a demonstration

Here is something further on the point I was just making.

It's a poem by Tennyson, called "St. Simeon Stylites." It's about how ascetic and devoted this monk is, but (in true Lacanian fashion) he fails to give away the excess (of devotion, saintly ambition) of his desire, so he is circling around what *cannot* finally be renounced: renunciation.

But the real problem is that it is a dramatic monologue; ie: he is talking about himself, how "base" he is, and you'll see it just rubs you the wrong way. [Astute readers will make the connection to psychoanalysis' "talking cure"--we can't STOP "making meaning" about ourselves, even in our flattest justifications.]

Altho’ I be the basest of mankind,
From scalp to sole one slough and crust of sin,
Unfit for earth, unfit for heaven, scarce meet
For troops of devils, mad with blasphemy,
I will not cease to grasp the hope I hold
Of saintdom, and to clamour, mourn and sob,
Battering the gates of heaven with storms of prayer,
Have mercy, Lord, and take away my sin.

Let this avail, just, dreadful, mighty God,
This not be all in vain, that thrice ten years,
Thrice multiplied by superhuman pangs,
In hungers and in thirsts, fevers and cold,
In coughs, aches, stitches, ulcerous throes and cramps,
A sign betwixt the meadow and the cloud,
Patient on this tall pillar I have borne
Rain, wind, frost, heat, hail, damp, and sleet, and snow;
And I had hoped that ere this period closed
Thou wouldst have caught me up into thy rest,
Denying not these weather-beaten limbs
The meed of saints, the white robe and the palm.

O Lord, Lord,
Thou knowest I bore this better at the first,
For I was strong and hale of body then;
And tho’ my teeth, which now are dropt away,
Would chatter with the cold, and all my beard
Was tagg’d with icy fringes in the moon,
I drown’d the whoopings of the owl with sound
Of pious hymns and psalms, and sometimes saw
An angel stand and watch me, as I sang.

The silly people take me for a saint,
And bring me offerings of fruit and flowers:
And I, in truth (thou wilt bear witness here)
Have all in all endured as much, and more
Than many just and holy men, whose names
Are register’d and calendar’d for saints.

The end! the end!
Surely the end! What’s here? a shape, a shade,
A flash of light. Is that the angel there
That holds a crown? Come, blessed brother, come.
I know thy glittering face. I waited long;
My brows are ready. What! deny it now?
Nay, draw, draw, draw nigh. So I clutch it. Christ!
’Tis gone: ’tis here again; the crown! the crown!
So now ’tis fitted on and grows to me,
And from it melt the dews of Paradise,
Sweet! sweet! spikenard, and balm, and frankincense.
Ah! let me not be fool’d, sweet saints: I trust
That I am whole, and clean, and meet for Heaven.

Proust, Paradise Lost, this blog

Here's a maxim you can have.

There's no way to say something positive about oneself and not come off badly.

Have you read IN A BUDDING GROVE? Proust tries to present himself as this precocious adolescent, and just comes across as self-absorbed and cocky.

Here's a question, though. Why should I take umbrage at Proust being cocky, at knowing how smart and witty he is? I think he is the smartest and the wittiest. I should be nodding in assent; "Yes, you *are* so great." Because, apart from this novel, that is how I feel. But, when he says it, it strikes a false note.

Milton uses this device against Satan in PARADISE LOST: Satan pretty much only talks about himself (CS Lewis calls it "incessant autobiography"), and so after a while, you kind of hate the guy, even though he starts off with all your sympathies.

This is also the premise of PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN. Any reader who *likes* Stephen has to be a total asshole. Or, at least, someone who sympathizes with precocious, self-absorbed adolescents. We can assume this would extend to other (self-absorbed) adolescents.

Anyways, my last few posts contained references to myself that were undeniable, stone-cold facts: I like these things, I read these books at a certain age, I do such and such for a living, etc. And like, as a rule of style, no matter what, those things, which admit of no contradiction, probably irked some people at least stylistically.

Have you ever read Ayn Rand novels? They are full of people who don't understand this point. People who, because they are successful, can't understand why everyone else is not interested in them as much as they are interested in themselves.

OK, that was a trick. I actually just wrote that last paragraph to demonstrate a point. When I wrote, "people who, because they are successful", the obvious implication is, that's me, and I would like to not be under the same delusion as these characters, *while* being successful. Now, no one wants to hear that I think I am "successful," although by the strictest definition, I imagine that I am. More than that, you don't even want me to align myself with a negative example of (fictional) successful types. And it's not because you don't like me, or because you would prefer that I not be or consider myself happy or successful.

No, nothing like that. It's just a rule of writing and psychology. But here's the literary part: it's why, for a while in PARADISE LOST, we can't stand God. Because he knows he's right. Now, that is tautological, because God IS rightness in its essence, and yet we would still prefer that God be a bit humbler. This is stupid of us, yes, but you know what? I just compared myself to God. I bet you are furious.

What qualifies as "interests"?

I will post more on this later, but I was reading some dumb Village Voice article in which the author, recounting a conversation with a boyfriend who wanted her to be something she wasn't, has this inward moment of befuddlement:

I was devastated. Couldn't he see I was into the same things he was—Dostoevsky, early '90s shoegazer music and Indian food?

Now that we have the internet to prominently display our interests on social networking pages, presumably this isn't a problem any more. Although, my blogger profile lists my interests as: "iced coffee." Talya has "coffee", "snacks" and "showers". Well, that's almost as bad as Dostoievski (yeah you can spell it however you want) qua "interest."

In that Village Voice list, erhaps nothing is as weak as "Indian food" as an interest. What does that mean, that someone likes to cook Indian food? go out to Indian restaraunts? discuss Indian food? Even worse: "I was into the same things he was." Honey, EVERYONE loves samosas. This is not a bonding agent.

Recently I was half-jokingly telling someone how easy it would be to date me because I have such varied interests: Italian cinema, Victorian novels, French critical theory, German philosophy, Hollywood westerns, Jamaican reggae, Finnish hardcore, etc.

Now, I said this was "half-jokingly," and I hope you see why, but let's first say why I wasn't joking. 1) Those are interests. 2) My mom and her siblings, or my roommates, or most random people, don't have interests like this. 3) I think it's a good list. And I have Top 10 lists for each one.

More apparently, though, I was joking. Here's why:
1) Whether it is easy to date me is up for debate, but certainly "He has so many interests!" is far from being either the final word, or even necessarily positive.
2) The list is in a joke format: [Country/time period]--[genre].
3) In a way, it's really all the SAME interest to someone who doesn't care. Like, when I lived in Austin, no matter WHAT band shirt I was wearing, d-bags would be all, "Oh you like liiiive music? You must love livin' in Austin." [Which is kind of the Austin take on everything: "You like XXXX? You must love livin' in Austin."] So, my infinitely discriminating taste in various genres is ultimately irrelevant to anyone who doesn't have that same interest. Or, say: I love French New Wave films, but I would never offer that up as saying anything about myself. Because that is moronic. What would it say about me? That I am a cinephile? A francophile? A fan of classic noirs? A fan of Jerry Lewis films? An avid reader of Cahiers du Cinema?
4) As you can see, I have no idea what interests are, or why they might matter to someone else.

I'll get back to this topic in a bit (do I ever leave it) but I want to say, since we don't live in a romantic comedy, we need better shit than Dostoievski, indian food, and Pavement to qualify as an interesting person. (And I like Dostoevski and Indian food more than most things).

To clarify:

A couple points about the previous post; or, THE points of the previous post.

1) Cultural knowledge is an endeavor you cannot fail at.

2) Cultural knowledge (of whatever kind), and our own history, are our imperatives as human beings.

My "big problem" with the world, then, is that if we MUST do this, and we CAN'T fail at it...then...you know...what the fuck, man?

Reading on the Subway

What people read on the subway is a kind of infinite topic, but yesterday I was really annoyed by these high school kids (who weren't reading anything, and were behaving really badly) on the train. They were just dumb. And I thought, well, here I am reading PARADISE REGAINED, and here they are just kind of babbling and swearing, and it just sucks to be surrounded by idiots while I'm trying to get work done. But then I thought about it for a while and came to rather a different conclusion.

Because, (to borrow some italics from "Grindhouse") I was reading. They weren't. By which I mean, I have prioritized my own reading since I was in 2nd grade. I was fucking precocious. I was reading THE ILIAD in 2nd grade, and from then on I was reading about six years ahead of my grade level, which meant that I had to read everything twice: BEOWULF, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, JULIUS CAESAR, THE STRANGER, HERODOTUS, THE INFERNO, etc, all in middle school. I know, for instance, that Talya was like this as well.

It is hard to say which is the cause or effect. I made it a priority to read PETER PAN and ALICE IN WONDERLAND when I was really young, because I knew I wouldn't be able to enjoy them as much when I was older. That's weird! But actually the whole idea of "reading at one's grade level" is messed up, because I was reading: none of the other kids on my school bus were. It's not like when I was reading DON QUIXOTE, they were trying to catch up. Kids just didn't read.

In a way, I don't which I should prefer: to just BE smart or to have accomplished it myself. Obviously it's a bit of both, but let's just say I worked on it. And the moral here is, not that stupid people don't exist, or that everyone could eventually be as smart as everyone else, but that we always give up the game too early. I started reading very early, I still read. I read all the time. And unless someone is only reading trashy mystery books or airport fiction, if you can find someone who can say the same thing, I bet they are not an abject moron either. [They may not be cute and sweet like me, but that's another question.]

And here, either you agree with me, or your position is like, "dumb people know their place; why should they force themselves to read FAUST when they just want to read Allure?" I'm not okay with that question, since to me, there is obviously a class issue here: my parents were college graduates, they prized these things, they imbued me with a love of reading, and maybe everyone doesn't get to Foucault--that's fine. But it seems to me the question is always ceded *far* too early.

There are two corollaries to this:
1) In the academic world, after a certain point, it doesn't matter how smart you are. The person doing "interesting work," who has committed themselves to worthwhile values, to a rigorous methodology, to a love of literature over careerist aims, to pedagogy rather than name-dropping, to books instead of trends, may not be any smarter than someone else: but this work will be worth reading, and other stuff, perhaps written by more intelligent people, won't.
2) Cinema literacy: I got a head start on this early, too. I think everyone should. It should be taught in high school. Talya just watched "The Bicycle Thief" the other day. I had to watch that in a class in high school, and I'm all the better for it. (It's about man's search for dignity).

To be honest--a love of learning, a love of culture, having principles, etc., these things stand above raw intelligence: in my world they are the only things that matter.
And, this makes almost the entire world one extended major bum-out.

Gay Marriage, A Questionable Enterprise

[Preemptive note: read the whole post before you start arguing with me.]

Consider the implications of this editorial from the NY Times.

Mr. Spitzer is right to be fighting for gay marriage. Civil unions and domestic partnerships are an important recognition of gay relationships by a state. But they still represent separate and unequal treatment. One federal study identified more than 1,100 rights or benefits that are accorded only to the legally married. That means that even in states recognizing civil unions and domestic partnerships, gay couples often have to use legal contortions to protect their families in ways that married couples take for granted. Gay couples may also be discriminated against when it comes to taxes and pension benefits.

The argumentative blocks of this paragraph are as follows:
1) Many states recognize civil unions and domestic partnerships.
2) Although these fall short of "marriage," they are well-intentioned.
3) However, these good intentions neglect the practical "discriminations" against those who are not fully and legally married.
4) Therefore, NY should pass a law legalizing gay marriage as opposed to these half-measures.

This logic is specious at best, because it ALSO assumes the following:
1) Gay people should want to buy into the institution of marriage
2) Only gay people are being "discriminated against" by marriage laws (taxes, pensions, etc).
3) That it is easier to promote gay people to marriageable citizens rather than dismantling an obviously-prejudicial pro-marriage system.

I would have to be really naive not to see that gay marriage is a hot issue for reasons other than those having to do with pensions; and obviously straight people who choose not to get married are in a different situation: BUT REALLY, MARRIAGE IS DUMB. Anything the Catholic Church and George Bush are so keen on defending, which is THE institution for reinforcing RHN (reproductive heteronormativity), that is (even in this pro-marriage editorial) an instrument of discrimination, socially compulsory, homophobic, patriarchal, etc. etc. etc.

So, gay marriage. Excuse me for my lack of enthusiasm about it. In my mind, it will only ever be (gay) marriage. And as long as the issue of homosexuality is an issue about "tolerance" and "the other," these are the sorts of ultimately irrelevant battles that will take place (over constitutional amendments): ones that ultimately supports "the system" and self-ascribes to degrading legalisms, etc. In short, marriage IS homophobic; why try to play their game?

What I Do

[Preface i]
Right now I am reading PARADISE LOST, which is one of my favorite books, but I am in the middle of the most boring part, where the angel Raphael is explaining Ptolomeian astrophysics to Adam: Zzzzzz. Thus, time for a blog post!

[Preface ii]
The other day I was talking with a friend and our conversation wandered into the frontier where basically we were complaining that "no one understands us." This seemingly juvenile claim is probably the truth of existence. I am always shocked (shocked!) to hear people repeat back to me what they think I am saying, or hear descriptions of myself, etc. (Except in obvious cases where of course what someone thinks about me says everything about them and is therefore predictable.) And that all could be really petty. However, the very claim of "what I do" is that I understand things and their meanings. I think I "get" Dickens and Proust and Trollope, in a way that I probably don't "get" any person whom I actually know. My job is basically to express this understanding--and if this blog is any indication, my writing does not produce the same universal head-nodding as a novel.

In a way, then, criticism is a very sad thing. It takes something that everyone loves, like OLIVER TWIST, and turns it into something we probably can't all agree on, that we may even argue about. This all sounds very naive, as if the question of criticism were only, "What is XXXX book about?"

That is not what I mean, though. For me, the question of criticism is as follows.

[What I Do]
There are numerous criticisms. Let's name a few. New Historicism. Deconstruction. New Criticism. Queer Criticism. Post-colonial. Marxist. History of the book. Reader Response. And so forth. What one immediately notices when listing these schools is that a few are totalizing and others are partial. Queer criticism won't tell us everything about a work. New Criticism pretends to. This is a dialectic.

In life (which I separate from academia), I am a fan of all the questions motivating these schools. What history underlies a fictional work? Why is this work *good* or how does it mean anything at all? How should one teach it? What are its political implications or overt commitments? What can we learn from it about the central human question of sexuality? and so forth. As "interesting topics," they are all fine. They are not my topic.

I actually would like to play dumb as regards literature. New Criticism's question is something like, "how does this thing, literature, work?" My question is even more naive: "How is it this thing even is at all?" For me, "the thing" is the novel. The novel qua literature, and the great 19th century novels qua Novel. [An interesting project suggested by a recent conversation: what is the implicit formal criticism of the 19th century novel as seen by the development of the Modernist novel? There is, as Spivak would say, a "criticism-shaped hole" in the Modernist novel.]

Narratology approaches this question but does not ask it. Roland Barthes' semiological analysis (especially in S/Z, hands-down the critical work I admire most) asks it, but his answer is already its methodology.

What I am not interested in:
- thematic criticism. What a book is "about" or conspicuously *not* about. Edward Said's superb criticism of MANSFIELD PARK falls into the latter category, while ORIENTALISM into the former. [I love Edward Said. A source of infinite encouragement. His early book BEGINNINGS also approaches what I would like to do.]
- the topic of reading. First, criticism is already reading, and vice versa. Second, while I am with Kant on "we can only know our impression of things, not the thing itself", studies of reading can be weirdly sociological or beside the point of the individual text. Ie: what is the difference between reading LITTLE DORRIT and MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT? Probably not one that can be explained by the concept of "reading."
- the "bad" deconstruction of J. Hillis Miller. Really there is nothing more dated or embarrassing.
- discourse analysis/cultural analysis. A novel is not one writing among others. The novel, the Magna Carta, a politician's speech, an essay by Hannah Arendt, and a legal brief are not all the same. "Duh," you think. But I mean it. For one, as "discourse" one immediately runs into (Bakhtin's notion of) the dialogical discourse employed by the novel and NOT employed by these other forms [two different meanings of discourse here, but you take my point]. By "culture", I mean: "What Victorians thought about XXXX." The novel is both a limited, and it seems wrong-headed way to access these thoughts. The novel is SO individual. A "communal" form like the epic would seem much better for cultural analysis, although again, only quasi-psychoanalytically or imaginatively: what a culture fantasizes about itself.

That is what I don't do. A real failure to me is the recent book by Nancy Armstrong, "How Novels Think," which is a fine book, but the title is misleading [it is about historical ideas of the subject and individualism in the novel]--but how DO novels think? What are its elements? Genre, narration, character, plot, etc. We are a long way from having said all there is to say about these things. Take TRISTRAM SHANDY for instance. No genre. No plot. A paper I wrote about OUR MUTUAL FRIEND questions the limits of what counts as "a character" in a Charles Dickens novel. I just finished my MA thesis about the multiplicity of locations of narration in GREAT EXPECTATIONS. The closer we look, the more these banal categories which nonetheless form our conception of the Novel--the more insufficient they seem, the more they call for troubling and redefinition. And if Character and Narration are no longer stable terms, how can we then proceed to treat these works as thematically/politically coherent?

So, to blatantly pose Heidegger, before we do anything else with novels, we need to be able to say how it is that they ARE novels in the first place. What it means. *How* they mean. This may tend increasingly towards a "linguistics" of literature that would expand on Jakobson, Bakhtin, and Barthes. [Not yet how it is that "there are" novels in the first place, which probably belongs to a different discipline.] Not to take novels for granted, not to lose sight of their strangeness, not to forget that each one is its own world, and not to imagine that there ever could be an answer to this question. [Or, at least, an answer better than "prose fiction over a certain length.] This question needs to be historicized, indeed even the question has a history, and probably seems too vague without looking at specific criticism that I mean, but I think the question can be seen in Said (BEGINNINGS), Franco Moretti (ATLAS OF THE EUROPEAN NOVEL), Bakhtin, DA Miller (NARRATIVE AND ITS DISCONTENTS), Barthes (S/Z), Peter Brooks (READING FOR THE PLOT), as well as many works that approach the question more tangentially (Henry James' criticism, Fredric Jameson's POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS)--but certainly *not* in dissertations/books that take a theme and have 5 chapters on 5 novels taking up that theme. This appears to be the majority of graduate work, and although misunderstanding is built into understanding, I hope no one will ever misunderstand what I do to be a variety of that practice.

DAVID COPPERFIELD (or REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST, or PARADISE LOST) may be the greatest and most astonishing thing ever produced by a human mind. I'm not joking.

It is certainly not the business of the everyday.

Those fucking losers (part two)

Representative Peter Hoekstra, a Michigan Republican, said: “If Harry Reid believes that this war is lost, where is his plan to win this war?”

Those fucking losers

Let me tell you a story about myself that I think will explain EVERYTHING.

The other day, I was downtown waiting for two friends to meet me outside of a restaurant. OK, so I am standing there, with my worries, watching people go by on this very busy street, checking everyone out but kind of spacing, too--and see one of my friends coming down the street, and in front of him are these two guys. They are basically, like, what you would call "skater dudes," but the NY hipster version: some kind of amazing-core hoodies, new era hats, girls jeans, and kind of puffy sneakers. But they were dressed exactly the same and not-at-all the same, simultaneously. Like, one of them was wearing a hoodie with a jacket over it, one of their jeans was flared a bit (bad choice), their hats were different, okay--but they were wearing THE SAME SHOES. Or, conspicuously close enough to the same shoes. And it made them look like they just didn't get it, or they had just raided Urban Outfitters. You could envision their bummed-out looks when they were pulling their new clothes out of their big Urb bags, and saying, "Dude! That's so rad!" up until they saw they had bought the same shoes.

So, I am trying to point this out to Spencer when he rolls up, but he didn't really see the guys, so I'm explaining this thing-only-I-could-care-about in this exaggerated way: "They looked like FOOLS!" etc, until Spencer interrupts me and says, "Ben, can I tell you something?" and points at the ground.

"WE are wearing the same shoes." (ie: black converse hi-top all stars).

Cry of the Soul

Let me tell you a story. Talya and I were eating a kind of crappy meal at this lame pan-asian restaraunt across the street from my school: hot, rushed, too many toddlers, a million people on staff. Ok, we were just in and out of there, basically, but we were sitting next to this foursome who were definitely on some kind of double-date. They were in their early fourties or late thirties, none of them attractive, wearing some mishmash of Gap or J. Crew clothes, but really haphazardly and unflatteringly. And clearly they were not "catching up" in the sense of this going on all night, but they were probably going to see a movie after eating at this crappy, cheap place.

Anyways, Rick Springfield's "Jesse's Girl" comes on in the background. There's only one conversation to have, really: the awesome scene in Boogie Nights where they are trying to sell all this baking soda as cocaine, and the druglord insists that they reverentially listen to "Jesse's Girl." That is the conversation, ok? But instead, these douchebag dudes who are "old enough to remember when" just kind of gesture verbally towards some potential nostalgia or (you'll see) I don't know what.

- "Oh, hey...Rick Springfield..."
- "Jesse's Girl"
- "This was his one big song..."
[Not true. Rick Springfield may have only one song that made its way to 2007, but certainly for these old losers, Rick Springfield had several more hits during their teenage years.]
- "I still know all the words."
- "Of course...everybody does."

IMPORTANT MOMENT. So, after this last thing, the guy turns to his wife, who has not been in this conversation, and kind-of shimmys his eyebrows at her, suggestively.

Signalling, BEN'S MIND BLOWN.

What did this eyebrow-raising mean?
1) That he had just said something clever, and this was a call for acknowledgement of that.
2) That he was being sarcastic to the other guy's face, and this was a signal to her that something was going on under the surface.
[So, that something he had said was worth taking notice of. Which it precisely WASN'T.]
3) Vaguely, something like: hey, we're going to have sex later, so I'm sorry that I am leaving you out of this conversation.
[This is part of it, I think, but here's the real explanation]:
4) "Well, here we are. We have nothing better to talk about than this thing that none of us care about; we just ate some bad food and we still have a few hours to spend with these people, and with each other. And after we get home, I still am going to have to see you for the rest of my life, and you aren't getting any younger and neither am I. Not only did I not say something clever, but I have lost even the capability of being embarrassed about that, and these morons we are eating with didn't even notice." Basically, the gurgling sound of the disappearance of any irony towards one's own, now-unretrievably-worthless life being swallowed in the slime of hopelessness, disguised as a comment to his wife: "Like, we're in this together" never seemed so threatening.

They were very expressive eyebrows.