I had spinal surgery two weeks ago. An anesthesiologist told me that I
wouldn’t remember anything he was telling me, and I remember every
word.
NRC Rankings
I had a lot to say about these until I learned of the role the Survey of
Earned Doctorates played in them, at which point I decided to remain
silent.
Losing the OED
Our state library consortium lost access to the OED last week. This
was, needless to say, considerably more traumatic than the surgery. I
had to buy an individual subscription ($295/year; thanks Oxford!)
The most recent NLR has a piece by Zizek on the contemporary European
financial crisis, in which he attributes to Kissinger the “make the
economy scream” comment. I was unable to find any source which claims
anyone other than Nixon made the remark noted by Richard Helms.
Christopher Hitchens even mentions that Kissinger was relatively
unconcerned with Chile, describing it as a “dagger pointed at the heart
of Antarctica,” for example.
I am intermittently working my way through the archives of the London
Review of Books and have now reached late 1984. An article by Alan
Brinkley about the Mondale-Reagan presidential race mentioned one of
their debates, and I remembered that I might have actually watched that
when it happened. Thanks to the miracle of the Reagan Presidential
Library, a handsome copy is available on Youtube for all to see, and I
was just browsing around in it.
I have a serious interpretive problem with films of this type, where
there are significant commercial considerations impeding upon what might
be the narrative aspirations of the director, considerations absent from
Shane Carruth’s Primer, for instance, or even one of the Buñuel films
that some reviewer mentioned (perhaps it was Denby in the New Yorker;
I don’t remember). Anyway, my problem is that I don’t know how seriously
to take the construction of the plot. With something like Primer,
which also features intricate layers of nesting, I was willing to credit
the director with anything as complicated as I could think of, provided
that it fit. A $7000 budget warrants obsessive attention to detail.
Here, with the gratuitous, multigenre action sequences;
gravity-distorting stardom; and flagrant acts of miscasting, I was left
very unsure of the interpretive boundaries. I mean, it’s one thing if
it’s just done for fun and is not intended to make any sense at all. I
can accept that. Done well, with a refusal to take itself seriously,
this mildly cynical professionalism can suggest depths that more earnest
efforts never plumb.
In a discussion of Wallace’s “Mister Squishy,” I believe, a member of
the wallace-l discussion list made a comment about how he didn’t seem to
understand computer jargon very well, despite his penchant for deep
research. I don’t know if I thought that was entirely fair at the time,
but I would like to offer the following passage from Thomas Harris (an
often deep researcher himself) for comparison:
“The FBI has a closed system and some of it’s encrypted. You’ll have
to sign on from a guest location exactly as I tell you and download to
a laptop programmed at the Justice Department [. . .] Then if VICAP
hides a tracer cookie on you, it will just come back to Justice. Buy a
fast laptop with a fast modem for cash over-the-counter at a volume
dealer and don’t mail any warranties. Get a zip drive too. Stay off
the Net with it.” (Hannibal, 234)
Here’s a neat piece on a
Pynchon conference in Poland. The thesis of the paper the author
presented sounds somewhat similar to some ideas I had about Lemuria in
the book when I wrote about it a while
ago.
I’ve only been in one gathering of Pynchon specialists before, and they
were nowhere near as eccentric as those Nick Holdstock describes. n+1
academic conference descriptions always, at least in this and the Elif
Batuman versions I’ve read, sound closer to something out of The
Futurological Congress than those I go to; but I haven’t been terribly
adventurous in my choices either.
I read Denis Johnson’s Shoppers tonight, a collection of two related
plays that were written and performed in the early aughts. The first,
Hellhound on My Trail was genuinely good on the page, though I wonder
at how well it would translate to the stage in every particular. The
other play, Shoppers Carried by An Escalator into the Flames, gave
every indication of being written without revision of any type, and I
can’t imagine how it could have been performed, though the introductory
material claims that it was. I almost get the impression that Johnson
had tired of playwriting at this point and was fulfilling some type of
fellowship obligation. Perhaps that’s uncharitable, I don’t know. I
wasn’t there. But it’s by far the worst thing of his that I have read.
Keith Gessen’s preface to this book acknowledges a problem: that, while
providing a clearly expressed overview of the financial crisis from a
knowledgeable participant who seems to share some cultural
characteristics with the interviewer and broader audience at n+1
(humanities major, thoughtful and analytic, likely Harvard graduate,
doesn’t own a tv, etc.) and who also is as neoliberal as they come, the
Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager is not pressed hard enough on his answers.
I would have loved to have read Doug Henwood interviewing AHFM, for
example (or Benjamin Kunkel from the n+1 editorial staff).
I started off living in Atlanta very near the Fernbank, then moved two
miles or so east. By the time this picture was taken, Clancy and I were
living in a rented house not very far at all from a northeasternish
curve of the perimeter. It was a woody circle, and a gnome lived next
door.
Such promise. A guru, a fully tuned-in Aquarian, leads a pack of young
cheeseheads past a riot into a meadow to perform a ritual summoning. As
a result, one young lady becomes an esoteric Straussian without the
eyestrain, another has her eyes strained, one becomes a
poststructuralist against his will, an ambitious young man is mugged by
the quotidian while his courtier gets lost, one has architectural
musings, and the other, the one who most wants to be the guru, like his
guru sees only the cynocephalic guardians who’ve been presiding over the
affair. Some of what they see is zodiacal—there’s an interlude with
Agrippa a bit later—some merely demoniacal.
