Writer of No
I’m already in a summer slump, not writing, despite having not that much writing to write. Stuck in the last 75 pages of a massive novel but not feeling like finishing, and so putting the rest of my reading on hold while I chip away. Still, it’s nice not to work.
A Scanner Darkly
Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly is one of those books you’re supposed to read in late high school/early college and it’s supposed to BLOW YOUR MIND. Somehow I never got around to it, though I remember reading Valis around age 14 for some reason. I don’t recall what I thought of it.
Well, I just finished A Scanner Darkly, this time in preparation for a class I’m teaching, and I have to say, while it didn’t blow my mind in the way that, say, Naked Lunch or House of Leaves or “In the Penal Colony” did when I was that impressionable age, it did actually move me, which is something that rarely happened when I was in my more-pretentious-than-thou phase. It’s a profoundly moving novel, even leaving aside the “Author’s Note,” which added was probably a wholly necessary element for Dick but which served almost no purpose for me.
I’ll have more to say about it later, probably as I teach it, but for now I remain sort of glad that I waited until now to read it. Because I think that 17-18-19-year-old me would have totally missed the point, probably would have been upset or frustrated by Dick for what I would have perceived as its sentimentality. I was that much of a cold bastard. I think A Scanner Darkly shows me, in some sort of unexpected ways, what growing as a reader can mean.
Another Excerpt from a Work in Progress
The disorganized, shocking play of light in the city gives way to the focalizing power of the Kremlin, which is able to organize and focus the force of individuals into a single concentrated locus: “All the colors of Moscow converge prismatically here, at the center of Russian power. Beams of excessive brilliance from the car headlights race through the darkness. The horses of the cavalry, which has a large drill ground in the Kremlin, shy in their light.” Figuring Russian life as a luxurious spectrum, the Kremlin is the lens that focuses Benjamin’s experience of Moscow’s quotidian landscape, reconfiguring small moments of peasant-like daily activities through the emblem of Russian power they perpetuate. Light itself is the agent of the particular form of modernity that Benjamin discovers in the Moscow (the electric car headlights frighten the cavalry horses, a military division that is already obsolete by 1927, the year Benjamin visits Moscow) and through its figuration the political economy of the place finds body in his writing.
Reading Lists for the Oral Exams
1. The Organizational Imagination: Cutting, Mapping, Filing and Transcribing in 19th, 20th, and 21st Century Literature and Philosophy*
2. Humanism, Antihumanism, Posthumanism
3. Making Americans: Immanence, Transmission and “The Natural” in American Fiction
*This list has nothing to do with this … though it might.
Walter Benjamin - On Some Motifs in Baudelaire
In the mid-nineteenth century, the invention of the match brought forth a number of innovations which have on thing in common: a single abrupt movement of the triggers a process of many steps. The development is taking pace in many areas. A case in point is the telephone, where the lifting of a receiver has taken the place of the steady movement that used to be required to crank the older models. With regard to countless movements of switching, inserting, pressing, and the like, the “snapping” by the photographer had the greater consequences. Henceforth a touch of the finger sufficed to fix an event for an unlimited period of time. The camera gave the moment a posthumous shock, as it were. Haptic experiences of this kind were joined by optic ones, such as are supplied by te advertising pages of a newspaper or the traffic of a big city. Moving through this traffic involves the individual in a series of shocks and collisions. At dangerous intersections, nervous impulses flow through him in rapid succession, like the energy from a battery.