Lil' Cthulhu!

Novels via Intravenous Injection

At the A.V. Club Josh Heller writes about his one pop-culture rule: ‘no matter how often I pick them up and stroke them lovingly in the hidden corners of my local bookstore, I just cannot bring myself to purchase new hardcover books. Partly it’s the price — $25 for a freakin’ book? You’d think trees are scarce or something!—but I also can’t stand the fact that a) dust jackets, as lovely as they can be, always slip off in my hands and get ripped way too easily, and b) hardcovers are needlessly heavy and portability-challenged, especially if I’m already hauling a laptop around in my bag. But that preference for paperbacks means I’m way behind on a shitload of recent books I’m absolutely dying to read, including China Miéville’s The City And The City and Paolo Bacigalupi’s hotly tipped debut, The Windup Girl, simply because I don’t like the heft, epidermis, or price tag of hardcovers. Luckily, some publishers — including Orbit, one of my favorite purveyors of fantasy and science fiction — likes to release books directly to trade paperback, my format of choice. Of course, according to the Boing Boing set, we’ll soon be reading novels exclusively via intravenous injection, so what the fuck does it even matter?’

I'm hearing this a lot. Not just about price (which is a way of expressing lessened desire), but about the modern lifestyle and the way hardcovers just don't fit into it. I read every morning and evening on the train, and certain types of books are just awful to read; particularly, big hardcovers and old paperbacks with no thumb margins and teeny gutters. Is it time that hardcovers became the second wave? Perhaps the modern publishing model has to rely on softcover and digital editions first, with hardcover editions appearing as a collector's perk.

Borges Review at Quarterly Conversation

My review of Seven Nights, lecture / essays by Jorge Luis Borges, is now up at The Quarterly Conversation! To wit: ‘The assertion of Jorge Luis Borges’s literary genius is today assumed and completely unremarkable, and since many superior critics have elaborated it, I will refrain from boring you with redundancy. However, it is occasionally overlooked that Borges is also a philosophical genius — philosophical, that is, in that he is completely in love with knowledge, with the pleasure that knowledge for its own sake provides him — and although he is a lover of knowledge, he never declines into reverential pedagogy. Knowledge, to Borges, is not for the knowing, nor for the asserting over and condemnation of others, nor for proving others wrong, but for the pleasure of discovery.

‘In these lectures, Borges uses his genius to provide that gift of discovery, an experience akin to poetry, “something as evident, as immediate, as indefinable as love, the taste of fruit, of water.” Of the truths themselves, he is always humble. One believes or else one does not; the mind is a malleable thing so that, as he says in the lecture on nightmares, “we may draw two conclusions, at least tonight; later we may change our minds.” And besides, most of what is believed is only an illusion, “our ignorance of the complex machinery of causality.” Like Socrates, Borges is most sure only of the fact that we are mostly ignorant, that there are obscure mechanisms imperceptibly at work in our lives. Whether we decide to call these machinations magic, or God, or fate, each explanation is yet another expression of the consequences of unknown acts.’

Nota Bene: William H. Gass

“It is always dangerous to define yourself, as [Ezra] Pound increasingly did, in terms of your beliefs: I am Catholic; I am an anarchist; I am a fan of the flat earth. An attack on them is an attack on you, and leads to war. You can fight for a cause and make it come about, but you can never make an idea come true like a wish, for its truth is — thank heavens — out of our hands.”

— William H. Gass, “Ezra Pound,” from Finding a Form

A Change in American Education

There is a very informative article by John McWhorter at The New Republic today on the educational reforms being tested under the Obama administration. Teacher assessment — with real compensation for those who succeed — has always been the bugbear of education reform: one obviously has to be able to reward the good and purge the bad, but teachers' unions always saw this type of assessment as an opportunity for cronyism or corruption. This remains a concern (local governments are ripe with amoral egomaniacs and reality-averse idealists), but I've always thought that the upside of a broadly successful assessment program for teachers far outweighs the negative — you just have to find a system that works. It appears that Obama's people may have finally coerced the unions, mostly by turning the opinion of teachers (60% of teachers are now in favor of this type of assessment, and a union is nothing but the sum of its members). Good for them.

I love the additional emphasis on vocational training. It's a step, hopefully, towards a general shift in our educational culture. There were plenty of people at my university with no interest in the liberal arts, jumping through the hoops, using college as a path to some unknown career (now mostly unemployed). Too many of them felt that any non desk career would be a “step down,” unfortunately. I'm of the camp that believes any job which allows you to live well and provide for your family is a good one, and really so were they — it was only an outmoded sense of class that veered them to the liberal arts. As McWhorter writes, “in the long run, what will be much more important to the fate of America will be a new awareness that learning how to fit a house with central air conditioning is as worthy a pursuit after high school as getting a BA in English.”

In any case, all of these reforms are intriguing. They are all state-driven projects, and will be tested on a state level before any further implementation. It will be as important for our greater understanding of teaching methods to see which programs don't work as it will be to find ones that do.

I would prefer not to.

“It suits people always to make out things were very bad in the old days so that there is need for new days. I’ve heard Empson and Eliot referred to as horse-and-buggy criticism. A lot of anger (mine and other people’s) in those matters had to do with mis-descriptions of the past. ‘We no longer believe in the myth of the solitary genius.’ Now who did believe in the myth of the solitary genius? It’s the phrasing: ‘We no longer. . . .’ ‘We are no longer naive empiricists.’ Alright, now was Eliot a naive empiricist? It doesn’t look like it to me.

“A colleague at Boston University (I’m not in the English department at Boston University anymore, partly to do with the presence of people like the one I’m about to quote) announced at a graduate class: ‘At least since [recent year slotted in], it has been necessary to think about literature.’ I mean, Aristotle didn’t? Coleridge didn’t?

“This is, of course, what Eliot called a parochialism of time. But the dead hold shares; it’s not true that only the living hold shares. Who are the critics post-Eliot who most matter? For me, they are Empson, Trilling, Kenner, Davie, Yvor Winters. And the idea that these people represent totally antiquated positions, empty or used-up? The demon of progress in the arts, as Wyndham Lewis called it, led to the demon of progress in the humanities. In an essay of mine on ‘Literary Principles as Against Theory,’ I quote all these people all the time saying that the only thing worth doing is theory, confident that everything else has been superseded or exposed.”

The above passage is from a recent interview with the literary scholar and critic Christopher Ricks. It will strike chords with anyone who has taken some definitive side of the so-called “culture wars,” either through ready accord or vivid disagreement. Theory-crazed blogger Ron Silliman has termed Ricks “irrelevant,” and labeled him as a “Quietist” for his views on literature and criticism; just the type of arrogant off-hand dismissal that Ricks describes with so much frustration. I am equally frustrated by such people — exemplified par excellence by Silliman — regardless of which side of the debate they present. They act as if their own conclusions were the only conclusions, and they treat opposing (or in this case, pre-existing) ideas with gross and purposeful disrespect.

I don't want to make it seem as though Mr. Silliman were “bad” in some sense; he contributes immeasurably to internet poetry culture. Nor do I wish to pardon Professor Ricks for what were, I think, reactionary statements in the face of an attack on his tradition and, in more human terms, his livelihood. It is rather this paradigm of invalidation and erasure, with its messianic tones, that I find is so ineffective and so unhelpful to a better understanding of literature and ourselves. It makes true discourse impossible, and limits the intelligence of both sides by blinding prejudice. Humility in any case is the missing virtue of each.

As to the question my own side in this war among elders — well, in that I defer to the good wisdom of Bartleby. The critical work of scholars such as Christopher Ricks is often as intellectually enjoyable to me as that of Fredric Jameson or Edward Said. I would prefer not to take sides — particularly in a pissing contest.

Nota Bene: Christopher Ricks

'I am not sure what to do about "politically correct" because of its particular historical conditioning. That is, in general having to be correct or needing to be prudent about certain kinds of risks has always been the case; the Beckett remark about "the quantum of wantum does not vary." So it irritates me when people make out that now there are constraints of cultural / political / social situations, as if there used not to be. I don’t know a society in which there aren’t pressures to conform. And anyway I don’t think conforming is a bad thing. So I’m not one of those people who use the word "subversive" as if it’s automatically a good thing: "The great thing about literature is that it’s so subversive." There are lots of things which should not be subverted. The idea that you have shown that someone is a good writer because you have shown that he or she has challenged the orthodox opinion. . . Orthodox opinion is often immensely to be valued. But then all great religious art is accusable of blasphemy, yet those accusations should not stick. So all erotic art is accusable of pornography. If the question doesn’t even arise then, it must have played safe, and nothing is more dangerous if you want to create great art than playing safe. You’ve got the relation of blasphemy to religious art, pornography to erotic art, of sexism to all art that deals with relations between the sexes – which could include same-sex relations and so on.'

— Christopher Ricks; read the rest of this interview with the eminent scholar and critic at The Literateur Magazine.

Nota Bene: Imre Kertész

‘The diabolical wooden spoon had once again scraped the very bottom of the human soup in the cauldron of so-called world history in which we all stew.’

— Imre Kertész, from The Union Jack

Janaka Stucky for Boston's Best Poet

The Boston Phoenix, which I think has become a little bit lame in its dotage, has it's annual best-of competition happening right now. And wouldn't you know it, they have a "Best Poet" category. Which is a great thing — but the nominations are Pinsky, Glück, Bidart, Warren, Cornish. Not "bad" poets per se; just, you know, kind of lame choices. I mean, can we get somebody not collecting Social Security up in here? Is that too much to ask? Can we shake this sh¡t up a little bit? Can we blow some mºther fu¢king minds?

WHY YES, WE CAN
Today, and every day (because everyone can vote once a day), you should vote for poet and Black Ocean publisher Janaka Stucky: the baddest mºther fu¢ker since Leroy Brown. Janaka Stucky is "practicing the perfection of effort while working on silent relationships with knives, hairpins, & a history of tentacles. Other passions include whiskey and pugilism." He is also the Publisher of Black Ocean and its literary magazine, Handsome. His latest chapbook, Your Name Is The Only Freedom, is now available from Brave Men Press. His poems have appeared in Cannibal, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Free Verse, No Tell Motel, North American Review, Redivider and VOLT. You can also join the "Vote for Janaka Stucky" group on Facebook. Do it because this matters so little, there is no point in not doing it.

Now you've got one question to answer for yourself, monkey: do you dance for the man?

Swansong of a Guy in a Top Hat

So, we all know that Macmillan and Amazon have been at each other's metaphorical throats lately. They dueled, wrestled, cried, threw pottery across Victorian dining tables, had a few drinks at the local dive, promised drunkenly to change their ways, spent an awkward night together, and woke up only slightly worse for wear. Amazon snuck out while Macmillan showered and texted Mac from the bus, "thnx gr8 time c u ltr." Little did Amazon realize that Macmillan quite unknowingly gave it the clap.

[Since the recent Supreme Court ruling affirming companies' rights, I've had a lot of fun imagining them as actual people acting the way that they do. They are all terrible, terrible people. It's like Seinfeld, but not funny; but in that case I guess it's exactly like Seinfeld.]

Over at The Soundtrack to Life, the Gilligan-to-my-Skipper good buddy Jon Wooding writes, 'considering how much I love pushing that little dopamine button, I’d feel a lot better about whatever Amazon.com’s got in store for me in the future if I knew its Emergency Kit contained more tools than the broadsword they’ve repeatedly demonstrated.' In a great post at Charlie's Diary, Charlie Stross writes, 'Amazon, in declaring war on Macmillan in this underhand way, have screwed me, and I tend to take that personally, because they didn't need to do that.'

The brandishing of that broadsword, the proverbial taint that Macmillan left behind, and the ire of customers about their actions, are each indicators of a new era for Amazon. They are no longer the startup-come-Monopoly-guy, buying up online retail real estate like a drunken Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross: "Fuck you. That's my name." They were nearly a monopoly in online book retail. With the addition of Google and Apple (and the Nook, I guess), the e-book field has just become the AL East of new media. It isn't the center of the universe, but they think it is, and it's sure going to be fun to watch.

Logan on the Notebooks of Frost

At The New Criterion, William Logan considers the Notebooks of Robert Frost once more: 'Where Faggen was not making nonsense of Frost’s sense, he was misreading with suicidal creativity: Frost’s “brought up to date” became “brought up dull,” “if I blame your Bently” became “if I become your Bently,” “any of us” became “angry,” “belong to the highest class” became “belong to the highest clan,” “It seems poor spirited” became “It runs poor spirited.” On and on it went. Faggen showed a hapless gift for transcribing words that were not there while overlooking the words that were. Lines perfectly legible were called illegible and left untranscribed. Punctuation was invented on some occasions, ignored on others. Words Frost had misspelled were mistakenly corrected, words he had spelled correctly bizarrely misspelled. Though Faggen declared that everything in the notebooks was included, entire lines were missing, as well as a whole page found by James Sitar. The editor showed a genial talent for transcribing his own editorial notes and private queries, as if Frost had made them. The phrase “When spoken to unsympathetically attack ally as by a hostile lawyers” should have read “When spoken to unsympathetically as by a hostile lawyer.” The two extra words were Faggen’s initial attempt to read “unsympathetically” — he simply forgot to remove them. This is among the damning evidence that the editor failed to proofread his text against the original manuscripts.'