This is even more self-indulgent than usual, but you may want to know that I’ve added two new pages to my website in the interests of fully cataloging my activities and person on the Internet. One page provides my full CV, while another archives some syllabi for courses I’ve taught. I only barely apologize for the self-indulgence of the latter gesture, since I really do believe, as I grandiosely say over on the page, that the course syllabus is one of the great unappreciated narrative forms of our time! Which doesn’t mean mine are great—only that I’ve tried.
Website Updates
Outside, the orchard and a piece of moon
Are islands, he an island as he walks,
Brushing against weed stalks.
By hook and plume
The seeds gathering on his trouser legs
Are archipelagoes, like nests he sees
Shadowed in branching, ramifying trees,
Each with unique expressions in its eggs.
Different islands conjure
Different beings; different beings call
From different isles. And after all
His scrutiny of Nature
All he can see
Is how it will grow small, fade, disappear,
A coastline fading from a traveler
Aboard a survey ship. Slowly,
As coasts depart,
Nature had left behind a naturalist
Bound for a place where species don’t exist,
Where no emergence has a counterpart.
— Gjertrud Schnackenberg, “Darwin in 1881”
Thus, according to what is now conventional progressive wisdom, equality requires censorship. What is the provenance of this belief? It dates back some 30 years to the feminist anti-porn movement, which equated presumptively offensive sexual speech with sexual assaults and labeled pornography a civil rights violation (pursuant to a model statute conceived by Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin).
—
(The contemporary Left’s complete and total abandonment of any philosophical defense of freedom of speech is highly alarming. The argument that it’s done in the service of breaking white-male hegemony is unpersuasive, given that the philosophical underpinning of their attack on free speech is directly traceable to the grand old men of European philosophy, Hegel above all, who, whatever his merits, was surely wrong to argue, if I understand him correctly [big “if,” of course!], that the ethical life can only be lived through the state. The new consensus on the Left is doubly worrying when I consider the fact that with only one exception, every single complaint about sexually-inappropriate or otherwise “uncomfortable” reading material that I’ve personally heard or heard of from undergraduates concerned writing by queer authors, e.g., Allen Ginsberg, Samuel R. Delany, Gloria Anzaldúa. If supporters of this kind of policy don’t think that its miscalculated vagueness will be used as a weapon against them by the countervailing forces of conservative censorship, then, well, they should think again. Robespierre may go last, but he inevitably goes.)
“The rose is, in Greek mythology, associated with Aphrodite, who is often shown with roses garlanding her hair. It is the flower that most readily stands in for the female body, for female sexuality. But DeFeo’s Rose is not the bloom of purity, not the blush of first desire. It is more vagina dentata, an alluring but dangerous trap, a pleasure and a menace.”
“Beauty, the world seemed to say. And as if to prove it (scientifically) wherever he looked at the houses, at the railings, at the antelopes stretching over the palings, beauty sprang instantly. To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy. Up in the sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round and round, yet always with perfect control as if elastics held them; and the flies rising and falling; and the sun spotting now this leaf, now that, in mockery, dazzling it with soft gold in pure good temper; and now again some chime (it might be a motor horn) tinkling divinely on the grass stalks—all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere.”
―Virginia Woolf, “Mrs. Dalloway,” published on this day in 1925
Has there, moreover, ever been a phallic power? This entire history of patriarchal domination, of phallocracy, the immemorial male privilege, is perhaps only a story. Beginning with the exchange of women in primitive societies, stupidly interpreted as the first stage of woman-as-object. All that we have been asked to believe - the universal discourse on the inequality of the sexes, the theme song of an egalitarian and revolutionary modernity (reinforced, these days, with all the energies of a failed revolution) - is perhaps one gigantic misunderstanding. The opposite hypothesis is just as plausible and, from a certain perspective, more interesting - that is, that the feminine has never been dominated, but has always been dominant. The feminine considered not as a sex, but as the form transversal to every sex, as well as to every power, as the secret, virulent form of in-sexuality. The feminine as a challenge whose devastation can be experienced today throughout the entire expanse of sexuality. And hasn’t this challenge, which is also that of seduction, always been triumphant?
—
Jean Baudrillard, Seduction (1979)
(As far as I can tell, Baudrillard’s counter-hypothesis remains the dominant story according to folk wisdom, men’s and women’s. Granted, my only evidence for this assertion, given that I am a mere male, is that I was more or less raised in a beauty shop. But this was the consensus in that particular institution and, I suspect, in many others—excluding, of course, mine and Baudrillard’s, i.e., the university.)
Odilon Redon (French, 1840–1916), Day: From the series Dreams, 1891, Lithograph, Image: 8 1/4 x 6 1/8 in. (21 x 15.6 cm); sheet: 17 5/8 x 12 7/16 in. (44.8 x 31.6 cm).
As a shy and lonely boy in his uncle’s remote old house, Redon discovered that books, pictures, and music opened windows onto marvelous vistas. From his childhood on, he maintained an attachment to a world of fantasy and dreams that he often pictured in charcoal drawings and lithographs he called noirs, for both their essential substance and resonance were black. “One must respect black,” he wrote. “Nothing prostitutes it. It does not please the eye and it awakens no sensuality. It is the agent of the mind far more than the most beautiful color to the palette or prism.”
My heart seemed to purge itself of its own accord…For this I couldn’t even blame the laws of nature, although I have always resented the laws of nature more than anything else all my life.
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground (via c-ovet)
Drawings and notes in Dostoevsky’s Notebooks for Crime and Punishment
John Ruskin, Stone Pines at Sestri, 1845
Thirteen Girls by Mikita Brottman
Click for my review of Mikita Brottman’s excellent story-cycle about serial murder, Thirteen Girls. It’s a book I recommend.
INTERVIEWER
You are, in fact, a fan of Dostoyevsky.
ISHIGURO
Yes. And of Dickens, Austen, George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins—that full-blooded nineteenth-century fiction I first read in university.
INTERVIEWER
What do you like about it?
ISHIGURO
It’s realist in the sense that the world created in the fiction is more or less akin to the world we live in. Also, it’s work you can get lost in. There’s a confidence in narrative, which uses the traditional tools of plot and structure and character. Because I hadn’t read a lot as a child, I needed a firm foundation. Charlotte Brontë of Villette and Jane Eyre; Dostoyevsky of those four big novels; Chekhov’s short stories; Tolstoy of War and Peace. Bleak House. And at least five of the six Jane Austen novels. If you have read those, you have a very solid foundation. And I like Plato.
INTERVIEWER
Why?
ISHIGURO
In most of his Socratic dialogues, what happens is, some guy is walking along the street who thinks he knows it all, and Socrates sits down with him and demolishes him. This might seem destructive, but the idea is that the nature of what is good is elusive. Sometimes people base their whole lives on a sincerely held belief that could be wrong. That’s what my early books are about: people who think they know. But there is no Socrates figure. They are their own Socrates.
There’s a passage in one of Plato’s dialogues in which Socrates says that idealistic people often become misanthropic when they are let down two or three times. Plato suggests it can be like that with the search for the meaning of the good. You shouldn’t get disillusioned when you get knocked back. All you’ve discovered is that the search is difficult, and you still have a duty to keep on searching.
—
Paris Review interview with Kazuo Ishiguro
(Which I was reminded of by the earlier Paris Review manuscript post. It’s a strange, attractive personal “canon” for a novelist who seems so non-realist and anti-Victorian and perspectivist, and also a reminder that I really need to read Villette soon.)
Frederiksborg Castle, Denmark (by Enrico L. )
A manuscript page from a novel in progress by Kazuo Ishiguro.
