A New Career in a New Town
There are arcane ins and outs to the present budget crisis at the university with which I’m associated, but the short version is that the administration has responded to massive state funding cuts with at least two boneheaded decisions, axing a large portion of a) language courses in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, and b) the required two-semester undergrad composition sequence. Both a) and b) are routinely overenrolled as is; they’re about to get much more so. The consequence of a) may well be to restrict Asian language courses to people who are majoring in those languages; thus our proud leading 21st-century Pacific Rim university which is charged to provide its students with Competitive Skills in the Global Arena will not be able, for example, to teach its business students any Chinese. As for people who might want to study Chinese at a university out of intellectual curiosity—that pays no dividends, buster.
Now the consequences of b). The farce of requiring students to take logistically inaccessible courses will cause the undergrads a lot of scheduling headaches and prevent many of them from graduating on time. Further, since the Ph.D. program in English and most other literature departments funds its doctoral students by giving them these courses to teach, most of us have just found ourselves without the wherewithal to finish our programs. At present the university guarantees its doctoral students four semesters of teaching; since that is insufficient to get anyone out the door with a degree, teaching semesters have always been extended in practice. It appears that next year this will cease to obtain. The faculty in our department, outraged as anyone, are trying to put together some stopgap measures for next year; but in essence this new policy makes it impossible for anyone to get a Ph.D. in English who does not have independent wealth, a full-ride fellowship, or another job.
As I’m in the middle of a fellowship year and looking to get out the door very soon, I personally am not as fucked as many of my colleagues, in particular the incoming students who just signed on to the program with the understanding that they’d be able to teach indefinitely. But obviously no one is getting hired at a public university in California in the near future. It is starting to seem to me that higher education is not even a ship from which one jumps; it’s more like a collection of rafts, loosely bound together with odd lengths of netting, some more seaworthy than others. In the past I’ve been cynical about the mission and I never know what to do with systems, but this is very sad.
Fatalism is a position easy and comforting enough for me that it is probably suspect. But it’s a reflex of mine, as is introspection, and it tends to trump any impulse to action. It’s not that I have no concern for the social; rather it’s the same reason that I can’t stomach the kind of artistic self-promotion which I’ve seen many people employ to great success. Interest doesn’t get very far into praxis with me. And this is a problem between me and the current academy, which for perfectly good reasons is interested in the social and historical valence of the texts it studies. You get a lot out of that, except, except—to evaluate texts by their effect in the temporal world is to treat them as highly wrought works of propaganda, and this unfortunately eviscerates them of everything I care about. Most of my favorite books are elegies of some kind, and the ones that aren’t are probably hymns of praise, that is, elegies in reverse. The work of mourning needs help, and it needs company, but it can’t be turned into any other kind of work. Insofar as the profession doesn’t recognize this or doesn’t care about it, it doesn’t speak my language.
For one thing, trying to teach elegy in the classroom is stupid. It makes more intuitive sense to teach literature with some kind of social valence, whether it be the inane accounts of self-discovery beloved by essay-writing freshmen and the New York Times Book Review or the glorious edifices of someone like Raymond Williams. I’ve repeatedly found myself in the classroom trying to give literary works various socially applicable morals, simply because it’s the easiest way to answer the question of what is the fucking point. My course evaluations reflect my halfhearted and unconvincing performance of this task. You can talk to society, but I don’t see where it talks back. There is the sphere of natural law; and there is the sphere of individual persons; and then there is the sphere of persons in the aggregate, which is unlike the sphere of nature in that it yields no invariant laws and unlike the sphere of individuals in that praise and blame do not apply. Like I say, I don’t do systems, and even if the university system weren’t falling apart I’m not sure it has a place for someone like me.
So yesterday I finished my novel, and today I’m flying to Colorado for a week-long seminar on current trends in mining law, because I have to start moving along new paths. All us monads need to shake out somewhere. I’m close enough to the doctorate that there’s no reason not to finish, and I’ll go through the forms, at least once, of applying for academic positions, again because there’s no reason not to. But as a self-moving errant child of the Enlightenment I reserve the right to turn 180 degrees whenever necessary; or better, to keep on looking for a new direction orthogonal to everything.
The novel is near completion, but I was suspecting that I might need to put all the writing projects away for a brief while; and this morning God confirmed it by sending me some momentous gastric upset to keep me moaning in bed all morning. (If you think you are likely to vomit in the near future, do not swallow those bright red strawberry Tums, because they will terrify you coming back up.) J. took care of me until I was well enough to come downtown and get some carrot juice and open up Aristotle’s Physics, which is where I’m at now and will not be tempted elsewhere from. He always cheers me up:
Again men propagate men, but bedsteads do not propagate bedsteads; and that is why they say that the natural factor in a bedstead is not its shape but the wood—to wit, because wood and not bedstead would come up if it germinated.
I’ve had very little contact with my department this semester and have been neglecting my academic duties to finish this novel; I feel like I’m taking off one suit of clothes after another, scattering them around me until they are completely shed and I leap into the sun. To land in Spain.
Something is shifting. I can’t tell if this means I have left the academy in my heart, or if it’s just the usual shift of coming to the end of a project. Either way I keep falling out of voice contact with people, I get surprised by how many kinds of light there are in the world, inexistents upset me, I get the old urge to drink coffee and stay up until dawn. I pace the house and don’t clean. I write these posts.
We’re reaching the point in the spring where the enormous juvenile sparrows, molted into adult plumage and quite obviously able to forage for themselves, still hop after their parents making plaintive noises and the “feed me” wing-flapping gestures which are perfectly ludicrous on birds of their size. Presumably their excuse is also that they’re writing dissertations.
I feel better about myself now
This is what goes on; J. and I are minding our business at the café when in walks our local famous gender theorist, followed by a respected philosopher in the Continental tradition who must be visiting from New York. They get coffee and salads and whatever and come sit next to us. The philosopher is speaking very slowly and carefully about his current work on embodiment, and the dignity of embodiment, and the passive body which cannot be controlled; the gender theorist listens attentively and asks if he’s taken Merleau-Ponty into account. Apparently sex is also a part of this, because the philosopher then starts trying to theorize rape, and what does it mean for rape to be an ultimate trauma, still in the slow and careful and sententious voice, and the whole thing was so hideously grating that I had to pack up my computer and go off to the bookstore next door. I suppose in a year or two the completed monograph on dignity and rape and embodiment will appear in that bookstore with an appropriate graphic on the front and some appropriate blurbs on the back, along with a $75 list price.
It’s not a matter of stupidity. Either of those people could argue rings around me on any turf I chose. It was just in terrible taste—and it’s not that the philosopher himself was being especially objectionable. It’s the whole discourse, the whole manner of thinking and living. Whose angels are we? What in the bloody burning world is worth this triumphant moaning?
So yes, apparently I am planning to walk into next year’s job applications with some kind of Little Lord Fauntleroy attitude about the whole institution. Ugh, for people like me they reserve studio apartments in hell.
you shoulda "accidentally" knocked off a cup o' joe in that
sententious lap...that woulda been the embodiment of fun.
I disagree with you, in the sense that I agree with you. It means
something when rape becomes a critical football, and it isn't a nice
thing.
Indeed. The problem with what I wrote up there is that I disagree with
myself; I feel bad taking the philosopher's earnest sentences completely
out of whatever their context was, but I had my visceral reaction, and
it reminded me of how much (say) Elaine Scarry's "work" on
torture has done to mitigate my own country's practice of torture... so
that gets you, like so much else, to Henry Adams's line about the
mere grass-hoppers, kicking and gesticulating, on the middle of the
Mississippi River.
Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country
Kawabata, Yasunari. Snow Country (Yukiguni, 雪国). Trans. Edward G. Seidensticker. New York: Knopf, 1956 (1947).
How long does a novel need to be? Kawabata’s 1947 text runs a little under 200 pages in Seidensticker’s fine translation, and combines a classical compression with a lifelike meandering. In the middle I started to wonder if it was getting too meandering, like them French movies I don’t like, but the last fifteen pages elevate it all. At any rate, Kawabata went back at the end of his life and rewrote the novel in eight pages, taking out most of the incident (including the end) and leaving little beside clusters of images—for lack of a better description, and because Seidensticker himself suggests the connection, I will call them haiku-like, meaning that their emotional content is allusive in a particular shorthand that I’m unused to reading. From my stock of Western models I would want to call this an ascetic practice, but I don’t think that gets the flavor right.
Frequently Asked Questions About Blogging
To take on a task
Workers of the world, put down your tasks! If man will strike, strike
through the mask!
Saul Bellow
Bellow, Saul. The Adventures of Augie March. New York: Fawcett Premier, 1967 (1953).
Bellow, Saul. Seize the Day. New York: Penguin, 1977 (1956).
Bellow was one uneven writer, and as much as we would like to separate his virtues from his faults it never seems quite possible. On balance Augie March has much more of the former, Seize the Day and what follows more of the latter. The question of Bellow is the question of why Augie March could be written only once, what sort of reality principle had to rise up to discipline that book’s exuberance and tame its prose.
The prose, and not the title character, is the real protagonist of Augie March. On their own, Augie’s speech and action would make him likeable and curious, also hapless and passive, perhaps without many connecting threads to hold him together. What turns him incandescent is the language Bellow grants him. The largeness and catholicity and meticulously worked sloppiness of that language, consistently pitched an octave higher than its actual referents, amounts to a protest against smallness in all forms, against the limits of the world as it stands, and because our primary attachment is to the ghost within that prose, it doesn’t really matter that nothing Augie can do, not even hunting iguanas (!) with an eagle (!!) among the igneous rocks of Mexico (!!!), can meet its demand or fulfill its promise. One of the few points where the book shades into the problematic later Bellow is in Augie’s speech (which is meant to be climactic) about following the axial lines of one’s own ethos—because after all, an axial line is an ideal construction without thickness or breadth, and we don’t read novels for the schematic; we want the particular. At any rate, the end of the book finds Augie married to one of the many winning women he has encountered, but otherwise itinerant and impermanent as always. Finding himself displaced in postwar Europe and helping another of his shady mentors to run another lucrative scam, he insists that this situation, too, is only temporary. Do we believe him? Thankfully we are not required to decide, because it’s the end of the book.
Seize the Day finds Bellow playing Flaubert to his own Balzac, with a much tighter rein on the sentences, but without the extravagance of sauce one soon tastes the leanness of the meat. Bellow is a little older now, his protagonist much more so, and this one change in the formal setup reveals how much of Augie’s rhetorical claim depended on youth. The difference between Tommy Wilhelm and (say) Arthur Miller’s washed-up salesman is that Wilhelm is not a holdover from an earlier time but someone who never found a fit in any decade. Like Augie he has both a weakness for being enrolled into other people’s systems and a passive stubbornness that keeps his from properly assuming them; but now too old to pull off Augie’s rhetoric of integrity, he stands before the reader as an undisguised schlemiel. His world does not permit the exercise of virtue. Even his estranged wife and children are only mistakes at the other end of a telephone line, duties that cannot be discharged. In sum it is steely naturalism, and quite well done over the book’s first half; it is the second half that gets tired of naturalism and edges toward the anxious conceptual ping-pong that presumably won Bellow the Nobel and which I’ve never been able to warm to, that perpetual half-turn toward qualified and insufficient emblems of redemption which over a novel’s length becomes perfectly maddening. To refuse your characters any public reckoning is to leave them the sole recourse of private catharsis. And as for that—well, you have to take the writer’s word for it, don’t you?
Robert Graves, No More Ghosts
Graves, Robert. No More Ghosts: Selected Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1940.
These vary a lot, but here are two of the best, in very different modes, to give you an idea of the range.
Warning to Children
Children, if you dare to think
The Advocates
Fugitive firs and larches for a moment
Green things, you are already there enrolled.
The young people of Stanford are still doing good work; scrawled in one of the library cubicles, next to the W.A.S.T.E. muted trumpet, is
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne
<3
One of the women's rooms at the University of Munich had a "Toilette
für Englische Philologie"
Salvador Espriu, La Pell de Brau (The Bull-Hide)
Espriu, Salvador. La pell de brau. Trans. Burton Raffel. Marlboro, VT: The Marlboro Press, 1977 (1960).
XXIX
Little by little we forget
The circle turns, there is no stopping.
While the meaning machine continues its interim rumbling, you will want to know that my alternate career as a piano technician is moving apace. The piano’s 88 hammers are made of felt layers wrapped around a wood core, and if you happen to own a spinet from the 1950s that has been serviced rarely if ever during the intervening decades, you will discover that the felt has become grooved and compacted from the pressure of the strings, and that striking certain keys now produces a sound like Beethoven dropping his beer stein. The solution, we learn from the internet, is to grip a needle right proper in a pair of pliers and poke some infinitesimal holes in the felt just above and below the striking surface. I am dumbfounded at the change produced by a mere four holes per hammer—I have not turned the spinet into a baby grand, and it is still not the easiest instrument to play pianissimo, but the bass half of the scale is no longer attempting a hostile takeover of the treble. Anyway, once I get the vegetable garden back in action I will roll back the division of labor entirely and never need one of your damn jobs again.
Charlotte Brontë, Villette
Brontë, Charlotte. Villette. New York: Modern Library, 2001 (1853).
Virginia Woolf said that Middlemarch was one of the few English novels written for grown-up people; Villette must also be on that short list, and its unerring wisdom and sobriety must be the reason it gets read less than Jane Eyre despite being, as I just found out, one of the very greatest novels in the literature. Lucy Snowe, our narrator/heroine, is not herself unerringly wise or sober—that wouldn’t make much of a novel—but she knows her own heart and spares herself nothing, not least the constant recognition that by usual standards she ought not to be in the book at all. Plain and poor, possessing no virtues but a fathomless moral intelligence, she is obliged to work for a living without hope of relieving that obligation by inheritance or marriage; thus if she could be expected to claim any place in the novel, at most it would be that of confidante to the real heroine—here, either the boundlessly annoying Ginevra or the more artless Paulina, both of whom Lucy does advise, and both of whom do claim their appointed rewards. That Lucy is, notwithstanding, the structural center means that she has to spend the entire book fighting for her own existence. And what existence might be possible for such as her—what is given, what is taken away—leads into one of the cruelest and most beautiful endings I have ever read.
toujours villette!
Why do we keep driving across Nevada? I don’t know, but on Wednesday epic winds were blowing across the plains, kicking up dust and darkening half the sky. What is up with this, I asked, and J. said, “A complex emergent phenomenon”: egghead. Armies of tumbleweeds came bouncing across the road; when cars hit them, our own included, they puffed out into evanescent clouds of twigs, like bad guys in a video game. Those that survived the passage would get caught on the miles of barbed wire fence that run along the highway to screen off the range lands. When we drove back the next day they had piled ten deep along the fences, on both sides of the road, for mile after mile. We made out a column of smoke, a glint of red flame, and as we got closer we saw about fifteen people from the highway department standing around the fence in their orange overalls, watching a pile of weeds burn down. But is that what they’re planning along the entire highway? It will take months to burn them all.
André Gide, L'Immoraliste
Gide, André. L’Immoraliste. Paris: Gallimard, 1972
(1902).
How the wastes of North Africa remind me of the Greeks! Ah, the Greeks, for whom philosophy was a natural outgrowth of poetry, poetry but a dialect of philosophy, who practiced all arts naturally—and boy-love—What? Who said that? Silence, devil! BOYLOVE Ah, my wife will be inconsolable! HOT ARAB BOYS WITH BRONZED LIMBS But what is your morality to me—I must discover my true self—why do I always end up down by the canal where the boys go swimming? Sultry Africa! Oscar Wilde, you never should have taken me to that club!
I do well in the quiet, high, bright places. When I was in better shape I would climb mountains; now I have to settle for walking to campus and perching on a wall above the current construction site, which blessedly sleeps weekends. Cool bay air, sparrows. A towhee scratching for morsels under the leaf carpet. The occasional well-groomed undergraduate walking by with sandals on his lily-white feet.
Mundo mundo vasto mundo! Not over yet.
Meilleur
UPDATE
VEGGIE D-LITE ENCHILADAS
Black beans, carrots, onions, mushrooms, red potatoes, edamame, spices, sauce. Let it in; make it better.
I am trying to read Gide in French, and it is all right except that I don’t understand the function of all the farms and horses in the middle. J. is at work on her winter quarter papers, and it is a slow haul up a rocky slope but it is getting done: go J. I am in my department building on the weekend because I am lightly rooted and go with the prevailing winds; and when I climb up the unswept stairs I ask myself, “Is this a home? In what sense has this been a home?” Dumb question to ask a building. I never like the talks that are advertised on the bulletin boards, and right here next to the computer is a copy of the 1603 quarto edition of Hamlet, and damned if I know what to do with it, if I could make a life of doing things to it, or of encouraging others to do the same.
I have been here nearly four years, because I am very good at staying on the racetrack as long as there are clearly marked hurdles, so I hear that I need to start professionalizing. Now I just forgot to send in any conference abstacts before the MLA deadline, because fuck the MLA. Oh dear. If labor is alienating always and everywhere, why pick this? I drank coffee until my head unscrewed and spat out steam, then followed the ravens over the grass. That is the self of youth, I guess, and the ravens will still be around when youth is gone.
Jean Racine, Andromaque
Racine, Jean. Andromaque. En Théatre Complet I.
Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1964 (1668).
I had expected this one to end up more or less like Phèdre;
a
consecutive chain of unrequited desire threatens to undermine projects of state... meanwhile Andromaque, in the impossible position of extortion for her son’s life, is forced to simultaneously plot his salvation and her own death. You could derive the whole thing from the fact that larmes rhymes with charmes, and that isn’t a knock; Racine’s simplicity is his beauty. So I was bouncing along with the alexandrines, appreciating the rhetoric and expecting the usual relaxant catharsis with all the aristocrats dying—and that is sort of what happens, but the fifth act brings a number of reversals that I really wasn’t expecting and which leave the violence frighteningly unfinished. As the curtain falls the Trojan War is set to start all over again, in displaced form, and Aeschylus could have told you that an infinite revenge cycle yields no tragic comfort at all. It gives me the fantods. I have to go to bed.
you must put on a mask.
When the task is done
the mask stays on.
It whispers the themes
you embroider in dreams.
Of the greatness, rareness, muchness,
Fewness of this precious only
Endless world in which you say
You live, you think of things like this:
Blocks of slate enclosing dappled
Red and green, enclosing tawny
Yellow nets, enclosing white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where a neat brown paper parcel
Tempts you to untie the string.
In the parcel a small island,
On the island a large tree,
On the tree a husky fruit.
Strip the husk and cut the rind off:
In the centre you will see
Blocks of slate enclosed by dappled
Red and green, enclosed by tawny
Yellow nets, enclosed by white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where the same brown paper parcel—
Children, leave the string untied!
For who dares undo the parcel
Finds himself at once inside it,
On the island, in the fruit,
Blocks of slate about his head,
Finds himself enclosed by dappled
Green and red, enclosed by yellow
Tawny nets, enclosed by black
And white acres of dominoes,
But the same brown paper parcel
Still untied upon his knee.
And, if he then should dare to think
Of the fewness, muchness, rareness,
Greatness of this endless only
Precious world in which he says
He lives—he then unties the string.
Caught, past midnight, by our headlight beam
On that mad journey through unlasting lands
I cannot put a name to, years ago,
(And my companions drowsy-drunk)—these trees
Resume again their sharp appearance, perfect
Of spur and tassel, claiming memory,
Claiming affection: ‘Will we be included
In the catalogue? Yes, yes?’ they plead.
And should a new resentment gnaw in me
Against my dear companions of that journey
(Strangers already then, in thought and deed)
You shall be advocates, charged to deny
That all the good I lived with them is lost.
And our dances
End, and our songs,
Out of the ancient earth
And sky of the plains
Of Sharon. Because fear creeps into
The beat of our dance,
Fear of wild bears around us.
The sun comes out, the sun sets
And there is never anything new
Under its light.
Read
Ecclesiastes
And everything will seem
Easy to understand:
He who wants to deceive himself
Is free to deceive himself.
Now we say “later,”
And later we’ll say “tomorrow,”
But we never go astray forever
All in one night.
Men are all different, different,
Thoughts are all different,
We go on living the dream
Of a unique love
And death is quick
To ripen us, death is quick.