Posts (page 2)

My little digital camera isn't much good for birding: to get a really good photo I'd probably have to set the timer and embed it in a block of suet in the backyard.  For the most part this is all right, because my schedule and daily habits aren't much good for birding either.  But occasionally unusual things happen, like the arrival of a flock of cedar waxwings in the backyard.  I got up this morning and saw a few of them near the fig tree through the kitchen window, but before I'd gotten to the end of wondering if I should go get the— , they had flown off.  Unsurprising.  But they came back an hour later in greater numbers and I decided, even after certain people had mocked me for my series of "photos of little faraway blurry birds in Europe," to try to capture the event.  And lo, in a couple of these pictures, you can even maybe see distinguishing features!  (Images may also contain sparrows, towhees, and other common backyard denizens.)

Something about literature and irrationality.  Irrational authors, irrational subjects, irrational novels.  Are there rational novels?  There are "novels of ideas," although the ideas are not so often good.  Representations of philosophy, of ratiocination, of remotely successful quests for knowledge in fiction are somewhat rare.  Although intelligence is one of the preeminent virtues of our time, people rarely take it on as a subject, because it cannot be shown

Okay, new question: why am I such a fucking idiot?

The graduate student in literature as idiot

Blindness and stupidity among critics

The uselessness of anecdote

Thinking as terrible

Okay, to the point, narrowing the problem:

Problematizing the nonexistence of common ground between Spanish and German literature oh no, wait!:

Self-deception in Cervantes and Kafka or actually

Self-deception in every goddamn novel ever written

Self-deception in graduate programs

Self-deception in time management

Okay, that's good.  I guess I'll have to switch to psychology.

One of my favorite passages in all literature, from Bachmann's "Among Murderers and Madmen" (Unter Mördern und Irren).  I have liberally amended Michael Bullock's translation, in consultation with the original German text, to give it the requisite... fury.

"It seems to me that there is no solution whatever in this world.  We grapple with life and aren't once able to clarify* this dim little situation for ourselves, and before us others have grappled with it, have managed to clarify nothing and have run to ruin, they were victims or executioners, and the deeper one descends into time the more impassable it becomes, I often feel completely lost in history, don't know where I can hang my heart, on which parties, groups, forces, for one can make out an infamous law that governs everything.  And one can always merely be on the side of the victims, but that leads nowhere, they don't show us any way."

"That's the terrible thing," cried Friedl, "the victims, the many, many victims show no way whatsoever.  And for the murderers times change.  The victims are the victims.  That's all.  My father was a victim of the Dollfuss period, my grandfather a victim of the Monarchy, my brothers victims of Hitler, but that doesn't help me, do you understand what I mean?  They simply fell down, were run over, were shot, put against the wall, little people who didn't have many opinions or thoughts.  Well yes, two or three of them thought a bit, my grandfather thought of the coming Republic, but tell me, what for?  Could it not have come without that death?  And my father thought of social democracy, but tell me, who can claim his death, surely not our Workers' Party that wants to win the elections.  It needs no death for that.  Not for that.  Jews were murdered because they were Jews, they were only victims, so many victims— but surely not so that today, finally, one can tell one's children that they're people?  A bit late, don't you think?  No, that's what no one understands, that the victims serve no purpose!  That's exactly what no one understands and so it bothers no one that these victims have to get it for the sake of insights.  Those insights just aren't needed.  Who here doesn't know that one should not kill?  That's been known for two thousand years.  Is another word to be wasted over that?  Oh, but in Haderer's last speech there is plenty of talk about it, there it has just been discovered, he balls up Humanity in his mouth, quotes the classics, quotes the Church Fathers and the latest metaphysical platitudes.  But that's crazy.  How can a person make a speech about that?  It's absolutely insane or wicked.  Who are we that we must be told such things?"

* aufklären, same root as the German word for "Enlightenment"— get it?— but "enlighten" didn't work grammatically for me here.  Can you enlighten a situation?  You can enlighten people.  You can enlighten yourself about a situation.  Sigh.

What passes for "seminar paper planning and research" around here is occasionally risible, but I had the best of intentions when I began, and only hours later did I end up fishing around for details about Harold Bloom's 2002 Catalonia International Prize.  I note with great chagrin that the prize of 80,000 euros was then valued at $75,000— I mean, chagrin on Bloom's behalf, of course, for not getting it 5 years later.

[Also, I am craving, craving blueberry pie.  But that is of no importance.]

Ahem.  Another article (pdf) mentions that Bloom includes half a dozen Catalan authors in his reading list appendix to The Western Canon.  Who knew there was an appendix?  Who knows why we have a copy of The Western Canon in the house?  To the bookshelf I go.  The appendix amounts to 39 pages or so, comprising a "Western canon" that only really completely excludes East Asia, for incomprehensible reasons— the Hindu sacred texts are there; Mahmud Darwish, Ngugi, Chinua Achebe, Narayan and Naipaul and Rushdie and CLR James, the Qu'ran, the Thousand and One Nights, a ton of Latin American and Caribbean literature, but not a jot from China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Tibet, or their diasporas... baffling.  I guess it is all Too Far East.  (I was actually going to say here that reading the list was a disorienting experience, in perfect innocence, but the pun is stronger than I am.)

But in any case: quibbling about what should or shouldn't be on the list— Chernyshevsky's What is to be Done? and not Grossman's Life and Fate?!: voilá, Harold Bloom has killed culture— misses an important point, which is that anyone who actually tried to read all these books would go insane.  This is not a canon with an individual reader in mind; it's more like a vote for the books that should be in the library at all.  I know it's a cliché, but unread books aren't good for much, and these days I'm happy to hear that anyone not actually in a literature program wants to read even three of the Western Classix.  If they can read ten— great!  Greeeat!  Literacy!  And how long is this cliché going to hold?  It certainly shows no sign of dying out.  There are ways to make the library a more appealing place, and to draw more people into it, but if I have to choose between reading and library planning, I'll choose reading— although it is beginning to seem less elitist or imperialist or choose-your-adjective and more simply, eccentrically, quietistic.  I would like to know how many people have been inspired by Azar Nafisi to read Lolita.  I can't imagine there are many.

The six Catalan authors, incidentally, are Carles Ribá, J.V. Foix, Pere Gimferrer (all Selected Poems), Joan Perucho (Natural History), Merce Rodoreda (The Time of the Doves), and Salvador Espriu (La Pell de Brau: Poems).  No Tirant lo Blanc or Ramón Llull, I'm afraid.  Of these, I can only vouch for Espriu in Spanish translation: it is godhead; it made me tear up in class.  And, um, yes, um, it made me want to learn Catalan, a little bit.  I'm not sure what made me want the pie, which I am still visualizing, however: eidetic pie?  Pie-dos?  Alas, there are no blueberries in this cave.

Rilke writes in a letter, according to Heidegger (Poetry, Language, Thought p. 130):

We are the bees of the invisible.  Nous butinons éperdument le miel du visible, pour l'accumuler dans la grande ruche d'or de l'Invisible." (We ceaselessly gather the honey of the visible, to store it up in the great golden beehive of the Invisible.)

I hate to unweave the rainbow here, but bees don't, um, gather honey.  They make honey.  That is why honey is associated with bees.  If bees could gather honey, then Man with his Technology could probably find a way to gather honey without.... oh, forget it.  Wozu Dichter?  Well, if this essay makes anything clear, it's that skill with figurative language is small stakes.  I guess that's what I tell the class.  In Spanish.

to sign up for this presentation on Heidegger and poetry, because I sit down and read the first line of the essay that refers to Hölderlin's "Brod und Wein" and immediately put down the Heidegger and run to the shelf to read "Brod und Wein" again, and half of it makes me delirious, and then I page through the bilingual edition of Hamburger translations to "Häefte [sic] des Lebens" ("The Middle of Life"):

Mit gelben Birnen hänget
Und voll mit wilden Rosen
Das Land in den See,
Ihr holden Schwäne,
Und trunken von Küssen
Tunkt ihr das Haupt
Ins heilignüchterne Wasser.

Weh mir, wo nehm' ich, wenn
Es Winter ist, die Blumen, und wo
Den Sonnenschein
Und Schatten der Erde?
Die Mauern stehn
Sprachlos und kallt, im Winde
Klirren die Fahnen.

With yellow pears the land,
And full of wild roses,
Hangs down into the lake,
O graceful swans,
And drunk with kisses,
You dip your heads
Into the hallowed-sober water.

Alas, where shall I find when
Winter comes, flowers, and where
Sunshine,
And the shadows of earth?
The walls stand
Speechless and cold, in the wind
Weathercocks clatter. (tr. Michael Hamburger, pp. 158-59)

Now these are, I think, pyrotechnics not always on display in Hölderlin: his work is not all jaw-dropping.  But this astounded me when I read it seven or eight years ago, as now, and on both occasions I wanted immediately to share it with everyone.  I think it is pure genius, and I don't know what else to say.  Perhaps that isn't good pedagogy.  Probably not, and therein lies the problem: presentations in graduate seminars are basically cakewalks, stage fright notwithstanding, but I somehow have to work outwards from this core of my engagement with poetry to explicating Heidegger.  In Spanish, did I mention that?  In Spanish.  Maybe I'll just bring in "En la noche escura" and read that and be done with it.  Maybe I'll talk about secularization in Europe.  Maybe, as I did Wednesday, I will just bewilder most of the class; I could talk for 5 minutes and leave 25 for Q & A.

I should have brought my camera to the massive UC Press sidewalk sale, to show you how a town like this responds to a clearance on academic titles.  But it was early, I hadn't had my coffee, and I was chiefly concerned with my own acquisitions.

Perk

2 comments

It's eclectic, as always.  Emphasis on art and film reveals my growing worries about the importance of visual media in literary studies; the book at the bottom, Germany in Transit, was the best score.  My housemate contented himself with three titles.  He was in the minority.  The staff was handing out boxes to grad students who mumbled things about poverty and staggered away with their chimeras.

I came home to Berkeley to find that the TLS had sold my address to the New Criterion.  I assume that's why "Hilton Kramer & Roger Kimball: The New Criterion" is trying to sell me a subscription, anyway: "the Times Literary Supplement (London)" is quoted as saying, "As a critical periodical, The New Criterion is probably more consistently worth reading than any other magazine in English."

And let's not forget Mark Steyn, Harvey Mansfield, William F. Buckley Jr., Robert Bork, Keith Windschuttle, John Derbyshire, John Keegan... you never know who will appear in our pages.

Well... actually, that gives me some idea, guys.  If it's "K & K's New Criterion," can we call it the Kakanion for short?  I think I'd rather have seventypes' pest problems.

So during the first of my two campus visits, I went to a Q&A with current grad students in the program.  The questions eventually slowed to a trickle.  Suddenly I thought of a good one, and raised my hand.  Yes?  "Do you guys have enough time to read?" I asked.  It sowed general confusion.  Did I mean, time to do the class reading?  I shook my head.  Or, like, reading novels for pleasure?  Light reading?  I shook my head again, and gave up.

What I meant was this: suppose you are assigned a short essay by a late 20th-century theorist who refers extensively to, say, Brecht's Kleine Organon für das Theater, and you have no idea where he or she is coming from, so you go in search of the Brecht and discover that it is indeed klein and you can polish it off in an evening.  Now, having read the Brecht, you think you understand a little more and it may be time to tackle Benjamin's essay, "What is Epic Theater?", which seemed gnomic and mysterious the last time you read it.  Do you have time to do that reading?  That is, do you have time to learn more than you're required to by others— because no professor can ever give you the complete story, unless it's a semester course on Hermann Hesse or something you do not want— and to learn enough to answer your own questions?  Do you have time to read as much as you need?

My answer for this program, so far, is no.  There is no time whatsoever to do outside reading.  There is a little time to do the course reading.  There is a tiny bit of time beyond that to eat dark chocolate chipotle almonds, and about 13.5 minutes left over for the blog each week.  I think I'm over this week's limit here already.

The Iberian Lynx is critically endangered and ridiculously cute.  Its survival heretofore suggests that it's normally more of a danger to rabbits than that picture implies.  ("Camadas" probably means "litters" -- cama is the Spanish word for bed.)  Photo archive here.  Maybe I can go conserve the Iberian Lynx this summer, on the pretext of improving my Spanish and, er, studying eco-criticism?

Lince y roman: Goya, gatitos, y la mirada del escritor. [Lynx & novel: Goya, kittens, and the gaze of the writer]