I declare today DedalusDay
27 April: Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.
--Bryant
The humanities save
Via Luminous, Stanley Fish has a what-is-it-all-for moment in a NY Times Op Ed. In short, are the humanities useful? He says, "if they don’t bring about effects in the world they cannot be justified except in relation to the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them." Is he implying that reading books and listening to records are selfish pursuits? You don't say. He goes on: "you can talk about “well rounded citizens,” but that ideal belongs to an earlier period, when the ability to refer knowledgeably to Shakespeare or Gibbon or the Thirty Years War had some cash value (the sociologists call it cultural capital). Nowadays, larding your conversations with small bits of erudition is more likely to irritate than to win friends and influence people." Ok, now he's really stripping us of our laurels.
Postville: report
I finished Stephen G. Bloom's Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America within a few hours of Barack Obama's convincing victory in Iowa last night. The two stories are actually pretty similar, given that in both cases we see how Iowans react to people who don't look like their own. In Bloom's book, a suprisingly negative portrait is painted of a group of Hasidic Jews who move to smalltown Iowa from Brooklyn, NY to open a Kosher slaughterhouse. Bloom himself is a non-practicing, assimilated Jew who leaves San Francisco to take a teaching position at the University of Iowa. As an Iowan myself, I cringed to read his welcoming in the Hawkeye state: stares in the supermarket, Christians asking to pray for his family, and no one turning up to his family's Watermelon social. A shock to me considering Iowa City's long tradition of liberalism and diversity (relatively speaking). Eventually, Bloom questions his identity and seeks out his Jewish roots by commuting to Postville, IA, where in 1987 the town underwent its seismic Semitic shift.
The Hasidim want nothing to do with the goyim (non-Jews) and do everything in their power to ignore these white, Christian locals. Bloom relates stories from the Postville natives wanting to reach out but being continuosly rejected. Throughout the book we hear alarming stories of the Jewish contingent stealing money, attempting murder and showing no remorse, and being staunch racists to boot. Yet the slaughterhouse has revived a dying farming community: hundreds of jobs have been created and real estate in town has boomed. All of this coincides with an impending annexation vote which could do serious damage to the slaughterhouse. Bloom hit the journalistic jackpot by having this as his backstory.
The thing that shocked me most about this book was Bloom's calm and clear conclusion that he's just not a big fan of his people, or atleast its most orthodox sect: "Lazar and I may have come from same parents thousands of years ago, but now all we shared were some common prayers, a smattering of Yiddish words, an affection for the same food, and a profound love of our families." ....and "It was finally time for the pleasant, accepting Iowans to stand up to the Hasidim. I hoped they would get some cojones, neither an Iowa word or concept. The locals had to know they had been abused and ridiculed." The reader can only come out of this book with some severe biases, and that's a seriously disturbing revelation. I hate to say this, but I hope this book doesn't fall into the wrong hands. If anyone's read this, I'd be curious to hear how it settled with them.
Sundown
"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can." -Moby Dick
Big science
Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading--the jive-plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the "gourmet mansardic" junk-food joints, the Orwellian office "parks" featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chaingang guards, the particle-board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call "growth." --James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere
While I wasn't a fan
I'd like to point out that author Kurt Vonnegut died today at the age of 84. I feel bad, cuz I pimped him all these years for his ties to the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Hey now, a homer is as a homer does. I did meet him once at a book-signing at the Border's on 57th and Park in Manhattan. While I couldn't get into his fiction, he did seem a really funny and personable man.
Yer blues
While reading Much Ado About Nothing today for my upcoming Master's exam in March, I came across an awesome passage about those who try to cope us through our sorrows:
Give not me counsel,
Nor let no comforter delight mine ear
But such a one whose wrongs do suit with mine....
For brother, men, can counsel and speak comfort to that grief
Which they themselves not feel, but tasting it,
Their counsel turns to passion, which before
Would give preceptial med'cine to rage,
Fetter strong madness in a silken thread,
Charm ache with air and agony with words.
No, no, 'tis all men's office to speak patience
To those that wring under the load of sorrow,
But no man's virtue nor sufficiency
To be so moral when shall endure
The like himself. Therefore give me no counsel.
My griefs cry louder than advertisement.
---Leonato (act 5, scene 1)
Whoa there. Even with the romance comedies, Shakespeare can serve the steak and potatoes.
PS: That said, on Cyber Classical, many playlists ago, we played the nocturne from Berlioz's opera Beatrice and Benedict, which, I now see, is based on Much Ado About Nothing.
He's everywhere.
Restoration and 18th Century Lit.
Some of you out there ask me what I'm reading for class. I offered up my Shakespeare syllabus last Spring, so here's the reading list from the period just after him.
Unit One: The (Radical) “Comedy of Manners”
9/13 William Wycherley, The Country Wife (1675)
George Etherege, The Man of Mode (1676)
9/20 John Dryden, Marriage à la Mode (1671)
John Dryden/William Davenant, The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island
9/27 Aphra Behn, The Rover (1677) 10/4 Jean Racine, Phaedra (1677) [h] Roland Barthes, from On Racine Unit Two: Neoclassical Time/Space Experiments
John Milton, Samson Agonistes (1671) [h]
(optional) Mohamed, “Confronting Religious Violence”
10/11 William Congreve, The Way of the World (1700)
Unit Three: High Augustan Forms
10/18 John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera (1728)
Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore, chap. 2 [h]
John Gay, Polly (1729)
Unit Four: New Tragedy
10/25 George Lillo, The London
Horace Walpole, The Mysterious Mother (1768/1781) [h]
Robert Hume, “Before the Bard” [h]
Unit Five: Farce and “Laughing” Comedy
11/1 Henry Fielding, The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731)
Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer (1773)
Goldsmith, in McMillan, 489-492
11/8 Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The School for Scandal (1777)
The Critic (1779)
A Duty for Darrells Bullen
(Here's a super short story I wrote today in 29 minutes; I've been meaning to get it off my chest for quite some time now)
A young teenage boy—let’s call him Darrells—finished his last geometry problem and peeled back the sheets. Suddenly, his mom yelled up from the foyer: “Darrells! Phone!” The young lad picked up his cordless and muttered a quiet “hello?” into the receiver. Ringing back into his ears was that high-pitched, pre-pubescent and very self-assured voice: “Hey, it’s me, Nic.” Nick had dropped the “k” when he was 13. “Can you come over, it’s really important.”
“I don’t know man, it’s late and I was just about to go to bed,” rejoined a weary Darrells.
“Oh c’mon, I’ll owe you big time. I need you,” Nic pleaded.
“OK, I’ll get on my bike.”
Darrells was 14 and his bike was a Huffy. In the 6th grade, kids had mockingly chanted to him and always very slowly, “Huffy…Huffy...” whenever he began to unlock his bike from the rack before riding home.
And so Darrell pedaled his way to Nic’s, even though it was already 9 o’clock.
And he pedaled. He pedaled through dark country roads, patches of forest, and even through a wheat field when he finally arrived around 9:45.
As Darrells approached the house, Nic had opened the door from the garage trying to get his friend’s attention, “pssst…hey man…come in through here.”
Darrells quickly jerked back to his right and ducked under the half open garage door.
“Hey,” whispered Nic, “follow me.”
The two tip-toed down the corridor and entered Nic’s bedroom.
“What’s going on? You’re starting to worry me. You okay?” inquired Darrells.
“What I’m about to tell you can’t tell anyone else, alright?”
“Sure.”
“Listen man. I don’t know how to laugh. Will you teach me how to laugh?” asked Nic.
“What the hell are you talking about?” responded Darrells with impatience.
“I mean, I can laugh. But it doesn’t come out right. Will you teach me to laugh?”
“How do you laugh now?” asked Darrells with disbelief.
“Well….I don’t know. Kind of like this: uh……uh huh. Uh…..uh huh…”
And so a preposterous, mousy modulation filled the young boy’s room.
Shelf Candy No More
I had never read Moby Dick--my highschool English class let us watch the movie--so I picked it up and breezed through it in 11 days. Other than my Moncrieff and Kilmartin translation of Proust, I have not seen the English language so prodigiously handled. I have a couple criticisms and thoughts on the book:
1.) As far as epics go, I got little to no feel of durée; that is a sense of oneself (or the characters) flowing through time. The book is so intent on describing every technical and mundane aspect of the whaling industry, that I feel little has changed these characters from the time they stepped on the Pequod to the time they're drowned and devoured.
2.) We are thoroughly introduced to Captains Peleg and Bildad towards the beginning, only never to hear of them again. Why?
3.) Were Ishmael and Queequeg supposed to be gay?
