dagzine >>> dagsign >>> dagzine

It's been a long absence from writing, reading, researching--thinking about words and lines.
I'm very happy to have rolled back into health to such an extent that I can return to what makes me truly happy.

You can read my work on pedagogy, teaching, Korea, politics at dagSeoul.
Let me know what you think. Stay in touch.

This Man is Going to Pieces: On the emerging a-relational male subject and the salutary process of decomposition

Since so much of the story recounted in Swann's Way is Oedipal in nature, it's not hard to imagine a group of readers interacting with it in the way Rilke describes. However, the poet's life is representative not because he desires his mother but because he wants to get rid of her, and because by repudiating her he has lost the capacity to love. Women have a "diploma" in this affect, Rilke argues in a 1912 letter, but all that men have ever done is mouth meaningless phrases. Over the centuries, the male subject has become increasingly a-relational, and now a "man of the 'new grain'" has emerged, whose defining attribute is solitude. Since it is neither psychically nor ontologically possible for any of us to be alone, this man is "going to pieces." When this "salutary" process of decomposition is complete, he will finally start learning how to love, and at some point in the future we will witness something that we have not yet seen: the heterosexual couple.

Like Rilke, Nietzsche, Rodin, Cezanne, and Proust are all striking examples of this "man of the 'new grain,'" and the a-relational male subject also occupies an important place in Paul Valery's writings. Nietzsche, Rodin, and Proust share Rilke's preoccupation with corporeal disintegration, as well. Zarathustra tells his disciples that mankind is "in ruins and scattered about as if on a battle field or a butcher field." One of the most basic principles of Rodin's work is the "repetition and exploitation of fragments, constantly metamorphosed and renewed in context and meaning," and in the opening section of Swann's Way, a solitary male subject offers a detailed description of the numerous "pieces" into which his ego falls whenever he enters the indeterminate zone between sleeping and waking. Like Rilke, Proust seems to find this decomposition "salutary," because he treats it as the prelude to an almost unimaginably capacious relationality. In an important passage early in Swann's Way, Marcel describes the process of coming to consciousness as a vertiginous journey not just through his own memories but also through a much larger past.

from the introduction to Kaja Silverman's Flesh of My Flesh (Stanford UP, 2009)

Doris Lessing

Just posting a collection of links. Beginning reading Martha Quest. I forgot how fabulous Doris Lessing is. I'm actually quite excited about this reading. I think Praise is a bit ahead of me right now.

Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. Here is the interview conducted by John Mullan.

Here is her bio on the Nobel site.
Here is her bio on wikipedia.

A clip from an interview with Lessing translator, Krista Kaer.

I'm struck by Lessing's presence as an author. She really does belong to a liminal community of writers caught between the late 19thC and the late 20thC, early 21st. She willfully and gleefully, if I can say so, shrugs off the confines of polite society and intellectual clothing that wraps much of modern European prose. What appears at first traditional slowly becomes radical, diatactical rather than dialectical perhaps? I'm thinking of Hayden White's Tropics of Discourse. However, she is disciplined and intellectual, a true master of the craft of the novel unlike much of contemporary fiction, especially in the United States. The post 60s novel can be a rather anti-intellectual affair that poses as a radical representation of identity and consciousness. Writers are much more in tune to the market, even the writer-critics, teacher-writers, writer-artists, of which the last is the current vogue, are keen observers of the small press market and, in my opinion, much too interested in their noteriety and reception than they are in cultivating their craft and discourse community. In fact, there is no discernible writing community among fiction writers. There are many writers' groups, which like group therapy are about acceptance more than craft. I digress.

I just reached the point in the Nobel Prize interview where Mullan asks Lessing about Harold Bloom's critique that her prose was "an attack on the male sex." HA! Harold Bloom. What a fart!

Here is her reaction to being stalked by the British press after winning the Nobel Prize.

Lessing always expresses that her writing represents a kind of realism. For example, when answering criticism about how men are represented in her work, she responds that it's the "strictest realism." No apologies for her manner of observing everyday life. It is real. Very encouraging. It's not literature serving a social or political cause, in fact and for example Lessing says that being labeled a feminist author never did her any good. It's her prose and in that manner it is real. The personal is political. In other words, she is not carrying water for anyone. I like that. A lot.

"The novel is not where the passion is situated." Lessing criticizes the place of the novel. Well, she was correct. Is correct. The novel is currently the domain of the amateur and talented novelists are not promoted for their intellectualism. They are quite often shunned for it. Difficult books are a bad thing. And this is not only a problem in the more traditionally artistic circles, this extends to the genre market. I don't know what to make of this. Although it's safe to say that the market needs a resurgence of patronage. Authors need to get back in the habit of cultivating scenes that are picky and exclusive. We need to cultivate our literature. Some people do not write well. Look at the number of writing programs in the US. It's no surprise that much of the work being published is crap. MFA programs are as much about introducing writers to people who can get you published as they are about workshops. Unfortunately, they are less about developing a rigorous attention to the detail of working on theory and craft. In fact, I have yet to meet more than a few students from MFA writing programs that know anything about theory or care to learn. They are looking for opportunities to publish. What do we expect?

The novel should not be permitted to become the form for the amateur. We need patrons. It's incredibly difficult to work fulltime and write fulltime. That's the practical matter of fact. What's most lacking is a group of people to speak to about my work. I'm speaking form personal experience here. I take this rather seriously.

In the background, over Lessing's left shoulder, is a yellow box of Go Cat cat food. Wonderfully herself. Unprepared. Honest.

From Lessing's essay on journalism:
The fact is, with journalists as with every profession, only a minority are any good.. Most repeat what others say. This process can be observed in all kinds of context. An exciting bit of music is used to introduce a hundred programmes on television: or an opinion, a catchphrase, taken up, and used to death. (January 1990)

Here is a link to a fansite that is a good retrospective of her work, with many links.

Final Thoughts: I am the invisible man

Invisible Man reminds me of a Lucille Clifton poem: "she closed her eyes, afraid to look for her authenticity / but the light insists on itself in the world..."

Ellison creates this character who is kept in the dark, and who chooses to stay there.  He is strung along from one oppressor to the next as the try to dictate his identity for him, and he goes along with it--unknowingly, then knowingly.  Where does he finally find light? Ironically in the dark, when he falls through the manhole. He lights the last of his money on fire, and he realizes people have been using him to be who they want/need him to be. It's near the end of the book; he still doesn't know who he is.

It's the irony of identity. We need others to affirm who we are, or else we become invisible. IM needs people to acknowledge him, otherwise he is invisible.Yet affirmation can easily turn into definition.  As he is acknowledged, he becomes a clone for whatever institution is trying to use him. But I think light does insist on itself in the world; people don't stay in the dark forever, a la Parable of the Cave. I really believe that. It might take a long time, but it happens.

The journey he goes through to find out who he is and what it means to turn the eye inward is painstaking. People use him as the voice or the face of a movement, but organized movements sometimes forget the point of why they were trying to mobilize in the first place. Take for instance the Brotherhood. They started off with ideals of a more equal society, but by the end they had sucked the life out of the young people they used only for their symbolic value to the masses. This happens all the time today. Look at Miss California, who is now the bizarre spokesperson for the right wing's anti-gay campaign in the U.S. [WTF??]

I think of IM's plight to find who he is after experiencing great disillusion. He thinks he's a kid who's got a chance to do something big, but he finds himself confused, betrayed, hurt, misunderstood, unseen--that painful inner eye. Disillusionment may paint the perpetrator as evil, but it also brings light to your own foolishness for being duped. In lieu of facing the world, he goes into hiding. By the epilogue, he decides that he can no longer hide, hibernate, stew in his own revelations. 

I feel like this right now. I've been hibernating after being disillusioned by two big institutions that I really would have liked to believe were the answers to life: education and religion. I tried to do it their way, but their way wasn't me. And because of my personality, or my "showmanship" perhaps, I'm the one chosen to be paraded around. It's always been this way, i.e. put on a happy face in public, feel depressed about my identity in private. As IM says, "So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled."  My hibernation has been through my entire twenties. What do I do? Who am I, then? 

I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of all I find that I love. In order to get some of it down I have to love. I sell you no phony forgiveness, I'm a desperate man--but too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate. So I approach it through division. So I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love. 579-580

I don't rebel to a point where I give up those facets of my identity only because the institutions disappoint. But I'm a desperate woman--I fear that too much of my youth will be lost to hibernation.

Anyway, here are some cool quotes about the American Identity and conformity and all that. I just realized, that in the beginning of the book, Norton asks IM if he's read "Self-Reliance" and IM ashamedly replies, not yet. However, he is the very essence of self-reliance at the end- the realization of his own individuality, the ability to discern for himself, the anti-conformity rants in the epilogue. And he learns it all in a much harsher way than dear old Ralph., and I just realized it was "Emerson's son" who started him on his journey to utter disillusionment and self-reliance, non-conformity. Cool!!!

I had no longer to run for or from the Jacks and the Emersons and the Bledsoes and the Nortons, but only from their confusion, impatience, and refusal to recognize the beautiful absurdity of their American identity and mine. 559

Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway?--diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you'll have no tyrant states... America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it remain so. 577

So long IM! I've learned much from you. 

Too Muchee!

There is so much I want to say. I just passed page 300 and I don't know where to begin.

First, Ellison's character development is astounding. We have met about twenty characters or something and each person is as developed as he or she should be, according to how much time, speech and description they are given. Many aren't given more than a few pages, and they are quite vivid, deep. Take for instance, Trueblood, the farmer who impregnated both his wife and his daughter. His story, which was heard in its entirety by one of the rich, white trustees for a black university, gave us a glimpse and all there is to know about this one man and his situation. He was living in wretched poverty, a truly desolate situation. He dreams one night that he is sleeping with a white woman and with it comes all the conflicting emotions and fear--only to wake up atop of his daughter. Now, the more wonderful (and I mean "wonder"ful in its truer sense) thing he does is allow people who are supposedly uneducated and inarticulate, to speak in the most articulate, lyrical, metaphorical manner using southern black vernacular, while inserting double entendres to delineate truths that are not acknowledged by any of the characters because they were meant for me, the reader. EX: Trueblood (even his name for Pete's sake!) is explaining the dream in which he came to have sex with a white woman: Everything in the room was white and I'm standin' there knowin' I got no business in there, but there anyhow... I tries to git out, but I don't find the door; and all around me I can smell woman...Then I looks over in a corner and sees one of them tall grandfather clocks and I hears it strinkin' and the glass door is openin' and a white lady is steppin' out of it....she looks straight at me. I don't know what to do. I wants to run, but the only door I see is the one in the clock she's standin' in... [and the clock is] gittin faster and faster all the time. I tries to say somethin', but I can't. It leaves tons of room for interpretation, doesn't it? He's trapped in a white world. He doesn't know how to get out. The only exit is "time," but "time" is moving faster and faster, out of his control, not allowing him to leave. The woman stares right at him. She's alluring him to do what white society has labeled to be abominable. It's fucking brilliant.

Ellison juxtaposes Trueblood with another character, a black physician who served in WWII and learned his trade in France. He comes home only to realize that the color of his skin will not allow him to be a learned man who contributes to society and he speaks with standard grammar and high vocabulary, as the narrator points out, like a white man. In fact, he speaks directly to the white trustee without apology and in fact is the one with the knowledge to help when the white dude passes out. I leave out the setting for the sake of time and space, which is a shame because the Golden Day scene was unreal. But with this man, the concept of invisibility is slowly starting to settle in for the reader, although not as clearly for the narrator: But for God's sake, learn to look beneath the surface... And remember you don't have to be a complete fool in order to succeed. Play the game, but don't believe in it...You're hidden right out in the open--that is, you would be if you only realized it. They wouldn't see you because they don't expect you to know anything, since they believe they've taken care of that... Everyone is telling him who he is, how to be, what he can accomplish, in this case as an invisible man. 

What I find to be most awe-some is Ellison's ability to write in such a way to provoke a kind of tension between the reader and the narrator. The narrator is innocent and naive but becoming disillusioned. Trying to figure out what to do with his life AND WHO HE IS when there aren't many options (very similar to the Bigger Thomas conflict). The reader, on the other hand, feels frustrated with how slow to learn the character is because Ellison writes in a way that makes us think we know more than the protagonist (there is a term for that), but truthfully, we don't know what is happening to him, or us. We DON'T understand how much we are swept along with our own circumstances and how people tend to define us. (I just watched Fahrenheit 9/11. Damn the last administration to pieces!!) 

It's amazing so far. Much has happened, mostly concerning disillusionment. Being naive and thinking being black doesn't matter if he tries hard enough (the American dream), he moves to New York and goes through a hurricane of awakenings. I'm at the part now where he's meeting all the white folks who are fighting for "all people" strategically. And he has no power except for what they allow him to have- which is none at all. The illusion of power when really you're just a cog.

---

I took a break from this post and now I'm at page 400 and I'm amazed STILL. He brings back powerful images from past pages to create parallels-- like the religious hypocrisy he experiences while in the South. The reverend from Chicago who gives a sermon at the university and yanks, rips out everyone's heartstrings with the ups and downs of his thunderous voice--convincing everyone that they are part of a great African American- no, people's movement-- turns out to be blind. He has no idea what black or white looks like. The reverend moves people with his voice and his rhetoric, but really says nothing much at all, and literally cannot see anything at all... 

AND LOOK! That's what invisible man is doing now for the Brotherhood! He even uses the same preaching style that he learned from the South to make big speeches, trying to define identity and passion for other people so they might join the movement or feel inspired, while still having no idea who he is and allowing others (or are they forcing it on him) to define who he is! He keeps referring to "putting on new clothes" and becoming someone new- even if he didn't feel it, that he would become "it"... If you act the part, you genuinely start to believe it at some point, not knowing it is hypocrisy.  He is metaphorically blind. 

It's so sad because right before he met the Brotherhood, he was just saying "What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?" (266) At this point, he thinks he is doing what he wants to do, but Ellison is dropping mad hints that this is not the case at all. Another point for "them," still zero for invisible man. 

---

In response to Gary, who wrote so poignantly about his struggle with whiteness, I am astounded to find a white guy who feels this way. Most "majority" people feel bad for past/present injustice, but they don't take it personally. Maybe he's on to something when he says that the struggle found him and not the other way around. 

His post also made me think of all the many which ways I could relate to this book. First as a minority who has the rest of society telling you who they think you are. I was talking about this with Mary and Mish last night- like, if you are AfAm who can't dance, people think there is something wrong with you. I remember in college, my friend Deshonda said, "I am NEVER late for class. If I'm late, I don't go. Or else I'm that black girl who walked in late. Colored People Time. Everyone notices me. If a white girl walked in late, no one would remember which one." You are defined by what "they" say you are and whether you fit that standard or you buck against it. Which reminds me of a great line in the book: "What a group of people we were, I thought. Why you could cause us great humiliation simply by confronting us with something we liked. Not all of us, but so many." I like fried rice. I bow. I like conserving my money and being cheap sometimes. Suddenly those things become stereotypical and now I have to decide. Will I be loud and proud? Or will I try to break stereotypes? But I like fried rice. 

As an Asian American, your identity to the majority is defined by the media- because American history doesn't ever recount Asian immigrant experiences except for a few things: The Chinese built the railroads, the Japanese were placed in internment camps, the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Most people today wouldn't look at me and assume that I have much to do with those things, except white-American folks over the age of sixty who never fail to tell me about the Korean War. Also, we live in a black v. white, now black v. white v. latino culture, and the Asian minority (which has so many unique ethnic groups within it) become the minority of the minorities (although the Native Americans top us in diminutiveness for sure) and that means there are not even enough stereotypes to buck against. I have been called Margaret Cho AND Lucy Liu AND the girl from Gilmore Girls. How can I look like all three? White frat boys from U of Illinois never gave me the time of day in college (oh, if I had the time to share my and my friends' stories), but after we graduated and moved back to Chicago, I got hit on by them at bars: Oh, you went to U of I the same time I did! How come I never saw you? What are you? Oh, Korean. What would your parents say if you brought home a white boy? My sister married a black guy and my parents are not about it. You know, the older generation is so ignorant sometimes. How big of him! What does he want me to say to that--oh my, you're quite open-minded. What, now that you're in the real world, you walk up to a table of Asian girls, buy all of them a round of drinks and think you can get some exotic ass?  

There's not much I can be to the general public. Plus, Betty Brown wants us to change our names. Talk about identity theft.

May I say, on top of this, I'm a professing, Bible-reading Christian. As an Asian American Christian, I have no clue what the white evangelical folks are up to- I mean, I do to some degree of course. But it seems like a different world, a world where white folks live and do crazy shit like curse homosexuals and then molest little boys or ask for money on PTL and then go to jail and write a book about how Jesus didn't really like money at all. Korean churches had other shit. The adults were super-conservative and the kids were super-heretical. In Chicago, there is a joke that goes "Let's make like a Korean church and split" because so many churches were dividing because of politics. It made me hate anything that was conservative and anything that was political. FUCK THAT SHIT! 

So add that. Now I carry all the stigma of being a Christian in a white, right wing Conservative Evangelical movement with George W. and all his Bible study friends ALONG with being a geisha-seductress, math whiz who plays the violin and eats fried rice. If you can imagine that there could be still another very large dimension to my identity crisis, there is the Korean immigrant culture that is instilled in me by my parents and family friends and how I grew up.  I can't even go into what Korean culture tries to dictate when talking about identity. It would make my little brain blow up trying to communicate that in English to mostly non-Korean readers. 

I'm not trying to say, oh boo hoo poor me who grew up in such an oppressive culture. But reading this book, it makes me realize just how powerfully a majority culture can create and manipulate the norm, and how many, including members of the majority, do not fit into it. Invisible Man does a good job of showing us that we all grow up a certain way and are told to have certain beliefs and are told to be certain people. 

But like Gary, something should not sit right in all of us. 

Always keep them running

Invisible Man has always been a great read for two reasons.  It reminds me of 1995 and in 1995 I made the decision to change my life (that's another story) and attempt to become a teacher and writer; in addition, I came to realize I am a race traitor.  I'm likely to explain more of this in detail while writing about Ellison's novel.  Maybe not.  It's hard to write about.

It's safe to say that I see myself in this novel and what I see I don't like.  Not that I don't like myself.  I don't like what I am encouraged to inherit on behalf of all the other folks who look like me.  Moreover, I don't like feeling guilty of being white.  For some white men, this means bitching everyday about everyone who is not white always bitching about white folks.  I am not one to whine about being called white, though.  And really that is not getting at the heart of the matter at all.  It just scractches the surface.  Yet this introduction to my complex relationship with my own whiteness begins a story I have been attempting to tell since '95 about seeing myself as helplessly tied to something I have been vehemently rejecting since I was a child.

It wasn't that I thought it was wrong to call black kids in my East Tulsa neighborhood niggers, or brown people spics, or the Vietnamese refugee families, gooks.  I  did think it was wrong; I was taught it was wrong.  This is the simple way to tell the story of race:  talking about name-calling and finger-pointing.  More significantly, what I suffered was a pain in my gut and head, a real pain that often left me lying in bed writhing in real physical pain.  What pleasure is there in treating others in such a way?  Maybe I was naive and sensitive.  But I was affected when I was a kid.  Too smart for my own community, too creative and free-thinking for school, and too emotional for my own good.  In short, while genius, a total nutcase.  (It helps to have a good sense of humor.  You're supposed to smiling.)

I'm sure to write about this a little more.  But the difference I felt was always knowably not the difference the black kids endured.  For many folks in power, knowing about injustice absolves a person from guilt.  And that absolution then serves as a pass to participate in the unjust intstitutions anyway.  What I was upset about was that I was always encouraged to say yes to something others were never going to be allowed to access.  And that bargain has always made me sick to my stomach.

I never picked the fight against white.  It chose me.  Maybe it's genetic:  or maybe to support the white power structure is unnatural--a perspective I choose to support on my more optimistic days--and unnatural because it is at the core of some of the more grotesque social and cultural realities we confront everyday without thinking about them:  realities like "Capital is self-valorizing" and "Might makes Right."

I am not perfect.  It's hard to reject the allure of self-righteousness and Right.  I find no comfort in our Original Sin.  I do find that its mark--Whiteness--and its practice--Masculinity--and its economy--Capitalism--are quite easy targets actually.  But though the facility with which we can point to the visible errors in these institutions may suit a comedian's need for a quick, efficient and intelligent or timely joke, I think we need a dedicated fight to destroy each of these institutions and revise our work and common goals.

I am not patting myself on the back or trying to be eloquent.  And I am not saying anything new.  It's hardly shocking.  You may have every right to say, "Hey, here's another white guy who has discovered injustice!  Go figure."  I understand.  But I do believe that I have been tasked with overcoming the intellectual cynicism and smirk of educational professionalism and I ought to do something about it.  It's a vow.  I suppose this is why I am an Americanist.  This drive is written over and over again throughout our short history.  Yet, we go nowhere with the knowledge that we have sinned against humanity in a most severe way.  We are racists, sexist pigs; we hate the poor, the working class; we heap unearned ambition and morality on the wealthy.  It's almost as if because we know these things we feel we have done enough.  By the way, this is a problem I feel we have inherited from Europe and what we call Continental Philosophy is rife with smart bigots who we insist we cannot overcome because their innovative thoughts are so rich and complex:  for an example read Kant.

And this is what Ellison's Invisible Man is about.  And this is why I love it.  It reminds me that I should do something.  It's only that, at times, I wonder if a guy who looks like me can do anything other than betray his race?  (And you do realize that race is an illusion.  What we are talkign about is a social construction.  The biology is different thing altogether.  But the biology is about our similar mothers.  The sociology is about the sexist pig fathers and their attempt to find, by any means necessary, hoard all the material exploits our planet has to offer.)

But this should serve as a quick introduction to my reason for picking the novel to read.  I do have a simple reason, too:  Praise has not read it.  I loved the idea of reading it with her for her first time.

Ellison has two kinds of reader:  people who love his novel and cherish it, and folks who will admit the book is great but are upset at the subject matter.  It isn't that people don't know the truth (about white power in America,) it's just that some people don't want to do anything about.  It's hard work betraying the power structure:  it has benefits for everyone.

I had fits about one thing that nearly drove me crazy--and it did leave me in a deep depression from which I emerged 6 months after undergrad graduation, in 1997, with a bottle of pills in stomach, from which all the rest of my life has sprung.  The One Thing:  I am white and though I want to transform the power structure, I have had to learn to let go.  To betray my racist, unearned inheritance...well, it's not easy.  Ellison's novel is refreshing.  It is comic.  It is shocking.  It is revelatory.

The unnamed narrator of Invisible Man is the greatest Modern male protagonist in American literature.  There are a handful of these great, male protagonists:  Isaac McCaslin, Quentin Compson, Bigger Thomas.  Look I love Melville.  A lot.  Moby Dick is a great novel.  But some things happened to the American novel in the early twentieth century:  color, expressionism, surrealism, war, genocide, and psychoanalysis.  Maybe I should use the troubled term High Modern.  I really am superfocused on 1910-1960 when it comes to film, literature, theory, and art overall.

More to come.

Invisible Man

Our next read is Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Gary has read this already, but I haven't. It's always been on my list. I read Native Son last year and it rocked my world. I remember planning one Friday of silent reading with the juniors (I never do silent reading) because I couldn't stop thinking about Bigger Thomas and I wanted to silently read. I'm super-excited about Invisible Man.

Well, I read the author's note, the prologue, which felt sort of like Breakfast of Champions--can I trust the narrator?-- and chapter one. It seems like I've already met three main characters, and in a strange way, aren't they images of each other?

*The author, burdened by the task of creation, of deliberate manipulation of a character to reflect something bigger (the "something" that gets bigger almost in concentric circles, ripples of humanity, even as he ponders it)
*The "invisible" character of old age from the prologue, the product of what the author was able to find: the freedom to laugh the laugh of the blues- then write it down
*The "visible" character of youth from chapter one, the story begins...

All parts of the much larger, scarier, more lamentable picture. OH THE VULNERABILITY OF MAN!! OH THE DEPRAVITY!

Uh, who's being dramatic?

It's just that I am blown away so far. The scene with the whiskey&cigar higher-ups (which I can still picture in NYC--the old white boys club) becoming bellicose with drink; the blonde who sold her soul--naked body but wearing a mask of makeup--and the black boy-boxers trying to hide their erections and their guilt for looking at a white woman; the panicked and savage battle royal--blindfolded--who's fighting who, physically and metaphysically?; the inner-struggle/inner-monologue of our dear protagonist who only wants to prove that he is not savage by delivering a speech about humility--

That's all I've read so far. It's too much to bear for a morning commute to the office!

More to come.

Surface Noise: Or, How He Learned to Love the Structure More than the Tale Itself

I dunno what it is about books like Essays in Love and Me.  We don't get along too well.  The writing is smart, the prose is snappy, the composition is sound, the representations ring true.  It's even genuinely witty at times.  Yet, I hate it.  And I tried hard to like this book because of a growing optimism I have experienced since meeting my fellow reader who so recently and successfully pushed me not only to finish the book but to write about it here on DagSign (result of her wonderful post.)

Remember, later on, I have said here, early on:  Alain de Botton is a talented writer.  I just happen to think this novel is a poor exercise in Form and Content.  I admit that I disagree with how he uses Plato and Nietzsche, too, among others.  But that is beside the point.  I should be able disagree with an author's ideas and still appreciate his or her work.  Well...not when there is no other content to speak of.  Maybe not then.

Those of you who know me know my hate-on is turned-on regularly by certain kinds of authors, some of whom (but not many) write wonderful verse and prose.  I experienced a seemingly never-ending series of gag-inducing readings over my years in Denver cafes and graduate school.  But that's OK: I want everybody to write and to read and to share.  I'll give anyone a chance.  I'll always find a line, a phrase, even a word to like.  It's writing afterall.  I love it.  And I love language's democratic impulse to be freely shared.  However, the cynical intellectual elitist attitude, or pose, shared by many writers has always bummed me out.  What is it they have that they don't think I have?  What do they think they know that they believe needs so badly to be shared?  I ask this, of course, recognizing that I am often confused as one of these snobs because I freely consort with them.  I even have the nerve to call myself a writer.  Can you believe it?  (Notice how I continue to believe I am not one of them.  That's proof of my optimism, he's says as he leaves the room.) 

I have chosen to live the lifestyle.  But I have reaped my share of alienation(s) by vocally distancing myself from my colleagues with snorts of disbeliefs and even very direct "I cannot believe you think what you have to offer is any better than what anybody else has to offer" statements of disbelief.  I was not nice to many of my fellow grad students who I felt acted like children and behaved as if they deserved their leisurely lives.  They often admitted that they couldn't be bothered with things like teaching, research, and study.  (Well, not Duncan; but I have a perpetual boy-crush on him.)

I can paint you a pretty good portrait of what many 26 year-old women believe a poet should dress like--ugly scarves and turtlenecks--and speak like--husky voiced renderings of each line with an ear for her startlingly cool and quirky metaphors.  (Even she can't believe how good she is.) Or, a portrait of a young man writing what he thinks is genius prose.  This is the guy who chooses to be alone, who is smarter than you and me, and who laughs at the notion that he should represent IT in any other way.  Usually, this cynical prick and that poetess find each other after her reading, drink a bottle of wine over department gossip and sleep together sometime around three in the morning when she is drunk enough to lose prudish inhibitions about being naked around anybody other than her muse and he has shut-up long enough to appear attractive.  (OK it's bile this, but it's good to get these excesses out.)

I am a perpetual critic.  I am my own worst critic:  terrified to let go of everything I write.  I work sentences for years.  I think more out of fear of letting them go--does that even make sense--than for fear of being rejected.  I will find something to hate on.  That's my point.  That's me.  But I am tender, too.  I love to pet and be pet.  I am a closet Romantic.  I actually am a big softy.  And so to get back on track with this post.  To leave hyperbole alone:  Prelude to the post about why I almost finished Alain de Botton's Essays in Love but stopped short and finally gave up this morning is over.

All I ask of an author is to leave the gimmick alone.  In this case, I mean:  we should write responsibly or with Care about the process of writing itself.  Alain de Botton's book is a novel about being in love with the idea of love and all that is generative, regenerative, and degenerative in it.  And he chooses a discourse about social and political philosophy as well as Love to set his story.  He should have something to show me he knows how his narrative and characters work within the work he quotes.  But he doesn't do the work required.  

He says what he thinks.  Let me be clear:  the gimmick is that the narrator is the man in love.  So, shit.  He's lost in love.  He wraps up everything in clever remarks that satisfy his own POV and, in the end, his own ability to make fun of himself.  (See the novel's last two paragraphs.)  I believe that The Gimmick in fiction is a device that aids in the genre's continued path to permanent anti-intellectualism.  It also aids in displaying a quirk common in many contemporary novels: authorial laziness dressed up as innovation in form.  (Man I sound like a conservative.  But I am not.  Just a let-down lover of innovation.  After all, Novels should be novel.)

Much of mainstream Western Fiction is anti-intellectual.  I have my ideas about this, and most of my ideas focus on the market and our education industry.  But the authors don't help.  I think it's unfair to blame the readers.  Authors are to blame, for example, when they boil down complex philosophical forms and content into trite dialogues that merely summarize prior significant work.  De Botton's book, for me, is fiction's equivalent of Robert Fulghum's All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.  Take an idea that uniquely dwells in its topic's complexity, then flatten it into something that can be stated as if it were common sense all along, then sell it as problem solved.  Apparently solved, as in the narrator's case in this book because, don't you know, he will simply fall in love all over again.  Or, don't even bother to tell the story, to illustrate the details, rather opting for hastily sketched caricatures in order to fit the structure of the artist's vision: package the caricature as the History of the Form Itself, content included.

I suppose I can be blamed for what my fellow Koreans call Eye-Shopping.  I mean the book looked good with all it promised.  What did I expect?  My standards were low:  a story, some inside theory jokes, literary references galore, and some sex.  Isn't that what a book called Essays in Love should offer?  What I got was a book that outlined an argument about Love by referring to a lot of things the author has read in lieu of actual scenes that illustrated his argument.  In other words, the book IN Love is a book without it and sold as told by a guy who may have been in love or may not have but so it goes.  

If I could eat a pint of ice cream and not feel full of ice cream, that is how I feel after reading de Botton's novel.

I feel empty of ice cream.

[By the way, this is a problem:  confusing Philosophy with Common Sense.  Common Sense is the explicit rejection of paradox.  Paradox is what Philosophy dwells in.  Common Sense is explicitly anti-Philosophical.  And Common Sense is killing much more than philosophy these days.  It's killing intellectualism in literature.  Hey Poets!  It's just not prose, you know.  You guys have Billy Collins to cope with.  Have you been reading what he's saying about Poetry!  That guy will haunt poetry for decades after he is gone because there are hundreds if not thousands of high school teachers who will use him as a weapon against all that is intellectual in verse.  Sorry Smart High School Teachers like the one I love.  But you know it's true.]

I guess it comes down to two things for me:  1) Alain de Botton's first novel is a practice in fidelity to structure (not form) over content and 2) I just don't care about the characters.  Let's ignore 2.  I mean, maybe I just don't like folks like the narrator and Chloe.  I'll focus on 1.

I will be quick.

First, the good:  I like the structure of the novel.  Funny, huh, after I trash the book itself and question de Botton's fidelity to Social and Political Philosophy as well as to The Novel, I have the nerve to say I like the way he structured the book.  Well, I do.  Each Chapter examines love in what appears to be an ever-evolving and increasingly mature vantage point on Love vis-a-vis a walk/talk through an ever-increasingly complex vantage point on human relationships, or How We See Ourselves In-the-World.  I thought to myself looking at it:  WOW, this is the shit.

He begins with Romantic Fatalism and moves out from there to trip through: Idealization, Seduction, Authenticity, Mind & Body, Marxism, False Consciousness, Liberalism, Beauty, Everyday Language, Something Called "What do you see in her?", Skepticism and Faith, et al.  It looks fun.  Looks.

In Authenticity, de Botton writes 

6. I had to find out more about Chloe, for how could I abandon my true self unless I knew what false self to adopt.  But the patience and intelligence required to fathom someone else went far beyond the capacities of my anxious, infatuated mind.  I behaved like a reductive social psychologist, eager to press my companion into simple categories, unwilling to apply the care of a novelist to capturing the subtleties of human nature.

I marked this early paragraph with a question mark.  It's clear to me now that it holds the key to my distaste for the novel.  As I continued to read, I continued to ask myself what I was supposed to think about the narrator and his relationship to "the author."  I firmly believe that Alain de Botton is not the narrator nor do I appreciate readers who knee-jerk respond to first-person narratives by associating the narrator's beliefs and personalities and actions to the author's beliefs and so on.

But this paragraph confuses me.  Here lies an authorial excuse for not describing Chloe, a woman as a reader I wished I knew more about.  The narrator-in-love is telling me why he fails at getting to know her better:  he is infatuated with her.  Ok.  I waited, though.  And de Botton never got around to telling me about Chloe.  And he couldn't.  The structure of the book proscribes Chloe's development as a character I can care about enough to understand why the narrator might move beyond infatuation to possess her to love to be with her. (It doesn't matter anyway because SPOILER, their relationship doesn't work out.)

If what de Botton calls "the care of a novelist" is, in fact, "capturing the subtleties of human nature," then de Botton fails.  His novel fails even to catch the subtleties of the philosophers he quotes.  Even if this can be seen as a nod to the readers that "even I, the author, am failing too," then I am not satisfied because the line then becomes an excuse (a plea for an excuse) not to do the work it takes to present content that attempts to cope with human nature. 

David Foster Wallace complained about the abundance of irony in contemporary fiction.  Well, I have whined about Wallace, but maybe this novel is an example of what he was railing against.  I think de Botton is terrribly ironic.  And I mean terribly as in poorly or as in sinfully.  Is it too much to say that I find his book too cheeky even?

In Skepticism and Faith, de Botton cites Friedrich Nietzsche from Beyond Good and Evil.  Nietzsche was looking for grand attempters.  Whether or not a judgement or an attempt in life was false or true, who is willing to make the judgment regardless?  Nietzsche writes "the falseness of a judgement is not necessarily an objection to it."  The value of an undertaking is examined then.  What does it mean to attempt to love somebody if we cannot know whether or not our assessment of our lover or the circumstances in which we fell in love are/were true or not?  I think this is what de Botton is getting at with his novel.  Well, this is all fine and good to me and, quite frankly, it intellectually pleases me.  BUT where is my friggin story author man?

Anyway, on to the next novel.  I could go on but I am teaching 800 high school kids and 40 of them are waiting for me.  I want to write about a novel that will permit me to talk about the mechanics of fiction in a way that gets into the material not simply the structure.  I really am annoyed by Essays in Love.  Annoyed because I like the author and feel let down.  sniff sniff.

(i'll proofread this later.  pardon any errors.)

Moving Right Along

The real date of post: 3/31/09

I read the book during my morning commutes, and there are times where I dogeared the page because it so uncannily describes me or Gary (via Praise goggles) or me'n'Gary. Or more simply, in the words of Homer Simpson: "It's funny because it's true."

For instance, on page 5, he says, "...we had been destined for one another. We learnt that both of us had been born at around midnight in the same month of an even-numbered year. Both of us had played clarinet and had parts in school productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Both of us had two large freckles on the toe of the left foot and a cavity in the same rear molar. Both of us had a habit of sneezing in bright sunlight and of drawing ketchup out of its bottle with a knife." This struck me as hilarious because every romantic I know does this "romantic fatalism" game, where they start seeing all the coincidences in their relationship. Gary and I are too practical to do that seriously, but sometimes we can't help it either: We were both in Chicago at the same time before coming to Asia. Our Korea contract dates are one day apart: 8/24 and 8/25. Our birthdays are two days apart, 7/25 and 7/27, exactly ten years apart. AD NAUSEUM.

However, we do agree that we are ready to be done with this book'n'blog--in fact, I think Gary only read half of it and skimmed the rest; his response is conspicuously ambiguous when I ask him if he's finished it. It wasn't engaging enough; in a good novel, we expect movement, at least to the point where we'd want to read it even when it's lights-out (I just wanna finish this chapter!).

In all fairness, de Botton writes "essays" with all his points numbered (1. Love blah blah 2. Love blahbity blah 3. Love lalalala), which Gary, the walking Wikipedia, says is reminiscent of some philosopher of course I forget whom already. But then, I'm entertained by people like David Sedaris, who also does the whole collection of essays thing. (Don't be a snob. He's on NPR for a reason. Don't be a snob about that either.) It's because David Sedaris doesn't write about only one imaginary lover and all her (well, his) idiosyncracies and their less-than-exciting adventures, adding his ruminations about love, and then it's page 126 and nothing has happened yet. Plus, Sedaris is simply funnier. Jesus Shaves? Youth in Asia? Come on. Hilares.

The reason that I don't expect "movement" in Sedaris's books is that each essay is what it is. As witty as de Botton can be at times, he weaves a love story into the seams of philosophical meandering; a person like me, then, wants to skip through the chapters to see what happens with the narrator and his girlfriend, only to be disappointed at the lack of buildup in their characters by the time the climax of their story hits. [WARNING: SPOILER ALERT] For example, on page 156, the male character finally makes some pointed, confrontational comments:
"It's like there's a wall between us and you're refusing to acknowledge it's there."
"I don't see a wall."
"That's what I mean. You're refusing to admit there was ever anything other than this."
"Than what?"
OOOH. Now we're cookin'. I can feel the tension. I can see her trying to pretend she can prolong the inevitable break-up.

Then, for the next four pages, points 7-9, he philosophizes. I DO think his points are insightful. I see what he's saying about "romantic terrorism," that once someone starts losing the power of holding the other's interest, they start to wreak havoc in ways that "betray all the signs of childish rage, a rage at one's own impotence in the face of a more powerful adversary." I have been a romantic terrorist (ask my high school boyfriend, whom I was "with" for a year after we broke up) and I have dated romantic terrorists (guys have given me crazy speeches about MY fear of commitment or MY unrealistic standards when I tell them I don't want to date them anymore). However, by page 156 as opposed to page 5, I don't feel a connection with the two characters, I am tired of his poignant rants, and I just want to know if they make it or not.

I remember my friend Thad watching "Friends"- an episode from the Ross and Rachel saga - and he was engrossed. Beguiled. His girlfriend (my cousin) and I were watching him and smirking- Thad had always been the first to say he hated "Friends" but oh-ho! Titillated with the old R and R story. When he caught us, he said, "What. Everyone loves a love story."

It's true. Everyone loves a love story. But this book of essays doesn't have much of a love story, so that the contemplative examination of love seems rather frivolous and insubstantial. It was about two people who were attracted to each other's quirks (gap between front teeth, insatiable chocolate cravings, f-ugly luggage, love for museums) and were of the same race, SES, and age range so "falling in love" seemed easy. It makes me wonder what people's emotions are really based on. What is "falling in love" really, especially if they break up and feel like they never really knew each other anyway, or the memory of the relationship grows less important with the passing of time: "Like a century that is reduced to and symbolized by a certain pope or monarch or battle, my love affair refined itself to a few iconic moments..." (199). I mean, FOR GOD'S SAKE! All that emotion spent on someone or something that was really quite shallow, transient even! The narrator goes on for chapters after the breakup about all his complexes-- but it almost seems trifling that such a shallow relationship could provoke such intoxication with sorrow.

Or maybe that IS the point.

One last thing I liked. The narrator thinks of his fading emotions and says he feels guilty: "an infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear" (198), which I thought was so painfully true at least for a weirdo like me.

The book wasn't bad. It was a quick and easy read, perfect for morning and evening commutes. It was slightly embarrassing to hold a book that declares "ESSAYS IN LOVE" but whatever. I'm in Korea, the land of lovey dovey soap operas--Why can't they be together, even though she's a famous film star and he's only a lowly writer?! If we took random passages and extracted topics to discuss, there could be many lively discussions, but reading the book... as a book? I'm glad to be done with it and move on to more exciting reads.

Nerd Love

I used to be in this band in Chicago. Eh, I was starting my late-twenties crisis. It was fun. Let me plug their myspace.

Anyway, we were in Detroit doing some shows and were in a dive bar from 10pm-1am or so on a night off. The boys were back-handed-boasting and flirting with the bartender because there was no one else, except for the girl I saw in the bathroom who didn't wash her hands. Outnumbered by boys and feeling bored, I did what I have always done when in this type of waiting-around situation. I pulled out a book from my purse. To read at a bar. While sipping on cranberry juice since I had thrown up the night before. Into my purse. Don't judge me; I washed it out.

It's purposeless to hide. I've wanted to be cool, but will forever remain nerd. I used to stealthily go about this, you know, pretending that I couldn't relate every single life circumstance to To Kill a Mockingbird, which I've read six times, or that I learned what the term "beaver" means from Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Thankfully before a game of dirty charades, where I would pick from the bag "So-and-so's furry beaver" and didn't have to ask what that was--yay!). I mean, what's wrong with the fact that my travelin' bags are always too heavy 'cause of the books and that I need Isabel Allende in my life and a copy of Franny and Zooey in my back pocket?

How ironically fitting that I meet an American, that is exponentially nerdier than I am. IN KOREA?!

I realize we are being total nerdskis about the blog, and I marvel (and swoon) at how unabashedly Gary can write "So yeah friends, my girlfriend and I are totally gonna write about this book I picked out, it's called ESSAYS IN LOVE."

HAHAHAHHAHAHAA!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!! Oh, Gary.

FIRST ENTRY COMING SOON. We've both done our homework. Holy crap. Nerdski English teachers.

Alain de Botton. Essays in Love. 1993.

Praise and I will be using this blog to post about the books we are reading together. We'll first read Alain de Botton's 1993 novel, Essays in Love. I have wanted to read this for a while. I am particularly interested in the author's attempt at what I have often called creative philosophy. For better or worse--and he has his share of lovers and haters--de Botton purposefully combines theory and fiction in his narratives.

This novel is my choice for our first read. Praise will pick our second book. Our rule about choosing books is simple: I must pick a book she hasn't read; she must pick a book I haven't read. That's it. No restrictions on genre. While we have a few strikingly similar tastes, we really do come at things, like reading, differently. So, there should be some fresh discussion on a DagZine blog for the first time in 3 years. I am very excited.

Essays in Love is a novel about two folks who rapidly fall in love after meeting on an airplane. It's how the author handles the description of this important event--the falling "in love"--that needs attention. De Botton receives his harshest criticism from the literati crowd which claims, if I may summarize, he turns complex philosophical topics into trite cliches. He receives his most passionate support from readers who find his work fascinating for its attempt to dwell in complex discussions about topics such as Love.

I am afraid that de Botton's best and worst criticism opens a worthless binary opposition for considering his work: Is it good or bad when a writer uses fiction to discuss complex issues usually left to a philosopher? That is a bad question. It begs so much and seeks a knee-jerk "Yes" or "No" answer. In the U.S., Fiction--the genre as well as its practitioners--is often regarded as anti-intellectual, and for good reason I suppose. English Departments worldwide are populated with lit-critters who do not read the philosophers they cite in essays and discussion; a lack of scholarly rigor in some departments is infamous and to make matters worse many people are in denial that a problem exists at all; teachers read their peers writing about other writers and cite it rather than reading complex works for themselves; the Cambridge Companion series is a replacement for actual contemporary research; anthologies are too common; Harold Bloom has become an expert in everything literary in the English language that is important; Terry Eagleton has become an expert in everything Marx & structural; ETC. I have heard some things in conferences that would make many quoted philosophers puke blood.

On the other hand, we might expand this issue slightly by stating English-speaking authors who write novels are often encouraged not to handle complex issues. It's a shame. It's a critical phenomenon I don't understand. It reminds me of the crazy insistence that we should leave philosophy to the philosophers. I would suggest, and I am hopeful that Praise agrees, such insistence is nonsense and harmful. Shouldn't we all make grand attempts? It appears de Botton is attempting to attempt.

Is de Botton's novel worthy of its subject matter? We'll see.

Below is a concise list of useful links about the author.

Google "Web" Search.

Google "Blogs" Search.

The British Council's Contemporary Writer's entry for Alain de Botton.

The Complete Review's collection of de Botton reviews (with some links to originating reviews.)

The Author's web site.

[edition note: We are reading the 2006, Picador edition. It's the edition currently available in the UK. The edition currently available in the US and in Japan is from 2008 and has different art direction.]

Sound and Inqusition

Jonathan Lethem. Gun, With Occasional Music, 1994.(2005 edition, purchased in used-book store, Mason, OH, early Spring 2008.)

From his review of Motherless Brooklyn,) Luc Sante on Lethem:

Lethem possesses all the equipment necessary to write giant postmodern slabs that will invite decades of exegesis. Instead he has chosen to pursue something that calls to mind Manny Farber's famous category: art "that termite-like...feels its way through walls of particularization, with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement." He writes what are apparently small genre novels, but ones that sustain, perfect, and destroy the givens of genre all at once.

D.H. Lawrence's "A Spirit of Place

Chapter 1 - The Spirit of the Place

WE like to think of the old-fashioned American classics as children's books. Just childishness, on our part. The old American art-speech contains an alien quality, which belongs to the American continent and to nowhere else. But, of course, so long as we insist on reading the books as children's tales, we miss all that.

One wonders what the proper high-brow Romans of the third and fourth or later centuries read into the strange utterances of Lucretius or Apuleius or Tertullian, Augustine or Athanasius. The uncanny voice of Iberian Spain, the weirdness of old Carthage, the passion of Libya and North Africa; you may bet the proper old Romans never heard these at all. They read old Latin inference over the top of it, as we read old European inference over the top of Poe or Hawthorne.

It is hard to hear a new voice, as hard as it is to listen to an unknown language. We just don't listen. There is a new voice in the old American classics. The world has declined to hear it, and has babbled about children's stories.

Why ? -- Out of fear. The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences. And it is like trying to use muscles that have perhaps never been used, or that have been going stiff for ages. It hurts horribly.

The world doesn't fear a new idea. It can pigeon-hole any idea. But it can't pigeon-hole a real new experience. It can only dodge. The world is a great dodger, and the Americans the greatest. Because they dodge their own very selves.

There is a new feeling in the old American books, far more than there is in the modern American books, which are pretty empty of any feeling, and proud of it. There is a 'different' feeling in the old American classics. It is the shifting over from the old psyche to something new, a displacement. And dis- placements hurt. This hurts. So we try to tie it up, like a cut finger. Put a rag round it.

It is a cut too. Cutting away the old emotions and conscious- ness. Don't ask what is left.

Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. Truth lives from day to day, and the marvellous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.

The old American artists were hopeless liars. But they were artists, in spite of themselves. Which is more than you can say of most living practitioners.

And you can please yourself, when you read The Scarlet Letter , whether you accept what that sugary, blue-eyed little darling of a Hawthorne has to say for himself, false as all darlings are, or whether you read the impeccable truth of his art-speech.

The curious thing about art-speech is that it prevaricates so terribly, I mean it tells such lies. I suppose because we always all the time tell ourselves lies. And out of a pattern of lies art weaves the truth. Like Dostoevsky posing as a sort of Jesus, but most truthfully revealing himself all the while as a little horror.

Truly art is a sort of subterfuge. But thank God for it, we can see through the subterfuge if we choose. Art has two great functions. First, it provides an emotional experience. And then, if we have the courage of our own feelings, it becomes a mine of practical truth. We have had the feelings ad nauseam. But we've never dared dig the actual truth out . of them, the truth that concerns us, whether it concerns our grandchildren or not.

The artist usually sets out - or used to - to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist's and the tale's. Never . trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Now we know our business in these studies; saving the American tale from the American artist.

Let us look at this American artist first. How did he ever get to America, to start with? Why isn't he a European still, like his father before him?

Now listen to me, don't listen to him. He'll tell you the lie you expect. Which is partly your fault for expecting it.

He didn't come in search of freedom of worship. England had more freedom of worship in the year 1700 than America had. Won by Englishmen who wanted freedom, and so stopped at home and fought for it. And got it. Freedom of worship? Read the history of New England during the first century of its existence.

Freedom anyhow? The land of the free! This the land of the free! Why, if I say anything that displeases them, the free mob will Iynch me, and that's my freedom. Free ? Why, I have never been in any country where the individual has such an abject fear of his fellow countrymen. Because, as I say, they are free to Iynch the moment he shows he is not one of them.

No, no, if you're so fond of the truth about Queen Victoria, try a little about yourself.

Those Pilgrim Fathers and their successors never came here for freedom of worship. What did they set up when they got here? Freedom, would you call it?

They didn't come for freedom. Or if they did, they sadly went back on themselves.

All right then, what did they come for ? For lots of reasons. Perhaps least of all in search of freedom of any sort: positive freedom, that is.

They came largely to get away - that most simple of motives. To get away. Away from what? In the long run, away from themselves. Away from everything. That's why most people have come to America, and still do come. To get away from everything they are and have been.

'Henceforth be masterless.'

Which is all very well, but it isn't freedom. Rather the reverse. A hopeless sort of constraint. It is never freedom till you kind something you really positively want to be. And people in America have always been shouting about the things they are not. Unless, of course, they are millionaires, made or in the making.

And after all there is a positive side to the movement. All that vast flood of human life that has flowed over the Atlantic in ships from Europe to America has not flowed over simply on a tide of revulsion from Europe and from the confinements of the European ways of life. This revulsion was, and still is, I believe, the prime motive in emigration. But there was some cause, even for the revulsion.

It seems as if at times man had a frenzy for getting away from any control of any sort. In Europe the old Christianity was the real master. The Church and the true aristocracy bore the responsibility for the working out of the Christian ideals: a little irregularly, maybe, but responsible nevertheless.

Mastery, kingship, fatherhood had their power destroyed at the time of the Renaissance.

And it was precisely at this moment that the great drift over the Atlantic started. What were men drifting away from? The old authority ot Europe? Were they breaking the bonds of authority, and escaping to a new more absolute unrestrained- ness ? Maybe. But there was more to it.

Liberty is all very well, but men cannot live without masters. There is always a master. And men either live in glad obedience to the master they believe in, or they live in a frictional opposi- tion to the master they wish to undermine. In America this frictional opposition has been the vital factor. It has given the Yankee his kick. Only the continual influx of more servile Europeans has provided America with an obedient labouring class. The true obedience never outlasting the hrst generation.

But there sits the old master, over in Europe. Like a parent. Somewhere deep in every American heart lies a rebellion against the old parenthood of Europe. Yet no American feels he has completely escaped its mastery. Hence the slow, smoul- dering patience of American opposition. The slow, smouldering corrosive obedience to the old master Europe, the unwilling subject, the unremitting opposition.

Whatever else you are, be masterless.

Ca Ca Caliban

Get a new master, be a new man.

Escaped slaves, we might say, people the republics of Liberia or Haiti. Liberia enough! Are we to look at America in the same way ? A vast republic of escaped slaves. When you consider the hordes from eastern Europe, you might well say it: a vast republic of escaped slaves. But one dare not say this of the Pilgrim Fathers, and the great old body of idealist Americans, the modern Americans tortured with thought. A vast republic of escaped slaves. Look out, America! And a minority of earnest, self-tortured people.

The masterless.

Ca Ca Caliban

Get a new master, be a new man.

What did the Pilgrim Fathers come for, then, when they came so gruesomely over the black sea? Oh, it was in a black spirit. A black revulsion from Europe, from the old authority of Europe, from kings and bishops and popes. And more. When you look into it, more. They were black, masterful men, they wanted something else. No kings, no bishops maybe. Even no God Almighty. But also, no more of this new 'humanity' which followed the Renaissance. None of this new liberty which was to be so pretty in Europe. Something grimmer, by no means free-and-easy.

America has never been easy, and is not easy today. Americans have always been at a certain tension. Their liberty is a thing of sheer will, sheer tension: a liberty of THOU SHALT NOT. And it has been so from the first. The land of THOU SHALT NOT. Only the first commandment is: THOU SHALT NOT PRESUME TO BE A MASTER. Hence democracy.

'We are the masterless.' That is what the American Eagle shrieks. It's a Hen-Eagle.

The Spaniards refused the post-Renaissance liberty of Europe. And the Spaniards filled most of America. The Yankees, too, refused, refused the post-Renaissance humanism of Europe. First and foremost, they hated masters. But under that, they hated the flowing ease of humour in Europe. At the bottom of the American soul was always a dark suspense, at the bottom of the Spanish-American soul the same. And this dark suspense hated and hates the old European spontaneity, watches it collapse with satisfaction.

Every continent has its own great spirit of place. Every people is polarized in some particular locality, which is home, the homeland. Different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars: call it what you like. But the spirit of place is a great reality. The Nile valley produced not only the corn, but the terrific religions of Egypt. China produces the Chinese, and will go on doing so. The Chinese in San Francisco w ill in time cease to be Chinese, for America is a great melting pot.

There was a tremendous polarity in Italy, in the city of Rome. And this seems to have died. For even places die. The Island of Great Britain had a wonderful terrestrial magnetism or polarity of its own, which made the British people. For the moment, this polarity seems to be breaking. Can England die? And what if England dies ?

Men are less free than they imagine; ah, far less free. The freest are perhaps least free.

Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when I they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obey- ing from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, Organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.

Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. The moment you can do just what you like, there is nothing you care about doing. Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes.

And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.

Because the deepest self is way down, and the conscious self is an obstinate monkey. But of one thing we may be sure. If one wants to be free, one has to give up the illusion of doing what one likes, and seek what IT wishes done.

But before you can do what IT likes, you must first break the spell of the old mastery, the old IT.

Perhaps at the Renaissance, when kingship and fatherhood fell, Europe drifted into a very dangerous half-truth: of liberty and equality. Perhaps the men who went to America felt this, and so repudiated the old world together. Went one better than Europe. Liberty in America has meant so far the breaking away from all dominion. The true liberty will only begin when Americans discover IT, and proceed possibly to fulfil IT. IT being the deepest whole self of man, the self in its wholeness, not idealistic halfness.

That's why the Pilgrim Fathers came to America, then; and that's why we come. Driven by IT. We cannot see that invisible winds carry us, as they carry swarms of locusts, that invisible magnetism brings us as it brings the migrating birds to their unforeknown goal. But it is so. We are not the marvellous choosers and deciders we think we are. IT chooses for us, and decides for us. Unless, of course, we are just escaped slaves, vulgarly cocksure of our ready-made destiny. But if we are living people, in touch with the source, IT drives us and decides us. We are free only so long as we obey. When we run counter, and think we will do as we like, we just flee around like Orestes pursued by the Eumenides.

And still, when the great day begins, when Americans have at last discovered America and their own wholeness, still there will be the vast number of escaped slaves to reckon with, those who have no cocksure, ready-made destinies.

Which will win in America, the escaped slaves, or the new whole men?

The real American day hasn't begun yet. Or at least, not yet sunrise. So far it has been the false dawn. That is, in the progressive American consciousness there has been the one dominant desire, to do away with the old thing. Do away with masters, exalt the will of the people. The will of the people being nothing but a figment, the exalting doesn't count for much. So, in the name of the will of the people, get rid of masters. When you have got rid of masters, you are left with this mere phrase of the will of the people. Then you pause and bethink yourself, and try to recover your own wholeness.

So much for the conscious American motive, and for democracy over here. Democracy in America is just the tool with which the old master of Europe, the European spirit, is undermined. Europe destroyed, potentially, American demo- cracy will evaporate. America will begin.

American consciousness has so far been a false dawn. The negative ideal of democracy. But underneath, and contrary to this open ideal, the first hints and revelations of IT. IT, the American whole soul.

You have got to pull the democratic and idealistic clothes off American utterance, and see what you can of the dusky body of IT underneath.

'Henceforth be masterless.'

Henceforth be mastered.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Reading Wittgenstein, again, lately.

This notebook of arguments--how else can we name his "books"?--continues to fascinate me. Nevermind I am still learning how to comprehend some of the logic, I find his arguments so very significant to Writing and Literature.

It's not just seeing and knowing what I see and knowing how to say what I mean about what I think I see. It's about the space of seeing and the colloboration of creating the site/sight.

I am no fan of Bertrand Russell. Bad memories from undergraduate study, probably. I think I need to revisit Russell. I think I will.

Magazines

March 31 New Yorker
March Modern Painters
March Four Four Two
February & April Harper's

Currently Reading

• R Buckminster Fuller. (Eds Krausse & Lichtenstein) Your Private Sky. 2001.
• Flann O'Brien. At Swim-Two-Birds. Dalkey Archive. 2005.
• Peter Gay. Modernism: The Lure of Heresy. 2007.

Attempting: Alain Badiou's Being and Event, for the third time.

Grace Paley (1922-2007) RIP

Every Action was Essential.

All my habits are bad.

Process Thought & Law

Modak-Truran, Mark C., "Process Thought and Law: Prolegomena to a Process Theory of Natural Law" . HANDBOOK OF WHITEHEADIAN PROCESS THOUGHT, Michel Weber, ed., Ontos Verlag, 2007

Abstract:
As in other areas of the academy, post-metaphysical assumptions dominate modern and post-modern legal theory. Two contemporary quandaries in legal theory, however, provide an occasion for a revival of interest in the metaphysical or ontological principles presupposed by the law. First, the debate about legal indeterminacy has made it clear that law cannot function autonomously and raises the specter that judicial decisions in hard cases are illegitimate. In addition, Steven D. Smith has persuasively argued that there is an “ontological gap” between the practice of law, which presupposes a classical or religious ontology, and legal theory, which presupposes a scientific ontology (i.e., scientific materialism) that rejects religious ontology. This article attempts to demonstrate how the process philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and William James support a new theory of natural law that can eliminate the perceived illegitimacy arising from legal indeterminacy and close the ontological gap between legal theory and legal practice. In this process theory of natural law, the telos of beauty provides a comprehensive normative justification for the law and the so-called “extra-legal norms” relied on by judges when the positive law is indeterminate. Process natural law, however, does not advocate judges relying on fixed, antiquated natural laws for resolving legal indeterminacy. Rather, judges must determine what maximizes beauty in accordance with the circumstance of the case and the social perfection possible within that society. Process natural law also closes the ontological gap between legal practice and legal theory by providing an ontology that unifies the moral insights of religion with the insights of modern science. As a result, a process theory of natural law shows great promise for solving the two most important quandaries in contemporary legal theory.

(title of post is the link to quoted abstract from SSRN.)

Don DeLillo: A 30 year Look Back

Some notes on my reading; new ideas to work out here. I am trying to figure out how to deal with the concepts of the novelist as historiographer; how to approach memory, knowledge, the contemporary as a writer/reader; and how two novels written 30 years apart speak to each other beyond the spectacle of setting and place.

Anyway,
I was seven when Don DeLillo published Players. I am reading it now, for the first time. I like DeLillo's early novels. I am a big fan of End Zone. And I am enjoying Players, too. There is a sarcasm in both novels that I am having a lot of fun with as a close reader. Maybe it's helping me enjoy/relate to characters that I would be all too willing to not like--football players, Wall Street players.

I am reading Players before I read Falling Man; I bought both together, Monday. I read in a review of Falling Man that both concerned the World Trade Center. I am not as concerned with "the two towers" as much as I am concerned with how the way a novelist can use histories and actualites in his fiction to promote a particular way of seeing History of a place, a space, a moment in time.

Hindsight, or Looking Backward for you Bellamy fans, transforms the process of recollection, messes with memory, instantly creates a tone of memorialization. There is a stability, in my opinion, in the novel--a fiction--that does not exist in a history. Players in 1977 is Players in 2007. The World Trade Center and the people who lived and worked there, and around there, in 1977 are not the people there today. The history has been revised; or one might say, it has been in revision and will always be in revision. But I am still thinking one dimensionally here. There is much to work out.

I think it's in the beginning of Chapter 6 from A Light in August that Faulkner, as he introduces readers to the beginning of Joe Christmas, writes that "Memory believes before knowing remembers." I wonder how much memory can believe (it knows) before knowing remembers (what it has learned.) Some character in a story might remark on a thing's impermanence, but that doesn't necessarily represent a knowing or a believing. Faulkner's opening to that chapter in one of my favorite novels has always haunted me. I have tried to fathom the passages (the first sentence and the ones that follow) for some time. I am fascinated with his notion of recollection, of instantaneous recall that is much like the birth of a human being, who once born has within him, Joe Christmas in this example, his destiny already there to be born as well. And so when a character says about the World Trade Center, almost thirty years before it is demolished, that it lacks permanence, the burdensome weight of inevitability shows itself.

That the World Trade Center is a character in DeLillo's 1977 novel, that the characters experience fears of terrorism after inexplicable acts of violence, that things (namely, the two towers, but also love, sexual desire, understanding, et al) lack permanence, and that the characters are sound and appear so bored that they reflect on boredom privately and publicy: A reader, like me, cannot help but think, "How did DeLillo know?" But is this concern I have now only present because of a coincidence or is there something that connects events (the novels, in this case, published 30 years apart) as contemporaries and therefore, in a historical sense, worth looking at together?

I know the problems, theoretical and practical, DeLillo appears to address in Players because I know them here and now. And this is a here and now that is quite a bit different than the there and then of his 1977 novel. I am recalling my knee-jerk amazement in the timeliness-before-its-time of Players until 1) I read it and read Falling Man and 2) take a few moments to figure out how history and historiography figures into this.

One question I already have lingering as I finish the 1997 novel:
Won't I find what I am certain I'll find--connections, prescience really--in any text I read? This certainty a sort of radical certainty, to borrow from Lacan. I mean, can't we admit that I'll convince myself and others (let's say, as a teacher?)

I hope to be able to consider how DeLillo the novelist and DeLillo the historian (or, is it historiographer?) work together to produce the effect--30 years on and his books are pointing out consistencies in contemporaneity that many of us wish weren't there. For example, isn't the relatively short history of the World Trade Center bound to be considered an impermanence when the place (or is it space?) is new and, more so even, when it is gone? After all, such monstrosities as those two tall buildings in such a small space can create a space in which one might worry about how long it is supposed to last--the strength the World Trade Center represents: strength in engineering, wealth, market, etc.

more to follow...

Booming Chinese Art Market

New York Times (1/4/2007)

Commentary on Dagzine.