was struck by the way articles in these periodicals referred to a living American poet I had not heard of as if he were already part of the firmament, already integrated into the fabric of universally assumed references. When the University of Maine Press released his Collected Poems in 1986, i bought them and became familiar with his work. As a consequence of this, in 1991, when I was asked to write for an anthology on poems more or less of my own choosing, I chose Samuel's poem "Curriculum Vitae"

Scribe out of work
At a loss for words
Not his to begin with
The man life passed by
Stands at the window
Biding his time.

Time and again.
And now once more
I climb these stairs
Unlock this door
No name where I live
alone in my lair
With one bone to pick
And no time to spare.

I knew that this poem referred to Menashe's fifth-floor walkup, where, the British poet and critic Donald Davie had put it, he lived "alone and frugally." Little did I know that,in the course of cleaning out Menashe's papers, I myself would Mount those five flights of stairs hundreds and hundreds of times.

I later published two more essays on Samuel's work (four in total, but two more before I met him). Yet, as Samuel contantly reminded me, I made no attempt to contact him. Just as Samuel, when young in Paris after the Second World War, never even thought he would meet a poet, yet alone become one, at that point I did not see that any poet I wrote on would want to be contacted by me. We were finally introduced in 2002 through the agency of a senior American author (you can work out who she is from the context, since I have provided the gender) who suggested to a retired literary critic who had taught at CUNY that a new article be written on Menashe's work, that he was still underrated even though his recent omnibus volume The Niche Narrows had received very positive notice. I met Samuel in December 2002 and wrote a long piece about him for The Hollins Critic.
I never thought Samuel and I would become friends, he was forty years older than I was (though, perhaps significantly, born in a -5 year--1925--like me, and for that matter, Anthony Powell, about whom I was writing at the time, was born in a -5 year as well, 1905). Yet Samuel and I developed such a rapport that we would talk several times a week and would meet usually once a week or every two weeks to see a literary event. (Samuel set the record both for going to literary events in New York and for getting autographed books signed. He is the Cal Ripken Jr or the Joe DiMaggio of these records; they will not be broken). I also became, along with his friends of far longer standing, a principal interlocutor of his new poetry, including some of the most exciting of his 'ultimate poems,' which I got to see in their meticulous working-out. Here is 'Rue':

For what I did

And did not do

And do without

In my old age

Rue, not rage

Against that night

We go into,

Sets me straight

On what to do

Before I die—

Sit in the shade,

Look at the sky.

Here is a recording of Samuel reading the poem. It feels eerie to hear his voice, so strong and confident; this would have been in 2006 or so, before he became ill and frail; I am still used to the ill,frail Samuel, but tend to forget that until 2009 or so he was still at the height of his vigor, not, as goes the Dylan Thomas line alluding to in that poem, going gently at all into that good night.

But my friendship with Samuel was not one-sided or confined to his own poetry. We talked about poetry, the Bible, literature in general, politics. He was often a crucial backchannel reader or editor of my own work, at first the subsequent essays I wrote on his poetry, then, as I became increasingly ware of his intellectual breadth--Samuel loved the word 'breadth'--and learning on virtually every aspect of my work. As I will come back to later, the man was not just a great poet but also an intellectual.

I was very privileged to know Samuel in the years he finally got his due recognition; the Neglected Master award from the Poetry Foundation in 2004; regular publication in the premier little magazines of our day; increasing awe and respect from younger writers such as the award-winning novelist Colum McCann, who inscribed a short story of his to Samuel with these words: "We have taken our voice from yours." As much as Samuel was wont to rue his earlier lack of recognition, he understood what a gift and a miracle his being loved and respected in his own lifetime was; after all, none of his great idols among the poets of the past two centuries--William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins--had received anything like this.

I think that God, or whatever agency you prefer to impute these things to, placed me in Samuel’s life when he needed me; both when his career was finally becoming as spectacular as it should always have been, and when he needed logistical help of the sort I, being relatively young and geographically proximate was able to provide. It was wonderful for me to be able to give help and care in a way that I think mattered.

(For more of the eulogy you will have to come to the memorial service at the Synagogue for the Arts. 49 White St (two blocks south of Canal, west of Broadway), Thursday, October 27, at 7 PM.

Tranströmer

2011-10-07T05:33:00.000-07:00

I am very surprised that the selection of Tomas Tranströmer as this year’s Nobel laureate in literature is at all controversial. Tranströmer has been well known to followers of poetry for over thirty-five years, since Robert Bly translated him in the 70s. (It may have even been the 60s). These posts by Teju Cole and David Ulin sum up his virtues very well, but I was surprised by some of the detractors. Of course there are always those upset when an American does not win or when an author is not a household name, but, in the latter case, these critics never seem sated when a household name--and Mario Vargas Llosa, Doris Lessing, the late Harold Pinter, J. M. Coetzee, V. S. Naipaul, and Orhan Pamuk are that in the world of highbrow letters--do win.

Posts such as Tim Parks's strangely (for such an accomplished writer) misunderstand the nature of the prize. The prize is not primarily for writers under fifty; it is not about potential or the best book of the year. It takes the longer view, and that is its value; it is designed not to succumb to the trends of the moment, but to weigh writers and have a conversation about them. This countercultural tendency is the finest thing about the prize. If it just rewarded the trends of the culture now, many prizewinners would look very bad thirty years from now, as is true of the book-centered prizes for national literatures. Even as is, some Noble choices inevitably look hackneyed or dated, even ones made with the best of intentions. If the Nobel were redesigned along the lines of the Booker, as Parks seems to want, it would be even more so.

I also do not understand the criticism of the Swedish Academy giving it to a Swede. Is the idea that Swedes should be ineligible Or that just because some Swedes won it early on who did not deserve it deserving Swedes now should have to atone for this? A great writer in Swedish (albeit a Finnish Swede), Bo Carpelan, died a few years back without ever having won the prize, and if he were not Swedish speaking his chances would have been much better. Tranströmer himself, at 80, was near to this fate as well. Two generations have passed since a Swede won it, and it is clear that it was the quality of the work that was being honored and indeed the judges if anything had qualms about awarding it to a Swede. I wonder why some critics are anti-Swedish or anti-Tranströmer? Do they see his having worked (before his illness) as a prison psychiatrist as too social-programy, too much like water flouridation? Is it because they are people of the Right and still see Sweden as a socialist welfare state? Under the leadership of Fredrik Reinfeldt it is hardly that now....

Tuncel's Genealogy of the Spectacle

2011-10-01T10:00:00.000-07:00

My New School colleague Yunus Tuncel has just published a groundbreaking book, Towards a Genealogy of Spectacle. This handsomely produced book (Eye Corner Press) is important because Tuncel rehabilitates the spectacle from two species of opprobrium: social and aesthetic. Social, because, as Tuncel points out, modern authoritarian leaders have exploited mythic patterns and symbols in a crypto-populist way that the ancient world did not itself understand, but which tropes from antiquity provided a powerful substrate for their noxious propaganda, in which "myth becomes convoluted and confounded with nationhood" (77). Moreover, the absorption of the spectator in the spectacle (the two words interestingly aligned much as Paul Kottman, another New School colleague, has pointed out with respect to 'theory' and 'theater') has been unfashionable ever since the Russian Formalists, with their 'laying bare the device', and Brecht, with his "alienation effect." Really the idea of the spectacle today is confined, as Tuncel says, to the most banalized spheres, such as Disney shows and the Super Bowl. (Even in contemporary sports, the spectacle is being pierced, as in the case of Moneyball, one of whose effects is to 'lay bare the device' of what actually goes on in baseball, rather than to just look at the 'spectacle’ of on field play. Indeed, as a former student of mine showed in her senior thesis a few years ago, the behind-the-scenes quality of Moneyball (the book) had a plausible alignment with beyond-formalism quality of many postmodern aesthetic theories. Tuncel, one of whose great interests is sports history, would presumably not take this aside too amiss--or the observation that, if they lived today, Aeschylus would be a Yankee fan, Sophocles a Met fan, Aristophanes a Cub fan, Euripides a Tampa Bay Ray fan.

So spectacle needs to be rescued. How does Tuncel propose to rescue it? In short, staccato bursts of argument--their aphoristic quality reminiscent of Wittgenstein, Pascal, or the Nietzsche of The Twilight of the Idols--Tuncel resuscitates the spectacle. Far from being reliable and absorptive, true spectacle is risky in its hypersensible self-sufficiency, ecstatic (e g. 'standing outside of', not just 'blissful') its existence as pure metaphoricity rather than something which seeks to refer, affirmatively or subversively to something else. Ecstasy represents a kind of lay spirituality, intense yet unmoored, fulfilling yet chaotic. Ecstasy provides the heedlessness that unbinds the spectacle from self-sufficiency. "Spectacle does not represent something outside itself, but is a unique occurrence in time and space" (67). Tuncel is anti- or post-Aristotelian; but not totally so. His 'unity of spectacle' (26) takes its place in the sundry alternate unities that have been employed to widen, but not entirely supplant, Aristotle’s theory of mimesis. But Tuncel does not want us just to stand in awe of the spectacle or murmur genteel or even not-so-genteel effusions about it. (It is this light that he strategically does not discuss the natural sublime, or any form of extra-human or extra-aesthetic spectacle). Getting back to sports, Tuncel reminds us that, in ancient Greece, spectacle and agon has an intimate kinship, as Greek theater and poetry were manifested in competitions, contended for prizes. In a way, today these two strands have been separated: when artists win prizes, it is only about money and cultural capital, there is no art itself in the winning of the prize, as opposed to 'that quantity which wins the prize'. That a spectacle is manifested as part of a competition renders irrelevant the most vexing aspect of the spectacle, its seeming inertness and impenetrability.

Another way Tuncel goes against the grain here is in preconceiving the theory of response to the spectacle, which since Aristotle has been a subject of considerable ambiguity. it is understood, for instance, that catharsis requires an audience to complete it, that it cannot just unfold in a mute artifact without an audience, like Keats' Grecian urn. On the other hand, though, few would want to label Aristotle an audience-response theorist; he is seen above all as a theorist of the work of the art-object as work. Tuncel, though, widens the sphere of effects from the conscious to the unconscious--thus in a way the thinker who can most explain the element of audience response in Aristotle is Freud--or at the very least Nietzsche. Tuncel indicates that a mediating factor between the unconscious and the conscious is what might be called the proprioceptive, an orientation of the spectator to the spectacle in terms of space and place. The theater or arena, Tuncel implies, embody an ideal mediation of these two factors: architectural spectacle, on the other hand, risks careening towards the unipolar, a conscious display of splendor and visibility, that evokes the name Tuncel, in a highly Nietzschean way, sues as his bête noire of bad spectacle throughout—the music of Richard Wagner. In the wake of the debate about the World Trade Center site and the highly visible role of architecture s trope for both mourning and national reassertion, this is a very needed reminder. Tuncel suggests we replace architecture in our idea of the typical spectacle with the artistic movement—he proffers the example of Surrealism—that, whether or not its actual products operate in the mode of the spectacle (as Tuncel sagely recognizes all art does not), indicate in the public display of the very nature of art the most outstandingly brave aspects of spectacular manifestation.

What I like most about Tuncel's book is how he reminds us of the humility of the ancient Greek dramatists. Even what we might see today as something vaunting and narcissistic--that they competed for prizes--public-spiritedness and humility. Every time I teach Greek drama, my class and I struggle with how these works are so ‘universal’; without cliché, Tuncel comes very close to indicating why and how this is so.

Anthony Powell's From A View to A Death

2011-10-01T03:19:00.000-07:00

My old 1970s paperback finally having worn out, I purchased from Joe Trenn's Bookshed, in Benson, Vermont, a 1960s Heinemann hardcover of Anthony Powell’s From A View to a Death, and have just completed rereading it. Having done so, I sees that I missed a lot in my account of the novel in Understanding Anthony Powell. (I think I generally missed a lot about the prewar books there). I stand by my primary point that Powell delights in the fall (literal and figurative) of the opportunist Zouch, but does not simply endorse the resiliency of the old order in the form of a triumphant Vernon Passenger. But what I somehow did not see, although it is clearly stated at the beginning of the book, was that Passenger, like Zouch, is also seen as an Ubermensch. (Interestingly, Nietzsche is never credited with the term, never mentioned in the book—it is just seen as a generally German concept, of which more later). When Passenger catches Major Fosdick in his cross-dressing routine, he does not exact undue revenge on him, and feels some disappointment that he had not lived up to his Ubermensch potential. Does his aristocratic reserve and noblesse oblige prevent him from moving into the kill? Is his grousing to his wife at the end merely a deflective gesture, a refined way of underplaying his success, as a gentleman should? Or is Zouch the true Ubermensch, whose fall we rejoice in as a foiled aspirant to power, whereas Passenger keeps his love of dominance and mastery in more civilized channels? Powell, always fascinated by power and those avid in its pursuit yet keeping a reserved distance from it, lets us judge: but there is no ready moralist, and so simple recouping of an established given.

The ambiguity here is striking; My concern in UAP (somewhat expedited by issues present in the culture in the early 2000s, happily less present in the early 2010s) was to point out that Powell did not want a simple restoration of the Old Regime. He did not want to refight the old battles of the past (seventeenth century England now exists as a pageant where the roles of king, rebel, and courtesan are virtually interchangeable). But, on the other hand modishness comes in for a good deal of rebuke in the book. Characters are roasted for reading John Maynard Keynes and J. B. Priestley, both writers of the Left whom Powell seems to view with scorn. In addition, Powell seems to be sarcastic towards any sort of reconciliation with Germany; as witnessed by Mrs. Fosdick wanting to take in a German boy as an au pair. This of course was often considered the less “Conservative" position in the 1930s. As pointed out in UAP, there is some ambiguity about attitudes towards Chamberlain and Munich in The Kindly Ones, so it is interesting to see this hint of not being satisfied with a “don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans” attitude.

Zouch is a fairly conventional portrait painter but he does not show in the Royal Academy because, for his generation, that his not the pathway to power. Zouch is no rebel per se. When Passenger suspects him of being a Communist, the narrative comments that Zouch urgently depended on the capitalist system, to sell, his paintings. Indeed, his desire is to play the role of proud scourge to capitalism who nonetheless profits from it; by seeing vaguely rebellious, he can play the system whole seeing to thumb his nose at it. This kind of inverse attraction also seems to operate with Joanna Brandon and Mary Passenger; as it is stated that Zouch has generally not seen himself as attractive to women, having only one rather dowdy long-term girlfriend who is no great catch, it must be this juxtaposition—of the fusty privilege of Passenger Court with the go-getting Zouch—that makes him so effective in this regard in this particular tactical situation. (I always pronounced Zouch to rhyme with Pouch, but at the 2003 Powell conference in Oxford, Patric Dickinson pronounced it to rhyme with louche, something that brings out the seamy appeal of his character all the more).

But things get more complicated than this, Zouch, like all the protagonists of the prewar novels, is in some way a Powell manqué. He is a young, aspiring artist, going to country houses where his entrée is because of his art—much like, mutatis mutandis, the young Powell himself in his associations with the landed gentry and above. Powell himself said that Zouch’s misadventures on Creditor were based on his own on a horse during a rural chase—of course happily without the fatal results. Powell, of course, was actually a great artist, and his aspirations were ultimately artistic rather than social. But there is a kinship, if even by inversion. It has often been said that the I-narrator of What’s Become of Waring foreshadows the I-narrator of Dance. But, turned backward, the I-narrator also shows how Atwater, Lushington, Zouch, and Blore-Smith are all potential Is, or would be if turned around, having, as Zouch eventually does, their beards taken off (a feature obviously indicated to assure the reader Zouch is not Powell). In Zouch, Powell is writing about just what he is not. But in a writer of genius, writing about what he is not becomes an inevitably rich and complicated gesture.

Gender and ethnicity are also complicated categories in the book. In UAP, I was at pains not to overtly mention modern critical theories or concerns, because that often seems preposterous with a writer who has not yet been properly read in introductory terms across the whole of his oeuvre (considering the earlier critical books had not ha the chance to look at the Memoirs and Journals). With this now done—not just in UAP but also in Barber’s biography, Christine Berberich’s book on the English gentleman, and in the many fine articles in both the Anthony Powell Society newsletter and the Society’s journal, Secret Harmonies, by such hands as Colin Donald, Jeff Manley, and Peter Kislinger—one can look at issues that would have been thought disproportionate and incongruous before. The cross-dressing of Major Fosdick is obviously meant to be funny, but Powell also saw it was a very key part of the book, being delighted when, in the 1990s, Susan Macartney-Snape’s design for the paperback edition feature the transvestite Fosdick rather than a man on a horse. Fosdick’s cross-dressing is seen as insanity by the society but the narrative itself is more compassionate: when caught in the sequined dress by Passenger and folding it up for what he knows will be the last time, he feels as if a part of himself had ended.

Major Fosdick in a way is having to live within the constraints of a false self, having to impersonate a hearty rural squire whereas the sequined dress represents aspects of himself that this role cannot accommodate. Similarly, for all Powell satirizes any attempt at high culture—people who read Melville in the same tranche of books as Edgar Wallace, people who think Axel Munthe is highbrow literature—and recognizes how it can be used by opportunists to cozen landed gentry out of their funds (and their daughters), there is a tacit critique of the narrowness of men like Passenger here. When Passenger encounters Fischbein and his wife Hetty, Zouch tells them that they are hikers. “Hikaz’,” says Passenger, as if in an oriental language. Not only does Passenger not understand that the rural scene is being more festooned with urban nature-lovers, but he articulates his bafflement in a sound that sounds foreign. Powell spelled his astonished pronunciation of the word very like the Arabian region of Hejaz, much in the headlines at the time as the kingdom of Saudi Arabia was being formed out of the Arab states that had coalesced in the revolt against Ottoman rule during the First World War. Interestingly, this Semitic reference is paired with the entrance of Fischbein—a character with an obviously Jewish name. As with his portrayal of the Jew, Verelst, in Afternoon Men, Powell is deliberately foiling stereotypes of Jewishness. Some would see any representation of a Jew by a non-Jew in this era as somehow anti-Semitic, but here it is Zouch who exhibits anti-Semitic tendencies, being ashamed of Fischbein both because Fischbein knows him in his pre-aspiring-to-country-gentlemenhood life and because Fischbein’s ethnicity and status as a journalist are not the sort of associates he wants his new friends to see. Yet Fischbein is one of the servers at the end, offering commentary on the slain Zouch, much as the Palliser does on Lizzie Eustace at the end of The Eustace Diamonds, with as much an air of survival-authority as passenger has. The landed squire and the Jew remain on the canvas after the social-climbing opportunist has faded.

As long as well are discussing ethnic issues, what Major Fosdick reads during the sequined-dress interludes is also apposite—Through the Western Highlands With Rod and Gun. Scottishness is on Powell’s mind here, as he was shortly to write Caledonia. Again, he is writing about what he is not; of English and Welsh descent, Powell sees Scotland as a gently teasable ‘other'. The incongruity of the hyper-macho reading and the sequined dress hits the reader first; but the writer is, in complex ways, giving us his likes and dislikes, his identities and avoidances: putting them on the canvas.

Speaking of canvases, the women in this book—objects of Zouch’s portraiture—are some of the most attractive female characters in early Powell. For all the bad judgment both Joanna Brandon and Mary Passenger show in being interested in Zouch, both ladies are presented very positively. Mary is universally seen, by many neutral observers, as the best in the Passenger family. Joanna is game and lively and is accorded the books one happy ending, in her engagement to Jasper Fosdick. This marriage makes clear, --despite the Major’s commitment to a rest cure and the breaking of Torquil Fosdick’s relationship with Betty Passenger,--that the Fosdick family are not being punished by the narrative of the crime of simply being slightly less well off and/or prestigious as the passengers. Though we do not admire Zouch’s pursuit of the two ladies, his two-timing of Joanna, and his gravitating towards Mary simply because her family has more money and prestige, we understand what the women see in Zouch: an escape from the stultification of rural life, an expression of individuality, a chance to live a more creative and inspired life than their mothers. Powell’s ability to make us admire these female characters even as we despise the man who unaccountably interests them is one of his most subtle and winning touches in what, for all its satire and all the shock of Zouch's death, is so often a very lyrical and moving novel.

The youngest female character in the book should not be scanted. Betty Passenger’s daughter Bianca—the product of her ill-fated marriage with an Italian aristocrat—provides an air of impish irreverence throughout the book. Powell rarely depicts children, but in Bianca he engagingly depicts a precocious yet sometimes irritating child whose truth-telling is sometimes tinged with malice, as when she tells Zouch that, of all her family, only Mary likes him. She has both the insouciance and menace, though in a more minor key, of the young Pamela Flitton depicted in A Buyer’s Market, who similarly is the first instance in that narrative of generation definably younger than that of the novel’s point of view. The final action of the novel—Bianca’s defacing of Zouch’s portrait of Mary with a moustache—is a pleasingly farcical and deflationary ending to an often farcical and deflationary book. But not only, in its mixture of gender signifiers, is it reminiscent of Fosdick’s cross-dressing, but it also defaces a portrait that represents the book’s most admirable aspirations. Zouch, in reality had little real regard for Mary other than as a target of opportunity, but how Mary saw herself in Zouch's vision of her was something laudable and, for her, empowering, and her niece’s description of the portrait indicates that, whatever happens in the future, her family will not provide the succor and encouragement she needs

All this in a short pithy novel with lots of dialogue! So many missed chances, chance catastrophes, rogue animalities, calculating rogues. There is so much more--the linear inevitability of the title, taken from John Woodcock Graves '1820 Cumberland Hunting Song (do ye ken John Peel?), the open question as to whether Passenger actually planned Zouch's accident with Creditor, the fact that this is Powell's sole novel to deal primarily with country life. Powell’s prewar fiction is deceptively slight, easily able to fake out the reader with its slightness, as I confess it semi-faked me out when I wrote my book on Powell. For more on my reconsideration of non-Dance Powell, you will have to come to my lecture on March 17, 2012, at St James’ Piccadilly in London, sponsored by the Anthony Powell Society, starting at 1:45 in the afternoon.

Rafael Correa at New School

2011-09-23T10:48:00.000-07:00

The appearance at my university today of Ecuadrian President Rafael Correa was great theatre...he gave a 40 minute speech on the Yasuní-ITT park, a product of Ecuador's foregoing oil attracting in order to protect biodiversity....of course Correa said how noble it was for Ecuador to forego oil revenues, although he criticized people for criticizing his asking for compensation....Correa was assured, likable, charismatic (in a good sense, not in a bufofonish or malevolent sense). He gave a somewhat Clintonesque series of statistics about the flora and fauna in the park and claimed he was one of the few doing anything about global warming--which in light of the struggles of the current US and Australian admins in this regard was fairly stated. The real fireworks came afterwards when an elderly man stood up, let forth a stream of Spanish I could not get (I had foregone the translation device, but generally understood Correa, even though he pronounced 'desarrollo" as 'desarrojjo" and Ollanta as "Ojjanta". indeed Correa, who got his PhD at Illinois, clearly had mastered the art of speaking Spanish to Anglophones) but then added a short rider in English that 'this is all choreographed"; he was escorted from the room, Another (i assume) Ecuadorian, either of Asian descent or nearly full blooded indigenous, stood up and asked about the freedom of the press, and Correa said he was for freedom of the press, was only protecting the press from capitalism. (Fox News and Obama is a crude, though not all that accurate comparison). A ruckus ensued and sever la people shouted out questions, Correa said he was sick of the topic and that people did not care about his "lucha contra calentamiento global' a phrase he repeated sever la times..,finally he said that it was the sort of pres she got that led Allende to be overthrow by Pinochet--there Correa got the crowd on his side.

He referred to the indigenous people in the park (Guarani, who he asked his audience to name, and several others) as 'hermanos'; in English that would sound patronizing. He made no reference to his real brother, Fabricio, who has threatened to challenge him for the Presidency next year.

He struck me, both rhetorically and substantively, as one half Bill Cointon, another half somebody like Keith Olbermann, in that once his assurance broke down he seemed vulnerable and angry, resuming with difficulty the Clintonesque sheen.

As Correa, his entourage-including several members of the Ecuadorian cabinet. the Ecuadorian UN ambassador, and also representatives from friendly countries like Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina-left, it began to rain fiercely outside and there was a certain amount of panic to get him into the limo--odd I thought for the leader of a tropical country, they kind of acted like Saudi Arabians who had never seen rain.

Fulya Peker's THE PLAGUE

2011-09-18T04:19:00.000-07:00

When I attended the opening performance of Fulya Peker's Plague on September 16, the theater opened slightly late; finally, the announcement was made that we were free to go in. To do so, though, one had to step over a prone figure on the ground, a bald man caked in mud, a kind of combination of hobo and primordial Adam. This not only burst the bounds of the proscenium but also indicated the way this performance would present not just a spectacle but an anthropology. Instead of merely watching humans 'act’, we were to be confronted anew with speculations on the very nature of humanity. The actor eventually entered the stage and assumed a contemplative pose, now seeming more Bodhisattva than bum.

As I ascended the stairs to my chosen, slightly peripherally located seat, I stepped over what I thought was a bulky brown rug spreading out from the stage to the audience stalls. I stepped over it rather authoritatively, in a way that if I had missed a step would have clamped down on the ‘rug’ rather hard. After a point, I realized that in fact the bulkiness of the rug was caused by there being a human being inside it! I had almost crushed one of the actors! Again, more important than the standard Brechtian alienation effect is the total lack of distinction between the substance of the piece and its articulation. This might seem too comfortably organic were it not for the overriding metaphor of the plague. The very phrase “communicable disease” suggests how plagues can carry information that is also destruction, that their ability to penetrate past barriers means that the sort of structural interchangeability betoken here is not just a lark or a passport to beatific infinitude.

The action of the piece took place against the background of a central raised panel covered by a fluted black curtain. In the back of this to the right was a series of small white river rocks strewn on the ground. The elemental colors of black and white provided a stark tableau; they provided, though, less a foundation for the work than a grammar of it, in the same way that the precise and immediate verbal relationships of the vowels and consonants in the words were mirrored by the gestures of the actors. A robed figure in black (assuming a white robe by the end of the play) stood in the middle, speaking most of the language of the play and speaking as its raisonneur. He was flanked most impressively by two black-clothed caryatid-like figures who maintained an architectural poise for nearly an hour. In back, rustling, implication-filled tympani is heard as, from stage center left, a relentless pilot light bores into the audience, signifying, perhaps, the dualities, the ambiguities, of enlightenment.

One of the astonishing aspects of The Plague was how elastic the four male actors managed to make their bodies, seeming stoic at times, invulnerable at others, sometimes seeming very virile, sometimes more gender-indeterminate, sometimes vigorously tall, sometimes prone on the ground. They could seem Neanderthals at one moment, robots the next, living, breathing contemporaries at another instance. Again the sense of the anthropological seen at the very beginning returned, as body and utterance were both being examined for a kind of bedrock, core humanity, about which yet no cripplingly essentialist assumptions were being made. The sense of body as, again, not just base about mediation fortified the sense of permeation that the piece’s ruling metaphors, plague and the verbal interstices of languages, very much paraded.

Using very simple words—including many monosyllables—constrained by the need to have rhyme and assonance in as much of the enunciated language as possible, The Plaguenonetheless makes a concerted historiographic argument. Most take it is a mere coincidence that the Black Death occurred near the end of the Middle Ages as commonly conceived, that e.g., the quintessentially medieval Dante wrote before it, the quintessentially Renaissance Boccaccio wrote largely after it (and, famously of it). Peker argues here that the plague never totally ended, that its external aspects came to an end but not its internal. (This of course is relevant to the nature of event in general; how can one observe the anniversary of 9/11 if the events of 9/11 have in some way not stopped happening?) Even after the physical disease had vanished, the plague of reason remained, internalized, manifested in Cartesian dualism and in the reign of unthinking rationality. “The most terrible plague is one that does not reveal its symptoms.” Modernity has been trapped by a plague endemic to its very conception. Of course, Peker is saying no more than many modern critics of modernity such as Nietzsche, Foucault, and Adorno; but to dramatize it so intricately, so implicitly, and so considering the nature of her argumentnon-argumentatively is not only a considerable feat but a moving one. Peker's thesis could be potentially stentorian or monolithic, but her dramatic rendition of it forestalls these declensions, having established a past (the literal plague) and a present (a metaphorical plague of reason) Peker then looks to the future. One of the great assets of Peker's work is that it utterly lacks the curdled irony, cloying self-awareness, and naïve cynicism so often found in contemporary New York performance. Jettisoning the post-collegiate smugness of much of the predominant consensus, Peker is after a more serious art and is not afraid to flaunt artistic determination that, in its dignity and fierce ardor, will cause envy and resentment in the cynical. (In this light, the setting in the Theater for the New City reminded me of the work of the late Jeanette Arnone-K, whose paintings and murals, often exhibited there, in their bravest moments challenged an otherwise regnant bourgeois consensus in the urgency with which they registered ecological peril). Peker points out the sterility of reason, how what we think has been deliverance is in fact disease, what we think salvific is in fact morbific. Yet Peker is not writing from a sense of medievalist lament, a Henry Adams-like sense that the Virgin was superior to the Dynamo; she also avoids any kind of hortatory suggestion of a revolution in life, whether through political or sexual revitalization—vulgar-Marxist, vulgar-Freudian, and vulgar-Nietzsche. Her high seriousness and her use of innovative techniques to render issues of artistic gravity hearken back to modernism, but Peker is too postmodern to proffer any kind of positive agenda. Or is she not? It struck me towards the end that The Plague was proposing a solution, and that was through its own medium—of theatricality, and more importantly of language.

Peker has worked a lot with Richard Foreman of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, and the enigmatic lyricism of The Plague was reminiscent of Foreman, as was the rigor and discipline to which the actors had so creatively submitted themselves. Foreman, at least in his work of the past twenty years, seems to want to deliberately foil any pattern in his plays, particularly any overall import to the utterances and ejaculations made by the actors in the course of their performances. Peker, on the other hand, renders a kind of tone poem, playing on inherent resemblances in language like that between “once” and “was”, on the (to use a word sounded in the piece) “tectonic” possibilities of language. Yet the sword is double-edged. The play’s text uses rhyme, yet the introduction of rhyme into European languages was the play hints, part of our falling into verbal imprisonment. The play celebrates the resources of language in its own right, “words alone” as Yeats famously put it. And yet language is “the problem”, verbs wriggling free from their moorings in nouns create sterile puzzlement; the same elemental language whose bare resources are so pleasing in their enunciation here also holds us in thrall. Peker, originally from Turkey, is not a native speaker of English, and this pertains to The Plague both because it makes her experiments with language not just playful but philological, in the manner of an Auerbach or a Spitzer (who famously went the other way with respect to Turkey), or ascetic, in the manner of a Beckett, and because not being a native speaker robs Peker of a base which for a native speaker might make such an elemental iteration a safe harbor, a reassurance. Peker can seek or find no reassurance in the fundamentals; rather, for her, they illuminate the hope and peril of the very condition of our understanding.

In the program notes, Peker adduced high-modernist precursors such as Artaud and Grotowski; and, again, it is refreshing, considering the narcissistic snickering that so often assumes the stage in New York today, that these great artists are being taken seriously, yet, watching The Plague, I thought less of these European precursors than Ralph Waldo Emerson—the Emerson who said, in “Nature,”

Each creature is only a modification of the other; the likeness in them is more than the difference, and their radical law is one and the same. A rule of one art, or a law of one organization, holds true throughout nature. So intimate is this Unity, that, it is easily seen, it lies under the undermost garment of nature, and betrays its source in Universal Spirit. For, it pervades Thought also. Every universal truth that we express in words implies or supposes every other truth.

Peker, in linking the articulation of language and the movement of performers so intimately, in sounding the innards of a tongue she also thinks holds us in chains, is faithful to the intricacy and brutal duality of Emerson’s conception. As I exited the theater—unobstructed this time by prone bodies or human rugs—I felt a pervasive sense of possibility and excitement. This was not because I had been temporarily infused with sophomoric naïveté. As Peker and Emerson instruct us, all our truths and pains are intimately bound, and we can only hope to think outside of them if we understand how thoroughly and delicately we are sutured. Peker's elegant, forceful, and stunning play offers, in its stark, austere tableau, a glimpse of how this might be attempted.

9/11 ten years later

2011-09-08T11:34:00.000-07:00

I have not spoken much about 9/11/01, and in general I feel that decision was right. The mistakes that have been made in speaking of the catastrophe are to braid it into some existing personal or political narrative, to say the terrorist attacks of that day made one feel differently politically or made one take new steps in one's personal life, when most of these things were already somehow on the boards. I do not doubt that some people's lives and views were genuinely changed by 9/11, but I am chary of making much of this sort of change outside of the victims, their immediate families, and those in the serving military and other government officials involved in the response to the calamity. In addition, I think 9/11, as an event, should be isolated from whatever debates about whether what the US government did in response was right or not, or what the causes and preconditions of the attacks were. That's in the realm of ideology and history, a relatively normal continuum; the day itself was catapulted out of that continuum.

The closest I came to these events was..what? I cannot claim any sort of privileged or special relationship. I was almost on the jury for Ramzi Yousef, accused architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings. (I got out by saying I had to teach Andrew Marvell). I live about thirty-five blocks away, and some dust from the aftermath is no doubt still scattered on some of the books on my bookshelves. I knew, slightly, siblings or spouses of those who died in the World Trade Center and who were on Flight 93. I suspect the emphysema of my late friend, the poet Samuel Menashe, may have been exacerbated by breathing fumes from the disaster--he lived only fifteen or so blocks away.

Menashe wrote a poem that imagined, long before the event, the emotional scale of the calamity:

Must smiles subside in a sigh
   And sobs underlie laughter
   Shall we always leap high
   With flames leaping after?

9/11 reminded us of how much tragedy and suffering lurks beneath our merited--and even at times--valiant attempts to find happiness. We must try to vault further than the flames, exceed their killing grasp, live out what joy we can and should have, but my reaction to the anniversary is dominated by a sense of gravity and of persistent mourning.

Saving ESQ and Poe Studies

2011-08-18T08:19:00.000-07:00

As I prepare to teach a new course on Emerson and Thoreau (and other figures in their Transcendentalist milieu) the news of the impending closure of EEmerson Studies Quarterly (ESQ) and Poe Studies, which I already knew about in my capacity with the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, gains new pertinence. In prepping the course, I am turning again and again to articles published over the last few decades in ESQ, and it leaves me wondering if a future teacher, like me someone not an Transcendentalist scholar by training, takes up such a course as part of their university's offerings in twenty years, where will the scholarship be? Blogs, wikis, and open-source archives are not the utopian solution to everything. A scholarly journal, with the continuity provided by an editor and editorial and/or advisory board, by referees, reviewers, and the sense of an ongoing record, is irreplaceable.

Though celebrated and rewarded handsomely for writing and publishing my own books, I have never been given any reward by any university for which I have worked for editing a journal. I used to think this was because of fiscal stresses at my university and the faraway nature of the field in which I edit, but in talking with colleagues at far plushier institutions working in far more accepted and canonical areas, for the most part I get the same impression. Universities rely on learned journals to assess scholarship weighed in tenure and promotion, but the journals themselves, and their personnel, are, paradoxically, not deemed essential. Washington State University, in hiring a full-time editor for both journals and maintaining a well-staffed office to keep them running, was one of the few standouts here. This made, as far as I am concerned, a notable difference at raising the institutions; national profile and defining it as a genuine center of excellence. Whatever the dire budgetary situation--and I am aware it is dire, though even in a dire situation education should be a priority--I am surprised WSU would squander a platform in which it has achieved notable eminence.

Please sign the petition here and help save Poe Studies and ESQ.

Bachmann's submission

2011-07-20T15:42:00.000-07:00

Ironically, Michele Bachmann, in submitting to her husband, is (since "Islam" means submission) being a 'muslim' with I assume a very small m.

New Formalism CFP, deadline 1/2012

2011-07-03T16:22:00.000-07:00

Pennsylvania Literary Journal (ISSN#: 2151-3066) is a printed
peer-reviewed journal that publishes critical essays, book-reviews,
short stories, interviews, photographs, art, and poetry. Three issues,
starting with the Summer 2010 Issue, “New and Old Historical
Perspectives on Literature,” are on sale through Amazon and other
distributors. PLJ is also available through the EBSCO Academic
Complete database in full-text. It is listed in the MLA International
Bibliography, the MLA Directory of Periodicals, Genamics JournalSeek,
and Duotrope’s Digest. The journal is a member of the Council of
Editors of Learned Journals, and the third and fourth issues were
displayed on the CELJ table at the January, 2011 MLA Convention in Los
Angeles, where the Editor-in-Chief, Anna Faktorovich, presented her
research and chaired a few panels. The business is registered in
Pennsylvania. An “In Brief” article about the Journal, by the Editor,
was published in the November/December 2009 Issue of the D-Lib
Magazine. A scholarly essay on the journal and on online publishing
appeared in Peer English (UK). The Journal is published through the
Anaphora Literary Press, www.anaphoraliterary.wordpress.com.

“New Formalism: Spring 2012 Issue”: After a series of historicisms,
formalism has returned once again to claim a place in twenty-first
century deliberations about literature. We consider Marjorie
Levinson's “What Is New Formalism?” (PMLA, March 2007) to be a helpful
commentary on this development. We invite submissions in all fields
of literary study that either address broadly the turn to the
aesthetic in critical discourse or focus more narrowly on a particular
work or author in terms of new formalist concerns. We are open to
consideration of a range of genres, national literatures, and periods.
The deadline is January 5, 2012; the length of essay should be
between 4,000 and 9,000 words. The work should be written according to
MLA style. Please submit your essay to Guest Editor Nicholas Birns
(birnsn@newschool.edu).

Vargas Llosa's Victory

2011-06-05T17:31:00.000-07:00

Mario Vargas Llosa's biggest win in the past twelve months may not have been garnering the 2010 Nobel prize for literature. It instead may well be his unexpected and, we may conclude, pivotal support for Ollanta Humala in the 2011 Peruvian Presidential election. As of * PM EST SUnday June 5, Humala is widely reported to have eked out a narrow win.

For decades, Vargas Llosa has been the scourge of the Left. If not quite the paladin of the Right--he has never been a supporter of organized religion and is pro-gay rights and pro-choice on abortion--he was a ferocious opponent of governmental intervention in the economy and an acrid critic of Leftist illusions about the "Third World." His endorsement of Humala was a striking swerve from that tendency True, he did not exactly deliver a ringing accolade, having earlier said that choosing between Keiko Fujimori and Humala was like choosing between cancer and AIDS. Nor, as somebody who found even the presidential candidacy of General Wesley Clark faintly praetorian, am I myself inclined towards occasionally demagogic former army officers as political candidates. But I can see, and support, Vargas Llosa's logic, and it has to be understood on a deeper level than commentators so far have,

To see his support for the left-wing, populist Humala as just a visceral grievance against Keiko Fujimori's father, Alberto, to whom Vargas Llosa himself unexpectedly lost in the 1990 election, is to miss the point. Yes, no doubt there is an element of personal vendetta here. But, as a novelist, Vargas Llosa is fully aware that political actors always are tinged with personal emotions, and that this presence of personal affect does not invalidate or delegitimize the grounds of their choice. Humala may, for Vargas Llosa, be wrong and unwise on all manner of issues; Fujimori promised corruption and the rehabilitation of corruption, all the more painful for Vargas Llosa as Fujimori's platform--Keiko Fujimori's, that is--subscribes to the same neoliberal mantras as does Vargas Llosa, and her support came from the beneficiaries of the neoliberal trends of the past generation. Peruvian public figures previously in line with Vargas Llosa's positions, such as the TV personality and novelist Jaime Bayly, have parted company from the Master on this issue. Vargas Llosa is now sundered from many of his former acolytes,

In my article in Vargas Llosa's novel La guerra del fin del mundo in the co-edited collection for Palgrave I coordinated along with Juan E. De Castro, I asked, rhetorically, if Vargas Llosa's critique of utopianism and millennarianism was meant only for the Left, whether or not there were enemies to the Right as well. SO many intellectuals have accused the Left of these 'sins' while not saying a word when the same syndromes manifest themselves on the Right. Even if Vargas Llosa was letting personal spite prevail over ideological conviction in supporting Humala, this can be seen in a way as a salutary brake on the ideological purism of neoliberalism, which--as seen in the US Tea Party movement--has as dangerous a tendency towards unanimity and intellectual conformity as any leftist equivalent. Moreover one can see in Vargas Llosa's latest novel, El Sueñõ del Celta, a critique of colonialism and of unfettered capitalism that shows that the very late Vargas Llosa might be swinging a little bit back to the left after his well-chronicled turn to the Right of the past thirty years.

It will be interesting to see what kind of President Ollanta Humala makes. Peru's national interests--and its curiously right-wing media sphere and intelligentsia-- will not permit him to depart too drastically from many of the policies of his predecessor, Alan Garcia Pérez. Humala has pitched himself as an emulator of Lula in Brazil, and the strong Peruvian economy may permit him to be both redistributionist but also reassure the capitalist powers that be. Of course, Humala may also be a disaster. History will tell whether Vargas Llosa, and I, were right or wrong in supporting him. But this episode, if nothing else, represents an interesting turn in the fate of the neoliberal consensus which a few years ago thought itself unchallengeable. And it reaffirms Mario Vargas Llosa's stature as a writer of conscience unafraid to challenge--when they are wrong--even those ideological platforms of which he has so visibly been an active supporter...

Derek Jacobi's LEAR

2011-06-05T06:22:00.000-07:00

The Jacobi LEAR was great--riveting, grimly funny at times, conveying Shakespeare's most unrelieved tragedy, something so dark MACBETH seems like a dry run by comparison. Jacobi projected anger, sadness, bewilderment in just the right places. At the end of the production, birds twittered, as if to portend a new day after the worst had happened. I thought I could get my parakeets Actors Equity cards.

Millicent Dillon, In The Atomic City

2011-06-04T04:49:00.000-07:00

Millicent Dillon came to fiction and literary writing only in midlife, yet in a series of books, fiction, nonfiction, and in-between, she has addressed more than any writer of our age the overt ideologies of our time, the latent demands they make on our selves and our senses of agencies, and the art that can function as both resistance to these ideologies an, alas, confirmation of their hold. Her current work is a memoir of her years as a junior physicist in the 1940s, which is both an essay in memory and the resistant pastness of the past, and an examinationof the forces of destruction that still, in different shapes, threaten us today. The Believer has published this excerpt of Dillon's work and I would recommend it for readers of this blog not only for its quality and insight but for the way it traces certain issues which are also evident preoccupations of my own.

Reza Abdoh's pocket epic theater

2011-05-17T05:33:00.000-07:00

There are an overwhelming amount of things to do in New York; indeed, even if one restricts matters to what is going on in my university, certainly not the largest or busiest in the city, there are so many events put on each week that to attend even a third of them taxes one; stamina. Nonetheless, I try to make nearly every one of my Lang theatrical colleague Zishan Ugurlu's productions because of the eclecticism and cutting-edge nature of her material and as she has exceptional ability to motivate students to go to the very limit of their abilities. I was also interested in the work that was being put on, The Law of Remains by the Iranian-born American playwright Reza Abdoh. I knew his name, and that he had died far too young of AIDS, but was unfamiliar with the work.

The appalling murders perpetrate by Jeffrey Dahmer, against the tableau of the institutionalized racism and homophobia that made his crimes possible, is at the heart of the play--not pathologized, though (they are already pathological enough) but seen in a social context, as an index of the cruel place America had become in the 1980s. Having just reread Prometheus Bound earlier in the day, it seemed very 'Greek' to me--the way in which drama was precisely what was unrepresentable in normal life and discourse, that it was the realm of the abject, the scapegoated, the sacred profane..also the son-contraptions were like choral odes, of course satiric or ironically deployed choral odes, but had the same sense of emotional release....the very idea of remains, the taboo of cannibalism, the association of sex with other appetites, the Greek idea of sparagmos or fragmentation (as in the Bacchae), were all very pertinent I think....also the element of satyr play in the tragedy, the feeling of celebration amid suffering and critique....

It was also though a very American play, a very national play. One thought of Tony Kushner's subtitle for Angels in America, "A gay fantasia on national themes', and that could apply to Abdoh's play (written maybe slightly earlier as well, although Abdoh's vision is far more searing and radical, it makes Kushner look bourgeois while, far more economically, making many of the same points not only about racism and homophobia but about their cultural matrix and mythic valence. I am teaching Kushner this summer and will definitely let my students know of Abdoh as a complementary, yet more radical, counterpoint. The subject of the course is epic drama, and Abdoh's work, in its raw, intense, lyricism, can be seen as a sort of pocket epic, packing the punch of panoramic social critique without the discursive mega-pretensions of Kushner that, despite himself (and for all their moving and vision), can be seen as tying his vision back into Reaganite grandiosity. And indeed the figure of President Ronald Reagan is pertinent here. The cathartic moment of the play was the revelation of a prone, wax-like figure of Reagan, gazing mindlessly on the action; this theatrical touch expressed all the polemical fervor of Kushner's anti-Reaganism while making it more visceral and more profoundly accusatory to the audience: You, hypocrite lecteur, mon sembable, mon frère.

I felt totally repelled the first ten minutes, mesmerized for the rest. It was the same feeling that had been transmuted from a curse into a blessing. This is so much more a bass for theatrical exultation than a stance of bland, polite acceptance ab initio. The stage, an oblong rectangle that a spectator directly confronting the stage could not see entirely, was fascinating as not seeing it all put the spectator in an unaccustomed position. Usually as a viewer you have the perspectival advantage over the actors. But here it was more like being in a real place having to look around.

Of course none of these students were anything but babies or perhaps even alive at the time of the events and attitudes the play describes. They showed astonishing facility in immediately adapting themselves to the play, adhering to roles so quickly and reflexively--and the roles were not traditional roles but speakers, stances, perspectives. And their rendition of a very topical play made it not just an adaptation but a regeneration, a reanimation, an appropriation.....Abdoh's family and loved ones were represented in the audience and apparently approved of the work precisely in its sense of adaptation, that the work was not just archivally tied to the living body of its author but could be shifted, redeployed, had what textual scholars call mouvance. This adaptability being the essence of practice is, to me, what theatre and literary criticism, as acts, have most in common....

Risky Meditations

2011-05-13T09:54:00.001-07:00

This is a performance review written late in 2007 that for various reasons never saw publication, so I post it here.

Risky Meditations: Big Dance Theater’s The Other Here at Dance Theatre Workshop, September 28, 2007. Sam Kim’s dumb dumb bunny at The Kitchen, October 20, 2007. Joyce S. Lim’s Stolen at Danspace/St. Mark’s Church, October 26, 2007.

By Nicholas Birns

The Other Here was first put on in New York City at the Japan Society (which commissioned the work) in February 2007. Created by Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar, it is drawn from disparate sources, including short stories by Masuji Ibuse, seventeenth-century Okinawan dance, modern Okinawan pop music, and transcripts of a US insurance convention. “The Other Here” mixes not only past and present but literary and popular, and, crucially, the traditional Honshu of Ibuse’s stories and the vernacular Okinawa of the music and dance.

The performers, using an eclectic array of gestures, postures, and symbolic language, convey a tone at once arch and plangent. The deceased Nampachi Aoki bequeaths Medhi a carp. Medhi then attempts to sell insurance to Aoki’s widow. The carp is an image. on a small, portable screen. Medhi promises he will never kill it. But it is not alive. It is a mediated presentation. The performers treat the ‘carp’ as a joke gift that becomes meaningful as it is evoked by demonstration. In a more comic strand of performance. Yosuji (Molly Hicock), a lackadaisical servant, is reprimanded by his employer: “a chastisement, particularly in a remote area like this, is taken very seriously.”

All this is conducted in a style at once nostalgic and jocular; the performers clearly put on their personas and do not try to render an authentic or deep self, but they also do not totally make light of the material, often moving slightly more slowly than a normal rate as if to emphasize the gravity of their approach to the situation. We then see Yosuji receiving a private, confidential letter. After trying, in vain, to get others to read it aloud for him, h finally learns his contents; that his wife has heard that he has been chastised for ‘not giving proper service’ Yosuji’s wife (Jennie Mary Tai Liu), wearing a conical hat of the stereotypical Asian peasant, weaved her way onto the scene, clicking and undulating. The hinge between the two layers is the character of Medhi, played by Lazar. Medhi is trying to sell insurance to the widow of Nampachi Aoki. This provides a window on the modern-day level where insurance vending is conducted not on the level of neighborly individuality but on the level of corporate hard sell.

The insurance convention is presided over by an unctuous master of ceremonies (Jess Barbagallo) who is sprayed with bubbles as a man with a parasol walks by, yet is undaunted in her motivational, can-do rhetoric. These rousing speeches are modes of performance; as a woman interrupts the master of ceremonies (Jess Barbagallo), a figure in a white shirt at the balk of the space emulates the gestures, as if in a mirror. The insurance conventioneers are urged to be silent for fifteen seconds: “The one who talks first leaves”. Silence is posited as a sales tool, “it gives clients time to think. Silence says I care.” Silence is seen as a way of continuing noise by other means,

Barbagallo’s role is made deliberately androgynous (even more so than Hicock’s Yosuji). Resembling, in demeanor, a cross between Laurie Anderson and Michael J. Fox, Barbagallo, as master of ceremonies, answers questions from individual salespeople; Steve from King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, is afraid to make cold calls. Here, salesmen, contrary to popular stereotype, are disseminators of myth, exuding a mythical largeness, even a mythical preposterousness.

There was a tension between discipline of corporate mentality (the head of the insurance firm) and the publicity which the corporate culture needs to advertise itself (the master of ceremonies). Corporate propaganda is given a kind of independence from its source by its performative qualities. Yet we are reminded that work is also servitude in both agrarian and corporate levels. The thrust is satiric with respect to domination. But there is also the awareness that the choreographers and performers are, in their own way, practiced in their craft and being measured by the audience. The ‘master’ of ceremonies is not a master in the sense that Medhi is. She exists to publicize a hierarchy in which she does not make the decisions.

The voiceover says “What would you want to see happen in our world if anything you wish could happen would come true?” But this vision of realized dreams can only tantalize the insurance workers, though their world ostensibly is not bounded by the limits of Medhi and the Yosujis. The contrast of the insurance level with the Medhi level juxtaposes patterns of domination in former and present societies. But modern insurance raises the stakes in its quantifying of risk. It mounts a calculable riposte to the question, raised by a voiceover in the performance, “Are you going to die?” But on the agrarian level, as a red-robed man sings at a table behind the screens in front of which the master of ceremonies had stood, risk is seen as an act of love, not a materialistic variable. Similarly, when Yosuji is reprimanded by the voiceover for taking a nap in the daytime, it is done in a sardonically understanding way, inciting an underlying compassion.

Movement is the grammar in which these emotions, positive and negative, are expressed. Reverent acolytes gather around the insurance magnate, at first subserviently revering, then dancing in exhilarating, perhaps subversive steps. The dance steps had a hip-hop quality, as if hip-hop were the approximate outcome of an American-Asian cultural hybrid. When the action veered to the primeval level in the second half of the performance, the actors spoke in a kind of singspiel, reminiscent of some of the Talking Band’s performances of the late 1970s, such Pedro Paramo and Kalevala. In both cases, the performances, partially or totally basing their material on literary sources, pitched their voices in an intermediate zone between singing and talking so as to achieve a mode that seemed premeditated but not ‘bookish’. In its specific cultural mix, “The Other Here” was reminiscent of the Theatre of a Two Headed Calf’s punk-rock production of Drum of the Waves of Horikawa at HERE, which premiered slightly later on in the fall 2007 season, as well as of the Decemberists’ 2006 album, The Crane Wife.

The Other Here celebrates the meaning that disparate elements can take on if ordered in a suggestive and significant way. The mourning for Aoki teeters on the brink of joy, a ’wake’ in the sense that an acknowledgment of death can also be an awakening. Interludes of pure dance and exuberant music stand out as lyric pauses that became opportunities for rejoicing. The overt mentions of Jane Shaw, the sound designer, and Hicock supply a metadramatic quality that is reeled out with flair and zest. When Jennifer Tipton’s lighting—done in a style that even a casual dancegoer would recognize as hers—is raised on the audience, we too also feel the sense of fun even as, earlier, the raised lighting made us feel we were as vulnerable as the insurance acolytes.

At the end, an inspirational maxim from St. Francis of Assisi was uttered, followed quickly by the saucy retort, “That’s great, Frank.” This irreverence dissipated any sentimental reaffirmation of spiritual plenitude, but did not simply connote irony or anticlimax. Indeed, the spirituality of the piece was hammered home in a visceral way by the evident fun the performers were having, as seen in how the metadrama reaffirmed the jocular ecstasy of the performance rather than puncturing it.

Sam Kim’s dumb dumb bunny gives us a depersonalized, meaninglessly savage world where people, possessed as zombies, laboriously try to attain human vulnerability. A giant, jungle-gym like metallic structure (by Mimi Lien) loomed ominously over the center left of the performance space. As the audience contemplated the multi-tiered edifice, abruptly roiling motion heralded two columns of performers emerging single file. Liz Santoro climbed the edifice, followed by Miriam Wolf. Others assumed stationary positions as the music reached crescendo, erupting into a disco beat. The disco sound, and the campy portent of the scene, called to mind Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. The metal edifice never dominated the action, but always seemed to watch over the fray. It was just peripheral enough to attract only some of the audience’s attention and to provide these performers perched upon it with an angle of perspective from which to view the goings-on.

Santoro and Wolf began flopping on the ground with a combination of discipline and abandonment. Ripples of light (by Michael Stiller) in back surrounding the space constituted a fade effect that correlated with the staccato intermittence of the action. Wolf pouted in a way that elicited laughter. The tableau gradually becomes more static, while the movement becomes more boisterous. Santoro gyrated suggestively while Kim moved more sedately. As the movement became more animated, the soundtrack attenuates. (The in-and-out quality of the soundtrack is reminiscent of Susan Rethorst, with whose company Kim has danced). At first we hear brief intervals silence in-between musical sections, voids that gradually lengthen until silence becomes the dominant note of the latter half of the piece. At first, athleticism seemed the keynote for the movement, as the performers moved with a highly geared regimen a la Elizabeth Streb. Dancers trooped on and off with the efficiency of an offensive/defensive shift in sports.

But this well-oiled physicality is not meant to show off the forceful movements of the dancers. It indicates constraint and a loss of personality in a zombie state. In the latter part of the piece, though, there was a conspicuous physical energy, which correlated with the growing role of silence. Santoro is hunched, crouched, amid utter silence, followed cheekily by techno-pop music. She is followed in her entry from the coulisse by Kim who gradually strode out into the space, An erotic wrestling match, twisting and tortuous, between Wolf and Michael Helland suddenly erupted on the right of the space, while another couple moved more awkwardly and in a less invested way, as if they were rag dolls.

Meanwhile, a fifth performer sat motionless within jungle gym, unperturbed, a sixth lay prone, face down on floor. The non-wrestling couple (David Velasco and Kim) roll each other over, as if trying but failing to move forward. Motion was dramatized, but rest’s prospect remained a factor in the frenzy. The grappling agon of Wolf and Helland dominated the action, but silence as well as the pressing and flopping of the other dancers made the agon seem as much a mode of bodily discipline, or of zombie-like possession, as a cathartic release. Just as the metallic structure was sometimes a play-space, sometimes a cage, the rote movements of the performers, sometimes parodic, yet spoke to a sense of trauma, at the end resembling the twitching motions of a fit.

dumb dumb bunny portrayed sheer embodiment—the same discipline that enables their deft physical movements seems to be a regimentation of which they are trying to break out. Even the and gestures frequently made by the performers seem a groping towards signification. At the end, Helland and Wolf do seem to display more rapport, as if hints of acknowledgment are present. But dumb, dumb bunny portrays bodies operating in a mute void, adrift in a hard-edged dislocation which Kim limns to frighten and to warn.

Joyce S. Lim’s Stolen was dominated by a large screen composed of thousands of intricately woven strings, A series of tiered, horizontally layered sets of string, with several on top of the foreground and one in the background. In front, a wooden stool, containing a head of a dead fish with its eye visible, stood on the left front side of the space. On the right front side was placed a transparent Plexiglas mini-pylon, with pebbles (a motif which was to play an important role in the piece) scattered behind it and halos of warm yellow light (by Severn-Clay Youman), propelled from the back of the space surrounding pylon and stool on an otherwise darkened tableau.

A woman in what seemed a white terrycloth spacesuit pours water and (as the audience had been warned) a live fish into the Plexiglas pylon. (The fish was conceivably a carp, establishing continuity with The Other Here). A disembodied male voiceover began to intone disjointed phrases in English, such as “we are in party preparation,” followed by utter silence and stillness, and then, after an interval, more pouring of water into the pylon. Lim then knelt and appeared to knead material on the floor immediately in back of the pylon. The disembodied voice resumed, saying ‘Paul checked the oil’. The incongruity between the air of improvised ritual on the space and these media-standard announcements made one wonder if the transfer of the fish to the pylon was a parable for cultural adaptation or transformation. (Lim has indicated that the piece’s title refers to cultural borrowing.)

The space then became nearly completely dark, other than its far left, which was illuminated from the back, as a small projector-like light source bored forward. Light patterns (designed by Kwi-Hae Kim) then began to ripple in scattered cascades across the string structure, which became a sort of screen.

Several performers marched in, single file, from the left, eventually turning onto the center, new ones materializing as their predecessors paraded forth onto the space, for an eventual total of five. The performers were wearing beige robes with brown or white tunics over them. The light on the space dimmed, leaving the string-structure visible only in profile. One performer falls ritualistically on the ground at the far left of the space. Lyrical music (by Michael Gardiner) began as performer moved her arms and legs, tentatively turning around, as others also began to move. The sound effects became increasingly mechanical, evoking the bursts and grinding of machines, verging on an industrial-rock sound. Pebbles are rolled with aggressive abandon on the floor: a game of chance, a casting of lots, or a consultation of oracles. A performer releases pebbles from her tunic onto the ground.

The industrial noise then became sharper, generating a sense of asperity and anxiety. Merceditas Mañago-Alexander gave a raised hand-gesture towards the ceiling, then extended her hand downward like a claw as noise unfurled and pebbles racketed. An upsurge in the rate and intensity of the performers motion ensued; in general, the pace and movement of the performers had a sense of waxing and waning. This paralleled seasonal indications: the string at the beginning seems a kind of snow, the intricate material technique mimicking a natural process. Then Stolen seemed to pass through the turmoil of summer and the melancholy of autumn before hinting at the promise of spring. At the ‘autumnal’ midpoint of the piece, the string became ever more a screen, and the light projected on it a kind of video. Similarly, the random sounds became much more cohesive, more of a score.

Suddenly the mood of the piece became more savage. A rippling gong supplies a call to attention, a summons to a greater seriousness and sense of consequence. A performer, mouth gagged, snapped her fingers, bows, crawls, and then tiptoes coyly across the floor. Lim kneels over the stool, at first seeming to knead or cook the fish head in front of her (in the glass bowl) and then actually reaching into the bowl and eating it. The eating in front of the audience was striking. In an era when nudity and even fairly overt sexual activity is routine in New York dance concerts, the actual eating of food seemed to violate one of the few remaining taboos of what can be done in performance. That the eating was quickly followed by an unexpected, and, again, for dance concerts, rare outburst of actual, intense physical violence—not just the miming of violence in dance gestures--fortified this sense of disruption and challenge. Occasionally, Lim pants, seeming exhausted, and then picks and eats more of the fish head. The clear polarity between the live fish on the left and the dead, eaten fish on the right indicated contrasts between the product and its appropriation.

This metaphorical contention was juxtaposed with the shockingly literal when, replacing an attendant performer who had been reverently watching the eating of the fish from a deferential ancillary posture, three performers stride forward, one bows down to honor Lim. Unexpectedly, Mañago-Alexander begins repeatedly beating and attacking Lim, striking fifteen blows onto her back. A couple of times, Lim sprawled forward, toppling into the stool, apparently conclusively beaten, but then raised her back again only to suffer more blows from Mañago-Alexander. Mañago-Alexander had overtones of a Zen master, indicating a teacher-student disciplinary action gone massively overboard. A flour-like substance is poured into the Plexiglas fish pylon as beating continues. Lim flails around, finally definitely collapsing as mournful music plays in the background and pebbles ripple across the space.

Although Lim and Mañago-Alexander were the principals, all three of the other performers (Andrea Johnston, Marya Wethers and Peggy Gould) had a solo. Indeed, solitude was a leitmotif of the piece despite the frequent physical interaction. The performers did not seem to relate to each other; the only act of true engaged is the violent assault, much as in dumb dumb bunny, and also in Ashleigh Leite’s intensely grim Crawl Space, seen the following week at Danspace. Lim and her fellow performers exited authoritatively, suggesting the parabasis in Greek drama, though not a chorus, but a closing musical chord ensued. Stolen‘s subtle gathering of gestures generated a mood, an affect, that took on a distinctive affect of its own.

The Death of Don Juan

2011-05-08T06:12:00.000-07:00

In 2009, I reviewed Elodie Lauten's The Two Cents Opera and I was delighted to see another work by her last night, The Death of Don Juan (directed by Robert Lawson and Henry Akona and playing at the Theater for the New City. Although the subjects of the two operas--the current economic crisis and the waning days of the legendary amorist--could not be more manifestly different, in a way there was a common thread in that both were stories of a way of life that was no longer sustainable, that a lifestyle of avaricious greed and one of lascivious sexual appetite were coming to an end and approaching a moment of critical reflection, as the Owl of Minerva poked its head above the litter of wasted time and misguided braggadocio.

As Lauten's Don Juan says finally in his final parabasis, his great dirge:

"I am spent I am done There is no goodbye I am lost I am found There is no reply I have loved
many times I have truly lived I am deaf I am dumb I have lost my sight I am only human now"

Don Juan's sexual and moral transgressions are the diametrical opposite of Oedipus's--while the ancient king's sins were unintentional and monogamous, the modern lecher's are polygamous and knowing--but in both cases a true knowledge, a deeper knowledge, only intervenes after their illusions about themselves have been shattered.

The lighting, visual whirl-patterns (fractals of the sort associated with chaos theory_, costumes, and superb singing, dancing, and acting all made contributions to what was an exemplary instance of many worlds of creativity coalescing into a riveting, intense, cathartic experience that will not just absorb you, but make you think and feel.

As with The Two-Cents Opera I feel bound to insist the appellation of opera is not gratuitous; this is not the conventional kind of opera, but it is opera. I have been listening to a lot of baroque opera lately, and the stylization of form, the brevity of the overall work, and yet the clear presence of emotion even if not the melodramatic emotion to which we are operatically accustomed is something Lauten shares with Handel and Carissimi. The music is perhaps closer to classical minimalism than the more overtly post-minimalist Two-Cents Opera; it has the intimacy of chamber music with the spiritual declarativeness of opera. Based on a complicated set of patterns both mathematical and astrological and psychological, both Eastern and western, it is both technological and mystical. Lauten seems to be saying we cannot do without either mathematics or spirituality, that to bifurcate our cultural outlook to only accommodate one is to be ipso facto cognitively impoverished.

This is a very busy time for many, with end of academic term, people scrambling to do stuff before they go away for the summer, and so on. Fortunately, the opera's run is a generous one, extending through May 22. Please take the time to see this short but emotionally intense piece. It is rare to see work that will genuinely be part of the cultural conversation in the next twenty years and The Death of Don Juan is certainly of that caliber. Buy tickets now!

Teaching bin Laden's demise

2011-05-02T12:24:00.000-07:00

Taught two classes today, Theory and Shakespeare. I let in the bin Laden issue into Theory class but decided not to with Shakespeare. The Theory class probably went better but I just didn't feel like taking ten minutes away from Shakespeare and giving it to bin Laden, however joyously dead. It is a real tough call for a teacher, one does not want one's class to becpme CNN but on a day so momentous as this one wants to acknowledge the importance of it. Especially since my students were in middle school on 9/11/01 and have been living with this demonic presence and the trauma he caused--including that of the overcompensations of the US war on terror--all their lives. I love Walter Benjamin, but he could spare ten minutes for such a big day and in any event the essay we were discussing, with the aestheticization of spectacle and so on, could be teased to include today's headlines. I hate to sound canonical, but Shakespeare is a different matter-especially since we were discussing the first tow acts of The WInter's Tale, which however searing, are not so in a 'political' way.

Webster and Shakespeare

2011-04-09T03:58:00.000-07:00

My colleague Cecilia Rubino and a group of Lang and New School for Drama students put on a production of Webster’s White Devil on Wednesday.. I really enjoyed it--the shortened length made it stripped-down and intensified, and even though the plot was compressed it is the emotions and attitudes that make the play, not the plot, which the more one gets into this kind of theatre the less necessary it seems.

I am going to talk to my students at some point some point, maybe during our discussion of Macbeth, of changes in the London theatre system attendant on the accession of King James, but Webster's theater was part of these changes, and Webster represented one, Gothic, 'extreme' of a younger generation than Shakespeare while John Fletcher, who collaborated with Shakespeare, represented the 'other', more light-hearted one. But it is interesting to think of similarities and differences. Like Shakespeare, Webster was (most likely) not formally educated, but unlike Shakespeare he remained a genuinely colloquial, popular playwright, while the creator of Hamlet has an undeniably intellectual side to him and uses much fancier language. Moreover, Shakespeare’s sources were more literary, while Webster took his plots from, most often, versions of 'current events' or scandals n the air, ableit often luridly distorted.

Nonetheless how power was regarded in the play seemed to me similar to Shakespeare. The idea of the white devil,; the would-be virtuous person, being worse than the black one speaks powerfully to Angelo in Measure for Measure. Where Webster is different is he is much more sexually frank, and the sexual motives in his plays are rather obvious, I have to say this is far less the case in Shakespeare. Even Gertrude and Claudius's relationship cannot be explained by mere lust...in Shakespeare sex always has something to do with cognition, with knowledge, in Webster it is more 'straightforward.’ Webster of course is also much darker in Shakespeare there is always redemption even at the end of tragedy (as we saw today with Fortinbras); with Webster darkness most often overrules all. When T. S. Eliot said that Webster saw "the skull beneath the skin" (used as his book title by my cheirshed colleague Charles R. Forker) he was in a sense suggesting Shakespeare did not.....

What Theory Would Say....

2011-04-09T03:49:00.000-07:00

I just read an assertion that people like other things, but love poetry. This may be true, it may be not, but what 'theory' would say to this is : people SAY they love poetry. It is an enunciation. And they may be saying this to gain cultural capital. They also may actually love it--I hope he's right, we need as many people loving poetry as possible. But 'theory' would not just take greater Google hits of what people say as evidence of something actually existing as opposed to a discursive formation.

Perusing the Physical Book

2011-04-01T04:27:00.000-07:00

I love e-readers--though my Kindle has mysteriously broken twice; I am awaiting my third--and love nothing more than standing around at dead time in the airport rereading something like Dombey and Son--but the physical book also has its incidental virtues. Keeping a book--a physical book--by your computer that you can dip into when you're bored, or can't face your own writing, is a great way to re-experience an author. I have my collected Robert Frost here for some reason and I'm finding tons of poems I never knew he wrote, and am reoriented how intellectual and political (not always wisely) he was....the lyrical Frost of the deathless, thoughtful meditaitons stands side by side with satirical jabs that would have sometimes been better jettisoned....only when you are bored and want to be distracted does one pick up such things otherwise one just flips through the book, alights on something one already knows and reconfirms it....

New blog

2011-02-21T17:30:00.000-08:00

The American Association of Australasian Literary Studies has voted to set up a new blog and I will be doing the first few posts. This will further take my energy away from this already very intermittently maintained blog, but soon others will take up the slack with the Australian blog and I can return here to some extent

Shakespeare and the Greeks

2011-02-05T06:05:00.001-08:00

It is very interesting for me teaching an online course on classical Greek drama as well as, concurrently, doing an on-site course on Shakespeare--one sees the similarities and differences so vividly. Shakespeare did not know the Greeks--only as refracted through the ROman tradition as in Seneca--but he was their indirect legatee. In Shakespeare, since it is in our language, one concentrates so much on language, whereas one cannot with the Greeks. Certain nineteenth-century thinkers would not see this as a loss; Thomas Carlyle, for instance, thought only the ideas, not the language, mattered with respect to Greek drama, and German critics like Gervinus and Gundolf said the same of Shakespeare.

Another difference is that Shakespeare plays are so much longer, have, in many cases, subplots or counterplots, and have a five-act structure with multiple actors being on stage at the same time. In addition, there is no plural chorus in Shakespeare plays, although in rare cases, such as the role of Gower in Pericles. Prince of Tyre, a commentator acts as a kind of sole chorus, which is the case with the Choruses in e. g. Henry V or Romeo and Juliet, or one can see the witches in Macbeth as a kind of anti-chorus. The many songs in Shakespeare plays of course supply a choral element.

Shakespeare also writes both tragedy and comedy, whereas in Greece you were either a comedian or a tragedian. "Aristophanes here is our ha-ha man, whereas Sophocles here is the marry your mother, murder your father and blind yourself man." Shakespeare also develops a third genre, the history play, which was sampled in ancient times (Aeschylus' The Persians, the unpreserved works of Phyrnichus, the praetexta called Octavia and probably falsely, ascribed to Seneca) but seldom sustained both because of Aristotle's proscription of history as a subject for being insufficiently universal and because talking about history at all was bound to be politically subversive. Shakespeare in general gropes for tragicomic genres (not just the history play but the problem play, the romance) which bespeak his independence from the Greeks' generic norms.

That said, the similarities outweigh the differences, the theory of drama (no doubt mediated through the medieval Christian mass) is similar, and details of implementation, like women's roles being played by men, as well as undeniable physical limitations (having to perform their plays publicly in full daylight etc) are held in common. They are different parts of the same story, so far away from each other. Yet it is a kind of bogus universalism to stress only the similarities and not to consider the differences.

Conference Meta-Paper

2011-01-19T10:27:00.000-08:00

Three years ago, I wrote a short paper on how to present conference papers--the intended audience was graduate students in Slavic studies and in nineteenth-century British, both areas in which a few people requested I address them on this topic. I subsequently re-tailored it for a broader audience--it has reverberated as far as the Republic of Georgia, i.e. Saakashvili Georgia, not Sonny Perdue Georgia) --and offer it here. Surprisingly, it has proven controversial, as my modest advocacy of complexity has upset people who want everything to be simple and lucid, or at least to insist that others strive for, or limit themselves by, such admonitions. I think the idea of research in the humanities is to struggle with complexity--not to be obfuscatory or incomprehensible or mystifying, but to be complex as the questions we answer warrant--and this paper is designed to show how the twin goals of complexity and rhetorical effectiveness can work in tandem.

Banalata Sen

2010-12-28T13:21:00.000-08:00

My translation of the Bengali classic poem Banalata Sen, by Jibanananda Das. As one can see, my strategy was ot lean ehavily on borrowings from the English poetic tradition to conjure a sense of "antiquity"--always a difficult quality to project across languages and cultures!

Why is the NEW YORK TIMES so anti-theory?

2010-12-04T03:55:00.000-08:00

It's interesting that the New York Times has this article extolling quantitative analysis solely because it is not deconstruction--in other context the Times would cavil at including so many noncanonical figures, and I myself an mainly interesting in knowing what the important Victorians thought--and in another article today the Times, or its critic, seems to think there was a serious, large-scale interpretive structure for literature before theory--if there was, theory would not have been needed. It is always the tactic of the anti-theorist to act as if pre-theoretical criticism was better than it was--and Lord knows I wish it had been. But we might also ask why the Times takes such an anti-theory line? Is it to compensate for what are its left-wing politics in other areas, to make sure they do not go overboard? Or are they really more moderate or accommodationist in their politics and more overt about this when discussing theory? Do they object to any model of critical thought that stands in the way of a more directed consumer preference? Do they just wish all language to be on an easily comprehensible, journalistic plane? What is good about theory--and as I have said repeatedly, I am not a unilateral enthusiast about theory, particularly deconstruction--is that it foils such an understanding of language.

El Sueño del Celta

2010-11-26T12:58:00.000-08:00

Mario Vargas Llosa's new novel, just published in Spanish,concerns Roger Casement, the Irish anti-colonial activist who later took up the irish cause against the British in World War I, going so far as to overtly collaborate with the Germans. He also was a homosexual, revelations of whose sexual hijinks seriously undermined his plea for clemency when the British decided to execute him for his political activity. Vargas Llosa is not an advocate for Casement, nor obviously does he celebrate all his activities, but he does present him as a fascinating and generally sympathetic figure.

As my co-edited book indicates, Vargas Llosa is generally seen as of the Right politically; when he won the Nobel, the right-wing mediasphere either was content or faintly annoyed that somebody it felt sympathetic had finlaly own, thus no more griping at the seeming prejudices of the Swedish Academy. This new novel makes clear, though, that, though while Vargas Llosa may favor economic libertarianism and an anti-collectivist vision of society, he is not a moral traditionalist, a political legitimist, or nostalgic for the pre-colonial order, unlike so many on the Right. (Witness the indictment of Obama as 'anti-colonial', an epithet most US Presidents would have worn with pride). Moreover, Vargas Llosa is neither anti-gay nor in sympathy with politico- religious zealotry.

Pp. 448-49 of the novel--where Casements increasing celebration within Ireland is connected to Ireland becoming less dominated by ecclesiastical conservatism-- is a very explicit linkage of (neo)liberalism and anticolonialism, and confirms what have assumed all along about his views on religion and the gay issue. Interesting that Ross Douthat, the conservative NYT columnist, seems to blame Ireland’s break from strict Catholicism for the economic crisis, so in a sense Vargas Llosa is to this extent a 'moderate;.

EL sueño del celta was much easier for me to read in Spanish than most of his other fiction, this is likely because I know the anterior subject matter well, but still seems a lot more accessible certainly than La casa verde.

The book has three parts: the Congo (early 1900s), Amazonia (circa 1910), and during the First World War and the Irish revolt. The book's middle, the Amazonia section, is very evocative, really brings alive the place (something rather difficult to do to a reader such as me who cannot read the language 'deeply', but even I sense he does it).

Vargas Llosa does take a really anti-colonial stance, which at this point is not controversial except the US Right is full of people saying the British Empire was wonderful; Africa had its finest times under European rule, etc. Even these might say the Belgian Congo is something different (and, indeed, Chinua Achebe makes the point that Conrad’s denunciation of Belgian imperialism actually privileged a more benign British imperialism) but it is clearly Vargas Llosa going to the 'left' again, at least as far as the US is concerned.

With regard to technical/formal considerations--the starting off with the execution scene and then flashing back, fairly conventional by now, but still well done. And the staying in Rogers consciousness virtually the whole time, the narration is not split as in La guerra del fin del mundo and La fiesta del chivo.. The author clearly does not agree with everything Casement does, but alas empathy, stays with him.

Clearly, as with Flora Tristán, the feminist hero of Vargas Llosa's novel The Way to Paradise, the Peruvian connection was the origin, and then he radiated out for the more global stories, it is in a sense of example of how one can be global and local at the same time.

Funny there is not a translation of 'Sheriff' into Spanish; I guess the word is so English (with its roots in 'shire') it just cannot be done.

Julio Cesar Arana, the rubber/robber baron of the Amazon, is not a very positive portrait of a businessman (cf. Jean Knight's article in Vargas Llosa and Latin American Politics.

The Crusader analogy on page 27 is interesting in light of what I said in the da Cunha article in Vargas Llosa and Latin American Politics.

In general, I liked the book, and I felt critiques such as that of the usually spectacularly able Gustavo Faverón's slighted it. One might wonder why the author is so interested in Celts (we remember Galileo Gall, the Scotsman in La guerra) but not only is there sympathy for the underdog but perhaps a vestigial memory of the large Celtic admixture of the population of Spain, especially Galicia, named after the Gauls. Vargas Llosa is also quite an Anglophile, though, so the advocacy of Celticity is not polemical.....

Winter break?

2010-11-08T18:58:00.000-08:00

After one more hectic week of meetings and activities, the pace of my academic year will begin to slow down; final papers will come in, my attention can withdraw to concentrate on marking them and dwelling on my classes, I wil not have to do a lot of writing over Thanksgiving break (unlike the past two years), the MLA will be in and I can read some new books, something which i have had all too little time to do recently--'new" in the sense of recently published, that is.

One book I have had a chance to read that I find I like more than does the consensus is Seamus Heaney's latest, Human Chain, which I reviewed for a reference compendium. William Logan slapped around the book a bit in his Times review, less really for any inherent deficiency than Heaney is a big target waiting to be taken down a notch. This is unfair to Heaney who has continued to write good poetry distinct from his earlier work if manifesting a continuity with it. I also find myself gravitating to different poems in this new volume than have most of the reviewers; the story the news headline, are the poems directly and indirectly about Heaney's recovery from a stroke, but for me the heart of Human Chain is in the translations from Pascoli and Guillevic. In the latter, "A Herbal" (sic) even the grass is alive with motility and tension, "It too takes issue.now sets its face/to the wind". What seems low-key in this book is throbbing with life, of one bends to examine closely enough. In any event go out and buy the book; don't listen too the consensus! In fact, don;t everlasting to the consensus, other than on those occasions where it happens to be right!

One more theory post

2010-11-06T07:48:00.000-07:00

A colleague wrote me and asked what I thought of Guy Debord's semiotics, and I had to admit that I had never really read Debord, that the closest I came to him was reading Baudrillard. Debord is too Sixties-radical for me; he acted as if the dilemmas of semiosis could be solved through inversion or parody. What I value about Derrida and Foucault and Baudrillard is their sense of both celebrating instability and acknowledging limits; there is both euphoria and bitterness in their tone. It is not all-just deformation and--though I may be unfair to Debord here, as I said I have not really read him--this has always struck me as the agenda of his work.

I heard an interesting talk last week, where the speaker argued that our existing view of a certain text was limited because it had been anchored in what was essentially, though not locally, a New Critical reading which emphasized a binary approach to the work, when the interpretive possibilities it offered were much more variegated. Why this lasted, inferentially, was because it was good for the undergraduate classroom, it protected students form naive readings. But a reading that is there to protect from naive readings, if it becomes anchored and permanent, acquires the very naïveté it sought to dispel. This is why I go as high as two cheers for deconstruction, because if not for deconstruction who knows that these simplistic readings would not have endured forever. What is valuable in the undergraduate classroom in 1959 is not necessarily valuable in the graduate classroom over five decades later on, or in the very different undergraduate classroom of today for that matter. It is not just times change and people need to change with them but texts need to be read more thoroughly, more adequately. And deconstruction offered this, without, again, falling into simple deformation or parody--though many thought it did.

I would argue the age of deconstruction has most likely neared its end, and we need to think in new ways, but this thought made a very important contribution to the history thinking about literature, for, among others, the reasons outlined above.

THEORY and deconstruction

2010-11-01T10:32:00.000-07:00

No, not theory as such, but my recently issued book, THEORY AFTER THEORY (Broadview).

Some professors have been asking publishers' representatives whether the use of the subtitle 'deconstruction' in nearly all the chapter titles meant the book was endorsing or favoring deconstruction, or applying deconstruction as a method across the board.

The answer is, emphatically, no. The book is indeed quite critical of deconstruction and its limitations, and only part of chapter 2 is devoted to deconstruction per se. What the book, does, though, argue is that principles analogous to deconstruction can be found in the other theories, and that there is an intimate intellectual relationship between them; they are not cordoned off.

But the book is not entirely critical of deconstruction, thus differentiating it from Eagleton or, on the other side of things, Corral/Patai. It is not saying deconstruction is/was worthless. Its stance is deconstruction happened, it mattered,it is now over, and we can assess its strengths and weaknesses. Its stance is. at most, 'two cheers for deconstruction".

That's what I asked my publisher to tell people. You might though ask hen why I chose the title in the first place when any intelligent person might predict these sorts of questions would arise (and potentially turn off customers/readers). I did it because deconstruction is the word, and the set of ideas/practices, that really arouse emotions about theory, and one of the agendas of the book is to explain to today's students, who if they are traditional-age were born well after the heights of debates about theory, why people got so emotionally worked-up over theory. I wanted, as that non-deconstructionist Gerald Graff would say, to 'teach the conflict'. Also, I wanted to normalize the word deconstruction, to make people less afraid of it, to render the willing to remember and cultivate the good aspects of the 'method', if it was such--and that someone clearly as non-card-carrying-deconstructionist as myself is willing to use the term should help accomplish this task of normalization.

In Memory of Nestor Kirchner

2010-10-28T14:50:00.000-07:00

I am very surprised by how little coverage the sudden and unexpected death of former Argentine President Nestor Kirchner has received in the US media, This was the pivotal recent leader in one of the four most important countries in the hemisphere, one of the thirty most important in the world. This was someone who took a country many had given up on and made it a factor once again. I was not in lockstep with his every political move or viewpoint, and, follow it as I can, I am insufficiently attuned to the interstices of Argentine domestic politics to judge the nuances of his, and now his wife Cristina Fernandez's, every move or policy. Bur he deserves to be noted and, as appropriate, mourned. Surely if Jacques Chirac had unexpectedly died, there would be more attention. And, despite his recent heart problems, it was unexpected: he was at the New School (which has developed an institutionally strong relationship with Argentina and Argentine institutions) to speak last month and looked fit as a fiddle, vigorously taking on those who accused him and his wife of passing the presidency between them as a political football.

In any event, Argentina matters to me, though apparently not the US media.

Vargas Llosa Wins Nobel Prize

2010-10-07T05:45:00.000-07:00

I am thrilled that the great Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa has been declared the winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in literature. Vargas Llosa has had an exemplary literary career. As a novelist, he has excelled over five decades in many genres and modes, from the grim confines limned in The Time of The Hero to the portrayal of the life of disaffected youth a dictatorship in Conversation in the Cathedral, from the engaging satire of soap opera and young love in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter to the searing yet empathetic portrait of millennialism in The War of the End of the World, to his masterpieces of the past decade, The Feast of the Goat with its convulsive sense of trauma and machinations amid an authoritarian regime, to the moral progress, or regress. of the boy-made-good gone bad in The Bad Girl. Effortlessly adapting himself to eroticism in the Don Rigoberto books, the mystery-thriller in Death In The Andes and Who Killed Palomino Molero?, and the historical novel, in some of the books mentioned above as well as in El sueño del Celta, his forthcoming novel about Roger Casement in the Congo, Vargas Llosa is a deft craftsman even as there is always substance, heft, behind his every gesture. Vargas Llosa is also an accomplished critic, writing on authors from Flaubert to Hugo to Arguedas. encompassing the European and Latin American inheritance. I don;t agree with a lot of his politics, rather obviously, but his role as political commentator has also been distinguished, especially as exemplified in his widely syndicated Piedra de Toque columns. Vargas Llosa has lived out his imaginative vision in public life; while he asks no one to approve of all his positions, he has thrown his moral weight behind them in a manner that commands respect. I am very pleased to have edited, with my Lang Literary Studies colleague Juan E. De Castro, an anthology on Vargas Llosa's recent work; those looking for an orientation to the latter half of Vargas Llosa's career may find it useful.

Fruit Keys

2010-09-23T09:19:00.000-07:00

Burt Kimmelman, As If Free, Jersey City, Talisman House, $14.95, 88 pp, ISBN 978-1-58948-069-8

Reviewed by Nicholas Birns

In “The Seeds of the Red Maple,” one of the most commanding poems in his new anthology, Burt Kimmelman annotates for the reader the phrase “fruit key”, is “a type of seed or pot of seeds in which a flattened leaf of fibrous, papery tissue, called a wing, develops from the ovary wall.” (64). The phrase “fruit key” fiancées not just bauxite of its conjunction of the organic and the mechanical but because fruits are products of a process, whereas keys illuminate or investigate processes; because using a key is active, while reaping a fruit can at least seem passive; because fruit is abundant, while keys are scarce. Kimmelman's definition tantalizes as well, with its vocabulary that could be used as well of human as of arboreal reproduction.

The tree is captured at a moment of transition, of late summer, even perhaps late midsummer, at the height of its :majesty: yet ready “to let go of its seeds”. Nothing is still; even the still luxuriance nature contains hints of its succumbing. But Kimmelman is not plaintive or elegiac; the seeds of the tree, in literal terms, become a tree diaspora, making the children who play with them “people of the tree”; the tree distributes itself, mixes itself in the world, in a mode of cyclical death—and-rebirth but also as a vehicle of a more widespread propagation which is moral and spiritual as well as natural. The title of the volume comes in here: the seeds are cast off as if free, sent out into the world on their own missions The almost Kantian irony of the title—and its three words are indeed together three very important words in Kant’s thought—are suggestive; the tree is not really free to go outside its own natural rhythms, but its exuberance and prodigality make it seem almost as if it were, and it is that freedom, as much as and concomitant with the tragic awareness of mortality that this midsummer casting-off inevitably denotes, which is the affect the poet wants us to reap from the occasion,

Kimmelman writes in the Objectivist tradition of Zukofsky, Oppen, and cognate figures such as William Bronk as well as contemporary practitioners such as the masterful Michael Heller; but his principal difference from them all is that he is not worried about sounding too romantic or lyrical; he can look at nature without total severity and can model rather than carve experience without thinking he will mutate into Wordsworth or Sara Teasdale if he lets down his guard too much. Kimmelman is not just a poet of stance but of place. His Cape May nature poems, illustrated by Fred Caruso, are among the most absorbing site-specific poems of this time, poems that travel towards readers in one direction even as they travel towards Cape May in, for the most part, another. The poem in this volume of the opposite topographical extreme in New Jersey, the Delaware Water Gap, is similarly convinced by nature yet not overcome by it. He does not presuppose a Romantic unanimity or ease of reference about places, but they do exist: he does not enforce the composition of the frame (as others in his tradition might) so as to preclude them.

Kimmelman is a better poet as he tries less to be a loyal objectivist, and this can be seen in the ekphrastic poems scattered throughout the volume. In “The Deception,” on Giorgio Morandi's 1955 still life as seen in the Metropolitan Museum in 2008, Kimmelman speaks of the ‘stubborn craft” of a “made world” (72). Compelling as an evocation of the painting as such, in the broader context this is a kind of creedal affirmation, an Objectivist flag-waving so determined to avoid any epistemological connection between perceiver and referent that it becomes a bit doctrinal and airless. In some of his other poems about paintings, though, Kimmelman more than makes up for this, In writing about the sculpture of Laocöon in the Vatican—that famously inspired G. E. Lessing’s ate eighteenth-century treatise on space and time in art—Kimmelman prizes the analogy between sculpted and human body, “the ecstasy. of sinuous bodies” (68) in the sculpture both contradicted and reflected by the aging and vulnerability of actual bodies. “Variation of Green,” on an Ellsworth Kelly painting at the Metropolitan, makes a punt similar to that attempted by the Morandi poem but without any dogmatic recitation: the painting is “a sure possibility” that is “just there” calling us to “stand alongside it./ in astonishment” (64). The registering of the power of art is manifested without any aw-shucks excess or overly ascetic restraint: the poem opens itself up to the force of the painting without being overwhelmed by it.

There is a delightful and even bracing variety in this volume, an unwillingness to limit the poet’s gaze to a certain idea of the poetic, a reluctance to deny the potential integrity of any aspect of experience. “Reading Barbara Hemming’s Poems” praises ‘the possibilities” that notice of the world affords, possibilities as likely to be gratified in a grimy urban landscape or “a toilet overflowing” as in “the hills outside Santa Fe” (28) In “The Sleep of the Dead” death is resisted yet also seen as a state of calm and peace; a sleep we want to, and want our loved ones to, do their best to avoid but which also offers possibilities for wholeness, healing, and links between the generations.

Most of these poems are a page or two long, giving enough scope for setting the scene, for an exfoliation—or a seed-scattering—of ideas, and for an often unexpected turn or conclusion to reveal itself. In some poems, though, Kimmelman works within a shorter compass, unafraid to let every word matter, as in “Abandoned House:

Thin tendrils of moss,

Bright green in the shock

Of morning sun across

Red brick stones, stand up straight

To tough the light (50)

With only three words more than one syllable, each word carried a large burden, yet the way the moss/across poem wins out, in its contrast of stasis and movement, over any potentially over-melodic associations tallies with the air of alertness, of readiness, of crispness in the scene. If we do our best with nature, Kimmelman hints, if we stand at attention towards it, it can yield it can yield moments of quickened, restless unfolding such as this.

Kimmelman‘s experience in many different aspects of acidic literary studies (medieval literature as well as modern poetry) and his respect for academic ways of thinking without succumbing to being constricted or defined by them. His poems in past volumes on personal and family life are generally not repeated here, but lend their felt engagement to what in other hands might be more distanced considerations of nature and art. There is a sense of experimental, if not necessarily perceptual or moral, optimism here. We may not be free but acting as if we are will not only be inspirational can yield the exacting concentration and unlooked-for deliverance, the “quick tremor” (84) of these most welcome poems.

L'heure zéro

2010-09-17T23:06:00.000-07:00

I saw, without much expectation, Pascal Thomas's 2007 adaptation of Agatha Christie's Towards Zero as L'heure zéro and was very pleasantly surprised, Thomas showed a scrupulous fidelity of the text, using names in the text as much as possible, or seeing the closest French equivalent, Nevile Strange became Guillaume Nouvelle, Audrey became Aude, Kay became Caroline, Thomas Royde Thomas Rondeau, etc. This showed both a certain ingenuity, a game-playing in the realm of translating miming the greater game of the puzzle and the text constituted by the original work, and also showed a comprehension that, in adapting Christie, fidelity matters, unlike the recent British adaptations, which have exploded the text in search of a more gratifying 'story'; the adaptation of The Secret of Chimneys, that most delicate and pleasing of farces, made it into a creaking melodrama, and made the text's most genial character into the movie's villain. The French adaptation approached Christie as if she were Shakespeare--not to say that she is anything close to Shakespeare, but that her texts respond similarly to attempts to keep the plot and characters. that the setting was French, the language was French, made little difference, the integrity of the original was there--only in two small points did the movie stray from the text, and the only crucial one is that a certain car accident is meant to be an accident, not a part of the murder scheme for artistic reasons: not all bad things in life are the product of malevolence, there is risk, fortune, which of course has been an element of many tragedies. I was surprised that so little was lost in making the milieu and characters over into French one,s and perhaps we need to reevaluate Christie;s presumed cozy Englishness, ,perhaps this is not in any way essential to getting her work right, no more than Jim Thompson's; rough-hewn Americanises proved a barrier to rendering his oeuvre into French adaptations. French academics (Pierre Bayard) and writers (Michel Houellebecq) have been at the forefront of recent revaluations of Christie, but there is more than a touch of irony in their championship of her; this movie took her completely straight, and provided a gratifyingly faithful and intricate rendition of one of her best, and most engrossing, novels.

The two wives of Guillaume were, incidentally, both played by children of famous actors, Chiara Mastroianni, daughter of Marcelo, and Laura Smet, daughter of Nathalie Baye. Both were stunning.

Franzen and Shakespeare

2010-09-06T16:22:00.000-07:00

Amid all the hubbub about Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom, what has not, as far as I know, been noticed so far is that the epigraph from The Winter's Tale is very significant not only for the plot but for the overall formal and thematic sense of the book. The passage in question is Paulina's speech in Act V, after the miraculous resurrection of Hermione and her restoration to her repentant husband, Leontes, a resurrection which Paulina has either stage-managed or presided over:

Go together,
You precious winners all; your exultation
Partake to every one. I, an old turtle,
Will wing me to some wither'd bough and there
My mate, that's never to be found again,
Lament till I am lost.

Franzen takes advantage of a semantic migration that often occurs to people reading this passage, that we speak of "winners", as in the sense of"winners and losers, more colloquially than did those in Shakespeare's day, and that moreover the rise both of capitalism and of ideology has given the entire idea of winning a sense both of competition and of polemics that, though undoubtedly there in Shakespeare's day, was not as accented. (indeed, Franzen's novel somewhat argues that it was even in modernity not as accented until the 1980s, and that is part of the book's weft of implication). In a book all about status and the ideological means to status, this verbal gap is very pertinent,. But also of note is that, like Shakespeare's play, Freedom is a story of multiple generations, where the younger generation seeks to atone for, correct, or walk back the mistakes of the elder. Without giving away the story--I finished the book yesterday, but many have still to read it--I can say that. although Freedom is hardly a pastiche or rewrite of The Winter's Tale, and--though I enjoyed the book--not remotely in Shakespeare's league-- there are fascinating echoes, which only serve to enrich both the book itself and our response to it.

Obama and Responsibility

2010-09-01T12:26:00.000-07:00

I differ from the mainstream media consensus in seeing President Obama's speech last night as really very good--contrary to what most people have said, it was not 'just about Iraq', it was using the end of active US combat in Iraq as a signal that positive developments can still occur--pace the naysaying of the media for the past nine months or so--and that the economic difficulties we have now should be viewed in an ampler context. Even more, he was trying to provide some perspective so as to cirucmnavigate the endless drumbeat of bad news.

I was, though, admittedly predisposed to be particularly sympathetic to Obama by reading Andrew Ross Sorkin's article in Monday's Times, which suggested that business executives were surprised Obama was so progressive in economic terms--after all, they said, he was a 1980s Ivy League graduate! This is especially amusing given that, in that era, every Ivy League institution, no matter how relatively conservative on the spectrum, was seen as politically liberal, leaning towards the Democrats--but Obama was thought to be a reliable endorser of corporate interests simply because of when and where he attended college! This made me muse on something Obama had said in his Inaugural Address, indeed perhaps its most resonant and best-trmemberedlnie'his call for a 'new era of responsibility', and, with its Biblical resonance, his imploring that we 'set aside childish things'. How this was read was: Americans had been living above their means or pursuing self-interested agendas, this had been a form of narcissistic immaturity, now we must grow up and own our own actions. In a vacuum, this made perfect sense, and was of course a potentially bipartisan argument, given (somewhat reactivated) Republican concern for deficits.

But--as the assumptions about Obama's generation in Sorkin's article indicate--in this era, adulthood, maturity success, self-realization has been associated with endorsing the imperatives subscribed to by the corporate world, not the public weal. Obama was not so much asking the immature to become mature as to ask those who thought they had indeed become mature to adopt a new definition of maturity. He was urging people who thought they had definitively arrived at who they were to reconsider their basic assumption. And it is, here, perhaps, that his message feel on deaf ears, and why his efforts to lead the country have proved so oddly frustrating.... Not the only reason, of course, or even the main ones--but it is one of them.

Richard Maxwell, scholar and gentleman

2010-08-24T17:38:00.000-07:00

Richard Maxwell, who preceded me as editor of POWYS NOTES, died on July 20, after a nine-month battle with cancer. Richard taught at Valparaiso University for many years and for most of the past decade had held a position at Yale. Like all truly dedicated reader of John Cowper Powys, Richard was not just a narrow cultist but also someone for whom Powys was one of myriad arteries through language, history, and imagination. Richard was a truly wide and comprehensive reader, for whom no byway was too obscure. When I learned of Richard's death I was reading a provocative review-article by Frank M.Turner in the Victorians Institute Journal, lamenting that we had gone away from Matthew Arnold's small circle of privileged texts and loosened the gate sot admit, in canonical terms, all and sundry. No reader was a better reflection of the benefits of the broadening of the canon, though, than Richard; he delighted in Naomi Mitchison and Harrison Ainsworth, Anthony Powell and Mervyn Peake, the most obscure of Sir Walter Scott's novels, the rediscovered critical writings of Clara Reeve. His vision of literary study included old books and new theories, the subversive and the antiquarian. Richard combined this of course with a thorough appreciation of the Big Names; Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Hugo. As this list shows, Richard was multilingual both literally and figuratively, and was one of the few people I have known truly worthy to teach in a Department of Comparative Literature.
Richard was a man incredibly genial, gracious man. He was erudite but not pedantic or pretentious, and had gentleness and a compassion that made him approachable whereas otherwise his sheer intellect might have made him intimidating. He was tremendously encouraging to me, and delivered even criticism in an affirmative, caring way; he was in academia to help people and to share knowledge, and he made those traits abundantly clear. He seemed to have friends everywhere, among academics and creative writers, literary types and common readers.
Richards great summa on the historical novel came out last year, his co-edited Companion to the Romantic-period novel in 2008, and I really saw these years as Richard’s coming into his own; still in the prime of his career, he seemed likely to have many more books in him. As abundant as his production has been, his early death robs us of so much more. But his sly humor and his ferocious energy as a reader of literature remain as inspirations.
Now that Richard is gone, both the blurbers for Understanding Anthony Powell are dead. This was probably not a surprise in the case of Congressman John S. Monagan, who was over 90 when he blurbed the book, though John also seemed to have enough energy and intelligence to last forever. However, it is truly a shock that Richard is gone so soon. His blurb, incidentally, was both generous and tactful, and it is a rare bird that can show both traits. In any event, I was lucky to have two such distinguished and virtuous people endorse my book.

Gustafson on Fet, 45 years later

2010-08-24T08:22:00.000-07:00

In doing final, reconfirmatory research on my Tolstoy paper for October I have become intrigued by the figure of Afanasy Fet, the poet and friend of Tolstoy’s whose jovial pessimism' (Medzhibovskaya's phrase) made him a congenial and understanding friend to Tolstoy despite many manifest political and philosophical differences. I saw that one of the few books on Fet in English (I am getting slowly better with this Russian thing but still very much forced to rely largely on my own language here) was by Richard Gustafson, later to become renowned as a leading scholar of Tolstoy and the Russian religious/mystical tradition. In reading Gustafson’s 1966 book The Imagination of Spring: The Poetry of Afanasy Fet, I became intrigued by how different it was from (or, as the Australians would say. "different... to") a comparable book in English studies in the same era. Gustafson’s book is a work of interpretation; in other words, it is not comparable to the merely taxonomic single-author works of the era covering noncanonical authors, such as the Twayne series. It is actual literary criticism, which 95% of the Twaynes did not remotely achieve. Yet when compared to similar books of equivalent intellectual ambition and critical accomplishment in English studies, Gustafson’s book is far more multiple in its competencies. There is no separation of form and history language and milieu; no Wimsattian fallacies, no trace of what, in Theory After Theory, I term 'the resolved symbolic'. This, though is easily attributable to differences in national tradition (and Russian Formalism being, despite the weary, recuperative attempts to yoke them as cognate, very different form the new Criticism), and Slavicist criticism, since the time of Belinsky et al, being more open to social influence, many times, of course, restrictively so. The most notable difference between Gustafson’s treatment of Fet and equivalent treatments, of the same period, of Anglophone poets is that Gustafson is not partisan; he is not out to advocate Fet at the expense of others, to denigrate Fet to the benefit of others, or to give a rereading of Fet that would redefine him towards or away from romanticism, conservatives, classicism, Christianity etc. Indeed, Gustafson is less partisan than Fet himself; he does not simply ventriloquize or update the poet’s aestheticism, but regards it in the light of an overall appreciation of Fet's artistic vision; the ideology refers to the poet, nor vice versa. There is none of this here; it is simply full, responsive, telescopic overview of a poet's career, done with flair and nuance, yes, it is obviously a first book, lacking the characteristic religious and mystical emphasis of Gustafson’s signature later work. But one could say that the lack of partisanship, the deft, economical organization of material, and the avoidance of formula in the Fet book foreshadowed Gustafson’s later agility, his capacity to take positions and manifest emphases without these making him narrow or polemical as a critic. It is thus a book that can still be useful now—even after several further studies on Fet have appeared—and not just a museum-piece in the archive of lapsed ideologies, as would be true of so many books on Keats or Donne or Hopkins,

Fet is an intriguing, idiosyncratic figure, for one thing exemplifying the nineteenth-century Russian taking the Muses far more seriously than any poet of his century. Fet's muse has real power, can, as Gustafson says, give the poet "the power to speak: in a way more imperative than ceremonial.

I just realized "Afanasy" has to be the Russian version of "Athanasius". Intriguing.

The Loose Baggy Monster and the Great White Whale

2010-08-05T06:10:00.000-07:00

I am usually much more of a connoisseur of the obscure than this--I recall a former colleague of mine some fifteen years ago riding me for not writing about 'major figures'--but I have been reading Tolstoy and Melville a lot recently, both in relation to fall activities at the New School--Melville for an 8 AM (!) single-book class on Moby-Dick I am teaching, Tolstoy because I am speaking at the international Tolstoy conference and celebration being organized, in a truly herculean effort, by my treasured colleague Inessa Medzhibovskaya. Aside from writing books of great size--indeed, if Henry James thought Tolstoy an author of loose, baggy monsters, it is interesting what he would have said of Moby-Dick--whose revival did not occur until after the Master had gone off to the great drawing-room in the sky--Tolstoy and Melville have little in common. Indeed, the gravamen of my paper is that Tolstoy is de-romanticizing or even 'novelizing' the novel, whereas Melville deliberately incorporates huge masses of seventeenth-century prose and allusions in his work, as if to deliberately keep alive a link to an earlier time in which writing was more curiously wrought. (Russia of course had no equivalent of the 'Metaphysical' period in its literature, which was, as I will argue, one of the cards Tolstoy held in his hand). Although both men lived complicated lives, had vexed relationships with their national identities, came from families of repute in their respective lands, their courses on this planet were quite different, Tolstoy being one of the most famous and admired men in the world, whose very death was an event, Melville dying in obscurity.

Yet I kept on having two feelings about them. One is, that as an American I knew what Melville was 'driving at' much more, but felt a far greater affinity to Tolstoy in terms of what was important to me. (I am not presuming to at all compare myself fin stature with either, believe me). But the second is that, as simple as this might sound, there was actually something in common in them--a quest for social justice. I mean this both manifestly, in that Tolstoy, after 1880, obviously put his moral and ethical work above his literary, and even Melville, in Billy Budd--one of the books included in my university’s Core course and always pleasure to teach--made a final plea for humanity and equity, aboard ship and, implicitly, on land as well. But there is also a peal for social justice in their celebration if the unusual, their nonconformity, their spurning of conventional social expectations. Melville hailed Hawthorne for saying "NO--in thunder"; Tolstoy thundered in a different, more hopeful key, and thundered not at workd-affirmaiton but at those greedy for power and control. but I think his motivation for thundering was fundamentally the same.

'Lennon' versus 'McCartney'

2010-06-16T12:30:00.000-07:00

Getting back to the Gilmore book, an interesting aspect of its citation of “Heart of Glass" as an indexical citation of the time period was that, if polled at the time, everybody would have chose that as just the song to be so employed; it was indexical of its time as a past time even as it was current!

Thinking of this period also reminded me of a minor vexation that has stuck with me all these years, though most recently occasioned by seeing McCartney at Citi Field last year: the theories of canonicity proposed by the way teenager so that period valued the solo, post-Beatles work of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. This valuation was one-way and total: Lennon was cool, McCartney was not. (This was before Lennon's murder, which of course changed things, it was understandable afterwards why Lennon, for a time, would be more highly regarded, but I am skipping of the time before). That McCartney sold more records, that the people involved actually knew most solo McCartney (I e. Wings) songs than they did solo Lennon songs, did not move them; nor was the preference made on the basis of n sort of musicological or aesthetic criteria. Lennon was cool, basically, because the adults, or the elder siblings, in their lives told them this was so; there was no autonomous judgment, no heart-swell of an incipient generational cri de coeur.

To put it in theoretical terms—and, en passant, I might indicate my Theory book is mow definitely published, a copy is by my desk as I type this—one might use this to say something like: usually, the debate over pop culture is framed as a contrast e g. between Adorno’s wholesale rejection of it as conformist instinctual trash, and corporate versus Hebdige’s defense of the proliferation of subcultures and consciously styled practices in the aftermath of rock, punk, etc. But what if one has the conformism Adorno castigate manifested itself in a minor snobbery that seems to be Hebdigean in savvy but is in fact totally ersatz and handed-down? Or, to put it another way, when high art is no longer used as cultural capital, when a mass phenomenon is used in just the way Bourdieu discussed avant-garde painting being used as such, how does that affect the frame? (In a sense this question continues the thread I started with my Caillebotte post on this blog of spring 2009). It may well be that the solo work of John Lennon was better than that of Paul McCartney; at this point, to make that judgment I would have to listen to their entire oeuvres and probably write on them. It is not the judgment that was the problem; it is that the people who made it had no adequate criteria of reaching that judgment.

Additionally, the unthinking preference for Lennon had these problems:

1) -- It branded itself as the consensus of a new generation-that later to be called Generation X—yet not only was the valuation in question made of artists of a previous generation, the critical judgment and valued were totally those of elders—if was as if something manufactured in one country was relabeled as being made in another than marketed as echt indigenous to the second country.

2) -- It had nothing to do with msic-0evne the most atavistic, instinctual, un-cerebral response to music, It had totally to do with wanting to be cool and in with the in-crowd. The only lessons about aesthetics that were relearned were the lessons of canon-making.

3) --It used a form originally liberating, and intended by both Lennon and McCartney in their different ways, to still be liberating, as a mode of confirms and oppression, of a herd mentality that was precisely hegemonic because it presented itself as a sophisticated cutting-edge judgment.

4) -- It used a potentially critical perspective—of not just supposing McCartney’s larger sales made him a better artist—to foster a stupid consensus. And it made somebody who took risks with his life and art—John Lennon—into an organ of cultural policing and of social authoritarianism. McCartney deserved better so did John Lennon. In addition, this attitude used the semantic and emotional vocabulary of critical judgment, without the actual presence o fit. This was even worse than just not being critical at all, merely being enthusiastic or consensus-driven, because this attitude had the aura, the aroma, of a critical mentality without its real presence. This led to the assumption, vis a vis critical thought, that this generation had ‘been there, done that’ and that, for this generation, such critical frames as e. g. literary theory of the 70s and 80s provided were supernumerary. Much of the backlash against theory in the 1990s and 2000s can be traced to this perception that a critical stance had already been canvassed and integrated when in fact it had been only glimpsed.

I pledged not to get into the McCartney-Lennon debate, and John Lennon is profoundly important to me in a way I cannot even get into here, but I can’t resist throwing this out—if Lennon had lived, would he ever have collaborated with Michael Jackson?

Spies of the Balkans

2010-06-16T11:56:00.000-07:00

A few books later, I read Alan Furst's Spies of the Balkans. This presented a contrast to Gilmore’s book in several ways: an older, established writer as opposed to a young emerging one. anemone who writes consciously as a genre writer as opposed to a high-literary novelist; and, perhaps most crucially, a setting not that far away--just forty years back from Gilmore’s--but one which mandated s a very different approach to detail. Giving away the plots of Furst's spy novel would be even less productive than with Gilmore’s .What I want to think about here is how his approach to detail is both similar and different. Gilmore is writing about a past time, but, most immediately, a similar place: she assumes most of her readers will be culturally savvy residents of the Northeast Corridor, with the faraway reader, who happens to come into contact with the book, finding it more exotic but perhaps needing more help to navigate the cultural patterns. For Furst, both time and place are different he not only writes novels of the World War II era, but novels of that era without English-speaking protagonists: his point of view characters have ranged from the French to the Polish to, in this book, the Greek. Not only does Furst give the reader a mixture of the familiar and alien--they may know that Germany invaded Greece but have forgotten that Greece at the time was under the quasi-Fascist dictatorship of Ion Metaxas, they may know generally what clothes people wore and what customs the practiced in the 1940s, but not known a Greek police officer would drive a Skoda 420 car or smoke a Papastratos No. 1 cigarette--but he has to let the details do the vast majority of the work. Whereas Gilmore can assume a background--one that can be adjusted to fit the experience of relevant generations of readers--even the oldest of Furst's readers would know World War II as foot soldiers and not grand strategies, and so Furst is in a sense engaged in what Peter Carey (whose latest, Parrot and Olivier, I highly recommend), has called 'writing science fiction of the past".

Gilmore is able to have her details and plot dovetail; they generally complement, vouchsafe one another. Furst cannot do this; if he did, there would be no action, and his books would simply be catalogues of lost time. That they are not is due to his ability to render suspense and action, but this has to run counter to the detail; as a writer Furst zigzags, diligently constructing detail with one hand, cross-cutting against it with suspense and action with another. This to-and-fro means his novels are fascinating not just on the narrative but on the architectural level, and why they are so reread able.

Intriguingly; Furst's books, like Gilmore’s novel, are, in many ways, post-1989 fiction; they are fiction rendered conceptually possible by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Gilmore’s sense that Communism is an utterly ludicrous option would not have seemed so apparent to the literati before then (see my previous post on the deutero-Katyn tragedy of last April, which in a sense was an occasion for the first Katyn tragedy to be fully ventilated in the Western press for the first time). And Furst's detailed exploration of the small countries of central/eastern Europe in the late 1930s and early 1940s would have seemed beside the point before 1989, not so much, for the most part, out of pro-Communist prejudice but because of a sense that the countries involved were simply not 'players' on the international power scene. After 1989 this changed; and the map of wartime Europe Furst provides has some features, such as an independent Slovakia, that would mirror today’s.

Yet his map is not just of the wartime Balkans as such, but of an escape route through them--before Yugoslavia and Greece were in the war, one could escape from German-occupied Austria through pro-German but neutral Hungary down through Serbia and to the Aegean at Salonika--and this calls to mind an even more important facet of Furst's books: they are often either literally about neutral countries in wartime or people in neutral situations who are jostled by events into having to commit. Even amid total war, there is neutrality some countries (Sweden, m Portugal, Switzerland, Ireland) stayed neutral for all of the war or (Turkey) for most of it; and Furst is superb at working out with an almost mathematical precision how people could take advantage of these suspended neutralities to navigate to and for, in covert service to one side or another or trying to evade both on their personal odysseys. Furst thus sees wartime through a second, reflective level, and it is this, as much as in his understatement and ability to skillfully evoke a fully rendered scene with a few storks, that the profound influence of Anthony Powell is apparent. Furst has spoken of his admiration for Powell often and made a bravura and generous contribution to last year’s Powell conference in Washington, DC, which I co-convened. Like Powell, Furst can treat the war as, on the one hand, an unabashed struggle of good versus evil, and, on the other, a tableau with all sorts of interstices, contradictions, banalities. perhaps Furst’s most impressive display of this was in Dark Voyage where the sheer skill of plotting a trajectory of a neutral ship from the Mediterranean to the Baltic required as much ingenuity as the plot itself. This sort of cerebral dobbing of the books' action in its mental planning has all of Powell's nuance and precision. Powell himself was also keenly interested in the lesser-known countries of Europe during the war, and Furst's cycle in many ways is the latter-day fruition of this interest.

Greece and adjoining areas are new territory for Furst, but he handles them well. Where will he go next? Albania, though interesting, would be almost too recondite, The Baltics? he has touched on them in Dark Voyage but never a full-scale treatment. Tere öhtust, as they would say in Tallinn.

Something Red

2010-06-15T10:46:00.000-07:00

One of my first readings of this summer was my colleague Jennifer Gilmore’s novel Something Red. I had heard Gilmore read an excerpt from it in a faculty reading series and was intrigued by its portrait of three generational of a Washington, DC intellectual Jewish family in 1980, at the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the grain embargo, Olympic boycott, etc. What I expected, and received, from the novel was a sharp, provocative portrait of our country at a crucial liminal time in its history. To do what Gilmore attempts a risky step for the author to take as there is still not a consensus about what this era meant or who were the good guys or the bad guys in it, and even her citations of popular songs such as Blondie’s Heart of Glass or (of a moderately earlier vintage) the Starland Vocal Band’s Afternoon Delight will not only mean different things to those who originally heard them on the radio versus those too young to know them or having encountered them as part of the archive of the past, but no tow people ‘old enough’ to ‘be there' may well agree on what the tonal/political valence of those memories are. This aspect was as I expected, although Gilmore's achievement is to make the two elder generations-those in their forties and in their seventies in the represented time of the novel—as or more interesting than the teenagers whose manners and bearing most incarnates what we now remember as ‘typical’ of the time.

This is what I expected from the book, and received. But what I did not expect—and what makes me not just suggest but insist that anyone who likes contemporary fiction read this book immediately—is the spectacular nature of the ending, which I am not remotely going to give away because experiencing it is such a convulsive treat. The ending so bravura, so striking that it conveys a pleasing element of fantasy, pleasing because in a generally realistic book it supplied the element of cognitive fantasy—one felt one was not just in the ‘real world; of 1980 but in your own fictional world, and, paradoxically, , as someone who remembers the era I wanted fiction, I wanted something autonomous, within the frame—and the dénouement gave it a hundredfold. What courage Gilmore must have had to do this, and what a great result—to have both the collective base of memory that draws the reader initially to the novel, and to then have the train of plot events which gives the novel its own subjectivity, its autonomy, makes its world one of its own interior integrity not dependent on any externals.

Without, though, knowing this was in store, I decided, as a readerly exercise, to cut out my own memories of the time period, to read it in a more abstract way; Interestingly I think even had I not done this by page 80 or so I would have extrapolated myself from my own awareness of the context (which can be both enabling and debilitating). Really the only character the context is intrusive with is Vanessa, though since she is the primary register of the indexical aspects (the pop songs, teenage fads etc.) of the item, this is probably necessary and won’t be minded by the younger reader. But as it turned out the novel went so far beyond its premise I did not need to do this.

Detail is very important in this book and I identified,, roughly, three kinds. The main mode of narrative detail, e..g. the mother Sharon's meals (hilarious and pitch-perfect) in terms of rendering the 'gourmet’ cooking; of the time Sharon’s musings on e.g. page 28. This is for me where the novel is so outstanding, as it is everyday detail but it is replete with a panoply of feelings, reverberations, sensory perceptions—the ordinary flow of detail is as rich as those on subjects that are the products of expertise; (the DC geography, the time period. Etc.). Then there is e. g. the kind of detail linked with Dennis, the father, , his memories of his own father’s Leftist organizations, where he is very aware of his own cognitive dilemmas, the details are background to these, but where his mind is stands out independently from the details. Then we have detail with Vanessa, and I have to say (again with the caveat that the younger reader, one who cares less about the time per se, won’t mind this) that I feel Vanessa is overly enmeshed in detail, she sues detail to constitute her identity, it’s Jimmy Carter, punk rock, whatever is around, with little judgment or filter. Part of this is because she is the youngest most undeveloped character, but I began to see her as oppressed by her immersion in detail, and hoped that when she became an adult she acquired more agency and perspective—she almost becomes a ‘camera’ at times, a passive recorded of data. The characters whose relations to detail did not have to evoke the period as such were actually much more captivating.

Vanessa’s elder brother, Benji—who would no doubt ask that I call him Benjamin—on the other hand I really enjoyed, and was very comfortable with him, his reactions to Brandeis, his relationships. In the end his relationship with his girlfriend Rachel was the most admirable one in the book, I felt there was real love there, and he also showed the greatest self-awareness—the urge to go out West with Rachel and get away from his family’s tangled dysfunctionality, even if utopian like his father's, Dennis's excursion to the West with his best friend' Len when young, still speaks to a diagnosis of the uncivil state of the family which lurks beneath its placid, liberal- bourgeois surface. . At first one thinks Ben is a hippie--come-lately, pathetic in coming to the party after it is over; in the end though he is a character of real discernment and offers hope for the tableau It is interesting how Ben’s sex with Rachel seems at least somewhat wholesome, whereas Sharon’s adulterous sex with the ‘social activist; Elias is tawdry—though here is a moment where Sharon thinks that after sex, he is either going to pay her or SHE will have to pay him is laugh out loud hilarious! In general, the men in this book seem healthier than the women, I think that is true in all three generations. In a sense it can be said that all three women are too passive, tether themselves to ideologies—Tatiana to the pieties of the Old Left, Sharon to the LEAP program, a nasty self-improvement cult which she admits is a displacement of her lapsed religious faith, Vanessa to consumer culture and sex she is too young to comprehend. I feel the men are at least aware of their shortcomings and try to get out of their debilitating circumstances ;I do not mean to overly psychologies the characters but this gender difference was pronounced., and even the writing of the genders was different.

Despite this, though, Sharon—the character furthest from me in terms of ;who she is’--was the character I most identified with in terms of her subjectivity, it is a very vividly rendered character, as is Dennis—the ultimate in-betweener, in-between ideologies (Washington and Moscow) , generations, and what he wanted to do with his life versus the reality of what he did with it. But Sharon one saw from the inside,--somewhat surprisingly because at first one thinks Vanessa is the main point-of-view character and Sharon is ‘the mother’) whereas Dennis was meticulously sketched from the outside—his uncertainty, unrealization, is fascinating and is itself extraordinarily realized.

Yet for all the presence of Sharon’s personality, I felt the men came off better than the women, act with more integrity. That in this case the author was female, and the reader male, indicates that, again what was achieved here was firstly an exciting plot, secondly a compelling setting, but thirdly and most importantly real fictional autonomy, fiction that in the end operation its own steam….

As a kind of ironic coda to a book preoccupied by various iterations of the Left--Gilmore’s portrayal of a kind of vestigial radicalism on the Brandeis campus, the very tail end of 60s-70s protest, is well rendered, though curiously this man was Brandeis’s most famous graduate of the period.

If LeBron stays....

2010-05-14T09:13:00.000-07:00

With the unexpected (especially by me) departure of the Cleveland Cavaliers from the NBA playoffs, the next two months will be dominated by speculation about LeBron James coming to New York to play for the Knicks. Without making any basketball-related predictions, I am intrigued by what it will mean if LeBron ends up staying in Cleveland. If he goes to NYC, of course it will mean that once again an athlete has gravitated to the Big Apple not so much for money (the money would be more or less equal anywhere), not even for supplemental advertising revenues, but for fame--witness the famous Reggie Jackson quote, ca. 1973, "If I played in New York they would name a candy bar after me", which, when Jackson ended up playing in New York in 1977, they did, although both Jackson’s stint in New York and the marketability of the candy bar were slightly shorter than was once thought, Jackson was not talking about money from the candy bar; he was talking about fame.

But can LeBron be any more famous? If they named a candy bar (or, given our more health-conscious era a granola bar or sports drink), could he be any better-known? And can anyone be more famous in their field than Michael Jordan, who never played in New York, and Wayne Gretzky, who did only late and inconspicuously? And does this matter less in basketball, a more compact sport with smaller teams, a shorter schedule, so many of whose games are nationally televised? Even more so, is the centripetal assumption behind the "I can only make it big in NYC” scenario still valid? Has cultural pluralism, the dislocation of conventional scenarios of place made possible by the Internet and other forms of virtuality, hybridity, diaspora, migration, all those critical buzzwords, made where one works, in any profession, less central? After all, I am typing this in the heart of Manhattan, but for this to reach the person reading it now I could as well be in Cleveland gazing upon the (hopefully) blue reaches of Lake Erie, no? If LeBron stays, it won't be just a matter of "local boy wanting to stay in hometown". We will then know the postmodern communications revolution has succeeded to the point where the big city cannot automatically claim the sort of cultural hegemony--in the arts, sports, learning--that it enjoyed during the era of High Modernity, where glorious athletic careers could be totally unknown nationwide if the athlete had the bad luck not to play in New York…

Wycliffe to Wyclef

2010-05-06T11:52:00.000-07:00

At yesterday's final event in the spring Lang faculty reading series. my colleague Henry Shapiro mentioned having attended Balliol College, Oxford, one of whose early graduates was the Lollard Bible-translator John Wycliffe...later on, my colleague Ferentz LaFargue mentioned a possible project on Wyclef Jean, who needs no identification--Wyclef Jean was apparently named after John Wycliffe (I don't know why I never put this together before, but I didn't) which makes a neat symmetry! And of course both of their careers raise issues of expanding literacy, new modes of verbal expression, and crossing linguistic boundaries...that would make a trendy course, "From Wycliffe to Wyclef: Vernacular Sampling from the Fourteenth to Twenty-First Centuries." Someone else would have to teach it though!

THEORY AFTER THEORY now available for pre-order

2010-04-30T14:33:00.000-07:00

It may not be my 'magnum opus' (as one of my colleagues graciously referred to it) but it has been three years in the making, and it does set out my views on a number of subjects, most notably the challenging and poorly understood realm of recent literary theory.

Theory After Theory, with a beautiful cover, is now available for pre-order from the splendid Broadview Press; the actual book should be physically available in a month.

It can also be ordered from Amazon.

I take particular pleasure in this book as it is a subject I have taught so much, and it exemplifies a real relation between my teaching and my research.

Sorry to only be blogging about my own books recently, but I am a minimal blogger; that is just the way it is :)

Polish tragedy

2010-04-10T07:05:00.000-07:00

Though it seems somewhat mechanical to blog after every catastrophic event--the victims of the West Virginia mine disaster and the Haitian and Chilean earthquakes solicit, in their pain and loss, blog entries just as much--the plane crash in which President Kaczynski of Poland and many others were killed is particularly awful because they were about to participate in an act of reconciliation with respect to the slaughter perpetrated by the Soviets at Katyn. As I dealt with the consequences of the Katyn massacre in my Anthony Powell book (t=due to Powell's references to the event in his fiction), and learned about the continuing trauma felt by Poles in its aftermath, this plane crash is devastatingly sad as it occurred just as some painful memories from the past were about to be at least partially healed.

This article (in German) puts the complicated skein of history and tragedy in context.

Vargas Llosa and Latin American Politics

2010-03-18T10:52:00.000-07:00

The anthology of essays on mario Vargas Llosa I co-edited with my Lang colleague Juan E. De Castro is now available for pre-order on Amazon. While the price os pretty much prohibitive except for libraries, if you are interested not just in Vargas Llosa's work since 1980 but in a case study in how a single career interacts with ideas of neoliberalism, anti-Communism, and postmodernism--and in how we see literature and politics differently in an age dominated by the Right--the book might well be for you. The contributors are all first-rate and interesting, from a great variety of contexts and viewpoints--Juan and I really enjoyed assembling the essays and framing them with our own commentary and we also contributed one essay each ourselves!

Poetry and Jazz done well, finally

2010-02-21T13:33:00.000-08:00

As someone who has watched sundry attempts to combine music at the spoken word at poetry readings, and even gamely attempted himself to do it a couple of times (with fine personnel, but yet without in my judgment totally coalescing) I was staggered and stunned by the brilliance of the event I saw at the New School of Robert Pinsky reading his poetry with Vijay Iyer (on piano), Andrew Cyrille (on drums and Ben Allison (on bass); the musicians are all New School faculty members. Pinsky said at the beginning that the four should just be regarded as a quartet--with the spoken word as another instrument, like the singer in a band--and, astonishingly, this worked. Pinsky read his verse with an offbeat, syncopated, slightly ironic quality, very different from the straightforward, public, 'everyman' quality his regular readings are known for. I had not had such fun at a poetry event in ages, and several in the audience--including a distinguished elderly poet and some other veterans of literary readings--agreed. Pinsky's readings of "The want Bone" and of "Street Music" from his "City Elegies" sequence--which made such an impression when I read it in the New Yorker some years ago--were particularly impressive, and that the latter--with its complicated web of references to Memphis (the Egyptian, not the Elvis one) , Nineveh, Ashurbanipal, and Babylon--became a dynamic, engaged thread in a jazz tune was revealing--it indicated the coexistence of erudition and joy, learning and spontaneity, that I had otherwise only seem in a really good academic lecture--which can have its own music. Pinsky's "happiness" (a word he once used in a book title) was evident, he seemed to have the Orphic qualities in him released, which does not have the danger of being too cathartic when one has been trained by Yvor Winters. I am less of a music critic than a poetry critic, but the piano struck me as essential, as a complementary melody anchored by the backbeat of bass and drum, Kudos to all involved; I dragged myself to it as I was still tired from Berlin, and got a last-minute seat in the bacl, but I am immeasurably glad I was privileged to see this extraordinary performance.

Back from Berlin

2010-02-20T04:23:00.000-08:00

I need not have had any reluctance--the trip was wonderful, both for the academic aspect--the symposium on Wednesday was invigorating and I felt on the same page which much of what the other people, both the two other principal speakers and the colleagues and graduate students in attendance had to say--and for the city itself. Berlin is not exactly the hip, edgy boomtown the media often present it as--the city is effectively broke, not so much from the aftermath of reunification or the current economic crisis but from earlier bad real-estate speculation--but it is very congenial and highly affordable--half the cost of living of NYC, I would imagine. I went to sundry museums, including the Pergamon (a deeply moving experience, especially for the Near Eastern material), the Bode, the Altes Museum, several having to do with the relatively recent history of Berlin (the Wall, the German Democratic Republic, the Holocaust), as well as my personal favorite, the Dom or Cathedral--the Lutheran cathedral, naturally, where I ascended to the top of the cupola, a kind of ecclesiastical Empire State Building. And not only did I encounter wonderful collegiality at the Freie Universitat and have dinner with an old literary friend but I ran into a former graduate school colleague at the Alexanderplatz U-bahn station!

Here is a picture of me with the remnants of the Wall on Bernauerstrasse.

Reluctantly Transnational

2010-02-12T11:18:00.000-08:00

I don't really like traveling that much--I like being in the new place, but not the hassle of getting there, or of having os much work to do whenI get back. Equally, I am somewhat of a skeptic as to the euphoria surrounding globalization or transnationalism, a lot of which amounts to what Graham Huggan (following, I think, James Petras) called 'globaloney'. But here I am, about to go to Berlin to lecture on transnational dimensions of Australian literature. It will be a short trip, as it is the middle of the semester. and as it is I have had to ask colleagues to generously give of their time to guest-lecture and show movies to my Lang classes. But, of course, I'll enjoy it when I get there, the collegiality will be great and intellectually stimulating, the prospects for Australian studies in Europe it augurs are importantly polyvalent, and they have put me up in a wonderful apartment in a hip' part of town, and, needless to say, it is a great opportunity, I have never been to Berlin before....

I am seeing Avatar today, I must be the last person in the world to have seen it, and I doubt any insights I might have will be particularly provocative! Nor did I have any such on the Super Bowl, as exciting a game as it was, except the Colts jinxed their season by resting their starters vs. the Jets...

Methodism!

2010-01-03T12:30:00.000-08:00

I am on the NY diocesan Episcopal-Methodist dialogue committee, and as such I thought it my duty to actually attend a Methodist church service to see what goes on there. I thought I had done this in late 2008 when I attended a weekday lunch service at the John Street church in lower Manhattan, but it turned out that this service is officiated by a Baptist preacher who more or less rents the space out. So, prompted by Sunday school at my own church being cancelled today, I went to Christ Church on Park and 60th, which had been recommended to me by my Methodist colleagues on the committee. As I greeted him at the end of the service, the pastor said it was "just like Episcopal" which in some ways was not much of an exaggeration--it surely was a rather 'high' Methodist service, with taking communion at the altar and the clergy being robed--though there were many differences (neither the Nicene nor the Apostles' Creed, which would never occur in the Episcopal Church, also, confession and post-communion prayer much less punitive and/or humble in tone, hymn after offertory instead of a doxology). Nonetheless, with the Byzantine/Romanesque interior and the familiarity of much of what went on, one can see a 'catholicity' in the service--the United Methodist Church may not at this point be apostolic or liturgical, but it certainly is catholic with a very small c. The peace was much earlier in the service, which made it more a greeting, less a perfunctory occasion. And, of course, the Methodists do not have a prayer book; everything but the hymns is in the leaflet. I do wish they would not use the modern Lord's Prayer, not so much as I have stuffy objections to more contemporary languages but that I always forget to say it in the modern way, just as I always forget to leave out the last line in a Catholic church...still a fun visit and a good way to start out 2010, as the minister said, jettisoning all the baggage of the previous year...

To Australia for most of month, suspect I won't post again until Feb. and Super Bowl time.

Wally Cardona and Jane Austen

2009-11-21T23:15:00.000-08:00

I have been busy writing and teaching, but I did go to three cultural events this past weekend: My Lang colleague Wally Cardona's dance piece 'Really Real' at BAM, the Jane Austen exhibit at the Morgan Library, and a reading by Justin Taylor and one of the Wu Ming collective at P. S. 122. Wu Ming and Taylor--though very interesting--does not really go with the other two, but I found odd commonalities between the Cardona and the Austen.

The Cardona is divided into two parts, "He Lived A Somewhat Uneventful Life" and "Repetition". For the first (shorter) part, the lights are turned on, so that the audience can see themselves see the performers (I don't know whether the lights helped or hindered the performers seeing the audience). As a series of small, unobtrusive actions took place on stage by a series of dancers, a overvoice--deliberately halting and unassured--recited details which, without the name (I believe) ever being explicitly mentioned, clearly demoted the life of Søren Kierkegaard.

The first time we heard the snippets about Kierkegaard, we paid rapt attention to them, the second time, we began to drift away, notice the movements of the dancers on stage, hear the sound as only sound but not sense. By the time the words--spoken with an awareness of both how difficult the concepts evoked in them could be and for their potential as cliché--were said a third time they became meaningless; only the action mattered. Then "Repetition" began--with no words other than songs, the stage darkened, and a series of lyrical, sinuous dances, peopled by both adult and child performers, took over as a kind of rhapsodic counterpoint and complement to the more talky and cerebral part that had gone before.
It is interesting to think of the juxtaposition of Kierkegaard with the emphasis on youth and the presence of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus as a large part of the action--Kierkegaard is usually thought of not as a philosopher for young people, if indeed there is such a thing, but part of the show's theme is openness to experience.
The articulation of a lived intellectuality is very different form actually living it, and the difference between the first and second sections was just that: the first was the rationale for a concrete mental life, the second the actually living it. But the second could not possibly occur without the manifestation of the first, just as, for Kierkegaard, the 'aesthetic' mentality was the necessary prelude to the ethical. Kierkegaard was very unlike many of his contemporaries who objected to e.g. haggle for not being political or practicable enough--Kierkegaard wanted to turn Hegel in the direction not just of concreteness but of irony and polyether title, “Really Real” suggests three states, the Unreal, the Real. and the Really Real. In this scheme, the Unreal could be philosophical abstraction as such, the Real could be an understanding of the need for lived. understood intellectual experience. the Really Real would be that experience, itself. of course, for some people, like Kant and Lacan, the Really Real would be the most ultimately unknowable, and in a sense there is a kinship between the most knowable and the most unknowable, conveyed by the moody lyricism, the playing of the song "I Feel Free' , which has exuberance, joy, a sense of the unfettered, but also especially in the version used by Cardona, an underlying melancholy. The uniformity of the second half has less to do with collectivism in my mind than the connection necessitated by the dichotomy of repetition and a more active recollection, which, as all readers of Kierkegaard know, has to be lived forward. In order for this to happen, the unites that are repeated or recollected have to be standardized, but the black to me signified the inevitable sadness that attends on this project as also a sense of the night, the unknown, a kind of dark, mystical ecstasy. I did not feel any sense of ;conformity from the dancers, the differences in ages and features in any event made that impossible.

Part of the liberation was having the lights turned on the audience for the first twenty minutes or so...we felt relaxed, freed, we no longer needed to pretend we were an audience, pretend we weren't there (though I wished the woman in front of me whose cell phone went off with the telltale Cingular/At&T ring tone had not been there)

I did not see the dynamic mentioned by Gia Kourlas in her, to my mind, generally, albeit unsurprisingly, uncomprehending Times review about the individual and the collective--to me, the dynamic was between thought and experience, the mental and the physical, the conceptual and the authentic. Really Real achieved what its title spoke of, a release into the freedom of the lived, the actual, but it also showed that this has to be a complicated and earned and actually performed process, that it cannot be done with a snap of the fingers. it was an extraordinarily uplifting and stimulating evening and I am most grateful for it.
A day later, I had a strangely analogous experience, going to the Jane Austen exhibit at the Morgan. Austen, like Kierkegaard, was someone not really taken seriously in her own day: compared to her peers, like Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott, she, like the Danish thinker, seemed unusually personal, narrow, 'living a somewhat uneventful life' --the observations made about Kierkegaard in Cardona's play, that he only traveled outside Denmark five times, that he rarely left home, could also be made of Austen--and they both, sadly, lived only 42 years. Austen also raises the issue of concrete experience--she has been underrated until the past two generations of critics because people thought she did not give vent to the Big Ideas, but what she really did is, like Kierkegaard, embed them in a lived, actualized context. As W H. Auden said about her in 'Letter to Lord Byron".

Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.
It makes me most uncomfortable to see
An English spinster of the middle class
Describe the amorous effects of ‘brass’,
Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety,
The economic basis of society.

And this was not just an unmasking but an unmasking done in order to affirm life and affirm the real ties of regard and affection that could exist even after society's economic basis was granted. Austen and Cardona combined ot underscore the rich braid that is possible between conceptualized and lived experience, if thought of in , very generally, the right proportion.

The exhibition had Austen’s personal copies of several of the major books that influenced her (a number of which I am teaching in my eighteenth century fiction course at Lang this semester) as well as some of the few manuscripts of hers that have survived (all of her unpublished, unfinished work; the publishers threw away the manuscripts of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and EMMA, etc., not feeling anybody needed them any more). there also was a set of instructions on courtly dancing--which attracted a group of attendees from the Westchester Courtly Dancing society, (or some such name), an organization devoted to dance in the Georgian and Regency era. The woman I talked to at the exhibit said that some dancers liked Jane Austen, and some Austen fans liked dance, but that the groups did not have an overwhelming overlap. Still, it did provide yet another interesting link between Austen and Cardona.

Aside from the Richard Foreman play, “Idiot Savant” , in December, this is it for 2009 in terms of cultural events—writing, the holidays, the end of the semester, and the MLA call! And, unless in case of emergency, my last post here for 2009—see you all in 2010!

Trip to New England

2009-11-01T16:46:00.000-08:00

A quick weekend trip to the symposium on Australian literature at Harvard provided a joyful diversion from the rigors of the semester; not only was the academic companionship congenial and the intellectual atmosphere stimulating, but my ride up and back on Amtrak was enjoyable and in a way revelatory because I had never before travelled on this route this late in the fall--it was striking going past the Connecticut and Rhode Island shore with leaves turning, burning, churning, vibrant...seeing the bare birch trees standing alert in the unexpectedly balmy October air, the estuarine majesty of the Charles in Boston and the Thames in New London. Even an hour delay coming back at Old Saybrook was made tolerable by the company of my fellow passengers and the clarity of the blue-gray water surrounded by taut, brown reeds, the delight of intermingling yellow, green, and brown even in unromantic clusters of brush, the spray of afternoon sunlight amid trees steadily dispensing leaf after leaf...

More Marches

2009-10-11T15:31:00.000-07:00

it would be very funny, in terms of 'diversity', if in the gay rights march today there were some who were in the anti-Obama march I encountered last month......

Back from Klagenfurt

2009-09-25T04:11:00.000-07:00

I am back, so once again have little time to blog, but the last two days in Klagenfurt were filled with fun, heroic and poignant folk singing, continuing sumptuous food, boat rides, and wonderful collegiality. Back to New York and once-a-month blogging!

Klagenfurt 3

2009-09-22T07:48:00.000-07:00

Okay, I gave my talk--which went well depsite an extraordinary initial foul-up in which i was told by the convenor that I was to speak in a room different from those of the other keynotes, went to that room, was told we had to wait fifteen minutes for people to drift in, went to the bathroom, then was told the paper was in fact in the original room, makng me rush back to the alternate room, get my paper, get lost in the cavernous 'Hauptgebaudt' of the university, then finally rush to the podium, despite all this, the delivery was great, the adrenaline if anything really helped. Because the paper got off to such a late start, there was no time for discussion, but I heard appreciative comments afterward. Then the convenor took us to his house in the hills above Klagenfurt for a salad and lasagna lunch accompanied by champagne and red wine with a delicious cake prepared by the convenor's wife for dessert. There is yet another banquet tonight, and I wonder if I am up for it...but at least my own work here is over and I can sit back and listen to the other papers.

The convenor's wife by the way said the local Slovenian dialect (as opposed to the official Slovenian propagated from Lljubljana), was laced with French admixtures..I wondered if from the Napoleonic occupation, but apparently not, it was just French as lingua franca....javascript:void(0)

More Klagenfurt

2009-09-21T09:58:00.001-07:00

Back before buffet dinner, impressed but also daunted by the excellence of the two plenaries (out of five, including mine) so far, I will have to be at my best. The jacket and tie definitely helped. Another detail; as those in the know know, Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, is traditionally referred to by German speakers by its German name, Laibach, which people may know from the band of that name if nothing else. But I have noticed that not only is Llujbjana called that here but they pronounce it with exaggerated formality, as if an English speaking person was saying it--this is also a gesture in the direction of respecting cultural difference. or maybe Laibach is now just the name of the band.

As long as we are on the topic of music--my hotel's soundtrack plays the complete oeuvre of Lionel Richie, including hits I forgot he had.

Klagenfurt

2009-09-21T04:00:00.000-07:00

I am currently in Klagenfurt, Austria, where tomorrow I am giving a plenary speech to Anglistentag 2009, a gathering of German-speaking professors of English. I am writing this as I had to return to my sumptuous hotel, the Lindner Seepark, in order to get a jacket and tie; I usually reserve these accoutrements for the days I am actually giving my talk, but, unlike on my last international conference trip to Brazil, the Teutonic formality of the occasion (even though all the peopel afre friendly, engaging, and unpretentious) clearly dictates a more stringent dress code.

Klagenfurt is, as one of the Forum speakers in the morning said (in German, therefore so far as I understood it) the southernmost city in the German-speaking world, near the Slovenian border (the university makes a deliberate attmept to be trilingual, with signs in Slovenian and Italian as well as German, and therefore a place of liminality that can meaningfully position itself in the context of diaspora and globalization in the Englsish-speaking world. In practice, the only language one hears on the street is German, and this region, as the bastion of the late Jörg Haider, is more 'conservative' than 'multicultural' in inclination, more Tea Party than Spivak or Bhabha in mien, though the people on the street and in the hotel are, again, friendly and charming. The ciy feels like a small city in the hillier regions of the Northeast or mid-Atlantic, sedate yet vigorous, with many new buildings. It is also the beach volleyball capital of Austria. The large lake, the Wörthersee, is now near to all that Austria has for a seacoast, Trieste and Pola of course having been long denied it.

Among the Marchers

2009-09-14T11:59:00.000-07:00

While in Washington for totally different reasons, I found myself, unexpectedly on the Mall, in back of the Washington monument, in the middle of the anti-Obama rally on Saturday. I had been with a bunch of Europeans, all of whom were quite surprised that people were rallying against government-sponsored health care that they did not so much celebrate—all said that they had needed to supplement their public insurance with private care when necessary--but assumed as a matter of course, indeed as a social right. The Europeans also were amused that those protesting thought that any reform that would be passed by the US Congress would be "socialist". To go from this point of view to the radically different one of those at the rally was disconcerting, but I was actually impressed by the demeanor, if not the beliefs of the people assembled. They seemed civilized, friendly, well-behaved, and after all they were exercising themselves of the great American right to peaceably gather and represent a point of view. It was also surprisingly diverse crowd, there were certainly people of color as well as people who (from my admittedly snap judgment) did not look as if they could seamlessly afford catastrophic health care costs without some sort of systemic help. One may have said that these people were perversely going against their socioeconomic self-interest, but it could also be said they were standing up for their convictions. There were tons of children there who could not necessarily consciously avow the views on the banners they were holding, but that could be said of left-wing or anti-war rallies as well….
It was when I continued to be surrounded by rally members on the train ride home that I had a few more qualms. First of all, the protestors began, in their conversation, to stray from health care or economic issues into various Obama conspiracy theories, including some with clear racist overtones and I had never heard before and were just incredibly outlandish and full of venom and spite. This was not only reprehensible in itself but detracted from the purity of the convictions I had sensed earlier; they seemed to be looking just for an outlet to attack Obama who they disliked anyway. In addition, a squadron of men wearing identifiable blue-jean jackets with the American flag created a slight impression of uniformity which, with the references to Pat Buchanan and lurid scenarios such as the prospect of the US breaking up into several balkanized regions in the near future, made the group seem more ‘fringe’ than they wanted dot appear (The conversation was full of claims the media had belittled thief renumber, which they said was 1.8 million, the media—CNN, they said scornfully--saying less than 100,000; the media seemed right even if one added ten or twenty thousand to their estimates at the maximum). What also surprised me is that so many of them were going all the way to New York—although hoof course 20 percent of New York City routinely votes for Republicans, and that adds up to a lot of people numerically if not percentage-wise, although of course a lot of the people on the train could have been from the suburbs or other points….a layer of irony was provided by the fact that, of all the ways to get from Washington to NYC, Amtrak is the one run by a quasi-governmental entity it is the public option. Indeed, the Northeast Corridor gets, through Amtrak, the kind of efficient public transportation denied the rest of the country. There seemed to be no protest against that….

Peak

2009-08-27T14:04:00.000-07:00

After reading this overoptimistic article on peak oil, i was reminded of this superb poem by John Kinsella occasioned by the phrase 'peak oil'-this poem sums up a certain mood, linguistic and cultural, that prevailed around the middle of this decade:

Graphology 590

Language having reached peak, the slide

into plagiarism, blackmarketeering of syntax,

electrolysis of grammar, inevitable. Became,

lifted like cascade, warbled in magpie tune-ups;

to flex shades, shadows, pleasures, comforts,

shopping reflex; caravaners fringing countries;

sourcing alternative energies, green as ground-down,

pillaging three mine policies and upper antes

dug over, extrapolated, wood-chipped,

wearing overalls and safety goggles: I found

the pair we lost cutting wild oats before summer,

clear as a bell on a rocky outcrop, mini-

breakaway, the maker or publisher

guarding reputation, owning orders,

licenses to drill-core, Google, Wikipedia,

edit as you go purchase-power,

reading habits, ingénues,

loan-sharking.

John Kinsella

The Art of Memory

2009-07-28T11:00:00.000-07:00

The Art of Memory, explored in a famous book of that name by Frances Yates and later studied more systematically by Mary Carruthers and Anselm Haverkamp, intriguingly binds the verbal and the visual as the mind is able to retain huge troves of archival information by picturing them, associating them with a tangible, visual icon. To extend this parallel into movement and into three dimensions seems both challenging and the next logical step, and this is just what Company SoNoGo's Art of Memory , which I saw last Saturday at 3LD in Tribeca, accomplished. From the lighting by ‘book-lights’ which filtered light through prisms resembling book covers, to the ‘glass musician’ to the left of the performance space who meticulously and hauntingly sounded out clinks and clanks on an intricately wrought glass instrument, to the set full of old books, this performance called up what it is like to remember the past to have a past, to be burdened by a past. There is a sense of the aura, the aroma; the weight, the gripping presence of memory. In an age so full of transitions and transformations, this was heartening; at a time when so much performance wants to allude to historical or political issues but has trouble meaningfully incarnating that desire on stage, the piece’s genuine achievement of a sense of the archival in a live performance is worth noting. Yet the Art of Memory does not idealize memory; the piece understands Walter Benjamin’s aphorism that every act of civilization is also an act of barbarism, and that memory, with all its nostalgic, redemptive allure, can thus be a double-edged sword. One of the four performers declares in the middle of the 50-minute piece that her shoes were taken by a malevolent princess; this both elicits the trauma of memory—that we can remember bad things, painful things—and also implies that memory, in its privileging of certain objects and associations over others, can be hierarchical, can led to subordination. Neither this nor any other conclusion is so definite; the piece allows room for the viewer to fill in their own dreams or nightmares, making the space around us also include personal and collective pasts. The Art of Memory is running for a few more days—go see it.

Gates, Obama, Intellectuality

2009-07-24T16:30:00.000-07:00

I have spent much of the week thinking about the Henry Louis Gates Jr. incident. I have always admired Gates, used his work in my dissertation (during which I had a polite and helpful exchange of letters with him) and during the writing of my forthcoming book on theory, in which he figures extensively. I viscerally sympathized with him having to deal with the police, at the end of a long trip (having done that distance from Australia, I know how he must have felt) and finding his door jammed. Very few academics, especially one of Gates’s stature, would be above using “Are you aware who I am >” rhetoric in that circumstances, it is a kind of arrogance that just ocmes with the territory of being a professor, and it is, after all, one of the few things we have—even somebody of Gates’s stature is not well-salaried when compared to the Coco Crisps and Jose Guillllens of the world. Sometimes our cultural capital is our only armor, and if gates was showing off that capital to Sargeant Crowley, it was in a way his professional reflex to do so.

My first reaction to the incident was that it was racial profiling; that the person who made the call should have known their neighbors; and that the police should not have arrested gates unless he was violent, not just agitated or petulant. which again I would not put myself past being if I were in the same circumstance. I still basically feel this way.

I was surprised at how big a story this became—I was interested in it, but I know Gates’s academic work. I was surprised that people who had no stake in Gates’s work became so interested, but clearly, as President Obama implied, it became a barometer of people’s attitudes towards racial profiling and police brutality. It mushroomed very quickly—it was surprising Lynn Sweet asked the question at the end of a press conference that could be instrumental in a pivotal health-care bill, and it was surprising that Obama addressed it so forthrightly and with such a clear admission of his own stake in the matter. Obviously, he himself now wishes he had not said ‘stupidly,” when something like “precipitously” or “heedlessly” would have been fine, but no one who has a had to answer questions about multiple subjects for an hour could say they would be pitch-perfect in their diction and in their nuances of meaning. Police officers have been ragged by the intellectual left for their level of intelligence, and are understandably miffed by that, and by a general left-elite disregard for the police, audible, sadly, even in New York right after 9/11. Having made an obvious mistake, the Obama White House handled it well with the rapid-response acumen they showed throughout last year’s campaign. What if Obama had offered to have a latte or a Cosmopolitan with Sargeant Crowley, not a beer….

But what I am interested in is another aspect ot the situation, my Lang colleague Ferentz Lafargue, in a fascinating essay in the Huffington Post, has suggested that town-gown, as much as black-white tensions, may be at the source of the incident—Cambridge, having elected two black mayors in a row, who in addition were successively a gay man and a lesbian, is not necessarily a hidebound racist enclave, but does participate in the historic tension between municipalities and universities that play a huge economic role in them but do not dominate lock, stock and barrel. I would add to this that some of the reactions gates provoked may be reaction provoked in general by intellectuals. I do not mean to invoke the corking ghost of Richard Hofstadter one more time, but we all know the road to popularity in this country is not by appearing overly cerebral, and that for all of Gates’s popularizing and media friendly activities, most people in the US would still perceive him as forbiddingly academic. It is in this regard that I note that, until this incident, Obama has been, strikingly, helped rather than hurt by his evident intellectuality. Unlike past Democratic candidates like Adlai Stevenson, reviled for being an ‘egghead’, Obama’s clear comfort with books and curiosity about what is in them did not hold him back from the top. Part of this is racial—Obama’s intellectuality meant he was not a “black militant,” his conversancy with the mainstream academic tradition meant that he could be counted on to affirm common American values. But some of it may well have been a growing comfort level with people who foreground their intelligence, a concession that expertise and intellectual curiosity are needed in government. The Gates incident is the first time Obama’s intellectuality—his reposnse to Gates being conditioned not just by his personal friendship with the professor but his knowledge of the value of his work and the regard it has garnered—influenced his reaction to Sweet’s question, and arguably the American people’s reaction to his reaction. This is perhaps a way to explain just how much stemma this story has unexpectedly gotten….

Ensor, Modernity, Nationalism

2009-07-24T16:27:00.000-07:00

I saw the Ensor exhibit at MOMA last week—I was deeply impressed by his idiosyncrasy, his combination of rigorous draftsmanship and adventurous uses of color and imagery, and his wining combination of parody and distortion with a generous embrace of the world as it is. It also struck me as interesting that “Les XX,” the avant-garde movement to which Ensor belonged for some years, was the first organized European avant-garde, and these Belgians were the first set of “modern painters.”, or “painter of modern life” to use the phrase Baudelaire so famously employed of Constantin Guys—the first set of them. The painter of modern life is, by definition, not celebratory of modernity, not a ‘Futurist', not a “modern sublime”, and Ensor’s paintings of modern life indeed express its dinginess and banality. Yet, importantly, they are not, as the works of so many later modernists were , meant as a critique of industrial modernity. Indeed, Belgium, as a nation, as a compound of French and Flemish that was when Ensor began working, behind only Germany and Italy as the most ‘recent' nation of Europe, owed its national identity to early and successful industrialization, and Ensor’s canvassing of industrial dinginess, though again not overtly celebratory of it, was an affirmation of the everyday modernity of ‘his’ Belgium, and maybe even an attempt to position it as ‘cutting-edge”.

Flash forward over a hundred years. Ensor was half-Flemish (his father was English) and worked in an artistic environment as French-speaking as Flemish-speaking. Moreover, the entire industrial identity of Belgium, anchored in the ‘Sillon Industrial’ had a French emphasis; the Flemish were seen as rural, ‘having fallen off the turnip truck’ the French were initiates into la vie modern. Ensor’s Ostend, as a beach resort, was hardly part of this as such, but it was not severed form it either. But, lo and behold, the 2009 Ensor exhibition is funded partially by Flanders House, an organization representing specifically Flemish trade and cultural interests in many world cities now including New York.

Without taking sides in Belgium’s internal politics or expressing a preference—which I do not have either way—for Flemish over Walloon nationalism, I must observe that Flemish nationalism is unusual in being so assertive auspicated with postmodernity. It is because Flanders did not industrialize as much as Wallonia did that it was eligible for the information age; it is like the Research Triangle or Silicon Valley as opposed to the Detroit or Cleveland of the Sillon Industrial. Now, nationalism is supposed to be rooted in ancient loyalties, or conversely bound together by modern economic centralization and its communicative appurtenances such as print culture; postmodernism, the information age is supposed to globalize, decenter. Yet Flemish nationalism boasts of how postmodern it is, how globally attuned, how unlike the plodding old Rust Belt of Wallonia. And Ensor’s emphatic embrace of ‘modern life’ in its deromanticized dingy avatar does not fit a nationalism that bundles local self-assertion with a celebratory affirmation of up-to-date business practices and global exchange…on the other hand, perhaps the current economic crisis will make this vision of nationalism itself a back number.

Nonetheless, Flanders House should be thanked for helping mount the show, which I enjoyed and would recommend—free with a New School ID by the way!

Return From Rio

2009-06-18T11:59:00.000-07:00

I am just back from a quick, five-day trip to Brazil. This was a journey of great significance for me. Not only did I get to present my research on the complicated intertextual relationship of Mario Vargas Llosa's The War Of The End of The World (La guerra del fin del mundo). with Euclides da Cunha's Os sertões at the LASA conference, but I got to have a thorough experience of Rio--its beaches, its bookstores, its restuarants, and even got to see a bit more of the city than the toriust guides, panicked about crime that in fact is largely gang warfare, tend ot encourage. Even though my Portuguese is analogous to Shakespeare's Greek, as diagonsed by Ben Jonson, I managed to get by, although having a friend in my colleague Juan de Castro who speaks it well was a great help. (my Spanish, I think, is comparable to Shakespeare's Latin; pretty bad, but if I had to only read Ovid in Spanish I could crib it, as Shakepseare presuambly did with respect to Latin).

The LASA conference was held in the Gavéa neighborhood, which I quickly, after a couple of times taking the shuttle bus, found was walkable from my Ipanema hotel; my morning walks allowed me to see a great deal of the city's Zona Sul. One of the aspects one quickly noticed was the massibve security. Some guessed that this was because the former President of t fBraizl, Francisco Henrique Cardoso, was scheduled to speak (I believe he cancelled; if any readers know otherwise, let me know); others, like Idelber Avelar in his Portuguese-language blog, attributed it to paranoia about Rio and an exclusionary atitutde towards the local populace. There was in any event, far more security than even an MLA, and it was not to check the badges, as the last day I left my badge at the hotel and I was unapprehended. The conference itself, though, was fun: soem of my favorite sessions were on the representation of the Chaco War in literature, on the Supreme Courts of Latin American nations as figuring, performing, legitimacy (and thus being in a sense 'imaginative; as well as 'formally legal') and NGOs as enabling 'organic intellectuals' in the Granscian sense. This was the best side of the interdisciplinarity of the group; which inevitably led to fragmentaiton. I also confess to finding, true intellectuals like Alfred Stepan aside (and Stepan's work was explcitly lauded for itself being interdiscplinary) , the dl-school poli-sci analyses to be a bit stultifying. There were also just too many sessions; on the security line at the Rio airport, I heard once of the section chairs say that the next conference, which will be held in 2011 in Toronto, the acceptance rate will be reduced to 33% for individual papers and 66% for panels. Although our own panel was marred by there being no quesiton period (because some of the speaker sincluidng myself, went on too long), it was a very situmlating occasion, and had I been in the audience, it would have been one of the most stimulating. It was conducted in two languages, included discussions of authors in yet a third, represented three continents, and included two people who had connections with Australia, as well as academics with both Roman Catholic and Episcopal/Anglcian connectinos. Besides De Castro and myself, other speakers included Paul Allatson and Rocio Silva Santisteban. We were disparate individuals brought together by a common interest--not even a common enthusiasm, as all of our talks contianed some castigation of the author under scrutiny--but a common fascination with Vargas Llosa and how he represents the overdetermined relationship of literature and politics at its richest.

At the beginning of my Vargas Llosa/da Cunha talk, t, I made a point (thereby adding sometiem to it, alas of mentioning Elizabeth Bishop's support for the 1964 military copu on nraizl; I felt this was unseemly, especially since those friends of Bishop's who protested os vehently agianst the US role in Vietnam seemed not to notice or care that she was supporting a regime much lauded by right-wing elements in the US. As mario Vargas Llosa himself might say, does not Brazil deserve self-determination as well? I admire Bishops; poetry tremendously, but other writers get called for political missteps, and she tends not to be. The coup was in my mind because the previous day I had seen Stepan, of Columbia University being honored with LASA's Kalman Silvert award for contributions to the filed, and in his acceptance tlka Stepan spoke eloquently of his experience in his youth witnessing the run-up to the coup which dpeirved braizlians of democracy for twenty years. Stepan is an acquaintance of my father's, and I conveyed my father's congratulations to him, as well as noting that I had known Silvert, the nameskae of the award, as a child and had visited his new England country home. Even at the young age I was then, i reclal him as a formidable intellect and compassionate man. In my comments, I spoke of Latin American Studies somewhat presumptouously and grandiloquently as 'our field'. but, even though this was my first formal paper in the area, Latin Amerucanists have been so hospitable to me and eocuraging on my interest in region and its literature that I felt at home to make this delcaration. Indeed, I generally felt at home in Rio, and plan to go back there, visit other parts of Brazil, and indeed other nations in South America in the hopefully very near future.

Consequences of Inarticulateness

2009-05-13T07:13:00.000-07:00

A friend posted the link to this fascinating article , spurring me to read it after seeing many mentions on blogs and in the general press. What I am saying here implies reading Joshua Wolf Shenk's article first, so please do click on the link above before you come back and see what I have to say, if you then so choose. I had two major responses. One was that a midlife crisis, or more specifically that sense of things not working out for people despite every conceivable material or cultural advantage gas something to do with not only class but generational scenarios. The guys who went to college in the fifties did all the right things, wore the gray flannel suits, got the conventional, remunerative, socially conformist office job, had the presentable house, garage, two gas-guzzling cars, 2.5 children, but they failed to individuate themselves, failed to accept themselves despite fulfilling all the normative criteria of happiness. But I want to be Foucauldian here and only half-jokingly say an analogous scenario in the next generation. Somebody born in 1950 could 'do all the right things', smoke dope, chill out, turn on, protest against the Vietnam War, wear psychedelic t-shirts, and miss out on happiness, fail to individuate themselves aside from what was generationally expected. The inverted 'success myth' is still a 'success myth'. And there were some who fell outside entirely; if you were gay, both scenarios really had no place for you. Similarly, my generation was told it had to be more mainstream than the Sixties people and pursue Yuppieism as a cultural remedy. I do not know what the following generation was told. but it was told something. All of these are 'epistemes' and I think the sense of personal disappointment has to do with letting oneself be totally defined by 'episteme' and having no reserve of selfhood.

The second issue is masculinity and its particular construction in the mid-twentieth century. (I have been co-directing a fine senior work by a very promising on this subject at Lang so have been thinking about this a lot). Masculinity meant, or entailed, inarticulateness; silence about any kind of not only emotional but subjective feeling was so mandatory as to make being male both ultimate privilege and unavoidable paralysis. All this of course was heightened by the Puritan inhibitions and discomfort with anything emotional or spontaneous that characterized the white Protestant elite. (Though the name ‘Vaillant” certainly implies some French ancestry in the past). Thus the suicide of the father, in a sense occurring because he could not talk about his own pain, release it, share it, so a kind of consequence of silence ; and then the silence of the son about the father’s death, as to have a father who killed himself and to talk about it, would be an act of weakness, an exhibition of vulnerability and inadequacy that would be punished. This may be overdoing it, but that both Vaillant senior and junior were scholars and academics, which migiht be thought to make them more able to deal with feelings, maybe put more pressure on them, as they were already 'unusual' in their cohort for being so avowedly intellectual. But, notwithstanding our genuinely and laudably greater freedom from gender-based inhibition, can we look back from a sense of teleological advance, a sense that we are all metrosexuals now? Today he could go on Oprah and cry about it, but one is still unsure whether men are actually allowed to show vulnerability and to talk about their feelings, or whether there is just the discourse that men should do that, which operates without actually changing the underlying syndrome. Men, I think, still feel they cannot reveal their inner pain, and now the old citadel of inarticulateness is gone. Men are castigated for not sharing. Now it is lamented when they are silent and immovable; but they still seem week when they share. It is sad that he could not come to terms earlier with his father's suffering, but, again in a quasi-early-Foucauldian vein, I wonder if the only gain we would have today is one of discursivity, nor affect?

I do not want to be overly diagnostic about a human story with profound particularities: to be ten years old and see your father shoot himself is going to affect your future relationships. And there is something individually, almost novelistically poignant about leaving his second wife for a third and then crawling back to the second. This sort of thing may well come up irrespective of what gender or generation you are. But I thought I would offer these thoughts....

Spring recommendations

2009-05-06T04:37:00.000-07:00

Some recent reading recommendations

Jeremy Davies--Rose Alley (Counterpath, 2009). A hilarious, utterly original, totally self-conscious tale of making a film about the life of the seventeenth-century libertine Earl of Rochester during the height of the frenzy in 1960s Paris. Both rollicking and riveting.

Brian Lynch, The Winner of Sorrow (Dalkey Archive, 2009). A compelling, experimental novel about the troubled but oddly inspiring life of the eighteenth-century poet William Cowper. An intriguing subject and an original way of presenting it. it is nice to see a novel about a poet also manifest its own aesthetic self-consciousness.

Omar Shapli, Them (Twenty-Three, 2007). Lyric poems by a well-known experimental actor and director which focuses on the aftermath of 9/11 but also combines fresh lyric insight with its sharp angle of public commentary.

Burt Kimmelmann, Somehow, (Marsh Hawk, 2005) Poems about a daughter growing up, understanding a Gerhard Richter painting, and how the last portions of each month have a special quality that subverts our conventional ideas of time and seasonality. Kimmelman is disciplined, precise, but deeply responsive to life and feeling. A poet at the height of his craft.

Also look for Patricia Carlin's Quantum Jitters, just out from Marsh Hawk....

Caillebotte and distinction

2009-04-27T04:58:00.000-07:00

I went to the Caillebotte exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and this engendered some thoughts which had already been percolating in my teaching of Bourdieu's 'Distinction" to my students at Lang. Owner of the points that arose in our discussion was Bourdieu's dissection or Sartre's self-presentation as an intellectual--that his portrayal--performance, as Judith Butler mgiht say--if himself as rejecting conventional bourgeois standards, of not fitting in, of the poignancy of his non-assimilation into the normative, was itself a struggle for a sort of comparative advantage, a seizure of a niche of distinction that would make him look special. No one is more the target of the theoretical generation of French intellectuals than Sartre, but even after taking out Bourdieu's local agenda the point is worth taking: the avant-garde was so successful precisely because it made its non-normativity normative, made conventional the embrace of the unconventional. Despite waves of postmodern irony, one still saw this in the presentation of Caillebotte. His association with the Impressionists was played up, he was made to seem an artistic rebel, even as the exhibition made clear that he was not only that. Caillebotte was not only one of France's leading painters, but its leading marine architect--in other words, builder of boats--and its leading yachtsman. It is as if Ted Turner, in the early 80s, had also been Robert Ryman and (whoever the leading American marine architect of that era was, which even I am not going to bother to find out). This is a consummate example of the late nineteenth-century yen for the artist as doer, the Jack London ideal, which is a little-noted complement to the aestheticism and experimental sexualities of that era: its coexistence wit hypermasculine, hyperengaged artists who also were figures of not only public notoriety but public action and responsibility. That, on the floor below the Caillebotte exhibition, Hernán Bas's work, consciously referring to late nineteenth-century aestheticism and decadence, and playing up its queer valences, while clearly enjoying financial and popular reward in a twenty-first--century Miami context, illustrates not just the inextricability of art and commerce but how the 'art' element is actually potentially overexaggerable for motives that if not immediately commercial are certainly strategic or positional and not 'intrinsic
.

So far so good for the Bourdieu model. it works well with modernist or existential aesthetics that try to assert that they have on prudential or expedient motives in mind; Bourdieu delights in goring their ox. But both the Caillebotte and Bas exhibitions also raised points that might vex Bourdieu's paradigm. If one were to choose Caillebotte over, say, Bonnard at the Met (and oddly the actual feel of the paintings, the sense of their harboring a beneficent, open, minutely observed and felt world was similar) one might do so out of a kind of deliberate cheesiness: wanting to see the more hybrid, commercial artist, wanting to see the artist whose less ascetic choice of lifestyle promised a relief from aesthetic rigor. As I said to my Lang students on Wednesday, this is the same motive that leads people to croon over pop songs from the 70s and 80s that they know are not great artistically: there is the sense of them having bene undervalued by snobs, as Caillebotte would have been by a "Greenbergian' aesthetic, and so there is a guilty pleasure in unearthing them. This coolness of the cheesy is something Bourdieu does not discuss in detail, though at times he gestures at it, as in his example of the guy who drives Rolls-Royce but takes the Metro. This up-front cheesiness seems necessarily connected to the unleashing of free-market capitalism in the West after 1980, which Bourdieu, writing from a society that was more statist and hierarchical anyway, and in a time--the 1960s and 1970s--when a mixed economy seemed a permanent given in Europe and America, seems oddly innocent of in his discourse. Our reality in the past thirty years has given another twist of the screw to Bourdieu--and this was something my students were very much aware of even as they appreciated his excavation of the latest motives of situational taste in the assertions of artistic value.

The G20

2009-04-03T13:31:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking about the G20--not the summit itself, but the very idea of the G20 as an organization.

This organization, it is no exaggeration, somehow grew in prominence by stealth, but now after just under six years of existence it is perhaps the most effective international group imaginable, as it includes the mot powerful nations of the world, all of them, in one way or another. I am, though, here only interested in its composition, and the principles of that composition: who is left in, who left out, who qualifies.

First of all, there are only 19 member nations; the European union is also a member, And here if the G20 was actually a rule-making body, if it had any regulatory or fiduciary responsibility, there would and should be objections; after all, EU member states Germany, France, Italy, and Britain are all members, so EU membership is like both the USSR and Ukraine being members of the 1945-1991 UN, or both California and the US being members of the G20 now. (I am sure California is bigger economically than several G20 member states). Again, if the G20 were functionally rather than pragmatically important, other regional/federative groups would rightly claimed disenfranchisement. One could say EU membership in the G20 is to represent the smaller EU members, the recently admitted states, but this then implies that these states need the EU, are dependent on it, but the Big Four do not.

This is reminiscent of the debate inspired by the separate memberships of the English-speaking Dominions in the :league of Nations after World War I: but one of those nations is here absent: New Zealand. Canada, Australia, and (a now happily multiracial_ South Africa are all members, all judged to be among the 20 biggest economies, but new Zealand is not. White and English-speaking, yet it is among the shut-out. Although Canada was routinely criticized for not really being up to membership in the G7/G8, it is felt that being among the G20 is its proper rank, and there was only a slight sense of pushiness about Stephen Harper’s inevitable swanning-around on those second-rank US cable networks that would have him at the summit. But Canada is among the circle of the privileged; the trek across the border from British Columbia to Bellingham, WA is requires no upward step in terms of conglomerate economic power. Not so the Tasman Sea: and no wonder the continual exodus of New Zealanders to Australia, which is not a political or cultural exodus, but an economic one.

To be a Muslim nation in the G20, one has ot either have oil (Indonesia, Saudi Arabia) or not be Arab and be partially European (Turkey). Saudi Arabia's presence is almost ludicrous; as an economic power, it is like the Cleveland Cavaliers if no one but LeBron James were on the team. South Korea's inclusion is justified, and also helps provide a bridge between China and Japan, but also conjures a host of other possible claimants. Taiwan might well be in the next ten; but it will never be the G30 because China would protest that. Who would have thought thirty years ago that China would be not only politically but economically more powerful than Japan?

If Iran were in dialogue with the Western world, it would be, and deserve to be, a member. And one would think Nigeria is certainly knocking on the door as well, or will be after a few more years of relative stability and economic growth.

As for the Latin American states, if you are not Mexico or one of the ABC countries (Argentina, Brazil, and Chile_--in other words, if you are an Andean or Central American country, you are out of luck. One sees why a lot of the countries thus excluded are electing more radical governments, and why such organizations as UNASUR may be appealing as vehicles ot pack more collective weight--although one doubts that any other federative group will be members alongside the EU--unless that is you count the US.

The Man Booker International Prize

2009-03-21T10:42:00.000-07:00

The nominees for the 2009 Man Booker International Prize are Peter Carey (Australia), Evan S. Connell (USA), Mahasweta Devi (India), E. L. Doctorow (USA), James Kelman (UK), Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru), Arnost Lustig (Czechoslovakia), Alice Munro (Canada), V. S. Naipaul (Trinidad/India), Joyce Carol Oates (USA), Antonio Tabucchi (Italy), Ngugi Wa Thiong'o (Kenya), Dubravka Ugrešić (Croatia) and Ludmila Ulitskaya (Russia).

I really like this list: it remedied a lot of the structural issues that plague the international prize circuit: for instance, the dominance of novels over short stories (Munro, the premier short story writer of our time, is on the list) as well as the dominance of the Anglophone (not only are Tabucchi, Vargas Llosa, and Ugrešić on, but Devi, Ngugi, and Ulitskaya are writers from Anglophone countries who have written partially or entirely in languages other than English. (Ulitskaya seems to live most of the time in the US). In addition, Connell, Ulitskaya, Devi, and Lustig have all been underrated by the mainstream Anglophone press (though most have received respectful notices) and Devi has the additional non-commercial appeal of being principally championed in the US by a well-known postmodern theorist (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak).

I tend to think none of the non-American Anglophone writers (Carey, Munro, Naipaul, Kelman) will win because they are already eligible for the regular Booker Prize, and with the exception of Munro have won at least once. (besides, Chinua Achebe won last time). Munro may, though, transcend this limitation as her practice in the short-story format has never been Booker-friendly. Given that this prize was ostensibly set up to honor Philip Roth, it is funny not to see Roth on the list: Oates, Doctorow, and Connell are all eminently deserving (it is especially nice to see the much-underrated Connell given a nod) and they might want to commend America for having the grace ot elect a Democratic president, but I still would bet against any of these winning. Ugrešić is known as much as a social commentator than as a novelist, and, though I may be underrating her work, does not seem of the same stature as the rest. This leaves Ngugi, Devi, Tabucchi, Lustig, Vargas Llosa. I can see any of these getting it, and all would deserve it. Vargas Llosa’s eligibility may have been helped by his having, as my colleague Juan De Castro has observed, distanced himself from the rightist associations he has often cultivated, for instance making positive remarks about President Obama and critiquing religious fundamentalism. I have an interest here—I am currently working on Vargas Llosa—but it would be a great tribute to a writer always at the center of both political and literary currents who has produced buoyantly, abundantly, and with continually high quality.

Calgary drama

2009-03-05T08:03:00.000-08:00

One of the highlights of my visit to Calgary last week was seeing the highly laureled Canadian playwright Judith Thompson’s Palace of The End. This play was put on in New York last year and won a prominent award, and has also been prominently staged in Toronto, but, as so often, I had missed it until steered ot it by the need to find something to do in Calgary on a Saturday night. The play consists of three monologues by individuals relating to the Iraq War and its backstory—Lynndie England; David Kelly, and a woman based on a real-life individual who se family was an early victim of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny. What struck me, aside from the intense, mesmerizing, yet necessarily disturbing performances, is how simultaneously passionate and nonjudgmental the playwright’s implied view of her subjects is. England’s affectlessness and narcissistic sadism, Kelly’s tormented, guilty indecisiveness (brilliantly acted by Stephen Hair, a well-known Calgary performer who was really superb), and the Iraqi woman’s bewildered rage at the cruelty of those who vie for power are highly articulated in discursive terms yet are given from within; subjectivity does not detract from adequacy to the material. For this reason, I think this play will well outlast its immediate circumstances, and may well be a principal lens through which we look back at Iraq and its reverberations thirty years from now. I particularly appreciated the way England was looked down on not because she was uneducated and from an often dismissed part of the country, but because she participated in unconscionably cruel acts. The journalist Tara McKelvey, who interviewed England, gave a talk at my university recently, and made a similar point; that cruelty can come from people in all walks and from all stations of life, and, as Thompson shows, in this context, from both Iraqis and Americans.