Long Sunday

the worst book you ever read

Here's material for a meme, no doubt: what was the worst book you ever read, and why?

A quick search around the web, however, turns up several lists of notoriously bad films (e.g. Wikipedia's "Films considered the worst ever"), and indeed there's an annual award for bad films, the Razzies, but I can't immediately find anything similar for fiction.

There is the Bad Sex in Fiction Award; and also the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest, "wretched writers welcome." But nothing for entire books, so far as I can see.

playmobil / brecht

The first in a series of great moments in literature acted out by my daughter's * Playmobil guys.

Bertolt Brecht, “Changing the Wheel”

I sit by the roadside
The driver changes the wheel.
I do not like the place I have come from.
I do not like the place I am going to.
Why with impatience do I
Watch him changing the wheel.

* I say "my daughter's," but others in my household might well disagree. I am, after all, taking pictures of them acting out moments mentioned in my manuscript in progress. There's more to say - I really do feel like my time playing with this stuff when I was a kid might have had a major effect on my aesthetic and political bearings, the dissertation I wrote, the books that I am trying to write now. But that's for another post.... The next one - spoiler warning - will do the montage sequence ("comices agricoles") from Bovary...

In need of heroic readers (more than heroes)

"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone."

Some readers may have already seen Benjamin Kunkel's essay in the Sunday Book Review (bugmenot), in which he writes, among other things:

What Thoreau has to overcome during his time in the woods is not a lapse in mental health.  His great problem is to escape the mental health of his neighbors, their collection-plate opinions, their studious repetition of gossip.  Thoreau isn't against self-esteem (he admires a friend who has learned to "treat himself with ever increasing respect"); but his main task is to lose his esteem for society in which "trade curses everything it handles" and the singular natural resource of time is wasted in barren productivity.  Maybe he had vices out there in the woods, but that's not his concern, or ours.  The overwhelming impression is of his philosophical ardor, which he tries to fuse with his practical ardor.  There's not a note in the book of self-pity, or nostalgia.  And why did he quit his cabin in the end?  "It seemed to me that I had several more lives to live."   This accent of futurity is missing among contemporary memoirists.  They sigh over their past woes; sigh with relief now that they're better; or sigh the long sighs of nostalgia. 
(emphasis added)

Indeed, and not just among contemporary memoirists, but also American Presidents.

Anyway, I would like to concur with Marco Roth (another editor of n+1), that in the current marketplace of literature's ongoing infantilization, the legacy of the "heroic reader" may be one thing we can not afford to let alone. 

The paradox of the heroic reader is that she must actively distance herself from the sick world.  She must submerge herself, one might say, in the very limitless task, in the important and arresting and non-trivial stakes of reading, with all the terror–indeed, potential madness–this implies, but significantly in order to then re-enter society with both sincerity and sympathy, and with an attention–dare we call it philosophical–to living (zoe!) as opposed to mere endurance of the "safe" thrills of organized spectacle or pre-packaged experience.

Refusing to Engage

Reading Tronti has been somewhat of an experience.  Consequently, I'm not sure how to proceed with my comments because my reading of Tronti has alternated between fascination and boredom.  Perhaps these two responses to Tronti are closely related because, Tronti, who I've never read before, appears both as  new and sedimented.  Some of the ideas are quite familiar and in this respect we might speak of Tronti as an origin and thus an interesting spark of creativity, but, at the same time, his ideas have appeared over the past forty years in fragmented form, most notably in Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno. Fascination & boredom; new & old.

The Day After President's Day

Harvard University, in a post-President's Day gift to the world, announced today that the second most controversial President in the United States would resign from his position effective the end of the current the academic year.  While not quite as famous as the most controversial President in the United States, who has instituted a torture archipelago, a number of illegal wars, and even more illegal polices at home, Lawrence H. Summers is nonetheless widely -- and justifiably -- loathed for saying a number of really dumb things.  (More dumb things.) By resigning now, Summers dodges a second no-confidence vote by the members of the arts and sciences faculty, scheduled for February 28.

In his letter of resignation, Summers writes:

As fulfilling as they have been in many ways, these last years have not been without their strains and moments of rancor. After a period of sabbatical and reflection, I look forward to taking up the tasks of teaching and research at the University and to returning to my professional preoccupation with questions of national and international economic policy. In the meantime, I hope and trust that we will together move through the remainder of this academic year in a spirit of good will and constructive engagement with the work of the University.

I will treasure the continuing friendship and support of so many exceptional colleagues and students at Harvard. I will always be grateful for the opportunity to have served as Harvard's President.

More: Inside Higher Ed, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, New York Times, Chronicle of Higher Education.