After Christmas and Disclaiming Care

So Christmas has finally come and gone, and with it the end of first term at New Institution.  My workload has briefly subsided, but the post-class period demanded a mad dash of more than 80 hours of marking in a week and in many ways I'm still recovering from it.  Come January, I'll have six courses, up from five this term, which augurs for a repeat of the end of term insanity unless I can figure out a way to coordinate a more professor-friendly calendar rather than the student-friendly one I ran with this time.  Is that selfish?  Probably, but it's a necessary selfishness, I fear.  That means, though, that I'm going to have to be something of a so-called "hard-ass" next term.  I'm sure that'll thrill my future charges.

Onto another matter.  Now and then, something happens culturally that makes me feel very much like an odd man out, particularly when critical and general responses are largely laudatory while mine is ambivalent or worse.  Such is the case of No Country For Old Men, a movie I find myself unable to like.  Certainly, there are many admirable things about it, including the performances, the cinematography and the direction.  In many ways, it's a study in stillness and silence which surely makes the interruptions of violence seem far more brutal than they otherwise might be.  It's also perhaps the most genuinely nihilistic film I've seen in years, even outpacing the dark-comic-cum-revenge-tragic Before The Devil Knows You're Dead. 

So, what's missing, or what am I missing?  There's something passionless about the whole project, something too artificial by half, that I find too distancing, and consequently dull, as the vastness of it all seems to choke off any capacities for empathetic or visceral response.  There's nothing purgative about the movie, which I suspect is supposed to be the point, but it ends up short-circuiting anything emotive or ostensibly "satisfying," using that word in the largest dramaturgical sense rather than the colloquial one.  As a meditation on violence and chance, it works, I guess, but only in the sense that A History of Violence did, another film whose praise I did not understand and thought inexplicably effusive.  Everything is treated with a kind of clinical coolness that's supposed to be intellectual or at least objective, but the result is counter-intuitive and anti-climactic.  Yes, that's probably a mimesis of the film's nihilism, but it renders the film little more than a mental exercise, and irresolute and intractable one at that.  That's probably why the film ends with Tommy Lee Jones describing a dream, as if provoking us to decipher the dream when it's probably just a disconcerting koan.  Violence is swift, arbitrary, discordant, beyond the limited methods of rational understanding; it just happens, both within and beyond the pale, as incidental as a mosquito bite.  No wonder the withered "hero" of the piece (Jones) is so ineffectual; he's supposed to be, lest the film suggest that violence can be countenanced or confronted.  It just simply is, and we're left to respond to it with the troubled indifference that the Jones character does.  The film's violence is the stuff of waking nightmare, and just as preventable.  And yet, like a nightmare, the film is visually vivid but oddly alienating.  I reached the end of it wondering, beyond the intellectual circularity (to say nothing of defeatism) of it all, why I should care.  That's the problem with the film, and nihilism generally; they both have only themselves as their own rewards.  It's a peculiarly tepid reminder that nihilo ex nihilo, nothing comes from nothing.

I realize I'm nearly alone in this response.  No Country for Old Men (its title torn from Yeats) feels too much like a crossword puzzle or a sudoku, admirably constructed to be sure but manifestly trivial; it resolves itself rhetorically, pointlessly, a resolution for resolution's sake; it is the sum of its parts and nothing more.  It's thoughtful but not insightful, and because of its mimetic approach to its central themes, too aloof to be involving and too significant to be finally substantial.  There's a scene near the end where one of the characters, I won't say who, is encouraged to call head or tails on a coin flip to determine his or her fate.  The character's refusal to do so is supposed to suggest a refusal to play by the fatalistic rules of the villain's game.  Ultimately, however, the character seems to reflect the Coen brothers' abnegation of the rules of their own cinematic game, and while that's laudable, even admirable in a way, it's probably also why the film is so staunchly unsatisfying.  It invests our time and offers nothing afterward, perhaps like life itself, and while I suspect that's supposed to be disquieting, it's just barren and dyspeptic, offering experience but disavowing meaning.  Maybe that's what's most profoundly unsatisfying about the movie: it's all unjust just-ness, just a darker version of Fargo, or a less gripping version of Blood Simple; it's all just a moody parable, a stilted and relentlessly ambivalent allegory of nothing signifying nothing.   It all just is-- passionless, pointless and surprisingly painless.   And if the film doesn't care, why should we?  Or maybe it's just a coolness which I can neither countenance nor confront, except as an intellectual exercise, passionlessly, pointless and, yes, painlessly.  It's all too easy when one simply doesn't care.

Now, Then and the Half-Poetic Shrug

It's all too tempting to use this space to rant about the insanity of things: the lunacy of trying to mark piles and piles of assignments in a fruitfly's lifetime, the impossible me-me-me-ness of (certain) students who think one has nothing to do but tend to them, the crests of snow that will surely bollix up the traffic in these parts for days; all too tempting to resort to the cyberspace equivalent of a primal scream only thinly-disguised as either a screed or a jeremiad. Let's just say that with the end of term, the dramatic entry of winter, and the drudgerous demands of the "holidays" (yeah, right...), there's just too damned much going on to begin whining. If I did, I'd never stop.

Unfortunately, I can't say I have much of interest to report. It looks like I'm going to have at least six courses come January, though I suspect at least two and maybe three of them will be smaller classes (he writes with fingers crossed, which, he assures you, is a feat in itself). As I understand it, there are even possibilities for more, not that I want them, but I guess the demand is there and I haven't entirely farked up my current lot of students (though a little bit is, in fact, required by law). It's a little surprising, really; I had been told to expect a decrease in workload. So much for that, I guess. I'm really looking forward to one of the courses, though; it should be fun.

And, I guess there's one other bit of "news," such as it is: I lost my hat. I'm not sure how I feel about that, as there are various connexions to it to incur something very near ambivalence, but that fedora had become, over too many years, something like a Dr J trademark with so many of its indicative, and sometimes ironic, characteristics. But it's gone now, almost certainly for good, and I can't help but wonder if that marks the end—or the beginning—of an age. Times, like old loves and former selves, pass away into accident and circumstance, for good or for ill, and it's too easy, like complaining, to fuss too much about them. Best, I think, just to shrug them all away. And yet, maybe that's a problem for all of us, how easily we shrug things all away. After all, those easy answers, they're so tempting, aren't they? Because all of life's sensible answers, right or wrong, are always too temptingly easy, or too easily tempting, by half.

Another Fry Up

So you can share my addiction: herewith the YouTube links for the most recent episode of QI:  part one, part two and part three.  It's a pip.  If you don't end up hooked on the show, you're a stronger soul than I.  (Careful, NSFW due to bits of naughty language.)

Also, finally picked up Fry's The Stars' Tennis Balls, which I had been trying to locate for some time.  You have to love his bio from it: 

Stephen Fry was born in the twentieth century and will die in the twenty-first.  In the course of writing six books he has drunk four hundred and twelve thousand cups of coffee, smoked one a half million cigarettes and worn out nineteen pairs of trousers.  He has no birth sign.

The novel's a variation on The Count of Monte Cristo, though its title is torn from Webster's The Duchess of Malfi.  Can't wait until I can actually take the time to read it. 

A Little Note For Now

Consider this an update more in theory than in fact.  As ever of late, I'm whelmed by marking that seems only to worsen with each passing week; in the past week alone, I've probably been grading assignments for thirty to forty hours entirely exclusive of my normal teaching duties and (worse inevitably following worse) making all kinds of extra-curricular meetings for students who didn't, or couldn't be bothered to, signup to discuss coursework in normal times.  Let's just say it's exhausting and leave it at that. 

In the interim, until I can actually think about a real entry, herewith a few short takes:

• Finally watched, in bits and pieces, the Guy Pearce film of The Count of Monte Cristo, which is a travesty of a film for anyone that knows the Dumas novel.  While it's nothing new for Hollywood to revamp a tale for its own purposes, the unmitigated evisceration of Dumas' plot, right down to excluding major characters and excoriating all of the issues of mercy so key to the novel, is utterly unpardonable.  More sadly, though, it reminded me of how long it has been since I read anything for pleasure; seems like an eternity. 
  
• Though I can't feign much interest in the technological material, I discovered to my great joy that Stephen Fry-- the actor, director, novelist, comedian and general polymath-- has a blog.  I was particularly impressed by his discussion (a "blessay," as he calls it) of the global warming debate, partially by way of Pascal's Wager before he rightly rejects Pascal's practical cynicism.  It's long, and perhaps too dense and tangential for most, but it's a terrific read, especially if you know Fry's voice and can it hear it in your head as the words roll by; he and Lewis Black are the only comedians capable of regularly turning material into virtuoso comic arias.
  
• Speaking of Stephen Fry, unfortunately we in North America are not privy to most of his television projects as they inexplicably don't get aired over here.  Blessed be, then, YouTube, which offers most of the episodes of his brilliant series QI, a rare programme that's both delightfully informative and deliciously funny.  I highly recommend going over to YouTube and entering "QI Fry" as your search terms and savouring the results.  I also managed to purchase Fry's Bright Young Things last week, his film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies; it's quite good, though the last sections drag a bit.  Watch it if you can find it, though the latter will certainly be more difficult than the former.
  
• Can you tell I'm procrastinating from marking?  I thought so.
  
• Have been trying with some of my classes in recent weeks to add some oddities to add some spice to the duller lessons of grammar & writing.  Did some lectures on the history of the word "word," contranyms, and the counter-instinctive nature of prose, as opposed to the instinctual nature of poetry (with the primary unit of logic for the former being the sentence, but the latter being the line).  One wonders, however, how much any of this takes in convincing my young charges to thing more actively about language.  It has, at least, to be more interesting than the myriad rules for comma usage.  *shrug*

Okay, I've obliged this blog long enough for now.  Marking beckons like an angry shrew, so I'd best attend its call.  Until later, probably much later,

the increasingly recondite, scattered and almost completely exasperated Dr J

Bloody Brilliant

Although I should note that XP never, ever rebooted so quickly before.  And Vista, well Vista, the less I say about that intrusive piece of fecund technology the better (lest Microflaccid decide to make any George Lucas-like "improvements")....

link via Clevergirl, with thanks.

She's Baaaaaack....

And this time, she's got company.  Gawd help the Internets-- and all of us.  ;-)

(Historical side-note: It was Christie and RK that were primarily responsible for kicking this blog into existence so many years ago, way back when I actually thought I would maintain it diligently.  Anyway, now you know whom to blame.)

Spending all day marking & trying to figure out how to handle a new transit strike that promises to start very soon.  Life, ain't she grand?  Pffft.

Jesus H. Kristeva

Sorry, everyone, but I haven't had any time whatsoever in the past-- has it really been?-- two months to write.  Such is life at New Institution, alas.  That's also unlikely to change anytime soon, unfortunately. 

I was reminded tonight, though, of an old "issue" for (inter-)textualists, the one commonly called Tommy Westphall Syndrome.  (Make sure you read the "external links" at the bottom.)  Given the spectacularly, to say nothing of circularly, onanistic nature of such thinking, I was reminded that the Westphall Syndrome is probably the best example in the past thirty years of a broad cultural koan, and a ludicrously over-considered one at that.  Two other thoughts occurred to me.  One:  that this "riddle," if it deserves to be called that, reminds me of the episode of Frasier in which the good shrink, bored at work, subconsciously manufactures for himself a dream that's psychologically indecipherable just for the challenge.  The other, of course, was much cheekier, and speaks to the absurdity of the riddling itself:  that the pontificators should be well and gladly pleased that St. Elsewhere never crossed over with Newhart.  Then whose dream would television be?  Or would all dreams be collective after all?  In which case, not only would the world, and all its fictional worlds, be dreams within dreams, but shared ones to boot?  In which case, we'd have gone beyond Kristevan incredulities and landed somewhere in Jung's town.  How's that for an imponderable ponderable? 

Wow. Just Wow.

Someone clearly needs a life--- and a little disassociation therapy.  And probably a island's worth of sedation.  (Link courtesy Christie.)  Warning:  prepare your pity sacks!  Or at least you vomit bags.

Apologies for the lack of posting lately:  life is nuts-to-the-wall insane, and I'm spending much too much of my time either in transit or in recuperation.  As Danny Glover famously put it, "I'm too old for this...."

God Help Us All

Just when you thought television couldn't get any worse....  At least it won't feature Ben Mulroney.

Under The Fold

Subtext?  SUBTEXT?!?!  We don't need no stinkin' subtext.... 

(Key quote:  "This is hurting...."  Indeed.)

And Turn Away Thy Face

Now this is what you call "dramatic irony." 

Brief Update

Hard as it is to believe, the NSG Doc has finally caught up with the times.  Well, kinda.  I'm writing this entry from my long-wanted but only recently-acquired laptop.  It's a neat little system, with a great display and a nifty design.  It is, however, causing me to install all the programmes I use on a regular basis, and I'm having to deal with the various frustrations caused by Microsoft Vista.  I can certainly see why people aren't enamored with it.  It's slow, bloated and irksome, especially when it nags you about every single task you attempt.  I'd remove it, but something tells me that'd be more hassle than it'd be worth.  Otherwise, though, I love the new system and I can only imagine how much commuting time won't be going to waste anymore. 

BTW, thanks to those of you who sent kind wishes regarding yesterday.  They were much appreciated.  Perhaps more later.  Cheers.

At Long Last

And it's about effing time .... 

Logical Positivism

Wow, it has been a long time since I updated here:  have been crazy-busy lately with various things (writing, editing, reviewing medical briefs slightly larger than Montana) and desperately pretending that it isn't really August.  I am in the slow process of setting up at New Institution which, it turns out, is much more complicated than it used to be: contractual stuff, net access, voice mail, the whole drill.  (I shudder to think how exasperating it'll be checking voice mail on even a semi-regular basis; email alone has become a chore.)  I'm also trying to figure out the eventual purchase of a laptop, which is an odd thing since I've been using the same desktop since Clinton left office.  As I'm planning to continue my freelance work, I'm going to need one with all the work I'll have to do.  Turns out I'll also have to use a laptop in my teaching, which I've never had to do before.  It feels like I'm being dragged into contemporaneity, and in my experience that usually means more work rather than less.  C'est la vie. 

I've also learned that one of the things I'm going to have to teach is the tired chestnut of the five-paragraph essay.  Surely you all know the structure.  It's also one I used to rail against in class, as many of you also know (probably too well).  That structure, in the hands of some genuinely awful teachers, has probably been responsible for some of the most turgid and thoughtless essay-writing I've had to endure because so many people think in rubrics rather than argumentative or analytical logic.  No religious man I, suddenly I'm praying I can impart the fundamentals without accidentally becoming part of the problem-- specifically, contributing to the breeding or enabling of Baaaaaad Writing.  The structure works as a teaching device because it's simple and memorable; but as an organizing principle, it's often woefully misleading and functionally impractical.  When I taught first-year courses at Place Of Which I Do Not Speak, one of the first things I used to do was demolish that model.  Now I have to promote it.   I'm sure several of you are laughing your butts off as a result.

So, yeah, there's a lot cooking these days with only more to come.  I can't promise, alas, a return to form in re blogging any time soon.  It's that time of year when I normally become most elusive (and, if caught, surly).  It came to my attention, however, that this year-- for the first time-- I will officially be twice as old as most of my students.  Twice.  As they say, if I were a horse, they'd have shot me by now.  How's that for logical positivism?

Delays and Dissonances

Sheesh: lately it seems every time I go to update this blasted blog, I feel I should apologize; same, in fact, for finally answering any of the emails that have gathered like moss recently. With things being the way they have been, combined with a general distaste for writing, I must have seemed at best erratic and at worst rude. My apologies. And, I should add, my thanks to those who've expressed congratulations and such, even if I haven't gotten around to thanking everyone individually.

Just some random bits and pieces for your consideration:

• Watching The Simpsons Movie, I was struck by one sight gag that has to be one of the most insightful observations I've seen in a long, long while. At one point, as a giant dome is falling upon Springfield and the direness of the town's predicament becomes apparent, the movie cuts to a shot of the town church and Moe's Tavern. The denizens of each stare up into the sky, panic, and run into the opposite building: the drunks to church, the religious to darkened stools. Ah, truth in satire. When the shit hits the fan, the familiar crutch just won't do. Bloody brilliant.
• Ironic moment pending: Occurred to me the other day what a joy it would be to fly-on-the-wall when Nelly Furtado's daughter becomes an out-of-control teenager. The precocious But Mom!s would be priceless. *snicker*
• Ever like ships in the night, it seems that just as I'm about start working in the same city as Zelda, she's off to another city. The story of our lives: always in the same area, never in the same place at the same time....
• Since being sheared like a New Zealand lamb, I've been inundated with "Oh-my-God-you-look" [insert number here between 19 and 22, with or without a colourful expletive]. Sure, it's all supposed to be complimentary & all that, and I'm equally sure most of the remarking is exaggerated. It reminds me, though, why I started growing in beards all those years ago; one tires of the "do you have ID" and effusive darlingism. There's something desperately wrong with the world when people start calling me "cute." *Shiver* Especially when I know it's meant in the Gary Coleman sort of way. Ugh. Talk about your cognitive dissonances; it's like describing Burgess Meredith as "cuddly." Or Trouble, pictured at right doing his best impression of a possum, as "ambitious." (Old Cat's Book of Practical Possums, anyone?)

Oh well. It's August, that most dread-inducing month. It's enough to drive a man to drink--- even more than usual. Then again, I like my crutches tried and true.

Kinda Sorta

Yes, yes, yes:  I have been delinquent in updating this blog, so my apologies to those of you who keep checking it so inexplicably dutifully.  Have been asea in issues and paperwork, and generally exhausted, but I have finally (and surely temporarily) alighted from the waves long enough to catch my breath.  And yes, as Zozo tweaked in one of her comments, there is a bit of a change for the Ole Doc, as he will be assuming a new position shortly at a local institution.  (As opposed to my last institution, the position for which I was constantly forced to assume zoologically constituted "presenting.")  But good news in my own regard has been so rare, that every little bit counts. 

So, there you have it.  Kinda sorta.  Discretion, better part, you know the drill.  But now you know.  Kinda sorta. ;-)

Scum and Villainy

You must be cautious.



And yes, he does do a better job than Ewan.

From There To Where?

Something to remember from Alan Watts, with a little help from Stone & Parker. Key words: "And it was a hoax...." Yup.


One of the ironies, of course, is that if you study (say) Tom Eliot or Wallace Stevens, you need to know this sort of thinking intimately. Then they tell you to-- what?-- go do this and then this and then that. Oh, and that too. No wonder so many of us, to steal Mr. Yeats' image, cannot tell the dancer from the dance.

Tuesday Meld

Just a few notes on recent items & events:

• The much, much, much too-hyped CNN-YouTube debate for the Democratic presidential nominees wasn't the failure some predicted it would be, but it wasn't the political watershed moment CNN would have you think it was either. The big winner from last night? Democrats generally. With the Republican version not happening until September, the Dems will get almost two months of credit for engaging "the public" directly. The Republicans, however, are going to get crucified when their questions get sent in; by September, the schisms within the party will be plain and the calls for blood will be positively choral.
• You Jane Austen fans out there might appreciate this. In the Google age, this is inexcusable and should send more than a few heads rolling.
• The Guardian put together its list of the fifty greatest film comedies. Note some of the really bottom-of-the-barrel inclusions. We'll see if The Simpsons Movie makes a future version, but if the Guardian review is any indication, it will be; the review falls somewhere between supplication and fellatio.
• I will not link to any item about the LiLo fiasco. Period. I will only add this: given the paranoiac effects of alcohol and cocaine, and her constant realization that yes, she is being hounded everywhere, one should hardly wonder why she keeps going on and off the, ahem, rails. Remember the old adage: Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean that no one's following you.
• Recent online discovery: this wonderful reflection by the great lyric critic Helen Vendler. Pious Labours, especially: as RK would say, RLAID; read, learn and inwardly digest.
• After being reminded recently of Northrop Frye's The Well-Tempered Critic, I decided the other day to reread it in its entirety--- and which I did, in one sitting over pints at one of my locals. The first essay I'd still encourage everyone, of literary bent or not, to read & re-read & re-read yet again: it's brilliant, central and more valuable now than when it was written those forty-plus years ago. It also reminded me why I loathe the current critical trend to discuss literature as "discourse." Discourse, in its current usage, is really just an attempt to conflate the various areas of critical distinction which Aristotle rightly separated: the ethical, the rhetorical, the poetical. It also conveniently allows lit-critters to say and to write whatever the hell they want, regardless of disciplinary considerations, while guising it as scholarship. In short, it's a license to bullshit and has been used, egregiously, as one. No wonder I wince when I see the word in any scholarship in the past forty years; it has become meaningless, save to say that it indicates and enables pretentious prognostication of the broadest order. We'd do well, I think, to re-read our Aristotle--- without the commonplace sniggering about the convenient compartmentalization of elements.

Hair shorn and beard gone, believe it or not, I have been shocking the hell out of people lately. Further to the Ripley's file, from a young woman the other day: So how old are you? 22, 23?

If only, dear lass, if only....

It's, Like (You Know), Unmitigated Bullshit (updated)

Here's the biggest, steaming, corn-infested lot I've seen in some time.  Key quote:

Parents may gnash their teeth, but language scholars like like.

"It's a shame this poor little usage gets such a bum rap," says Jennifer Dailey-O'Cain, an associate professor at the University of Alberta in Canada.  Dailey-O'Cain, who has published an often-cited study on the use of like, says, "It's innovative, it serves a particular function and it does specific things that you can't duplicate with other quotatives."

Someone needs to revoke that woman's tenure-- even if it is at U of A.

FOLLOWUP:  I mentioned Frye in the comments.  Here's a good example of the sort of thing I'm talking about, and for which the common usage of "like" is cognate:

The other day a student came to consult me about a failure in English, and what he said, as I recorded immediately he left, was this:

Y'know, I couldn't figure what happened, cause, jeez, well, I figured, y'know, I had that stuff cold-- I mean, like I say, I'd gone over the stuff 'an figured I knew it, and-- well, jeez, I do' know.

I submit that this is not prose, and I suspect he had failed because he had not understood the difficulties of translating his speech into prose.  He was, of course, "taking" English.  But English was not taking him: fifteen years of schooling had failed to make any impression on his speech habits.

(Northrop Frye, The Well-Tempered Critic)

(That speech, by the way, I heard, in one form or another, countless times in my day.)  With Dailey-O'Cain and those who concur with her, we have academics acting as apologists for filler "language," for the babble of syllabic fumbling and stumbling.  In short, it's the evidence of inchoate thinking-- and a result of untimely and ill-considered expression.  So, yes, if you will:  like is, quite literally, a premature ejaculation.  Something to consider, non?

You have to love the (Groucho) Marxist turn by Frye there: "But English was not taking him."  Alas, English isn't taking a great number of its students these days....