The Comps Reading Project part 17: THE END!!!

TO QUOTH THE LIZARD KING: THIS IS THE END, MY ONLY FRIEND, THE END!!!  SO ENDS MY SPECIAL TOPIC LIST!!! SUCK ON THAT, ANGLO-MODERNISM!!!

I must now take a break to spend the next-odd month feverishly writing and compiling my comps portfolio, in time to submit it to my committee by Nov. 4th (it will be a most frightening Halloween season indeed!).  I will then spend the ensuing 2 weeks cramming the last half-dozen critical works on my historical list, in prep for my Comps Defense--a fateful date--Nov. 18th.

So ends The Comps Reading Project; thanks for reading, if you were reading at all!  I'd take a nap, but I don't have that luxury right now...

In the meantime, here are the final titles on my Special Topic list, presented as rough drafts for my Annotated Bibliography...

Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science, Michael Golston.

The image on the cover of this 2007 is what was once known as a phonoscope, a device designed to track the "natural" speech rhythms of the test subject and record them onto a roller-sheet for "scientific" examination.  The turn of the 20th century, argues Golston, was rife with obsessions over "rhythm," which had obvious ramifications for racism, fascism, and eugenics, as the "Rhythmists" (Golston's invented term for the loose cadre of adherents to this rhythmic pseudo-science) came to believe that 1) a "race's" innate rhythms were genetically predetermined; yet 2) one's rhythm could be "contaminated" by other race's rhythms (hence the fear of contamination from the rhythms of Africans, Indians, and Jews); moreover 3) modern man had lost connection with his own deeply-racinated rhythmic roots, a racial rhythm that had to be both purified of "contaminations" as well re-configured and re-totalized, reuniting body and soul, in order to rejuvenate the race (hence the dramatic, goose-stepping military marches of the fascists).

Golston's literary argument is that much of the poetry of this time period cannot be fully understood without likewise understanding the grand influence of the doctrine of "Rhythm" that permeated public discourse.  His two primary examples are, of course, those arch-fascists Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats.  Golston spends 2 chapters tracing the influence of this fascist-conception of rhythm in the poetry of Ezra Pound, particularly through close-readings of Canto 77 of the Pisan Cantos (wherein he attempts to rebuild within poetry the lost "ideal" fascist utopic city after the end of WWII), and in his poem "The Return."  In contrast to Pound scholar Hugh Kenner, Golston claims to read in the "Look and see" of Canto 77 not a look up to the gods, but at the roller-sheet of the phonoscope (though I personally found that reading a little specious; Pound may have been a fascist, but his fascism was still rooted in idealism, not obscure inventions).

The next 2 chapters specifically claim to follow the purported eugenics thread running through some of the scattered poems of William Butler Yeats, reading Yeats' stubborn rhythms as an attempt to not lose connection with a distant past, and that his rare turns into Blank Verse coincide with commentary on what happenes when that heritage is briefly lost (though I likewise found his close-reading specious; for what then of "Easter 1916"??).  The abbreviated final chapter focuses upon William Carlos Williams, whom he reads as self-consciously abandoning the doctrine of "Rhythmists" altogether, preferring instead the doctrine of "measure."

Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction, Philip Weinstein.

In this 2005 study, Weinstein contrasts literary Modernism against Realism and Postmodernism like so: Realism imagines life and existence as a clear linear progression, a narrative that progresses from each previous stage, building up to a predetermined conclusion--a very 17th-century Enlightenment formulation; Postmodernism by contrast rejects such formulations as utterly illusory, imaginary, and fictional.  Modernism, then, is what mediates between these two competing approaches towards Western thought.  As Weinstein argues it, Modernism is the first mass movement to interrogate the Enlightenment assumptions of innate progression by engaging in a process of "Unknowing," wherein we must begin to unknow what we thought we knew, to in fact confess that we never knew, and perhaps never know.  Although many of the works of this period appear depressing, Weinstein argues, there is actually an undercurrent of hope threading through it (unlike Postmodernism), as though to diagnose the problem is the first important step towards ending it.  But hope is not the same as optimism, says Weinstein; Modernism, in rejecting Enlightenment ideas of progression, works under no illusions that the problem will be fixed, only that it can.  His primary literary artifacts for illustrating his claims are the works of Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, and William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!--though he also gets heavy into the works of Marquez, Morrison, Levinas, Flaubert, and Beckett.

He also draws Modern and Postmodern comparisons between Faulkner and Pynchon, Rilke and Calvino, Forster and Rushdie.  He leans heavily on the theories of Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud.  Intriguingly, his analysis of the Modernists begins a century earlier, with Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, wherein Abraham realizes that the narrative he thought he was following--a progression of righteousness towards God--has actually been radically upset by a completely different narrative, one that more properly situates him within the greater universe, as an element subject to greater forces than he, rather than the primary force within it, when God calls upon him to sacrifice his son Isaac.  Abraham has to unknow what he has known, in other words.

Epic Negation: The Dialectical Poetics of Late Modernism, C.D. Blanton.

This 2015 work highlights and thematizes the possibility that genuine epic unity is no longer available to the modern poet.  Blanton opens by interrogating Ezra Pound's deceptively simple statement that "An epic is a poem including history."  But the problem is that, as Lukács argued, history in the modern era is far too complex (and self-conscious so) to ever be totalized into a poem anymore.  There is a tension, then, between the necessity and the impossibility of history in the modern epic.  The Modernist strategy that arises, then, is to encompass history through negation--that is, what is historical within a Modern epic is precisely that which has been left out, since it's all too big to be included in the first place, as is predicated on the encryption of disarticulated historical content.  Eliot's "Waste Land" and Pound's Cantos are of course his first Exhibits of this attempt to encompass all of history by focusing only on the fragments--which in turn calls attention to all of the fragments that have been left out.  It is in the negation that Modernism thus solves the problem of how to include history in all its unwieldiness. 

Blanton thereby proposes to think about the possibility of a poem that includes history differently--and to reconsider some of the works of the late-Modernist period more properly as epics that accomplish their historical-inclusions through this negation dialectic.  He of course considers T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" (as all Modernist scholars apparently must), but more intriguingly, pares this reading with Eliot's editorship of the journal The Criterion; he also considers WH Auden's poetry collection Another Time, Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal, and H.D.'s war trilogy (produced in conversation with Sigmund Freud's Moses and Monotheism) all as examples of negated epics. Blaston half-facetiously coins the term "Eliotic Marxism", to describe how Eliot's editorship applied Marxist concepts of historical totalization as defined from a fundamentally conservative perspective. 

The Sacred Wood, TS Eliot.

It is no exaggeration to stress that the influence of this rather modest 1922 essay collection upon English academia has been incalculable.  Among casual chapters on Ben Johnson, Swinburne, Dante, and William Blake, sit two of the most hotly debated and cited essays of the past 100 years: "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and "Hamlet and His Problems."  The former is basically Ground Zero for New Criticism, Formalism, and the professionalization of English literary studies as a recognized research discipline.  In said essay, Eliot makes the claim that all of Western art forms a single, continuous tradition stretching all the way back from Homer and even the cave paintings of France, and all the way up through the Classical, the Medieval, the Renaissance, up to the present; and that when a new work is created, it exists not in isolation, but interacts with all the works that preceded it.  But not only that, all the other works in the Western canon become altered as well; we read and experience them in a new light, for the tradition is living, and works thousands of years old are still being tweaked by those published in the 20th century.

In a round-about way, this essay gave a key to certain determined scholars, who read in this contemporaneous tradition a strategy for interpreting the collage of literary references scattered throughout "The Waste Land", published that same year.  This whole strategy prompted an entire approach to criticism that promoted close-readings of the text, seeking for underlying tensions and paradoxes, an approach that privileged complex works (as giving the critic more to work with), which in turn assisted in the canonization of the most difficult works under the banner of "Modernism."  The essay also promotes the idea of the impersonal author, with the poet but serving as a "bit of platinum" in a mechanical process between his imagination and the Tradition, which chemical reaction creates new poetry.  This approach prompted new terms such as "the intentional fallacy," and promotes readings that privileged mechanics over biographical readings of literary works.

"Hamlet and His Problems" in turn attacks the most sacred cow in English literature, calling Shakespeare's play a "failure," and coining us the term "objective corollary," which is still strenuously debated to this day, both within and without Shakespeare studies.

The Gender of Modernity, Rita Felski.

In this significant 1995 study, Felski begins her analysis of modernity through a "deceptively" simple desire: "to reread the modern through the lens of feminist theory."  Her introduction poses the following questions: How exactly would our understanding of modernity shift if we focused primarily upon texts written by or about women for a change, rather than taking the male experience as emblematic?  (Believe me, after reading so, so many studies on Ulysses and "The Waste Land," such is a refreshing change of pace!)  What if, within the context of cultural modernity analysis, the feminine experience was privileged in its primacy, rather than ascribed secondary and/or marginal status?  "What difference would such a procedure make?" she asks ultimately. She notes that in most texts that self-identify as "modern", the  rationale, autonomous, and independent is usually associated with the male, while the traditional and conservative element is typically feminine.  Her interest, then, is in those texts that interrogate these ascriptions.  Yet she is not content either to simply demonize the modern as intrinsically patriarchal, or assume a simplistic binary opposition between male and female modern experience (indeed, she one of her starting assumptions is that a gendered shift in modern perspective would not in fact result in something totally alien or unrecognizable, given the irreducible entanglements between men and women in that and every moment in history); indeed, she calls into question such narrowly feminist perspectives that deny such entanglements.

Her primary focus is upon texts from the Fin de siècle--that is, in the years immediately preceding the "Modernist" period I have mostly focused upon.  She carefully scrutinizes male and female writers alike: Simmel, Zola, Sacher-Masoch, and Rachilde to Marie Corelli, Wilde, Olive Schreiner--though her argument is that, aesthetics-wise, the end of the last century still closely parallels our own, that many of the same gendered assumptions still inform our debates today, and therefore the lessons of a century ago are still applicable in our contemporary moment.  Her book is as likely to analyze sentimental popular fiction as it is the avant-garde.

Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Paul Gilroy.

In this famed 1993 study, Paul Gilroy seeks to demonstrate how the centrality of black experience to Western Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment concerns.  He argues that racial slavery, race doctrines, and white supremacist terror was integral to the West, examines the master/mistress/slave relationship as foundational to black critiques of and defenses for Western modernity alike.  He lobbies hard for black vernacular culture, especially black music, as likewise central to Western civilization (for far longer than the 20th century, even), and analyzes the long history of how Pan-African black nationalism has often repressed its own ambivalence about exile from Africa.  He attempts to address the apparent absence of concern for "race" and "ethnicity" in most contemporary writings about modernity (which I fear is as true in 2015 as it was in 1993).  He likewise strives to demonstrate how the false binary between essentialist and anti-essentialist theories of black identity (especially as it has been viewed through the lens of black music) have both been fundamentally unhelpful, and proposes what he terms an "anti-anti-essentialist" construction of black identity.  As for work directly pertinent to the Modernist literary period, Gilroy examines the "double consciousness" work of WEB Du Bois, which he claims as one of the central organizing them of this book.  He suggests that Du Bois' travels throughout Europe transformed his understanding of race, and examines how Pan-Africanism and anti-imperialism fueled by his belief in African-American exceptionalism.

Likewise relevant to the Modernist era, Gilroy examines the works of Richard Wright and its critical responses, defending Wright in particular against those African-American critics who read Wright's later writings produced in Europe as inferior to his earlier writings, by applauding Wright for connecting the plight of black Americans with the colonized in other countries (which, incidentally, anticipates Malcolm X).  Gilroy concludes with a meditation on the concept of diaspora, which he claims Pan-Africanists imported from unacknowledged Jewish sources; he argues for the importance of black and Jewish exchanges as important for the future of this line of scholarship.

Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-garde, Julian Murphet.

Oh Murphet, you and New Media will be the death of me.

RANT What's so incredibly frustrating about New Media theory is that, at least on paper, it just sounds so fascinating, and even has the potential to appeal to the general public, renew popular interest in literary studies, reinvigorate the field, and give a much needed shot in the arm to a discipline under siege.  For indeed, neuroscience now confirms that social media, the internet, and touch-screens are literally rewiring the way our brains process data and perceive the world; now along comes New Media theory, to demonstrate that our brains have always been rewired by the introduction of new media technologies--the printing press, the telegraph, cinema, etc--and what's more, we can trace those changes throughout history's greatest works of literature!  

But in practice, New Media theory is afflicted with that same old dull, oppressive, turgid prose, and even exceeds the Post-Structuralists and Neo-Marxists in needless opacity.  Seriously, even Derrida and Althusser are models of pristine clarity compared to Kittler and his ilk.  I mean, my goodness: the humanities are under siege, our budgets are constantly cut, the general public dismiss us as inscrutable and unintelligible, and their brilliant solution is to double down on that?! Screw you New Media theorists, and the filthy whore Discourse Network that bore you!!  /RANT

As for the actual book: This 2009 study picks up where David Trotter Cinema and Modernism and Frederic Jameson's A Singular Modernity leaves off, applying a lens of New Media theory to examine how the rise of photography, cinematography, mechanical print technology, and visual advertising influenced the literary productions of such Modernists as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Louis Zukofsky (not to mention the Cubist painters)--both in how they incorporated and resisted the rise of these modernizing technologies.  He offers a "media theory of modern poetics" that draws upon Jameson's description of modernism as a product of uneven development.  He describes the media landscape of the early twentieth century as a field of competing forms, a quasi-Darwinian struggle between the ancien regime of beaux arts vs the new media (film, photography, etc) that was invented during what he terms the "second industrial revolution". The new media forms, argues Murphet, tried to legitimate themselves by feeding off of the perceived legitimacy of older forms (he cites for example Virginia Woolf, who bewailed the fact that all the old novels appeared to now exist only to be "turned into movies").

The paradox, then, is that these older types of media art sought to keep themselves relevant by tying themselves to these newer forms (a process which we still see in play today). Murphet claims that literature's response to the assault of new media forms was "an ongoing chiasmic process of 'borrowing' the vestments of materiality from other media" (36). Murphet doesn't just claim that this tension between old and new media forms happened to occur during the modernist period, but is what defines Modernism itself: "this is what the writers and artists we call 'modern' were collectively engaged in: a concerted becoming-media of the arts" (5). 

Modernism and Empire, Ed. Howard J. Booth and Nigel Rigby.

This 2000 anthology is claimed by its editors to be the first sustained exploration of the relationship between literary Modernism and the contemporaneous British Empire.  Although Post-Colonial theory was at least a generation old by the time of this book's publication, the introduction claims that there had been up to that time little conversation between the two fields, a critical vacancy the editors seek to rectify, both by examining the Imperial presumptions underlying the writing theory of so many of these "canonical" writers, as well as including more writers from the nether-regions of the Empire itself.  Nevertheless, there is still an inescapable sense that this book is a little late to the party; for example, two different chapters center upon Joyce and Yeats as colonized subjects after long having been neutralized and absorbed into the English literary canon--as though there wasn't already a half-decade's worth of Post-Colonial Joyce scholarship that had been aggressively making that claim, dating back to Vincent Cheng's 1995 Joyce, Race, and Empire.   Likewise, this book's claim to analyze Britain's own cultural attitudes towards its own colonial subjects--both their fear of this exoticized "Other" contaminating their psychological, cultural, and racial purity, and as a spirited re-invigoration of an exhausted and wary West--as though, again, Edward Sa'id had not written extensively on those very topics clear back in 1978's Orientalism.  The influence of Empire upon Kipling and Orwell are hardly neglected angles, either.

Despite touching upon such oft-trodden ground, this collection does still justify its existence through some still-novel approaches, for example: A discussion of the influence of Imperial imports (Celtic, Chinese, Japanese, etc) upon Imagism and other "neo-primitive" art movements; a discussion of Sylvia Townsend Warner and sexuality in the Pacific; a comparison of Mansfield Park (which was already well-picked by Post-Colonialists) and Maori culture; and analyses of Australia and "Modernism's Empire" (indeed, as Harwood pointed out, Anglo-Modernism never took root in Down Under). 

Modernist Fiction and Vagueness: Philosophy, Form, and Language, Megan Quigley.

Other Modernist scholars have noted Modernism's self-conscious difficulty; Megan Quigley fine-tunes that diagnosis down to self-conscious vagueness specifically.  For Quigley, Modernism's vague definitions are a feature, not a bug, for Modernism's own vagueness aptly reflects the vagueness of its novels, as well as the anxieties of the era's philosophy--as manifested both in the era's desperate attempts to make language more clear and precise (as in the invention of Basic English, and in the early writings of TS Eliot and Bertrand Russel) or more willfully vague (as in the philosophy of Wittgenstein and novels of Woolf, Joyce, and late-period James).  An interdisciplinary work, each chapter of this volume pairs a Modern novelist with a contemporaneous philosopher--Henry James with his brother William and Charles S. Peirce; Virginia Woolf with Bertrand Russell; James Joyce with Ludwig Wittgenstein and C.K. Ogden--in order to explore, not so much how these various writers and thinkers influenced each other, but rather how they expressed similar anxieties and infatuations with the concept of vagueness itself.

She historicizes this Modernist turn towards the vague, noting that it is no coincidence that Modernist novels become far more ambivalent at the same moment that Western philosophy turns towards linguistics and an obsession with the intrinsic vagueness of language itself--as well as in the same moment that Einstein renders physics itself vague by describing light as both a wave and a particle.  The Modernist novelists, likewise, begin to play with the possibilities of words being both waves and particles--vaguely defined but still forces of power.  Quigley concludes by arguing that we have vastly underestimated the influence of Russel upon Eliot's vision of Modernity.  She writes in a lucid prose that is the refreshing opposite of the vagueness that is her primary topic.  (See New Media theorist?!  It's not that hard!)  This text pairs well with Weinstein's Unknowing in perceiving Modernism as a deep-rooted interrogation of many Enlightenment assumptions.

Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930, Edmund Wilson.

 

As Hugh Kenner notes in the 1981 introduction, at the time this study was first published in 1931, Joyce's Ulysses was still banned in every English speaking country; TS Eliot's reputation was by no means secure, or even finished; Yeats was still known primarily for his 19th-century poems; and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas had yet to make Gertrude Stein rich and famous.  This context is to demonstrate that, although Joyce, Yeats, Eliot, Stein, Proust, and Valery are over-represented in Modernist studies today, in 1931, for a critic like Edmund Wilson to dedicate an entire book to these figures was a radical move indeed.  In fact, this very tome was instrumental in legitimizing these figures into the literary canon in the first place--and moreover doing so contemporaneously, in real time, years before the term "Modernism" even existed.  Hence, if so many of Wilson's claims feel overly familiar to us now--that Romanticism reacted against Classicism, Symbolism against Naturalism; that the French Symbolists (Rimbaud, Mallarme, Flaubert, etc) heavily influenced the Anglo-Modernists; etc--well, that is because Wilson was the one who first asserted these claims in the first place.  The book's title refers to a German drama by Auguste Villiers, about a Byronic hero and a princess who realize their dreams are so fantastic that their real lives will never measure up, and so commit suicide; Wilson sees in the image of "Axel's castle" a unity between the Naturalists and the Symbolists that he hopes the present Modernists will at last accomplish.

Of course, the study has its weaknesses: his chapter on Proust is largely just a plot summary of In Search of Lost Time; his one on Stein is primarily just a summation of her work up to that point; he falls into the trap of trusting Ulysses' unreliable narrator, particularly as to whether Molly Bloom is a serial adulterer or not; many of is dates are off; he utterly elides the colonial context of the Irish authors.  But if the critical conversations have veered in other directions, this is all just another way of saying that Wilson is who first started these conversations, that he is long-range whom all the Modernist scholars are still responding to.  Axel's Castle is basically Ground Zero for all Modernist studies; he is hipster-scholar, studying Modernism before it was cool.

Modernism and the Ordinary, Liesl Olson.

As the title indicates, the focus of this 2009 text is upon Modernist literature's relationship with the ordinary, domestic, and quotidian, which she argues has long been neglected by Modernist scholars who have perceived the "ordinary" to be the province of 19th-century Realism.  Olson, however, argues that there is a different kind of ordinary at play in Modernism, for even the 19th-century Realist novels still had a deep emphasis on plot, that is, on what changes, what is new, what disrupts the quotidian, whereas the Modern is concerned with the ordinary itself.  It is a theory of Modernism that focuses upon the duration of endless moments rather than the moments themselves, upon the habitual repetition of tasks rather than the singularity of any single, and that interrogates a quiet bourgeois satisfaction as opposed to a sublime intensity.  In contrast to the many Modernist acolytes of Viktor Shklovsky who claimed that the purpose of art is to de-familiarize the familiar--that is, to shock the audience awake at the wonder of what we erroneously classified as ordinary all along--Olson presents a theory of ordinariness that emphasizes the ordinary as ordinary, that is, that does not disrupt the ordinary but instead explores the experience of ordinariness itself. 

This theory of the ordinary is not to argue that the Modernists were apolitical or insulated, far from it--in fact, she explores how the ordinary was deployed by the likes of Joyce and Woolf to interrogate the earth-shaking events that surrounded them, to explore how WWI, colonialism, and capitalism infected their very habits.  She also explores how their focus on the ordinary was used to puncture the pretensions war itself, as far from glorious and heroic, but in fact dull, repetitious, and boring.  Her valuing of the ordinary takes on three specific manifestations: 1) The ordinary as affective experience (as in Joyce's Ulysses or Woolf's Mrs Dalloway); 2) the ordinary as a genre, wherein the focus is upon all that quotidian experience that does not ever rise to the level of adventure (as in Proust's In Search of Lost Time and, again, Joyce's Ulysses); and 3) the ordinary as a style (as in the works of Gertrude Stein).  Her primary artifacts are James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Henry James, Wallace Stevens, and Marcel Proust.

The Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire, John Marx.

In contrast to the conventional wisdom that casts Modernism as in the throes of anxiety about the imminent collapse of the British Empire, John Marx in this 2005 study recasts the era as a period that was already anticipating our current post-Imperial world order, wherein the world is globalized into discrete yet interconnected localities--one that is decentered, yes, but that of course is still managed by a cosmopolitan cast of capitalist English-speaking experts.  Marx argues that in the hands of Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Ford Maddox Ford, and others, English became exoticized, and therefore something distinct from the British and American empires; but this is not a utopic vision Marx presents, but one that still keeps English privileged above all others--even transposed to the United States, it is still the Victorian Empire, only by other means.  Part of that privileging of the English comes about by the process of professionalization that was also occurring throughout most Western occupations at this time, and Marx reads the Modernist novelists--yes, even the colonized ones--especially the colonized ones--as being complicit in this process of professionalization that would globally privilege the English-speakers in the post-Imperial order.  Rather than mapping the decline of Empire, modernists such as Conrad and Woolf celebrated the shared culture of the English language as more important than the waning imperial structures of Britain.

Part of the need for these language experts arises from the fact that the English language became no longer English in this period--creoles form, as well as new accents and dialects throughout all of England's current and former colonies, and mediation is required between all of them. Marx tracks how England's imperial self-perceptions transformed from an austere us/them binary of the 17th century by which the English could define themselves against, to the more fluid 20th-century variant that perceived the English themselves as taking on the characteristics of their colonized, just as the latter became more English.  Basically, Marx reads in Anglo-Modernism the seeds and roots of contemporary Anglo-centric globalism.

The Eyes of Richard G. Scott

The paradox of photography is that the medium conceals as much as it reveals. Take for example the above press-shot of the Apostle Richard G. Scott.  It is of course, like all publicity photos, carefully airbrushed and digitally tweaked to artificially create a light emanating from his countenance, some subtle halo about his head.  But the irony isn't that he doesn't look Photoshopped in real life, no--the irony is that the photo utterly fails to capture the one truly impressive, uncanny, terrifying feature of his face: those bright, piercing eyes.

Oh you can still see a twinkle there, sure; but it still conveys absolutely nothing of what it is like to meet the man in person, like I did as a young missionary in Puerto Rico, standing in line to shake his hand, wherein I observed this short, stout, balding, utterly unremarkable looking old man going through the glad-handing motions, such that it's not so much I had low expectations as I really had no expectations at all.

But then it's your turn, and you look down to mutter "buenos dias" or "it's an honor" or some other useless pleasantry, when he suddenly locks his eyes into yours like we all so rarely do--we normally just look at each other (if we're lucky), and spend our days just watching each others' mouths and body language, all while we wait for our turn to speak, such that real eye contact is a shock to the system!

But what is even more shocking is that Scott's eyes are the most supernaturally bright shade of blue--like they could shine in the dark if they had to--they not only look right at you but into you, through you, straight to your very heart and soul, like you didn't even realize you had.  It's terrifying is what it is, as though some hackers have suddenly broke through your firewall and now all your secret, most private data is horribly exposed and they are reading everything.

I broke eye contact immediately. I still haven't recovered from the shock.

I was near the front of the line, so when I sat back down I observed all the other missionaries suffer the same shock, in the same pattern--a sort of blasé saunter up the line, turning to say hi to the old guy, and then immediately jerking their heads away in an electric jolt.  A couple even jumped, I swear.

It's a supernally rare gift--not even all the other Apostles have it (I'm told Henry B. Eyering has it, but I can't speak from experience). I once stood in line to shake hands with Dallin H. Oaks, and though he is far warmer and funnier in person than his conference persona suggests, I was still slightly disappointed to find that his eyes were merely clear, not bright.

Back to Richard G. Scott: I paid much closer attention to his talk after that handshake.  I credit his sermon as the turning point in my mission, in fact--I wasn't getting along with my companion you see, and I thought my area was kinda ugly and worn-down, and I hadn't had a baptism in months and hardly any investigators so I was starting to feel like a failure as a missionary.  I really needed this pick-me-up, is what I'm saying.  Now, Elder Scott's sermon was nothing show-boating, no pizzazz, no evangelical hell-raising; he would have made a terrible Megachurch preacher, for he spoke simply with the quiet confidence of a man who knows exactly what he's talking about--and what he had to say was deceptively practical.  He said that our first discussions should be 10 minutes long.  That's it. 

Yet it hit me like a ton of bricks: I had been talking too long, hadn't I!  And that was the problem, wasn't it--I was making the discussions about me, not the person I was talking to. And I rarely made any progress because all that folks remembered was that I talked too much, and all I gave myself was a headache.

So from that day on, my companion and I taught 10 minute discussions, tops.  (I actually got mad at future companions if we creeped up to 15.)  And we began to teach a lot more.  And a lot more people began to invite us back.  And some of them even decided to get baptized.  And some of them even still attend church to this day.  Not from anything I said, mind you.  Quite the opposite.

So yes, that brief handshake with Richard G. Scott probably changed my life more profoundly than many close friendships I've had.  

I admire everything about the man--his intelligence, his obvious compassion, his real effort to learn foreign languages so that his talks were overdubbed in his voice, not some impersonal translator's.

Most striking to me was his decision to never remarry after his wife passed away--and that in a religion that privileges being-married to almost fanatical degrees, one that still grapples with its legacy of polygamy by encouraging men to get sealed for time and all eternity to second wives just so long as the first one is dead.  But Elder Scott refused to bend to social pressure, he refused even the appearance of disloyalty to his beloved.

Now, he never judged anyone else for getting remarried; but I bet real money that anytime anyone, even other Apostles, encouraged him to "find yourself another woman" and end his loneliness, that he would simply lock his eyes into theirs, and immediately they would trail off, stammer an apology, and never bring it up again.

And now those eyes are back with his beloved.  Requiescat in pace you Apostle of the Most High God, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

The Comps Reading Project part 16

THIS IS THE WEEK I FINALLY FINISHED THE LAST OF THE PLAYS AND POEMS ON MY HISTORICAL LIST, AND OVER TWO-THIRDS OF MY SPECIAL TOPIC LIST, GUYS I AM SO FRICKIN CLOSE I CAN SMELL IT


Modernism is the Literature of Celebrity, Jonathan Goldman.

2011 study picking up where Jaffe and Glass left off.  Traces how style became conflated with celebrity as early as the Modernist period, following the examples of Oscar Wilde (for whom his writing became so identified with him that it was used as evidence against him at his Sodomy trial), James Joyce (who still consciously guides our readings of Ulysses to this day; Goldman's readings here are heavily indebted to Barthes and Foucault), Gertrude Stein (with a heavy emphasis on her later work, wherein she "democratizes" style, only to then undercut the democratization to still emphasize the per-eminence of her own celebrity), Charlie Chaplin (as "uniquely revealing the commonalities of popular celebrity and modernist authorship," by how the very fact of his celebrity helped over-write the very characters he portrayed), Jean Rhys (as the abject object of desire who is both marginalized and centralized all at once), and concludes with John Dos Passos (who's style becomes inseparable from his celebrity--though, as always, we can never seem to discuss him without bringing up Hemingway).

The Cripple of Inishmaan, Martin McDonagh.

My goodness, the endless whiplash of this 1996 play!  Just when you think these bitter characters could possibly get any worse...they do something to totally redeem themselves...only to then do something even worse...only to then give a glimmer of hope...only to the snuff that out, too.  This play had my mouth contorting in laughter, then in pain, then finally just agape in bewilderment.

Eliot to Derrida: The Poverty of Interpretation, John Harwood.

1995 anti-theory polemic that's been cited multiple times by other works on my Special Topics list, particularly for Harwood's insistence that the entire category of "Modernism" is a fictional construct invented by the post-war economy in order to artificially sustain an entire cottage industry of criticism and theory.  The irony here is that Harwood is actually a deep admirer of TS Eliot specifically and of that particular literary era in general; it is not experimentation he is opposed to, but the use of the generic term "Modernism" to try and enclose a very disparate and disconnected series of competing movements within the same insufficient rubric.  He attacks first the New Critics (those inveterate disciples of Eliot) for creating an astronomically, unsustainably massive corpus of criticism that in effect sucks all the joy out of reading; the theorists who followed in the '60s and '70s, initially formed to attack and deconstruct the New Critics, became no less authoritarian and suffocating as the ancien regime they were intended to displace.  Harwood sees the death of Eliot in '65 and the arrival of Derrida in '66 as a clear passing of the baton from the old boss to the new; yet while Harwood sees Eliot as largely a victim of circumstances, he has absolutely no patience for Derrida specifically, nor for Deconstructionism in general, classifying the latter as no more than a mystic art with no grounding, purpose, or insight.

He repeatedly punctures the pretensions of literary critics, by in effect saying that if you're 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 readers in fact get along just fine without us.  He spends quite a bit of time on "The Waste Land" (since it is such a foundational poem in New Criticism, inviting exactly the sort of excessively close reading that plagues literary criticism to this day), by demonstrating Eliot's own deep ambivalence with the poem, especially since it was basically Ezra Pound's massive re-writes that produced it in its current form.

Anti-theory is not original to Harwood (he cites other contemporaneous screeds), and if anything anti-theory is even louder today within academia (Rita Felski is arguably the latest standard-barer--albeit less polemical than Harwood).  I had at least 2 professors at Utah trained at John Hopkins, who were likewise deeply anti-theory.  Nevertheless, he still appears to be the primary skeptic that everyone is still responding to, either in agreement or in argument.  There is a paradox about him, though; he rails against all the excessive scholarship in literary criticism, and he defends that assertion...through extensive scholarship.  He also seem, despite his British crankiness, to be a true lover of literature and scholarship, which leaves me wondering at the end: what exactly does he want us to do instead?  I'm certainly all for tearing down literary theories that force all texts into the same square peg--hammers that see everything as a nail--that subjugate the text to the theory instead of the other way around--that practice the very authoritarianism they ostensibly oppose.  But if we walk away from all this theory and close-readings, well then...what do we do instead?  Just sit around and read, refusing to comment about what books might have to say about the world at large?

The Weir, Conor McPherson.

1997 play staged in that most Irish of places, the local pub--and sharing in that most pub-ish of activities, telling ghost stories.  We don't see the stories acted, no--we see them told, which feels like a crucial difference, as the orality of the shared experience takes precedence, grants greater authority and sense of reality, than the textual or even dramatic elements.

And now, the final play on my list...

Translations, Brian Friel.

Famed 1980 play that takes place in 1833 Ireland, when England was mapping its nearest colony and Anglicizing all the local names.  Young bilinguial Irishman Owen is hired by the English to translate between the army and the local Gaelic-speaking villagers.  Things come to a head when a Romantic young English lieutenant falls for a local Irish girl; they can't speak each others languages, but, you know, the title of the play and all.  Things quickly fall apart when the lieutenant deserts and the English army assumes he's been kidnapped or killed, and threatens to first kill all the livestock then evict everyone unless he's found.   The play ends inconclusively and ambiguously, with an aged Irishman and veteran of the 1798 rebellion recites and translates the Aeniad from the original Latin, which was likewise a tale of a homeland decimated and languages lost in translation...

And thus ends the last of the plays on my Historical List! And now, the last of the poetry:

El Canto General, Las Alturas de Macchu Picchu, Pablo Neruda.

Pablo Neruda is the one Latin-American poet who requires no introduction; I'd previously read his 20 poemas de amor y una canción desesperada and 100 sonetas de amor, generally considered to be the finest love poems of the Spanish language in the 20th century. But in contrast to those far more famed short poems, 1950's Canto General is a much longer book-length work, treating a wide variety of themes.  For the purposes of my comps list, I only read "Las Alturas de Macchu Picchu."  My Spanish professor insists to me that 3 of the major "labyrinths" in Latin-American literature are the labyrinth of the jungle, the labyrinth of dictatorships, and the labyrinth of history.  All 3 are present in this brief section, as the speaker escapes the labyrinth of the autumnal dying city for the titular ruins of Macchu Picchu; he "scales the ladder of the earth/amid the atrocious maze of lost jungles" up to the "Towering reef of the human dawn/Spade lost in the primal sand," and questions of the beautiful ruins, "did you put/stone upon stone and, at the base, tatters?/Coal upon coal and, at the bottom, tears?/Fire in gold and, within it, the trembling/drop of red blood?/Bring me back the slave that you buried!/Shake from the earth the hard bread/of the poor wretch, show me/the slave's clothing and his window./Tell me how he slept when he lived./Tell if his sleep was/harsh, gaping, like a black chasm/worn by fatigue upon the wall."  Don't you mess with Pablo Neruda!

Antología Mayor, Nicolás Guillén.

Collected works of Cuba's national poet, 1902-1989.  His heritage is half-African, half-Spanish, which fraught identity is naturally a recurring theme in his poetry.  Other recurring themes: the ocean (obviously, given his island), love, women, food and eating (given the historic poverty of the island), Cuban expats in New York, Spanish fascism, and U.S. imperialism (lest we think that we had nothing to do with why the 1959 Revolution happened in the first place).  An early poem of his even calls North Americans "the new Spaniards." His poems have a very musical quality to them, with staccato phrasing and repetitions, like in a chorus; these are poems generally intended to be read out loud, orally, even sung.

Tuntún de Pasa y Grifería, Luis Palés Matos.

1937 collection by the Puerto Rican poet.  The musicality I referenced in Guillén?  Well Palés Matos' poetry could straight up be danced to.  "Asia dreams her nirvana/America dances jazz/Europe plays and theorizes/Africa grinds."  These are poems that claim sympathy with the jungles of Africa and Haiti, Havana and Zimbabwe, Angola and Congo, Jamaica and Uganda, Timbuktu and all the Antilles, a sort of Pan-African consciousness that includes "los negros" of Puerto Rico.   Yet despite all this noise and energy, silence and solitude are also recurring themes in these poems. For while there's obviously political critique underlying this Pan-Africanism (he eats white flesh at one point), there's also a yearning to feel less lonely on this isolated island. 

Discovering Modernism: TS Eliot and His Context, Louis Menand.

 

Menand is referenced repeatedly (and pejoratively) by Harwood, so it makes sense to see what the former actually wrote.  In this 1987 study, Menand tracks how that arch-modernist TS Eliot was responding to certain aesthetic issues raised in late-Victorianist England, beginning with Oscar Wilde, of all people.  Menand draws comparisons with that arch-Victorian Alfred Tennyson, and his poem In Memoriam, arguing that Eliot's early poetry finds itself working within the same vein only without the same assurances of poetry's efficacies (even though Tennyson had many of the same doubts).  Menand performs extended close readings of Conrad's Heart of Darkness to demonstrate the anxieties of professionalization (including the professionalization of poetry) that plagued not only Eliot but the Moderns in general.  As always, the Imagists loom large, who were likewise reacting against certain Victorian norms, trying to save literature from its own "literariness."  Menand also focuses upon the theory that poetry and art are not about the old Romantic notion of recreating an experience, but rather of creating a new experience that is accessible only within art, albeit ones that still have referents rooted in lived experience (this heavily informs Menand's readings of "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and "The Waste Land").  Menand also tracks how the Eliot disavowed many of his younger artistic theories (albeit not as thoroughly as Menand), leading him to be endlessly cited as the highest authority of ideas he had already either repudiated or lost interest in.  

Menand tracks by means of Eliots' wrangling with poetry how even though we can never really get outside of culture, we can never really get into it, either.  Menand's readings of "The Waste Land" is likewise influenced by Victorian anxieties about how authenticity must be attained by abandoning "literariness," which undermines the very category of literature; "The Waste Land's" manifold literary allusions are an expression of that wrangling with a tradition that is no longer up to the task of self-expression.  In the 2007 afterword, Menand discusses how his interest in Eliot is purely academic; he shares little of his similar tastes, takes as axiomatic that he was reactionary, a traditionalist acutely self-aware that fate had forced him to be a modern.  Menand claims his interest in Eliot resides in his fascination for how the latter came to dominate literary England for a half-century so completely, how this American came to be more British than the British.


Cinema and Modernism, David Trotter.

The automatism and impersonality of cinema, as opposed to specific cinematic techniques such as jump-cuts, montage, or close-ups, as the premier influence on Modernist literature, is the focus of this 2007 study.  Joyce mimicking not the montage quality of early cinema, but of its automatism, and its will-to-automatism; Eysenstein nevertheless explicitly drawing corollaries between cinema and Ulysses.  Critiquing Garret Stewart's methodology for being unable to conceive of the author, or author-function, in literature; and that it takes account only of avant-guarde cinema.  Attempting to re-situate cinema as one of those "popular entertainments" with which TS Eliot was "productively engaged," and "The Waste Land" as similarly obsessed with automation as Ulysses ("The Waste Land" and Ulysses apparently being Oedipus Rex and Hamlet of all literary scholars dealing with this specific era).  Performs sustained analysis of the purported "modernity" of the films of D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin (the latter is classified as Modernist due to his anti-mimesis, which is ironically portrayed by his hyper-mimesis--or mimicry for mimicry's sake, thereby demonstrating the impoverishment of mimesis).  Trotter acknowledges Virginia Woolf's intermittent interest in cinema, and how the medium's influence purportedly caused her to capture in To The Lighthouse that she hadn't in Mrs Dalloway--namely, how one no longer has to be present for beauty to persist. Lighthouse's 2nd portion is not cinematic, argues Trotter, but was nevertheless made possible by cinema.  Like apparently all New Media theory, this text is hopelessly afflicted with a certain dry, convoluted anti-clarity.

A Singular Modernism: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, Frederic Jameson.

Book length 2002 essay by the famed Postmodernist cultural and Marxist critic who turns his attentions at last towards Modernism itself.  He discusses how contemporarily, the very term "Modernism" has been co-opted by the global capitalist system to signify to so-called "developing" countries that only the decrease in worker-protections and increase in corporate-pandering qualify as "modern," with all attempts to resist such exploitation classified as "anti-modern."  Yet Jameson also notes that during the actual "Modernist" art period, it was exactly these "less"-developed colonies and former colonies--the United States, Latin-American, and above all Ireland--who were considered the most "Modern," and were most exporting these cutting-edge aesthetic movements to Europe's colonial centers.  "Modernism," then, signifies a modernization that ends (or becomes "Postmodern") once said modernization process actually ends--Jameson's examples include Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, which effectively ended and/or cut short the Modernist art movements within their respective countries, ironically under the auspices of turning to totalitarianism in order more fully "modernize" economically.

Part 1, or most the first half of this essay, involves a lot of heady historical preamble ("always historicize" is Jameson's axiom) centered around the philosophy Descartes, Foucault, Heidegger, and Paul de Mann; all of this historicizing is in the service of setting up four maxims for the "bon usage" of the term "modernity" as it relates to aesthetics, viz:
1. One cannot not periodize. [Indeed, Jameson offers that periodization is not an optional consideration, but "an essential feature of the narrative process itself" (81)].
2. Modernity is not a concept but rather a narrative category.
3. The one way not to narrate it is via subjectivity (thesis: subjectivity is unrepresentable). Only situations of modernity can be narrated.
4. No 'theory' of modernity makes sense today unless it comes to terms with the hypothesis of a postmodern break with the modern.

Part II, or the final third of the book, then tracks how it is within this temporal tension betwixt the "pre-modern" and the "modernized"--or more precisely, between the agricultural, feudal-peasant countryside and the industrialized, urban city--that Modernist art situates itself, e.g. as in Joyce's Ulysses and Prousts' In Search of Lost Time.  Again, it is in the unfinished process of modernizing, not in the modernized, that "Modernism" is to be located.  As for Postmodernism, Jameson draws a parallel between the marketplaces of both commodities and ideas--beginning in the 1950s and '60s, Postmodernism felt itself unable to continue to fulfill Pound's Modernist injunction to "make it new," to be innovative above all else, for all available creative ideas seemed to have been already exhausted by the previous generation, much like how late-capitalism faces in the same era finds itself faced for the first time with the very real possibility of total market saturation, wherein no longer can new markets be opened, but only existing markets can be ever expanded with diminishing returns.  The goal of art, then, becomes to somehow at last resist commodification--or, become allegories of its own commodification.


Modernism (as we see clearly in TS Eliot) is all about resisting modernization, reacting against the modernizing process.

A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England, Jed Esty.

2004 study that arguably picks up Jameson's thread about how "Modernism" is really defined as a reaction against modernization--but whereas Jameson is far more theoretically driven, Esty is actually the one who more concretely historizes.  Namely, he tracks how the collapse of the British Empire over the course of the Modernist period influenced the writing of this time.  It is borderline-axiomatic nowadays to note that most of the really vital English literature published throughout the 20th century came from England's former colonies: Ireland, the U.S., the Caribbean, India and Africa.  What happened to the home of the mother tongue?  Some blamed England's increased provincialism as they lost their overseas holdings--but Esty posits that this process really began before the process of decolonization.  (In the Intro, Esty cites Ezra Pound in 1910 as already noting that England itself is now largely irrelevant towards the development of English letters).  As Esty traces this history, he first notes that by the end of the Victorian era, England's sense of self-identity was very much rooted in a sense of being the central hub for a multi-national empire, from which it could mine endless new mythologies, folklore, and stories (as we see in the writings of Kipling).  Yet this self-conceptualization ironically had the effect of making England itself feel de-centered, hazily defined, and absorbing identities more than they exported their own (little wonder, then, that it was mostly Americans and Irishmen coming to London, rather than the other way around, that was increasingly driving literature).

Moreover, the profound laissez-faire capitalism of the era rendered most the English feeling all the more radically individualistic and therefore radically alone, without firm anchor in any sort of common culture, and therefore all the more subject to the ruthless power of market forces.  Likewise, the rise of fascism on mainland Europe had the effect of 1) cutting them off from further continental contact and sources of extra-literary cultural sources, and 2) forcing the English to band themselves into a common cultural identity in order to oppose a common foe, yet in a nationalistic formation that hopefully wasn't fascist as well. This process inwards was exasperated by the homerule movements in Ireland, India, Egypt, Canada, and Australia (each of which were granted greater and greater autonomy before seceding altogether), which cut off England from sources of Othered folklore.

This process, argues Esty, resulted in England turning inwards to mine their own countryside (in the 1930s there is a sudden boom in English tourist guides), searching for forgotten native folklore, traditions, and a sense of pre-modern unity; everything becomes retro, in other words.  (This is thus far the only study I've read so far to acknowledge JRR Tolkien's rise in English letters, as just the sort of retro-stylist that this English turn inwards would create--of course, Tolkien is still technically an outsider, being born in South Africa, as Esty notes).  Esty further notes how Virginia Woolf's first novel, 1915's The Voyage Out, involves sailing out to the colonies, while her final novel, 1941's Between the Acts, takes place in the provincial countryside; likewise TS Eliot's early poetry, especially 1922's "The Waste Land," has a very internationalist cosmopolitanism to it, while his latter poetry, especially 1943's "The Four Quartets," is very unapologetically Anglican.  Esty, however, is careful to argue that Eliot's was no mere reactionary nativism (though it is that, too), but rather a strategy for forming a sort of common cultural core within England that could resist both the isolating loneliness of free-market capitalism and the forces of European fascism.  Eliot's, argues Esty, is likewise a bottom-up approach towards cultural formation, eschewing the top-down tyranny of fascism.  Woolf, although far more liberal than Eliot, is likewise working within a similar common-cultural framework--and with a similar goal towards resisting fascism.

But intriguingly, Esty's primary leftist example is not even a literary figure, but the economist John Maynard Keynes, whom Esty argues was attempting the same difficult negotiation between an isolating free-market and totalizing government, by arguing for a common cultural sense of English identity that could undergird the emerging British welfare state, particularly as Britain transitioned into its current post-imperial identity.  Yet Esty is also careful to argue that none of these writers was under the delusion that they could simply move back to some pre-modern, pre-imperial England--that indeed post-colonial Britain was now diverse, heterogeneous, and multicultural, and the paradox is how contemporary England's retro provincialism now cohabitates with a cosmopolitan internationalism; again, as Jameson argues, English Modernism ends as soon as England finishes modernizing.

Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern, Michael North.

1999 study on easily the most mythologized year in Modernist literary studies. It was of course the years both Ulysses and "The Waste Land" were published.  When Woolf wrote that the world changed "December 1910," she wrote that in 1922; when DH Lawrence said the same of 1915, he likewise wrote that in 1922.  Ezra Pound recommended starting a new calendar system, a Year 1, from 1922.  The English translation of Wittgenstein's Tractus Logico-Philosophicus was published that year.  Willa Cather at last won the Pulitzer, only to suddenly find herself suddenly out of favor; decades later, she would publish a short-story collection entitled None Under 40, for none under 40 would enjoy these tales, identifying 1922 as the break.  Yet F. Scott Fitzgerald identified 1922 as the high point of the younger generation.  Chapter 1 of this book focuses upon Wittgenstein's linguistic theories, the trouble with translation, the defamiliarization of language, and closely related to it the establishment of anthropology as an academic discipline roughly that same year.

Chapter 2 analyzes how Freud's theories of the unconscious were ironically front and center in the public conscious in 1922.  In fact, advertising was naturally the first to explicitly lay hold of these theories.  North then follows a circumlocutious route to track how this psychological infatuation influenced the writing of these books themselves, how stream-of-conscious in fact became a marketing ploy, which then brings us to how the pretensions of "High Modernism" that purportedly resisted commodification were in fact complicit with their own marketing all along, which then somehow gets us to how the rhetoric of self-consciously acknowledging our own prejudices still somehow resulted in utterly non-self-consciously reinforcing the era's dominant xenophobia, anti-semitism, eugenics, racism, and anti-immigrant politics.

Chapter 3 juxtaposes the Prince of Wale's Imperial Tour to India against DH Lawrence's own world tour to find himself; the former was attempting to clearly establish England's imperial dominions in the very moment when they were starting to fall apart (this was the same year, after all, of Irish self-determination, Egyptian and Indian self-autonomy, and of Gandhi).  Yet though Lawrence had no imperial ambitions per se, he nevertheless is driven by the same mythology of Englishman as universal citizen, one who can merge into any and all cultures, though the process cannot be reversed in this model.  Chapter 4 examines how the "great divide" between high art and pop art was by no means as wide as is now assumed, beginning with an anecdote about how the same Gilbert Seldes who helped published "The Waste Land" also wrote about Tin Pan Alley songs. Also discusses how the music hall influenced Ulysses, and how the film industry wasn't so much defending itself against censorship as much as proffering global cultural U.S. hegemony--censorship by other means. CHarlie Chaplin, as always, is a topic of focus, especially how he was a split figure.  Chapter 5 discusses gender issues, particularly the gendered manner in which Willa Cather was dismissed, and of Hemingway and Stein's complex relationship ("she was like a brother to me" and etc).

Ben Folds So There

(More in my continuing adventures of writing something that isn't Comps related for a change, before I go mad!  2 more months, 2 more months, 2 more months...) 

Alternate Title: Confessions of a Reluctant Ben Folds fan.

So There is Ben Fold's best new album in over 10 years.

Some context: I play piano, and any kid who played piano in the late-90s/early-aughts remembers how absolutely everyone insisted that you must therefore like Ben Folds Five, too.  I didn't.  Part of it was being told that I seemed like a natural Ben Folds fan came off as a rather back-handed compliment--especially since he described himself as "Punk rock for sissies".  

Part of it too was when friends tried to get me into him by always playing Whatever and Ever Amen--which holds the dubious distinction of being the only disc of his most people even seem to own, as well as hands-down his weakest album.  There, I said it: Whatever and Ever Amen sucks.  Opener "One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces" features exactly the sort of immature, petulant nerd-complex that continues to bedevil his personal life to this day (I believe he's now on divorce number 4--i.e. the number when you really gotta start asking "Maybe it's me!").  Also, "Brick" is bland, boring, and overplayed; the fact that everyone just has to point out that it's about an abortion makes me like it even less--especially since it whines about how the abortion effects him, not the poor girl he knocked up.  To this day, I skip more tracks on Whatever than any other album--yes, even that crappy Nick Hornby album!

Ah, but I just gave away the fact that I do in fact listen to all his albums, and that quite regularly!  For the fact of the matter is this: when Ben Folds is off, he's rather off-putting; but when he's on, oh my, is he ever on!  

In one of those memories that only ever seem to happen in your early-20s, I still remember working a construction job in college, commuting an hour between Rexburg and Island Park near Yellowstone; my foreman was a much bigger Indie aficionado than myself, and had just picked up Ben Folds Fives' The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner on-sale at a local library fire-sale, and insisted we give it a listen on the way home.  For 40-straight minutes, I sat transfixed; "Narcolepsy" waded me into the waters before plunging me into the depths; "Don't Change Your Plans" warmly welcomed me to the other side; "Mess" sent in the storm; "Magic" was the clear night sky after the storm has cleansed the air; "Hospital Song" forced me to account for how one dies; and then of course "Army" forced me to account for how one lives!  The album peaks with "Army"--a stone-cold classic and the band clearly knows it--it's the kind of song you turn to when you're likewise "thinkin' a lot today," and the turmoil in your soul needs something to rock out to. 

The album then keeps the hot streak alive with "Your Redneck Past," the haunting voice-mail of "You're Most Valuable Possession," and the even more haunting "Regrets"; if you've ever wondered why I've done so much traveling so young, well, it's because calypso-laden "Regrets" contains the devastating line: "I thought I'd do some traveling/never did..."

I had never heard anything like it before or since, and when the album ended I didn't want it to end.  True, this was the album that killed their commercial momentum and precipitated their break-up--but that's just another way of saying it was too good for them or this world.  Am I overselling it a bit?  Then you clearly haven't listened to it yet.


Reinhold Messner was their 1999 album; Ben Folds then went solo with 2001's Rockin' The Suburbs.  These two together mark the artistic high point of Fold's career, in my opinion.  It's frankly a shame that Folds went with what is by far the weakest track on the disc as the album title (my goodness man, "Not the Same" was RIGHT THERE!), and if I could travel back to 2001, I would...well, first I would stop 9/11.  But after that, I would convince Folds to leave the jokey, whiny title-track off altogether, for it is the one blemish on an otherwise flawless LP.

Opener "Annie Waits" is the most beautiful song ever about your crush waiting for someone else; "Zak and Sara" makes it sound like so much fun to be a psychic no one believes; "Still Fighting It" sounds like you've always known it, like it's always existed, so it's always a shock to learn its from the 21st century; the album's middle-trio of "Losing Lisa," "Carrying Cathy," and "Not the Same" work like gangbusters (which, again, is why it's such a shame for that momentum to be ruined by the title track, as though Folds lost his nerve and had to throw in a novelty song before anyone started to take him seriously as a song writer); and of course the closer "The Luckiest" is his all-time most perfect love song, the one that finally, mercifully, succeeded "Brick" in defining him in the public consciousness.

The one-two punch of Messner and Suburbs is what caused me to finally embrace my destiny and become a Ben Folds fan.  I picked up Whatever just to be a completionist, and picked up Ben Folds Fives' self-titled debut too, which is second only to Reinhold Messner in my mind; it just has this refreshing, propulsive energy about it, that even today, 20 years later, is wonderfully bereft of the simpering nerd-rage and sentimentality that would bog down so much of his later releases.

Which is exactly what happened.  I would say that on Songs for Silverman (2005), Supersunnyspeedgraphic (2006), Way to Normal (2008), Lonely Avenue (2010), and yes, even The Sound of the Life of the Mind (2012), between a third and half the tracks are genuinely inspired, strong enough to keep me coming back to him...while the rest are utterly skippable.  Combine the best tracks off his last decade's worth of work, and I'd say you'd end up with one really solid double-album, as opposed to this long trail of merely so-so LPs trailing in his wake.   

Reinhold Messner and Rockin' the Suburbs are still unassailable in my mind, but nevertheless, after realizing one of my favorite artists has been recording to ever-diminishing returns for a decade now, I wondered if maybe it was time to start focusing my energy elsewhere while I was still young.

But then along comes So There, and I'm in love all over again. 

It feels like the album that should have followed Rockin' the Suburbs oh so many years ago; in any case, it sounds like the album he's been building up to his entire career.  It's the next level, you see, when this consummate musician becomes the classical musician he was always destined to be.

At least on the second half, anyways, wherein he performs the piano concerto he was commissioned to write for the Nashville Symphony.  The Concerto is this sort of journey through the 20th century, with shades of Gershwin and Copland and Williams.  The first half of the disc sees him joining forces with the chamber-pop ensemble yMusic, for some of his loveliest tunes in a decade.  The running violas and flute-runs on the opener "Capable of Anything" immediately sets your soul aflutter.  Now, it does threatens to collapse on itself by joining the rather dreary pantheon of Ben Folds break-up songs; but it redeems itself by pointing out that the pump-up phrase "You are capable of anything" means you are capable of great evil as well as great good.  (Plus, that opening line "What is this?/It doesn't make much sense/They sing it like a pop song" is just such a delightfully meta-wink).  Speaking of self-awareness, "Phone In a Pool" sees him at least acknowledging how much his life is his own fault with "Seems what's good been for the music/Hasn't always been so good for the life."

I could go on, but I shouldn't; going on for too long is perhaps the same mistake Ben Folds has been making all along.  The 8-songs he limits himself to on side-A is perhaps an indicator for what he should have been doing for the past 10 years--trimming down to just a select few playful tracks, just enough to keep you satiated yet wanting more.  So There is not a return to form; it's a move to a better one.

The Comps Reading Project part 15

Prometheus and Other Poems, Mary Devenport O'Neill.

 

This 1929 collection was the first to be written by an Irish woman poet that could be considered "Modernist."  Better known as a playwright in her time, and for hosting a salon attended by the likes of Yeats, AE, and Frank O'Connor.  Strangely, most the poems in O'Neill's sole collection actually feel the most contemporary of all--in contrast to the the rampant neo-Classical collage of most her contemporaries, the stark, meter-less brevity and simple declarative statements of these poems feel exactly like the sort of poems that are being published in today's journals anthologized.  So, though there appears to have scarcely been a second printing since 1929, this collection might ironically be the most directly influential of all the Irish Modernists.  For example, the vignettes of natural environments would not feel out of place in Boland's 1990 Outside History.  Which reminds me: natural wilderness is likewise a place of feminine refuge in Bombal's La ultima niebla--is a similar theme occurring here in Irish lit?

The titular "Prometheus" poem that closes the collection is closer to O'Neill's dramatic instincts, being presented as a play.  As her own rather on-the-nose intro indicates, the tension is between Prometheus and the Story-Teller--the former sees the beauty of the world as it is, the latter sees how the world can provide the raw materials to create and fashion one's own world.  Is this the same tension between Vallejo and Huidobro I cataloged last week?

A Woman in Her Garden, Dulce María Loynaz.

Bilingual edition of the selected poems of the legendary Cuban poet (and boy-howdy, are these bad translations!  Like, barely in the same neighborhood of the originals...).  In contrast to the wildernesses of O'Neill and Boland, Loynaz finds the space for feminine self-realization within the carefully cultivated domestic sphere of the garden.  This quest for freedom is not just gendered; as a survivor of the old aristocratic class, Loynaz was fundamentally at odds with the Cuban Revolution of 1959, vowing to never write poetry again (though she later reneged).  Her own husband went into exile in 1961, but for her national loyalty trumped even the severest political ideology, and so she stubbornly stayed in Cuba till her death in 1997, writing to the end poems that scarcely spread out beyond her own domestic sphere (though with a more expansive historical sphere, as shown by her long poem on King Tut), where there alone she could still be.  She also has a deep infatuation with waters, similar to her fellow Caribbean Burgos (though Burgos came from far less privilege--and was far more explicitly political--than Loynaz).

Marconi's Cottage, Medbh McGuckian.

1992 collection, and the final Irish poet on my list!  A fellow Belfast Catholic and classmate of Seamus Heaney, who himself praised her poetry (oft compared to Rilkes') with: “Her language is like the inner lining of consciousness, the inner lining of English itself, and it moves amphibiously between the dreamlife and her actual domestic and historical experience as a woman in late-20th-century Ireland.” I fear, however, that I have little else to add to that; partly that may just be burn-out; partly that may be just nobody tops Seamus Heaney in pithy phrases; but part of it too may just be that I feel like everything I wrote of Boland or O'Neill or Loynaz I could again repeat here.  I mean, yes, she is a little more explicitly feminist than those other three (though she's no Adrienne Rich--but then, who is?), and she allows the clash between England and Ireland to seep in there more; and there is a more distinctive focus upon seasons I suppose, and the titular poem near the end really is stunning; but otherwise her poetic diction, structures, and topics--waters, seas, flows, lovers, the domestic, nature, individuality ("saying 'we' is dangerous"), etc--all feel more or less the same.  And maybe that just means there are the important obsessions of female modernist poets, the themes that merit closer examination.

Or maybe it's time for me to re-read this poem just to cleanse my palette.  

Antología, Gabriela Mistral [Lucila Godoy Alcayaga].

Selected works of the early-20th century Chilean poet, the only Latin-American woman thus far to win the Nobel for Literature [1945], great advocate for liberalizing public education, and former teacher to no less than Pablo Neruda.  You know, after reading so much "precious" contemporary poetry and opaque Modernist collages, it was frankly refreshing to read just good ol' fashioned religious themed rhyming quatrains for a change!

Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880-1980, Loren Glass.

2004 study on literary celebrity by the Special Topics director of my comps committee.  This particular work analyzes the fraught phenomenon of the celebrity author--those people who claim to disappear behind their works, only to become personalities who loom larger than their masterpieces.  He tracks this change through the best-selling autobiographies of Henry Adams and Edward Bok, to the planned copywrite-extensions of Mark Twain's autobiography, to Jack London's manifold impersonators (including himelf), to Gertrude Stein's identity crisis following her late-period massive commercial success, to Ernest Hemingway's self-constructed hyper-masculanism, to Norman Mailer's failed attempts to recreate the now-extinct modernist macho writer in the post-war period.  Glass cites this as a phenomenon that is now passed, particular in our era where all the major publishers have been absorbed into a few mega-corporations more interested in production of profits than culture--as well as the wider marginalization of literature in the larger culture in general (though given how, say, David Foster Wallace functioned as a literary celebrity in the 21st century, I'm not sure that pessimism is entirely justified).

I need to read one Modernist study a day from now till the end of September to finish my entire Special Topic list, in time to then spend all of October focusing solely upon composing my comps portfolio (I have a firm defense date at last: November 18th!  Send prayers and/or good vibes my way, please!)

Literary Modernism, ed. Irving Howe.

This early 1967 anthology serves as a sort of historical artifact from when academia was still reeling and coming to terms with the then-recent phenomenon of Modernism.  Intriguingly, Stein, Woolf, and other women are blithely excluded from the discussion, while fascist Ezra Pound had yet to be fully recuperated back into the "canon"--indeed, the various essayists therein appear to still be uncomfortable with the whole idea of a Modernist "Canon," inasmuch as most of them can still recently remember when Joyce, Eliot, and Hemingway were all still alive.  They aren't quite ready to bury the past just yet, even while grappling with the fact that these "Moderns" really are the past now; these are scholars struggling with their own complicity in the canonization process.  Unlike later such anthologies, no attempt is made to account for--or even acknowledge--Postmodernism.  Though necessarily disparate interpretations are corralled into this single volume, an over-arching theme does indeed seem to emerge, one that projects the writers' own anxieties onto the period itself, as period of permanent anxiety, neurosis, sickness--and unresolvable at that, or even needing to be resolvable.  In fact, as Howe himself observes in his intro: "A modernists culture sees doubt as a form of health."  The great Modernist question is away from moral questions to metaphysical ones--away from the view through the window pane and onto the pane (and the pain) itself.  To paraphrase in my own words: it's no longer a question of "what does God want of me" or even "is there a God," but rather, "given there is no apparent God, what on earth do we do now??"  These critics also appear to agree with Dievespeen much later in identifying a self-conscious difficulty as the key defining characteristic of literary Modernism.

Spatial Form in Modern Literature, Joseph Frank.
Influential and oft-cited 3-part 1945 essay that, while never using the term "Modernist" (such would have been an anachronism), nevertheless attempts to account for Modernist literature's radical spatial forms.  In Part I, he outlines by means of the Imagists, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Proust, how Modernist writers corralled together disparate moments and sensations into a single complex emotional/sensual image through their prose and poetry.  In Part II, he evangelizes heavily for Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, making numerous comparisons to Shakespeare and her biggest supporter Eliot, getting into heavy plot summary, and situating her in the context of anti-representational modern art and poetry.  In Part III he posits that so-called (and problematically named) "primitive" art arises in certain civilizations not from any lack of skill or development, but from times of great turmoil, when mankind does not feel in tune with the universe, and there is a need to impose some sort of spatial order upon the chaos.  Such was the Modernist age.

The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova.

Leave it to a Frenchman to write a book about world literature that still centers everything in Paris!  Serious, his basic claim is that it's not till a book's been approved by Paris that it becomes "World" literature.  This 2004 study claims to offer a strategy for inclusiveness extended to the margins that is nonetheless still predicated upon the most Western of ethnocentrism, no matter Casanova's hand-wringing protests to the contrary.  How very French.  Though there is a great chapter on "The Irish Paradigm"--and a reminder to check out Edward Sa'id's "Yeats and Decolonization," wherein Yeats is explicitly compared with Neruda (which I'll need to remember to address in my essay on Yeats and Burgos).

A Survey of Modernist Poetry, Laura Riding and Robert Graves.

Scholarly study first published clear back in 1927, when "Modernist" referred not to a canon, but to the actual contemporary moment!  The over-riding preoccupation of these authors is with Modern poetry's self-conscious "difficulty," lending credence to Dievepeen's 2002 argument that it was this difficulty was what most defined this era.  The authors are constantly concerned with how this poetry can be accessed by a hazy, ill-defined "common reader."  (Many sweeping over-generalizations are made in this text, and with zero citations).  Anticipating Calinescu in the '70s, Riding and Graves identify a distinct aristocratic thread of elitism and classicism (both in the sense of social classes and Greek Classic-esque) that undergirds the ethos of the era.  I suppose it is a mark of how far e.e. cummings' star has fallen, that he is by far the most prominent poet cited in this text, while I have scarcely heard him mentioned in any of the more recent studies I've read so far.  

These two have little patience for the Imagists, denigrating H.D. (comparing her unfavorably with Emily Dickinson) and dismissing Ezra Pound out of hand.  They don't seem to mind TS Eliot and James Joyce, and oddly enough love Gertrude Stein (interesting, since apparently it wouldn't be until the '70s that Stein would be fully recuperated into the canon).  They make an effort to point out the humor in Modernist poetry that even today is often elided and ignored.  They are still very much beholden to Victorian Poetry theory, as shown by their willingness to compare Cummings against Shakespeare (the "Bardolitry" continues), unironically and unproblematically deploying terms like "timeless truth" and "Spiritual Elevation", frame the Romantics as unified and uniformly reactionary (and the Modernists as reactions against the reactions), and cite Poe, Rimbaud, and Mallarme as most obvious antecedents to the Modernists.  Most of the study is dominated by close-readings, revealing how New Criticism had already taken over the study of poetry.  All in all, these two claim to be fond of "modern" poetry, albeit with serious caveats.

Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture, Lawrence Rainey.

1998 study concerning the complex negotiation the various High Modernists had to perform between the pseudo-aristocratic Patronage system of yore with the realities of the contemporary bourgeois capitalist commodity market system, in order to get their works known, respected, and above all else sold.  Details how Ezra Pound scored a straight up patronage in early-20th century England--right up until his patron killed herself, so he took a cue from the Italian Futurists in behaving like a polemical radical to insult the very bourgeois who gleefully applauded him; theorizes that at least part of Pound's attraction to Italian Fascism had to do with Mussolini becoming his new Patron.  Also examines how the famed, expensive "deluxe" first-edition of Joyce's Ulysses was printed privately because 1) that got around U.S. anti-obscenity laws, and 2) it rendered the text a commodity, an investment, like a fine painting, with higher resale value.  Also tracks how TS Eliot got The Waste Land published through a combo of playing different literary magazines off each other, and getting "patronages" disguised as awards, "pensions," and "investments."  Finally concludes with an examination of the post-'60s recuperation of H.D., who fully retreated into aristocratic patronage, to the point that she was virtually unknown until the PC crowd needed a feminist, lesbian poet to disrupt the Modernist "canon."  Rainey interrogates whether H.D. was really as progressive and feminist as her champions make her out to be, and suggests that her patronage continues into the present day with our contemporary version--college textbooks and required readings, sadly the last bastion of where poetry is still preserved and read today.

Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity, Aaron Jaffe.

Jaffe's 2005 study arguably picks up where Rainey's book left off--in fact, its intro references Rainey directly, how Institutions of Modernism is part of the Henry McBride series, and how a facetious amazon.com reviewer posed as the resurrected McBride himself, demanding to know how such a dry, humorless book came to carry his name, and written by a scholar who doesn't even seem to actually enjoy reading novels and poetry.  But it is exactly this trade-off of Modernist celebrity--how the personalities came to stand in for the works themselves--that most fascinates Jaffe.  He opens and closes with mirror images: the famous pic of Marilyn Monroe reading Joyce's Ulysses, and of TS Eliot keeping an autographed pic of Groucho Marx on his desk.  Low-art trades on the High, just as High-art trades on the Low.  Jaffe has an especially intriguing chapter on "Adjectives," how Ezra Pound's well-known Imagist calls for cutting all adjectives (as Hemingway reported), far from being a manner by which to elide the author altogether, was in fact a strategy for preserving the personality of the author all the more permanently into the style itself.  "Poundian," "Shakespearian," "Eliotic," are all terms Jaffe continually returns to interrogate--particularly to explore how Pound was the least Pounding, Shakespeare the least Shakespearian, for they were not derivative of themselves--which is further ironic, given how nakedly derivative they all were.  

Jaffe explores the nature of Modernist collaboration--how it both undermined and reinforced the authority of the "solitary genius."  Jaffe is especially fascinated with how gendered these differing collaborative roles could be--as well as how transgendered the roles often were.  Although Jaffe never once uses the word "kitch," it is clearly deep on his mind (especially in the Calinescu sense), particularly in his discussion on Barnes and Noble gift-mugs in the epilogue.