A new reason I’ll miss David Foster Wallace
Here are the concluding paragraphs from his short talk, “Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness From Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed,” in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays:
What Kafka’s stories have . . . is a grotesque, gorgeous, and thoroughly modern complexity, an ambivalence that becomes the multivalent Both/And logic of the, quote, “unconscious,” which I personally think is just a fancy word for soul. Kafka’s humor–not only not neurotic but anti-neurotic, heroically sane, is, finally, a religious humor, but religious in the manner of Kierkegaard and Rilke and the Psalms, a harrowing spirituality against which even Ms. [Flannery] O’Connor’s bloody grace seems a little bit easy, the souls at stake pre-made.
And it is this, I think, that makes Kafka’s wit inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance. It’s not that students don’t “get” Kafka’s humor but that we’ve taught them to see humor as something you get–the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It’s hard to put into words, up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell [students] that maybe it’s good they don’t “get” Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his stories as all about a kind of door. To envision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door opens . . . and it opens outward–we’ve been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komish. (64-65)
Great moments in archaeological deduction
“We know they were there because they were remarkably messy.”
–Thomas Gilbert, University of Copenhagen
Dear clusterflock
I come seeking advice and counsel . . .
I’m in the market for an in-town bicycle. Because I’ll be on sabbatical this coming fall, I’ll be giving it a try as my fair-weather transportation till winter sets in for real in November; if it goes well, I’ll be using it as commuter transport in the spring. Home to work is 11 miles one way. The streets on my route aren’t in the best of shape.
$200 is my upper limit. Sturdiness is paramount. What bikes should I look at/stay away from?
Dear Clusterflock
(As per this) Have you ever made an unfortunate choice for a first-date movie?
I’ll start: In high school, I took a young lady to see Ordinary People. That was the last date, too . . .
“Owning” vs. “licensing;” or, will e-bookworms gnaw our entrails?
Over at Crooked Timber, John Holbo has a post on some questions Kindle raises regarding “ownership.” First, he quotes from Kindle’s owner’s agreement:
You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.
And then . . .
I am annoyed to think that I might pay almost full price for a book that I don’t technically own. I’m just ‘licensing’.
Sheila earns the ’Flock a hat-tip . . .
. . . and from Andrew Sullivan, no less!
Kudos, Ms. Ryan. And watch out, Clusterflock servers, wherever you are.
Did Unitarianism become too dogmatic for someone?
Dudeism.com: The Church of the Latter-Day Dude
(via Winston of Nobody Asked . . .)
Squid pro quo
Briefly Quoted. “Do you think she could talk sexy so I can pinch my squid? … Obama has cute ears.”
— An unidentified rogue caller on a media conference call with campaign staffers for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) on Wednesday, talking dirty before the moderator cut him off.
from Roll Call, via The Plank (Note: the comments are worth the read; this post’s title is lifted from one of them; also, look for williamyard’s contributions)
Y’all
Crooks and Liars–yes, that Crooks and Liars–actually linked to a post of mine today. Here you go.
I’m more stunned than anything else.
Detroit Octane (Ba)racks the house
“Barack Obama-sistible”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPLtotzqH0M[/youtube]
And . . . because you KNOW you want to know . . .
“The Making of ‘Barack Obama-sistible’”:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2-sRGIk5SE[/youtube]
I think the primary season has officially jumped the shark.
“Area codes”
* “Ludacris heavily favors the East Coast to the West, save for Seattle, San Francisco, Sacramento, and Las Vegas.”
* “Ludacris travels frequently along the Boswash corridor.”
* “There is a ‘ho belt‘ phenomenon nearly synonymous with the ‘Bible Belt’.”
* “Ludacris has hoes in the entire state of Maryland.”
* “Ludacris has a disproportionate ho-zone in rural Nebraska. He might favor white women as much as he does black women, or perhaps, girls who farm.”
* “Ludacris’s ideal ‘ho-highway’ would be I-95.”
* “Ludacris has hoes in the Midway and Wake Islands. Only scientists are allowed to inhabit the Midway Islands, and only military personnel may inhabit the Wake Islands. Draw your own conclusion.”
(That last one sounds like a parody of an entry on Chuck Norris Facts)
(Via Strange Maps, by way of Matthew Yglesias)
in which a flocker imitates Rosanne Rosannadanna
Remember this?
Well . . .
(But surely, Sheila et al., we can continue perpetuating the “Swedish Imperialists!” meme.)
They yclep us doormats . . .
Two Danish academics, Klaus Kjöller of the University of Copenhagen and Tröls Mylenberg of the University of Southern Denmark, conducted a thorough analysis of the names used in the IKEA catalog. They concluded that the Swedish names are reserved for the “better” products, and that even Norwegian names manage to make it into the bed department. But the “lesser” products bear Danish names like “Roskilde” and “Köge.”…Upholstered furniture, bookcases and multimedia consoles, for example, are named after small Swedish cities, while Norwegian towns serve as the namesakes of beds, dressers and hallway furniture. Names of Finnish origin grace the company’s chairs and dining tables. As it turns out, nothing is random at IKEA. “Doormats and runners, as well as inexpensive wall-to-wall carpeting are third-class, if not seventh-class, items when it comes to home furnishings,” Kjöller is quoted as saying in Nyhedsavisen, a Danish free paper. The stuff that goes on the floor, Kjöller said, is about as low as it gets. He accused the home furnishings company of “Swedish imperialism.”
(from Org Theory, via Law and Letters)
Um . . .
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9NUPLaoUdo[/youtube]
Isle of Lucy
“And over here, sir, is the lovely, secluded Vitameatavegamin Cove.”
(Go here for context.)
“Be nice”
Thanks to Andrew’s Fry & Laurie post below, I browsed around a bit and found . . .
[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=XdRfhARwGoI[/youtube]
Neill Cumpston reviews Grindhouse
Some of you may remember Cumpston’s spot-on critique of The Return of the King. So who do you want reviewing Tarantino and Rodriguez? Pauline Kael?
That’s what I thought.
First 300 and now this? I think the summer of 2007 just went, “Hey, let me take you to a free taquito buffet” and you eat all these taquitos and then the summer goes, “Here comes a foot to your stomach”, but you go, “It’s full of taquitos” but it’s too late – there’s a boot in your stomach only the boot is really a motorcycle and you puke up a bikini girl who blows you and then kills your boss with a hammer.
That’s what GRINDHOUSE is. It’s a taquito buffet that you puke up after getting hit with a motorcycle, and it turns into a bikini chick that blows you and kills your boss with a hammer.
Rodriguez and Tarantino probably don’t read this site, but someone should tell them they can use that last paragraph as a quick blurb.
(link)
Trailer for Rififi (1955)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv-JWH8S6Z4[/youtube]
A remake of this film, starring Al Pacino in the title role, is now in production.
More here
Kenzaburo Oe in “The Art of Fiction,” The Paris Review
From interview no. 195 (Winter 2007):
When I was in my twenties, my mentor Jazuo Watanabe told me that because I was not going to be a teacher or a professor of literature, I would need to study by myself. I have two cycles: a five-year rotation, which centers on a specific writer or thinker; and a three-year rotation on a particular theme. I have been doing that since I was twenty-five. I have had more than a dozen of the three-year periods. When I am working on a single theme, I often spend from morning to evening reading. I read everything written by that writer and all of the scholarship on that writer’s work.
If I am reading something in another language, say Eliot’s Four Quartets, I spend the first three months reading a section such as “East Coker” over and over again in English until I have it memorized. Then I find a good translation in Japanese and memorize that. Then I go back and forth between the two — the original in English and the Japanese translation — until I feel I am in a spiral that consists of the English text, the Japanese text, and myself. From there Eliot emerges.
INTERVIEWER
It’s interesting that you include academic scholarship and literary theory in your reading cycles. In America, literary criticism and creative writing are, for the most part, mutually exclusive.
OE
I respect scholars most of all. Although they struggle in a narrow space, they find truly creative ways of reading certain authors. To a novelist who thinks broadly, such insight gives a sharper way of comprehending an author’s work.
When I read scholarship on Blake or Yeats or Dante, I read it all and I pay attention to the accumulation of differences between scholars. That’s where I learn the most. Every few years a new scholar puts out a book on Dante, and each scholar has his or her own approach or method. I follow each scholar and study that way for a year. Then I follow another scholar for about a year, and so on.
[snip]
iNTERVIEWER
It sounds like when you travel you spend most of your time in your hotel room reading.
OE
Yes, that’s right. I do some sightseeing, but I have no interest in good food. I like drinking, but I don’t like going to bars because I get in fights.
Pyongyang as virtual space
Fiction Pyongyang, curated by Joseph Grima together with Stefano Boeri and Armin Linke
Pyongyang’s sinister landscapes are not to be quickly dismissed as the tangible proof of the existence of a “kingdom of evil.” As we pointed out, one can perceive something familiar in them, an eerie familiarity to an eye accustomed to the imagery of western science fiction. It’s as though in the aftermath of the 1952 bombing of Pyongyang (an entire city razed to the ground seven years after Hiroshima and Dresden — have we all forgotten?), someone like George Orwell or Ridley Scott decided to create, without a hint of irony, Western culture’s worst dystopia. It is impossible to remain indifferent to the bizarre collection of architectural caricatures built by the North Korean nomenklatura. They created a city populated by automata unable to exercise their free will, the incarnation of an isolated absolute regime that is nevertheless capable of unscrupulous recourse to the symbolic language of Western democracies. –from an interview with Stefano Boeri in Artkrush
I know next to nothing about the capital of North Korea, but hey–that describes, quite literally, just about everyone else in the world, too. Finally, a subject on which the vast, vast majority of people can be equally knowledgeable.
Some cases in point: Via Andrew Sullivan, this article in Esquire about the focal point of much of the video above, the uncompleted Ryugyong Hotel. As you can see, it looks like the Dark Lord Sauron’s idea of a destination hotel. The article reveals that this building is regarded by the government as being so hideous (not to mention embarrassingly uncompleted) that it regularly airbrushes it out of its photos of the Pyongyang skyline.
The Esquire article led me to Ryugyong.org, a site where visitors can (or could because, analogously to the hotel, it’s no longer being supported) claim space in a 3-D model of the building and install projects of their own design in that space. The idea is reminiscent of Second Life–but, again, it’s curious that this site’s space is like that of the hotel it’s modeled on. It’s fun to speculate that Pyongyang just has that effect on those who deign to engage with it, even in the blogosphere.
And finally there is the site I visited a couple of years ago which first piqued my curiosity about Pyongyang, this unofficial site describing the Pyongyang Metro. The first two paragraphs from the “Statistics” page are actually pretty typical–read closely and ponder the implications of what it’s saying:
The Pyongyang Metro consists of two public lines, north-south Chollima (named for a mythical flying horse, the Korean Pegasus) and east-west Hyoksin (Renovation); there are also believed to be other undisclosed lines for government use. The total length of the public system is probably around 22.5 km, of which the Chollima line is about 12 km and the Hyoksin line about 10. Like most North Korean statistics, this figure may be inaccurate, as it has been reported since the mid-1980s, and may not include the nearly 2 km between Ponghwa and Puhung, opened in 1987; if this is so the system is approximately 24 km. Some sources claim 34 km, of which the Chollima line is 14 km and the Hyoksin line 20 km, however this figure may be arrived at by adding the original 24 km mentioned above and a planned 10-km extension to Mangyongdae, and thus likely does not refer to the system’s current length.
And, further down the same page:
Maps of the system are not widely distributed, and physical locations of stations are not marked on street maps; the brochure “The Pyongyang Metro” does not include one. . . . As an economy measure [due to chronic electricity shortages], the entire service is said to close on the first Monday of each month, and perhaps more often. Station lights are dim or switched off altogether, and many sources report that trains in tunnels are often caught by power cuts, forcing passengers to wait in the darkness, sometimes for hours. Indeed, whether the Metro is in regular service at all is not entirely certain. Practically the only non-North Korean eyewitnesses to Metro use are the visitors given the showcase ride on the system.
I have no big wind-up to all this, aside from the obvious: all cities have their own character, but beyond that they are all the same in that they are inarguably public spaces, a heteroglossic space whose meaning is contested (at times happily, at times less so) by various state and community interests. Those notions are so familiar as to go unremarked . . . unless or until one bumps into a place like Pyongyang.
(Cross-posted at Blog Meridian)
Picture of the day
Barack Obama at a roundtable, Charleston, SC, January 25th (via)
No point to this, except: What a great photo.
Follow the link to see some good suggestions for captions.
See the archives . . .
The archives of Cormac McCarthy, below, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, have been bought for $2 million by the Southwestern Writers Collection of Texas State University-San Marcos, The Associated Press reported. The university said the archives included correspondence, notes, drafts and proofs of 11 novels by Mr. McCarthy, 74, who won the Pulitzer for his 2006 novel, “The Road,” and a 1992 National Book Award for “All the Pretty Horses.”
(link, via private correspondence)
Texas State University (nee Southwest Texas State University) is where I earned my masters; the Southwestern Writers’ Collection was just getting started when I graduated, so I’m feeling especially proud to know this.
Bang a drum
(via)
The intricacies of political strategizing
From here. If/when the time comes to write the Clinton political obituary, it’s hard to imagine a better one than this:
[Internal Clinton staff meeting]
Bill Clinton: “We need a shot in the arm. You hear me boys? In the goddamn arm! Election held tomorrw, that son of bitch Obama would win it in a walk!”
Mark Penn: “Well he’s the change candidate, sir.”
Hillary Clinton: “Yeah.”
Mark Penn: “A lot of people like that change. Maybe we should get us some.”
Bill Clinton: “I’ll change you, you soft-headed son of a bitch. How we gonna run change when we’re running on experience? Is that the best idea you boys can come up with? Change?! Weepin’ jesus on the cross. That’s it! You may as well start drafting her concession speech right now.”
(For the record, I am pulling for Obama, but I personally thought Hillary did well last night–I think it’s the first time I’ve seen her emotionally invested in the race. And Edwards was very impressive as well. I’m not an anyone-but-Hillary guy; I’ll be happy with whoever won the nomination)
She loves you, and she’s buying a stairway to heaven
Meet the Beatnix, Australia’s preeminent Beatles’ tribute band:
(via)