Pickover, Clifford A. Computers and the Imagination: Visual
Adventures beyond the Edge. (St. Martin’s: 1991). Hyperkinetic.
Early sections on computer-generated mazes of interest, and the
clear hand of A Perfect Vacuum and Imaginary Magnitude was
visible later.
Sedgwick, Mark. Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the
Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century. (Oxford:
2004). Prologue reads in some ways like it could have come from the
eXile. Would have liked more exposition of Guenon’s, Evola’s, and
Schuon’s ideas as such.
Clarke, Lee. Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular
Imagination. (Chicago: 2006). Thought that Posner’s book might have
warranted a bit more discussion here.
Phares, Walid. Future Jihad : Terrorist Strategies against
America. (Palgrave: 2005). I don’t know why I kept reading this.
Probably to see what the next bizarre LOTR reference would be.
I spend some time in my dissertation with the political and diplomatic
history of interwar England and was pleased to have a[n] historian on my
committee, who pointed out some overgeneralizations I was tending to
make about the nature of the British right in the mid-twenties, among
other things. So imagine my dismay when I learned, via Jenny
Davidson’scomment,
that, according to Sarah Maza’s “Stephen Greenblatt’s New Historicism
and Cultural History [. . .]” (Modern Intellectual History 1.2 [2004]:
249-265) at least, “Historians often approach literary criticism with a
hostility, or at least skepticism, that gets in the way of trying to
understand what literary critics are really doing. In conversation, if
rarely in print, historians routinely dismiss literary criticism as
self-indulgent, trendy, arbitrary and jargon-ridden” (251).
I’m very lazy about changing a CD in my car stereo unless I’m on a long
drive. I think I once listened, as Clancy can
attest, to Blonde on Blonde (mind you a scratched-copy with “Visions
of Johanna”–the “all night long we sang that stupid song” from “Dr.
Wu”–unplayable) for at least a month’s worth of driving. I’m coming up
on a month now with The Harder They Come. Even thought about playing
the first track as a way of explaining my grading policy.
“Suppose at this juncture we were to state the blindingly obvious: that,
whatever their other properties, literary texts do not possess genes”
(59). So begins the “Perils of Analogy” section of Christopher
Prendergast’s response*
to Moretti. Notwithstanding the Paris Review
interviews, it does seem
difficult to maintain that literature has genes. Does it have memes,
however? Ideologemes? Maybe. And I will discuss metaphors of cultural
transmission and evolutionary analogies in Moretti’s argument.
That’s the title of my
course this semester.
I’m thinking possibly of substituting Primer for eXistenZ. I think
Primer’s engagingly baffling, and it’s also one of the best movies
about engineers qua engineers I’ve seen.
I did ‘solve’ Rhem, and getting the bridge to rise is really just the
start of it. Clancy bought me the sequel as a
present, and I’ve vowed to get through it without looking at a
walkthrough, which I admit I did out of frustration two or three times
in the first game. (In each case, it was something I would have figured
out–my problem throughout was making the game more complicated than it
actually was. You don’t need trigonometry to solve it, for example, and
if something is baffling, it’s because you haven’t found the necessary
information. I consistently missed out on this aspect of the game’s
“puzzle rhetoric.”)
Just caught a commercial for the Super Bowl on ABC with “Heartbreaker”
in the background. You couldn’t really hear any of the lyrics, which is
too bad: A ten year old girl on a street corner, Sticking needles in
her arm. She died in the dirt of an alleyway, Her mother said she had no
chance, no chance!
Be sure to catch Superbowl XL on ABC!
This also reminds of the countless times I’ve heard “Time out of Mind”
playing in supermarkets. I suppose there was also the whole Iggy Pop
promotionals for, what it was, Cadillac?
I’ve
announced
the upcoming Valve book event on Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees,
about which I’m excited.
Also, Mark Bauerlein has an
article (currently
subscription) in the Chronicle about adolescent culture and the
decline of literacy. In many ways, I think Bauerlein misses the mark
here; but for now I just want to note that this:
The fact that involvement fell while access rose signals a new stance
toward literature and the arts among the young. I don’t know of any
research that formally examines the trend, but a snippet of
conversation that occurred during a National Public Radio interview
with me last year illustrates the attitude that I’m describing:Caller:
“I’m a high-school student, and I don’t read and my friends don’t read
because of all the boring stuff the teachers assign.”
Another tidbit
from the Chronicle (still subscription):
Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter With Kansas? How
Conservatives Won the Heart of America (Metropolitan, 2004), sketched
out prevailing American narratives of class and the rhetoric of left
and right. “The ways we’re encouraged to think about elites and
elitism is the key to what’s wrong with us, and there is something
wrong with us,” he said. “Indignation is the great uniting aesthetic
principle of conservative culture.”
I think foreign policy should definitely be taken out of men’s hands.
Men should continue making machines, but women ought to decide which
machines are being made. Women have far better sense. They would have
never introduced the infernal internal combustion engine or any other
of the evil machines. Most kitchen machines, for example, are good;
they don’t obliterate other skills. Or other people. With our leaders
it is too often a case of one’s little boy saying to another: “My
father can lick your father.” By now, the toys have gotten far too
dangerous. (Auden, Paris Review Interview57
[1974]).