Long Sunday

Tyger and Becoming-Artifical

Hi.  I'm Tharmas, but I listed my username as Roger Whitson.  I've been fascinated by this film short from Brazilian filmmakers Guilherme Marcondes and Andrezza Valentin for almost a year without knowing precisely what to do with it:

Stephen Burt in n+1, Number 4

Excerpted from the symposium on "American Writing Today:"

Whom should more poets follow, or at least contemplate? Again, in poetry: George Herbert, Christopher Smart, pre-1937 W.H. Auden, Basil Bunting, Donald Davie, James K. Baxter, post-1964 Robert Lowell. Among living writers, maybe Thylias Mass, Juan Felipe Herrera, Laura Kasischke, Liz Waldner. In poetry criticism: William Empson, Donald Davie.

What current modes clog the pipeline and tire me out? (1) Quasi-automatic writing and a kind of comic quasi-surrealism, especially when the author wants to be winning, funny, "entertaining," and shocking at the same time. (2) Slack free-verse autobiography; chatty anecdote without interesting form. (3) Endless zeroxes of '50s formalist poems, copies of Anthony Hecht and Howard Nemerov. (4) "Spirituality," which, pursued as a primary goal, tends to make poems sound like bad translations.

Most poets today are writing either for a coterie of readers they know personally, who want to participate in the social circulation of new work (rather than in the rereading of old work), or else (in part) for an academic market in which the more you publish (as long as it's in semiprestigious venues), the more your chances for tenure and promotion.

Both paradigns encourage overproduction. Younger poets, in particular, seem to rush things, to make public ten pounds of cookie dough when, had they waited, they might have had five pounds of tasty cookies. I don't know what any of us can do about that, and for certain poets whose work is supposed to sound "raw" (such as Kasischke and Waldner) that may not even amount to a disadvantage.

Anything you can do 100 times in 100 poems without learning a new trick isn't worth doing more than twice. Sense is harder than nonesense; order is harder than disorder. But, as Stevens said, "A great disorder is an order"; as Dickenson said, "Much madness is divinest sense / To a discerning eye."

Something by Caleb Crain, somewhat less memorable, followed.

Strong Beliefs, Weakly Held

(Yet another shameless cross-posting from I Cite)

In a critique of Scott Eric Kaufman's draft paper on the history of theory in literary studies (which I haven't read; I recommend, though, the terrific discussion over at Rough Theory)  Eileen Joy rightly draws attention to Stephen White's discussion of weak ontology. Indeed, to my mind, Scott's emphasis (as channeled by N. Pepperell) on "an aggressive commitment to strong beliefs, weakly held" is more akin to William Connolly's ethos of pluralization and commitment to the cultivation of an ethos of generosity (White discusses Connolly's work in detail in Sustaining Affirmation; White's notion of weak ontology in fact draws heavily from Connolly and attempts to mediate between Connolly's Deleuze-indebted 'immanent naturalism' and the work of other political theorists--in particular, Charles Taylor, Judith Butler, and George Kateb).

Is this interesting primarily as a matter of academic pedantry or turf warfare (along the lines of "gee, political theorists have already been talking about this for quite a while")? Perhaps. But there could be more at stake. Differently put, that Connolly has worked out these notions in several books that have been the subject of sustained discussion among political theorists for the last decade might shed light on potential ramifications of an "aggressive commitment to strong beliefs weakly held" (it is also likely that the disciplinary difference here is significant--Scott says that literary theorists are more interested in imagined worlds; political theorists, for all our engagement with ideals, remain imbricated in this one, for better or worse). Here are a few possibilities:

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.

rewriting the Introduction to Theory's Empire

The "Introduction" to Theory's Empire fails to confront its object. It is a mishmash; an intellectual muddle. It is not the best effort conceivable by a long shot. I could write a much better Introduction than they did, and I think their whole point sucks. And then some of the articles that follow!

theory's empire: the intro

Our book does not propose a return to an ideal past (nonexistent, in any case) of literary studies. Nor do we support a retrogressive or exclusivist view of a canon, classics, traditions, or conventions (the predictable charges hurled against critics of Theory). p. 7

Soon after the above, the introduction's authors provide a brief history leading to the development of Literary Theory.

dualism in phlosophy

Everyone is familiar, even if they haven't come across this particular quotation from Rorty, with the comment that Western metaphysics is grounded in 'dualisms.'

'Platonism'...refers to a set of philosophical distinctions (appearance-reality, matter-mind, made-found, sensible-intellectual, etc.): what Dewey called a 'brood and nest of dualisms.'These dualisms dominate the history of Western philosophy, and can be traced back to one or another passage in Plato's writings. Dewey thought, as I do, that the vocabulary which centers around these traditional distinctions has become an obstacle to our social hopes. (Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, xii)

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.

so as not to ruin

But Benjamin wrote for quotation, his style is geared to it, and it rose to method for him as aphorism had for Nietzsche...'What mattered to him above all was to avoid anything that might be reminiscent of empathy, as though a given subject of investigation had a message in readiness which easily communicated itself, or could be communicated, to the reader or spectator:   "No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener"'      (The Task of the Translator)

-Stochastic Bookmark, on Walter Benjamin (by way of Lindsay Waters and CI).

The Value of "Theory"

The issue of the theoretical enterprise in the social sciences and the humanities has been both central and marginal to the discussion thus far.  Central insofar as all the contributions and comments have oriented themselves towards the question of "Theory" -- that is, what is the use of "Theory" and how should one make sense of "Theory" texts?  The problem of rendering sense to a strange text about value, complete with pictures and references to ostensibly long-dead debates, has pre-occupied nearly everyone.  I say "pre-occupied" in a literal: we haven't yet gotten on to the real occupation of the symposium.  Or have we?  And this is the sense of marginal.  While "Theory" has been central, it has only had a shadowy, rhetorical existence.  People on one side characterize the other side as being "anti-Theory" and the "anti-Theory-ists" return accusations in which the ostensibly supporters of "Theory" are unable to recognize themselves.  Put another way, those who propose a critique of "Theory" cannot ever hit their targets because those who defend "Theory" do not recognize themselves in the critique because their alliance is elsewhere: to "Continental philosophy" or some such.