Jacques Der Day (Er, think about it.....)

      My apologies to those that have been waiting either for an email or for posting on this blog, but the N-S-G Doctor now and then, as most of you know, needs to slough off the idea of communication for a bit.   It's one of the few prerogatives that remains to males in this day and age, the freedom (nay, the right) to be insular and unresponsive.   Or, at least, we retain that prerogative for now.   I'm expecting soon that the psychobabblists and their imitators are soon to launching their second wave of attacks against it, of which the "you-have-to-learn-to-talk-about-your-feeeeeelings" movement was just the initial melee.   Oy vey.   Sometimes I think such types will not be happy until all those of us with Y-chromosomes are utterly metrogenous.   But, as so often happens, I've gone rather far afield.   Add that to the panoply of the doctorial aliases: Inspector Tangent.

      Seems in recent days there's been much happening in the literary world, not least of which is the recent passing of Jacques Derrida from pancreatic cancer, the disease that seems to be rearing its ugly head in too many corners of the N-S-G Doctor's life of late. (See also The Independent's short piece here.)   I don't want to say too much about Derrida, for many reasons, but not least of which is that because I haven't read him in the original French I hardly consider myself an authority.   I'm certain RK will post here or elsewhere some remarks that will prove much more sage than any I could provide.   But Derrida's death is an event of awkward symbolism for me: like most literature students of my generation, I was introduced to his ideas, very often with the attached implication that those ideas were laws rather than theories.   That's one of the facts of a literary education in North America in the last quarter of the twentieth century.   Derrida was right about so many things-- about the conditions of language, about the various informations and histories of language and their ultimate consequences-- but Derrida, especially in the hands of North American acolytes, always seemed to me in the end unsatisfactory, incomplete.   I suspect Derrida would not only have understood that sense of frustration, but he'd likely have encouraged it, so much of his work in fact an exercise in academic, intellectual, philosophical and verbal play.   But in the end, I could never accept Derrida, could never reject him, either; or, rather, I could do neither entirely, though I could -- and do-- reject the majority of his followers.   In many ways, Derrida and Northrop Frye stood in utter opposition to one another, and I keep thinking there has to be a Hegelian synthesis that can be drawn from the two.   I feel, I guess, a bit like Henry Drummond at the end of Inherit The Wind, pressing copies of Darwin and the Bible together, much to the chagrin of the science-professing cynicism of E.K. Hornbeck, the play's version of H.L. Mencken.   Too corny a summary-feeling?   Probably, but I guess I'm stuck there.   As Hornbeck snipes, "We're growing a strange crop of agnostics this year."   Yes, very much so, though I was probably reaped before I was sown.

      In other literary news, Mr Bloom has a new book out, for which the NYTimes review can be found here.   Bloom, another critic with whom the N-S-G Doctor is alternately chummy and uneasy, seems to be writing these days with a kind of vatic urgency, as if he alone has to carry the torch for The Love Of Literature, even if some of us more than others see why he would think he needs to do so.   (Don't worry: I'll spare you all the sermon to which I'm sure most of you know all the words.)   But Bloom seems to be writing with such rapidity and force, one begins to worry if he's not being driven by concerns with his own mortality, concerns that seldom come from strict hypochondria.   I hate to write that, especially since Bloom has always been prolific, often alarmingly so, such that one begins to wonder how seriously he considers his own ideas before he releases them for publication.   One stoops by worrying, one supposes; but I can't help but chuckle at Amazon's decision to sell Bloom's book by linking it to Greenblatt's new book on Shakespeare, a fact that has to have Harold rubbing his eyes in despair.

      And, lastly, there's the release of the first volume of Bob Dylan's memoirs, Chronicles (NYT review here).   Strange how much Dylan and Van Morrison are sounding alike.   But reading some of the fragments of Dylan, I can just imagine how much he LOATHES Christopher Ricks' recent book.   My mother would probably tell me that I shouldn't snicker; I'd probably have to explain how hard it is not to.   Methinks we've seen the Ricks of the litter.

      Yes, this has become a large post.   I'm so behind on my email correspondence now, I'm almost ecstatic.   I'm trapsing through some material (as Mr Eliot would say) "forgotten, half-remembered," including The Iliad and Beowulf, as I reel back into The Past.   Reeling back?   Yes, after a day spent with Family, and thinking back on days when (gasp!) the now twenty-year-olds were five-year-olds and so subejcted to all forms of throwing, tossing, tickling, and teasing.   Reeling back, too, because I have been instructed that I have to give a toast at an upcoming, er, Wedding (*cough cough*), and going through the motions of creating a mental "Do Not Say" list.   Suffice it to say that whatever the Arf I say won't be "all warm and fuzzy, about picnics and ponies."   Oh, it's a fine, fine line.   *Must. Suppress. Evil Nature. Must. Not. Mention.....*   Don't worry, I'll be nice.   I won't even do my Peter Cook impression.   My James Brown, on the other hand.....

      Is that enough? Yes, that's enough.   Consider yourselves righteously updated.   Now back to being insular and unresponsive, back to the war against metrogeny.

      .... and yes, the title of this post alone has guaranteed the Doctor an eternity of having his chestnuts roasting on an open fire.   But Derrida would have liked it.   Methinks.   Not?   Yeah, now that you mention it, it is getting a bit toasty in here....