All of us in the RG (this is what our return address stamp says)
household have been unwell this week. I initially blamed food poisoning
but am now leaning toward some malevolent virus. For some reason, it hit
the parents far harder than the toddler, though he has had it longer.
In any case, I haven’t been able to concentrate on much sustained
reading. It’s probably easier to read with a headache than with terrible
stomach distress, though the involuntary caffeine withdrawal I went
through earlier this week left me with what are undeniably the worst
headaches in memory. (I think it also—the caffeine
withdrawal—affected my judgment; I decided a few days ago that the
only thing I could stomach was pho, which I then proceeded to order with
tripe and immediately douse with as much spice as I could reach, only to
wash it all down with a particularly acidic Vietnamese lemonade. I leave
the outcome to your imagination.)
‘In England a schoolboy of [James] Watson’s precocity and style of
genius would probably have been steered towards literary studies. It
just so happens that during the 1950s, the first great age of
molecular biology, the English schools of Oxford and particularly of
Cambridge produced more than a score of graduates of quite outstanding
ability – much more brilliant, inventive, articulate and dialectically
skilful than most young scientists; right up in the Watson class. But
Watson had one towering advantage over all of them: in addition to
being extremely clever he had something important to be clever
about.’
This horrible nastiness of Eng. Lit., which makes the teachers preen
on themselves on being too smart to attend to the story (so that they
can tell any holy lie they choose instead) must I think derive from
the short-story technique of Chekhov, though he would have been
astonished and exasperated by it. (Selected Letters, ed. Haffenden,
p. 481)
The context there is a discussion of King Lear, and I just chose it to
illustrate the often-vehement intentionalist-line that Empson took in
much of his criticism. (It’s remarkable how often he’s grouped by loose
reference to the New Critics.) Empson’s theory of Ulysses is that
Joyce wrote it to honor not his meeting of Nora Barnacle but rather to
commemorate his sexual encounter with an older woman which gave him the
self-confidence he needed to leave Ireland with Nora. The projected end
of Ulysses, for Empson, is that Stephen takes up Bloom on his offer to
sleep with Molly (in addition to Italian lessons, etc.), thus increasing
the chances that Molly would bear him another son (by him, not Stephen,
in Empson’s view).
Like many citizens, I’ve followed the Google in China case somewhat.
This Wiredarticle caught my
attention for a different reason. Look at this quote:
“If you’re a law firm and you’re doing business in places like China,
it’s so probable you’re compromised and it’s very probable there’s not
much you can do about it,” Mandia says.
Is there a way of parsing this other than “it’s like so probable” ? Not
that I can see. (“It’s so [holding up hands to measure] probable” ?)
When I read the breathless write-ups in venues like Wired, I think of
the alternately amusing and terrifying possibility that these various
attacks are so nested, so concealed within levels of duplicity, that two
guys in adjacent cubicles are unwittingly doing it all to each other.
Or, even better, that some type of obfuscated PHP code has become
self-aware and is targeting a similarly self-aware bit of code with
results ultimately not dissimilar from what you see in Lem’s Fiasco.
If I were to write a novel using this premise (its lack of novelty is
part of the amusement, I think), I would have to call it Thank You,
Thank You, Little Dinosaur. (Or, The Rain-drops on Feste’s Tabor,
with the added twist that one self-awarelet taunts another with Feste’s
wellfed wit.)
I’ve been more-or-less frozen in here in South Louisiana the last few
days, which isn’t too bad as it gives me a good excuse to eat massive
quantities of gumbo and watch as the weather takes revenge on the many
unwanted plant species in my yard. The city utilities folks also charged
me for 29000 gallons of water usage last month and dug a picturesque
ditch in my front yard. Any correlation between those two events remains
uncertain.
NEW YORK, July 4—Now that hepster Harry James has hit the heavy
dough by hiring a flock of fiddles and blowing trumpet solos strictly
from the sugar mill, and now that hepster Tommy Dorsey, in the heavy
dough to begin with, has added catgut and a harp besides, the band biz
finds itself in the throes of a trend. Said trend is more than the
removal from the relief rolls of several dozen previously impoverished
fiddle scrapers—it is the dawn of the hep-schmaltz era, as
contrasted to the ragtime days, the jazz age, the heyday of the
crooner, and the era of swing, all trends and all now dead.
(Billboard, 11 July 1942 [viewable at google books])
Once you know the cancelled pilot backstory, it’s hard to deny the
narrative logic of transformative fantasy; but what complicates matters,
for me at least, is that the dinner party scene and the rest of the
putatively real content shows a Camilla so cruel that the viewer is
tempted to forgive contract murder. More likely is that the “real”
content of the film originates with a fantasy of the waitress called
Diane truly and Betty falsely, and her failed affair with the woman she
switches apartments with. I’ve read a lot of Lynch scholarship lately,
and if someone had advanced that interpretation without me realizing it,
I apologize.
Much about the TLS annoys me, though I still subscribe. Here is one
happy thing I found in the latest issue, a non-watermarked version of
which I was unable to find elsewhere:
I’ve said this before, but the proper analogy between an alien
intelligence capable of placing impenetrable spheres around the exact
boundaries of a human township is not ants to humans, as in King’s
novel, but a virus colonizing some type of formicative intestinal
bacterium to Colette, say.
I’ve been amusing myself thinking of the type of apoplexy that Stanislaw
Lem may have worked himself into when considering the consequences of
the book’s premise, as in his essay on Roadside Picnic. I suspect he
may have decided that the leatherfaced pueriles were in fact from
futurity, conducting a chronoeconomographic experiment on the isolation
of North America’s largest meth lab. Some work could be done on the
ideogram as well.
Ernst Bloch’s first wife owned gold mines in Russia: “I used to say that
I paid 30 million marks for the Russian Revolution, but that it was
worth the price to me!”
There’s something very cheerful about that remark, which was made in
1974 or so (note the “used to.”) I’m teaching selections from The
Principle of Hope this week in my utopia and modernism seminar. Like
many of Bloch’s readers, I’m fascinated by his discussion of the
relation between ideology and utopia, that the former could produce only
crudities without the inherent anticipatory illumination
("Vor-Schein") of the latter. It seems that a type of default critical
understanding of David Lynch has been produced through reference to
Lacan and Zizek; I wonder if Bloch can’t add something.
