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.

Choose Your Form of Frustration

I reached voting age right in the middle of the former Yugoslavia's self-implosion, so that entire, painful conflict still looms large for me, just as a Cold War atmosphere defined my childhood. And in spite of following the bloody mess in depth at the time, these days, it's hard for me to keep straight who did what to whom when and why. I remember seeing, and loving, Cabaret Balkan-- just as much for the film itself as for the fact that I was watching it in a small theater in Paris-- and having a distinct feeling that I was part of "a time," as in "my time," when X particular historical events occurred, and Y particular qualities were often prevalent in people of a certain age.

Since then, my head's been filled with so many political, historical, personal, etc., etc., situations that I sort of lost the thread of that particular narrative. But then last night, I watched Emir Kusturica's Underground, and got so eager to sort things back out in my head that I reached for two books that've been on my shelf for way too long without being read: Ivo Andric's The Bridge on the Drina and Leslie Benson's Yugoslavia: A Concise History. Admittedly, the former will only give me an historical background, via fiction, to what led up to the Balkan conflicts of the late 20th century; the latter, published as it was in 2001, won't get me anywhere near where we stand today. But patience is not my forte, so of course, I just rushed in with what was at hand, polishing off a chapter of the novel before making a leap to pore over the maps in the history book. And since all of this was taking place way past my bedtime, predictably, I didn't get far-- so judgments about it all will have to be made later.

At any rate, that word debauchery was a welcome change from another volume that's been sitting on my shelf for a while, John Macquarrie's Two Worlds Are Ours: An Introduction to Christian Mysticism. As part of TA'ing the same class for a couple of years, I was granted a free copy-- but irresponsibly, I never read it, since it was part of the "for further reading" section of the syllabus, and I had my own interests to pursue and a dissertation looming over my head. But after the Buber episode of last week, I decided to check it out. I'll finish it, but I was annoyed from the second I set eyes on the preface-- not for anything the author had done wrong at that point, but because there was one more dude thanking his patient wife for "preparing the material for the publishers." (1) I just didn't want to hear about one more lady apparently waiting around to type up her husband's manuscripts and do all the drudge work so that he could rest his delicate brain for the thinking of further big thoughts. I have never once read any female scholar thanking her husband for the same services, not because she was being miserly with her gratitude, but because that situation never ensued.

But I'll get off my gender-centered soapbox and talk about the aspects of the work itself that are bothering me: a theologian still being worried about so many "dangers" of potential flubs in doctrine, or of dismissing (probably not consciously) others' practices as unworthy means "of escape from the harsh realities of life into new and exhilarating areas of consciousness." (2) And then, there's the maddening refusal to get my man Nietzsche right when he alleges that the Übermensch "seeks and believes he can attain to domination over the world." (3)

Now, from what I hear, Macquarrie was a good egg, and was all in favor of everyone being able to practice his/her own religion without being condemned for it or being seen as a potential target of conversion. I think my grumbling is, more than anything, evidence of the fact that I should just stop reading theology, since I've imbibed enough for at least a few lifetimes, and can pretty much predict by now who'll make which tired argument, and who'll sprint right out into left field to try and save a tradition at all costs. Maybe I'm saying that I should just stick to good literature and complex civil wars and real-life, unimaginably horrible conflicts. At least with the former, the chances that any action that emerges out of personal frustration might actually make a bit of difference.


(1) John Macquarrie, Two Worlds Are Ours: An Introduction to Christian Mysticism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), viii.

(2) 12. In this case, Macquarrie was partially referring to "the taking of the drug psilocin derived from a mushroom and inducing an expanded consciousness" in "some forms of religion" in Mexico, which he seems to see as illegitimate and insincere, and doesn't take the time to differentiate from a bunch of college kids going goofy on 'shrooms. Say what you will about Carlos Castañeda, but his field studies, and the people with whom he interacted, were hardly out to "escape from the harsh realities of life."

(3) 19.