Amidst all the rejoicing that Star Wars: The Force Awakens didn't suck (even if it did feel more like a Star Wars highlight real than a stand-alone film, but more on that later), it may be helpful to remember what caused that palpable sense of relief to build up in the first place.
Last summer marked 10 years since some friends and I, on a lark, decided to attend a Monday midnight viewing of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith at the dollar theater; all of us had already seen it, we fully knew what we were in for. I guess we all just assumed that the prequel trilogy couldn't possibly disappoint us anymore, it's ability to hurt us was officially over--and thus to celebrate our liberation from its treachery, I suppose we thought we were just going to mock it all movie long, Mystery Science Theater 3000 style, riffing on the scenes and on each other, and have a rollicking good time doing so.
Within 15 minutes, we all realized we'd made a terrible mistake. Some movies aren't just so-bad-their-good, they're just plain bad, and actively resist your ability to make fun of them. It wasn't a good-natured levity we were feeling while reliving this cinematic abortion, but a deep and abiding loathing for a film franchise that had burned so tirelessly through our last remaining shreds of goodwill. It was with a profound disgust--with George Lucas, with Star Wars generally, and with ourselves for wasting one last dollar and 2 hours of our finite lives on them--that we exited that theater 'round 2am. Duly chastened, we haven't rewatched the prequels since.
I bring this up because it has apparently become fashionable among some modern-day revisionists to claim that Revenge of the Sith was actually some sort of underappreciated blockbuster, its reputation unfairly dragged down by the two turds that preceded it, that in fact, though by no means perfect, it was still well paced and nuanced and "dark" enough to merit mention in the same breath as the original trilogy, to in fact even be considered better than Return of the Jedi--to which I can only say, NO. Just, NO.
Revenge of the Sith really is as bad as you remember. Return of the Jedi ain't perfect either, but its worst parts--the mawkish cutesiness of the Ewoks--come nowhere close to plumbing the same depths of asinine idiocy as any of the prequels; while its best parts--Luke Skywalker's temptations to the Dark Side by the Emperor--are possessed of a feverish intensity and frightening plausibility that are utterly unparalleled by the contrived clumsiness of Revenge of the Sith. For in Luke's rage-fueled final showdown with Vader, you are filled with a very real dread that Luke could actually turn; while in Anakin's final CGI battle with Obi Wan, you only tap your watch impatiently for Anakin to complete his preprogrammed costume change.
There's simply no rationalizing it: the Star Wars prequels were awful. Never in film history has there been a greater disparity between expectation and execution--Lucas didn't just miss the target, but shot his own foot off.
Now, The Force Awakens, while easily better than the prequels (though talk about a low bar to clear!), still has some flaws: it was not only a predictable point-by-point rehash of the original Star Wars, but its two main story threads--the search for Luke Skywalker and the destruction of yet another Death Star--both oddly felt like afterthoughts of each other. For in the original Star Wars, the Death Star is the single largest threat the liberty of the galaxy has ever faced, and all events and plot points continually relate directly back to its destruction. But in The Force Awakens, the Star Killer's destruction is just another nostalgic box to check off, a weirdly beside-the-point side-quest in the search for Luke--which in turn felt largely inconsequential to the broader Star Killer plot. I don't know whether or not to actually be impressed by how the movie's two main threads managed to feel weirdly beside the point (the point of course being to sell merchandise, not dramatize the archetypal struggle between life and death).
Overall, the film felt less like a passion-project (like the first one was for a younger, more vivacious George Lucas, who suffered a full-on heart-attack to bring it to fruition), than a carefully calculated corporate marketing venture--which, given Disney, is exactly what The Force Awakens is.
Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed The Force Awakens, I liked it just fine, even as it still has not quite burrowed its way into my imagination like the originals did. But I also fully get the great groundswell of joy that has greeted Episode VII as well: it's not just happiness but relief that another Star Wars has been made that doesn't completely suck! In the dark days of the prequel trilogies, we could only dream of such basic competency! With Revenge of the Sith still lingering like a bad taste in our mouth over a decade later, The Force Awakens has been a welcome draught indeed.
So this year, as part of my continuing quest to find Christmas music I don't hate, I stumbled upon this hidden gem:
Harvey Danger's "Sometimes You Have To Work On Christmas" just nails the feeling of abject melancholy that comes from, well, having to work on Christmas, a severely under-represented element of the whole Holiday experience (and really, if you're thinking of going to see a movie on Christmas day, please think twice; it's bad enough that the police, EMTs, and other essential services workers have to be on call that day, without a spoiled middle-class compounding the yuletide misery of an overworked underclass). In the song, the narrator notes the irony of serving movie patrons who come to "spend Christmas alone together"--not to mention the agony of his family being "two time zones away," while his "vodka and snow is melting/the alcohol isn't helping."
That is, I guess he could say that "the agony and irony are killing me."
Wait, where have we heard that line before?
Don't even pretend you don't know the words to Harvey Danger's "Flagpole Sitta," the perennial late-90s one-hit-wonder to end all late-90s one-hit-wonders--a song that still gets overplayed on the radio to this day. It has featured in multiple film soundtracks, British TV shows, Edward Snowden clips, videos of bicyclists beating a minivan, countless karaoke nights, and whatever station your manager tuned to in the background at work. At this point, the question of whether you love, hate, or even feel indifferent towards this song is largely irrelevant; it's just burrowed too deep into our common cultural consciousness, just another tiny part of the air we breath without thinking.
Much like Springsteen's "Born in the USA," Neil Young's "Keep on Rockin in the Free World," U2's "With or Without You," and The Police's "Every Breath You Take," "Flagpole Sitta" ranks among the most wildly misunderstood songs of the American Pop canon--in this case, a sarcastic screed against the empty pretensions of alternative culture ("I want to publish zines, and rage against machines, I wanna pierce my tongue, it doesn't hurt it feels fine...") that is persistently read as a sincere and unabashed homage to the same. Partly this is the band's own fault, inasmuch as they wrote an unapologetically joyous earworm of a melody that can't help but sound like a celebration of whatever it's mocking. Besides, such an ironic misreading seems apropos of a tune that finishes with "the agony and irony are killing me (whoa!)".
But enough on a song we've all heard a million times already! For my stumbling upon of "Sometimes You Have to Work on Christmas" didn't just reveal to me that '90s-trivia-question Harvey Danger actually wrote another song worth listening to (or even another song period), but tripped me down a rabbit hole to discover that, guys--Harvey Danger was actually really good.
For after discovering "Sometimes You Have to Work on Christmas" and determining that it needed to be on my Navidad playlist, I quickly learned that the track is available for free download on the band's own website, as part of a 2009 B-Side collection called Dead Sea Scrolls (the fact that it wasn't available for sale anywhere else tells you all you need to know about Harvey Danger's non-Flagpole-Sitta popularity--though unjustifiably, as you may soon see). I downloaded the whole album a month ago just to get the one Christmas song; nevertheless, it wasn't long till my idle curiosity got the best of me, and I gave the other 13 tracks a cursory listen.
How do I describe what happened next? Did they benefit from my utter lack of expectations? Or does that mean I engaged them with a mind open and free of hype? In any case, from that cursory listen, I suddenly found myself listening to Dead Sea Scrolls with rapt attention from beginning to end--and then again--and again--and again. It sure didn't sound like a B-Sides collection, no--it sounded like the best album I'd heard in years.
This is especially important, because just last Spring, I was catching up with an old college buddy, wherein we
lamented about how the perennial experience of our early-20s--that of
discovering a gorgeous new album that transports you outside of
yourself--was one that neither of us had had in several years. Oh sure, we still kept up plenty with contemporary music, but though we enjoyed much of it, little of it swept us off our feet like when we were just a little younger. Indeed,
we quietly worried that we would never have that experience again, that
maybe we couldn't have it again. (Studies have shown that
most people won't get into anymore new music after the age of 34).
Maybe, sadly, we had finally outgrown the possibility of having that experience with music, as our brains slowly calcified into old age.
I hope that gives some context to my hyperbolic statement
that to finally have that experience again with Dead Sea Scrolls has been a bona fide Christmas miracle for me.
The lyrics are clever yet soulful, the musicianship in turns subdued and ecstatic. It's another mark of the inherent injustice of the universe that The Shins are renowned for lesser-examples of the same while Harvey Danger has been otherwise forgotten.
Intrigued at this incredible find, I quickly dug deeper. On the same free download page, I learned that in 2005, five years after the utter flop of their second album King James Version had sealed their place in the dubious pantheon of one-hit-wonders, Harvey Danger had attempted to embrace this whole newfangled file-sharing thing by offering their third album Little by Little for free online. Wilco had similarly revived their flagging career in 2001 with the much more renowned Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and Radiohead would do the same to even greater acclaim just two years later with 2007's In Rainbows; by contrast, Harvey Danger's much more modest success with "over 100,000 downloads" and selling "most of" the ensuing physical copies with bonus tracks, gets understandably overlooked in the history of internet-only releases--which is a shame, because this really is a great album.
I don't want to oversell this one, it takes at least a couple listens for it to get under your skin; but once it does, you'll find that "Little Round Mirrors" and "Incommunicado" both sound like songs you've always known, that have always existed, and you will be perpetually surprised to realize that they were only ever released on a largely-forgotten one-hit-wonder's online crapshoot. You'll wonder not only how you ever got along without the de ja vu of these dispatches from some alternate universe Billy Joel, but why on earth they aren't as much a part of the cultural air we breathe as "Flagpole Sitta".
Granted, I'm biased; I went to High School in Centralia, WA, my family moved their when I was 9. My mother is buried there. I got an Associates degree there. That town is a part of me. But I moved away from there 10 years ago, and my family moved to Vancouver a few years ago, thus ensuring that I'll never live in Centralia again; really, I haven't given that rundown town much thought since. But this song has revived Centralia within me something fierce; for what Seattle-based Harvey Danger has done is perfectly capture the uncanny feeling that comes from living in a place that is exactly half-way between Seattle and Portland on the I-5--that is, it is both in the middle of everything and in the middle of nothing; it is both equally close and equally far from the two most important cities in the Pacific Northwest; the whole world moves right through you while you feel stuck going nowhere when you live in Centralia.
I had never thought of it this way before, but the town really is the perfect metaphor for that infernal feeling of limbo you feel after a breakup, which Harvey Danger must have felt each time they stopped in Centralia for gas and the bathroom on their way down to Oregon. "When wicked thoughts come inter alia/You wind up in Centralia, morally" they sing, and that is not a place you want to wind up, I assure you!
I now had two full albums by a band I thought I would never listen to more than one song by. I hadn't felt obsessed, truly and really obsessed, by a band in too long, so I decided it was time to go all in with Harvey Danger. It won't surprise you to learn that their "Flagpole Sitta"-featuring debut Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone? is available for only a penny on Amazon, and their flopping follow-up King James Version for not much more, so I easily got my hands on both.
First KJV: it didn't take me much googling to find that I of course was never alone in realizing that Harvey Danger was amazing, nor that they had a cult following as passionate as it was small--and that among the faithful, KJV is considered their magnum opus. The band clearly desired it to be understood that way--like the Bible translation it is named for, KJV is a self-conscious attempt to present the Authoritative Version of the band's sound.
I have now given several listens to KJV and I can now say with deep conviction that...it's fine. Not bad. But here I'm gonna have to break with all the other budding Harvey Danger enthusiasts out there and say that it makes sense why this album never capitalized on the success "Flagpole Sitta", for the songs don't quite stick their claws into you the same way Where Have All The Merrymakers Gone and Little by Little do.
That's not to say that KJV isn't an achievement; it has far more ambition than Where Have..., and far more fully develops their aesthetic that was first introduced by "Flagpole Sitta": what has often been labeled as the Post-Ironic.
Perhaps KJV's "Sad Sweet Heart of the Rodeo"might help illustrate what is meant by Post-Ironic: the lyrics and video tell the story of a city-girl who pines for the wild-life of the rodeo. The topic of many of Country song, for sure, but this is a punk anthem by a leftist Seattle-based Indie band, and thus that yearning is written from that distinct perspective--it is a reexamination of rodeo culture by those who are otherwise most suspicious of it. In the song, she is mockingly lectured by her boyfriend that "The Marlboro Man died of cancer/And he wasn't a rocket science when he was alive", to which she responds with a derisive "ha-ha-ha." That is, the ironic deconstruction of the rodeo mythos is in turn ironically deconstructed with that laugh. The irony has been ironized. She craves the rodeo life not because she doesn't understand the irony of it, but precisely because she does, and is tired of it. In the smug "soft city condescension" of the Postmodern, she is seeking the Post-Ironic.
For the Post-Modern is absolutely drenched in irony; self-awareness and deconstruction are the names of the game. Simply put, the world is awful and impossible, and with the failure and complicity of most religion in its awfulness, along with all other institutions, counter-cultures, and belief systems, the lone salvation that the Post-Modern can turn towards is ironic self-detachment. By the early '90s, Post-Modern irony's cultural supremacy was complete.
Which of course meant that now irony itself had to be interrogated and deconstructed. Not surprisingly, irony was found wanting; in literature, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen lead the charge to reject irony and cynicism, to find a new sincerity that could somehow move us past the anesthetizing numbness and meaninglessness of the ironic. 9/11 would exasperate this trend, as ironic self-detachment and a casual, cynical shrug were now luxuries we could no longer afford, anyways. We had to start believing in things again, or the fundamentalists (both at home and abroad) would start believing in things for us. In music, Arcade Fire helped lead the charge for this new Post-Ironic sincerity in the 21st century; mid-'00s Emo, for all its other flaws, was likewise an expression of this Post-Ironic sensibility; Harvey Danger's KJV then, released in the halcyon days of 2000, was arguably ahead of its time.
For as much as Harvey Danger sang that "irony is killing me," they fully understood why irony was so desperately needed in the first place. KJV's opener "Meetings With Remarkable Men" describes a dinner with Jesus himself, who had "two words about inanity: fundamental Christianity," which was an alarmingly prescient prediction of the havoc that fundamentalist evangelism would wreck upon the U.S. electorate over the course of the new millennium. That is, Harvey Danger understood the danger of fundamentalism that irony needed to deconstruct, even as they likewise recognized that irony alone is insufficient to create new meaning.
Besides religion, the other recurring theme in their oeuvre is cinema: the very first track on their very first album, "Carlotta Valdez", is a retelling of Hitchcock's Vertigo, a film about deconstructing (and then reconstructing) false appearances; on KJV's gorgeous "Pike St./Park Slope" (a piano ballad that presages Little by Little), the singer asks his crush "Maybe we could run away and start a little repertory movie house or something"; and of course on "Sometimes You Have to Work on Christmas", the narrator is opening that very repertory movie house on Christmas day. Like irony, cinema is both the solution (wherein you can self-detach from life by rendering it all just a show) and the fresh problem (now you are trapped by the very shows you tried to self-detach with)--just as Christmas is both what you need and what hurts you all at once.
But just where does one find the Post-Ironic, the new sincerity? I am willing to make the argument that in their very last single, released in 2010 on their free download page a full year after their final show, they find a hard-won resolution. Almost too on the nose, it is entitled "The Show Must Not Go On".
This song, by the way, is their best one, and that's saying something. For when I pooh-pooh KJV a bit by saying, though more ambitious than Where Have...,it is not as good as Little by Little or the masterpiece Dead Sea Scrolls, what am I really saying? That their 4th album was better than their 3rd than their 2nd than their 1st? That they just kept getting better and better? That if they had enjoyed even just a little more commercial support, they could have just kept up that trajectory and churned out ever more shining masterpieces, and that it is to our condemnation that we never encouraged them so?
But I worry that if they had had the success they needed to keep growing artistically, they never would have produced this one remarkable song; though obviously a final kiss-off to the music industry (if they couldn't succeed on their own terms, they determined to at least end it on their own), the lyric's are about finally getting over a long-lost crush--and my goodness, that is a song I could have really used multiple times throughout my 20s. Even as I am now happily engaged and my torrential 20s are fading into the rear-view mirror, this song can't help but conjure up those old feelings once more. "You can bash your head against a wall for years/The wall is not impressed", "It's not hard to see a beautiful girl/And imagine the life that you could have with her", "So much of what we so grandly call love, is simply in our heads", and "You can try, try, you'll never read her mind/Which is fine, fine, cause she cannot read yours", are all lines I fully plan on using with other troubled young men I will doubtless meet throughout my life--as I wish someone had once said to me.
Moreover, that song, I think, is the purest expression of the Post-Ironic ethos: wherein you use irony not to deconstruct others' illusions, but your own; not to self-detach from life, but to finally reintegrate into it again; not to mock or parody the performance (as they unsuccessfully tried to do in "Flagpole Sitta"), but to end it. This is not finding escape in either the empty spectacle of rote religious observance or of cinema, but in getting up and leaving the theater altogether for the fresh light of day. That is how you make it so that "the agony and irony" are no longer killing you.
And that is how you find meaning again, even if you have to work on Christmas--not by ironically mocking or self-detaching from the holiday, but by letting Christmas be meaningful enough to hurt you when you don't get it. And because missing Christmas can wound your soul, you now know that you have one, and you can feel again, and be passionate and ecstatic and free again--as we behold in that wild, wonderful second-half and outro to "Sometimes You Have to Work On Christmas"...
It is entirely likely that Daniel Craig's latest round of declamations that he is "through with Bond" are just a strategy for strengthening his salary-negotiation position before the next film (he claimed he was through before Skyfall made him an obscene gob of money, too). But I vote that we treat his claims as entirely sincere this time around, and bid him, in all sincerity, a grateful adieu, for it is high time to reboot the series once more.
For the same pattern happened when Pierce Brosnan was Bond, if you recall--strong out the gate with the surprisingly refreshing and rejuvenating Goldeneye, which successfully transitioned Bond into a post-Cold War world, followed by rapidly diminishing returns.
Then Daniel Craig repeated the cycle--strong out the gate with the surprisingly refreshing and rejuvenating Casino Royale, which successfully transitioned Bond into a post-9/11 world...followed yet again with rapidly diminishing returns. Now, the Craig Bonds never quite plumbed the same absurd depths of campiness as Brosnan, which pushed straight through so-bad-it's-good to just plain bad; nevertheless, there's this distinct feeling of once again scraping the bottom of the barrel and already recycling ideas.
For just as Brosnan twice battled a laser-satellite (the second time as farce, to quote Marx), Craig in SPECTRE has now twice uncovered a dastardly evil organization who's reach goes far wider than any guessed (didn't they just introduce--and promptly drop--Quantum a couple movies ago?), and twice dealt with the hauntings of his childhood past (didn't Skyfall supposedly but the kibitz on that?). And for the third time in a row he has had to go rogue. What'll happen next film, will he go rogue yet again to uncover an even bigger evil organization that goes even deeper than Quantum and SPECTRE combined? A Pentaverate, perhaps, made up of the Queen, the Vatican, the Gettys, the Rothchilds, and Colonel Sanders? Will he encounter yet another ghost from his childhood? A second step-brother, perhaps? Or a nanny? A drunk uncle? We are now scraping not just the wood but the splinters at the bottom of the barrel.
What's more is how the last couple Bond flicks have cribbed so shamelessly from other, better movies, rather than forge their own path--SPECTRE's whole new-surveillance-system-turns-out-to-be-secretly-run-by-the-bad-guys plot-twist was already used by Captain America: The Winter Soldier scarcely a summer ago; the rather-pointless revival of SPECTRE and Ernst Stavro Blofield can only remind one how much more vital-feeling the old Sean Connery Bonds were; the evil former agent from Skyfall is just a repeat of 006 from Goldeneye; and the-bad-guy-wanted-to-get-caught trope comes from almost every summer blockbuster of the past 10 years.
Now, this is not to claim that Skyfall and SPECTRE are exactly awful--they're middlingly, passably alright I guess. But that's just it, I almost would have preferred them to be flat-out, Brosnan-level terrible,because that at least would have provoked another full Spring-cleaning of the franchise. But right now MGM has no incentive to break formula, to do anything more than to just keep pedaling along with the same forgettable status quo, all about as exciting as printing money--like, literally, about as fun as running a monotonous printing machine all day.
This mediocrity is so tragic because (and this is difficult for me to overstate) Casino Royale was just such a revelation! Clearly do I remember Summer '06, my girlfriend at the time dragging me to the Rexburg dollar theater to see Casino Royale--at the time, the whole idea of "rebooting" James Bond (and this even before the whole "gritty reboot" schtick had been worn to death by Hollywood) seemed patently ridiculous to me. You just get a new actor guys, literally no one was asking for a James Bond origin story! C'mon. So I went in skeptical...but came out converted. It was a breath of fresh air! James Bond had not felt this vital in a decade. I easily consider it one of the best films of the 2000s. The acting, pacing, plotting, dialogue, action, chemistry, humor--the film just hit the right balance between all of it, and what's more, made it look easy!
The humor especially--I bring this up because all subsequent directors of the Craig films have learned the exact wrong lessons from Casino Royale, and doubled down on the brooding grimness, failing to recognize that that was only one part of what made the film work, a constellation of factors, rather than the chief element. And with each new release, as fans and critics have loudly lamented the absence of the suave, good-humored, fun Bond of years of yore, these various directors have defended their plodding darkness with something along the lines of, "Well you see, these films are about how Bond becomes Bond; he must work through his demons until he gets his sense of humor"--all while utterly eliding the fact that Bond's sense of humor was already present in Casino Royale!
Now, Casino Royale's humor was certainly a more muted, gallows humor than that of the Brosnan or Moore, but it was still there. Remember that fantastic opening scene, wherein after this vicious, extended build-up that involves Bond brutally beating a man to death for the first time in a public bathroom, the villain somberly observes, "Made you feel it, did he? Well, you needn't worry. The second is..." at which Bond promptly shoots him and quips, "Yes, considerably." Recall Bond being asked if he wants his Martini shaken or stirred, to which he mutters, "Does it look like I give a damn?" Or when he suffers cardiac arrest in his car, is shocked back to life by Vesper Lynn, and he just glances up to her and says, "You OK?" He then returns to the poker table and tells Le Chiffre, "That last hand almost killed me." When Le Chiffre later tortures him for the money, Bond, bloodied and traumatized, just cracks a joke about how Le Chiffre has now scratched his balls.
Now, none of these moments are funny "ha-ha", so to speak, but they did exactly what jokes need to do in an action movie--break up the tension at just the right-timed moments, so that the audience doesn't get overwhelmed, exhausted, and finally bored by the action. But if you have too many jokes, then the film devolves into a dull parody of itself--as the Brosnan ones ultimately did. Casino Royale hit that balance just right in a way no Bond film has since.
And then there's that wonderful final scene, wherein the nefarious Mr. White, looking over the calm, bright lake of his Swiss estate, having apparently gotten away with the money, answers his phone with "Who is this?", only to be immediately shot in the leg. As he crawls away in the same writhing pain he has inflicted upon others all movie long, Daniel Craig, in an impeccable 3-piece suit, a sniper-rifle held aloft in one hand and cell-phone in the other, struts up casually and says, for the first time all movie, "The name's Bond, James Bond." It's not a joke per se, but it is such a perfect climax, one that signals that the suave, fun-loving, self-possessed Bond of years gone by has finally arrived!
In terms of perfect endings, I can only compare itto the first Matrix, when Neo flies straight into the sky. In that moment, anything and everything feels possible; sudden new vistas have opened up; you are filled with the elated feeling that this franchise can now go anywhere!
And like The Matrix, the series went on to utterly squander the promise of that perfect ending. Rather than follow Bond's progression post-Casino Royale, the series has just reset him, over and over and over. Each film ends with the implicit promise that Bond has at last arrived,
that his transformation is now finally, finally, for-realsy-this-time,complete--only for the gloomy machine to
reset itself, yet again, once more, for the next rendition. In fact, they've done worse than reset--they've actively regressed, because the incipient humor of Casino Royale has vanished, and he has made no moves to recover it since. Casino Royale was about the redemption of a sociopath; but every subsequent one has been about the same redemption of the same sociopath. They just keep spinning their wheels, and I fear they've now ran out of traction.
So yes, it's time to start all over again. Get a new actor, start a new reboot. I will always be grateful for Casino Royale (just as I once was for Goldeneye), but it is sadly plain now thatDaniel Craig's Bond is never going to become the joie de vivre Bond of days past, at least not with the current crop of writers and directors. So give me a fresh faced Bond, one to breath new life into the series--and then go ahead and give me 3 subsequent disappointments again, til we doubtless start the cycle fresh anew once more, or at least till we learn the right lessons from Casino Royale.
So a few Decembers ago, I suddenly decided that Dickens' A Christmas Carol was a thing I should own. It was an impulse buy--I was just hanging around some mall Barnes & Noble while waiting for someone (the only reason anyone seems to enter a Barnes & Noble anymore), when I spied this ornate little copy sitting on the shelf, claiming to be a facsimile reproduction of the original 1843 edition.
Which turned out to be a bit of false-advertising--what Barns & Noble actually had on display was a facsimile of the 1922 facsimile of the 1843. It wasn't till I was home that I realized the subterfuge. Very clever, Barnes & Noble! I should've known that $12.95 was too good to be true.
But whatever minor feelings of being ripped off I might have harbored were quickly dispelled by 1) the fact that it really is a handsome little volume, 2) the delightful text is the same no matter what year it's reproducing, and 3) it contains a most excellent introduction written by G.K. Chesterton, celebrated frenemy of no less than George Bernard Shaw himself, such that I now actually prefer the 1922 facsimile!
What is so refreshing about Chesterton is that he eschews the standard sentimentalist "what a treat to have this holiday classic for new generations to cherish!" type intro that plagues us like a Hallmark ad to this day. No, Chesterton has far bigger fish to fry--for given how he was writing in 1922, with all those sundry Eugenicists, social Darwinists, Nietzscheans, and nascent-fascists making the rounds and laying the groundwork for WWII and the Holocaust, Chesterton finds nothing quaint or classic about A Christmas Carol at all. On the contrary, he finds its message more urgent than ever, and it's worth interrogating whether we can still say the same today.
For after spending the first couple pages repeating the party-line of how Dickens "saved Christmas" before it was too late, Chesterton makes clear his real target: "Scrooge is a utilitarian and an individualist; that is, he is a miser in theory as well as in practice. He utters all the sophistries by which the age of machinery has tried to turn the virtue of charity into a vice...Many amiable sociologists will say, as he said, 'Let them die and decrease the surplus population'...
"It is notable also that Dickens gives the right reply...The answer to anyone who talks about the surplus population is to ask him whether he is the surplus population...That is the answer which the Spirit of Christmas gives to Scrooge...Scrooge is exactly the sort of man who would really talk of the superfluous poor as of something dim and distant; and yet he is also exactly the sort of man whom others might regard as sufficiently dim, not to say dingy, to be himself superfluous...the miser who himself looks so like a pauper, confidently ordering the massacre of paupers. This is true enough even to more modern life; and we have all met mental defectives in the comfortable classes who are humoured, as with a kind of hobby, by being allowed to go about lecturing on the mental deficiency of poor people. We have all met professors, of stunted figure and the most startling ugliness, who explain that all save the strong and beautiful should be painlessly extinguished in the interests of the race. We have all seen the most sedentary scholars proving on paper that none should survive save the victors of aggressive war and physical struggle of life; we have all heard the idle rich explaining why the idle poor deserve to be left to die of hunger. In all the spirit of Scrooge survives".
Tell me: do we still have the ugly rhapsodizing the beautiful? (I seem to recall the CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch doing just that recently). Do we still have the wealthy showing off how poor they can dress? (I'm looking at you Mark Zuckerberg). Do we still have the flabby, obese, and sedentary preaching the virtue of strength and aggression? (Such is the stereotype of your average NFL fan--or of your overweight talk-show hosts demanding shows of military strength). And most of all, do we still have the idle rich lecturing the idle poor--all while their mouths are full of produce picked by migrants working 98 cents an hour, their clothing sewn by sweatshop children, their Holiday chocolate harvested from African plantations, their diamonds collected through blood and horror? My my my, how the spirit of Scrooge not only survives but thrives into the 21st century. But Chesterton ain't through with us yet, and saves his most biting commentary for last:
"But in justice to Scrooge, we must admit that in some respects the later developments of his heathen philosophy have gone beyond him. If Scrooge was an individualists, he had something of the good as well as the evil of individualism. He believed at least in the negative liberty of the Utilitarians. He was ready to live and let live, even if the standard of living was very near to that of dying and letting die. He partook of gruel while his nephew partook of punch; but it never occurred to him that he should forcible forbid a grown man like his nephew to consume punch, or coerce him into eating gruel. In that he was far behind the ferocity and tyranny of the social reformers of our own day. If he refused to subscribe to a scheme for giving people Christmas dinners, at least he did not subscribe (as the reformers do) to a scheme for taking away the Christmas dinners they have already got...Doubtless he would have regarded charity as folly, but he would also have regarded the forcible reversal as theft. He would not have thought it natural to pursue Bob Cratchit to his own home, to spy on him, to steal his turkey, to run away with his punch-bowl, to kidnap his crippled child, and put him in prison as a defective...These antics were far beyond the activities of poor Scrooge, whose figure shines by comparison with something of humour and humanity."
Ouch.
Perhaps, upon further reflection, it is a mistake to purchase facsimile reproductions of A Christmas Carol, for that implies that this is an artifact from some other time, with concerns irrelevant to our own--if anything, the things that worried Dickens are even more cutting-edge now.
And yet again, there has been another mass-shooting--this one hit especially close to home, because my fiance was raised in the San Bernadino mountains. Her family has been following the details especially closely. Somehow we never seem to get desensitized to these, as each just feels more horrible than the last--for this comes scarce a couple months after Umpqua Community College, which in turn came on the heels of Coral Ridge Mall, Charleston, UC Santa Barbara, Sandy Hooks, Aurora, Fort Hood, Virginia Tech, and doubtless a hundred others I can't even remember off the top of my head, they're just all getting to be so many, too many...
But here's the strange thing (there are many horrifying things here, but this is the strange one): though we have so many to choose from, the standard by which all my freshmen continue to gauge mass-shootings remains Columbine.
Just to put that in perspective: my students were 2 when Columbine happened. 2. Literally still in diapers. They have no possible memories of the event. Yet when Umpqua happened two months ago, the first thing my students breathlessly asked was whether this was worse than Columbine. Not Sandy Hooks, not Virginia Tech, but Columbine.
It's an odd sort of time-warp; one would expect my generation to be the ones constantly referring back to Columbine, since it happened when we were in High School. Well do I remember the lock-down drills, the backpack searches, the bomb-squads, the expulsions of unpopular kids in trench-coats--right up until 9/11 happened and we all decided we had far worse things to worry about now. Shouldn't we be the ones constantly harping on Columbine, annoying these young teenagers who have far more recent rampages seared into their collective consciousness? Yet I think I would have forgotten about Columbine by now, if it hadn't been that my students keep bringing it up. What gives?
My best guess is the fact that Columbine remains the biggest High School shooting ever--and these kids just got out of High School. For the vast majority of them, shootings in malls, churches, military bases, hospitals, even other colleges, still feel too abstract and distant to fully process. But a High School--now that's something they know, something that has defined a solid fifth of their life. Classes, sports, extracurriculars--the super-majority of their waking hours revolved around High School. It's an intimate space, a Holy one, Great and Terrible--when a shooting happens there, they feel it in their bones, even if it happened 16 years ago.
But even deeper than that, these kids can still kind of understand a High School shooter. By contrast, some psychopath shooting up a theater, a Church, a mall, is just too opaque, too inscrutable to really resonate. But a High School shooter, well...none of them will admit it, but every teenager's thought of doing it, haven't they. Even the so-called "popular" kids have experience being bullied, while the most-bullied still have experience dealing it out, too. To be an American High Schooler is to be constantly caught between rage and guilt, between an intense desire to avenge yourself upon your tormentors and a deep fear that you deserve it if it happens to you. Everyone who survives adolescence merits a medal.
Most teenagers, in their deepest, darkest moments, have all fantasized about blowing up the school. But (as these things usually are), fantasies become horrifying in real life. What I suspect continues to trouble American High Schoolers about Columbine is the fact that those two teenagers actually carried out what the rest of them have secretly considered. The fact that the rest of them would never indulge in the awful fantasy is of no avail: they feel complicit, because they are able to imagine the unimaginable, to sympathize with the unsympathizable. Unlike other massacres, teenagers can actually understand the horror of Columbine, they are able to stare into the abyss and it stares right back--and that is what frightens them more than any other shooting you could name. Those other rampages don't belong to them; but Columbine still belongs to the teenagers.
And this all feels directly relevant to our most recent and endless bout of mass shootings: they are fantasies brought horribly to life, aren't they. Most of us manage the impulse towards total violence in more constructive manners, or at least try to--action movies, video games, sports, etc. The violence is carefully regulated, as in football, or it is somehow justified in a sort of ethically-definsible framework, as with action heroes. We create "good-guys with guns."
But the problem is that everyone thinks they're a good-guy with guns--yes, even the mad-men in Charleston, or Umpqua, or now San Bernadino. That they obviously weren't scarcely needs to be stated; that many really can wield firearms responsibly is likewise self-evident; rather, what makes these mass-shootings so horrifying is that they represent the awful fantasy brought to life, carried to its absolute extreme. For I dare speculate that people who purchase weapons typically don't just do so for self-defense or for sports-shooting--no, it's with the secret hope of wielding them in righteous fury.
But now some maniacs have actually done so. It is too horrible to contemplate, that we might have anything in common with these killers. So we must loudly disavow these shooters, declare we are nothing like them, blame their religion, their mental health, their troubled childhood, and R-rated movies and music and videogames and gun-laws and everything else except their very humanity which drove them to be so characteristically inhumane. We wish to keep them inscrutable, lest we recognize the same abyss within ourselves.
So hence we treat each new mass-shooting like it were some strange new thing, as though it had never happened before; perhaps that is why the horror never seems to go away, why we never get desensitized, each time it happens.
But the teenagers have been wiser; Columbine still scares them like nothing else from 1999 does anymore, precisely because they are keenly aware of the possibility for Columbine within themselves, and worse. But the rest of us adults still stubbornly, petulantly refuse to see the same within us, so we are continually blindsided by it, and that with every increasing velocity.
So there's this 2000 art-house film, Nora, based on the marriage of James Joyce and Nora Barnacle; I still haven't seen it, largely because the poster's tagline of "The World's Sexiest Writer Had One Inspiration..." seems about the wrongest way to market Joyce ever. Anyone who picks upa Joyce book expecting some great Modernist "Dirty Novel™" á laDH Lawrence or Henry Miller is in for a bitter disappointment. "World's Sexiest Writer" is generally the last descriptor that leaps to the mind of anyone who has ever been depressed by Dubliners, or baffled by A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or actively irritated by Finnegans Wake. About the sexiest thing most readers have said about Joyce is "Screw This!" approximately 3 chapters into Ulysses.
Call him difficult, call him challenging, call him innovative or ground-breaking or even overrated if you must, but sexy? C'mon guys. C'mon.
At least, so I assumed until my most recent re-reading of Ulysses. I had already read it 3 times before--or should I say it had already defeated me 3 times before, as it is a work of such monumental complexity that so much of it flies over the head of even the most erudite reader (let alone me). Now, life is short and art is long, so I hadn't planned to return to it anytime soon; but as I researched for my comps portfolio, I realized that no single novel looms larger over either the Irish canon or the Modernist canon than Ulysses, so I decided it was high time for me to scale this mountain once more.
Now, I don't know what's changed between now and the last time I read it 4 years ago--whether my PhD course work really has succeeded in making me a sharper reader, or if my mind simply isn't as innocent as it used to be, or what--but for whatever reason, this time around, it became exceedingly obvious that, boy howdy doody, no wonder this book was banned in 1922! It is obscene.
I don't just mean it was obscene by the standards of the era (remembering that it would be another 18 years before Gone With The Wind would scandalize the nation with "Frankly my dear, I don't give a ----"); nor am I referring solely to the novel's hinted-at adultery (because Leopold Bloom, this modern Ulysses, instead of trying to get home to a faithful wife, is ironically trying to avoid going home to an unfaithful wife, get it? Get it?!). No, I mean that once you wade far enough and deep enough into the Leopold Bloom sections, you learn that this introverted, mousy character has some seriously troubling proclivities. For example, hidden within the satirical-sentimentality of the "Nausicaä" episode lies voyeurism, exhibitionism, and an onanistic act you need a graduate degree to parse that that's just what happened. The "Circe" episode much more explicitly foregrounds Bloom's repressed sado-masochistic, transgender, and cuckold fantasies. In the wild, rambling, closing "Penelope" episode, Molly Bloom, half-awake and mind-racing at 1am, briefly fantasizes about fellatio with Stephen Dedalus, recalls how well-endowed her adulterous fling Blazes Boylan was (albeit she determines that "Poldy has more spunk"--ouch!), notes Leopold's disgusting cropology fetish, yet also remembers holding his head to her breasts on the day he proposed to her in Gibraltar as she answered with "yes I said yes I will Yes."
All in all, embedded within this text's labyrinthine allusions to classical history, mythology, music, literature, local slang, and Irish Nationalism, lies a surprisingly extensive catalog of sexual deviancies that even a 21st-century porn addict might be embarrassed to admit to. And these references all sailed right over my head the first few times I read the novel. Frankly, I'm impressed that the censors back in 1922 were able to read this book rigorously enough to find the stuff worth banning (book-burners ain't exactly known for their close-reading skills).
But this is not to claim that Ulysses should have been or still be banned--or that its obscenity should be considered pornographic. As Judge Woolsey wrote in his 1933 decision to lift the U.S. ban on the novel, "I do not detect anywhere the leer of the sensualist." And he's right. Pornography, as I understand it, does not generally require this much work to access. More broadly, Bloom's fantasies of repression and punishment fit in with the novel's larger themes of impotence, paralysis, powerlessness, and guilt that were endemic not only to the pre-independent Irish state, but to Modern Man generally; this is sexiness not as escapist fantasy, but one that forces you to realize just how pathetic and sad your sexual fantasies really are.
But that still doesn't distract from the fact that Ulysses is still surprisingly sexy--and the thing about sex is that even when it's ironic and satirical and undercuts itself, it's still there. Sex is intrinsically arousing, even when it's trying not to be. Now, Ulysses may be the last book you would ever use to get your lover in the mood, yet still there is something disconcertingly sexual about Ulysses, something that challenges you to not only admit but just own that sordid part of your inner-self. Now, openly admitting it can be the first step towards mastering it...but it can also be the first step towards sliding even further into self-indulgence, submission, paralysis, and thus remaining one of the "gratefully oppressed" (to quote Dubliners). The censors were right to consider this book dangerous--but not just to their own puritanical mores, but dangerous generally.
But then, it's good for a book to be genuinely dangerous; that makes it feel like a book can actually matter, like it's some sort of radioactive energy that needs to be carefully grappled with and harnessed lest it destroy us, and not just as another obscure, esoteric artifact to keep the academics busy another thousand years. And despite the danger, there is also still something transcending and life-affirming about that closing "yes I said yes I will Yes", a promise (albeit a precarious one) that we not only have been ("yes I said"), but still can be ("yes I will"), better than whatever it is we are right now.
Though it's still dumb to call Joyce "The World's Sexiest Writer". C'mon guys. C'mon.
I read over a hundred books. Wrote over a hundred pages. Out of necessity (the head of my committee is retiring next month; this was her final act as an academic), I did in 6 months what most grad students take a year to study for.
I even made flash cards to prepare my answers, carefully mapping out each response with relevant texts and theoretical frameworks--all for naught, for during the oral defense they did not ask me a single question I had prepped for, and every question I had not. There was a whole lot of stammering and scrambling and thinking on my feet.
And I passed.
I passed my PhD Comprehensive Examinations.
I am now ABD.
All But Dissertation.
I have crashed now. I am absolutely exhausted. A day later, my body is still recovering--physically, emotionally, spiritually. There were moments these past few days when I seriously worried I might have a breakdown.
But I didn't. I passed instead.
The sky is bluer. The sun is brighter. My shoulders are lighter. I feel elated and free.
Last year, at the end of my worst semester ever, I posted Frank Sinatra. But this year, I'm feeling a little more...grandiose:
The above is the famed 1939 photo of a Frenchman crying on the streets of Paris upon hearing the news that France had fallen to Nazi Germany. The shock and sorrow expressed in it feels sadly apropos this morning--not that France is anywhere close to surrendering to ISIS or any such nonsense (really, my greatest fear right now is a further increase in European xenophobia, anti-Muslim violence, and a return to the French police state; as Tom Wolfe once said, "the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe"). But the French are still reeling from a similarly devestating act of violence--though one that, as the photo reminds us, is sadly not that foreign to the City of Lights, as though violence were a strange thing to happen there.
It is, after all, the city of the storming of the Bastille, the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror, and Napoleon's Arc de triomphe--which were all in turn precipitated by the centuries of violence perpetrated by the French Crown upon its own impoverished. A single visit to Versailles in all its stunning grandeur will remind you why the starving peasants revolted in the first place. And that wealth came on the backs not just of the poor at-home, but abroad: the slavery of Haiti (that required its own violent revolt to overthrow), the bloody partitioning of Africa and the Middle-East with other European powers, the annexation of Vietnam, etc and etc and etc; the wealth and beauty of Paris was built up in part through brutal violence.
Please don't misunderstand, this is not to exculpate the cowardly terrorists who sent themselves to hell last night, nor blame the victims just trying to enjoy a Friday night for once as though they were somehow complicit in their own murders. Far, far from it. Paris is one of my favorite cities and, contrary to stereotype, I find the French to be some of the friendliest people I've met; I wish these attacks on no one, but least of all on them. Rather, this is just a weary reminder that we are all still enmeshed in the same tangled web of history, the French as much as everybody, tragically swept away by events that predate us and remain far larger than all of us (the main thesis of War and Peace by the way--which incidentally is a novel about France invading Russia). "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake," sighs Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses (a novel also written in Paris), and we all got up this morning no more awake from the nightmare than we have ever been.
...of which we scarcely need to even name now, do we.
A personal response in 9 movements:
1. I have had far too many intimate experiences with the Church and the Holy Spirit--too personal to detail here--to ever abandon them now. These include the many manifold times I have felt guided, protected, preserved, encouraged, discouraged, moved with and against the Spirit, moved with and against myself. My parents named me for the Biblical Patriarch who wrestled with God, and I have continued that wrestle throughout my own life. I stay in the Church not because it's comfortable, no; it is precisely the discomfort that has kept me wrestling, kept me staying, and why I continue to stay.
2. But the sheer fact that I have feel like I have to reaffirm my commitment still demonstrates how upsetting the recent changes to Handbook 1 have been. Even the most faithful have been troubled, caught off guard by its sheer viciousness, which scarcely needs to be recounted here. It lacks charity, without which "ye are nothing." I am saddened when people leave the Church, but I am even more saddened when they are given good reason to.
3. The many well-intentioned people who have struggled to defend the change have done so with the tacit acknowledgment that it is indeed a vicious one, that they so desperately wish it wasn't. They've tried every Orwellian rewording in the book to make it look like a mercy, not punitive--and understandably so, because they love the Church, and so want the Church to be good. Yet their own shaky "I don't fully understand this but" belies their own insecurity, how hollow they know their words sounds. I'm sadly reminded of an old Steven Weinberg quote: "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."
Meanwhile, in the most laughingly ironic twist of all, the most full-throated, sanctimonious defenders
of the change have only outed themselves as lacking in charity themselves, neither "mourning with those who mourn," nor "standing with those who stand in need of comfort"--that is, in their defense of the Church, they have failed to
behave like disciples of Christ, but rather like the Pharisees who crucified him.
4. Also part of why the changes are so galling is just how uncharacteristic this all seems of the Church! Did the Church not just give their unqualified support for anti-discrimination housing legislation in Utah less than a year ago? Did not Elder Christofferson open up about his own gay brother and his husband a few months ago? Did not Elder Oaks condemn Kim Davis just a couple weeks ago? Has not President Uchtdorf repeatedly reached out to those who've felt unwelcome over the past several conferences? Has not the Church extended repeated olive branches to the LGBTQ community over the past 7 years since the blowback over Prop. 8? Have they not unrolled their massive "And I'm a Mormon" ad campaign with great PR savvy to promulgate a more inclusive image? And in one fall swoop they dessimate all that hard work. They struggled to build up all this public goodwill, and then promptly handed the anti-Mormons all the ammunition they needed. This pain was entirely self-inflicted.
5. What's more, they seemed to be genuinely surprised by the reaction they should've known they'd get--rushing Elder Christofferson to film a quick video with Deseret News that very evening and such--there appears to have been an utter bungling of not only the changes, but of the announcement itself. They were caught flat-footed with their hand in the cookie jar. To quote Napoleon, it's worse than a crime, it's a blunder.
6. The only defense that has even remotely resonated is the reminder that God has often tried his people; "they must be tried even as Abraham" the Almighty told Joseph Smith--yet remember that what God asked Abraham to do was explicitly wrong! Human sacrifice went against everything Abraham had ever preached throughout his century-long life, and Isaac was the Covenant child he had been promised throughout decades-long waiting that would try even the severest patience. Yet when the moment came for Abraham to violate everything he had ever taught or believed as he raised his blade into the air, God sent his angel down to stop him at the last possible second, and provided a ram in the thicket. The Lord needed Abraham to learn something about himself, but still stopped Abraham short of actually going through with it. (Kierkegaard has a wonderful book on this topic, Fear and Trembling). That is, maybe you're right and the changes to Handbook 1 are an Abrahamic test--yet that just underscores that it is so trying precisely because we rightfully feel in our bones that it is so wrong. "Being in the Church isn't supposed to hurt this much" some critics have said; but maybe it is.
7. But then again, this Abrahamic discussion is all predicated upon the assumption that this change did come of the Lord God Almighty. I am still not convinced of this; let me explain why. First is the fact that, according to the Doctrine and Covenants, all new revelations must be brought before the Church for a sustaining vote made "by common consent." This was never presented as a new revelation; this was only a bureaucratic change to a manual. Some might here argue that the vote is but a sustaining vote, and they choose to sustain whatever the First Presidency chooses to do. Balderdash. Joseph Smith and Brigham Young both declared that their greatest fears were that the Latter-day Saints would only blindly obey whatever the Prophet said and thereby drag themselves down to darkness. We are no more excused from seeking a spiritual confirmation on this change, as we from seeking it on the Book of Mormon, or on Joseph Smith, or on the Atonement of Christ, or on literally everything else.
And here I must say: I have received no such confirmation. I have fasted, and I have prayed repeatedly; I have long paid the price to learn how to distinguish the still, small voice of the Spirit from the noise of the outside world and from the prejudices of my own soul, and I know I still have a long way to go. Nevertheless, I have asked, I have wrestled. I can speak for no one but myself, but I have thus far received no impression that this change comes of God. Quite the opposite in fact.
8. And that is fine. For the leaders of our Church, inspired and well-intentioned though they may be, are still fallible human beings, ones subject to the vicissitudes of the flesh and their own weaknesses and filtering their inspiration through their preconceived biases and in need of repentance and redemption and the Atoning Blood of Jesus Christ as desperately as literally everyone else. The Catholics are the ones with Papal infallibility, not us, yet even they know how to separate their leaders from their faith. "I do not want any of you to think I am a very righteous man because I am not" said Joseph Smith, and he was not just being modest--especially when you consider his polygamy.
And then there's Brigham Young with his bizarre Adam-God theory, and his starting the Priesthood ban on black people, and of Bruce R. McConkie claiming that the ban would never be lifted in this life, and Boyd K. Packer claiming that no one is born gay, and endless Seminary teachers claiming the Third World were fence-sitters in the pre-existence despite official disavowals from the Church, and etc and etc and etc. When Wilford Woodruff said God would never allow any man to steer the Church astray, what he perhaps meant was God would allow no man to steer it into a ditch--it can still veer wildly across multiple lanes and clip the median and ride the rumble strip. The War in Heaven was fought over Free Agency, and the Lord allows us an astonishing amount of it in making our own mistakes. (That's why the Atonement was necessary in the first place).
9. Because that's how I finally made peace with the pre-1978 Black Priesthood ban, and how I'll likely make peace with the changes to Handbook 1: not as some mysterious revelation beyond the understanding of man, but as egregious errors made by fallible men whom I need to love and forgive as much as they doubtless feel the same about me.
CS Lewis, in A Grief Observed (written on the occasion of the death of his wife), said that what he most feared from his experience was not that he would now lose his faith, but rather that he would learn that this is how God actually is, to "be no more deceived" about the loving deity he thought he worshiped. These changes have similarly unsettled me. But though I'm saddened to learn what these changes reveal about some of the men I revered, I am thankfully not similarly convinced that this is how God actually is. To quote Joseph Smith one last time: "Our Heavenly Father is more liberal in His views and boundless in His mercies then we are ready to believe or receive." I am convinced we still have not learned how to believe or receive such divine liberality--and Handbook 1 is but the latest evidence of that. In the meantime, I will not be seeking to defend or excuse or justify the recent changes to Handbook 1; I will only seek to mourn those that are mourning, comfort those who stand in need of comfort, and love my neighbor as myself.
This experience has indeed shifted my relationship to the institutional Church. But it has not my relationship with God--and whatever else its gaping flaws, I remain convinced that this Church still does belong to him, so I will stay with it, and will ride the Good Ship Zion through all its torments, even (maybe especially) the self-inflicted ones.
So our revels now are ended. I have checked off each book on my titanic reading lists. I have submitted my portfolio to my committee. In less than 2 weeks, I defend my comps portfolio. There is naught left but to prepare for battle.
Of those reading lists: roughly 50 of those books, or about a third altogether, were critical texts, works of scholarship written over the past century upon literary Modernism and Postmodernism. My attraction to these art movements is derived in part, I dare say, from the same place that drives my childhood love of Star Trek: a sense of wonder. For there's just this childlike awe about these texts, this feeling that all the old rules are off, that anything can happen now, that new worlds are upon us, that there exist infinite possibilities in infinite combinations that our imaginations are finally free to explore as widely and wildly as we are willing!
Even if so many of these literary experiments fail, even as they all must fail as their ambition far exceeds the limits of language and the sordid politics of this earth, as so many of these writers fell prey to the fatal seductions of fascism, of communism, of capitalism, etc and etc, yet still they at least tried, and dared to conceive of new ways of existing, of living, of thinking and of being. For all their boundary-pushing, there's just something comforting about that sense of possibility. I need no other defense of avant-garde literature than this: it makes the mind aware that other worlds are possible.
Which is why I find so much of the criticism so stultifying, so frustrating, so inexcusably dull! Great Guns, these literary scholars--folks, mind you, who have already dedicated themselves to soul-crushing years of poverty and grad school for the love of literature, who have basically won the lottery by scoring tenured-professorships whose sole job is to read beautiful books all day and teach them to students--these critics sprawl around them the most fascinating and exhilarating texts of the past 100-odd years, and they conclude that the best use of their prodigious gifts is to write about these texts as boringly as possible?! They take great ideas and wonderful insights into ground-breaking texts, and cram them into the most formulaic and turgid of prose-styles? Talk about missed opportunities, talk about an utter waste of potential!
Of course, scholars have been writing turgidly for as long as there has been scholarship. Complain about Death and Taxes while you're at it, one might say, for all the changes you'll make to it. Nevertheless, some rare few scholars are able to rise above the dense fog of torpor to create critical works that live up to the creative ones they examine. I come not here to bury academese (it's not like that shuffling undead zombie can be buried anyways), but to sing the praises of those critics that actually make criticism seem worthwhile, who still preserve that childhood sense of wonder, and to remind myself what my critical writing should aspire to emulate as well.
Here's the small smattering of critical texts I read over the past 6 months in prep for comps, that I personally found well worth the effort:
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland
I groaned when I first checked out this 650-page behemoth--which then flew by faster than many 180-pagers I've had to drudge through. Right from that killer first line--"If God invented whiskey to prevent the Irish from ruling the world, then who invented Ireland?"--Kiberd's humor, insight, encyclopedic knowledge, and shear joie de vivre sweep you away on a journey that will convince you through the sheer force of its scholarship and personality that Ireland didn't just produce great literature: the literature produced Ireland.
Hugh Kenner The Pound Era
As the '60s turned into the '70s, Canadian scholar Hugh Kenner was faced with a nigh-impossible task: how to recuperate the post-War reputation of Ezra Pound, whose critical recognition had significantly waned after siding firmly with the fascists during WWII? (He was a POW of George S. Patton for crying out loud)? Answer: by reminding us all why Ezra Pound mattered so much in the first place--namely, by producing a critical work as wild, inventive, innovative, insightful, and sheer fun as Pound's work originally.
It is part Pound biography, part literary history,
part artistic theory, yet still something different from and more than all
those genres combined.The book
certainly lionizes Pound, but it is not hagiography; it does not attempt to
skirt Pound’s fascism, for example, only explain it by means of his
preoccupation with the “usury” endemic to capitalism, as Pound believed interest
rates to be an exploitative evil that could only be neutralized through
dictatorship (one anecdote—this text is rife with apocrypha—states that when
Pound first became a radio propagandist for Mussolini, his speeches were so
intellectually dense that the fascists worried he might in fact be sending
coded messages to the Allies).The byzantine prose and structure of Kenner’s suis generis blurs the line between scholarship and literature, rendering this
tome perhaps more approachable as a fellow poetic work of late-Modernism than of
criticism.
John Harwood Eliot to Derrida: The Poverty of Interpretation
Admittedly, part of why I have been so preoccupied as of late with the torpidity of literary criticism is thanks to this very work. Maybe I just enjoy a good rant and the English are just exceptionally good at them; but Harwood's book here is a tour-de-force of delightful academic writing, one that strives to be everything that modern scholarship is not.
He repeatedly punctures the utopic pretensions of literary critics, by
in effect stating that if your goal is revolution and social change, then
literary criticism is by far the least effective way to go about it, that the
fate of human civilization certainly does not rest upon our
interpretation of, say, The Waste Land,
that most common readers in fact get along just fine without us. And in
fact, if one wanted to hatch a plan to sweep all the activists off the street,
one could do no better than to convert them all to obscure French theorists,
lodged in the ivory tower speaking past each other, unintelligible to anyone
still on the streets. What Harwood wants more than anything is for us to remember why we read these works in the first place--not to impress people at parties, not to drone on in conferences, and certainly not to achieve tenure, no--it's because these texts are astonishing, and they can still overwhelm you aesthetically if you let them.
Leonard Diepeveen The Difficulties of Modernism
Is it ironic that a book focused solely upon the difficulties of Modernist literature should be written so lucidly and clearly? But Diepeveen has a real affection for his subject matter, and it shines through--the story of Modernism's reception history, how it was at once derided and praised as inaccessibly difficult from the very beginning, is a fascinating story to tell, and he tells it with aplomb! Whether you agree with TS Eliot that human civilization has now become difficult and so its poetry must as well, or if you think that this all so much pseudo-intellectual blustering and pontificating, you will find your views challenged and expounded upon in every chapter. And not patronizingly or antagonizingly, either, no: Diepeveen thinks this topic is fun, and you can't help but have fun reading him, too.
What academics have you found actually enjoyable to read?
