I'm still unable to give a proper definition in my research paper, but the Google results for gnoseology made me pretty happy. Being momentarily face-to-face with a gilded flicker also made me pretty happy. So you probably think that, overall, I'm pretty happy, but I'm not sure. Sleepiness is interfering with my ability to monitor these things. And I've been having epically ridiculous paper-writing adventures, which are not yet over, for reasons surely connected to my tendency to pick paper topics like "use of figurative language in Romantic poetry, and its relation to consciousness and history."
I'm reading "On some motifs in Baudelaire" in German with the English translation in hand— it really seems clearer to me in German; the thoughts aren't as counterintuitive and contorted. This is the old Illuminations translation by Harry Zohn, which renders "Über den Begriff der Geschichte" as the splendid, blazingly Hegelian-Marxian "Theses on the Philosophy of History" with which I assume many of you are acquainted. Who was Harry Zohn, I wonder? (This tells me little.) Somehow, in English, something about the tone throws me off: it's fastidious, yet conceptually bold, in a combination I've never seen in a native speaker not actively trying to write like a translation.
Someone is playing with guitar effects in the next room. I DON'T CARE I DON'T CARE I LOVE ACADEMIA THIS IS PARADISE WRITING LITERARY CRITICISM IS THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION of my entrails
Paradjanov's Color of Pomegranates is also fine author-biographical art, as it turns out.
Kein Ort. Nirgends is Wolf's novella about an imagined meeting between Kleist and Günderrode. I turn out to have a copy of the English translation in my library; after some resistance to the mere idea I decided to sample it.
Wolf is certainly an artful stylist, although the full effect doesn't always come across in translation.
Hmm.
Okay, I seem to be unable to write a balanced review: I couldn't keep reading it. I kept putting it down and remarking on its failures to Paul, picking it up again, getting more frustrated and discussing those failures more intricately; I'll leave it up to anyone else to tell me if it gets better.
Example:
He can easily imagine, down to every individual turn of phrase, what tattle the members of Frankfurt society are telling behind his back. To stall his fiancée, and then to jilt her. Why does it matter to him what they say? Why this horror at standing up to their judgment? Why, when putting this distance between himself and them has failed to bring any relief, does he still feel the temptation: it is better to die than face that.
Ah: because their reproach confirms his own self-reproaches. Immorality! They do not know the meaning of the word. But he knows. To fail to pay life the debt it demands, and the living what they are compelled to demand; to feel truly alive only when one is writing . . . These ghastly six months in Wedekind's home. In some secret sense they had been for him an indescribable holiday: his condition forbade him even so much as to think about writing. In the nearness to death this compulsion to write falls away. One lives simply in order to live. Now, how could that idea be expressed?
One really ought to think about something else.
This is an irritatingly psychologically-minded critical essay with delusions of being fiction. There are footnotes. Who is Wedekind? What was Der Prinz von Homburg? To which of Kleist's letters does this passage make reference? But you don't care, because no one talks, thinks or lives like this, not in 1979, not in 1804, no writer ever, no place on earth. What competent novelist doesn't know that? Writers don't have writerly thoughts: they shit, they go to the grocery store, they wake up late and groggy and off their game. Sehnsucht is notoriously unstable as a state of mind.
I thought Wolf's Kassandra had its moments, but I couldn't get into it in the end: it seemed to be trying so hard, so disingenuously, to determine the reader's reaction to the thoughts and ideas and words of every character— in fiction this is, I think, fatal. Fiction is what you write when you don't have an agenda. You can write perfectly good, perfectly beautiful, persuasive essays, without requiring your readers to buy into the contingency and opacity of imaginary people with imaginary thoughts to get your point. The only decent piece of author-biographical fiction I can think of is Büchner's Lenz, which is a masterpiece, written out of obvious and unfathomable sympathy with its subject. Do any of you know any others?
I suppose it's too much to ask that Mel Gibson's next project be the film version of Blood Meridian.
(UPDATE: Or Salammbô! Even better!)
I went down to the Stanford library and was as happy as a lark.
But larks need to eat. They also need to sleep. And then they need more books books books books books
(Thank you, Florida Center for Instructional Technology, for having the only image of a lark I could find in the public domain. There is some poignant lesson here about remoteness and access, I'm sure.)
The French press coffee pot is a delicate instrument, requiring old-fashioned care and vigilance. You must not grind the coffee too fine; you must stir the grounds into the water, before and after pressing down with the plunger, to obtain a proper and homogeneous suspension; you must rinse the pot and its plunger well. With what do you stir the coffee in the pot? With a spoon. And, while you wait for the coffee to brew before stirring it again, what do you do with the spoon?
The pot itself has no answer. The spoon ends up covered in coffee grounds and if you set it on the counter it will make a mess. Where can you set a spoon covered in coffee grounds? Where? In a bowl? On a napkin? Must you rinse the spoon twice in order to set it down?
A brain in need of coffee is not a brain that can easily solve problems with spoons. But at some point I located a little soy-sauce dish (I think) and I took to setting the coffee spoon in the dish. "Look, Paul," I said, "a dish. We can put the spoon in the dish." He glanced at the dish and, after determining that it had nothing to do with novels, dissertations, Chopin or money, most likely thought: "J. is pointing at a dish. Also, there might be coffee soon."
Some time after that I noticed a mess on the toaster. "Paul," I said, "can we schedule a time for me to train you with the coffee spoon?" Ho ho ho, great merriment, etc. I left the house and, when I came home three hours later, saw a familiar sight. I wondered if it would be polite to leave a note; then I saw the magnetic alphabet and the magnetic poetry set.
The lesson here is that Paul is able to stay focused on important tasks, whereas I get bizarrly distracted by the coffee spoon. I don't think there is any other lesson.
Two girls, or women, talking loud and fast about the crush of downtown shopping, the lameness of the men in San Francisco, a crowded "lounge" ("you can lounge, but there are like 40 people on top of you"). Soon talk turned to blogs: one of their friends had been forced by "her CEO" to keep a daily work blog, for which they both expressed scorn.
1: There's this girl at Harvard who was keeping, like, a Harvard sex blog.
2: Omg really? What house was she in?
1: (ponders) Mather.
2: Did she, like, write about parties and stuff?
1: Well, no, it was about her, like about the guys she had sex with. But then, I don't know, she got to her second year and had to work harder in school so now she mostly posts about her homework.
2: Blah, that's lame. "Harvard Study Blog" -- who's going to read that?
Here the train halted at the Powell station. Was Powell their station? It was. They hurried off; we stayed on until Civic Center, because we were going to see Hilary Hahn.
Damn it, does no one have the requisite poison ink to satirize this generation? Are interest and distance now entirely incompatible? Is it because there's so much cuddly satire now, not meant to instruct, and so much hostile satire, also not meant to instruct, that the best sort has vanished?
All unanswerable questions, as usual. Your source for. I'll admit that my interest-distance ratio is really too low, but surely someone could do this. Someone on Vox, even! Someone.
Everyone seems to love Walter Benjamin. Why do so few people emulate him? Is there simply nowhere to write that kind of essay anymore? Why is he so few people's precursor?
A perennially fun subject for seminar papers. You run into some odd things.
I still, for all I try, can't picture Charles Baudelaire sitting in a café reading an American book in English. My impression of 19th-century French chauvinism needs some refinement.
