WRITING I'VE ENJOYED RECENTLY

Recently, in addition to the brief return to life of K-Punk (!!), I've enjoyed two posts by Mark Richardson on his relationship to the work of David Lynch. The first is on Lynch on Lynch, the inspiration for Eraserhead, and the dread of responsibility, while the second is on The Elephant Man and its intersection with Richardson's family and life. I'm not a huge Lynch fan--I've seen Blue Velvet and I think it's a good movie, and what I've seen of Twin Peaks has been pretty great--so the draw is mostly the writing itself in the pieces. Both of them aren't exactly new ground for him--in fact, they're variations on a theme that he's pretty much made his own at this point through his "Resonant Frequency" column at Pitchfork--but they are perfect illustrations of what I love about his writing. I guess it's actually just a feature common to all good writing, in a way, the ability to start from a small moment and, through a gradual accumulation of details, to arrive not at a big revelation or a capital-t Truth, but an understanding of the way those various small moments and experiences come to bear the weight of our everyday lives. For whatever reason--there are probably several--I find that what he writes often feels right to me. And, in a way that I'm not sure I could articulate very well, his writing feels very contemporary to me beyond the level of strict content, which very often is of-the-minute music. It engages with those bits of culture in a way that I recognise as a common way of engaging with culture at this moment, I guess.

In a "Resonant Frequency" column that feels like a companion piece to the one I've cited a bunch on here about music-making-as-reblogging, Richardson outlines his goal or process with writing, and the conundrum which proved its impetus: 

I've always felt a bit off in my own world, which sometimes is a point of pride and other times feels like a kind of social failure. These days, for me, the greatest tension when writing about music is trying to bridge the gap between music as a private or a public experience. So part of me envied those who could join the conversation about Nicki Minaj and connect her music to the broader culture, because so much of the music I love and have interesting ideas about means almost nothing to the world as a whole. . . . And in the larger scheme of things, Alog [a band Richardson has had difficulty connecting with other people about] don't matter. At all. Unlike Nicki Minaj, if their music didn't exist, the world would be virtually no different. So when writing about Alog, I have no choice but to write about how this music might work for a single person (me), and how these abstract sounds might enrich a single life (mine). That's where the meaning is found.

While those final sentences might suggest a certain of solipsism, and while the opening could be misread as a kind of too-hip pretension, it's in establishing the connection between 1) the single listener/viewer/experiencer, 2) the moment in which he/she encounters the music/video/experience under discussion, and 3) the response to that music/video/experience as pre-conditioned by 1 and 2 that Richardson's writing (mostly) escapes those traps.

In the first piece on Lynch I linked to, for example, the moment in question, what you might call the point, is his experience of being in Yellowstone with his wife and:

laying in the tent. I felt like I could hear so much going on outside. Things rustling, sticks breaking. It was pitch black out and you couldn't see a thing. And I had a strong sensation of fear and dread. And I think it was partly because I was afraid of the responsibility that came with being in a relationship. If something happened and we were confronted by something dangerous, I was going to be the one to deal with it, primarily.

Of course, Richardson doesn't leave it at this point. There's been a perfectly good set-up for this moment already given--a series of killings in the park, an encounter with another hiker giving off strange vibes--but Richardson goes back to why at that moment he might be feeling fear and dread, why this responsibility suddenly and in that moment feels like such a terrible burden. And it's in that tracing back that he works in how Lynch on Lynch and Eraserhead fit into this psychic moment, how those works come to both explain and bear some of these emotions. I think it's an elegant move, as it doesn't impute an overly simplistic causal relationship between object and viewer/listener. That is, it doesn't limit the object to simply an explanation of the viewer/listener's experience of the object, but it does illuminate how certain aspects of the viewer/listener's experience activate (for lack of a better verb) parts of/meanings in the object. At the same time, the object retains a separate existence and can effect the viewer/listener because it is distinct from him/her. It's a tough balancing act. Going too far either way usually means bad writing.

The second piece, the one about The Elephant Man, does a good job of illustrating the separateness of the object from the viewer/listener. All of the significant details in the story are about Richardson, about the personal context of elephantiasis and John Merrick for him. Lynch's film is a spectre, a force that crystallizes all of those moments in Richardson without ever really being there. In fact, the closing paragraph which addresses the film most directly--though it is quite interesting and nicely pensive and wistful without being grasping--isn't even necessary for the piece to work. The way that bits of culture become ambient objects that structure and reflect our inner worlds has already been illustrated by the image of a ten-year-old boy listening to radio because he's too scared to turn on the TV, the device that brought something he'd already been afraid of to a fever pitch.

Cs AND THE ARBITRARINESS OF FORMS

While re-reading Houston A. Baker, Jr.'s excellent Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, I came across this humourous (and true!) passage:

When the cubes of ice intended for a refreshing lemonade (or a more severe potable against academic malaise) melt while we are explaining to a student who has telephoned that his or her "C" is only a letter, a convenient form explaining nothing deeply relevant about his or her psyche, we grasp a notion of the arbitrariness of form.

If there is a solution to this problem, I'd love to know it. On a slightly more substantial note (though not much of one), Baker's book is excellent not only because of the quality of his argument, but also because it is filled with passages like the above that demonstrate his lightness of touch even with his most complex material (this passage appears in the midst of his definition of the strategy of "mastery of form"--exemplified by Booker T. Washington's mastery of the minstrel mask, enabling him to sound "back and black" to whites). The combined effect is to tun what could be a slog into a rather enjoyable read that balances impressive readings of texts with some heavy duty theorizing without sacrificing the author's character and personality. 

 

DNA IN CAMBRIDGE BEFORE WATSON AND CRICK

Today would have been Douglas Adams' sixtieth birthday and it is massively unfair that he is not alive to celebrate it. I can remember reading The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (it was a rite of passage in my house, along with reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, that signaled one was an adult, with adult tastes and opinions, etc.) in grade six and boring my friends by reading long passages to them. It was the most brilliant thing I'd ever read at that time, and the whole series remains one of the funniest things ever committed to paper. I know that my sense of humour and my outlook on life can often be traced back to his writing ("Life: loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it."), and I'm grateful for every minute I've spent reading him. I almost walked out of the 2005 movie version of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy--it felt overtly Disneyfied, more an insult to his legacy and a betrayal to his vision than anything else (even if he approved it)--but not even that could dim my love for his books (though it did increase my appreciation for the wonderful BBC television series a hundredfold).

Dig that theme music! 

While I love how madcap and zany he could be, I also love the darkness of the last three Hitch Hiker books. He may have felt they weren't in keeping with the tone of the early books and radio serials, but they were still wonderful, even with the humour absolutely pitch black and the characters succumbing to all sorts of horrible events. What's more, they felt in line with the Dirk Gently books, particularly The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, in a way that helps to unite his entire corpus (not that someone with as distinctive a voice as Adams could really write something that wouldn't be recognizably his). There is--and it's unfair I can't find it online (though my own stunning ineptitude is probably the reason)--one of the more beautiful passages in the English language, one that I often find running through my head at the end of a long day, in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, and it's moments like that, when you suddenly realize that you've been laughing hysterically because someone managed to write something so profoundly true, to get the universe and what it's like to live in it so right, that make Adams such a pleasure to read.

Happy birthday, Douglas Adams!

A BRIEF NOTE ON MAUS AND HAUNTOLOGY, INSPIRED BY METAMAUS

If there's a canon of American hauntological fiction, Maus is definitely part of it (other texts to be included in that list: Beloved, The Shining, a whole mess of Philip K. Dick [e.g. Man in the High Castle, Ubik, and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said], the New York Trilogy). I'm working my way through MetaMaus right now and this quote from Art Spiegelman is just so perfect, both in explaining why Maus is a hauntological work and why comics are an inherently hauntological medium:

What is most interesting about comics for me has to do with the abstraction and structurings that come with the comics page, the fact that moments in time are juxtaposed. In a story that is trying to make chronological and coherent the incomprehensible, the juxtaposing of past and present insists that past and present are always present--one doesn't displace the other the way it happens in film. (165)

This seems like a formal and material manifestation of Derrida's  "deconstructing, dislocating, displacing, disarticulating, disjoining, putting 'out of joint' the authority of the 'is.' . . . measuring . . . against the historical experience--and this is history itself--against the experience of that which in the 'is,' in time or in the present time of 'is,' remains precisely 'out of joint'" ("The Time is Out of Joint" 25). In Spiegelman's description, Maus would fail if it gave authority to any "is;" the narrative works precisely because there remains no time or tense that gains priority. Spiegelman points to a passage early in the second volume in which the formal representation of the past and of the present are "butting . . . up against each other." The very rigid and regular grids of the present "have fallen away to reveal what's underneath. . . . By peeling away what would have been six of the panels on that fifteen-grid page, the map of Auschwitz that underlies our present is revealed" (181-82; my emphasis).

Similarly, the introduction to Auschwitz in the second volume--which up to now has been seen only as its iconic front gates--is accomplished via a similar displacement of the primacy of the present moment. In a way to get around the dread he felt at telling this part of his father's story, Spiegelman sought to enter Auschwitz in a way that "doesn't allow for the momentousness of the moment" (188). Thus, the introduction comes through a break in the present--one that reveals that the past was there all along, that any entry into Auschwitz by the narrative is a reentry--when, "after wandering around the bungalow colony with my father . . . a very small panel, a close-up of a snarling Nazi . . . interrupts the fairly fluid stroll through the country. It's very abrupt and perfunctory" (188). The Nazi's shout--ostensibly to the Jews who had been transported to Auschwitz in the truck carrying Vladek and Anja--is multivalent: a call to leave the present moment and a call to the past to expose itself as there in that present moment.

In these reveals, these explorations of the past and present as both always present, Maus is a tremendously uncanny text. It offers up what is to remain hidden in order for the present to assert its authority: the competing narrative of the past, whose presence, formerly skirting by at the edges of awareness, frame, and panel, now becomes fully visible. In this sense, Maus fits with Adam Harper's definition of hauntological art, in which the object possesses:

two stages, or layers. The first layer seems to present something that's in some way idealised - this is often but not always an image involving the past . . . The second "hauntological" layer problematises, compromises and obfuscates the first layer, undermining or damaging it in some way and introducing irony into the work, and represents the opinionated viewpoint of the present. While the first layer might express hope and confidence, the hauntological layer contradicts and undoes this by expressing a satirical doubt and disillusionment.

Here, Maus functions as a hauntological work because the ostensibly idealized life in America that Vladek enjoys in Rego Park is continually undercut by the reintroduction of the past (or the way it functions as an uncanny text). In a mirror of the map of Auschwitz underneath Vladek and Art's present conversation, the back cover of the second volume (reproduced within the body of the text) geographically and temporally displaces contemporary New York and New Jersey into Poland and Auschwitz.

Even Spiegelman's counterpart in the text, Art, cannot escape the past in his present moment of success after the publishing of the first volume. His writing desk rests on the bodies of dead mice, he's bordered by a swastika, and a guard tower looms outside his window. For Spiegelman, this "Time Flies" section serves "as a MetaMaus like commentary on the whole project."

Perhaps even more powerful, though slightly less visceral than the above sequence, is one of the motivating questions Spiegelman describes:

"So, how did you get born when you weren't supposed to?" In a way, taking on my parents' Holocaust story was a way of getting to the primal moment of my birth, because there was no way that they were both supposed to be alive and coupling after World War II. It is a specific journey that has nothing to do with history and everything to do with history; one or both of these people is supposed to be dead, which means that I'm not supposed to be here. (199)

Spiegelman's own presence, his body, destabilizes time and history here, complicating narratives that resist closure and refuse to add up. In this way, the hauntological elements of Maus are, I think, exactly what continue to make it relevant. As Spiegelman points out, casual racism is:

what festered into becoming the Final Solution; and it is what allows our current immigration debates to take certain kinds of appalling coloration now. It is what allows us to call Arabs "ragheads," it's what allows Arabs to think of Jews and Americans as wearing targets around their necks so one can kill them, it's that whole process of dehumanization. I'm not exempting myself, my father, or the Nazis or Poles from it; it seems to be a basic aspect of how tribes organize themselves. (36-37)

The call to remember in Maus, to account, introduces "Guilt . . . an explosive thing to live with, but it may be the price we humans must pay for civilization while trying to learn true Empathy" (158).* It might be possible to pair this statement with the ethical and political aspect of hauntology, its insistence that the present is not the only possibility: "The reason all these ghosts matter, the point of saying It wasn't always like this, is not that it was better then, let's go back, but to remind ourselves that it doesn't have to be this way. . . The ghosts that should most haunt us are the spectres of events that have not yet happened." The spectres raised by Maus, the history that the text bleeds, are not confined to the past, but extend into the returning future in which the preconditions for what takes place in Maus have never been eliminated.

Anyway, if you're a fan of Maus, do yourself a favour and pick up MetaMaus. The three long interview sections--"Why the Holocaust?," "Why Mice?," and "Why Comics?"--are illuminating, with Spiegelman's candid and articulate answers a real joy to read. Added treats: the unedited transcript of his initial interview with his father, Vladek, in 1972 and the DVD, containing audio clips of Spiegelman explaining his work and excerpts from the tape recordings of Vladek telling his story.

*Echoes of PKD's claim that empathy is the necessary characteristic of the human?

DERRIDEAN GHOSTS OF RON BURGUNDY

EDIT: An equally applicable title might be "Derrida, the Hauntological Hauntologist."

As I was doing some reading earlier this evening I came across what Jon Stewart might call my moment of Zen for the day--from the contributors section of Deconstruction is/in America:

Jacques Derrida is Jacques Derrida.

Perhaps I simply was suffering from an attack of the giggles, but I could not stop laughing about that biography. It's so casually arrogant, but, at the same time, it's hard to argue that he hadn't earned being able to say that in a collection of conference papers dedicated to the idea of Deconstruction. Nevertheless, in its tautological form, I couldn't help but think of that sentence as something like Derrida's Ron Burgundy moment--and given everything I've heard/read about the latter part of his career, he certainly seems to have taken on something of the qualities of that character, retreating into the arms of his cult at the slightest hint of question or criticism--a statement that deserves to be followed by "He is kind of a big deal. His apartment smells of rich mahogany. He has many leather-bound books."

Indeed, while such directness might (would?) jeopardize the very Derridean/deconstructive project, a contributor bio seems like the perfect place for Derrida to make good on his claims that he is (was) not deconstruction (a statement that seems as ridiculous as Robert Fripp's claims that he is not King Crimson) by presenting a clearly delineated definition of what Derrida is if he is (was) not deconstruction (and, conversely, what deconstruction is if it is not Derrida). There's probably quite an interesting reading to be developed from this about the proper name and its significance to Derrida--signified, of course, by that most inescapable of names. Jacques Derrida was (is) Jacques Derrida, yes, but was (is) he more than "Jacques Derrida?" Is he doomed to be only French and obfuscatory? To be an eternal author-function? I'm not a Derridean, so I don't think I can even venture an answer here, but I would gladly listen to/read some thoughts on this.

What's equally interesting to me, though, is how difficult it is to write about that sentence now, and how it resonates with the translation of his talk that appears in the book, "The Time is Out of Joint." Derrida is "out of joint;" at once the eternal present tense of the object of literary analysis and the past tense of the deceased person. Derrida still very much "is" something--in the sense of a meaning that continues to shape, change, and develop--even as he can never "be" anything again. In another, equally valid, sense, he "was" something, and can only ever "have been" that thing. He has become the spectre, the ghost, that he discusses in Spectres of Marx. Derrida, the hauntologist, becomes the hauntological object. Fittingly, he claimed to be a ghost before he ever became one in the common understanding of the term, and that biographical sentence conceals many ghosts.

Of course the impenetrability of the biographical statement works to create those ghosts: "there is no presence except mythologically, no myth without a recording surface which both refers to a (lost) presence and blocks us from attaining it."  What else is the "is" in that biographical statement than the creation, the perpetuation of a myth? To return to Derrida's language in the talk: Jacques Derrida is/in/as/and "Jacques Derrida." The relationship drawn up here is always going to be one that is lost, for if the "is" must be interrogated, as Derrida makes clear it must, how can the relationship his biographical sentence proffers survive? How can it be accessed when, ultimately, it's unclear what would be accessed, but even by what method, through what authority, access is granted to us?

Both this biographical sentence and his talk hinge on "is." As Derrida frames his central questions:

Has deconstruction happened? Has it arrived? Of course it has, if you like, but then, if it has, so many questions arise: How? Where? When? On what date exactly? Was it so long ago, already? Or perhaps not yet? . . . Now, when and if one does not know when an event took place, one has to wonder if it indeed took place, or in any case if it took place in "material reality" as Freud might have said, and not only in the fabric of some "psychic reality," in phantasm or delirium. A date, which is to say, the objectivity of a presumed reference, stands precisely at the joining of the "material" and the "psychic." . . . And perhaps deconstruction would consist, if at least it did consist, in precisely that: deconstructing, dislocating, displacing, disarticulating, disjoining, putting "out of joint" the authority of the "is." Or yet again, rather than doing that, sooner, even before doing that, and doing it methodically, it would be a matter for deconstruction of measuring itself against the historical experience--and this is history itself--against the experience of that which in the "is," in time or in the present time of "is," remains precisely "out of joint." (17, 21, 25)

So the obvious question to pose to that biography are those same questions that Derrida raises: Has Jacques Derrida happened? When? On what date exactly? Was it so long ago, already? Or perhaps not yet? Given its not disjointed nature, thanks to the very passage of time, what is the "is" in "Jacques Derrida is Jacques Derrida?" From where does it derive its authority? Does it possess any authority at all? Did that "is" ever take place, or is it simply that "psychic reality" of phantasm? What does "is" mean for a ghost? For an already ghost, an always-already ghost? Again, I've got no answers here (although, I'd be tempted to joke "Yes, Jacques Derrida happened in 1966 at Johns Hopkins University"), but it's kind of fascinating to think about.

This is perhaps why, once the initial shock of its arrogance wears off, Derrida's biographical sentence becomes quite profound in a certain sense, an opening into how hauntology functions and how it develops out of ontology: "It is this sense of temporal disjuncture that is crucial to hauntology. Hauntology isn't about the return of the past, but about the fact that the origin was already spectral. We live in a time when the past is present, and the present is saturated with the past." In one sentence, Derrida has dinjunctured himself--he both is and was, will always be and has never been. This has been accomplished through the technology of language, of writing, and it is through that same technology that we must attempt to come to terms with this dinjuncture, to set Derrida right, to place him accurately within time, to find the presence that "Jacques Derrida is Jacques Derrida" implies, even as we know it to be a futile task. As he puts it, quoting himself (of course, necessarily, the ghost of himself making this point possible):

And so as to clarify this question of time, of the being of time, of what then is, in its impossible present, time itself, I continued: "Intended to avoid contretemps, to be in harmony with our rhythms by bending them to objective measurement, they produce misunderstandings, they accumulate the opportunities for false steps or wrong moves, revealing and simultaneously increasing this anachrony of desires: in the same time. What is this time?" 

A delirium of the date thus confers on the incredible sentence "The time is out of joint" more than one supplementary meaning, to be sure, but at the same time, just as many more madnesses. At the same time. At once. As if there were a dead time in the hour itself. (19)

In the hour that Jacques Derrida "is" Jacques Derrida there is a dead time, the time he "was" Jacques Derrida, and the future state in which the "is" will be both "is" and "was." At the same time, at once, Derrida as person, presence, spectre, ghost, absence. Our own desire to make that "is" an objective measurement, to establish an objective originary moment in which that "is" is true, is wholly present, creates these contretemps, these same times--the past present and the present (suffocating in) past. What does it mean that Jacques Derrida is Jacques Derrida when Jacques Derrida was Jacques Derrida, was always dead, was always a ghost?

THOUGHTS FROM A CONVALESCENT

I've been sick for the past few days--surprisingly sick for what seemed like a simple cold--but after about sixteen hours of sleep last night, I'm feeling much better today. I still sound like hell, but at least I don't feel miserable. Obviously I haven't done a whole lot of anything while I've been sick so this update might be a little thin.

I went to a screening of the humanitarian group Invisible Children's film Tony on Wednesday night (this was probably a mistake in retrospect: I felt like crap Wednesday morning, and spending all day on campus having to be awake and somewhat sociable probably did nothing to help my immune system fight off what was coming), and I found it an interesting presentation, if flawed. While I support the group's work to help villages warn each other of, and possibly fend off, attacks from rebel groups in central East Africa, and while their film made at least a token gesture to the idea that white people coming in to Africa and throwing money and consumer goods around does not, in fact, fix anything, I was uncomfortable with the overall tone. There was more than a hint of orientalism (perhaps that's not the exact word I want--maybe just othering or exoticizing Africans?) throughout the video, with the titular man shown to be both a person of tremendous perseverance and a kind of cipher for all the desires, dreams, and guilt of middle and upper class whites about Africa, a kind of "look, we gave him Nikes and rap CDs and he likes us just so much and we're just such great friends, isn't it great?" type narrative. I couldn't help thinking that if Christian Lander had been there, he could've used the film to illustrate any number of points in Stuff White People Like (I think the entries on "Nonprofit Organizations," "Having Black Friends," "Awareness," "Documentaries," "Knowing What's Best for Poor People," "T-Shirts," "Following Their Dreams," and "Self-Importance," at the very least, could easily be illustrated by various aspects of Tony).* At the same time, the subtitles that appeared any time a black person spoke in the video--while all whites remained unsubtitled even when the sound quality of handheld footage made it difficult to make out any words--was, I thought, a telling touch.

The purpose of the video was less to tell the story of Tony than to explain how Invisible Children is the coolest organization you could hope to be a part of, one that will help you "follow your dreams" and realize your "true self" through its internship program: driving around in vans and fundraising for the group by showing their movies and speaking to high school, university, and church groups. The mix of handheld and professional camera work, combined with the quick cuts and trendy camera effects, made it feel like a well-made YouTube video diary. Coupled with the stylish t-shirts and bags on sale after the screening, and the organization's social network style fundraising website, it seemed like a great pitch to capture teens and and university students. The roadtrips appear perfectly designed to serve as material for cooler Facebook status updates and tweets than those of one's peers. Ultimately, I was left cold by the film (and by the personality of the organization's founder, who came across like Tucker Max running a nonprofit), even as I found many of the group's goals admirable. I'd required my students to go to the screening, but I'm less comfortable with that decision now than I had been. A complicated issue, to be sure.

Other than that, not much more to report. As I said, being sick sort of wiped out the last few days. I've (slowly, oh so slowly) been working my way through James Fennimore Cooper's The Pioneers, and while it has more points of interest than I'd been led to believe, it's hard to overcome Mark Twain's masterful putdown of Cooper and give the novel the benefit of the doubt. I'm twenty chapters in and there hasn't been much in the way of plot yet; however, I've been assured that much will take place in the next twenty--for the sake of my brain, which is in danger of turning to mush if I come across another two-page description of what one character or another is wearing, I certainly hope so. On the plus side, this week we're talking about Tom Stoppard's Arcadia in my other class. You might say I'm a little excited: a play about academics is awesome--it's not often I actually get to talk about my primary scholarly interest in class.

A sign of the times as I finish? A balloon (it looks like one of the bright plastic helium balloons) shaped like a man just floated across the sky above the houses across the street.


*Of course, part of what makes that book ride the "this is funny"/"this is painful/infuriating" line so well is its accuracy: you can laugh at the foibles of those around you and feel outraged/find yourself forced into justifications about the things you like. The book also goes a long way, I think, to furthering the idea that "white" is, more and more, an economic designation: the last time I filled out the checklist in the back of the book, it told me I was less than 20% white despite my being practically translucent and able to burn on a moment's notice in sunlight; I simply don't have the kind of disposable income necessary to be "white." Of course, this refers to a fairly narrowly defined idea of whiteness, one that groups on the right might be less willing to embrace, even though it shares a particular kind of anti-intellectualism underneath its well-cultivated appearance that would fit in well with the right (the constant belittling of the humanities [and higher education in general], the disparaging remarks about intellectual figures [both Zizek and Lacan are presented as nothing more than fodder for PoMo posers, devoid of any real substance]).

ROBERTSON DAVIES AND THE PLACES THAT HAUNT US

My bedtime reading for the past week or so has been Robertson Davies' The Fifth Business, the first book in his Deptford trilogy (the other two being The Manticore and World of Wonders). I first read it in high school during our one unit on CanLit. We'd been given a list of six or seven Canadian authors to choose from, along with recommended books. I asked my mom for advice, and she suggested Davies to me as the writer who would most appeal to my tastes. She was right there. She has, in fact, never failed in suggesting books to me, and even though we don't share exactly the same tastes (she is not an SF fan, and she can't really get on with magical realism), no one manages to get my taste in novels right more often. The Fifth Business might be her best recommendation, though. Since high school, I've read it a handful of times. My parents have a handsome, hardback copy (it might be a first edition), but I didn't own a copy until I spied the entire trilogy in a used bookstore in Corvallis, in the same Penguin print run as my copy of The Rebel Angels. I got all three for the princely sum of $4.50, fifty cents cheap than each sold for individually when first released, and I'd have quite willingly parted with more to get them.

Few novels speak to me in the way that The Fifth Business does. While I adore the entire Deptford trilogy as a whole, I would not for a second suggest that The Manticore or World of Wonders are the equal of their precursor. Part of its initial appeal was the shocking realization that someone could write a novel about life in a small town in Ontario. This was unbelievable; to my teenage self, art was made by people who lived in glamorous places, like London or Paris or Rome, or in exciting places like New York and Los Angeles. The books and movies I liked that weren't set in those places were set in the future or in space. Art most definitely did not come from people writing about fictional towns on the wrong Thames. I was sure of that. That the small town in Ontario in which I grew up could be worthy of commemoration or reflection in this way was stunning. Since then, I've grown accustomed to the idea--indeed, I'm fairly convinced that I owe a great deal to growing up in the suburbs, intellectually and otherwise, although the sense of inferiority about where I come from (is this a general Canadian feeling? It might be. . .) has both served me well and hindered me at various times--and, as I read this time, when I came upon Dunstan Ramsay's line that "I boarded the train--there was no crowd at the station this time--and left Deptford in the flesh. It was not for a long time that I recognized that I never wholly left it in the spirit," I was so overcome and agitated I had to put the book down for several minutes. Nothing else has ever quite captured so well the way I feel about Canada while I'm in the States: the physical disconnection, but psychic/spiritual hyperconnection that is at once painful and embarrassing (I kind of hate being reminded of it by other people, especially by several people in the same day, or by the same person over and over again) but something that I long for and need (I will surprise myself at odd times with the need to assert, to myself as much as to anyone else, that I am Canadian).

Davies can flat out write about place. His description of a public mental hospital does such a good job capturing its atmosphere and evoking dread and loneliness that I found it (again) so unsettling as to require me to put the book down:

[T]he building was an old horror. It was about eighty years old and had been designed for the era when the first thing that was done with an insane patient was to put him to bed, with a view to keeping him there, safe and out of the way, till he recovered or died. Consequently the hospital had few and inadequate common rooms, and the patients sat in the corridors, or wandered up and down the corridors, or lay on their beds. The architecture was of the sort that looks better on the outside than on the inside; the building had a dome and a great number of barred windows and looked like a run-down palace.
Inside the ceilings were high, the light was bad, and in spite of the windows the ventilation was capricious. The place reeked of disinfectant, but the predominating smell was that unmistakable stench of despair that is so often to be found in jails, courtrooms, and madhouses. [The smell of the carceral society; and wouldn't Foucault have just loved that grouping: the apparatus of discipline!]
She had a bed in one of the long wards, and I left her standing beside it, with a kindly nurse who was explaining what she should do with the contents of her suitcase. But already her face looked as I remembered it in her worst days in Deptford. I dared not look back, and I felt meaner than I have ever felt in my life. But what was I to do?

Of course, that's not his only stunning description of place (his depiction of the Staunton house on Christmas morning as "a dismal, toy-littered waste of wealthy, frumpish domesticity" is delightfully savage), and really the entire novel is a long investigation of the psychological ramifications of places (especially homes). Davies' writing is uncanny, but in a quiet, subtle way. Without ever really seeming to disturb, he manages to get under my skin and make me uneasy.

Freud looms large in his novels in more than that sense of the uncanny, though. While his work is often discussed in relation to Jung--Dunstan Ramsay mentions a preference for Jung over Freud, and The Manticore is in the form of a Jungian analysis of its protagonist--in his tracing of the conflagration and commingling of history, religion, and myth in everyday life, his exploration of the logic of obsession and fetishes, and his depiction of psychosexual trauma as a key lens through which a person's life must be read, Davies is unabashedly a Freudian (cf. "I was trying to forget the spectacle, so horrible in my visions, of what I had seen when first I happened on them--those bare buttocks and four legs to strangely opposed. But I could never forget"). As in his evocations of the uncanny, the darkness of the pleasure principle and the death drive bubbles below the surface for the most part, but it will burst out in sharp passages that sear one's brain and cause a slight recoil in horror from the images on display. In fact, with all of its discussion of the Real and the Symbolic and their place in our lives, The Fifth Business might be of particular interest to a Lacanian. . .

There are other reasons the novel resonates with me: Dunstan Ramsay's appreciation of learning and his valourization of his scholarship as a hagiographer made my current life path seem glamorous, even when I was in high school. The plot is full of action and adventure, surprising for a novel so focused on deep psychological exploration. It is, to a degree I probably underestimate, a book that has shaped the way I see the world and the way I interact with the people and things I encounter. I can think of only a very small number of novels that have equaled it in terms of impact, and I don't think anything had such a radical and profound impact on my worldview until I really started to get into theory in grad school. At this point, I have a great deal invested in The Fifth Business. Once, after several years of me prompting her to do so, an ex-girlfriend read it: she said it was a good book, but the narrator sounded so stuffy and old that she couldn't really enjoy it. I should've known right then and there it wouldn't work out between us.

EDIT: I forgot one of my favourite passages. It's rare that someone catches the pain of puberty with such precision:

I thought I was in love with Leola, by which I meant that if I could have found her in a quiet corner, and if I had been certain that no one would ever find out, and if I could have summoned up the courage at the right moment, I would have kissed her.

That was painfully funny and painfully true to my high school self.

DON'T CALL IT A COMEBACK: END OF SUMMER AND THOUGHTS ON ASIMOV

Well, summer is officially over for me. I am back in Pittsburgh, writing this from the desk of my new apartment. When I stare out my window, I no longer see student slums. That has to count for something. There are many things to do in the two weeks between now and the first day of classes (like finally getting around to writing that syllabus . . .), but I should hopefully have enough time on my hands to resume blogging with whatever approaches regularity for me on this thing. I've been working on the long promised post about chillwave (thesis [essentially]: chillwave is a specifically North American form of hauntology) and I hope to have it up (famous last words) by tomorrow evening. After that, I'll try and tackle my impressions of DFW's The Pale King--it really does seem to me to lend itself to a reading via capitalist realism--and some of his other later work.

Before I get to any of that, though, I've just finished re-reading Asimov's three Lije Baley/R. Daneel Olivaw novels (The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, and The Robots of Dawn). When I was younger, I loved all three, but I have to admit I didn't find them as enjoyable this time around (it's been probably five years at least since I'd even glanced at them). While I was impressed with the resonances between some of Asimov's sociological and psychological commentary and current social and political situations--particularly in the two earlier novels--what left me cold were the glimpses of the much stranger novels that got left behind in their adherence to fairly conventional mystery/adventure templates. In some ways, the humaniform robot R. Daneel Olivaw invites speculation on the nature of the human vs. the simulation, the authentic vs. the simulacrum from the first: he is introduced to the reader as a human, and is under orders to maintain his disguise as a human at all times (a deception he achieves much more successfully in the second novel, but which is rendered impossible in the third). Asimov is too clever to dispense entirely with speculation on the above themes, but he avoids lengthy digressions on the subject, preferring the issues to remain in the background (and to arise mostly as secondary or tertiary subtexts to other conversations or internal monologues by Baley). Indeed, Daneel becomes increasingly "human"--or is thought of as such by Baley--throughout the series, to the point where he is able to smile in the third novel (something he is unable to do successfully in the first). Whereas this would seem to be the point at which to push the distinction between the authentically human and the imitative robot to its extreme or to dissolve it entirely, Asimov does neither.

This is, ultimately, where the weirder novels that lurk just beneath the surface of the trilogy start to appear. Not overtly, but rather as the ghosts of what other writers might have done with this material, particularly Asimov's doppelganger in terms of hyperprolific American science fiction writers with an extraordinarily large influence over the field: Philip K. Dick. The Caves of Steel could become, with some minor tweaking, a dry run for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? What happens instead is that at the very point where Dick's novels and stories break into epistemological and existential chaos, at the point where the human and the real become impossible to locate or verify, Asimov's novel closes the door to that chaos through the relentless logic of Baley the plainclothesman. Where in Dick's hands Daneel would grow steadily more unnerving as he became increasingly human--and where Baley's shifting attitude toward Daneel (from fear and loathing to love and respect) would be matched by an increasing uneasiness towards Baley's own humanity--Asimov's Baley is already so machine-like, so rooted to cause and effect, to chains of logic, that he can point to Daneel's artificial nature and discuss that nature with the robot without ever really making the question of the human/robot distinction a live one. Baley's physical shortcomings (his agoraphobia, for example, or his need to eat, to defecate, etc.), what would on the surface seem to point to his very humanity, become affectations on par with Daneel's in the robot's attempt to be taken as human. The many references to Baley's long, glum face, a face that only rarely smiles, seem like deliberate echoes of Daneel's own grave visage and Baley's revulsion at the lifeless smile he commands Daneel to display for him in The Caves of Steel.

The two become mirrors of each other, but where Daneel's resemblance to/echo of everything that should distinguish Baley as the human in the pair should unnerve, should awaken exactly that primal fear Freud mentions in "The Uncanny," it fails to do so precisely because he has no one who appears to fulfill the criteria of the "human." This, ultimately, is the disturbing part of the series, and it is in some ways more deeply unsettling than Dick's questioning of the human. Where Dick worked hard to locate the "authentic" human gesture--"The concept of caritas (or agape) shows up in my writing as the key to the authentic human. The android, which is the unauthentic human, the mere reflex machine, is unable to experience empathy"--Asimov works with a similar basic assumption (the reflex in this case being a robot's unfailing response to the First Law of Robotics), but then undercuts them (the search for the Laws of Humanics) with a desire to make the human more like the robot, like Lije Baley, who is identified at the end of the third novel as the template for the "ideal" human to colonize the galaxy.

PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS ON (THE FIRST 1/5 OF) DFW'S THE PALE KING

I went on something of a book-acquiring spree over the past few days. At a used bookstore in town I managed to pick up on the cheap Paul Auster's New York Trilogy (more on this soon), Philip Roth's The Human Stain, and Richard Russo's Straight Man (yes, two more novels about professors). To go along with these books, I finally fulfilled a promise to myself and picked up DFW's The Pale King (along with Jess Walter's The Financial Lives of the Poets [which, if Walter's reading of the first chapter and my own perusal of the first two chapters in the bookstore are anything to go by, will be hilarious], the purchase of both of which made me curse the disparity between the cost of new books in Canada vs. the USA).

Anyway, I'm not super far along into The Pale King just yet (looks like ~1/5 of the way), but a few thoughts have crossed my mind so far:

1. I'll go along with critical consensus (based on early reviews) and say "Wow" to the first chapter. I mean, serious writing chops on display and it's mostly just a list (of course, large parts of The Things They Carried are "mostly just a list" and the effect in that novel, as in The Pale King, is nothing short of electrifying). At the same time, while the (long) first sentence received a lot of attention (and, truthfully, it merits it), I was more drawn to the start of the second paragraph: "Some crows come overhead then, three or four, not a murder, on the wing, silent with intent, corn-bound for the pasture's wire beyond which one horse semlls at the other's behind, the lead horse's tail obligingly lifted." Painting with language, indeed. You can see and smell and feel and hear everything about that scene.
2. Chapter 3 feels like a leftover from Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.
3. Chapter 9, the "Author's Foreward," though it has (again) been singled out for both praise and criticism by a number of reviewers (mostly because of its seeming way too clever and metafictional and postmodern for its own good) is, by and large, mostly wonderful. The "landscape" writing is what's impressed me most so far about the book (the description of the trailer park and the gypsum hills, the grandmother's house, the first chapter, Sylvanshine's view from the plane as it comes in for a landing, etc.), but Chapter 9 is like an obvious dose of "classic" or "vintage" DFW that just zips along until building to his chief philosophical/thematic concern in its final two paragraphs (based on the material surrounding The Pale King and other "late" writing of his like "This is Water," and even, to a certain extent, most of Brief Interviews). In a lot of ways this theme, especially as it is phrased in these paragraphs, reminds me of Mark Fisher (aka k-punk)'s comments re: life under capitalist realism. Is The Pale King capitalist realist fiction par excellence? 

"Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with out full attention. . . . [S]urely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets' checkouts, airports' gates, SUVs' backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called 'information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down. . . . [L]iving people do not speak much of the dull. Why this silence? Maybe it's because the subject is, in and of itself, dull . . . only then we're again right back where we started, which is tedious and irksome. There may, though, I opine, be more to it . . . as in vastly more, right here before us all, hidden by virtue of its size."

I think what I have in mind is something like Fisher's excellent gloss of this photo: "The image above is so evocative because it suddenly suggests an outside, an effective interruption of the blank trance you can see in the model's abstracted eyes, which reflect our own ...". Similarly, DFW's investigation of dullness, of boredom, of the "something else, way down" that's "hidden by virtue of its size," forces us not only into an awareness of that dullness and boredom that we cannot simply flee by closing the book (because now we are aware, and actions taken to mask the dullness and boredom reveal the states they are masking the more effectively they do the job, thus making it impossible to actually escape the dullness and boredom and necessitating a confrontation with the psychic pain that dullness and boredom force us to recognize in ourselves--cf. Zizek's remarks on the power of the "conceptual Jew": "The fantasmatic 'conceptual Jew' is not a paternal figure of symbolic authority, a 'castrated' bearer-medium of public authority, but something decidedly different, a kind of uncanny double of the public authority that perverts its proper logic: he has to act in shadow, invisible to the public eye, irradiating a phantom-like, spectral omnipotence. On account of this unfathomable, elusive status of the kernel of his identity, the Jew is--in contrast to the 'castrated' father--perceived as uncastratable: the more his actual, social, public existence is cut short, the more threatening becomes his elusive fantasmatic ex-istence"*), but also into a questioning of the larger systemic causes of the "psychic pain" that makes dullness and boredom--which are, in the end, merely symptoms of life in that larger system/social structure/cultural moment/historical era--so unbearable. That is, The Pale King creates, by offering a glimpse of the boredom and dullness that is contained (and therefore visible), an outside wherein the "blank trance" of that dullness and boredom is interrupted by an awareness of its own existence. The psychic pain that is kept at bay through a constant and ceaseless determination to experience neither the dull nor the boring (via the devices DFW mentions in the passage I quoted above, amongst other activities) is cast in sharp relief, and we wonder "what causes this pain and why do I experience it?"

Is this also, I wonder, pointing to some "obscene underside" of the action of enjoying a commodity in one's leisure time (i.e. the book The Pale King) in that reading the book--the process of enjoying that commodity--leads to the above understanding re: dullness/boredom/psychic pain and becomes the aim in and of itself (i.e. the experiencing of that psychic pain) rather than the enjoyment of the entertainment device that would ostensibly combat the dullness/boredom of modern life and prevent an awareness of that psychic pain from emerging? That is, the effects of the system are best revealed through a conscious participation in the system (a participation that the system encourages because of the difficulty of that participation ever being conscious [due to the psychic pain that participants attempt to avoid and that conscious participation makes readily apparent]). Indeed, the aforementioned psychic pain would seem to make acting against the system (which in this case are those cultural/political/financial institutions that help to create and perpetuate the "information society" [late capitalism]) difficult, let alone actually participating rather than just existing in the blank trance of rote actions--so, in the end, the system gets both to inflict pain and, by allowing the person within the system the chance to become aware of the pain that the system is causing, to offer a way to prevent that pain in a single gesture.

Anyway, some initial thoughts on The Pale King as I make my way through it. I'm excited to see where this novel is going.

[EDIT BASED ON MORE READING: The conversation in the elevator and the story about obetrolling/doubling clearly lend themselves to discussions of capitalist realism, and, in the case of the former, are essential to the novel's working (and not just stuff from high school civics class that should be cut). The most interesting mistake (?) so far: the sudden intrusion of the dialogue tag "I said" out of nowhere in the middle of the elevator conversation.]

*This is from Zizek's essay "Between Symbolic Fiction and Fantasmatic Spectre: Toward a Lacanian Theory of Ideology" from Interrogating the Real (229-48; the quote itself appears on 239).

HARRY POTTER MANIA IN TORONTO

Last night was the premiere of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, and the CBC reported that fans had been lining up outside the theatre since 5:30 AM. Interviews conducted with various fans of the series were played throughout the day yesterday, and a number of people called in to share their tales of fandom.

I'm not a fan of the series myself--I've never read any of the books, and I fell asleep watching one of the movies--but I do think it's an interesting cultural phenomenon. For example, I find it fascinating that fans dressing up as their favourite characters, or their own characters they've created (!!), is regarded as a normal expression of their love of the series, whereas fans of other series like Star Wars, Star Trek, and The Lord of the Rings are stigmatized for the same activity. Ultimately, I wonder if this has something to do with the function that the Harry Potter narrative serves in the symbolic life of our society. Is there something more acceptable about overt (some might say excessive) Potter-love because of a certain desire the series caters to? When I think about Harry Potter I'm drawn back to Jameson's concept of the function of narrative and its larger social purpose:

ideology is not something which informs or invests symbolic production; rather the aesthetic act is itself ideological, and the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal 'solutions' to unresolvable social contradictions. (PU 79)

What is the ideology being expressed by Harry Potter? What real contradiction is resolved in its narrative? Perhaps more importantly, what ideology is being expressed by the series' fans' appropriation of the narrative? What real contradiction are they using the narrative to resolve? To what extent are they rewriting the narrative to cover new contradictions?

I am also intrigued by the obsession with celebrity and the actors who play the main characters in the Harry Potter movies (see also the frenzy surrounding the recent royal visit to Canada). If the novels serve to resolve certain real social contradictions, the movies must do likewise (though not necessarily the same contradictions as the novels, I would imagine), as must the actors themselves. What contradiction(s) do the actors resolve for the fans, especially for the ones camping out in the pre-dawn hours to catch a glimpse of the actors at the premiere? What desires do they fulfill? The obsession certainly seems to have something of Freud's family romance in it:

Small events in the child's life may induce in him a mood of dissatisfaction and so provide him with an occasion to start criticizing his parents and to support this critical attitude with the recently acquired knowledge that other parents are in some respects to be preferred to them. . . . At about this time, then, the child's imagination is occupied with the task of ridding himself of his parents, of whom he now has a low opinion, and replacing by others, usually of superior social standing. In this connection he makes use of the chance concurrence of these aims with actual experiences, such as an acquaintanceship with the lord of the manor or some landowner in the country, or with some aristocrat in the city. Such fortuitous experiences arouse the child's envy, which then finds expression in a fantasy that replaces both parents by others who are grander. The technique used in developing such fantasies, which at this period are of course conscious, depends on the child's ingenuity and the material he has at his disposal. It is also a question of how much or how little effort has gone into making the fantasies seems probable. . . . For if one takes a close look at the commonest of these romances--the replacement of both parents or just the father by grander personages--one discovers that these new, distinguished parents are provided with features that derive from the child's actual memories of his real, more humble parents: the child does not really eliminate his father, but exalts him. Indeed, the whole effort to replace the real father by another who is more distinguished is merely an expression of the child's longing for the happy times gone by, when his father seemed to him the strongest and most distinguished of men, and his mother the dearest and loveliest of women. He turns away from the man he now knows as his father to the one he believed in as a child. The fantasy is actually only an expression of regret for the happy times that have vanished. ("Family Romances" 37, 38-39, 40; my emphasis)

Coupled with this, does Harry Potter serve as some kind of distorted mirror stage for its readers: the recognition of an ego separate from the reader's actual self in society, the acknowledgement (and encouragement) of an inner life in which the reader is heroic, special, unique, magical? Is the popularity of Harry Potter a response to life in late capitalism? A symptom related to the quarter-life crisis? An attempt to live in a society in which each person is encouraged to believe that he or she is special and unique, with talents that deserve recognition and praise, and consequently no one is special and unique? That is, can the reader of Harry Potter assert--via the fantasies that the text allows him/her to have--"no, I am special. The qualities that make me special are just hidden. If only I could go to a world more like Hogwarts rather than [x], then I could show everyone my hidden, inner self"?

In asking these questions I don't mean to suggest that Harry Potter is bad or that it's not literature. I couldn't honestly make any such judgement, given that I haven't read the series myself. If Harry Potter has made readers out of non-readers, as the most commonly offered claim for its greatness goes, then I say "great." I wonder, though, if the series has made readers or readers-of-Harry-Potter. That is, how many people who are enamoured of the series go on to read other books regularly? I know plenty of people who love Harry Potter who can't name another book they've read. I know dozens of people who were already quite avid readers who love Harry Potter. I personally don't know anyone who would say that they didn't read for pleasure before Harry Potter but do so now that they've finished the series. I think the truth, as is so often the case, is a little more convoluted than Potter devotees would like to admit. Also, I have no answers to these questions, but I would be interested to hear what others think about this. Perhaps everyone who talks about Harry Potter got over these questions years ago and I'm behind the times. Based on the interviews on CBC yesterday, though, I rather suspect I'm not.

WHAT I DID ON MY SUMMER VACATION

I had some friends visit last week, which should explain my total absence from blogging (and the internet in general). Anyway, I feel the need to put something up here so that it doesn't seem like I've entirely abandoned the blog. To that end, a brief list:

1. While my friends were here, they convinced me to read Neil Gaimon's American Gods. I'd read the first two Sandman graphic novels and enjoyed them, so it wasn't exactly a hard sell. I'm happy to note that American Gods was wonderful. It reminded me a lot of Douglas Adams' The Long, Dark Tea Time of the Soul, though slightly more serious. What impressed me most about American Gods was its originality and ability to surprise me: I never felt that I knew what would happen next in the novel and the characters (even those with theologically/mythologically pre-determined natures) were unique and memorable.
2. Also, my friends convinced me to rent and watch Thank You For Smoking while they were here. Again, an excellent call on their part: the movie was fantastic. I don't think I've laughed so much while watching a movie in quite some time. I'm already scheming up ways to show parts of the movie to my class in the Fall.
3. Inspired by a ridiculous comment by the teacher of the German class I just finished taking ("When you think of the Industrial Revolution, you think of Pittsburgh"*), my friends and I spent the past week making increasingly ridiculous statements as we wandered around the city ("Pittsburgh invented Christopher Columbus;" "Pittsburgh invented America;" "Pittsburgh invented Elephants;" etc., etc.).
4. I've been unable to get to work on any of the stuff I "need" to be working on--like those papers I said I wanted to get ready to send out--because another idea has popped into my head and won't let me go. Taking the advice I've received from the Object-Oriented Philosophy blog, I've decided to strike while the iron is hot and get to work on this idea. There will be plenty of time to get a rough version of this paper together and to work on those other things. Given that this is the first paper I've ever written without any outside prompting or context (like a class or a conference), I'm really anxious to get some feedback.
5. Two short books I'm enjoying working my way through right now: Roland Barthes' Writing Degree Zero (although the chapters on "Writing and the Novel" and "Is There Any Poetic Writing?" are something of a slog) and Dick Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style. The former is helping me re-think some sections of one of the paper's I should be working on and the latter is helping me think through some problems I'm facing in the paper I am working on.
6. I'm heading home for a month or so this coming week. I'm looking forward to being back in Canada and seeing some friends. I don't know if I'll have the chance or not, but it would also be nice to see my sister and my brother, his wife, and my niece. 

That's all for now. Here's hoping for a more productive July (though I've enjoyed my pretty vacation-esque June).


*For the record, when I think of the Industrial Revolution, I think of English cities like Manchester, Birmingham, and Liverpool.

BORGES' PHANTOM CLASSROOM

I volunteered for an event being held on campus today and, as I had been warned it might be quite dull, I took a book with me, Jorge Luis Borges' Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. I find reading Borges to be a lot like working out after a period of not doing so: it takes time to limber up and for the first few pages or stories, like the first few minutes of a run, I struggle to find the rhythm that I'm used to. After awhile, though, I'm able to find my rhythm and start moving pretty solidly through the pages (usually just in time for Borges to turn my mind inside out). After the usual period of struggle today, I found myself enjoying the bizarre worlds Borges conjures up seemingly out of the leftover scraps of other stories. I spent most of the day reading through the book, when I wasn't directing high school and elementary school students to the classroom they needed to find.

One passage in “The Circular Ruins” made me sit up and take notice, and I haven't been able to get it out of my mind since. During the lunch break, I'd sat with a friend and some visiting high school teachers as we ate the pretty terrible pizza that was on offer. The high school teachers asked us about our own teaching and wondered if we might be able to recommend some books, stories, or poems that we wish all high school students had read before they entered out class and to suggest the most important writing skills students could bring with them to university. Needless to say, this was a fun discussion. What made it so pleasant was that the high school teachers treated my friend and I like real teachers. We were not just grad students teaching the classes that tenured faculty couldn't be bothered with, nor were we some kind of bumbling apprentice who would someday figure this teaching thing out. The high school teachers we sat with regarded my friend and I as peers and colleagues, people who could share knowledge about the business of teaching and who had expertise to impart w/r/t to the classroom and the curriculum. After returning to my post and picking up Borges, I came across a description of teaching that damn near nails what I think is so magical about the encounters you can have in the classroom:

The stranger dreamt that he was in the center of a circular amphitheater which in some way was the burned temple: clouds of silent students filled the gradins, the faces of the last ones hung many centuries away and at a cosmic height, but were entirely clear and precise. The man was lecturing to them on anatomy, cosmography, magic; the countenances listened with eagerness and strove to respond with understanding, as if they divined the importance of the examination which would redeem one of them from his state of vain appearance and interpolate him into the world of reality. The man, both in dreams and awake, considered his phantoms' replies, was not deceived by impostors, divined a growing intelligence in certain perplexities. He sought a soul which would merit participation in the universe.

Cosmography and magic (and any number of other subjects) are all part of what comes out of a literature class at its best, I think. I know there are classes that I've taken where I've come home so charged with ideas, so full of newness, so disturbed, that it's been impossible to stop thinking and has taken me hours to settle down enough to do any work or to go to sleep. In the proper setting, new worlds are birthed, new horizons of understanding glimpsed, new perspectives found, new arguments raised, and new questions asked. This event is one of the reasons I find teaching freshmen to be exhilarating: that moment when suddenly nothing is the same for them anymore, when they've come further than they ever have before and cannot help but think new thoughts and entertain new opinions. It doesn't happen with every student, unfortunately, but I see it happen with enough of them to keep me engaged and interested. I want to help them find those souls that merit participation in a universe that is more difficult to live in than the one they live in now because I think life in that universe is richer than the one they live in now and they deserve to live in a richer universe (provided they work to get there).

At the same time, though, I understand why many of them get frustrated and choose not to head for this new universe. Everything is more complex there: no one will make their decisions for them anymore, no one will tell them how to think or what opinion to hold. Even the things they thought they knew how to do become defamiliarized. Reading can make things more confusing; writing can lead to mazes of uncertainties and doubts. Of course, there are positives to go along with this: reading can open whole new areas of existence and writing can offer the thrill of working right at the very limit of one's knowledge. I know it's those two sensations I'm always looking for and trying to introduce my students to. I love that sense that every word I put down is a step into darkness, into a place I've never been and that I'm creating as I write, or that every page I turn somehow makes the world, brighter, louder, more vibrant, more complex, more ambiguous, and more mysterious.

I felt something was missing from my teaching over the last half of this past semester. Somehow, I tried too hard or pushed in the wrong directions or something, but the experience was less “cosmic” and more tedious, I think. The promise of the circular amphitheater in which the stranger lectures was just not there. Borges' character ultimately abandons his dream of the classroom. However, I'm not ready to abandon the parts of his dream that I share just yet. He considers it a failure, a hallucination that will fail to bring about a new soul he can bring into existence. I don't know that I disagree entirely; I do think, though, that it helps to create the dreams that can do it, if nothing else. It's been nice this past month to have a break from teaching, but I'm starting to get excited again for fall and to return to the classroom. I'll be teaching at 8:00 am on MWF, so I will be the first teacher my students have in their university careers. This is the first time I've had this opportunity, and I can't wait. Maybe I'll read them that Borges passage on the first day and tell them how much we have to look forward to together.

REVIEW: BRIAN ALDISS, THE LONG AFTERNOON OF EARTH

No, I'm not planning on turning my blog into a series of book reviews, but I'm finding it difficult to simply enjoy the books I'm reading without saying anything about them. I guess grad school has finally won.

I finished Brian Aldiss' The Long Afternoon of Earth (1962) this afternoon (one that I would describe as long). It didn't reach the heights of A Case of Conscience, and overall I found it disappointing. But first, the good: it has an awesome title and the novel's setting (an Earth that has become a murderous jungle, much like standard SF depictions of Venus before people found out what it was really like there) is fantastic. The ecology of that setting is worked out in such detail and complexity that it rivals (though it doesn't quite surpass) Herbert's Dune. Seriously, Aldiss does a great job of painting the world his characters inhabit. You can practically see vines and branches start to emerge from the pages of the novel.* The section of the novel that takes place in Nomansland is both terrifying and exhilarating, mainly because of the sheer variety and inventiveness of the plants that Aldiss comes up with. Of particular interest is the character of morel, an intelligent fungus with plans for world domination. The speculative or fantastic elements are entirely biological, which is a welcome respite from hard, glittering worlds of computers, spaceships, and cities. The emphasis on living things, on the ways life adapts to changing environments makes the whole novel throb and hum. There's a kind of sexiness to its focus on the violent struggle of life (a sexiness that, unfortunately, is entirely lacking in the novel's sex scenes) that is a rarity in SF. The old masters--Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein--are many things, but they aren't sexy. There is some nice and surprisingly subtle social commentary and philosophical speculation on the question of slavery and what it means to be human, as well.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of problems that (for me, at least) sink what is otherwise an engaging novel. It reads like a stitch up (the practice of turning independent short stories into a novel) even if it isn't one. The novel was originally serialized in five parts, but only three parts are labelled in the novel itself. The break between the second and third parts is particularly arbitrary (it would make more sense at least one chapter later than when it occurs). Similarly, the first part of the novel spends most of its time laying out details and putting in a motion a plot that--while it is finally resolved in the closing pages of the novel--acts for over two-thirds of the novel as an an annoying question mark because of its apparent disconnect from the main thrust of the story.

Indeed, not one, not two, but three (arguably four) sets of characters are introduced, only two sets of which belong to narratives that are resolved. The vast majority of the characters seem to exist only to be killed off in elaborate set pieces that show off the danger and mystery of the world Aldiss has created. The characters the reader spends the most time with are not very compelling (the “hero” of the novel, Gren, is particularly unpleasant), and the minor characters are irritating to the point of distraction. The fate of the second set of characters--they literally walk out of view--is never resolved, or even mentioned by any other characters, though Gren is initially part of this second cast. The novel's treatment of its female character manages to be both atypical (they are not the descendants of dime novel stereotypes and film noir femme fatales that inhabit so much SF) and wildly misogynistic at the same time. Much of the energy and momentum the first half of the novel gains from its unique setting is squandered by too much time spent simply following the characters from one setting to the next in the second half (each less unique and interesting than the one before it). The ending reneges on many of the promises set up earlier in the novel in favour of a fairly conventional closing that seems to negate the character development Aldiss takes care to repeatedly emphasize leading up to the final chapters.

All in all, I have to say that I was disappointed with The Long Afternoon of Earth. It can be suitably imaginative (the first half is a minor masterpiece), but too many balls are left in the air for too long and too many questions go either unanswered or are lamely explained away for it to sustain the energy of that first half. The Long Afternoon of Earth reminds me in many ways of William Tenn's masterful Of Men and Monsters, but it lacks the black humour of that novel to pick up the slack when the action wanes, and Aldiss' Gren is less interesting than Tenn's Eric. If pressed, I would probably recommend Tenn's book over Aldiss', though it is a joy to experience the care and craft Aldiss puts into imagining his jungle earth.


*This made for an uncomfortably tense experience this afternoon as I ran along a trail in a nearby park. After several hours with Aldiss' forest, I never expected to make it back to my apartment alive.

REVIEW: JAMES BLISH, A CASE OF CONSCIENCE

I just finished James Blish's A Case of Conscience (1958), which I picked up in a used bookstore today based on its reputation as a classic piece of SF. After reading it, I can definitely see why the novel has achieved its status: it's a well-written piece of SF that's more concerned with moral and philosophical problems--the case of conscience of its title--than with gadgets and technology (though those get their play as well). The second half of the novel, set on an Earth that exists almost entirely underground in “shelters,” is reminiscent of Asimov's The Caves of Steel (though more pessimistic) and the overall tone and feel (along with the personality of the main character, Father Ruiz-Sanchez, SJ) recalls (or, more accurately in terms of chronology, points to) Silverberg's novels of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly Tower of Glass and The Masks of Time.

While Ruiz-Sanchez and the other major characters--the scientists Liu Meid and Michelis and the alien Egtverchi--are not quite as memorable as Lije Bailey and R. Daneel Olivaw, they are fairly compelling. If at times Blish uses them more as mouthpieces for philosophical and ethical positions than as actual human beings, it is justified given the fascinating nature of what they discuss: the nature of matter, the question of evil, and the existence of God and the Devil. Ruiz-Sanchez in particular is a masterful portrait of grief and doubt, a man confronted by a startling revelation that both undermines and confirms his deepest belief.

There are some flaws with the novel--certain plot threads are not satisfactorily resolved, and several major developments are simply a little too convenient (there is no adequate explanation for the destruction of the Message Tree, for example, other than to quell obvious objections to the novel's resolution: “Why didn't they just call them?”)--but they generally do not detract from the experience of reading the novel. Indeed, given that the novel was first published over fifty years ago, it has aged surprisingly well. Certainly it is less cringe-worthy than some of Heinlein's efforts from the same period. It is a great example of SF that is more sociological than technological, and really pushes the limits of what the genre can do without resorting to the (occasionally gimmicky) shock tactics of some of the New Wave SF writers of the 1960s and 1970s.

One interesting point: I was surprised to find a preface from the author defending himself against criticism for suggesting that in the almost century difference between the publication of the novel and its setting (2050) there would be certain changes in Catholic doctrine. Just last week I would have dismissed such a preface as unnecessary and distracting, but after hearing the theology students in the German class I am taking go at it over (what seem to me at any rate) mundane and rather obvious problems (such as whether or not it is acceptable to use gluten-free communion wafers), I can see why Blish felt the need to make clear his reasoning behind the proposed doctrinal changes.

Anyway, I recommend A Case of Conscience to any SF fan (and to all readers, really). Any SF novel that can make its central plot concern the consequences of an heretical opinion (Manichӕanism) by a Jesuit priest regarding whether or not to open a planet for settlement by humans is worth a look. The political and social commentary the novel makes and its treatment of the problem of evil are also fascinating (indeed, I would like to say more about this when I've had time to digest the novel). This novel proved to be well worth the one dollar it cost me (ah, cheap old SF paperbacks. Is there anything better?).

CLOSE READING: HOW/WHEN DID YOU LEARN TO DO IT?

I will preface this by saying that I've never done any research on this topic, so I might be repeating the most mundane conclusions in the world. They're new to me, though, so I thought I'd share.

After a conversation with a colleague about close reading and how to teach it to first-year university students, I tried to remember how I learned to close read. At this point, the practice is so ingrained in me that it is largely unconscious. Obviously I picked it up somewhere, but I couldn't nail it down to a particular assignment, a particular class, or even a particular level of school (I can remember, however, discovering New Historicism--or my very basic imitation of it--as a result of a high school essay. I didn't know it was called that then, nor was I encouraged to engage in its practices, but that's a story for another day). I'm fairly certain I learned the term "close reading" in university, but I could already perform a basic close reading when I entered university.

I remembered two books this evening that seem to me to offer a starting point (or at least a pretty significant nudge along the path) for my life as a practitioner of close reading. I can't remember the title of either book, but I do know that they were both mystery novels. One was a kind of traditional whodunit and the other was a graphic novel (I recall my mother hated it for that fact alone) and involved a "haunted" house (the resolution of the mystery proved it to be a perfectly normal house with the hauntings contrived by a conman to deprive a family of its millions; the gothic's anxieties about property and its rightful transmission surface again!). Both explicitly modeled the practice of close reading a text in order to uncover information that would otherwise be hidden, with the graphic novel going so far as to have an "answer key" in the back that contained examples of the kind of information hidden in its words and pictures the alert reader would spot and use to solve the mystery before the book presented the solution. The more traditional novel relied on wordplay to disguise clues to the murderer's identity in otherwise innocuous-seeming sentences (a character helpfully explained all the wordplay in the denouement). For whatever reason, I found this strategy infinitely less irritating than Dan Brown's use of basically this same device in The Da Vinci Code.

Anyway, those mystery stories seemed particularly suited to demonstrating the practice of close reading to a novice reader. Obviously what they were doing was simplistic and didn't necessarily offer a way to immediately translate the skills they flaunted to other texts, but they made me aware that techniques like the ones on display existed. Without that kind of exposure I don't know that I could have taken to literary analysis. I wonder: is there something inherent to mystery stories that relates to close reading that makes them so effective at demonstrating this skill? I guess that would explain the interest (obsession might be a better word) that literary theorists have with Poe--his mystery stories somehow model practices that they want to encourage readers to make part of their repertoires, so they highlight what Poe is doing and how's he doing it.

Of course, the ways these skills were being modeled for me were not without their ideological, social, and political purposes, I'm sure (just like early teen slasher films usually served--covertly--as a warning about premarital sex). That, once again, is a topic for another day, though. For now, I'm going to try and remember the name of that graphic novel. I really liked it, and I never did manage to figure everything out without the "answer key." Could I do it now?