St. Monday and the Ignorants

I quote today from the penultimate lecture delivered by Dr. James Robert McTweedpants in his tenure as J. Ronald Lane Latimer Professor of American Literatures Directly Referencing the Erie Canal at the Corey Hill School for the Developmentally Tangential. His title comes from the then-recent publication of Fernando Pessoa's writings, given the title Always Astonished.

"Today I speak on the work of a Portuguese writer in translation. I know no Portuguese, nor have I read this book; this is, I am fairly sure, the first time I have not lectured on Philip Freneau's 'On the Great Western Canal of the State of New York.' I take the title solely as a point of departure, but also as a terminal point of self-identification. If I could choose the shorthand by which my tenure at Corey Hill would be remembered, I would select precisely the words chosen by those who have edited and translated the prose of Fernando Pessoa: always astonished.

"I do this as I do most things, in a reactionary way. It is no surprise to those few who know me well that I have found myself generally marginalized not only within the academy and the department of English, but also within the small group of academics who specialize in the literature of upstate New York. I have never quite seemed to find a seamless place, and I attribute this fact less to my endless fascination for my admittedly selective subject matter than to my intellectual stance in general: always astonished.

"I work in a field that, whatever its pretensions otherwise, cannot accommodate astonishment. We claim to be cultural arbiters, 'teaching' the art of literature to a largely indifferent public, and in this position we feel such acute anxiety over the presence (or lack thereof) of our own specialized and qualified knowledge that we cannot, for even a minute, allow ourselves to enter the purely negative space of astonishment: never astonished.

"I speak of the kind of astonishment (the only real kind, I suppose) in which one's immediate perception is incommensurable with the history of already-accommodated perceptions. One is speechless and even thoughtless; one is confronted with the new and uncategorizable. One must, of necessity, appear naive and childlike within the grip of such a perception, implicitly recognizing the power of our environment over our ability to subjugate it to our ideas of order: utterly astonished.

"Go to a seminar or job talk or conference at any department of English and observe what happens when a faculty is presented with the new, either in the form of a dramatically inventive reading or an introduction to an art unrecognizable by current standards. Reactions tend to fall one of two ways: observers are either bored and irritated at being subjected to what is clearly nonsense, or; observers nod their heads in varying degrees of enthusiasm. The latter is more generally the case (as outright dismissal is thought vulgar nowadays): faculties observe that this new work fits quite nicely into the paradigms established by trendy professors a, b, and c. And perhaps this new work does; what it does in and of itself is not my concern. My concern is the ubiquitous ability of literature faculties to perform this work of categorization without passing through or giving notice of the experience of astonishment: never astonished.

"I would like to close this lecture by addressing those who have criticized my academic work for my refusal to speak on the work of Walt Whitman, a fault they considered very grave in my second book, entitled Some Thoughts I've Been Having Recently About Walt Whitman and the Erie Canal. Whitman is, I admit, categorically a negative figure in this book: his shadow only moves from page to page. I will chalk up this 'failure,' if one can call it that, to my perpetual astonishment in my reading of Whitman. In my time spent reading the 1855, 1861, and 1892 editions of Leaves of Grass, I have rarely been able to read more than a pair of lines, or the first few items in a catalogue, before experiencing what I have been calling a state of astonishment that leaves me bereft of the hermeneutic confidence with which I might have been able to produce a comment on the work. Whether or not Whitman's poetry defies interpretation is beyond my concern and ability; I speak here only of what I cannot speak, of the unrecognizable that remains insistently unrecognizable. I will confess only to honesty: to being always astonished.

"Please exit at the side doors."

He made the summit in order to see,
because he needed a certain remove,
and silence, and some distance from the wood-lines.

He knew he needed to be farther to get closer,
because he could not write in blood, and ink
requires some time to dry.

From there he was free not to be he,
to be the shrub under the broad-leaves,
and to show that becoming.

But the wood-lines failed him there,
as they'd failed him when they crossed his brow;
the leaves were spots in his eyes.

Infinite spots and no lines or else
a line that moved upon and overwhelmed him,
encircling the summit with his ascent.

-- Samuel Ashland

Enjoy one picture of my new apt below while I attempt to figure out how to post more than one at a time. It's an old picture, but not much has changed, except we got three more counter stools like the one you see pictured.

More from J. Ronald Lane Latimer Professor of Progressive Thought at Brighton Technical Academy, Dr. James Robert McTweedpants:

"So I was thinking about pragmatism the other day; it's something I found immensely interesting when I began my academic career in the early 1960s, but that I find myself feeling quite different about these days. For no reason in particular, it occurred to me that pragmatism, for all its pretentions, is (equivalent to) the highest idealism imaginable. Pragmatism, with its dictum demanding that one acknowledge all contingencies, becomes in practice the end of the imagining of contingency.

"There are a couple of illusions at play here, one related to immediacy and the other to utility. I'll start with the latter. Although pragamatism claims to value only the utility of any given action (hence early critiques of it as being immoral or unprincipled), pragmatism precisely offers nothing in the way of use (think of use in the OT sense of usury, interest, profit). Use, although having its birth within a given system (a financial exchange in most cases), makes its appearance extraneous to the system. The money I pay my creditors in interest is not related in any fundamental way to our exchange, but instead irrupts as a kind of moral remainder, a balance (a debt) I knowingly take on and understand to have a certain deferred quality. It is precisely this debt, however, that pragmatism cannot accommodate. Pragmatism advises that we concern ourselves only with what can be done within the limitations of what obtains. Difference, then, is inconceivable. All actions within the system overlap each other to the degree that they are indistinguishable; therefore, what 'obtains' comes to seem natural or almost inevitable: it is doing what comes naturally.

"The other illusion has to do with immediacy. 'What obtains,' on the pragmatic view, depends for its coherence on the assumption of ubiquitous transparence. We must have the faith that we are able to recognize our contexts as what they are in order to assume that we have the ability to move as rational actors within our contexts. In this sense, pragmatism is identical with something like Christianity; but it's really identical with any context in which it happens to find itself (as pragmatists will readily allow). It's the idea that pragmatism can simply disappear within its context that is the fundamental illusion. Pragmatism, with its inability to accommodate doubt, is even guilty of idealism within a positivistic context, where pragmatism would attempt to pass itself off as positivism's twin (which it is). Christianity, in fact, is actually less idealistic than pragmatism, insofar as Christianity recognizes its mediation, asking its contexts always to fit a typological patterning. Pragmatism, meanwhile, pretends to find its contexts as they are, always dealing with them as a (somehow) separate sphere, imminently extricable from what it would study."

Thank you Dr. McTweedpants.

I was thinking that heroin is an imperfect form of the ipod. If heroin had a pause button...

bourgeois central 

So on my run through Chicago's beautiful Millenium and Grant Parks, I saw: the remains of a huge blues festival (cf. yesterday), acres of public gardens, a bunny rabbit, Lake Michigan, and the Sears Tower. And some seagulls.

The Cubs-Red Sox series is almost over and I wanted to post on it before it was a foregone conclusion. These are my favorite teams: two of mlb's oldest franchises, as well as two of the most dramatic (in terms of drama, which as we know consists of comedy and tragedy). I could not spend six years in Boston and not become a Red Sox fan; it seeps into your blood like whatever that stuff in the Charles is, and whether you like it or not everything tastes different afterward. I originally decided to like the Cubs before I knew I'd be in Chicago, but that was a more rational decision: I needed a sure-fire, reliable club to balance the mercurial nature of the Sox. Simply put, I could always count upon the Cubs to lose. We all know how well that decision panned out from 2003 to the present.

My wife seems to think that rooting for two teams is incoherent. (I should mention that she is a die-hard Cubs fan.) You must invest your baseball energies in one team, she preaches; anything else is hedging your bets. I don't have much of a response to this other than the pragmatic observation that the Cubs and Red Sox are in two different leages -- with the exception of this weekend's series, they haven't played each other since 1918. Rooting for the Cubs and Sox is like rooting for a hockey team and a football team: there's just no overlap. But that's all rationalizing anyhow. I like both teams because I like both teams, and I will follow them both until the next player's strike turns my stomach.

That said, I've been enjoying this series immensely. I can honestly say that I really don't care who wins (although I'd like to see the Sox win today to preserve some sort of balance). Both teams need the wins, as they are both clustered in the wild-card chase in either league, but for me it has just been fun to watch every single at-bat. I simultaneously cheer on both pitcher and batter. It's a wonderful kind of schizophrenia.

Yes, I enjoy baseball. I enjoy it because it demands energy and refuses to recognize the priority of the capitalist work schedule. Sure, any slob can be a weekend warrior and attend football games on his Sundays off, but it takes real, absurdist persistence to follow your baseball team throughout their night games on the West coast that don't end until one in the morning. While the culture industry has certainly been able to glean a little something off of brand marketing, the practice of baseball simply disallows conformity to a routine that would only allow amusement to become a kind of recharge for the next week's work. A baseball fan comes into work the next day and produces poor, inconsistent work, just as she should.

Go RCeudbSsox!

profile pic 

The Chicago Blues Festival is going on this weekend a few blocks north of my apartment, although I can't hear it from here despite the complete lack of anything at all between me and there. For commentary I defer to eminent blues scholar, Guggenheim recipient, J. Ronald Lane Latimer Chair of Folk Musix at the South Side School for the Deaf, and incendiary deconstructor Dr. James Robert McTweedpants:

"As with most of the elements that composed to so-called "Great Migration" of African-American laborers from the Southern states in the twentieth century, the blues did not escape unscathed. Expecting a lifestyle in which jobs would be available in a "free" market, Delta sharecroppers found instead a climate in which racist boundaries and exclusions still obtained, although in insidiously implicit and de facto forms. Likewise for the blues: musicians accustomed to performing to the rhythm of a heart beaten into a shape no 4/4 time could fit arrived in Chicago intending to follow their mode of expression, except that maybe some of those hipbones might be a few shades whiter.

"What the blues encountered in Chicago, although celebrated on Mayor Daley's manicured lawns, was an attention that, instead of allowing for the growth of blues artists into major cultural figures, forced their expressions into ever-narrower forms palatable to ascendent bourgeois audiences. They couldn't dance without a snare on 2 and 4; they couldn't hear you unless you plugged yourself into an amplifier; they didn't like songs whose lyrics seemed to shift with every performance, moving from one song to the next. The old Delta guys had to make a buck, and Chicago blues was born.

"Everything now regularized, every chord progression obvious before it's even begun, no hint of surprise: you can dance to it, baby! But it kills the soul, as Skip James knew and as precious few practice today. You almost have to get those old 33s and work through the vinyl crackles to find the strangely lustrous blue gold inside. I can tell you for sure you won't find it out on those stages in Grant Park. You can probably find a hot dog out there, but no blues.

"Translation's not an easy game, and it's hard to say if any practice crosses boarders without changing somehow. Hell, look at baseball, the 'American past-time,' which we inherited from a bunch of French monks. Best-case scenario, something new and impossible to predict emerges -- you get an art form that is just recognizable enough to catch your ear, but strange enough to hold it. That's a million-to-one chance in our day of late capitalism, and in Chicago it just didn't happen. If you go looking for it in some small towns just on the Union side of that Ohio River, though, you just might find it."

Special thanks to Dr. James Robert McTweedpants for guest authorship.

...'cuz it's done. There is some feeling of relief that I have now completed all of my coursework (15 15-pagers) and preliminary (preliminary!) exams, but I feel really awful about losing that near-indescribable feeling I once had at the completion of a school year. Mid-June, I'd wear my shorts to school on the only day when such wardrobe was permissable, and after about an hour and a half of pedagogical irresponsibility I would leave the doors of Durand-Eastman school as if an invisible Berlin Wall had been struck down between me and the reality of Western New York summer. The possibility existed, I know I believed somewhere in my pre-pubescent (sp?) psyche that maybe it could be possible that that would be the last day of school for me ever -- that surely I would at least die before September, it being an incomprehensible three months away.

Repetition reifies, I guess; year in and out one grows accustomed to such a feeling, its novelty becoming routine, and the freedom it offers deliquescing (sp?) into the ironcially pedestrian hope that one's parents won't need the car all summer long. In this, my twenty-something-ieth year in academia (if you count high-school teaching, which I do due to the schedule involved rather than the quality of work performed), even the milestone of the MA in English (last June) means little more than the incipient necessity that one must apply for funding for the next year, or for a position at some institution for the fall. I suppose there is a measure of relief; but I hesitate even to ascribe any value to that; you can't relax for even a second or, as I read in a book one time, you will "wreck yo'self."

The steadily-building monotony of mid-twenties life aside, I just know this summer will be different. And indeed it will, at least in the number of hours I'm on the clock, as I won't be working at Tanglesnatch any more. I don't know if I've come to my senses or if I've just stopped caring about having money. At any rate, as the title of this webular-log suggests, I will be using this site as something of a creative outlet for my band, St. Monday and the Ignorants. The name swipes something from Benjamin Franklin and from the high-school version of myself (the student version, not the teacher version). Ask me about it when you get a chance because I'm not too keen on posting that kind of stuff. So everyone who reads this will have to give me suggestions as to how to post mp3s, as well as how get that retarded picture of mine over on the margin where it's supposed to be. Thanks to Vinnie, I now have the technology to move the hits from my analog four-track onto the digital one-track, finally divesting myself of those pesky four other tracks. I expect to put an old tune of mine, entitled "Cheap Sex," up here asap. It was written during a tough time in my life. You could ask Vinnie about it, but I think he actually slept through most of it.

Between reading things I actually enjoy, hitting the South Loop gym, running around Millenium and Grant Parks, and traveling as much as modern science will allow, you have my summer, although you certainly didn't ask for it.

me too close 

Why am I writing this blog? Because I realize it's imperfect. Dreamed, it would be perfection; written, it becomes imperfect; that's why I'm writing it. And above all else, because I advocate uselessness, absurdity, [ ] -- I write this blog to lie to myself, to be unfaithful to my own theory.

The awareness that a work is perfect, the satisfaction of a work achieved ... --soothing is the sleep under this shady tree in the calm of summer.

Thank you, Bernardo Soares.