High-tailin' It

Here's a heads-up to readers: I'm moving this blog over to Wordpress. Yep, in an effort to get out from under the universal thumb of Google and its demands for phone numbers and a stationary existence in order to get into my account, I mastered the art of blog export/import, and you can now find me at http://expositrix.wordpress.com/.

Allow me a moment of childish pugnacity to declare, "Suck on that, Google!" (I'm sure the departure of what amounts to a nano-speck in their realm is beyond their notice, but I felt the need to make some sort of victorious gesture anyway.) See you on the new site-- and of course, let me know if you encounter any problems. (I'll keep this account active for a while, just to direct traffic over to my new home.)

The Problem with Packing

Ah, moving. Such a logistical pain in the ass. I dread the point at which I'll finally be left with a disgusting mixture of plastic baubles, paper clips, stray utilities receipts, and ugly greeting cards of sentimental value-- and instead of having the patience or endurance to sort through all that crap and just throw it away, will toss it all in another cardboard box and drag it along with me to my next abode, only to have it stare reprovingly at me for the next six months while I try to avoid facing up to my inability to eliminate clutter.

Anyway. My departure is still just under a month away, and I don't even have a place set up yet to which to move, but I thought I could try and get a leg up by beginning the book-packing process. It's a lengthy one; although I've gotten better about getting rid of volumes I don't like/won't use/will really never read, the number of moving boxes that ends up getting filled with printed tomes usually winds up totaling more than my age, and I'm teetering over my last couple of years in my thirties. (Yeah, I've done this a lot, and can predict by now the amount of space in the van my reading addiction will involve; among all my relocations spent dragging books along with me was one that entailed a true coast-to-coast move.)

The process starts out as an easy one; for the most part, my library is organized according to a half-logical, half-idiosyncratic system of classification, and certain chunks usually beg to fit neatly into cardboard containers. But then the individual volumes that have been completely overlooked for the last few months or years start calling out for attention-- and suddenly, I'm in a quandary about whether to pack them or set them aside for pre-moving reading. Out of the blue, it suddenly becomes imperative that I dive into The German Ideology, which until now has given me the stink-eye for being neglected, its spine accusing me every time I glimpse it of having no true grasp of Marx, and therefore, of being a failed human being.

I'm proud to say that I resisted its draw, and that it's now stacked inside a carton.

But, having run out of boxes for the night, I'll probably be tempted into setting aside at least a stack of stuff I aspire to read before the new job and new life get underway. Admittedly, there are more harmful snares to be worried about-- and so I'll be thankful that the most I'll probably suffer from this particular one are paper cuts and a wasted hour or two lingering over words I'll eventually have enough time to give my full attention.

On to Better Things

So, my completion of The Wreath didn't really alter my general feelings of apathy to the project-- but what ended up being a more realistic, if not less borderline melodramatic, end to the thing than I'd expected did result in a smidgen more of approval for the novel. (The one thing, though, that still has me laughing? The fact that Kristin's dad rides the same horse throughout the book, which encompasses a span of at least ten years-- and yet the amazing creature never ceases to gallop all over the place and be a generally impressive specimen of broad-chested strength and horsy manliness throughout.)

Source: David Shankbone

But that done, and with a weariness resulting from an only OK pile of finished books put behind me over the last couple of weeks, I decided to move on to something more likely to float my boat-- and George Saunders' CivilWarLand in Bad Decline has so far not disappointed. Given, I've only read the first short story (of the same name as the collection in general). But if the rest of the volume is like that initial offering, I'll continue to be blown away by the guy's ability to hit you hard with a completely masterful, and unexpected, ending-- all after having demonstrated why, if I were to teach again, I'd offer an ethics course using only his works. The man is a brilliant examiner of nuanced motivations, fears, hopes, and sticky dilemmas, without being remotely self-congratulatory about it all. The last few sentences of the opening story, and the actions therein, gave me such a grateful thump of hard-won beauty that my suddenly lumpy throat nearly pushed me to tears. That's all I can say about it without spoiling it for others-- so I'll remain silent. Needless to say, though, I'm truly looking forward to opening up those pages tonight.

A Rant, and Then Back to Reading

OK, kids: let the excuses flow. When traveling for work, it seems that all reading gets set aside; by the time all the meetings and schmoozing and forced smiling have come to a blessed end, my brain is too tired to look at a printed page without feeling disheartened about my temporary lack of ability to engage with it in any meaningful way. And although I did knock out a solid portion of Pascal's Pensées on the plane ride over, the return trip wasn't nearly as fruitful, involving as it did lengthy hang-outs on the tarmac waiting for a storm cell to blow over, then a consequent missing of all available connections home and spending the night trying unsuccessfully to sleep in a chair next to stilled baggage carousels. All those hours of potential reading time went unused; among other things, the hourly drive-by of the floor-waxing Zamboni was just too amusingly/dismayingly absurd to think of dedicating myself to prolonged concentration.

Source: JohnnyMrNinja

And then there's Google and its increasingly ridiculous sign-in protocols. I joined this here blogging site back when it was just a lone little personal publishing endeavor, before the days of being swept up along with so many other things by the G-demon's ever-grasping arms. Its ease of use, as well as my not-quite-satisfaction with Wordpress, meant I stayed on, even if it meant continuing to funnel blocks of big data to a corporation that's into things like making creepily invasive eyewear. And of course, I've done so while refusing to hand over my phone number to this nosy behemoth-- a decision that meant, just because I was traveling (as people do), that blogging was off-limits, as I was unable to sign into my own damn account, with my own damn password and particular e-mail address, the latter of which they could've used to verify my authenticity if they'd allowed that option to function. At any rate, I finally found a "contact us" form, and sent in an irritated message, to no avail. So here I am back home, subjecting everyone to a rant, but finally able to sign into a little blog account that I'm sure every high-powered cyber criminal is so eager to get his/her hands on, since the words that flow from my keyboard are oh-so-world-historically influential.

Anyway. End of missive.

I did finish Autumn Journal, and even though the latter half wasn't as mindblowingly spectacular as the first, I'm still itching to read more of MacNeice. Plus, I'm over halfway through the first volume of the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, The Wreath, and hope to be done with it in the next day or so. Glad I'm more familiar with the thing-- but in the end, it's another historical romance, and I'm quite alright with having rounds two and three spoiled for me, since I probably won't be following up with the rest of the series. I'm hoping the next Nobel-winning author I come across is more inspiring than Undset and Andric (whom I read just before beginning KL).

Looking Up, Literarily Speaking!

In what's become a week of wrapping up less than inspiring reading, I made use of insomnia last night to persevere to the end of The Bridge on the Drina. Unfortunately, I found the thing so bland that I really don't have all that much to say about it, other than the fact that I started rolling my eyes about halfway in, when I began to realize that most chapters would end with a variation on "but the bridge remained the same [in spite of all the changes going on around it]."

This is the only work I've read by Ivo Andric, (1) so I'm really not qualified to make any real pronouncements on his output in general-- but if everything he wrote was more or less like The Bridge, my puzzlement at his being awarded the Nobel Prize is, I think, justifiable. Unfortunately, based on my reading of said novel, I'm not motivated enough to go out and investigate any of his other pieces.

But! As I reported in the last post, literary/poetic enjoyment is again part of my milieu; as I told an advisor many years ago about Walter Benjamin, I think I'm developing a crush on a dead man.(2) In this case, the departed individual is Louis MacNeice. Autumn Journal is so damn good that, instead of wanting to devour it all at once, as I originally wanted to do, I'm drawing it out, to make it last longer. And so, I've been limiting myself, for the last couple of nights, to about three poems, letting all their details sink in. This is a collection I know I'll read more than once, and will probably go over and over, maybe even memorizing a poem or two.

MacNeice, the latest edition to my pantheon of literary boyfriends, courtesy of Altered By the Sea.

Plus, it seems that good poetry has been in the air the last couple of days; yesterday, I somehow landed on an article featuring Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo." I read it again, this poem I'd gone through more times than I could count over the years, and suddenly, that last line-- "You must change your life"-- hit me with an intensity it never had before. It wasn't due to what a good Southern Baptist would call being convicted by the poem's message; rather, given the rest of the piece, it just seems to come out of nowhere. (A fact which was, of course, always obvious, but somehow not in such an intelligent/insightful way.) I'm still puzzling it over; the line fits, somehow-- but how in particular, I just don't know. Brilliant.



(1) No matter what I do, I can't figure out how to get the proper accent over the "c", which I'm apparently only allowed to do with vowels. This bugs me inordinately.


(2) a) Of course, just as would probably be the case with any word-and-thought genius, even as I make my confession of being sweet on brilliant writers, I know very well that any sort of boy-girl pairing with the likes of Benjamin or MacNeice or Derrida or Kafka or Sebald (etc., etc.) would probably be a big messy disaster filled with feelings on my part of intimidation, inadequacy, and general envy of my beau's confident output. For a great investigation of the final item in that sad list, see Kathryn Chetkovich's examination of being a lesser-known writer in a relationship with a literary rock star (i.e., Jonathan Franzen).

      a1) I used to include Kierkegaard in my list, my heart breaking for his conviction that he wasn't worthy of Regine. But then I decided he'd really done the poor girl a bad turn, this gal who'd expended a lot of personal energy and time on a relationship, only to be ditched (at a time and in a culture where such a thing would've raised more than a few eyebrows) because of her tortured significant other's excessive existential self-flagellations. I ended up deciding (and maybe she did, too) that she was better off without a situation that probably involved a lot of puppy-dog eyes and maybe more than one fleeting imagined command on her part to just buck up. N.b.: I still felt stupidly moved when visiting Kierkegaard's grave.

b) Said advisor's unimpressed reaction to my sincere confession, now that I look back on it, may have been an early signal to me that the way in which I approach philosophers and theorists is not of the same genre as that employed by most academics. Although a good logical exposition can sometimes be entertaining, the way in which I understand and truly know things isn't satisfied by the aspiration to objectivity (if scholarship can even be accurately described as such). Trying to fit my literary bent and partiality to said world was entertaining, and a good challenge- but also resulted in a lot of looks from Smart People that ranged from flummoxed to frightened.

A Reward for My Perseverance

Believe it or not, night before last, I bit the proverbial bullet and just pushed through to the end of Paradiso. It became increasingly incomprehensible until finally resuming some sort of cohesive narrativity at the very end, a resolution that didn't leave me feeling any better about the project in general. It seems that poor Lezama Lima was aiming for the creation of a Cuban Ulysses, but fell short along the way.

What I did realize, while wading through the characters' frequent and flowery disquisitions, was that my disappointed adolescent yearning for a group of friends who would spout poetry and get into hefty literary discussions was probably best left unfulfilled. Imagine the mess of an adult that would ensue, were you to hang around all through college with chums who only fed each other's needless verbosity, letting each other's near-pedantic word flow run rampant. Well-- you'd probably get a bunch of people churning out stuff like Paradiso.

But I finished, almost prompting me to declare that miracles still happen. Instead of going that far, though, I will say that I felt as if I'd earned some sort of boon when I opened up Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal last night. I didn't get as far as I would have liked, thanks to a bothersome need for sleep, but it sure was great passing out to the tune of stuff such as this excerpt from "i":

                                            I loved my love with a platform ticket,

                                               A jazz song,

                                            A handbag, a pair of stockings of Paris Sand - 

                                               I loved her long.

                                            I loved her between the lines and against the clock,

                                               Not until death

                                            But till life did us part I loved her with paper money

                                               And with whisky on the breath.*

Sometimes, the universe (and/or its poetic representatives) really delivers.

* Louis MacNeice, "i," in Autumn Journal (London: Faber & Faber, 1939), 5.                                    

                          

More Daunting than Hegel

Yes, I'm still reading Paradiso. I was bound and determined to finish the thing off once and for all this weekend, but it just didn't happen. I attempted to summon up and derive inspiration and willpower from a grad-school feat of yore, when, not reading the syllabus with much attention, I was shocked to discover what I thought to be an assignment of 250 pages of Hegel's Phenomenology for the next class. Looking at said course guide the day before the seminar was to meet, I dropped everything and plowed into the tome, succeeding in completing what I thought had been the assignment. My reading, of course, wasn't very thorough, given its speed-- but about 3/4 of the way in, my brain being bombarded by world spirits and theses and Aufhebungen at early hours of the morning, I suddenly had something like a very brief epiphany, where everything came together in one brilliant, cohesive sphere of wonder-- and then fell apart almost immediately. I'm still unsure whether I was relieved or not when I got to class the next day, red-eyeball-tired, to find out that we'd really been assigned about thirty pages.*

How Paradiso makes me feel. (NARA)

At any rate, to be honest, I was less hopeful of achieving some ephemeral moment of clarity by doing the same thing with Lezama Lima, and more eager to just be done with the thing. No dice. I'm still fifty pages way from the end of this intolerable labyrinth, and at the rate I'm going, I'll be lucky if I finish it by the end of the week. If not, I've got a lengthy plane ride next week, which should help me knock this particular monkey off my back. (And who's to say? Maybe high altitudes and the canned air that comes with traveling at such elevations will add some legitimate trippiness to a text that seems far too self-conscious in its attempt to achieve vaguely hallucinogenic effects.)

Maybe my Hegel-coup is just an event never meant to be repeated. (And without the fear of being stared down by a very otherworldly prof who bore more than a little resemblance to Rasputin, it's understandable that my motivation to undertake such challenges these days is significantly less than it was long ago.) But my guess is that the completion of this present tome will at least merit a brief celebration, coming in a close second, probably, to the elation I felt on finally finishing John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory. That, though, is another story.


* I later took a course that focused the entire semester on just the Phenomenology. It was actually a brilliant class that brought me some real understanding of the work-- but I'm still unwilling to dismiss whatever momentary insight it was that I'd gained a few years before, even if I'm not sure exactly what sort of insight it was.