Sorry to whomever follows this blog that I have not been doing much blogging lately. I swear, however, that once the term ends and the flood of papers has subsided I will be back in proper blogging trim. So many wonderful bloggeriffic things have happened over the past few weeks too: Obama's speech in Cairo; my (re)viewing of Logan's Run, King Kong vs. Godzilla, King Kong Escapes, Danger: Diabolik, and Barbarella; a new show at Beppu Wiarda gallery featuring paintings by my teacher, Arvie Smith; Ian's new strides in vocabulary--including such words as gobbysuck, e-daddy, tunno, and buppy-goggy; my spins of the album "Logan's Sanctuary" by electronica duo Roger Joseph Manning, Jr. and Brian Reitzell; and many many more things...

Until I come back, here's a photo of Ian to hold you over:

Few things are funnier than watching conservatives implode. Read the following description of a National Review writer's mental disintegration:

http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2009/05/27/pronouncing_sotomayor/

CD

My 100th Post! So enjoy this picture of Dolly:

From left to right...

Brendon Fraser, Jimmy Kimmel, and Peter Sellers (in "What's Up Pussy Cat?")

CD

Eat them up yum!

No, I won't apologize "in advance" for providing the following link to one of the most influential videos ever produced. Nor will I say "I'm sorry" for putting into your head a diabolical tune generated in the head of the known psychotic Larry "Wild Man" Fischer. Nor will I feel the least need to "defend" my exposing you to the earliest directorial work of the great Bill Paxton (he of "Aliens" fame--"Game over man, game over!"). Nor will I justify "in any way" my preoccupation with absurd connections, such as that between Bill Mumy (the kid from "Lost in Space") and the Lost Continent of Lumania. Suffice it to say, the following link will be both edifying and terrifying (often in the same split instant) and the sooner you get used to the idea, the better.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTpUVAcvWfU&feature=related

So there. No need to say "Enjoy!" because you won't. But you will thank me, in due time...
CD

Ian McEwan

Here's a fantastic essay from James Wood writing in the London Review of Books on the work and methods of my favorite contemporary novelist, Ian McEwan: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n08/wood02_.html It's forcing me to re-evaluate my reaction to Atonement, a novel whose ending I, indeed, felt tricked by. My favorite bit (spoiler alert):

"On the last two pages of the novel, of course, McEwan lays bare his final secret: Robbie died at Dunkirk on 1 June 1940, and Cecilia was killed in the same year by a bomb in Balham. The lovers never united. Briony invented their happiness as an act of novelistic atonement for her earlier act of novelistic failure.

"Plenty of readers are irritated by this conjuring trick. But if Briony made it all up, so did we. If the desperation of both her guilt and her wish fulfilment stirs us, it is because, by way of McEwan’s delayed revelation, by way of his narrative secret, we have ourselves conspired in Briony’s wish fulfilment, not just content but eager to believe, until the very last moment, that Cecilia and Robbie did not actually die. We wanted them to be alive, and the knowledge that we too wanted a ‘happy ending’ brings on a kind of atonement for the banality of our own literary impulses. Which is why the ending provokes interestingly divergent responses: it alienates some conventional readers, who dislike what they feel to be a trick, but it alienates some sophisticated readers, who also dislike what they feel to be a trick; and I suspect that the estrangement of both camps has to do with their guilt at having been moved by the novel’s conventional romantic power. It shouldn’t be possible, but Atonement wants to have it both ways, and succeeds in having it both ways. It is Ian McEwan’s best book because it successfully prosecutes and defends – as inevitable – the very impulses that make McEwan such a compellingly manipulative novelist; and because it makes us willing, guilty, and finally self-conscious co-conspirators in that machinery of manipulation."

Enjoy,

CD

Problems with Theory

Here's a good little essay by Prof. Mark Edmundson concerning the dangers of constantly reading literature from strictly theoretical approaches: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i33/33b00601.htm


He articulates ideas that I have thought through many times (see my entry for June 24, 2008). My favorite bit:


"When you launch, say, a Marxist reading of William Blake, you effectively use Marx as a tool of analysis and judgment. To the degree that Blake anticipates Marx, Blake is prescient and to be praised. Thus the Marxist reading approves of Blake for his hatred of injustice; his polemic against imperialism; his suspicion of the gentry; his critique of bourgeois art as practiced by the likes of Sir Joshua Reynolds. But Blake, being Blake, also diverges from Marx. He is, presumably, too committed to something akin to liberal individualism; he doesn't understand the revolutionary potential latent in the proletariat; he is, perhaps, an idealist, who believes that liberation of consciousness matters more, or at least must precede, material liberation; he has no clear theory of class conflict. Thus Blake, admirable as he may be, needs to be read with skepticism; he requires a corrective, and the name of that corrective is Karl Marx. Just so, the corrective could be called Jacques Derrida (who would illuminate Blake the logocentrist); Foucault (who would demonstrate Blake's immersion in and implicit endorsement of an imprisoning society); Kristeva (who would be attuned to Blake's imperfections on the score of gender politics), and so on down the line. The current sophisticated critic would be unlikely to pick one master to illuminate the work at hand — he would mix and match as the occasion required. But to enact a reading means to submit one text to the terms of another; to allow one text to interrogate another — then often to try, sentence, and summarily execute it.

"The problem with the Marxist reading of Blake is that it robs us of some splendid opportunities. We never take the time to arrive at a Blakean reading of Blake, and we never get to ask whether Blake's vision might be true — by which I mean, following William James, whether it's good in the way of belief. The moment when the student in the classroom, or the reader perusing the work can pause and say: "Yes, that's how it is; Blake's got it exactly right," disappears."



Enjoy,

CD