SIGNS OF THE APOCALYPSE: Is that Smash Mouth covering "Everyword Means No" by (North Carolina's own) Let's Active? Must they sully everything they touch?

ONE MORE LINK: Camille is awesome, but then, you knew that:

"2.) Related: what's up with Renaissance Fair(e)s? It creeps me out when people dress like the cast of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and speak in Cockney accents that are not their own. I'm going out on a limb here, but if you have a codpiece on or identify strongly with a wood nymph, thou havest issues and needest some therappe."

LINKS FOR THE EVENING: I'm a little busy with the dissertation group and a fellowship thing, but I've had this in mind for some time, and now is as good as any to post it. As artistic progressions go, this is a particularly weird one:*

David Johansen in The New York Dolls, "Jet Boy." If it sounds a bit like Aerosmith in the mid-70s (as it does to me), that would be because Aerosmith and the Dolls toured together in 1973-74; which is to say, Aerosmith completely ripped them off.

David Johansen as Buster Poindexter. Sadly, the youtube video of "Hot Hot Hot" is gone, and this is not quite the abomination that is, but it's still really, really weird. I blame the 80s.

David Johansen as grizzled blues cat and historical preservationist.

*Did I do this already? Eh, probably worth doing again.

LINK: Joseph Bottom has an interesting article on death and political theory. I'm not sure the argument entirely works (I'll have to read it again), and I do have a slight skepticism about basing politics on metaphysics (which is to say, I don't have a problem basing my own politics on my own metaphysics, but I do share the early modern worry about basing 'politics' on 'metaphysics:' there's still a lot of work to be done before that description's complete), but it's certainly interesting and worth a read.

LINK: I've never understood male facial hair, myself, or at least not since the point I stopped regularly having it (over five years ago). I sort of get the female viewpoint (as noted in the comments) that not shaving is just incredibly lazy; this is why, generally speaking, I shave for pretty much any occasion when I'm going to see people I know, with the exception of when I'm with my family on vacation, and don't feel like bothering. I mean, clearly other people don't have this same opinion (and I would guess that the distribution of men-who-have-beards and women-who-like-beards is non-random, both highly skewed towards more intellectual professions), so it's just a gripe that some people have, but it was interesting to me to see it brought up.

By the by, this reminds me of the conference I attended where I took a brief survey of whether or not to grow a beard by looking at the men in the room and taking a count of how many fell into each category. The conclusion? A beard will get you an entirely respectable amount of success and esteem, but no beard will get you a higher citation count.

PAPER IDEA: Er, well, mostly a title: "Turning Rebellion into Money: The Politics of British Punk"

...this arising out of assisting my ethnomusicologist friend in preparing a lecture on the music of the 1970s, when I filled her in on such details as: David Bowie's embrace of fascism, Eric Clapton's support for Enoch Powell, Rock Against Racism, the Anti-Nazi League, and the use and abuse of Nazi symbolism (particularly by the Sex Pistols, but I think there's a fair amount to be said about Joy Division, given where their name comes from). I'm sure that paper's already been written, but it might be fun.

SATURDAY EVENING POST:

"Anne wondered whether it ever occurred to him now, to question the justness of his previous opinion as to the universal felicity and advantage of firmness of character; and whether it might not strike him, that, like all other qualities of the mind, it should have it's proportions and limits. She thought it could scarcely escape him to feel, that a persuadable temper might sometimes be as much in favor of happiness, as a very resolute character."

-Jane Austen, Persuasion

I did almost read Persuasion four years ago. I checked it out from the library, settled into my usual reading place at the time (the front balcony of the apartment I was subletting), and made it all of a page and a half into the book before I decided this was emphatically not a literary style for me. The time being what it was, I most likely put it down in favor of Euripedes or Aeschylus (and man, if you were ever looking for a gender-oriented literary division, there you go). Anyhow, I'm now very glad that I put it off: I finished it this evening, and would go so far as to say it's my favorite Austen (take that, Mansfield Park!). It is also quite likely that had I read it even so little as six months ago (well, let's say eight, to be safe), it probably would have appeared to me to be abstract and literary (in a bad way) and contrived. I can now see that it gets the emotions almost exactly right, and in conditions where it oftens seems difficult to make sense of what is going on within oneself. I'll be returning to it again, quite certainly.

This makes me think of the suggestion given in the comments to my Conrad post from last week, about overrated works of literature. My list tends to be short here*: if I think something's not going to be worth reading, I generally don't read it (or finish it--which is why Swann's Way is unlikely to be read by me anytime soon). One of the few I'd be inclined to put on that list is Middlemarch. The novel's merits, so far as I can see, are to throw a number of balls up in the air over the course of 800+ pages, and to manage to catch them all at the end; the plots themselves are a bit too diffuse and mechanical in their execution to inspire emotion or sentiment. But I hesitate just a bit in calling it 'overrated,' because it seems just as likely that the problem is me, and not the book: 'youth is cruel, and has no remorse' and all. Perhaps in another 20 years I'll feel differently about it, perhaps not.

*Okay, I'll indulge just a little, in passing: Howard's End, Kim, and The Satanic Verses as a start; I actually sort of liked the Rushdie, but with all three I felt the payoff was not worth the time invested.

BLEG: We're doing a little advance planning for my summer reading: anyone have thoughts on Thomas Wolfe? Literature from the south in the 20th century is a bit of a weak spot for me, and he seems like as good a place to start as any.

QUOTES FOR THE EVENING: The following Eliot is the first thing of his I ever took to and memorized. I have no idea what exactly compelled a 10th grader to recognize the weight of 'and youth is cruel, and has no remorse,' but I like to think Eliot sees himself in both of the people here: the young man is all arrogance and self-possession, but he recognizes that the way he sees things now is not the way he'll always see them. Anyway:

"Now that the lilacs are in bloom
She has a bowl of lilacs in her room
And twists one in her fingers while she talks.
'Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know
What life is, you who hold it in your hands';
(Slowly twisting the lilac stalks)
'You let it flow from you, you let it flow,
And youth is cruel, and has no remorse
And smiles at situations which it cannot see.'
I smile, of course,
And go on drinking tea."

-T.S. Eliot, "Portrait of a Lady"

"We exercise the kind of dictatorial authority to which Kant objects whenever we arbitrarily restrict the criticism we are prepared to accept from others, whether by preventing them from voicing it at all or by discounting what they have to say when we have no reason to think they are in error. If so, then while we might on occasion regard someone as, say, an object of theoretical inquiry or behavioral control, we exercise dictatorial authority if we decide that we will not in general regard others who are able to reason as reasoning beings. For in so doing we remove our reason from any criticism that might be offered by others, and decide, in effect, that ours is the only voice we will attend to."

-Hilary Bok, Freedom and Responsibility, "Holding Others Responsible"

4 8 15 16 23 42: That was awesome. I did sort of anticipate it'd be a flash-forward, but man...

WHEN WE SAY 'PARTEE' WE MEAN IT TO END ON THE DOUBLE-E: The ipod was particularly kind to me this morning. After I started out with "Trigger Cut/Wounded-Kite At:17", I got:

"Free Money" -Patti Smith
"You're No Rock and Roll Fun" -Sleater-Kinney
"Stop!" -Jane's Addiction
"Center of Gravity" -Yo La Tengo
"Summer Babe(Winter Version)" -Pavement
"Sugar Magnolia" -Grateful Dead (I don't care what anyone says, I love this song)
"Glory" -Liz Phair
"A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger" -Of Montreal
"Ease Your Feet in the Sea" -Belle & Sebastian
"Good Vibrations" -Beach Boys
"Stutter" -Elastica (have I mentioned how much Elastica reminds me of Nirvana (but British, and with a female singer)?)
"Funky Days Are Back Again" -Cornershop

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING:

(Parenthetical note just in case someone from my dissertation group is reading: I'm still percolating on how I'm going to put it together--why Grotius spends so much time talking about things anyone else would call virtues but flatly refuses to call them that. I have the title, though: "Virtue without virtue?" I am reasonably convinced that academic success depends on having halfway decent titles to things. Anyway, you'll see what I have tomorrow)

"If I ask myself (to take a comparison on a higher plane) why I prefer the poetry of Dante to that of Shakespeare, I should have to say, because it seems to me to illustrate a saner attitude towards the mystery of life."

-T.S. Eliot, preface to the 1928 edition of The Sacred Wood

In my semi-irresponsible reading of other things, I am now on to Wuthering Heights. Were I more rational, I would perhaps be ashamed to admit that there are still so many lacunae in my reading, but I think there's room in life for both the deepening and broadening of taste; the Eliot quotations are the former, branching out is the latter.

Relatedly, I spent Saturday afternoon reading in Duke Gardens, an activity I highly recommend to absolutely everyone. The weather was perfect, in a mid-June-in-Michigan sort of way (this is not, incidentally, the sort of weather one expects in North Carolina in July, but, again, there you go): mid-70s, sunny, light breeze. If it hadn't been for the other people passing through, it would've been perfect. Well, that and my choice of reading material: Conrad's The Secret Agent. Between this and my vague recollections of Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday (high on the list of 'books I didn't get'), I get the sense that there was a well-defined writerly ethos in late 19th-early 20th-century England. The flaws of Conrad's style were apparent: a heavy favor shown to description over dialogue (and action, for that matter), and the tendency to use a frighteningly exact word where a general one would've served just as well. I read Heart of Darkness about six years ago, and recall being not at all impressed by it. I suppose I will eventually get around to reading Lord Jim (which I gather to be the other famous Conrad novel), but I have no problem putting that one off for another six years.

PROSPECTUS? DEFENDED: I'm sure at some point in the not-too-distant future, the actual work of writing my dissertation will return me to the fear of inadequacy and the constant worry that I haven't gotten enough done. But right now, I'm feeling pretty good.

SO: I'm a little busy now, and tomorrow (though I do have a fabulous bacon-and-cupcake dinner planned for after my defense), and the next day too, actually (moving a friend). Links:

Via Alex Massie, a youtube clip of the greatest Warner Bros. cartoon of all time, "What's Opera, Doc?" Enjoy it before it gets taken down.

See also Matthew Fluxblog's comments on the series finale of Gilmore Girls. I gave up on the show several years ago (Rory turning into a stupid, directionless college student may have been realistic, but I get plenty of that reality stuff in my life), but did watch the finale yesterday, and it was really, really good.

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING: Now that I have just a little bit of free time (and the promise of a little bit more after Thursday), I returned to the novel I abandoned halfway through at the end of last break: Flaubert's Sentimental Education. I will admit that I first purchased the book (end of sophomore year of college) because of that scene in Manhattan; my only other Flaubert experience (short stories aside) is The Temptation of St. Anthony. Interesting enough, but probably not worth reading. Sentimental Education would make an interesting companion to Rousseau's Confessions. I make no secret of my dislike for Rousseau; I think Flaubert is willing to be critical of Frédéric in a way Rousseau is not critical of himself, and the end result is to make Frédéric a more human figure. Because we're not admonished from the beginning to withhold judgment, it makes it easier to sympathize and forgive him his (fictional) shortcomings.

If 19th Century French novels are good for nothing else, it's nice, medium-length speeches about big concepts like Art or Politics, that satirize the giving of medium-length speeches on Art or Politics, while still holding to some variant of the views there expressed. Thus:

"'I don't want any of your hideous reality! What do you mean by reality, anyway? Some see black, some see blue, and the mob see wrong. There's nothing less natural than Michelangelo, and nothing more powerful. The cult of external truth reveals the vulgarity of our times; and if things go on this way, art is going to become a sort of bad joke inferior to religion in poetry and inferior to politics in interest. You'll never attain the purpose of art--yes, it's purpose!--which is to give an impersonal sense of exaltation, with petty works, however carefully they're produced. Look at Bassolier's pictures, for instance: they're pretty, charming, neat, and not at all heavy. You can put them in your pocket, or take them with you on your travels. Solicitors pay twenty thousand francs for them, and there isn't tuppence-worth of ideas in them; but without ideas, there is no grandeur, and without grandeur no beauty! Olympus is a mountain. The proudest of all monuments will always be the Pyramids. Exuberance is better than taste, the desert better than a pavement, and a savage is better than a barber!'"

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING: We've been a lght on substantive posting, as our writing energies have been devoted to finalizing our prospectus, but that has now been sent to the whole committee. We'll see what happens Thursday. Anyway, on to the quote-y goodness:

"And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others' harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer."

Eliot's interlocutor gives this as the last of three 'gifts reserved for age' that 'set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.' I am tempted to find this terribly depressing: a lifetime of experience will allow me to see how constantly I have failed, how much I have perverted in the name of cultivating virtue? But the hope, I suppose, comes in the possibility of the refining fire.

(There is a longer post brewing on my initial attraction to Eliot as a poet and intellectual figure, which will make use of the Poussin painting Et in Arcadia ego, but that will have to wait another day or two. This is all prompted by a conversation I had with a couple of friends over lunch, in which I was asked what I found appealing about good ol' T.S.)

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING: In which I abuse the form in order to share a few things I've had on my mind:

First, from Eliot, "The Literature of Politics":

"For the question of questions, which no political philosophy can escape, and by the right answer to which all political thinking must in the end be judged, is simply this: What is Man? what are his limitations? what is his misery and what his greatness? and what, finally, his destiny?"

I love this, not only because it strikes me as entirely right (even in the ordering of the questions, which asks about the limitations of man before his greatness), but also because the 'question of questions' is in fact four separate questions. Brilliant.

Also from Eliot, "American Literature and American Language":

"Most of us, we know, have a pretty good chance of oblivion anyway; but to those of us who succeed in dying in advance of our reputations, the assurance of a time when our writings will only be grappled with by two or three graduate students in Middle Anglo-American 42 B is very distasteful."

"Oh, snap" as the kids say. But entirely fair. And we'll connect this with something in Dante (Purgutorio XXVI):

"I put myself forward a little towards him that had been pointed out and said that my desire offered a place of welcome for his name, and he readily began to speak: 'So much does your courteous question please me that I neither can nor would conceal myself from you. I am Arnaut, who weep and sing as I go. I see with grief past follies and see, rejoicing, the day I hope for before me. Now I beg of you, by that goodness that guides you to the summit of the stairway, to take thought in due time for my pain.' Then he hid himself in the fire that refines them."

Eliot readers will recognize the last line, in its Italian form (Poi s'ascose nel foco che li affina). The passage carries a lot with it: commentators will point out that Arnaut is one of the very few people in the Commedia who speaks in his own language, not Italian. But there are three reasons I've always liked this passage perhaps best of all of Dante. In the first place, the image of this moment of purgutory, the refining fire, seems to me an excellent metaphor for the this-worldly process of sanctification. It's not that you become something else: because of the fire, you become more yourself, more pure. The second is that Arnaut is a romantic poet, and I sometimes think that it is the task of singleness to see with grief your past follies while hoping for the day in which you can rejoice.

The third is the manner in which Dante draws out the implications of writing as an act of creation. The sin applied to at least certain writers in the Inferno (I am thinking here of Brunetto Latini as one of the 'literary sodomites') and the Purgutorio is lust. The urge to write is a desire to create a legacy that survives one's physical body in the world, and to do that by binding up one's work with an intense form of love. The thing I write I bring into being of my own energy, and make the world different because of it (and this is to say nothing of the desire of having followers to carry on one's work after death--the bond of affection between Latini and Dante is obvious).

When I finished my exams this past fall, I was obsessed with questions of structure and composition, fascinated by the creative process and its various failures (8 1/2, I think, is the perfect movie to watch when thinking about one's dissertation). To the extent that I have brought forward my project, it is largely by placing the larger questions about what I am doing and why off to the side. I certainly hope it is not simply amour propre, but I think Dante gives me the ability to ask that question honestly, and think about the implications of my answer.

OH, SNAP: Camille:

"Bachelorette" is the high-rise, tapered, acid-washed, elastic-waisted jean of vocabulary. With a mullet."

Awesome.

Also, "See My Friend" by the Kinks appears to have been the first use of a sitar in a pop song, beating "Norwegian Wood" by four months or so. I guess I can't even claim the Beatles to have been original anymore...

(addendum, from Kim: "(oh, there was no sitar on that piece but rather "Davies sought to achieve an Indian sound, subsituting a controlled feedback for the drone, and his approach differed markedly from Harrisons")"

“For the development of genuine taste, founded on genuine feeling, is inextricable from the development of personality an character. Genuine taste is always imperfect taste—but we are all, as a matter of fact, imperfect people; and the man whose taste in poetry does not bear the stamp of his particular personality, so that there are differences in what he likes from what we like, as well as resemblances, and differences in the way of liking the same things, is apt to be a very uninteresting person with whom to discuss poetry.”

T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism

One of my favorite riffs (distinctly Nozickian in character, I think, though not quite as good as anything he himself did) to bring up in conversation with other political theorists is the idea that you end up studying the people you deserve. That is, the process of finding figures who are worth spending time on is its own sort of Dantean contrapasso. The riff emerged when I noticed, in the reading I was doing in contemporary political philosophy, that there were some people who I returned to over and over on a variety of topics. My own little group includes Jeremy Waldron, Robert Nozick, and John Finnis amongst political philosophers. Hugo Grotius dominates amongst the political theorists (not surprisingly, dissertation topic and all), and is joined by the sort of figures one might expect to crop up on a list of a conservative’s favored theorists: Locke, Burke, Montesquieu, Augustine. Three things seem to apply to most of the members of the list: 1. They have some concern for issues of analytic specificity, but do not let the concern for perfect definitions overwhelm their usefulness. 2. On the whole, they are wildly discursive, and of the style of run-on sentences I have tried for many years to overcome, without success. 3. Most of them adhere to some form of Protestant religiosity (or are consistent with such religiosity), but none of them are Calvinists.

I bring this up because the ‘getting what you deserve’ part touches on, I think, what Eliot talks about in the introduction to The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. The process by which things stick with you is, necessarily, idiosyncratic. But it is often the case that something appeals to you long before you know why. I knew that I wanted to write on Grotius long before I knew he was a major figure in Arminian theology (some people, and by some people I mean me, might think this is a major shortcoming of the literature on Grotius, but that’s a section of the dissertation waiting to be written), which seems oddly appropriate for the man who struggles over whether or not he can be a Calvinist. You find intellectual figures to work with in part because they appeal to you, and might be useful for your project. Ideally, in the process of working with them you come to be changed as well, so you don’t simply appropriate them for your own ends, but recognize them as interlocutors no less real than the ones who sit across from you at breakfast tables or coffee shops.

It occurs to me that the same thing is true with respect to literature. I flatter myself to think that I’ve reached the point of critical capacity at which I can distinguish good from bad (a more sophisticated exercise, for Eliot, than ‘thing I liked’ or ‘thing I didn’t like’). Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth was, I think, probably the best book I read in college (I vaguely recall making several other people I know read it, no small feat for a 750-page memoir that ends with the author at 25 or so); I have similarly warm feelings about Balzac’s Pere Goriot, or Fathers and Sons, or Great Expectations. But I’ve not looked at any of those books since I read them, don’t think about them all that frequently, and probably will never read any of them again. Now, T.S. Eliot, Dante, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, A Hero of Our Time, Crime and Punishment, etc (I could go on, but won’t) have stuck with me—become a part of my consciousness—in a way those other books haven’t, even when, strictly speaking, the books on the first list are better (I can only imagine that my mother, should she have made it this far through the post, is thinking that my placement of Fitzgerald and Hemingway on the list means she failed in the task of raising me). Part of this is the change that’s happened to me as I’ve gone on. The end of The Great Gatsby looked like a number of oddly unconnected anecdotes when I first read it. I now can see why Nick digresses into the memory of what it was like to return home from college for the Christmas holidays.

Some of these have been with me a long time now (or a long time for me): Dante and Eliot I first read about ten years ago. And still I can think about whether a Calvinist doctrine of total depravity requires giving up on making the world better, and:

“For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

Or be walking along, and turn

“Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee”

or:

“Phlebas the Phonecian, a fortnight dead”

over in my head. (Or remember the poster in the room the section of my 17th and 18th Century philosophy class met in: “O O O O That Shakespearean rag”).

Anyway, this was going to be a brief explanation of why I enjoy Eliot as much as I do, but this post is waaaaaay too long, so maybe later.

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING: A little early, but why not?

"O empty glory of human powers, how briefly lasts the green on its top, unless it is followed by an age of dulness! In painting Cimabue thought to hold the field and now Giotto has the cry, so that the other's fame is dim; so has the one Guido taken from the other the glory of our tongue, and he, perhaps, is born that shall chase the one and the other from the nest. The world's noise is but a breath of wind which comes now this way and now that, and changes name because it changes quarter."

-Oderisi, from Purgutorio XI

SO, UH:

*Picnic last night? The coq au vin I ended up making went over quite well... not as well as the spicy Korean chicken, but I do what I can.

*Paper? Sent in noon-ish. I certainly hope the professor likes it, because he'll be seeing it again (in a longer form) as the end of the first chapter of my dissertation.

*Grading? All exams are graded. The average is solidly in B+ range, which will either be high, or low, depending on what everyone else does.

So that means that, final adjudication of grades aside (details, really), I'm done for the semester.*

I'd like to thank Deluxx Folk Implosion ("Interplanet Janet") and the B-52s ("Rock Lobster")** for keeping me from going crazy when I was only halfway through grading.

*Not including ongoing meetings with my advisor and committee members, but that's something else entirely.

**Video here. It's sort of funny that a new wave band with a 1950s fetish gets tagged as "60s" and "hippy."

TRIAGE: profgrrrrl-style:

By Saturday at 5:00 pm I need to:

*finish my philosophy of international law paper ("Grotius, Slavery, and the Problem of Contrary Practice in CIL")
*meet with my advisor about my prospectus
*attend both days of the Sovereignty Working Group's conference
*proctor the final for Con Law (7:00-10:00 pm Thursday)
*plan and make something for my friends' picnic on Friday night
*go to picnic
*grade finals

...so if I'm not around much, that's why

Thursday evening update:
*Full draft of the paper, above the minimum length requirement. The rest is just details.
*Meeting with advisor next week, but I was told that the proposal looks good, so there's not likely to be a need for major revisions, he said, counting his eggs before they hatched
*One day down, one to go
*In medias res, as they say. I was reminded of a SAT-prep textbook I read that noted 'proctor' and 'proctologist' have the same Greek root. I'm not sure exactly what to make of that.
*No idea, and the other people going don't seem to have a good idea what they're bringing. For all the other shortcomings of relationships, that's one advantage they have: one person or the other always has an idea of what to make, and the time to make it.
*N/A, yet
*...we'll take a look at some tonight and go from there