Why Study Literature? Part One: The Usable Past (STL 59)

Really only scratching the surface, but the following began in reply to a student of mine who asked about what I thought about her use of the first-person in the conclusion of an essay she wrote. The usable past is from Lionel Trilling, and I first came to it through a book called The Unusable Past that usefully categorizes historical approaches to teaching American literature.

Dear X(tina):

Thank you for your e-mail. See I never really meet or speak to the students in this class, I am always glad to hear feedback. I did appreciate your use of the first-person in the essay. It was an appropriate and effective strategy. The reason that students are warned away from the first person is that it can steer them away from the actual subject at hand. Instead of studying the thing to form an understanding of it, the inexperienced student might rush to judgment view the thing (the story, the historical event, the biological specimen) with pre-formed and unwarranted opinions. But more experience and accomplished students should use the first person, since understanding is ultimately a personal experience. (Especially in literature, but true for other fields too.)

One of the reasons we study literature is to recover what is called "the usable past." So much of our lives are defined by the times we live in. Political and technological factors are always changing, so any moment in time is a "now" sealed off from the past. But as your connection with The Yellow Wallpaper shows, our reactions to where we are now aren't necessarily that different than people in the past. By connecting with a woman who wrote 100 years ago, you might begin to see connections between now and then. Without pausing to reflect on it, the conditions of a woman in Victorian times--that she is little better than her husband's property, that she is thought of as a child unable to make her own decisions--are far removed from your own life. Yet the fact that you can't end an academic paper without referring to your own experience is proof that Gilman's story relates to your life on some level. (The fact that you respond so well to this unit suggests that the experience of 19th century American women is somehow useful to you as a 21st century American woman.) As you point out, the specifics are different, so different that we can only partially empathize with that past. But part of it we can incorporate into our own 'now,' and so benefit from the power of a "usable past."

Horrorfest 2007 (STL 58)

Every year around Hallowe'en, wifey and I curl up on the couch and watch a few horror movies. I kind of like horror movies--they can be exquisitely crafted, beautifully composed, and, thanks to creative scoring and sound design, incomparably moody. Nevertheless, we don't see that many during the course of a year. Aside from our seasonal viewing, we might only see one or two other horror movies a year, or none. Unless you count Snakes on a mf plane or Pan's labyrinth, I doubt if we saw any last year, aside from our Hallwe'en goodies, The Wicker Man (original British version, please) and the Dario Argento movie Deep Red. This year's batch was a Hammer film starring Christopher Lee and Donald Pleasance called The Satanic Rites of Dracula. It was rather dull, and the plot was somewhat like a middling episode of Angel in the way it mixes vampirism, corporate intrigue, and science fiction. The hired heavies in this movie are hilarious. They are typical mustachioed 70's dudes in sheepskin vests, that look like they were made out of their Trans-Am seat covers. Much better was Suspira and Halloween. Suspira is not as good as the Dario Argento film we saw last year (Deep Red), which relied more on suspense than the supernatural elements and gore of Suspira. (There's an evil witch, and a close up of a heart getting stabbed, if you want the specifics.) Wife puts her finger on Argento when she calls him the Italian DePalma (which only now sounds funny and redundant). They're both Hitchcockian (with a dash of Fellini), with deliberate and vivid imagery and a tightly controlled camera. By far the best of the three was John Carpenter's Halloween. All three of the qualities I mentioned earlier--craft, composition, and mood--are abundant in this movie. The horror comes from the background--of course it does, always--which remains still and empty most of the time, but is several times subtly violated by the affectless mask of Michael Myers, an inexplicable and incomprehensible evil. My favorite scenes are of the house across the way, observable by Jamie Lee Curtis. It's dark out but the porch is well lit. Several times Michael Myers comes around the corner, slowly and malevolently, but often it's just a still and horrible suburban night.

Archives Project: STL #39

Title: The Moon In Its Flight
Description: Okay, what you weren't waiting for: STL returns, (in May, as promised!) with some thoughts on Gilbert Sorrentino's collection of stories.
Date: 31 May 2004

Written, apparently, on my 34th birthday. Sorrentino's best work is his essays, which are collected in Something Said. Perhaps one day I will blog on that work, which are one of the models for what I do here. (To the extent I have models).

In an interview, Sorrentino called Ed Dahlberg "a subversive and destructive master of prose, who is, at his best, so good that he takes your breath away. He is also zany, goofy, loopy, misogynistic, deeply prejudiced, bitter, nasty, paranoid and absolutely unfair... He is a great American writer, astonishingly original, a virtuoso without peers,and probably much too good for us." You might say the same about Sorrentino himself, and that Sorrentino is virtually unknown (like Dahlberg himself, these days) tells you something-- that he probably is too good for us too. Sorrentino was first a poet (some of his work was incorporated into Paterson 5) and a literary raconteur (he befriended Hubert Selby and Leroi Jones early in their careers--if I'm not mistaken, Last Exit to Brooklyn is dedicated to him) and went on to write a stack of novels in the last 3 decades. The Moon In Its Flight collects his occasional short stories from the past 35 years.

Not only is Sorrentino is a master stylist "irreducible" prose ( vide this interview.)--manifested in perfect, acutely observant sentences, but he's a supreme innovator whose range is apparent in this collection. My favorite mode of his work combines metafictional self-awarenesss with a conversational, seemingly off-hand tone.* He works diligently within imposed constraints, such as writing a story only in questions (he actually continued this constraint through an entire novel) or integrating popular song titles into a discursive narrative, as he does in the title story, a moving consideration of nostalgia.

To top it off (so to speak)**, the right-minded reader might find an almost moral satisfaction in reading Sorrentino. He is a cranky Jeremiah who rails at fakeness where he sees it--whether in the insincerity of self-satisfied "fine writing" or in the intellectual laziness of contemporary America. Like Dahlberg, he's not for everyone--like any prophet he can turn nasty, which he does against inconstant women of his own creation, and his art is strongly devoted to artifice, which some might find cloying, if not occasionally befuddling.

And honestly, it's not his best work. His experimental and digressive tendencies need space to develop, which probably explains why he's written comparatively few stories over the years. Those of us who cultivate "oppositional" tastes (read "snobs") get some pleasure from our sure and unprovable knowledge that time will show us right. We would surely have been enthusiastic about Moby Dick, would have bought the first edition of The Way By Swann's, etc. In 2050, GS will have readers, if anyone has readers. Once we get a full picture of his body of work, his stories won't seem major in the way that novels like Mulligan Stew or Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things already do for some of us.

*"Meta-fictional" is an over-used description of an over-used device. Thankfully, in GS it's played less often as a writer sitting at his desk writing than as a story-telling questioning himself, and checking in with and interacting with his audience.
**This bracketing of the cliche is a GS speciality--it accentuates what the cliche glosses over.

Archives Project: STL #38

Title: "Other Dreams My Erring Soul Employ"
Description: A Note on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Date: 2 April 2004

I admit being drunk (droonk) when I wrote this, and it shows. This shames the previous candidate from worst post ever! It was also the last post before a temporary hiatus that then gave way to a longer hiatus. Ergo, my drinking ruined my blogging career.

This is the briefest of notes, written on a Friday night after inventing a ratio for making boiler makers out of "Gentleman Jack" sub-trademark and Shiner, left all alone after my hard day a-reading. It was edited thereafter when I remembered that some drunk guy left a post on me blog.

I saw Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. My first nota bene leads to the next: no other screen writer gets benighted with the project. Yeah, some guy named Michel Gondry directed this, but it's a Charlie K. "film." Secondly, note the way that the writer's process, his "inventio" gets captured in the plot of the movie. At the crucial juncture between the clinical treatment and 'reality' (also between the mental projections of Joel and Clementine and the 'real' clinic staff), Kirsten Dunst recites two quotes she gleaned from Bartlett's, one of which gives the movie its name. When I saw this wonderful movie, I thought to myself "hey, I bet that Charlie wuz paging thru Bartlett's one day, and these two quotes starting knocking together, until the sparks led to the script." But later I start thinkin' to myself: what if it's a little harder than that? What is CK is only pretending to be like the clinic receptionist, reading quote books for conversation topics. And so I checked my sixteenth edition: four quotes from 'Pope, Alexander's' "Eloisa to Abelard," not including "The world forgetting, by the world forgot/ Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind"! I bet the Nee-Chee aint there neither, but I is too droonk to look it up. My point? There's a lot of work happening here, a lot of deep thinking and reading of the old school that's getting disguised in an entertaining movie. The bottom line is that this movie isn't as simple as it looks.

In fact, it doesn't seem that simple compared to other movies: it respects your intelligence to let you juggle temporal lines based on the color cues of Kate Winslet's hair. But I think as I see this movie again and again, as I hope to, I'll keep thinking about the significance of this movie, of the intertwining of the subject and object, of the inseparability of moment and history. The saddest part of the movie only comes to you in retrospect: by removing Clementine from his life, he's sacrificed Huckleberry Hound, who obviously threaded in with his life earlier. You can try to separate emotional entanglements from your life, but like Alexander Pope says in the Big Alexander Pope Book and not Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, there are always "other dreams" that "my erring soul employ."

uh, missed a post on a day I had off

Not too good at this blog every day thing. I found out about it on the second and missed my first post on the fourth. At least I've posted more entries than days, thanks to the archive posts.

I'm tagging myself on a blog 'meme' wherein I list 7 facts about myself. I'll do my best to avoid simply listing books I've read.

1.) I've read all of Proust's A la recherch du temps perdu. I read it in English translation, but cite the French because it's fancy. I mean, because it's known by two English titles, the Shakespearean Remembrance of Things Past and the more accurate In Search of Lost Time. I've read the first volume 3 times, and also a comic book adaptation of the opening "Combray" segment (and posted on that somewhere). There are big parts swaths where I thought I was simply running my eyes across words, but a hundred pages later would be swept up in the cumulative force of the preceding mass of observations.

2.) I keep up on current happenings in the major comic book universes through a combination of webpages, podcasts, and first hand reading. To me, it's like the news; I just want to be an informed citizen of the multiverse. I now shudder because of the geekiness of that statement and from the fact that you already know that I keep up with said shiznitz from reading earlier posts.

3.) What's more, my dream job is to be a comic book writer. A straight-up, give-the-people-what-they-want, work-for-hire comic book hack.

4.)My wife and I got married in Las Vegas. Her name was Lola. She was a dancer.

5.) I have an amateur interest in the field of professional communication. The oddness of this statement can only come out in a separate entry.

6.) As a boy, I ran a fantasy baseball team. Not a team made up of real players banded together nor even of all-time greats, but a team of imaginary players with carefully crafted skill sets and backgrounds who would play and invariably defeat real world teams, while breaking selected single season records.

7.) I once saw a spider the size of a dinner plate. Or I like heavy metal. A lot. Or I fell in high school gym class and hurt my wrist, which still hurts to this day. I don't know how to end a list like this....

Detachment (STL 57)

To follow up on my previous archival post on selling the bulk of my records (for those who stumble on this site, I'm losing my former blog host so have decided to repost blog entires from 2003 in an "Archives Series"), I did in fact not only dispense with several hundred records at once, but then got rid of the cherry-picked seventy-five, the record player, and, finally, several hundred CD's. The first big lot of records we sold to a friend for a nominal sum ($10 per grocery bag, I believe). A few years later, faced with the fact that we hadn't even hooked up our turntable since moving, we took our 'good' records to a used music store which did still sell LPs. That lot we got some money for, but I don't remember how much. Obviously we got far, far less than the store will get. Most of these records were sure sellers even in the limited trade of used records--several Al Green records, Sticky Fingers with the zipper cover, Physical Graffiti with an undamaged insert, etc. Just this past summer, facing a long period of unemployment and a big move, we decided to part with more of our possessions. Wifey cleared out her closet, and I cleared out books, CDs, and comics. I made several trips to used bookstores, and I jumped into ebay with the comics and CDs, and actually made decent money. Ebay became an overbearing presence though--while far from equivalent to a full-time job, photos, auctions, correspondence, and trips to the post office seemed like a near daily obligation. Despite the fees, time, and occasional postage miscalculation, the money helped us pay the bills over the summer. I also sold our turntable on craigslist. It was posted for all of an hour before I got an offer from a hipster audiophile. There were practical as well as financial considerations for getting rid of this stuff. While I'm a lover of collections and have a professional need for a well-stocked library, it all takes up so much room. What doesn't take up so much room is the hard-drive right under my hands and which houses 1158 albums (and growing). I did comparative listening, and yes, Purple Rain does sound best on vinyl, next best on CD, and a little flat from an mp3 file (worse on an iPod plugged into the system than the laptop). But most of my listening actually happens on the iPod while walking the dog or going to work. I still love music and actively seek out new music, but my interest is more conceptual and/or analytical than what you could describe as affective or immersive. I listen to music to have thoughts about the music. Another topic I'd like to get into is how the iTunes/pod interface actually influences what I listen to. But that's a post for another day of this month o' blogging.

Archives Project: STL #36

Title: Perfect Example
Description:Reading comics, reading poetry, and presenting papers
Date: 18 March 2004

Not only did I not present (or write) this paper, I never even heard back from the panel chair I submitted the proposal to. That's some seriously unprofessional bullsheet.

The usefulness of academic conferences isn't really clear to me. I went a few weeks ago to one where I learned a lot: the Flair Symposium on Modernism. Of course, I went as an attendee, and all the speakers were well-respected and most of them were even smart. Not so with the ones I actually present at. But you want something on your cv, so I try to go to one or two per semester. Last fall it was a regional MLA in Arkansas (a sort of farm team for the MLA, who recently turned down my proposal), but this spring I'm staying close to home with a grad student conference on campus and a big ole pop culture conference in San Antone. (Pathetically enough, both papers are on blogs.)

Anyhoo, at that last SCMLA conference I got myself signed up to be the secretary of the panel I was on, so I "have to" go to this year's. ("Have to" in quotes b/c it's in New Orleans, so wasn't exactly a hard sell.) So that I wouldn't just have to go and watch, I sent out a couple of paper proposals this week. Since I feel myself getting more sporadic with my dear STL, I thought I'd post the more hare-brained of the two, which tries to unite two of my passions: poetry in the Pound tradition and comic books.

The most popular alias for comic books—the pretentious phrase “graphic novels”—plainly reveals a common assumption of readers and critics of comics: that they are by nature narrative, that they are essentially a type of illustrated prose fiction. This assumption has become the dominant interpretive frame which determines and therefore limits possible reading of comics. It derives from Scott McCloud’s influential Understanding Comics, which defines the form as “sequential art.” The structure of comics apparently support this narrative presumption: panel follows panel, action follows action. Scanning a comic strip or page, the narrative progress of ‘this happened, then this happened’ seems clear. However, I will argue that the narrative interpretive frame occludes what might be called the poetic nature of some comics. My paper will survey the prevalence of the narrative model, delineate its limits, and offer a supplementary frame based not on prose but on poetry.

While there are many possible poetic models to consider, I will focus on one of the most influential to modern and post-modern poetic practice: Ezra Pound’s “ideogrammatic method.” Though based on Ernest Fenollosa’s misinterpretation of the Chinese ideogram, Pound’s theory has provided a formal base for 20th century American poetry. It is based on the repetition and combination of images to signify concepts or themes which are not explicitly named. The understanding of the Chinese ideogram which underpins Pound’s theory depends on the representational quality of some ideograms: for example, the symbol for the sun resembles the sun. This understanding of writing gives us insight into the functioning of what McCloud calls “the language of comics.” Pictorial and nonpictorial elements (words) combine to form the vocabulary of a comics text, while Pound’s logic of the ideogram provides a syntax.

In presenting the paper, I would select images of a number of comics to illustrate my claims. Two likely sources would be Art Spiegleman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus, which certainly tells a story but need not be equated to prose, and John Porcellino’s lesser-known Perfect Example. Porcellino’s stories are lyrical and digressive, and reading them as narratives obscures their best qualities.

I kind of hope they turn this down (and the other panel accepts me) but if not, expect to see me develop here before next Halloween.

/other/
reading: Blood Oranges by John Hawkes, Alice Munro's stories, Sound of the Best (a history of metal), Berube's Employment of English
listening: downloads of classic metal (Iron Maiden, Dio era Sabbath)
watching: Starsky and Hutch, Millenium Actress, Pieces of April, Secret Lives of Dentists