Fellowshipping vs Friendship

I did some hometeaching earlier this week among a couple of "less-active" folks on my roster.  I put "less-active" in scare quotes there, because it turns out they have been intermittently sitting in on some sacrament meetings elsewhere in the Iowa City/Cedar Rapids area.  One guy on my list prefers the quiet anonymity of personal worship that comes from arriving a couple minutes late to a large ward where no one knows you, to then bounce a couple minutes early before anyone tries to "introduce" themselves.  He even got married recently, to a non-LDS gal who, though she's actually expressed interest in the Church, is hesitant to attend services, because of all the attention she'd surely get from well-meaning people tripping over each other to "fellowship" her.

Another gal I hometeach said something similar--she's been away from the Branch all summer long due to some job commitments as a Social Worker; but though she finally has Sundays free again, she's been hesitant to return to her home-branch, since it would inevitably entail a bunch of unwanted attention from an entire congregation rushing forward to "fellowship" her--ironically to make her feel "welcome."

And I can't say I blame them, either.

This is a tricky balance to strike, because the grand focus of most of our missionary and "reactivation" efforts have been predicated on the assumption that our great stumbling block right now is that we aren't friendly enough, that we have been insufficiently inclusive, that people shaky in the faith don't feel fully "welcome" to our services.  "Every new member needs a friend" declared President Hinckley a few years back, and indeed, it is vitally important that everyone who comes to Church feels like they have a friend there.

But the key word here is friend.  Not "fellowship."  And I have of late increasingly come to conclude that the two are not synonymous.

"Friend" implies a kindred spirit of sorts, someone you feel comfortable around, with whom you can be yourself.  You can let your guard down around your friends.  "Fellowship" however implies a duty, a performance, an act, one that, although it may be entirely well-intentioned, still has a subtle flavor of artificiality about it, as though we were just going through our good-member-check-list in vigorously shaking hands with every bewildered new face that seats itself among us.  These are the sorts of behaviors that cause visitors to instinctively put their guards up, not down--that is, "fellowshipping" does not necessarily lead naturally to friendship at all.

Even if we're not fully conscious of it, we can all tell when someone's being insincere, I've found, when we are saying hi merely because everyone else is too, not necessarily because we're genuinely happy to see them.  Salesmen do the same thing, and the last thing we need in this church is more salesmen.

But even if our fellowshipping efforts are wholly sincere and genuine (as indeed they often are), there is still the fact that large swaths of humanity swarming about your person really only works if the newbie in question is highly-extroverted, and derives energy from being around fellow humans.  The introverted, for whom constant social interaction is a drain, are similarly drained by all these "fellowshippers"--indeed, few things could be better calculated to keep them away.

Again, this is a tricky balance, one with no clean solution: some visitors really do need to know that everyone will help them feel welcome, while others really do need to know that they can just sneak in the back and commune quietly in the solace of their soul.  Some folks we make a space for them by scooting over and giving them a place to seat next to us; others we make a space by literally giving them as much space as possible, allowing them to be able to approach the gospel at their own pace, on their own terms.

I guess all I'm really calling for is for us to cease the one-size-fits-all approach to "fellowshipping," wherein we march up to every fresh face, shake their hands, and ask them a series of invasive personal questions as though we were all on a first date.  Avoiding that means learning to read people, to pick up on their body language, dress, and behavior; if someone looks wide-eyed and uncomfortable, shuffling along unsure of themselves, then in all likelihood what they really do need is a friendly smile and a warm welcome; but if they are keeping their head down, avoiding all eye contact and making every effort to sit down as inconspicuously as possible, then perhaps leave them alone for now, and maybe wait to quietly introduce yourself till after the meeting.

This approach to "fellowshipping" requires much more careful attention, empathy, and respect for boundaries; that is, it requires us to actually think about them, rather than about us.  In other words, it requires us to behave like a friend, not a fellowshipper, which is not the same thing.

"Back in Time..."

Dude, this old guy in a DeLorean just cut me off while I was flying over Hill Valley in a rain storm on my way to see Jaws 19.  Here, I got a pic of him, can anyone read the license plate??

Spilled my PepsiPerfect all over my new smart-coat and sports almanac and everything.  I mean, yes, the former is self-cleaning, but the latter was supposed to celebrate my Cubs' World Series win!  Get a hover board and show some courtesy, you maniac!

On Late-90s Classic Rock

Couple months ago, a friend and I were reminiscing about our teenage years in the late-90s--specifically, how much they sucked.  Yeah, yeah, the American economy was decent(er) and the horrors of 9/11, Iraq, the PATRIOT ACT, and mass shootings galore were still beyond the horizon, and the worst example of Executive abuse we knew of was the President having an affair in the Oval Office; but that was just it, things were too good, we were all too complacent, too cartoonishly cocky and so jaunt-filled with unearned swagger that it never even occurred to us we'd ever have to pay for.

Case in point?  The biggest "rock" band on Earth at the time was Limp Bizkit.  Oh my, remember them?  The middle-school locker-room joke that combined the worst parts of rap and rock into something even dumber?  The corporate-bros that co-opted teenage rebellion for the bullies and the frat boys?  The multi-platinum monstrosity fronted by a sentient date-rape and backed by the musical equivalent of downloading dirty pics on dial-up?

No?  No?  Not ringing any bells?

Thank heaven for small favors.

Because as both my buddy and I remembered it, the sheer omnipresence of the Bizkit at the tale-end of the Clinton administration meant not only there was nothing good on Modern Rock radio, but that they would in all likelihood become the signifier for our era. "Ah man, I don't want Limp Bizkit to represent my High School years!" my friend remembers groaning.  We could see it now: Forest Gump-style nostalgia films about the late-90s featuring "Nookie" in the trailer; Classic Rock radio blasting "Break Things" in between Springsteen and the Who; kids dressed up as Fred Durst for Homecoming week Decade-Days.  These clowns would define our generation till we died.  Things looked pretty bleak.

But today?  I teach 18-year-olds right now, and if they have any memories of late-90s music at all, the worst they remember is, say, Third Eye Blind or Blink-182.  The hipster kids remember the era most fondly for Radiohead.  Nowadays, Bizkit isn't even a historical footnote, a blip on the nostalgic radar; they feature on no retro T-shirts at Urban Outfitters alongside Joy Division and Nirvana; no copies of Chocolate Starfish sit wedged in the backseat of some 16-year-old's first car beside Queen's Greatest Hits and Led Zeppelin IV; there are no "nü-metal" retrospectives on PBS or NPR; no one pines for the "good ol' days" when they still made "real music" like they did back in the late-90s.

And thank goodness! Sweet heavens, even '80s Hair Metal wasn't culturally disowned as completely as the Bizkit has been!  Sometimes folks really do go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public; sometimes our culture's worst mistakes really are mercifully forgotten, and that far quicker than we hope or deserve.  Take heart!

A Spring Break Miracle!

 Sometimes miracles do happen.

It was near midnight, the end of Spring Break.  We had made it out of Puerto Rico, and as far as Chicago, but no further.  There were no other flights going out to Cedar Rapids that night, and the flights next morning were all over-sold.  We hemmed and hawed what to do; do we check onto a bus?  Try and fly red-eye standbys through other airports into Iowa?  But none of those left till the morrow either.  Sleep at the airport again?  Check into a spendy hotel? 

Things were looking grim.  Finally we couldn't put it off anymore, it was getting way too late, and it was time we bite the bullet and face the music: we had to rent a car, pay the exorbitant one-way fee, and drive it till 4am.  There was no way around it.

So we hopped on the Midway Airport Shuttle to the car rental...at the exact same moment as this older gentleman all decked out in Hawkeye gear, along with his teenage son.  Ladies and gentlemen, I have never been so excited to see Iowa colors in my whole life.

We chatted!  Our fellow Hawkeye fan was a retired lawyer living in the Des Moines area.  Turns out he was returning from Spring Break as well, chaperoning his son and some other teenagers down in Cabo.  They, too, arrived in Midway, only to find that only the father had a ticket to Des Moines, while the son (whose name was even Kevin McCallister!) had to be left behind in Chicago! 

Naturally, this didn't sit well with him, so he decided to rent a car back to Iowa, too!  I asked if he'd like to split one, and he readily said of course!  Suddenly this drive looked a lot more feasible.

My gf and I had a brief panic attack when he started asking the rental-place about mid-size sedans, and so we asked if we could maybe drive a different size...so he started asking about full-size sedans!  Once we explained we were students and were thinking of something maybe smaller, he just laughed and waved his hand, saying he would take care of it.  When I calculated that between us, we owed him close to $200 for our half of the rental, he insisted he would accept no more than $150.  "Besides, you're only going to Cedar Rapids, we're driving clear to Des Moines!" he said with a wink.

I drove the first leg, sailing out of Chicago (turns out there's not a lot of traffic at 1 in the morning); I had been nodding off in the airport, but now that we were on the road our conversation roared to life.  While his son and my gf fell asleep in the back, I told him about my graduate studies and Puerto Rican mission service; learning of my Mormonism, he launched into an extended diatribe against his first wife's family of Jehova's Witnesses.  We cracked jokes, traded stories, and sped through Illinois under a full moon.

As we crossed the Mississippi, he insisted on buying us all breakfast, so we stopped at the self-proclaimed "World's Largest Truckstop."  My gf was hilariously delirious as she woke up  in confusion and asked where on earth we were.  "Why, we're at the World's Largest Truckstop!" I crooned, "Can't you tell?" It was at least 10 minutes before she realized she wasn't dreaming the whole thing.

So there we sat, at 3am, eating bacon and eggs in an empty diner, chatting with the waitress, when I slid him the $150 we owed him...only for him to slide me back 100 of it.  "For your wedding!" he said with a smile.  When I warned him that, as a poor grad student, I would take full advantage of his generosity, he just hand-waived again and said if he had known he'd have this much fun driving out of Chicago tonight, he wouldn't have even worried when Southwest over-sold their flight!

He drove the next leg, dropped us off at Cedar Rapid airport, we exchanged addresses, and then I picked up my van (the Gypsy-Cab) and returned to Iowa City.  I need to remember to send him a wedding announcement!

And that's the story of how my gf and I spent a grand total of $50 together to make it from Chicago Midway to Iowa City!  If we had settled on getting a rental just a few minutes earlier or later, we would have been out hundreds of dollars, and what's more, missed out on ton of fun.  These are the moments in life that you can't plan on, that you can't budget for--sometimes the universe syncs up at just the right moment in ways you can never predict, when you least expect it.  It's a great reminder that in our world that is at once so programmed and so chaotic, that so many wonderful things far beyond our control can still work together for our good.

THIS IS HALLOWEEN!!!

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.