Oh No I’ve Been Hated On!
Anybody who does not spend at least a little time every day checking the comment thread on the second part of my Zeek piece is missing out on some truly grade-A internet shit. The hatred is palpable. I’d say something incisive about it, but really … really? You should just go read it and marvel.
I’m speaking at NeMLA (Northeast Modern Language Association) tomorrow, which is my first real conference. I wish it weren’t this close to my oral exams, as I think I could have come up with something a bit more polished if I had the time. Ah well. The paper is sort of about Samuel Beckett but mostly about Nathanael West. I don’t know if I’ll post it on the work page or not, but here’s a sample:
After “Some Notes on Violence,” and after reading West’s note to Cowley, the laughter in the Shoop episode appears as both a representation of a broadly American fascination with violence and as a metastasis of West’s vexed relationship to the comic. The cultural problem of violence and the individual problem of style, then, intersect in a moment of laughter that does not transfer from the page to the reader. In some sense, then, the presentation of this form of black comedy extricates the reader from his own dilemma: we’re required to recognize the scene as comic, but laughing at its comedy makes us the object of its critique.
Zeek II
The second part of the Israel piece is up. Frankly I like the first one more – I should have given myself more time to write this one. There is also some formatting weirdness – you should know that the name of the first subsection is titled “Rhythm Nation,” which I find to be both appropriate and delightful. There’s also a lot of white space, which bothers me for some reason. During my brief stint as an editor at my college paper, I learned to abhor white space, and I’m still getting used to its charms.
Zeek
The first part of a two-part piece I’m writing about Taglit for Zeek’s website is up for your perusal.
Probable Futures
Books I’m excited about:
1. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
2. The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littel
3. The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity and Chinese Pain by Eric Hayot
4. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing by Mark McGurl
5. (Re)reading The Oresteia, Medea, and Antigone all in the next month.
Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch
