Thinking about the work

"The work" can be a rather loaded phrase, particularly in the performing arts, where one has to be reminded by teachers to do "the work" in order to do "the art," the two being rather more distinct than in, say, writing. Of course, writing can involve research work separate from the work of commiting new words to paper - in fact, it generally does, these days. It was kind of a disappointment - yet a relief - for me to realize that the erudition of some writers was not as off-the-cuff as it appears on the page, but was the product of focused study.

I mention this because I somehow got it into my head that I'd like to write about Enrico Caruso. Not a fictionalized biography or something involving Caruso as a character, but something more like Flaubert's Parrot, talking around the various meanings and incarnations of Caruso in a variety of ways. To that end, I started reading biographies of the man, and have so far finished about 1.5 of them. It began to be rather difficult to face going over the same events multiple times, though I feel now that writing about it here is clearing the cobwebs and I may jump back in. The biggest difficulty is that while Flaubert's Parrot could reproduce some of the most seductive elements of Flaubert exactly as they appear in the (translated) original, the essence of Caruso to contemporary people - the recorded voice - cannot be transformed into words in English or any other language. I can talk about it, and if I am gifted I can talk about it in a moving and insightful way. But I can't offer, as Flaubert's Parrot could, the essence of the genius of the man. It has certainly had me thinking about how much better such a book could be in an appropriate electronic form. Perhaps the platform to create a saleable version of this book is not yet available, though I suppose there are plenty of ways to give away such a hybrid entity.

I recently finished "Born Standing Up," a book more directly about "the work;" in this case, the work of becoming a star standup comedian (aka Steve Martin). There wasn't much striking or revelatory about this book, which never delves into any serious emotional reality beyond Martin's cold relationship with his father. The one thing that struck me was the way that, particularly early in the book, he described his stage act in a sort of and then... and then... and then... style. For instance, he writes about how he would put a prop rubber hand on the edge of a curtain and then walk away from it, and writes something like: "The audience would think my arm was stretching." There's something delightful yet almost distressingly naive in the way he describes the joke's elements like steps in a magic trick (Martin talks about the connection he sees between highly controlled movement of a magic trick and that of a gag, but I don't think even he detects how similarly he imagines the choreography). And his description of the audience is so blank - they don't think it's silly or corny, they don't think it's hilarious or dull, they just think it is so - his arm is stretching. Very curious way of describing it.

After that I read "Letters to a young activist," by Todd Gitlin. I think Gitlin is drop dead brilliant, and I'm never disappointed by how far he's looked into things or how seriously he takes his ethical responsibilities. Emerging from America's last age of idealism, he is the ultimate realist of the left, debunking every one of the countless poses of the progressive movement without every giving up the cause or resorting, as so many such books do, to tired impossibilities when he begins to discuss next steps. He and I are on exactly the same page. I'm going to read his oeuvre, and have already begun The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. Good title, no?

Toward the less goodies

Continuing the post below...

Nabokov: finished Pnin, and was just plain inspired by it. The prose is intimidatingly masterful. Here's a beautiful sample:

From a smaller boulder than the one upon which Chateau was perched, Pnin gingerly stepped down into the brown and blue water. He noticed he still had his wrist watch - removed it and left it inside one of his rubbers. Slowly swinging his tanned shoulders, Pnin waded forth, the loopy shadows of leaves shivering and slipping down his broad back. He stopped and breaking the glitter and shade around him, moistened his inclined head, rubbed his nape with wet hands, soused in turn each armpit, and then, joining both palms, glided into the water, his dignified breast stroke sending off ripples on either side. Around the natural basin, Pnin swam in state. He swam with a rhythmical splutter - half gurgle, half puff. Rhythmically he opened his legs and widened them out at the knees while flexing and straightening out his arms like a giant frog. After two minutes of this, he waded out and sat on the boulder to dry. Then he put on his cross, his wrist watch, his rubbers, and his bathrobe.

Simple, right? Just an intimating ease. You know, while Nabokov was a famous egotist, I sense in Pnin a deep sympathy for all the rest of us who lack Nabokov's magical facility with English. He is less sympathetic toward those who mock poor Pnin simply because he never quite masters the language. There is tragedy in his inability to communicate in any significant way to the non-Russian-speakers around him his complexities and beauty as a human being.

Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 - here we start to get into the writers I have much less feeling for. I knocked out this short novel to see whether I'd want to read the longer ones, and I'll have to take a pass. I just don't care what happens to people in unreal worlds. I don't see the drama of an anything-can-happen situation. Which isn't to say I didn't see some fun in this novel. But I can't say it's more than fun, and I can't say I'll dedicate the weeks it would take me to plow through one of his longer novels simply for fun. That's not what brings me to the novel reading business. When he begins to be deep or philosophical or metaphysical or whatever, I completely check out. It's hard enough for me to buy into that sort of stuff in a realistic novel (see Humboldt's Gift), but in a fantastic novel you're just trying to build a castle on sand.

I've been attempting to read books from the New York Times' 10-best lists from 2006 and 2007. So far, I've made three efforts, and all have failed. I'm not consciously trying to not like these books, and I certainly give them less of a chance than others might because I'm a slow reader and have to decide early whether I'm going to commit myself to a lengthy novel. One of the three was a book of short stories, and to give it its due, I just don't like short stories. I'll get into why some other time. But here are the novels:

Absurdistan: Read 20 or 30 pages of this, but two things really turned me off.

First, the central character and narrator is obese. He talks about his obesity and his desire for food in cartoonish ways that convey a twin feeling of hilarity and disturbed repulsion. I can understand why the trim author thinks being fat is both hilarious and repulsive. But I cannot imagine a fat person thinking of himself in both these ways at once. BTW, Martin Amis' Money also features a fat person (though at one point it is revealed he weighs in the area of 210 pounds, which may be bizarrely obese to reed-thin Amis but is not really particularly fat), and I was similarly put off by Amis' nauseous dislike of overweight.

Second, the novel features unfunny white rapping and an unfunny "girl from da hood" talking like a "girl from da hood." Oh sigh. The author should consider writing what he knows.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics: I didn't read more than 10 page of what is truly a terribly written book. Here's a sample:

It began with simple sleeplessness. It had been almost a year since I'd found Hannah dead, and I thought I'd managed to erase all traces of that night within myself, much in the way Henry Higgins with his relentless elocution exercises had scrubbed away Eliza's Cockney accent.
I was wrong.

Do you get the impression the author stopped for about 5 seconds to come up with this timeless metaphor? What on earth is it supposed to mean? And the Dunh!Dunh!Dunh! sentence, "I was wrong?" Come on, that's something a 12-year-old would write. (And she did it twice in the handful of pages I read) But maybe I'm wrong. Let me try you on another gem of a metaphor:

And scars didn't necessarily mean one couldn't be, say, more Katharine Hepburn than Captain Queeg when it came to overall outlook and demeanor, a little more Sandra Dee than Scrooge.

Doesn't that parallelism imply that Katharine Hepburn and Sandra Dee are alike in "overall outlook and demeanor?" Am I the only one who has a problem with that? Again, the novel seems to have been written in one sitting.

I remember some gossip when the book came out about how the author, Marisha Pessl, is a devastatingly attractive young woman, and how the publisher was playing this up. As I recall, the stories I read tended to either not pass judgment on the book or praise it. Are people just blind to terrible writing? What the fuck is going on here? I'm baffled and kind of upset that a book written in this way was deemed one of the 10 best in the English language for its publication year in the NYT. That just can't be right.

Oldies are rather goodies

I'm so far having much better luck with dead novelists than I am with active ones. Here's the recent rundown, from deadest to least dead:

Nabokov: Pale Fire was a terrific read. I read Lolita years ago and have occasionally struggled, always unsuccessfully, with Ada for probably a decade. I'd fogotten what pure pleasure Nabokov's easy, confident prose can be, mired as I became in the tiresomely continuous efforts at brilliance in Ada. Pale Fire was authentically funny and ingenious and created a remarkable character in Kinbote. I'm now thoroughly enjoying Pnin, which is even less pretentious.

Bellow: Humboldt's Gift was a combination of a book I thoroughly enjoyed and a book I found a thorough chore. The one was a story of people and relationships (Heliogabulus likee that). The other was thoroughly unconvincing, tedious ruminations on metaphysical BS (Helio no likee). Where the two met, I found myself waiting impatiently for the characters who made fun of anthroposophy to be proved right. But no, the reader is apparently supposed to take this nonsense seriously, even to be moved by it. That's way beyond the powers of my imagination.

That said, Bellow's prose is absolutely wonderful. I had great pleasure (more, in fact) in reading Bellow's essays (in a volume called, I believe, It All Adds Up). Fascinating too, as a writer, to see how many of the minor characters and minor opinions in the novels can be found in the essays as people Bellow met and thoughts he thunk. I knew his novels were very autobiographical in their story lines, but seeing the same oddball people in his essay "reality" and his novel fantasy gave me a compelling sense of occupying the mind of the man.

Julian Barnes: Flaubert's Parrot was fun and inspired me, as I'm sure it did many, to read more Flaubert. I've started on the letters, which some rightly call his masterpiece. I also started Salammbo, but its lack of realistic characters put it a bit beyond my attention span. As for FP, I thought the "novel" element was forced in, as if JB himself was embarassed by his obsessive interest in Flaubert and had to put it on a fictional character. Otherwise, a quick and enjoyable read.

Won't someone stop them?

I mean the people who say "troublesome" for "troubling." This is a very serious gaffe, given how immoral it usually is to dismiss something truly troubling as merely troublesome. What to the rest of us is troubling in Iraq is troublesome to the Bush administration, for instance. If they said it is troublesome, they'd mean it. But time and again I hear perfectly well-meaning people who mean "troubling" pick the wrong word. Please stop these people.

I also beg you to stop the people who say "unchartered territory" for "uncharted territory." I was actually kind of shocked to hear such a boneheaded malapropism in an oil company goodwill ad (Exxon?). How many millions is it giving to the advertising firm that turns out this bizarrely wrong copy? But you hear this one all the time.

I bring these up in part because I usually find lots of other grammar police whining about other such errors when I google them, but these two have hardly been touched. The first one, as I said, is more serious because it is actually usually unethical to make this mistake.

Please stop them.

A couple more

Adam Bede and Ethan Frome.

I'll start with Ethan Frome, which is the first thing I've read by Edith Wharton. This was certainly worth the quick read for the intensity of the late middle section, which read very much like an excellent modern drama. A wonderful, quick leap into this intense conflict of feelings which had much of the discomfiting thrill of the real experience. Things start to fall apart in the unbelievable suicide-pact moment. If they're willing to die for one another, then why not run away regardless of their lack of money, either living on love or starving, but in either case extending their time together? The "gotcha," twist ending felt utterly cheap and forced, unworthy of the moment-by-moment intensity of the earlier section. Who are these people? How did they become what they are? I'm not happy as a reader to have to figure this out myself.

Also, by the way, I was almost scared off the book by its wholly unnecessary and ineffective framing, which is something along the lines of, a couple of people told me a couple of things and I intuited the rest. Fascinating.

I enjoyed Adam Bede a good deal. It is certainly a younger brother to Middlemarch, lacking the scope and breadth in its characters, storylines and ethics. But there were many flashes of genius; I actually liked Adam's character the most, because though he was so nearly idealized he was ultimately convincingly humanized by his fits of anger. Dolly the Methodist, on the other hand, was just over the top with her little miss perfect routine. She was also too prim to possibly be any fun, in the sack or elsewhere, and I admit I like the heroine to be someone I myself might find attractive. All that said, and despite my allergy to things religious, I cried at the scene in which Dolly offers Hetty the comfort of Christ while the lost girl is waiting to be hanged. But then I also cried when Keanu Reeves made those bullets float. Something about a miracle, I suppose.

Not that I'm looking to defend myself, but I came upon an essay (collected in 1963) on Joyce by the English critic Cyril Connolly, who's a personal favorite of mine, and I noted that he and I made some of the same arguments about Ulysses. He's more willing to praise the book, but partly as a "young man's novel." Indeed, I would have found much in the book more titillating, shocking and revelatory when I was 20 than I do now. But here's Connolly:

"I feel that so much of Finnegans Wake and Ulysses, even when the obscurity has been penetrated, is fundamentally uninteresting that there must be some failure of conception or execution or both."

Connolly joins other critics in blaming Joyce's "frozen in 1906" viewpoint for these failures.

"I am trying to suggest that he fed his queen bee of a mind with inferior jelly and that from such subject matter it could not produce the sublime or even the comic effects which were intended. He asks too much of his ideal reader. This is perhaps an English heresy and may account for the way we lag behind America in our appreciation of Joyce (or is it our lack of subsidized theses?); and perhaps I am the only person to find the plans and keys and clues and commentaries on Joyce's books more exhilarating than the originals. Is there an immaturity in his mind and humor or a blind spot in mine?"

A bit more on Modernism

One observation that I ruminated over several times whilst plodding my way through Ulysses is that the Modernist idea has had a heck of a lot more success in visual art than in literature. The supreme importance of novelty and the creative power of the observer over the work of art itself seemed to utterly win the field in the visual arts, while in literature they were nothing more than a fad lasting perhaps 30 or 40 years. Not that there aren't new and different styles, occasionally, in literature, but they are never radical departures, and their newness per se is not counted as a major point in their favor.

I developed a bit of a theory about this, which in part takes what I'm here calling Modernism seriously and partly treats it as a hoodwinking of a class of willing dupes. I don't think I have to commit to either interpretation to say that people are clearly more willing to subject themselves to art that they don't enjoy but wish to praise if the experience is short rather than long. Even a long viewing of a piece of visual art (excluding films) is unlikely to go beyond, say, half an hour. And that half hour would certainly not be a period of continual attention to the piece. A book, though, even a novella, is likely to take several hours. A "difficult" book, a Modernist experiment, is likely to take much, much longer. So I think it's much more difficult to fool ourselves about Modernist literature. One can very easily look briefly at all sorts of visual garbage and believe each piece is inspiring deep thoughts. Or, to put a friendlier light on it, it is easy to "look away," literally or not, from a visual artwork, and form an intriguing web of personal associations. The same is not true of a book.

It is mechanically, physically awkward to stop and linger over every word or every sentence.
It can also be exhausting, and that is the core issue with something like Ulysses, in which, for a man of my age and weight, so many of the references are almost meaningless. To try to get out of this work what appears to have gone into it is hopelessly wearying.

And Ulysses brings up another good point. It is relatively easy for a visual artwork to be a unitary object, because it is delimited in space. Even if it fails to meet any traditional standards of symmetry, it clearly has a physical boundary. Even if it is a pastiche of seemingly unrelated parts, they ultimately all fit into a whole. But for a novel to attack structure and symmetry is a different matter. Over the course of the maybe two dozen hours I spent reading Ulysses, I confronted a discontinuous patchwork which never satisfyingly added up to anything. That in theory it might, that parsing it for several months or years would show the thematic resonances etc., is no recompense for this unhappy experience.

One more point I wanted to make along these lines: It's interesting to think of music as an intermediary point between literature and visual art in terms of the success of Modernist efforts. Unlike Modernist literature, Modernist music is still appreciated with pleasure outside the academy, though not by many. The experience of a piece of music generally takes longer than one with a piece of visual art, but not nearly as long as one with literature. It is easier to "skim" music than literature - nonsense music just drifts away into the ether at its own pace, while nonsense words can quickly become a discouraging morrass.

Another way to look at these things is economically. A work of visual art is generally experienced as one of many at a gallery or a museum. The viewer does not expect any one work to be "worth the price of admission." A piece of music is also generally not presented alone, but the dozen or fewer pieces in a concert are often less than the number of works one would see in a gallery or museum. The pieces are expected to "pay off" a bit more - hence the tendency to pad Modernist music with more familiar and readily likeable fare. Finally, a novel has to stand on its own and has to be entirely worth its cover value. If the reader is disappointed, he can avoid Modernist novels altogether by not buying them.

I note the similarity of the time and cost arguments. Just as devoting less money to any one piece of art makes the appreciator more willing to be disappointed, devoting less time to any one piece of art has the same effect.

The greatest novel ever!

Not!
That would be, I suppose, the perfect example of the kind of apparently unsophisticated reaction I've heard complained of lately by those who say the book reviews that appear online should at best be called "book reviews" - in quotes - particularly in the current case, when I am referring to that holy of holies, Ulysses.

The offended ones say that the reactions we read online have none of the quality or significance of those we might read in the more admired journals of opinion because they don't emerge from deep knowledge of literature. There are too many things wrong with this argument for me to keep from vomiting a little, but what most deeply concerns me is that it rules out the possibility that the judgment of the cogniscenti is completely wrong. To examine the sources or even to question the ethical bona fides of Ulysses is perfectly acceptible, but to dislike it is, depending on who you ask, infantile or irrelevant.

I refuse, based on the combination of my self-respect and my sheepskins, to consider my reaction to any work of art infantile. As to whether liking or not liking a work of art is relevant or not to the discussion, time has been and will continue to be unkind to art that is highly respected by society in general but unpleasant in actual personal experience. But I don't want to get deep into this argument at the moment. I'll just deliver my infantile, irrelevant take on Ulysses.

The connection to the Odyssey is so loose as to be completely impossible of correct interpretation without Joyce's key. Therefore it fails to be a meaningful element of this work. I think descriptions of the book that say it is "based on the Odyssey" or that it parallels that work were written by people who have not read one or the other or both.

The parade of 18 different narrative styles comes off as artificial and juvenile. Rather unsurprisingly, the newness of new forms has in itself no zest 80 years later. Some of the forms, particularly that of the second-to-last section, are antithetical to pleasant reading and seem like nothing less than an insult to the reader, a joke at his expense. Who is the reader out there that gets any kind of pleasure from reading a page of legal boilerplate simply becuase it was perhaps oh so tres moderne 80 years ago to think of putting that in a novel?

Joyce is the only ideal reader for this work. I think it is reasonable to write a literary work completely accessible only to those of great learning. But that's not what Joyce did. He wrote a work completely accessible only to someone of his exact, peculiar learning. Simply everything Joyce knows or has looked up. This creates a work that no one can enjoy as much as Joyce, and in that I think it's a failure. It reminds me of Pound's Cantos. Once you learn all the allusions and such, the Cantos do something kind of neat, but to feel those allusions in anything like their real significance you have to read all the books Pound read - which is not some perfect compendium of world literature, but his own, peculiar, eccentric selection from it. With only one life to live, I can't dedicate my reading to reproducing Pounds' just so I can take as much pleasure from the Cantos as he did. The same goes for Joyce.

I barely skimmed the 600-page Notes for Joyce as I was reading Ulysses, because I found that simply knowing the bare facts of any one reference didn't make the reading come to life or become more meaningful. Perhaps reading all the original sources Joyce read would do this. But frankly, I was not inspired to care. Ultimately, going to a reference to understand the references is the same as having someone explain a joke (particularly in the cases where Joyce is being "humorous," but really in every case where I'm supposed to be struck with any kind of emotion or resonance by a reference I don't know).

Along the same lines, I found nothing the slightest bit funny in Ulysses, and I love to laugh. I loooooooooooooove to laugh. I'm ready to laugh. I get humor. And Ulysses is not funny. I suppose I could tell at times that things were supposed to be funny, sometimes in a just plain sad punning way, sometimes in a Shakespearian kind of way, sometimes in a satirical way. But it wasn't, any more than puns, Shakespeare or satire is funny. People who genuinely think these things are funny have no sense of humor. But I think most people who say Ulysses is funny are just ridiculous people who are full of themselves. I've heard the math majors laugh at math jokes. I know all about this kind of insider "humor." It is, pure and simple, a celebration of the fact that you know something other people don't and you're therefore better than them. I like to compare people calling this funny to people laughing out loud at musical "jokes" like the Surprise Symphony. Now come on. Be serious. That shit is not funny. And if it's witty, I apparently do not like wit.

Were there a couple of moments I genuinely enjoyed? Sure. I won't go so far as to say it was a total wash. But if I hadn't felt obligated by society (Society!) to read the fucking thing, I would have a abandoned ship a hundred times.

I would call this a work of almost purely historical interest. I would not recommend it to anyone. But such a recommendation would have been meaningless to me, and all others who feel similarly obligated, so take it for what you will.

Readings

In the absence of television, I've been on a pretty good reading tear over the last year, including all the major Hardy novels, Eliot's Silas Marner and Middlemarch, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, James' The Golden Bowl, Bellow's Herzog, Coetzee's Disgrace and Banville's The Sea. I read most of James' The Bostonians but abandoned it, read a bit of Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and dumped it, read a couple of chapters of Ohara's Appointment in Samara and hit the eject.

A winner:
I'd say Middlemarch is the greatest novel I've ever read. What amazed me most was the insight into the varieties of emotion and conscience, particularly coming from a Victorian woman. How, in the buttoned-up, sewn-up Victorian world, did she develop this knowledge? It's almost miraculous, and it's exhilirating and inspiring (as a writer) to read. And I totally buy the wisdom of the book, which I suppose could strike some readers as an unwelcome intrusion by the author. Her aphoristic moments work because they're true but not truisms.

A loser:
The Golden Bowl. I finally did it, I plucked up my courage and read an entire James novel - and the hardest one, at that. For me it was an experience utterly devoid of pleasure or purpose. The contrast with Eliot is so dramatic. Eliot's characters are so true, while James' characters are pure fantasy. What is the point of the endless psychological portraits of psyches whose terrestrial counterparts have never and will never exist? James is certainly tireless in going over and over and over the innermost thoughts of his characters, but it just beats me over the head, because these characters, with their idealisms and elaborate moralizing schemes, are pure figments of James' imagination. Just one more point on this, and then I go: where's the sex? If these are the innermost thoughts of men and women in love, why does no one ever want to fuck anyone else? If the era James was writing in forced this on him (and there is much more visceral passion in Hardy, say, than in James), that doesn't excuse him for being boring.

Random thoughts:

Anna Karenina: Meh. I don't see what's so fascinating about Anna. Her lover's an okay character, but I never quite believe the mix of adoring commitment to Anna, which costs him so much, and a self-interested streak. I don't see him caring quite so much for her and for himself at the same time. I found the regular breaks for set pieces like the horse race or working in the field or hunting entertaining to a degree, but also arbirtary, perhaps an artifact of serial publication. I didn't like the way they broke up the flow of the story. Finally, the whole conversion sequence was just a pure slog for a happy unbeliever like myself. I am so many worlds away from the folks who were actually convinced by Tolstoy's "logic" and went to live with him on his commune that I felt like an intruder as I read those last chapters, like I do when I'm paid to sing in church.

Silas Marner: Almost bizarrely bad compared to Middlemarch. File under What Was She Thinking.

Herzog: I'd read the first bits years ago and enjoyed them and always wanted to finish the novel. When I did, I found it kind of a bore. A lot of it has gone out of my head, but I remember feeling that Herzog himself never quite engaged me, that I never cared one way or the other.

Disgrace: Why would anyone do this to himself on purpose? I had no answer, yet I kept reading. A reader Waiting for Godot.

The Sea: I look forward to reading more Banville. The novel had many moments of real poetry, while the plot was pleasantly heartfelt.

The Bostonians was full of telegraphed plot twists (see Golden Bowl! Oh my lord, I forgot that horrible element) and utterly unbearable in its snide attitude toward feminism. It would take a tone deaf reader to miss James' derisive treatment of this set of beliefs and to say he was simply lampooning a funny set of people or was hard on both sides. Not that people with PhDs and professor's salaries haven't done it. Couldn't make it through. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha was a stunt and I could only take 10 minutes of it. Appointment in Samara left this awful taste in my mouth of juvenile American literary machismo that has made me slightly nauseous at the sight of any American authors 1870-1970.

I don't have anything intelligent to say about Hardy. I love to read him. He's a wonderful story teller with generally excellent pacing. The poetic, living charge he gives to landscape had me enjoying an aspect of literary scene painting I've never had any taste for in the past. I love his philosophical uncertainty, his fearfulness and the transluscent veil of hope he throws over it. While the plots can get operatic, some people are operatic - I believe his characters and care about them. I'm fascinated by the scenes of rural life, which unlike in Anna Karenina are integral to the characters and the stories.

Turn-off

Check out an alternative me at my new blog, Albuquirk.

I didn't forget the limerick this time.

My life is in a bit of not-unhappy tumult at the moment, so a lot of my study-focus is shot to hell. But I am troubled about this whole endeavor. I've been trying, really trying, to "get into it." And failing, really failing. I could imagine my own work being slightly interesting, and I've been having an entertaining time with a lot of the reading, but as I roam the litcrit blogs, trying to see whether I'd fit in, I see entry after entry be people who seem to genuinely care and even get excited about things that I could care less about. It just all seems like such a chore in service of nothing.

I can't seem to silence the voice that reprimands me for not doing what I really want to do, which is to be a creative artist. I'm sort of pussy-footing around it and half-promising myself to do it one day, to find a way one day. But I'm no closer than I was a year ago, or two years, or five years ago. It's not like I'm working my way toward it. If anything, I've been erecting higher barriers.

It's beginning to feel like I'm living one of two possible lives. This one is rich with love and warmth, sane and happy. It's one I had never imagined, one that in many ways is more than I had imagined. But my self, my inner life, can feel stunted or shunted aside. The other life would be lonely, crazy and painful. It's the one I thought I'd lead. It would be solipsistic and self-consuming, but I'd also get to experience those weird highs of creation and discovery.

I suppose most people would say it's my romantic delusion that these two worlds are exclusive of one another. They would think I'm saying I have to suffer to make art. I don't say that at all. I say rather that there are only so many hours in the day, and being happy takes time, and making art takes time. And unless I can make it my job to make art, the handful of waking hours I have outside my office will never be enough to split both ways. I have just enough time, barely enough time, not enought time, to feel like a husband and a father. Taking any of that away seems stupid.

But I loathe, with all my heart I loathe the idea of being 40 or 50 or 60 and coming up with the fiftieth stupid plan to set some time aside for my art. I will have failed to be what I can, to do what I can, to experience what I can. I will have missed my chance to fully live. I am full of a raging jealousy of creative people, of novelists and musicians and movie makers.

There once was a fellow from 'querque
Whose poetic ambitions were murque
He wanted his words
Light as green hummingbirds
Instead they were light as the turque

Sing, sing blog-O!

Okay, sorry about the unreadable "blog entries" that are so un-blogworthy. By the way, that could totally be a P.G. Wodehouse name, couldn't it? Rupert Blogworthy. Horatio Simpkin-Blogworthy, known about the club as Blotto. Horatio "Bloggo" Blogworthy. Poor Bloggo. A truly superb and giving blighter, one of the best, but bound more tightly than most to fortune's wheel.

a perlocution is what an utterance does

I never quite got into the kinds of illocutionary force I think Twain's n-word might be taken to have. The thing to do is, I imagine, to categorize the perlocutionary effects - the impacts the text has - and work back from them to theorize those illocutionary forces. For instance, some possible perlocutions would be:

• a generalized, non-specific, perhaps physical feeling of disgust
• a feeling of disgust aimed at the fictional speaker
• a feeling of disgust aimed at the "author of Huckleberry Finn"
• a feeling of disgust aimed at "Mark Twain"
• a feeling of disgust aimed at the vocalizer (if the book is read aloud)
• a feeling of disgust aimed at the teacher
• a feeling of disgust aimed at the school
• a feeling of disgust aimed at the American educational system in general
• a feeling of disgust aimed at white America
• a feeling of disgust aimed at the white America of some specific era
• any of the above, with disgust replaced with disappointment, delight, confusion, etc.
• a feeling of self-loathing
• and skipping over many other possible types of disgust...
• shame of any number of kinds
• a feeling of superiority of any number of kinds
• true indifference (which is perhaps not a perlocution at all, but is in any case rare)
• a sense of willful indifference
• shock
• curiosity
• anger
• a conscious argument regarding the moral meaning of the word's appearance
• a vocalized response, such as saying "I will not read another word of this!"
• a physical response, such as leaving the room or closing the book or leafing through the book

This is clearly wholly incomplete and perhaps skewed in one direction or another. But they all rather beg the question, What "made" the reader or hearer do this? The short answer is, the words. But this brings us to the heart of speech act theory's investigations - how do words do things? I would suggest the average unsophisticated reader (I won't bother at the moment to make claims for the sophisticated ones) is only capable of being impacted so powerfully because he feels he is in a lively, living conversation with somebody when he is reading. This somebody is surely not the actual historical person Samuel Clemens, but he may be part of it, as may his public persona, as may a more non-specific "author of Huck Finn," as may the teacher who assigned the book, the school that hired the teacher, the "system" that sets the school's rules, and so on and so on. The "author," whatever that is, clearly lives in the emotional life of the reader as he reads.

Once we have established that the reader is, or believes himself to be, in a conversation, we can look more systematically at the (already systematized) varieties of illocution and find out just what the reader might think the writer is trying to do (to him(?)).

This is not to attempt to undermine the logic of "the death of the author," or of historicist reconstructions of the author. I follow and generally approve of these arguments. It is an attempt instead to get at the reader's powerful, perhaps indelible sense of an author. Why do people idolize or abhor authors? When they idolize, abhor or have some more nuanced opinion, who or what is it that they have this opinion of?

illocutionary force is the way utterances do things

I've done a lot more reading since I last appeared. I would say my opinion of theory is becoming more nuanced. I am still struck by how some things that seem quite interesting and readable are considered on par with things that seem utterly awful and pointlessly convoluted. But I have also come to see that I am far from alone in my concerns, and am not joined in them only by the Neanderthals and paleoconservatives, if that's not redundant. I am beginning to feel that it might be possible to both detest some theory and be engaged seriously and vigorously with some other theory - that there may after all be a baby somewhere in this bathwater.

As I'm thinking about trying to get into a good school, I've been thinking about paper ideas as I've been reading. For those of you who might be able to follow this, my broad notion is to look at how one can apply speech act theory to fiction in such a way as to account for the undying popularity of the conviction that the author is not in fact dead - for the fact that many people develop strong affections or even stronger aversions for authors as much as, or more than, for their books. The idea is to look at how your average, unsophisticated reader might take a text to be a series of utterances by the author, utterances each with its own particular illocutionary force and therefore a personal act by the author. This illocutionary force would usually be indirect, I should think, and in blander sections might amount simply to, "I, the author of this text, assert that character A says: "You're the potato!" with, of course, "You're the potato!" being the printed text.

But I was thinking of the rather more interesting example of the use of the word "nigger" in Huckleberry Finn. Reams have been written about this from a moralizing perspective, but as far as I have seen so far, no one has "theorized" what exactly goes on when an unsophisicated reader reads one of the 203 passages with this word in it. I think few would dispute that it is something personal, and I would like to explore the ways in which it is experienced as a personal confrontation with Mark Twain or with "the author of Huckleberry Finn" or whatever.

Add to the mix, by the way, that most people in America have experienced this book as spoken language - given that it is generally read aloud in class. Indeed, it may be the most common experience of read-aloud literature in this country. I don't know if this is a welcome complication or not, given that, as I said, I'm trying to theorize the reader's experience, but as I say you must add it to the mix. When it is read aloud, is it experienced as the words and illocutionary acts of "the author," or of "the vocalizer," or as something else entirely?

By the way, speaking of the baby in the bathwater, I read Huckleberry Finn for the first time since childhood after reading a critical account of it, and was struck by two things. One, the common conviction that the critics missed the point, or perhaps rather that one cannot forget that the criticism of a text, however detailed or incisive, cannot in any way stand in for the text. The other, and this I should say became a developing feeling afterward as I read more criticism, was that while some were clearly off the mark, many on both sides had very good points, and being intellectually honest required admitting to that. I decided I in no way envy those who try to decide whether to teach this book to children, and left it at that.

pix and panz!

Pick: the 2005 Pride & Prejudice, with Keira Knightley, Donald Sutherland, Brenda Blethyn, Matthew Macfadyen and Judi Dench.
I was in the mood for this kind of romantic thing, and it paid off, though not exactly in the way I expected. The piece was shot very artfully, capturing somewhat the capital R Romantic sense of sublimity. Macfayden as Mr. Darcy was ugly-handsome and utterly convincing as a man whose shyness makes him appear rude. Knightley I thought was actually quite good and committed to her character, which was made more impressive my the DVD-add-on interview that showed her to be quite unlike her character, particularly in the sense of being clearly painted with her own contemporaneity. And this was one of the strongest points of the film - that it was relatively short on anachronistic speech and manners (though there were a couple of moments). Other than the fact that we have all had it up to here with Dench and her fright-wig queen/member of nobility/M, nothing turned me off about this film. It made me happy and wistful.

Pan: the 2005 Syriana, with George Clooney, Christopher Plummer, Chris Cooper, Matt Damon, Amanda Peet, others.
Truly gawdawful. Embarrassing. One of the worst movies I've ever seen, and I've seen Booty Call. I don't know why we didn't hear more about the fact that this is not just an apologia for terrorism, but a pretty clear if juvenile support of terrorism. There seem to be no limits to oversimplification for this intended-to-be-smart movie. The thing is so heavy with conspiracy theories that the filmmakers decided a plot would be an extravagance. Rather than any real attempt at the characterization of people, we have unashamed puppet theatrics, with everyone playing symbolic roles a-la Pilgrim's Progress.
Some absolutely shameful attempts at developing character:
*Clooney's CIA character eats with his son, who says he lies for a living (we never see or hear about the son again, so we are left to wonder why he put half a thing of Thai hot sauce on his noodles and then walked out without even trying them or asking for a box)
*Token black man's father shows up drunk on his son's doorstep. He eyes his son meaningfully. He shows up on the doorstep again. He throws his son the finger. His son picks him up off the floor of the bar. More meaningful eye contact. (And that's it. Apparently drunk dad is the moral voice of an oppressed race, offended by son's unprincipled behavior.)
*Damon's son is electrocuted by faulty lights in a Saudi Prince's pool. This is apparently a plot device that explains his being radicalized into the good kind of radical, who dreams impossible dreams. At the end of the movie, he returns home to wife and other child, apparently unperturbed. (There is "more" to this, but one is largely left wondering what the fuck any of Damon's backstory has to do with him or the plot, though the wiser ones among (viz. my wife) stop hoping that any of this will make dramatic sense pretty early in the film.)
And that is the most sophisticated character development in the film. Imagine the less sophisticated stuff.
Talk about giving the Hollywood liberal a bad name. I have not seen Good Night and Good Luck, but if Clooney could make this one and critics could praise it, I can't imagine GNGL is anything but gagworthy.
Now you must understand, I am liberal. Really, really liberal. I'm quite sure oil companies and other richies exert tremendous power over our administration and therefore over the intelligence agencies and the military. I'm not saying there aren't any conspiracies. I'm saying that if you're not going to utterly demean the possibility that there are conspiracies, you simply must try harder than this.
And about the terrorism thing... yes, the movie does show the terrorists being brainwashed by a guy playing soccer with them and telling them they're all brothers, but the overall logic of the film, in so far as there is any, appears to prove that the suicide bomber's final act is rather noble. They destroy a new oil facility, run by the totally evil (I'm not making this name up) Connex-Killen (italics mine, although probably an unnecessary Mad Magazinish gesture). C-K is evil, the lawyers employed by C-K are corrupted by evil, the intelligence folks who help out C-K are evil, the military that is in cahoots with the intelligence folks is evil. Damon and Clooney try to do good but are thwarted by the greater powers that be. Only our precious terrorists really manage to do a positive good.
One other amusing thing: according to these versions of the conspiracy theories, the heads of the Arab oil countries are the dupes of the U.S.-centered multinationals and the U.S. government. And when I say dupes, I mean they are DUMB. Damon suggests to the Saudi prince that instead of shipping oil around the Arabian peninsula he pipe it across Iran (again, not kidding). The Saudi prince reacts not only by apparently thinking this is a fantastic idea but, more significantly, acting like he's never thought of this before. Note to movie makers: if your plot turns at all on someone coming up with a brilliant idea, realize that it's not okay for that idea to be incredibly obvious/stupid.

Obscene pickles

In one of those odd coincidences, I was reminded by something I read last night that nihilism and aestheticism - the topics, in a way, of my last post - have often walked hand in hand. The obvious example is Matthew Arnold, who as we know saw art as the last best hope of those who had lost their faith in everything else. I have called myself an aesthete in the past based on similar reasoning, which I guess you can also find in Wallace Stevens.

I don't like to write these awfully lengthy posts, and I won't add another tonight. But there are definitely more points I'd like to make about theory. In particular, I'd like to ask myself how exactly one goes about writing criticism in the absence of theory. Looking back on my undergrad years, I remember I was actually quite troubled by questions about what's worth committing to paper. But more on that later.

White Lies

To continue this argument I'm having with myself about theory, I should note that I have little to argue with in the substance of most theory. I agree that there is a basic disconnect between words and the things they signify, and this lack of connection is a sort of space that allows complexity - a complexity of influences and commitments - into any question of meaning. I agree, in fact, that this complexity need have no real end or limit. As a result, I agree, in principle, that to say anything about a piece of literature is to attach oneself to what are probably literally numberless debatable propositions. I agree that most of the theory-naive are aware, if they are aware at all, of a tiny number of these propositions. I agree that the theory-wise are aware of quite a few, but that this few is a tiny proportion (approaching zero) of the whole. I agree therefore that saying things about a piece of literature is fraught with problems. I agree that looking into literature this way is a bit unnerving, is a bit of a stare into the abyss.

But (and this is the big but), I don't valorize that staring. Many theorists seem to say that it is either a mark of weak character to be so unnerved, or a mark of weak character to turn away from what is unnerving. I cannot agree that there is any kind of general ethical principle here. I turn away from dozens of unnerving, disgusting, repellent things every day and feel no shame. This includes - and this is perhaps the key point and the inspiration of the title of this blog - thoughts of my own that are unnerving, disgusting or repellent. I do this by telling myself white lies.

We all have dark thoughts, and the darkest ones are often the least resolvable. Take mortality, for instance. It is disagreeable at this moment that I will die, and it will be disagreeable in the next moment and for all the remaining moments of my life - if I let it be so. Instead, I tell myself, without thinking about it overmuch, a useful white lie - that death is certainly a long way off, that I will likely do things to redeem my existence before then, that I will end up dying in a pleasant, not overly-drawn-out way.

My favorite personal white lie is about nihilism. When I "really think about it," as I did during an unhappy period in college, my total lack of metaphysical commitments makes this a perfectly cold and meaningless universe, all of whose somethings might just as well be nothings. Life, for all its apparent tangibility, is a dream - la vida es sueno. Now this is a rather terrible thought. In my heart of hearts I believe it to be so, and I am utterly committed to rationalism and materialism and do not have the option of escape to some sort of theistic teat. So instead of facing this black view of existence, I don't think about it. I act - my brain runs - as if it weren't so. In other words, I tell myself white lies, things like "love is eternal," or "beauty is precious." I, of course, am aware that I am lying, so I am not troubled by a bad conscience for truly committing myself to ideas I know to be false.

Which brings up the morality of lying per se. I say that it is because I am lying that I am not troubled by a bad conscience, which may seem a curious perversion of the standard view. Given what I have said are my total lack of metaphysical commitments, I could just say I am an amoral creature who acts in such a way as to live as happy a life as I can (including behavior that serves no purpose other than to soothe a conscience I believe to be a psychological remnant of the Superego). However, I will, for the sake of those who might differ, talk a bit about the white lie in general. I would claim that there are clearly relationships in which white lies are not acceptable. For instance, a government should not tell its citizens any white lies. But in most relationships, white lies are one of the bases of the very serenity and happy fellow-feeling that ethics was invented to maintain. They must of course be used very sparingly, because they are often expressions of hierarchical power, which of course will occasionally be abused. But surely, if there is one form of the white lie that is a victimless crime, that can never be accused of abuse, it is the white lie we tell ourselves.

Now, I may have left some strings hanging out there, but let me leap ahead to the question of whether, when I lie to myself about literature, I am lying to my readers and therefore perpetuating in bad faith all those hidden levers of power in my interpretation that will abuse homosexuals, women, Spaniards or semioticians. There are two issues here, I think. First, if I am lying, is anyone being fooled? And, second, if I am fooling people, does my paper in the Annals of P.G. Wodehouse Research having any more of an effect than that rather over-flapped butterfly wing we hear so much about?

To the first question, whether I am fooling people, I will note that my biases would shock nobody of reasonable intelligence. Perhaps I should write at the top of my articles, THIS AUTHOR, A WHITE ATHEIST JEW/PROTESTANT BORN IN THE MID 70S IN SPAIN, GREW UP IN RELATIVE FINANCIAL POVERTY BUT WITH THE BENEFIT OF EDUCATED WHITE PARENTS, THEN ATTENDED AN IVY LEAGUE SCHOOL WHERE HE FELT LIKE AN OUTSIDER BUT ABSORBED A BELIEF IN HIS OWN SUPERIORITY, THEN...

Well, you get the idea. Perhaps, indeed, I should. But of course my point is that if I am part of some hegemony, which I find doubtful, the readers of the APGWR will be able to recognize that in the bigotry of my analysis.

To the second question, of whether there is any real harm done by careless - let's call it negligent - literary analysis, I'm afraid that here I will have to brace myself, because I have a lively sense of humor and don't want to insult those who feel they are doing something of deep ethical significance in revealing the innards of criticism. Oh, what the hell, I kind of do want to insult them. Ha. Ha. Ha. Oh, that felt good. Seriously, folks, SERIOUSLY?

That was powerful argumentation, wasn't it. At any rate, my personal opinion is clearly that my white lies about literature do no one harm and have the potential to make me happy, which will make my wife happy, which will make our children happy, which will add a happy generation to a world sorely in need of them. Thoughts?

Battening on huge seaworms in my sleep

Been wrestling with myself about going back to school. There are, thankfully, a few verities: (1) My present life is not satisfying, particularly in the sense that I am keenly aware that none but a half hour to an hour a day is spent doing something that is my heart's wish, not counting the happy time with my family which is my heart's pleasant reality; (2) I have become convinced that among a number of impractical 'practical' choices, an academic lifestyle would most fit my desires, abilities and self-image; (3) I just barely, on just a couple of occasions, had a glimmer of belief in college that I might actually like the academic study of English Lit; (4) I am never going to find the "difficult" versions of literary theory to be anything more than mental masturbation, and in some ways there is no part of the academy I hold in lower regard than the cultural studies people who treat the bookworms (who actually read books) with disdain; (5) I must wait until at least the Fall of 2008 to start, due to the date of my starting to think about this vs. application deadlines, and the daily grind has already made me feel old and desperate now - which is to say, 1.66 years away from that start date; (6) I am troubled by disturbing memories of underperformance and embarrassment during my undergraduate years, and more generally by a fear that what seems like determination now can easily dissipate over the unthinkably many years it will take to get my PhD (by which time I will be nearly 40 and therefore dead), leaving me once again feeling trapped in an unhappy profession.

So those are some of the verities. To talk a bit more about the theory thing, I decided to study English in the first place because I wanted to have an excuse to read and learn from the most beautiful and witty writing in English. I could hardly fail in this more completely than I would if I ended up spending most of my time reading criticism, which I rank with motivational literature and statistical abstracts as among the worst of all writing ever committed. I know that there is plenty of room in the academy for English Lit people who are not that interested in theory (although I admit we all have a "theory" in how we approach literature). But I don't like being the slow kid in class, and the theorists all act like the "mere researchers" are either dupes and dummies or downright dastardly. After my brief career in journalism, the last thing I want to have to respond to is continued accusations of being evil, narrow-minded, in on the conspiracy, etc., which is a regular part of my life and very hard on a person with as overdeveloped a conscience as mine.

I should also note that I have dreamed about other possibilities, and the relative sweetness of those possibilities transmogrifies itself into another drop of poison in the well. For instance, I think I could truly, geniunely if not unequivocably enjoy studying music in graduate school. Exactly what I'd study, I don't know. I do know my failure to get past the first timid steps of a music career mean that I would have a tough time getting a reasonably good teaching job with my PhD - it seems that every professor of music I've ever seen, other than the composers and the historians, had at least the semblance of a professional career before joining academe. The same seems, by the way, to be true of communications professors, though I don't think that's something that truly tempts me. I've also though about going the medical school route, which doesn't seem at all exotic for a Harvard grad, given that it seems like everybody and his uncle I graduated with is now a doctor, whatever they might have studied at school. I've never had the heart to treat the possibility seriously, but wouldn't it be nice to make a lot of money by doing something that isn't particularly evil? (p.s., I wouldn't be a plastic surgeon.)

So at the heart of the thing stand, I think, three questions, all interrelated:
(1) Is there any real option other than English Lit grad school for me?
(2) Can I truly enjoy English Lit grad school and what follows, or am I fooling myself?
(3) Can I wait almost two years to change things? (This question should take into account the fact that things WILL change in various ways over that time if I do nothing else - the wife and I are having another baby (in June - sorry if I haven't told any of my three readers), she is planning to start working and therefore giving us a healthier income, and she is planning to return to school herself at the local college. And then of course there are the unpredictable things, which we can safely predict will, in some form, occur. Of course, it must also take into account question one - we are always surprised by what we can stand when we have no choice, aren't we?)

An H.-grad who doesn't make money
Is like a bee dis-liking honey.
The dung-beetles prat
As they chew on their scat,
"For us, you know, life ain't so sunny!"

the high-cultural conservative

Been reading a book about art controversies in the United States. Was reminded of how I loathe so much of contemporary art. There are in fact many spheres in which I think - and I believe I am not alone - that what has been chic among intellectuals ostensibly serving the various muses for the last forty to seventy years (depending on the genre) is not merely false, not merely bad, not merely worthless, but quite destructive of the soul - visual art, architecture, poetry, classical music jump to mind, but I'm sure there are other areas in which I am equally curmudgeonly. There are certainly many social constructs in which participants display the same sort of collapse into pure masturbation. I have no time to parse this out right now - in fact, I think it might be more of a book than a blog entry - but I'm rather fascinated by the idea that after all is said and done I am a rather proud conservative in the arts, as liberal as my political and social thinking may be. I'm not a reactionary, and I have an open ear and eye and mind to new work, but I think there are quite genuine and valid reasons to despise much of the high culture of the moment.

Perhaps my top concerns - and again I don't have any time to parse this out - but I say perhaps my top concerns are:

1. the claim that art's highest purpose is to "challenge" or shock
2. the difficulties of the artist who would try to recover something of what has made art great in the past (which includes the tendency to appear reactionary or stupid, problems I admit are very real)
3. the way the problems in the arts are fed by or maintained by or enforced by the broadcast media and other new forms of communication

Shocking!

The fall of Ted Haggard, evangelical megachurch superstar, has me thinking about transgression. It is easy to think of transgressions as alien and bizarre, yet apparently easy to commit them. That combination of unthinkable and easy is what fascinated Camus and Gide – it seems like the leading edge of existence, which is perhaps itself unthinkable yet easy.

I haven’t struck anyone since I was a child, but I remember that it was sort of wonderful. I am not naturally a violent person, and I found myself, when it came down to an actual fistfight, very timid at first to land a solid blow, moving my hands slowly and feeling out the space between myself and my enemy as if to prove by a stepwise approach that the air between us could actually be crossed – unreal in a way to someone who had not only not hit anybody or been hit but had never kissed anyone or been kissed either. I would reach out my fist for what was really a kind of love-tap in the truest sense of the phrase – it meant something profound to feel the fabric of someone else’s shirt. I’d loosen up a bit, and even land a few punches, still awkward but growing into the happy sense that I could reach out and touch someone.

I was slightly too big to be elaborately bullied and had too few friends to make terribly many enemies, so my fights were few. But I remember them somewhat fondly. Now, fisticuffs don’t compare to amicable touching, and I wouldn’t go back. And I never developed a desire or had an excuse to fire a gun. But I can understand how it could be terribly thrilling to do violence, particularly for people who are profoundly isolated.

Now of course, violence is only one kind of transgression, and not the one Mr. Haggard is accused of. But sexual transgressions, at least in their early stages, must feel like a gun shot. Ages of silence and disbelief, then a cannon shot! And adrenaline coursing through the body, which shakes and sweats and weeps.

What is sexual transgression? For someone like myself, in a traditional marriage, most of the sexual possibilities would be destructively transgressive. But that is just one possibility, and transgression is in the eye of the beholder and is often a matter of degree. If Haggard had slept with a middle or upper class white woman who was not his wife, he might well have made it through with his high position – and his marriage - intact. But sleeping with a male prostitute was going several steps further than he needed to if he wanted to destroy his life – any man would have done. Any non-white or poor or lower-class woman would have done. Videotaping sex with an otherwise acceptable mistress would have done. Keeping a collection of vanilla porn or writing himself private naughty stories would have done.

And what about your average unattached American? Everyone seems to have their own standard, but somehow that does not utterly deflate the power of transgression. Many young people who “experiment” sexually do it entirely or partly for the thrill of doing things they feel their superego would tut at. Nearly everyone I ever dated tried to shock me – or perhaps to establish themselves in a position of sexual strength – by telling tales of transgressive sex. In other words, the idea that it was transgressive was very much a live one and a powerful one.

The pope of the church of transgression
Taught oddballs to love their obsession.
"Golden showers," he said,
"As they baptize the head,
Will release every ounce of aggression."

Isn't that interesting?

I'm not sure I very often find things interesting. It's a word I use a lot to make those around me happy. "That's really interesting," I say, or words to that effect, generally with a "really" or a "very" or some other magnifier. Just "interesting" doesn't seem enough. But how often do I really experience even "mildly interesting" or "barely interesting"? Today, for instance, I heard on the radio that 40 percent of credit card companies' profits come from late fees and other penalties. I thought to myself, "That's interesting!" and endeavored to remember it. But was it really interesting? An interesting thing is not just surprising. It is intriguing. It gets you interested - piques your interest. In other words, it is potentially the beginning of something, of a lasting interest. And I'm not now interested in how credit card companies make their profits. I'm not going to study the subject or write about it (beyond this) or ask questions.

This is what makes me unfit for the academic world. Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems to me that academics who at all enjoy their work say to themselves "That's interesting!" at least twice a day and actually mean it. Not just about their work, but about the world around them, about people and places and things. Sometimes I am jealous of the almost unbelievable sloth and self-indulgence we allow our academics, but when I actually picture myself doing the work I know that within a couple weeks it would become an awful chore of going over and over and into and through things that never ever quite rise, for me, to being interesting.

Does this mean I'm not a curious person? It could, but it seems to me I am curious, but my curiosity is constantly disappointed by reality. I don't want to know more because in a thoroughly jaded way I feel like I know (very approximately) what that more will consist of in just about every subject and situation. I long to be interested. I look for interesting things every day. I've been on a tear of reading novels I "should have" read and catching up on some history, in part no doubt out of some mix of nostalgia, shame, dissatisfaction and jealousy, but also with the not-yet-thoroughly-extinguished hope that something in or about one of them will be interesting.

But in the end I don't get that out of my reading. Yet I do get something more than the catharsis of all those bad emotions. If the experience is positive I get a sort of generalized aesthetic delight. If it's unusually positive I may even get singed a couple of times by that hard gem-like flame. In other words, I get pleasure. And that perhaps is the conclusion of this long, probably unread passage. The older I get the more I am convinced that I am a hedonist or a worshipper of Dionysus or an epicure. I wouldn't care to manifestize about it, or declare it the last word in my life or anyone else's. But I have found pleasure reliable, at both my worst moments and my best.

There once was a seeker of pleasure
Who diddled herself at her leisure
In her mind she'd conduct
A string trio she fuct
With a downstroke beginning each measure