Tweets
- Lana del Ray Weekend Update sketch = a courageous defense of mediocrity.
- Which would basically render snl obsolete.
- For all the bullshit Kickstarter projects out there, you would think we could get bill hader and Kristin wiig their own thing.
- My thoughts on I Just Want My Pants Back for @capitalnewyork
http://t.co/BZBgrelY - Prison Studies would make an okay band name. They could tour with Panopticon.
In Which I Discover New Depths
I saw this Charles Bukowski quote today on a piece of paper someone left by the printer:
An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.
And though I thought it wasn’t possible, I realized my loathing of that jackass had not yet reached its limit.
Pound’s Fecal Hell, Céline’s Shitty Utopia
Here’s a lengthy passage about defecating from Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932). Our narrator has just abandoned ship in New York and made his way to the city.
It just so happened just to one side of my bench there was a big hole in the sidewalk, something like the Metro at home. That hole seemed propitious, so vast, with a stairway all of pink marble inside it. I’d seen quite a few people from the street disappear into it and come out again. It was in that underground vault that they answered the call of nature. I caught on right away. The hall where the business was done was likewise of marble. A kind of swimming pool, but drained of all its water, a fetid swimming pool, filled only with filtered, moribund light, which fell on the forms of unbuttoned men surrounded by their smells, red in the face from the effect of expelling their stinking feces with barbarous noises from everyone.
Men among men, all free and easy, they laughed and joked and cheered one another on, it made me think of a football game. The first thing you did when you got there was to take off you jacket, as if in preparation for strenuous exercise. This was a rite and shirtsleeves were the uniform.
In that state of undress, belching and worse, gesticulating like lunatics, they settled down in the fecal grotto. The new arrivals were assailed with a thousand revolting jokes while descending the stairs from the street, but they all seemed delighted.
And so on! The shitting scene actually goes on for several more paragraphs in which we’re treated to a kind of comical version of Ezra Pound’s beloved (at least by me) “Canto XIV,” the shit canto. Here’s a good section:
Io venni in luogo d’ogni luce muto;
The stench of wet coal, politicians
. . . . . . . . . . e and. . . . . n, their wrists bound to
their ankles,
Standing bare bum,
Faces smeared on their rumps,
wide eye on flat buttock,
Bush hanging for beard,
Addressing crowds through their arse-holes,
Addressing the multitudes in the ooze,
newts, water-slugs, water-maggots,
And with them. . . . . . . r,
a scrupulously clean table-napkin
Tucked under his penis,
and. . . . . . . . . . . m
Who disliked colioquial language,
stiff-starched, but soiled, collars
circumscribing his legs,
The pimply and hairy skin
pushing over the collar’s edge,
Profiteers drinking blood sweetened with shit,
And behind them. . . . . . f and the financiers
lashing them with steel wires.And the betrayers of language
. . . . . . n and the press gang
And those who had lied for hire;
the perverts, the perverters of language,
the perverts, who have set money-lust
Before the pleasures of the senses;howling, as of a hen-yard in a printing-house,
the clatter of presses,
the blowing of dry dust and stray paper,
fretor, sweat, the stench of stale oranges,
dung, last cess-pool of the universe,
mysterium, acid of sulphur,
the pusillanimous, raging;
plunging jewels in mud,
and howling to find them unstained;
sadic mothers driving their daughters to bed with decrepitude,
sows eating their litters,
and here the placard ΕΙΚΩΝ ΓΗΣ,
and here: THE PERSONNEL CHANGES
Ok, so Céline’s pink marble shit pool isn’t as gross as Pound’s Hell. Pound’s Hell is obviously a reimagining of Dante’s Inferno, and thus we get “Faces smeared on their rumps / wide eye on flat buttock, / Bush hanging for beard,” a descriptive jumble in which faces are either transposed onto asses or asses are being described as faces, the contortion of the human body, and so on. Céline seems to delight in the opportunity the shit pool presents for unrestrained masculinity to run free. It’s like a “football game,” it’s a “rite and shirtsleeves were the uniform,” and so on.
He evokes an atmosphere of manly gregariousness exaggerated to the point of the grotesque. The ease with which the men laugh and joke seems to amplify the shit-spattering and belching somehow. This linkage between camaraderie and feces, sophomoric humor and infantile evacuation is totally at odds with the doom, horror, and bile of Pound’s Hell. Perhaps it’s the apparent disregard the damned have for their surroundings, like the “scrupulously clean table napkin” tucked under one of their penises, the public addresses spouted from assholes; they tend to go on with the hideous business of their lives without regard for the squalor they’re mired in. This is part of the point, of course, as Hell is just whatever you were doing in life, plus a kind of punitive metaphorical morality. If you talk nothing but shit your whole life, you go to Hell and literally speechify out your asshole.
If shit is part of the punitive metaphor of Pound’s Hell, then Céline’s shit pool is a masculine utopia in which (in the Freudian scheme of things) the id’s desire for the pleasure of expulsion come to terms with the super ego’s pressure to acculturate and socialize. And yet what emerges is not comforting but even more disturbing than either the unrestricted reign of pure pleasure or total repression.
This is where things get a bit trippy for me, because we’re presented with a dilemma here. My first instinct is to say that the shit pool scene reminds us of the necessity for the struggle between the individual’s pleasure and the codes and norms of society. If this is what we get when the two meet, count me out, thank you. I’ll take repression any day. Incidentally, I think this is also what Pound’s “scrupulously clean napkin” tucked under the penis is about – the terrible meeting of civility and pleasurable filth.
But of course my instinct is to say it’s gross, because I’m someone who’s internalized cultural codes and mores that tell me not to flaunting my shit everywhere. If I were more like one Céline’s defecaters, I would recognize the scene as something liberating.
I think this last reading is less convincing for other reasons – in Journey Céline seethes with loathing for almost everyone. I can’t imagine one of literature’s most pessimistic, misanthropic writers positing a Utopian vision of anything without the express purpose of exposing its stupidity. Pound was misguided about who belonged in Hell, as his World War II radio broadcasts clearly show, but he at least saw its necessity. Céline, while less extravagant in his vision, produces something far more disgusting, which must have pleased him.
The Two English Departments
Reading this post by Feisal G. Mohamed on Dissent‘s blog makes me want to sit down and formulate some of the questions I frequently ask myself as a teacher / grad student. Mohamed’s analysis of the English Department’s double bind seems correct at first, but I think that’s deceptive. Here’s the claim he spends the first part of the post elaborating:
To put it another way, the English department currently labors under a deep paradox: it devotes much of its intellectual energy to declaring the limits of Anglo-American culture while being structurally wedded to that culture in a way that necessarily privileges it.
Mohamed spends the last part describing a way where English Departments should look at the relationship between Western or Anglo-American culture as part of broader “world humanisms,” expanding the scope of English Departments rather than constricting it to the criticism of Anglo-American culture.
The first thing to say is that there are plenty of “world humanism”-type programs in existence in English Departments. Doing a favor for a department chair, I taught one for part of last Summer. It was interesting and challenging, not least because at the school where I was teaching, every student had to take the class in order to graduate. I know at the school where I did my B.A. there were classes like that as well, and that institution was no bastion of progressive education.
I think the confusion that inheres in Mohamed’s criticism, suggestion, and the “paradox” that he locates is in what he means by “English Department.” Does he mean the English Department that is the home for teachers of English language and literature, the place where students take classes? Or does he mean the English Department that is the home for scholars who produce new research, new knowledge, and new discourse? Because those are clearly two different places. Stanley Fish and others have written about this pretty extensively, but it’s not clear that the interpenetration between those two English Departments is absolute. Both of them are the same department, but they serve two different functions and are staffed by two different but overlapping faculties.
Most teaching English Departments are populated by a handful of full-time, tenured or tenure-track professors and a slew of grad students and adjuncts. In their teaching functions, these faculty members are charged with teaching everything from comp to advanced undergraduate seminars. They’re their to instill knowledge in the university’s students, knowledge ranging from the structure of the college essay to the techniques of close-reading to the history of twentieth-century literary criticism. In serving this function, these teachers don’t produce new knowledge or new research; if they do, it’s incidental to the task of teaching. For the most part, classes taught in English Departments, at least in my experience, have ostensibly little to do with critiques of “Anglo-American culture,” and more to do with things like learning what “analysis” consists of or (less frequently) how to scan a poem. Though what gets taught varies from class to class, the point is to communicate content and technique to students.
Then there’s the other English Department, the scholarly one, which produces new knowledge and new research. The faculty for this department is comparatively small. Their relationship to their university is symbiotic – they want tenure or tenure-track jobs because they offer financial support and security. The university wants to hire them in order to increase its prestige, knowing the department and therefore the university will look better when it’s attached to the work of a brilliant and cutting-edge scholar. This is the English Department that is producing criticism and scholarship that is often critical of Anglo-American culture.
I think the validity of Mohamed’s paradox depends on viewing these two English Departments as more unified than they really are, and on what realm the declaration of “the limits of Anglo-American culture” occurs in. It doesn’t seem paradoxical to me for critical discourse to turn itself back on the traditions that gave birth to it. This has been the function of any number of critical discourses, though not necessarily criticism within the academy. But I think there’s some sense in Mohamed’s criticism, as in most criticisms of “English,” that something said in the critical/scholarly realm reverberates just as loudly in the realm of teaching, that what one says in the critical realm also “occurs” in the teaching realm. Regardless of what should or should not be studied or taught in English Departments, the discourse surrounding the perpetual crisis of English Department ought to sort out which English Department it’s talking about.
“Never the center of itself”
I just picked up Georges Poulet’s classic study The Metamorphoses of the Circle for two friggin’ dollars, courtesy of my university library’s sale rack. As I’m currently plodding toward the conclusion of my dissertation chapter on Henry James, I immediately flipped to Poulet’s chapter on him and found this gem:
James’s consciousness, a surprising fact at the time, turns away from interiority. It is, so to speak, never the center of itself. It remains purely a point of view. A point of view which, most of the time, is that of a character whose investigating look, different from all others, holds the faculty of leaving on the objects which it contemplates, a nuance, a specific coloration, which is the stamp of its contemplative activity, Every look attests the entirely relative way of looking of a definite being. And the novel of which it is the center has as its goal to make this invariable individuality of point of view to appear in the variety of objects on which he exerts it.
Consciousness in James is “never the center of itself”: not bad, Georges Poulet. In a certain sense, he’s simply restating certain things James said about his own work. But there’s something about Poulet’s formulation that skids outside the bounds of paraphrase, a kind virtuosic literary-critical flick-of-the-wrist granting what could otherwise be rote recitation a kind of revelatory quality. This is why I’m always bugged when journalists, students, fellow grad students, even professors deride the practice of “academic” criticism as a whole. Academic criticism encompasses some pretty dreadful stuff, but it also allows for (but doesn’t directly imply) a kind of statement you can’t really make anywhere else.
People also say no one writes like Georges Poulet (or Eric Auerbach or name your preferred graying/dead eminence) in academia anymore. But that’s not to say one can’t, right? I think of Franco Moretti, in particular, who’s someone I used to deride because I was an idiot and didn’t understand what he was trying to say in Graphs Maps Trees and hadn’t read his other books. Moretti is a beautiful, funny, humane writer working in an explicitly academic context. I can think of a few other examples of academic critics who consistently make me admire the beauty of their prose along with the ingenuity of their arguments. Anybody have any favorites?
Two Points about The Black Swan
SPOILERZ below
1. As I understand it, The Black Swan is a kind of parable about the relationship between art and the uncontrollable, dark aspects of human nature. That is, one must have access to the latter in order to produce the former. This is a more-than-worked-over trope in art and film, but more importantly it’s a central theme of at least one of Aronofsky’s other films: Pi (1998), which is also his first. Both feature central characters, brilliant in their fields (math in Pi, ballet in The Black Swan), whose obsessions with their work brings them close to transcendent achievement and death or madness. The difference is the ending: Pi features its hero, Max, eventually abandoning his work after it becomes too dangerous to continue. Nina, the dancer in The Black Swan, endures her plunge into madness in order to give one great performance in the lead role of Swan Lake before, it’s implied, dying by her own hand at the performance’s conclusion. Thus in Pi, by far the better film, Max “chooses life,” as it were, while the look on Nina’s face at fadeout tells us the “perfection” she’s attained also brings her life to a close.
1.1. Another conspicuous similarity. In Pi, Max is plagued by migraine headaches that approach when he works too hard. In The Black Swan, it’s implied that Nina’s mother suffers from some variation of bipolar disorder or manic depression (obsessive behavior [she paints dozens of pictures of her daughter's face], a brief glimpse of her crying alone in her room, lightning-quick mood swings from effusion to despair) which, we are led to infer, Nina may have inherited. I’m suspicious, then: whereas Max’s migraines (the first of which was spurred by staring too long into the sun as a child, which presages the Icarus/Daedalus relationship he has with mentor Sol [like wise King Solomon but also the sun]) impair him, serve as a blockage to his genius, or an indicator that he’s gone too far, Nina’s breakdown is inseparable from her achievement as a dancer. Discipline, precision, and perfectionism are at the root of her talent while mental illness is the source of her brilliance.
1.1.1. Let’s also note that some of the ways in which Aronofsky represents “the black swan,” the dark side of Nina’s artistry, are shudder inducing, and not in a good way. The film is rife with mirrors, people looking in mirrors, reflections acting in an unruly manner, people punching mirrors, and so on. Lots of mirrors. Part of this simply derives from the setting, dance studios having lots of mirrors, after all. But come on: this is what it’s come to?
1.1.1.1 “I’ve chosen the motif of broken mirrors to show my protagonist’s fragmented self,” says Donald Kaufman in Adaptation. Which tells you something.
1.1.2. Brilliance as pathology, artistry as illness, and so on. The metaphorical world of the film seems like an excuse for its own failings.
2. A movie disguising itself as art by being about art.
2.1. Or as Jessica Suarez more elegantly phrased it, “basically bi-curious Fight Club.”
2.2. Or as Vulture phrased it, an “Art-House version of Showgirls,” though that’s meant as a compliment.