21 February 2008

Wednesday Night Notes

So, I haven't posted here in a while.  Part of the reason-- fatigue and general business-- is old and well-known, while the other is very much less so; lately I've been writing, if at all, on Facebook mainly because only my friends can read those entries, something that's increasingly important as I recall how easily people can misconstrue material, whether deliberately or accidentally.  Frankly, I'm just not sure I care much about blogging anymore.  After almost five years of it, I'm increasingly inclined to give up the pretense of maintaining a web-site, however nominal. 

That said,a few random notes on Life In General, collected for, well, no reason whatsoever:

  • I'm increasingly aware that my training-- or my experience, or whatever-- has made it almost impossible for me to be surprised by a movie anymore.  As I've noted elsewhere, some movies, trying to be cheeky or self-aware, indicate their own spoilers with ostensibly sneaky winks at the audience so they can justify their big surprises.  In The Usual Suspects, it was Kevin Spacey talking about the texture of his piss; in Lucky Number Slevin, it was Josh Hartnett's initial manifestation in nothing but a towel.  Today I was (finally) watching Brick, the high-school reinvention of Dashiell Hammett fiction with Joseph Gordon-Leavitt.  At one point in the early going, a young woman, I don't know the actress' name, appears at a party in a silk, Chinese-patterned gown, all eyes and would-be sophistication.  First thing I thought?  "It's Chinatown."  I knew right then who the real villain was going to be, and the movie didn't disappoint.  It's a good film, all in all, but directors really do need to be more careful about tipping their hands too early. 

    Similarly, in the remake of Sleuth with Michael Caine and Jude Law, as soon as I saw Law going into one his ambisexual cooing-poses, I knew exactly how the film was going to resolve, and it didn't disappoint, either, at least not in that context: the film itself is a depressing affair, given the immense talents involved (Caine, Law, Kenneth Branagh and Harold Pinter). I wonder if many other people suffer this sort of accidental prescience when they watch these sorts of movies.  Probably not.  By the way, Brick did one thing very, very smartly: conflating the Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) and Wilmer the Gunsel (Elisha Cook, Jr.) characters from The Maltese Falcon into one figure.  It borders, in its allusive simplicity, on a masterstroke.
  • I have been rereading Conrad's Heart of Darkness for one of my courses, and am remembering what a genius Conrad was with language.  Sure, I have read it several times before, the last time maybe five years ago, but I think it's only with this reading that I'm truly savouring the language like fine whiskey.  There's not an ounce of sentimentality to it, and in a perversely mimetic way there's a sublime sense to which Marlow's narration resembles the mysterious undulations of sea-travel-- or, rather, river-travel.  I started teaching it last week-- on Valentine's Day, of course, my subtlety too smug by half-- but I think my first week on it, content-wise, was one of the best lectures I've given in recent years.  There's so much to say about that magnificently miniscule text, one hardly knows when to stop.  I am now teasing through a possible article on it in comparison with Graham Greene's revision of it in A Burnt-Out Case, though I'm dubious about when I'll ever have the time.  Greene once said that he had to stop reading Conrad for twenty years for fear he would "colonize [his] style," but I suspect A Burnt-Out Case was a much more studied response to Conrad than many of Greene's critics have previously realized, particularly in Greene's transformation of Conrad's persistent "uneasiness" into his (or his character Querry's) "discomfort."
  • The more time passes, the more I want to teach Shakespeare again.  I miss it, immensely.  I keep inserting bits of Shakie into my courses, usually to surprisingly good effect considering the courses themselves, but I want to be able to talk about literature passionately again.  My short story course, with its heavy emphasis on Modernist writing, tends to disallow that, simply because of the profoundly ironic nature of so much of it.  If I had my way, I'd establish myself as my own Shakespeare Department at Current Institution and build it from the ground up.
  • Considering both Conrad and Shakespeare, I was reminded of the simple fact-- and it is, despite what others may say-- that the two greatest periods for literature in English were the Renaissance and the Modern (1890-1945) Era.  The former's obvious, but why the latter?  And it occurred to me today that it was in the Modern Age that, for the first time, writers could discover one another without really meeting.  In previous decades and centuries, they would do so in centralized loci such as Paris or London; but with the technological advancements of the time, and the mass production of texts reaching new capabilities, authors could, with legitimate excitement and/or antagonism, respond to other authors, other movements, other concepts, without limitation.  Moreover, there were specific Modernist projects, goals, aims.  This thing we loosely call Post-Modernism, for whatever its other virtues, is pretty much toujours-deja cynical about Everything, so no wonder it (and its various subsequent posts) has failed to find its genuinely crystallizing voices. 
  • I'm increasingly aware that my students really don't think of me as a capital-T teacher.  I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing; I find it sometimes undermines the authority, but it underlines the credibility, especially as they don't put me into the pedestal-based camp.  It often seems I'm more like a residence don than a professor per se.  I'm glad in most ways that I'm seldom seen as the "typical" prof, but it also disaffords me of some of the aspects so crucial to the imperious assertion of control that's often necessary in managing & co-ordinating large groups.  It reminds me, though, of something I find fundamentally distressing, the extent to which most in my profession work upon assumed authority rather than earned authority. It remains to this day that students of mine from ten years ago still go out of their way to see me; somehow, that's more intensely meaningful than any course evaluation ever would be.

I don't know: that should probably just be my mantra henceforth:  I don't know.  Intelligence ultimately defeats itself, as does instinct.  One simply goes, and moves, like Marlow's steamer, through the stillness and the calamity.  One should be so zen-- and yet never tip one's hand.

28 January 2008

The Beale World

I have been reluctant to comment openly about the Democratic and Republican nomination campaigns for a number of reasons, not least of which is the interminable ramble already being given them by media outlets in the United States. CNN, with its self-proclaimed "Best Political Team on Television" (as the network incessantly reminds viewers), is by far the worst offender, jack-hammering away at the same events and issues with particularly pernicious vapidity, but it's no less guilty than the panoply of other outlets passing off pointlessly speculative political yammering as insightful documentation and analysis. The effects of all this prattle are two-fold, depending on one's response to it: either one becomes addicted to it, a junkie demanding one's daily fix, or one becomes inured to it, a cynic begging, pleading, for a reprieve from constant clamour. I'm convinced that if there is a Hell, at least one of its tortures is a steady stream of American political coverage, a kind of Promethean punishment for those unable to extract themselves from their couch-potato related sins. It'd be a Dantescan punishment by way of Paddy Chayefsky, but a Dantescan one nonetheless.

Yet, I think we may, finally, be entering the peace before the General Election storm. The worst of the acrimony and contempt seems finally to be petering out, and the results coming largely to naught. The Republicans seem to be inching closer to accepting John McCain as their date to the prom, hesitant as they may be about it, while the Clintonian implosion of the past few weeks has probably all but coronated Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee. Today's endorsement of Obama by Sen. Edward Kennedy may finally have tipped the scales in the latter: in a stunningly scrupulous rejection of self-interested slash-and-burn politics, Sen. Kennedy may well have directed Democrats away from immediate immolation. Make no mistake: this is a Good Thing. Democrats, like Hamlet, are usually their own worst enemies, destroying themselves rather than their opponents. In recent weeks, the Clintons all but discredited themselves from the running not so much by any particular action but by demonstrating the willingness to return the party to internecine warfare, and while that may have worked well enough in other circumstances, the current ones demand otherwise. People are mad as Hell about politics as usual, and they're not going to take it anymore.

But, I think, it's also about people being furious about the various forms of fury itself. One of the reasons Senator Clinton was given a reprieve by Democrats in New Hampshire and Nevada was the vulturous behaviour of media figures like Andrew Sullivan, whose insistently vituperative derangement about the Clintons was perhaps the best gift he could have given them. Sullivan, though by no means alone in his position, represents the kind of 90s vitriolic, visceral and counter-sensical monomania that fed American politics of the past fifteen years, and people have seen where such thinking has led them. The Clintons, similarly, represent the win-at-all-costs strategy, and they're being rejected, too, though it's probably crucial that Democrats are doing the rejection of them on their own terms, and not those of others. (The same is true of Romney, whose over-packaged "say anything" campaign is being received with relative ambivalence.) The media generally are being punished, too, with last-minute mind-changes and disingenuous self-reporting, it seems, designed to throw all of that polling, prognostication and general gotcha-ism into disrepute. The electorate seems to be asking, "You think you know what are issues are," before immediately answering with a stern, "No. No, you don't." There's a whole lot of whoop-ass to go round, and voters seem very much unafraid to dole it out. Howard Beale would be proud.

And yet, for all that anger, for all that a-pox-on-all-your-houses kind of fury, the voters in both parties seem to be leaning toward the figures who represent at least some kind of integrity and some kind of trans-party appeal. McCain is about the only Republican candidate with a chance of winning Democratic voters, while Obama is the only Democratic one capable of doing the reverse. Neither are ideal candidates, but they serve in counter-point to one another, with McCain the voice of experience and Obama the voice of youth (I will not say "hope," a word now largely bereft of meaning in this context). All those of ideas of political predestination that once surrounded Clinton and Giuliani are on the verge of being relegated to the historical junk-heap, and all the political calculus that had become conventional wisdom in recent years is already there. It's as if voters have become cynical about-- wait for it-- cynicism and they're responding in kind, as well they should. It has been a long time in the coming, and while this could, admittedly, be premature, it's almost cause for-- dare one say?-- hope.

22 January 2008

Nodding Off

Just a few short notes, writing from one campus before I set out for another, on the Academy Award nominations announced today:

  • Conspicuously missing:  Marisa Tomei for Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, Donald Pinsent for Away from Her and Max von Sydow for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.  When will the academy stop ignoring Max?  He's the Joseph Cotten of foreign films: in every bloody classic there is, or so it seems, and he's usually tremendous; and yet, nary a nomination.  C'mon-- he's Max von fucking goddamn Sydow!  He had two scenes in that movie, and yet every critic I've read felt compelled to remark on his brilliance in them.  Maybe the power of you-know-who compelled them.
  • Pleasant surprises:  Ruby Dee and Hal Holbrook, for American Gangster and Into The Wild, two performers capable of changing an entire movie with a single scene.  For Mr. Holbrook, it's about bloody time.  Hal might actually win it: in a year when it looks like non-American talent will win big, his nomination will allow the academy to assert its appreciation of home-born legends.
  • Foregone conclusions:  I think the top acting honours are set in stone.  It'll be Julie Christie and Daniel Day-Lewis.  Do any of the other nominees in either categorty even stand a chance?  The academy is dying to reward Julie Christie, as well it should.  Her performance is absolutely heart-breaking.  Also look for Tilda Swinton to grab the award for Michael Clayton; it'll probably be the acknowledgement the academy gives for not being able to reward it in other categories.
  • Insult to injury:  after being robbed last year, and maintaining the longest losing streak in Oscar history, you'd think the Academy would have had the grace to toss Peter O'Toole a nod for Ratatouille.  The poor bastard just can't catch a break.  He should have won for Venus, just as he should have won for Lawrence of Arabia -- wait for it-- forty-five years ago. 
  • Look for No Country For Old Men to win Best Picture.  I'd be shocked-- shocked, I tell you-- if it didn't.  Why?  Because it doesn't deserve to.  Consider it the Coens' version of The Departed.  Best Picture is always about cultural cachet, and No Country has it in spades right now.
  • Striking the Match:  Will the writer's strike end in time for the ceremony?  Count on it.  There's just too much money involved in the Oscars for everyone to let it continue and disrupt the grand tradition. 

So there we are.  Dispute as you will.  Must to campus number two.  It's going to be a  long bloody day.

04 January 2008

Collective Commentaries

One of the odder things about the English language is the panoply of words that act as collective nouns.  Some are still in common use-- a litter of puppies, a range of mountains, a bed of flowers, a class of students, a crowd of people-- and some are just odd enough that some remember them just for their oddness, like a murder of crows.  How some of them came to be, or how they're ever used, is curious and often fun stuff; sometimes, however, they're just outright funny, especially when they've obviously been adapted to contemporary purposes.  Here are a few samples from academic contexts:

  • A group of academics is called a faculty; 
  • A group of Assistant Professors is a clamber;
  • A group of Associate Professors is a tenure;
  • A group of Full Professors is an entropy or an entrenchment.

You have to adore the progression.  Some other related collectives:  a oversight of deans; an essence of existentialists; a lack of principals (savour the irony); a brood of researchers;  a drowse of underachievers; a leap of overachievers; and, of course, there's a nullity of nihilists (say that ten times fast).  Even the student year-levels have their own collectives:  a plenitude of freshmen, a platitude of sophomores, a gratitude of juniors and an attitude of seniors; better yet, there are also fortitudes of graduate students and doggednesses of doctoral candidates all working on their angsts of dissertations.  Lovely when language offers its implicit commentaries, non?  Frankly, I think a group of doctoral candidates should be a delay or an insecurity; even a poverty would do.

Some other choice examples, even though surely the catch of collective nouns is language at its most sly:

  • an ingratitude of children
  • a rash of dermatologists
  • a guess of diagnosticians
  • a gross of farts
  • a conjunction of grammarians
  • a smear of gynecologists
  • a thicket of idiots
  • a spread of nymphomaniacs
  • a tenet of palindromes (clever indeed)
  • a babel (or a babble) of words

Many of these were surely invented only recently, of course, but one has to admire the elegance of them.  You can read amusedly through some sites through the link above.  Reminds me, though, that I'll have to pick up James Lipton's An Exaltation of Larks (yes, that James Lipton), which seems to have been the source for many of the above.  Makes me wonder what a group of partial-load professors would be.  A posse?  A parade?  A temper?