“I want to get tipsy from red wine and like everyone’s facebook statuses”

Garfunkel and Oates, my favorite of favorites

and, MORE:

Enjoy!

Signs & Wonders

Let me share with you The Good News… My apartment has been de-Christoed!  We emerge from our plastic sheath, our chrysalis, our white wrappings that have weighed so heavily on my soul these last couple of months!  This morning, as I was reading Barry Lopez, I realized that the light entering my windows was changing, that my ears were catching the German of people outside and above me, and that, yes, they were cutting away the plastic from the scaffolding…  Permit me some exuberance here, please.  I have been trapped these last couple of months, I’m sure I have complained about it here, and finally, I see the very gray sky of Berlin winter, which is not at all like the gray of the inside of plastic sheeting.  What I mean to say is Hallelujah.  From then on, I was struck throughout the day with the SIGNS AND WONDERS OF THE WORLD.  I read Wendell Berry after Lopez, and John Barth after Berry.  I did not bring my music with me on the train but instead read science poetry, things like:  “Logic is a mechanism/ made of infinitely hard material” (Steve McCaffrey) and “to be miniaturised is not small-minded” (Robert Crawford).  A man on the U-Bahn was reading Strunk and White (Elements of Style) and I thought, very naturally, omit needless words.

In the JFK library I discovered that there are, in fact, stacks in some German libraries.  Three floors of them at JFK, concrete, florescent light, tall shelves and metal staircases.  No Dewey, no Library of Congress, so of course I had no idea where the books I was looking for were.  But I found an oversized book, lying on the shelf (waiting for me?) called ‘The Confederate Soldier.’ Embossed cover and filled with illustrations, charts, lists of the structure of the Army of Northern Virginia for every single battle, compiled from what looked like newspapers and nineteenth-century publications.  It was so beautiful and useless.

We returned to this one Thomas Cole painting in class.  You know the one, ‘View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm – The Oxbow.’

Where is this place?  What is this river?  What are these place names?  Are their referents real or imaginary?  Are they the same for every person?

Now of course my day ended with Cartarescu drawing sperm with smiley faces and Siamese twins in homoerotic positions (please, don’t blame him, we are reading John Barth) so my mind is simply full of wonderment.  What does tomorrow hold?  It seems that a very small life can be heartbreakingly rich, if one just can see out the window.

 

Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity

“Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses — and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person “being” a genius, all of us “have” a genius. It’s a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk.”

On TED, only 20 minutes long… very interesting.

Dante didn’t invent hell. He furnished it.

I’ve had a disastrous couple of days “working” on my thesis.  Wednesday I “worked” nonstop (8am-8pm) and accomplished little (nothing).   I’ve been distracted by feelings of being trapped, and alleviating these feelings by making sure I go out, on walks, to the library, to the university, etc.  But rather than clear my head and allow me to focus on my task (thesis), they only distract me further, take up my time, make me nostalgic for them moments afterward.  I am sitting down after this post with a great thermos of tea and writing my thesis.  Forget the research, I need to at least write down what I’m trying to say, maybe in poems.  I know that today is the 14th of November and I have to start writing.

I’ve just returned from a fruitful trip to St. George’s english bookstore in P-Berg, where I made 15 euros selling back books to them, and buying Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters and Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, both books I have been wanting to read for ages.  Mason & Dixon is 700 pages so perhaps not the most wise purchase in the middle of my thesis, but I need something for pleasure and it’s better if it’s not streaming movies/television.  Tam and I had a snack off Kolowitzplatz at the same restaurant we ate at last year around this tea.  I had a wonderful hot chocolate and piece of carrot cake, which is, I believe, the same thing I had last year.  Things can be strangely cyclical.  We talked about Teagan & Sara, who we are going to see in 2 weeks; on one hand, I know that I really need these fun things in order to stay happy and sane but on the other I understand that this just puts more pressure on my at-home time to be really really productive.  Honestly, it hasn’t been so far.

So, I’m going to make tea now (the big thermos, not my cute ikea one) and get going on this thing that I don’t want to do (thesis)…

get your funny here

From the impossibly pretentious ‘pages’ of McSweeney’s: Jeff Bercovici and Piper Weiss’s “Actuarial Tables.” Read it where you won’t be embarrassed to giggle out loud.

 

Know Your Quanta!

This is Me:

Also, have I mentioned that I seriously miss cats?  One cat in particular…

Read it and weep:

Although Kant does not explicitly mention the predictive role of differential equations in the process of Anticipations of Perception, the notion of differentiability introduced by infinitesimally calculus permeates his text.

From Constituting Objectivity: Transcendental Perspectives on Modern Physics, a text that as far as I can tell, is just a big giant book of Kant and Math.  The pages even have that crisp ultra-white color of incredibly dense textbooks.  You know what I’m taking about.  Oh dear.

But there is hope:

[...]

Both schools are mistaken, the venerable mole declared.

Birds and cats are optical illusions produced

by the refraction of light.  In fact, things above

 

Were the same as below, only the clay was less dense and

the upper roots of trees were whispering something.

but only a little.

 

And that was that.

 

Ever since the moles have remained below ground:

they do not set up commissions

or presuppose the existence of cats.

 

Or if so only a little.

From Miroslav Holub’s poem, “Brief reflection on cats growing in trees”

 

Lunch interview?

I do love this woman.  Interview with Elizabeth Grosz, my favorite theorist.

quite the house

Check this out.  While I’m not a fan of decorative clutter, like piles of boxes that serve no useful purpose or knickknacks that are just taking up table surface, I love the stuff that’s on this guy’s walls.

Update on the Big T

That would be ‘T’ for Thesis, of course.

- I’m sitting in bed, surrounded by several piles of books, with a thermos of tea, a water bottle, a bunch of cut-up pieces of index cards (for bookmarkers/notes in library books), a pencil sharpener, and everywhere I find the squares of library requests which come with all my books.  A Great Mess.

- Am re-reading Time’s Arrow so that I can make a somewhat helpful outline of my chapter on it.

- Am reading Physics as Metaphor, which is not, as I had originally thought, about using physics as a metaphor but how physics is a metaphor.  The book is written by a physicist, so I guess it’s legitimate, although it does have cartoons  and the last chapter first demolished then defended astrology.  Working in its favor, it has been cited by more than one scholar I’ve read.  It’s a thin book, but pretty darned dense.  Enjoyable in short bursts.

- Also reading Span of Mainstream and Science Fiction which may have a couple relevant chapters on the non-mainstream but not genre SF fiction (the author’s close readings include the work of Doris Lessing and Thomas Pynchon).  I am beginning to realize that having anything about genre studies in my thesis is going to involve an enormous amount of study.  It’s not enough to read the scholars; if their theories are all based on texts, then I’m going to have to read the fiction work as well.  And I’m not sure that reading a bunch of SF is really the best use of my time.  In fact, I know it’s not.  And I really really dislike genre SF.  So my plan at the moment is to skirt the rim of this giant can of worms for as long as possible.  I’ve ordered a book from the Staabi by Darko Suvin (v. cool name, ps) that seems to be The definitive book on science fiction genre studies .  I’m a bit worried that it’s outdated (late 70s) but the good thing about SF genre is that it’s consistent and I can always use more recent scholarship in journals to supplement my reading.

- On the close reading front, I’m currently looking at Gut Symmetries for feminist re-writings of physics, Time’s Arrow for deconstruction of scientific causality, and Into the Silent Land for scientific narratology.  We’ll see how these change.  Although the close readings are what I’m most comfortable with I want to get more comfortable with the science first (ha! call it core knowledge!).  I also think that the way I approach these texts could be unique if I go for the harder stuff first.

-The harder stuff:  philosophies of science and literature.  Empiricism.  Physics as a metaphor.  Max Weber and the disenchantment of the world.  This stuff is the harder stuff because it’s all spacey and abstract.    I am mightily intimidated.

- Also.  I was going through my books to see if any of them might be useful in this project: Italo Calvino’s The Uses of Literature, Lee Smolin’s The Trouble with Physics… will de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life come in handy?  Maybe not, but having it in front of me might remind me that other works by him certainly will be.  Then I went through my extensive collection of articles and essays (and here I offer up praise of OneNote) and found many potentially useful things.  One was actually a page where I had jotted (can one jot on a computer?) down some great passages from Doctorow’s City of God.  I remember that I had been interested in using this book in my thesis, but had cast it aside for British texts.  I pulled it off my shelf and realized rather suddenly it, as well as Gut Symmetries, AND Time’s Arrow have a lot to do with either the Holocaust or Jewish histories (TA being very much about the Holocaust, but not very culturally interested in Judaism; while GS and CoG are very concerned with Jewish thought and place in the passage of time).  Well, here is another can, but one which I much more interested in opening.  I might have to write about how not only physics, but Einstein himself has captured the imaginations of fiction writers.

- The other articles I found were a number of articles on Winterson, which will help come close-reading time and some about Calvino, which I put in my thesis ‘folder’ because I know he’s going to sneak in somewhere.

- Lastly, on “potentially relevant” texts:  There’s got to be some of the decadent collector in me, because I love assembling texts together and imagining how I would analytically connect these ideas in my Big Project.  I did this with my div III.  And it’s not that the connections aren’t there; given very little information about a text that I haven’t read yet I can start drawing lines between ideas in my excitement.  And, somehow, time slips away and I don’t have the chance to actually read the book or article.  NOT. THIS. TIME.  My reading list might be a hundred texts long at this point. no matter.  I will devour them.  And from my head a usurper shall spring, armed and ready.

a master of what exactly?

I recently read an article about the importance of fact-based core curricula in elementary and high school education and how this significantly improves the academic success of college students AND an article lamenting the decline of the English Department, whose author cited that Harvard has done away with its freshman survey courses in favor of a thematic structure. (The first article, here, on E.D. Hirsch and the “Massachusetts miracle”, and the second, here.)  I’m going to choose to ignore the actual concerns of these articles’ authors and instead launch off on my own conceptual musings, therefore revealing how indoctrinated I am by the wishy-washy world of progressive education.  But well, let me think for a bit about “core knowledge” (And I’m not going to go into the elementary/middle school arena as the first article does–there’s no pedagogical defense for fifth-graders not knowing who Sherman was).  I remember looking at colleges and visiting one where our tour guide proudly proclaimed that the first year English course would include all the fundamental texts of the English canon.  I believe my mother and I exchanged a glance at this.  A very traditional view of the English canon would find the biggest fault with this class to be its naive ambitiousness.  How exactly do you intend to read all of Shakespeare et al in a single year?  But more fundamental is the utter trust that this approach has in the concept of a canon in the first place.  There has been a lot written, especially in the revisionist history arena about the constructions of aestheticism and power that affect why certain texts and authors are canonized and while others are placed aside.  When we talk about core knowledge that is not simply knowledge of who fought in World War I and when it happened, we move into a dynamic space, in which the telling and writing of history reflects all the conflicts of the historical moment to the present (or even before the historical moment).  This isn’t knowledge you can pin down.

I have a professor, who also happens to be my thesis supervisor, who has made disparaging remarks in several classes about the presumed (correctly, if I had to guess) lack of classics-reading by her students.  We aren’t schooled in Henry James? Mein Gott.  How did we get here without him?  Now, this is an interesting question on many levels (as I read Winterson I know that she has been well-schooled in James, is he in her pages?)  But it makes me wonder about fundamentals, especially when we reach the college and graduate levels.  Education is based on a quantifiable progression, a clear linearity of steps taken to reached an awarded degree.  It is a measurement of knowledge.  Unfortunately, knowledge doesn’t seem to want to fit into that line, preferring webs and pastiches and all those lovely (post)structuralist and social constructivist metaphors.  Critical knowledge, that is, discursive knowledge, has a problem with causality because it has an explicit problem with time, or rather, timing.  I am involved in my knowledge and the relationship is not all like a sponge in water.  My brain is choosy for reasons that no one has fully explained and my ability to draw connections between disciplines makes me a better thinker.  When I was in my first year at Hampshire, some students were up in arms about a newish requirement that we had to take a course in each of the five ’schools’ during our Division I studies (basically, the first year).  Hampshire students tend to be very individually motivated and many really know what they want and they don’t want to “waste their time” in disciplines irrelevant to their interests.  I sympathized, mostly because I was horrified at the idea that I had to take a course in Natural Sciences.  Other students laughed at the requirement, because sometimes the classes seemed randomly assigned to schools when they should have been in others. I think it would be safe to claim that most Hampshire students study humanities-related fields and there always seemed to be some tenuous humanities-friendly courses in Natural Sciences.  This requirement, the closest Hampshire got to “core knowledge” as a whole (I’m betting NS programs were slightly different), had more to do with core thinking than providing a platform of basic facts (we should have gotten that in high school).  Beside the NS school requirement, which was really tough for me, the other frightening school was Cognitive Sciences and I thought I had totally lucked out because my course in CS was on Plato.  I thought it clearly belonged in the Humanities school, or maybe Interdisciplinary Arts but now I see that the CS school was not really about all the neat brain and computer studies that most CS students were doing but about systems, linguistics, semantics, and logic.  Plato fit perfectly.  And I have major problems with math-based, quantifiable problem solving, which is probably why that Plato class was hard.  It was all about logic and nothing at all about its applications. What is my point?  Basic facts can be learned in middle school, maybe high school, but by the time someone has reached college, they should be pushed to think critically about everything and this has more to do with the processes of knowledge than the building up of it.  Even scientists, who may need more building up of knowledge because of how science has been created (no inherent quality assumed), greatly benefit from the study of other disciplines (I think postcolonialism at the very least should be studied by everyone who intends to spend any time on this earth).

Okay, this is just a really long confession that I’ve never read Henry James.  Never! In February I will be award a degree, I’ll be a Master of English Studies and I have no idea what that means.  I’m thinking conceptually, of course, not in the terms that many people get degrees for, namely, because is a requirement of employment in that field.  If we go down that road pretty soon I’ll be asking what is the conceptually point of getting a degree in anything; considering my unwritten thesis, I should probably avoid asking that question.  If I had the choice to receive a degree that is awarded based on mastering of knowledge, I’d really choose a degree in Thinking.  I find that much more rewarding than this pompous idea that I could be a Master of English.  What am I really a Master of?  Thinking in English.  I recently read another article, this one somewhat loosely connected to my rant-disguished-as-an-essay on the Booker Prize, called “Decadence, Nationalism, and the Logic of Canon Formation” by Matthew Potolsky.  Potolsky’s ultimate thesis was that the arbitrariness of the Decadent collection reveals how all canons are arbitrary and construct their authority through their own creation.  The idea of survey courses in the essentials of English literature supports the supposed organic nature of canons, in fact, Potolsky points out that college curricula lists are instrumental in the process of canon formation.  Again, this is dynamic knowledge.  You, as a freshman student, are not merely walking into a lecture hall to soak up the knowledge that will form the base of your further study, you are participating in the canon, you are authorizing it.  The canon does exist except as a list of texts, implying a development through time as we move from decade to decade. Again, knowledge and time.  It strikes me that this is quite a modernist view of human development, that each year we progress, we build up, each new piece of art is more sophisticated and artistic than the last.  I hate to use the word, but this is a teleology of constant betterment that inherently makes us feel superior to “primitives”, to the past, to everyone and every country that hasn’t followed history to its brilliant telos, us.  Constraining knowledge with a concept of time that is bizarrely linear (read some physics if you don’t think it’s that bizarre) subjects it to all of our nefarious prejudices.

I still don’t know if I’m a Master of anything… but I didn’t imagine that I’d be coming to any conclusions, brilliant or not, by the end of this blog.  Well, I leave you with Potolsky:

“Against the nationalist model of community as organically and essentially bound to a specific place and vernacular tradition, the decadents imagine a community fashioned on the model of the decadent collection: artificial, international, and united only by taste.”