Robert Scholes: Textual Power

Oh, academia. 

During my years teaching public school in America, I came to the classroom with a very clear set of goals for the students.

1. For them to read, watch, and listen to some interesting things, and have something interesting to say or write about them.
2. For them to walk away with a definition of literature that includes more than just old books.

That was it.  To that end, I filled my students' minds with comic books, telenovelas, advertisements, and yes, Shakespeare, and didn't care for a moment whether their perspective matched mine.  I didn't ask them what the underlying themes in the telenovelas were, I asked them "What makes this a telenovela?"  Their answers to the latter question would serve equally well as answers to the former--revenge, betrayal, power, lust--but the difference was that they were not receiving textuality from the text, they were creating it as part of a community of viewers with an implicit understanding of the medium. 

And so for the first half of this book, I was pumping my fist in the air with Scholes.  "We have an endless web here, of growth, and change, and interaction, learning and forgetting, dialogue and dialectic.  Our task as teachers is to introduce students to this web, to make it real and visible for them, insofar as we can, and to encourage them to cast their own strands of thought and text into this network . . ." he urges (21).  "Right on, brother!" I concurred.  "We move from a submission to textual authority in reading, through a sharing of textual power in interpretation, toward an asssertion of power through opposition in criticism" he advocates (39).  "Preach! Testify!" I responded.  "We neither capture nor create the world with our texts, but interact with it" (112).  "Amen!  Come lord Chaucer!" 

It is unclear at exactly what point he lost me.  His transition from the argument for teaching students of literature to construct a web of understanding and connect it to the existing web where they can, to a specific assault on certain of his contemporaries is so subtle and gradual that I am at a loss to give it a page number.  If this were a thesis and I his advising professor, I would stop him around chapter seven and guide him back in the direction of actual teaching practice.  For lack of such a guiding hand, Scholes tears off in a direction that is guilty of some of the sins against which he rails.  His invective against Stanley Fish is positioned at the apex of the book, in a way that would lead a reader to believe that such an assault was the primary reason for the book's existence.  His takedown is thorough and decisive, and one would have hoped that he returned at the last to the question of what this means for teachers.  He never does.  The result is that he spins a beautiful web of pedagogy, at once subversive and practical, then departs that web for another.  He does this seemingly with the intention of connecting the two into one great tapestry, but gets entangled in academic point-counterpoint, and dies there, covered in sticky, silken arguments.

Intolerance

I'm struggling to come up with a suitable metaphor for D.W. Griffith.  Was he the Brian Singer or Michael Bay of his time?  He certainly had their gift for pandering, for filling a slapdash script with car chases, tits, and explosions.  Or is he more analogous to Brett Ratner and James Cameron, with an ego big enough to actually stamp his initials on the narration slides, and infuse this mess with a pedantic air that convinces one he thought it was a public service? 

At any rate, it's clear that Griffith's gifts did not lie in scriptwriting, and this heavy-handed attempt to make Literature recoils from the mirror when seen in that light.  His titular subject is seemingly chosen at random, although no doubt influenced by the public's reaction to his earlier travesty, Birth of a Nation.  Of the four stories chosen to illustrate his subject, only one of them is even remotely relevant, and even that of the Bartholomew's Day Massacre was likely recommended by its picturesque potential, rather than its thematic relevance. 

I came to this film with an analytical eye, primed by name recognition, purported significance, and thematic potential to see layers of meaning in the film, carefully woven narrative threads, resonant confluences of character and plot.  I spent far too much mental effort trying to decipher the patterns hidden in the color washes he used for the various themes.  Were the green overlays meant to invoke jealousy?  The purple ones lust?  But there was no pattern, neither in color nor in anything else. 

If I had not come prepared to take the film seriously, I might have enjoyed it.  The sound stages are fit out in regalia that would still be impressive today.  No expense was spared, and one staggers to imagine how he convinced backers to put up 2.5 million in 1916 dollars.  A modern viewer can also find much to amuse in the laughable deaths of main characters, filmed seemingly in one take with 19th century stage props.  If I had brought as much mental effort to the viewing as I do to that of an X-Men movie, all of which are guilty in smaller portion of the same sins, I might have simply forgotten about it.  But I came to it with the mistaken hope that it might be good--as much a mistake as doing the same with any of the aforementioned modern directors.

Gabby Ruiz: Juliet Takes a Breath

I should have read this without having should to have had.  I can't even remember the last book I read for pleasure, without a list or a promise or a book club to drive me to finish it.  But if I was the sort of person who read things he didn't feel he had to (namely, other than cripplingly lazy), this would have been on the list anyway. 

It's a good, if flawed book.  I tried to give it the Literature treatment, highlighting passages that I thought would have thematic significance later, but it simply didn't hold up to that sort of analysis.  Nonetheless, I didn't put it down and read it straight through.  It charmingly weaves a braid of coming of age, queer theory, and racial thinkpiece filled with appealing characters that can be forgiven for seeming overly broad in light of the fact that they are based on real people who, in all likelihood, are actually caricatures of themselves. 

This book wasn't written for me at any angle.  I am neither trying to find where I fit in the world racially, coming to terms with the mechanisms of my own body, nor experiencing the first flutters of love and sexual desire.  There wasn't a single face in the book I could wear, but I still found it revealing.  The title character learns early what I wish I had learned at all: that your identity is never going to be explained to you, and that you must take pieces of what works for you from knowledgeable people you trust, and fill in the gaps with what they could never offer. 

Benedetto Croce: The Essence of Aesthetic

That the author should endeavor such a task as to define art in one word is remarkable enough.  That he very nearly succeeds is nothing short of formative.

Croce's proposal that art can be defined simply as "intuition" is the sort of seductive aphorism that I am surprised doesn't get tossed around more than the similarly catchy and vague "The act of you looking is art".  It bears up to casual conversation, and is suitable to be dropped as a one-liner over a glass of Malbec, but not a glass of absinthe.  Intuition is a word, and as such is at mercy to all the linguistic traps that Wittgenstein proposed, the more so insofar as Croce proposed it in his native Italian.  It is suffused with layers of meaning and interpretation, many of which are unique to the individual speaker of listener, and the idea of art as intuition requires as much translation, explication, and defense as one would expect.  What is remarkable about Croce is not, therefore, that he has chosen a word that is more or less acceptable to represent something that seemingly defies representation.  Rather, it is that the idea behind his choice is so incisive and universal that it untangles not only the conundrum at hand, but does so in a way that reveals underlying truths much deeper than he may have intended to probe.  The Gordian knot he cuts is revealed to have been holding up the curtain of perception that obscures reality, and which so many mistake for reality itself.

Hans Gombrich's excellent treatment of The Story of Art is one that I, rightly or not, recall as framing art as the constant swing of a pendulum between what is seen and what is known, between perception and thought, idea and reality.  Croce denies the existence of this pendulum, and in fact begins his argument with a denial of anything historical, moral, technical, or scientific in the nature of art.  Those who phrase art in terms of its purpose, its rightful execution, or its place in society are mistaking the reflection of the moon for the moon itself, the frame for the picture.  Art is not a dialectic between two things, Croce determines, not the swinging of a pendulum, but the thesis of the two, the moment when the pendulum suddenly comes to rest. 

Although the word intuition itself if not helpful in the task that Croce has set for it, his exponence of it most certainly is.  There are those that insist art is an act of beauty, a product--be it poem, song, or image--that exists in and of itself.  Accordingly, any question of meaning or purpose has no place in the conversation.  On the other hand are those that say the mere beauty of an object is not enough to qualify it as art.  These latter are constantly asking what it "means" (a nauseating question, to be sure) and finding no deeper purpose behind a work, consign it to the merely pleasing, rather than artistic.  Croce reveals this argument to be a foolish one, but, like so many foolish questions, one that inadvertently reveals the truth behind it.  Art is neither product nor process, image nor idea, but rather the perfect union of the two in one moment.  A moment of true art is not a song, poem, or image that perfectly expresses a moment of the soul; nor is it a philosophical truth somehow given form.  It is both of these things and neither: an unreal reality.  For Croce, art is the moment when it is not necessary to "promote mysterious nuptials between sign and image", but when the image itself is the sign (52).  The signifier of art cannot be divorced from its signified, any more than a word can be divorced from its meaning.  Both exist simultaneously in the sign, and to say that one does not gain supremacy over the other is to miss the point.  Rather, both cease to exist, and language, or art, is born. Anything that can be called Art is the marriage of the real and the unreal, the seen and the unseen, the perceived and the conceived, a lyrical intuition of a state of the soul.

No doubt my interpretation of Croce's meaning is heavily colored by my own thinking.  His language is often obscure, and he frequently takes for granted that of which I have no knowledge.  Combined with the obvious dangers of translation (although Italian is less opaque to English than some languages), and it may well be that Croce would give me a good slap for misunderstanding him so thoroughly.  Nonetheless, dead as he is, I shall add this volume to the growing, internal works cited page that appendices my continuing search for the nacheinander and the nebeneinander, the unreal reality of life.

The Revelation to John

It's hard to believe that I'm actually finishing this project.  For all of the other inconsistencies in my life, and all of the other projects I've thrown into the metaphorical firepit over the last ten years, this blog is one thing about which I have been conscientious.  Every book I've read during that time.  Hundreds of them.  It may be the only consistent thing in my life.  I'm pretty proud of it, whether or not anybody ever reads it.

1:1 I guess this is technically a fourth hand account, transmitted by  an as yet unnamed angel.  John's use of "soon" here likely does not mean what he thought it did at the time.

1:3 This is interesting.  What effect does reading these words aloud have?  This is the only mention of such a phenomenon of which I am aware.  Should I be reading this aloud as I go?  I'm tempted to.  But what are the terms and conditions of this blessing?  And what makes this prophecy different from others?

1:4 A nice parallel to the beginning of his own gospel.  John may have aged, but his voice and perspective are still recognizable here.  Who are these seven spirits though?

1:5 The ruler of the kings of the Earth?  In what way?  I am inclined to view Christ's Kingdom as entirely unaffiliated with Earthly governments.

1:7 I wonder what aspects of this in the Greek make it verse, and not prose.  What sets this passage apart linguistically?

1:8 A definite conflation of God and Christ here, consistent with John's theology elsewhere.

1:9 He "was" on Patmos?  Where is he now?

1:11 The literality of the seven churches here argues toward a literal interpretation of the seven spirits in 1:4.

1:12-16 More symbolism of 7s, but the figure here can be none other than Christ.  Didn't John say that the message was delivered to him through an intermediary in 1:1?

1:19 The Son of Man does not say "soon", but "after this".  John must have interpolated the time frame.

1:20 And, as I recalled, the seven spirits are indeed literal.  One for each church.  What church are those spirits supervising today, if any?

2:1 Ah, John is writing to the angels now?  Then perhaps not so literal after all.  Either "angel" here is a metaphor for a human overseer, or it refers to the spirit of the church in a metaphorical sense.

2:3,6 Peter and Paul also pounded this point pretty hard.

2:10 Curious to know if this came true in a literal sense.

2:11 The theme of conquest seemed unworthy of mention in 2:7, but the repetition here alerts one to a pattern.

2:12 And the way he identifies himself to each congregation is a nice little mini-theme within each message.  I don't recall John being this literary.

2:17 A fascinating and layered image.  I don't recall if it gets develop later or not, but I have my eye out for it.

2:20 Again, John almost sound like Paul here, only more florid.  Did they agree to this extent in life?

3:1 I would hate to be in the Sardis congregation when this letter was received . . .

3:11 Well, now he has said "soon".  I guess John wasn't taking liberties.

3:12 To each congregation, he makes a different promise for their conquest.  Of them all, the white stone with a new name on it is the one I would most like to receive.

4:1 This clears up the confusion about the messenger earlier.

4:2 The distinction is an important one.  The Son of Man with his seven spirits etc. is a physical manifestation, and all of his accoutrements are symbols of earthly things.  With this verse, though, everything we see until notified otherwise will be a symbol of something heavenly.

4:5 So much for that theory haha.  We now have the seven flames and seven spirits again.

4:6-8 I've always tended toward an interpretation of this section as an alternate view of Isaiah's chariot.  The see in from of the throne that John sees is the same expanse that Isaiah sees from below.  The four living creatures, each with one face, are the same as the Cherubs Isaiah saw.  Etc.

4:8 Definitely a theme with John, here and elsewhere.

4:9-12 I wonder how John resolved the clear separation between the one seated upon the throne and the Son of Man he met earlier.  Or did the dichotomy register for him?

5:6 These seven spirits are becoming the most fascinating part of this book.   Bound at the time of the writing to the seven congregations, but clearly not eternally so, they are here said to be sent into all the earth.  This part of the symbolism was also seriously undertreated in my upbringing, to the extent that I hardly remember it being interpreted at all.

5:8 The one seated upon the throne is rather pointedly silent.  

5:13 This dichotomy becomes even more pronounced here.  There can be no doubt in John's mind that this Lamb is Christ.  Who then is seated upon the throne?  It cannot be this same Lamb.  And the argument cannot hold that one is simply an earthly manifestation of the other, since we are solidly in the spirit realm here.

Samuel Wilson Fussell: Muscle

Whatever the intended audience for this book was, I am not among their number.

The most charitable interpretation I can offer is that it's a cautionary tale, one that successfully deglamourizes the world of competitive bodybuilding.  As though bodybuilders were not already unappealing enough, the detailed observations on cystic acne, prolapsed rectums, incontinence, and other side effects should more than serve to dissuade the reader from ever setting foot in that world.

A more cynical interpretation is that the book is written as a mea culpa, an apology to his parents and others whom he left behind to pursue his ridiculous task.  Each chapter is filled with self-deprecating explanations of why he did what he did, why he jettisoned his effete, academic life, and why he was sorry.  This is the literary equivalent of the fellow in your office who wants so badly to be thought of as intelligent that you can't bring yourself to give it to him.  It is the guy who says things like "What unspeakable hubris!" unironically, and "My clothes took on increasingly Brobdingnagian proportions" with a smirk that dares you to ask him what it means (201, 180).  The last chapter may well have been titled, "Can I Come Back Yet?"

But my personal interpretation is that the book was written for an audience of one.  I have certainly had those moments where I look back on my life from the emotional dumpster fire in which I stand and think, "How did I even get here?"  It is as though another took hold of my strings and shook me wildly across the stage, and then left me in a heap, draped across the lip of the bandshell.  What have I done?  Why did I throw all of that away, and for what?  It must not have been me; I was clearly possessed by a malevolent puppeteer, or an insane djinn.  At those moments, the only way to preserve one's sanity and move forward is to write a book, to spin a narrative out of the frayed threads, and then tell oneself, "This is what it meant." 

김려령: 완득이

한국 아동 소설을 읽을 때 왜 이렇게 고아, 아니면 부모랑 사이가 안 좋은 주인공 많이 나오냐는 생각이 든다.  생각해보니 Harry Potter, Tom Sawyer, To Kill a Mockingbird등과 같은 서양 소설도 그렇게 서있다.  왜 그랬을까요? 고아와 공감이 국가 간 경계를 넘어간 것 같는다.

근데, 이 책을 통하여 그렇게 경계 못 넘는 점을 이해하게 되었다. 대부분 한국 사람들 떡, 막창과 같은 쫄깃쫄깃한 음식을 미칠 뜻이 좋아한다.  대부분 서양인들이 "떡은 맛이 하나도 없는데 음식 아니고 입 운동"이라고 하면서 싫어한다.  왜 그런지 알게 됬다.  완득이란 주인공이 "나도 어느새 폐닭에 익숙해졌나보다. 씹기도 전에 똑똑 끊어진는 이 퍼석한 닭 정말 별로다"고한다.  한국 친구들 "질감도 맛이다" 설명한다.  난 그렇지 않다.  질감과 맛에 큰 차이가 있다.  떡은 질감이 있지만 맛은 없다. 그래도 한국 친구의 개념을 파악된 것같다.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

I like to put things into my own words usually, but in this case I find myself in such perfect agreement with the late Roger Ebert that I feel compelled to quote his review of this movie at length:

"The movie starts promisingly, with an amusing period-piece newsreel about the Cassidy gang. And then there is a scene in a tavern where Sundance faces down a tough gambler, and that's good. And then a scene where Butch puts down a rebellion in his gang, and that's one of the best things in the movie. And then an extended bout of train-robbing, climaxing in a dynamite explosion that'll have you rolling in the aisles. And then we meet Sundance's girlfriend, played by Katharine Ross, and the scenes with the three of them have you thinking you've wandered into a really first-rate film."

I concur wholeheartedly, and I also agree with Ebert when he goes on to observe that it all falls apart about halfway through.  this is especially true of the dialogue, which eventually

". . . gets so bad we can't believe a word anyone says. And then the violent, bloody ending is also a mistake; apparently it was a misguided attempt to copy "Bonnie and Clyde." But the ending doesn't belong on "Butch Cassidy," and we don't believe it, and we walk out of the theater wondering what happened to that great movie we were seeing until an hour ago."

This last line perfectly captures what went wrong.  What happened to the good, though not great, movie this could have been?  What misbegotten committee is responsible for turning it into a monstrous hybrid of Godard, Bacharach, and Apatow?  The only circumstance under which I could recommend this movie is to an aspiring director, as an example of how to lose one's vision.

Charles Singer: A Short History of Scientific Ideas to 1900

One of my favorite books from Ward's Lifetime of Reading so far has been E.H. Gombrich's The Story of Art.  Instead of just discussing various movements and their proponents, he wove a narrative of art as the constant interplay between the Turners and the Constables of the world, the Caravaggios and the Caraccis.  The story of art has been that of a pendulum swinging constantly between what we see and what we know.  Between our senses and our mind.  Reading that book has influenced how I see art more than any other experience.

This is probably responsible for my glee once I realized a few chapters in that Singer's intent was to do the same for scientific thought.  The story he tells, though he takes a well-calibrated amount of space to explain the various theories and discoveries themselves, is largely one of the constant push and pull between Plato and Aristotle--between mind and matter.  Scientific thought--and intellectual inquiry of all flavors--can never resist the urge to extrapolate beyond what we see.  To Platonize things and look for the underlying principle, the ideal.  Neither can it long stay in the theoretical, and before long it returns to the concrete, skeptical world of Aristotle. 

Which is why the story is filled with characters who, sensing the approach of the parabolic arc, turn their attention in the other direction.  Some look inward for answers, as Singer observes in his lovely treatment of Kepler:

"That Kepler sought so persistently for a simple mathematical scheme of the material worlds and, having found one, he regarded it as fitting his scheme of the moral world, suggests certain reflections on the workings of the human mind itself.  Whatever reality may be, we seem to be so made that we aspire towards an interpretation of the universe that shall hold together in a complete and reasonable scheme.  The fact that we thus aspire does not in the least prove that such a scheme corresponds to reality" (239).

And even as those forces draw the pendulum in one direction, others are gathering their momentum.  Those such as Giordano Bruno, easily the most fascinating figure in Singer's treatment of the subject.  He is described as a renegade monk who "showed a lofty indifference to common sense that cannot fail to command our respect--at a distance" (218).  Bruno's willingness to completely jettison Platonic models of existence makes him a far more engaging character than his predecessor, Copernicus, although it is this latter whom we remember.  His notion of space as being without a center and, therefore infinite, was diametrically opposed to the contemporary anthropocentric models.  This vision went far further than, preceded, and is more sustainable than Galileo's.

Of course all of this ties in nicely to my general framework for existence: the interplay between the nacheinander and the nebeneinander.  The series and parallel  natures of our experience.  Where will the pendulum fall?  Is reality what we see, or what we know, Subhuti?  Singer presciently closes his book with a supposition on that matter:  "It seems probable that Science itself is now reaching a stage in which an adequate scientific equipment will involve some regard to the world as an interconnected whole, in other words, in which Science and Philosophy will dwell less apart . . . Notably it seems probable that the conceptions of the separation of mind from mind and of mind from matter may need modification" (516).  No pendulum can swing forever.  At some point, Van Gogh and Monet, Linnaeus and Cuvier, will have to come to rest.

The Letter of Jude

This book strikes me as the outlyingest of the Greek scriptures.  Even by virtue of authorship it is singular among those books adopted as canonical by the early church.  There seems to be some confusion about the identity of this Jude.  Was he a brother of Jesus?  Or one of the original 12 apostles?  It would seem to depend on whom you ask.  My religious upbringing asserted the former.  In either case, nearly nothing is known about him, as compared with Peter, John, Paul et al.  As with the book attributed to James, it appears I will need to take it largely on its content.

1:2 Contrasting this salutation with those of Paul and Peter, one would expect the book to be less concerned with "grace" and more with love".

1:4 A recurring theme.  Jude adds his voice to those other writers in defending the church against apostasy.

1:6 Whence does this bit of theology come?  A reference from some apocryphal book?  Not found in any of the canonical books, to my knowledge.  And yet it is treated as established fact here.

1:9 Yet another unfamiliar reference--apocryphal even by Catholic standards.

1:14 And a reference to the book of Enoch--not exactly mainstream.

1:23 Well, at least we can see why "grace" was left out of his salutation. 

Of all the many epistles that have been lost to history, and still more that have been preserved but refused canonicity, how did this one manage to be included?  I can find no other answer than that the Jonathon Edwardsian fire and brimstone appealed to the sensibilities of those in charge of such decisions.  y my original count, I have one more book to go in this little project.  But the more I read, the more I want to add to the list books that have been inexplicably excluded.

Jaws

Well, that was unexpected.  I suspected that this film earned its place on the AFI's list of 100 influential movies by virtue of its social impact, rather than its quality.  And for the first third of the movie, I was comfortable in my assessment: it was a serviceable, but unremarkable monster movie. 

But then they got in the boat.  At that moment it went from being cinematic to theatrical, in the sense of being suitable for the stage, rather than the screen.  In fact, I can easily imagine the best actors of our time being drawn to the roles of three men trapped in a life and death struggle with a force of nature.  Working title: Two and a Half Men (badum tssss). And the movie never backtracked; it never went back to land and remembered that it was a monster movie.  Once those men got in a boat, it became a dramatic character study, and so it remained.

Emile Zola: Therese Raquin

 I am, perhaps more than most, a very susceptible reader.  I find myself, without meaning to or resisting, absorbing whatever I encounter, including books, movies, and people.  After reading a nineteenth century novel, I am far more likely to use "whence" in an email than not, and equally likely to refer to somebody as "gurl" after watching RuPaul's Drag Race.  The other day I got into a lengthy and, at times, heated conversation with a black friend about the extent to which it was appropriate for me to use snippets of AAVE in our conversation.

So it is not a surprise at all that my take on this book is heavily colored by the movies I watched this week, specifically Guillermo Del Toro's Crimson Peak and El Espinazo del Diablo.  On almost every page, I saw Zola's gruesome and vivid prose as filmed by that auteur, and speculated how the latter might revel in filming the water-logged greens and creeping, malevolent reds found there.  Camille's corpse especially lends itself to  Del Toro's take on ghost stories, never jumping or shrieking cheaply at the reader, but waiting in clear view and all the more sinister for it.

And what made the book ever so slightly dissatisfying was, or seemed to be in my heavily influenced mind, the same as that which occasionally detracts from Del Toro.  Especially in Crimson Peak, though the journey never seems false or contrived, it is often far too clear.  In watching that movie, it was not clear how the doomed siblings would die, or at whose hand, but the journey they would take to get there, and the process the movie would go through, was certain from the beginning.

Likewise in Therese Raquin, one couldn't say for certain whether the two murderous lovers would die at each other's hands, at the scaffold, or, as was ultimately the case, by their own hands.  It was certain, however, what steps would take them there.  Even though Zola crafted every moment flawlessly, once it became apparent where the story was going, I found myself less interested in arriving. 

조현용: 우리마로 깨닫다

제가 배운 한국어에 대한 것 중 가낭 많은 게 조현용 때문이다. 작가로서 쓰신 책이든 교수로서 전달하신 강의든 학자로서 발표하신 연구든 가장 많이 도와주신 분.  이 책은 제외가 아니다.  한국어 어원을 바탕으로 내성 하는 이 책이 철이 있게 한국인의 개념을 반사한다.  한국이 조현용과 같은 사람으로 가득차게 되면 얼마나 좋겠네요.

Arthur Schopenhaeur: The Wisdom of Life

". . . if a man finds himself in possession of great mental faculties, such as alone should venture on the solution of the hardest of all problems--those which concern nature as a whole and humanity in its widest range, he will do well to extend his view equally in all directions" (105).  With these words, Schopenhauer declares himself to his audience, urging those worthy of reading his treatise to pursue the universal, rather than the specific.  He would have done well to follow his own advice.

What he chooses to focus on, namely the task of taxonomizing all that a man has at his disposal, that which "makes" a man, so to speak, he treats insightfully and which a certain amount of panache.  I'm especially fond of his takedown of so-called "knightly honour", that system of chivalry which was popular in 19th century Europe which would brook the bearing of no insult among the civilized classes.  The result of this social paradigm, he rightly notes, "The rudest is always right . . . However stupid, bad or wicked a man may have been, if he is only rude into the bargain, he condones and legitimizes all his faults" (75).  Such a state of social affairs cannot be said to have any merit, as he goes on to illustrate, and is akin to trying "to prove he warmth of your room by holding your hand on the thermometer and so make it rise" (80).

The vigor with which he eviscerates the social mores of his time, however, gives evidence that he has not achieved his aim to treat "humanity in its widest range."  His attention is myopically limited to a specific period of time, and furthermore to those levels of society which are concerned with honour in the sense that he means.  The modern reader has no need of being convinced that a duel to satisfy some perceived insult is barbaric and pointless.  Schopenhauer unknowingly preached to the choir of posterity.  He did it with wit and vigour, but as he observes, "the strongest arm is unavailing to give impetus to a featherweight" (96).

Which is merely one example of the larger problem with this work.  When he chose as his topic that which makes a man, he did so literally and in earnest.  It does not occur to him, for example, that women are part of the fabric of humanity as well.  He does this largely by omission, but when he does address the fact that perhaps women also exist, he does so in a tone so dismissive as to make this reader seethe.  "The most essential feature in woman's life is her relation to man," seems to summarize his opinion of the matter, and he says little more than that (67).  Neither is he content to limit himself to humans with a penis, living in 19th century Europe, and possessed of some level of social status.  He for all intents restricts himself to a test group of one: himself.  For example, if I were to list that which a man has at his disposal, friends and family would be high on the list.  Having never experienced these pleasures, Schopenhauer makes the unforgivable assumption that all men are like himself, and comes to the conclusion that "what one human being can be to another is not a very great deal" (30).

I am often tempted by this line of reasoning myself.  Having never really experienced romantic love, it would be easy for me to assume that it did not exist.  But I have seen it.  I have seen the miracle of two good people working together for some even greater good, and even my ardent cynicism cannot deny that there are happy, loving, admirable couples in my acquaintance.  Schopenhauer assumed that his human experience was the only one, and there but for the grace of whatever go I.

The 3rd Letter of John

I took the liberty of reading this brief item through once before beginning on a verse by verse inspection. I find that it has very little in the way of theology to recommend it, and has very much the flavor of a brief email "keeping in touch", as one says.  One must wonder what John said to this fellow when and if they met in person.

1:1 In keeping with his opening in the previous epistle, the writer refers to himself merely as "the elder".  This sobriquet opens itself to multiple possibilities.

• This is an official title. If so, it's noteworthy that he is "the" elder, not "an" elder.  Would Peter object to this seeming demotion?
• This is merely a nickname.  The affectionate tone of the note is compatible with opening the book "from your old friend."
• This is a way of distinguishing himself from some other John, of which there are many.  Insofar as his name is nowhere mentioned, this seems unlikely.
• This is something of a code word, and truthfully, this is not the only place where the writer seems to be judicious in disclosing identities.
• I'm seriously overthinking it.

1:4 There is no mention, either the Bible or in church tradition, of John having literal sons--or even a wife.  It's a tempting reading, however, to look at this as a work of actual paternal care.  Indeed, there is nothing to prevent such.

1:5 In contrast to Paul's proscriptions, which are often doctrinal, this seems rather personal.  Diotrephes' offense lay in his lack of charity--both toward John and to others in the early church.

1:11 It is easy to see why John was seen as closer to Christ than the other disciples.  This admonition mirrors the work of his mentor both in its simplicity and its spirit.  Additionally, like much of what Christ is reported to have said, it is incompatible with much of modern Christian doctrine.

In short, not much here to comment upon, but nothing to give offense either.

Taxi Driver

Well, I suppose I have my answer.  Either by virtue of having found the perfect proof for my theorem, or of having become bored with the question, I feel like putting the idea of "greatness" in a movie to bed.

Everything about this movie was great.  The performances: iconic.  Aesthetic elements, cinematography, score (Scorsese's real gift, if you ask me), set design, costumes, everything: flawless.  And yet the movie itself was not great, in my mind.  It was good, flawlessly executed, even a masterpiece, but I can't bring myself to say that it was great.  What could possibly have been lacking? 

I have come to the conclusion that the sine qua non of a great movie is the script.  To be specific, the very idea of the movie must be great for the movie itself to achieve greatness.  If I were in a more mathematical frame of mind, I would write a formula wherein the potential quality of the movie lies in its central idea, and it can never rise above that, but can sink below it based on the quality of other factors.  But I am not in such a frame of mind.  I will simply say that Taxi Driver had a good idea, a good reason for existing, but not a great one, and although no one involved with the movie could have done zir job better, it was never going to be great.

Nagai Kafu: Life and Writings (Edward Seidensticker, ed.)

When we speak of something as an acquired taste, often it is a backhanded way of saying that its virtues are not obvious, or even readily found.  When I say here that the writing of Nagai Kafu in particular, and Japanese literature in general, is an acquired taste, however it is not in that sense.  Rather, it is to say that to appreciate it, one must step entirely out of everything one has learned from a lifetime of Western literature.

I recall a similar experience reading The Tale of Genji and Soul Mountain many years ago.  I failed to appreciate either of them because I kept expecting something that wasn't going to happen.  I'm used to good books having a narrative, a plot, and interesting structure, a resolution of some sort, lifelike characterization, and other things that Western literature does so well.  It was very much like missing the forest for the trees, failing to appreciate the journey due to an obsessive focus on the destination.  In Eastern literature, at least as far as I've experienced, the point is in the moment, not in the momentum.  The joy of reading Genji, or Li Po, or Tu Fu, etc. is the same joy as that of sitting in a park and watching the leaves blow.  This is a quiet, still joy, and one that Kafu exemplifies.

In his excellent editorial and biographical comments, Seidensticker well highlights these joys, found everywhere in Kafu's writings.  Narratively weak and filled with bald, unremarkable characters, his stories might well seem to be poorly written.  Indeed, if one reads them as stories, such a judgement is more than fair.  If, however, one reads them as poems, as insightful, touching descriptions of subtle moments in the life of a man growing weary with the world, but still determined to record its pleasures faithfully, one ceases to care about the plot, characters, structure, and everything else that a Western approach to writing has indoctrinated us to believe is important.  One is able to sit in the yard of this self-described scribbler, and watch the leaves.

Second John

1:1 Well this is obfuscatory.  Who is this lady?  I'm sure that most will take it as a metaphor for the church as a whole, but a reading that assumes an individual audience might be revelatory.

1:3 More anti-trinitarian theology from John.

1:4 This leads one away from a metaphorical interpretation of the "lady".  If she is the church as a whole, then surely it would be less than an overjoy that only some of her children were walking in the truth.

1:5-6 This is beginning to read almost like an Abelard and Heloise situation.

1:12 And there is no way that John was going to meet the entire congregation face to face.  This simply must be an individual.

1:13 Especially considering that the church proper has no metaphorical sister . . . this verse especially makes me sympathetic to the reading that John was writing to Mary herself.

Philip K. Dick: Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

There's a reason why Philip K. Dick is in my trinity of science fiction, alongside Vonnegut and Asimov.  While he can match the other two for creativity and vision, the latter are simply better writers--more consistent, more unified, and more erudite in every way.  But unlike Vonnegut and Asimov, the power of Dick (phrasing!) is that somehow he reaches beyond the page and reads you back.  Every time I read something by him, I find it reflected in my own life, and his books answer the questions that you didn't even think to speak aloud. 

This book, like all of Dick's, is flawed.  My reaction the first time I read it holds true six years later: that it could have done with a whole lot less explaining.  But this second reading finds me in a less analytical mood.  I forgive the author for caving to what were no doubt the demands of his publisher and tying things up at the end in a way that doesn't seem to match the rest of the book.  I forgive him because the other 90% is a work of breathing, staring philosophy, and it would not surprise me at all if it grew a pair of legs and walked off my desk of its own accord.

Richard Jackson Harris (ed): Cognitive Processing in Bilinguals

Generally there are three reasons to read a research anthology of this sort:

1. Because there is a single article that is seminal in its field, and unavailable elsewhere.  In this case, the article in question was Kroll and Shull: Lexical and Conceptual Memory in Fluent and Nonfluent Bilinguals. Although I spent a good portion of my thesis tearing it up, there is no doubt that this work on the so-called "translation asymmetry" is a crucial and influential piece of research.
2. To get a nice set of references for your bibliography and give weight to what you want to say, since you are a lowly master's candidate and you are making some rather bold claims.  Hypothetically, of course.
3. To figure out what you want to read next.  In this case, I was most taken by Brian MacWhinney's discussion of the Competition Model, and Jacqueline Thomas' treatment of explicit and implicit knowledge (via Bialystok).  The bite-sized morsels offered here were enough to tempt me in those directions without having to slog through dreary textbooks on cerebral lateralization or phonological processing.

All three goals were met successfully, and I don't regret slogging through this volume in its entirety, although I can't say that I would recommend it save to a very select few.   What I did not expect to find was a link between linguistics and my other, more literary pursuits.  I often say that you will not likely find someone who knows more about English than I do.  There are people whose knowledge of English from a theoretical linguistic viewpoint eclipses my own, to be sure.  By the same token, any honest assessment of my knowledge of English literature would find me a dabbler.  It is rather rare, however, to find someone who knows both sides of the language: the grammar, syntax, and semantics of the theoretical side; and the literature, style, and culture of the applied side.  Most experts are one or the other, and they rarely overlap.

Nick Ellis of the University of North Wales seems to be an exception.  In his article on Linguistic Relativity, a subject in which I have little innate interest, I found a quote from Joyce sticking out like a sore thumb.  What was Ulysses doing in this starchy tome?  Although the quote in question was simply about doing mental calculations, and was altogether unnecessary in this volume, it reminded me of my own take on that monstrous novel.  To say that Ulysses is a stream of consciousness work is only partially correct.  There are parts of it that treat the serial circuit of human thought, but it is equally devoted to the parallel process of human experience.  Joyce gives us a typically obtuse way of thinking about this in section 3:

"Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably."

It is the interaction of the nacheinander and the nebeneinander that make up life.  Those things we experience, perceive, and feel happen all at once, and those things we think and remember happen one after the other.  Insofar as this holds for all human activity, it is no surprise that it applies equally to the field of language acquisition. Krashen's "monitor" and Chomsky's "language acquisition device" work together simultaneously, and this dichotomy is observable everywhere in the literature on the subject: the aforementioned implicit and explicit knowledge, learning and acquisition, form and meaning, all these are simply names for the two ways in which the mind works with language--and not incidentally, the left and the right hemispheres.  If I can get my students to use both, and consciously so, I should probably write a paper on it.  Perhaps Mr. Harris will be interested including it in his next anthology.