Musings on Christians

A few things I have learned thus far from my (admittedly faithless) reading of the New Testament: a) wealth and Christianity are pretty incommensurable, which menas that a rich "Christian" is a hypocrite (here's to you, Joel Osteen); b) condemnation of anything other than lack of faith is dubious, considering that Christ spent most of his time among the diseased and the "sinners"; c) Christ seems to have abrogated the statutes of Leviticus, which includes the line about "a man lying with another man is an abomination"; d) even if he did not, he certainly was more concerned about divorce, so "Focus on the Family" shou...ld really campaign against divorce rather than worrying about gay marriage (let's see the push for a constitutional amendment, you self-righteous assholes); e) Jesus - especially in Luke's account, but elsewhere as well - was kind of a dick; f) but not nearly as much of a dick as Paul, who seems to be single-handedly responsible for much of Western sexism; g) if you really believe that all of this is actually the Word of God, you'll probably believe just about anything, because h) God needs a better editor. i) Were there five loaves of bread or seven? four thousand people or five? j) If I were writing about someone who ascended into the heavens, I feel like I'd spend more time describing it than Mark: "So then after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God." (16:20) I think my first words - and here I'm channeling Ricky Gervais's comments about Humpty Dumpty - would be: "Once there was this guy who flew up to Heaven."

Finally, Christianity combined with capitalism is a powerful force, and Nietzsche is spot on in his critique of it: what better way to ensure that the oppressed do not confront injustice and inequality than by promising them that their reward for good behavior and piety will come in the next life?

Ice Cream

Riding my bike to campus
On a beautiful Sunday afternoon,
I saw my father,
Sitting on a bench by himself,
Enjoying a dish of ice cream.
He was thirteen years older
Than the last time I saw him,
And he had re-grown the silly moustache
My mother made him shave
The year before he died.

The Pleasure Principle

This is a response to a conversation about the profession, about why we teach literature.

The standard liberal humanist point about empathy—that art has the power to transform us into better people—is unsatisfying, not least because it doesn’t hold up: many of those who have read plenty of literature remain unable to “consider life and its dilemmas from perspectives other than one's own.” More importantly, art very often reinforces rather than undermines the set of political and social relations that lead to prejudice, extremism, and blind individualism. Does Book V of The Faerie Queene, for example, teach religious tolerance?

Something similar could be said about preserving culture and history: how much should we really want to preserve, if our own culture and history includes so much ignorance and inequality, so much oppression of other peoples, so much mistreatment of nonhuman species? What "preservation of culture and history" suggests is a continuation of patriarchal, capitalist ideology. Is that what we should be teaching?

Critical thinking has always been our fallback, but what does this mean? Do we need literature as an object in order to exercise such critical thought?

What we really do is teach students to talk and write in a certain language. I'll just go ahead and quote Terry Eagleton, whose ideas I have been paraphrasing anyway: "Literary theorists, critics and teachers are not so much purveyors of doctrine as custodians of discourse. Their task is to preserve this discourse, extend and elaborate it as necessary, defend it from other forms of discourse, initiate newcomers into it and determine whether or not they have successfully mastered it. The discourse itself has no definite signified, which is not to say that it embodies no assumptions: it is rather a network of signifiers able to envelop a whole field of meanings, objects and practices." The "embarrassment" of literary criticism, he continues, is that "it defines for itself a special object, literature, while existing as a set of discursive techniques which have no reason to stop short of that object at all" (Introduction to Literary Theory 177ff).

What we really do, then, is teach something like "discourse analysis," and if we're good at it we might be able to demonstrate the ways that discourse is both a component and a product of power. Andy's suggestion about teaching writing is the flip side of rhetoric: if we can teach our students to recognize discursive techniques, we may also be able to teach them to apply these techniques for themselves.

None of this really explains why we still think Shakespeare is valuable, or why we ask students to memorize the plot and principal characters of Frankenstein. The latter is probably because we feel like we need to test them on something; the former is probably because we like Shakespeare. (There's more to it than that: we are told that we should like Shakespeare, because those who have come before us have decided that Shakespeare is somehow valuable. Still, if we were to trace that determination back far enough, I imagine it would have much more to do with pleasure than most of us are willing to admit.)

Like a turd just dropt on snow

What I like about Wyatt is his fascination with turning away. Most of the time he's obsessing over a woman who has turned away from him - "But all is turned, thorough my gentleness, / Into a strange fashion of forsaking" - but sometimes we can catch glimpses of that moment when he too wants to let something go: "I leave off therefore, / Since in a net I seek to hold the wind."

Still, he never really leaves off. He has too much Petrarch in him; his pain is too potent. His dismissals are always incomplete, as he holds on to the injury done to him in order to write about it (and here he has an excuse built in, which, even if we would call it misogynist, makes "her" somehow less culpable):

I will not wail, lament, nor yet be sad,
Nor call her false that falsely did me feed,
But let it pass, and think it is of kind
That often change doth please a woman's mind.

We see the same thing in those poets who lash out rather than turn away. Jonson purges his characters of their humours and sends them offstage, never to be seen again, but they're never really gone: he has had to hang on to them for most of the play in order to excoriate them at the end, and so they return, again and again, every time the play is performed. Swift's poetry might sting, but he still needs to hold on to Richard Tighe in order to say that Tighe's face is "Like a turd just dropt on snow."

A complete turn (or a total dismissal) would have to be a poem about something else entirely, a poem that contains no trace of the subject that is not being discussed. And what's more - here's the tricky part - is that every subsequent poem would need to be free from that trace. These would be the poems that do not acknowledge the possibility of recovering what has been forgotten; these would be the poems that come after forgetting.

This isn't 'Nam. This is [karaoke]. There are rules.

1) No fucking Billy Joel.

2) "Atrocious," when said with the right tone of voice, should be interpreted as a compliment.

3) Arrive sweet, but not already hammered. Hammered should come later.

4) Do not make eyes at Undergraduate Wisconsin Grandma Headband Guy.

5) Talk through all instrumental breaks.

Rather Cocksure of Facile Conjectures

I found the title of this post in the margins of a mid-twentieth-century tome entitled Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature, in cramped-but-confident old-man script. The commentator was right: the author's suppositions about John Marston - an author he hated so much that he needed to devote over a hundred pages to an explanation of Marston's poetic, dramatic, satirical, and personal shortcomings - were ridiculous enough in several places to make me laugh out loud.

I hope someone will write that in the margins of my book someday.

Why Lucian is Awesome

This is from Dialogues of the Dead:

Diogenes: “But, my handsome Mausolus, of your beauty and strength nothing more is to be seen, and if I should call in question your advantageous figure, you would not be able to give the judge a reason why your skull is more beautiful than mine. Both are peeled and bare, our teeth grin on both sides in like manner, and instead of eyes we have both empty holes and flat, apish noses. As to your monument, and the costly marble of which it is built, the inhabitants of Halicarnassus may certainly have reason to shew it to strangers, and to think much of themselves for possessing so great a work of art within their walls: but, my comely gentleman, what sort of enjoyment you should have of it, I see not; you should then only say, that you bear a heavier load than the rest of us, since you have an enormous heap of stones lying upon you.”