Thursday, March 18, 2010
Vargas Llosa and Latin American Politics
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!
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Poetry and Jazz done well, finally
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.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Back from Berlin
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.
Here is a picture of me with the remnants of the Wall on Bernauerstrasse.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Reluctantly Transnational
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...
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...
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Methodism!
To Australia for most of month, suspect I won't post again until Feb. and Super Bowl time.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Wally Cardona and Jane Austen
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!
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!
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Trip to New England
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...
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