For the first time, couldn't file my column.

 

On Tuesday night -- after a low-energy, no-concentration day -- the symptoms of a flu, or some such thing, really kicked in.

 

Couldn't think much about work, per se. However, I have had time to develop a renewed appreciation for the resonance of the phrase "talking to Ralph on the big white phone." (Lost about five pounds within twelve hours.)

 

No more now. Back next week.

 

(Very sorry to learn of the death of Robert Creeley.)

Sometimes I just want to quit doing everything else and go reread Perry Miller for a while. It's been a long time. Can't even keep the heresies straight any more.

 

While reading the biography of Jonathan Edwards, for example, I kept thinking that -- as indignant as he was about the influence of Arminianism -- it seemed odd that he wasn't really, really furious at having Christ's divinity denied.

 

Which is, of course, Arianism. 

 

Man was my face red! 

 

If you are someone who has written to me over the past two months or so and not heard back, I'm sorry.

 

It's not from malice, or even from indifference.  Many things in my life are on a triage system now. Aside from the work I am actually getting done, there is a lot that is due -- or overdue, in many cases.

 

Plus there are things coming down the pike. For example, the panel at the American Political Science Association (for which I wrote a sort of provisional abstract for a paper) has been accepted. That's several trips to the library, right there.

 

And the Cultural Studies Association meeting is next month, at which I'm a plenary speaker. Which sounds so intimidating as to make me afraid to find out what it actually means.

 

These are honors, to be sure. But mostly they are obligations. They require work.

 

I'm getting a little less stupid about organizing things, but not a lot. Spending any time at all writing this, for example -- is that quite rational? Perhaps not.

 

If you want the story on the dramatic unveiling at NBCC of what we call simply "the shirt," check out this item by the Happy Booker.

To repeat: I have no information about availability. Direct all queries to the artist, Robb, by writing him at the following address, suitably modified:  rschuneman AT ucok DOT edu .

UPDATE:  Now the Happy Booker has a photo of Rick Perlstein actually wearing the shirt.

UPDATE NUMBER TWO: Gary Shapiro writes about the NBCC panel in his column for the New York Sun. 

It is true that, as he says, Gary gave me some advice on making my column better known. (Here's the most recent one.) And it was good advice, too, but I have been so damned busy that I haven't followed any of it.

Really need to sit down and think about this soon. I really want the thing to have readers, and an impact, and whatnot -- but at the end of the day I'm much too prone to just concentrating on the writing itself, with a vague trust that people will find their way to what I'm doing.

Through what, etheric vibrations? That's stupid. But for all practical purposes that seems to be my operating assumption.

I've heard there was an incident involving the t-shirt during the National Book Critics Circle gathering on Friday. Either that or a whole bunch of my friends are playing a really involved practical joke. More on this story as it develops.....

 

Last week, someone (well, my editor, actually) said: "You are doing a shitload of reading for your column, and that's good, but maybe you should also write things in a more personal or casual vein." So that's what I tried to do with today's column.

 

Speaking of the shitload....My review of a new book about Jonathan Edwards appeared in Newsday over the weekend. And the two-part column on Otto Weininger is reprinted over at The New Partisan.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Quite a few people have been in touch since yesterday, asking, "How I can get me one of them t-shirts?" or "Does it have to be so rude?" or "So is that really what you look like?"

 

Also, "Will you be making any money off of this?"

Okay, that's four questions. Here are the answers.

 

(1) I have no idea.

 

(2) There has been some discussion, at The Weblog, of a non-obscene edition of the shirt. Given the circumstances (i.e., my departure from the Chronicle of Higher Education big-cash-and-benefits gravy train), the best caption to the graphic at present might be "Will Pontificate for Food."

 

(4) Profits (if any) from the sale of this t-shirt should go to the designer, Robb Schuneman. If he is so moved, I would encourage Robb to make a small donation to The Fund to Buy Chairman Bob Avakian a New Hat.  

Yesterday was a major personal milestone. It was the tenth anniversary of the day I left my job at the Library of Congress to become a full-time writer. By that point, I'd already published a bit, but it was definitely a huge step. Frankly, it scared the crap out of me. Not like leaving the Chronicle. That was easy. (The moments of self-crapping terror only came a few weeks later.)

 

Anyway, imagine my astonishment at finding that yesterday -- by total coincidence -- Robb Schuneman created this image as part of a new line of t-shirts.  

It's Otto Weininger week over at Intellectual Affairs! Here's the first part....

 

Think I may write the second column while listening to the soundtrack to Hedwig and the Angry Inch. That seems fitting.

 

Read somewhere (it might have been the intro to the new translation of Sex and Character) that Elias Canetti was satirizing Weininger in Auto-da-Fe. That's a really interesting idea, and it strikes me as plausible.

Still recovering from last week's traumatic cat-tripping episode. It has been a valuable learning experience. I have learned, for example, that it is possible to get Doan's backache pills for about half the price, just by looking for the store brand of pills containing magnesium salicylate tetrahydrate. 

 

It's like a whole new world is opening up. Middle age is rushing to greet me with a gesture of menacing welcome.

 

Oh, right....Speaking of which, more than a week ago, Newsday ran my piece about James Atlas's My Life in the Middle Ages, which utterly sucks. The worst book I've read in a while.

 

For a critical statement a bit more substantive than "it sucks," read the review here.

 

There wasn't room to go into it, but I'm struck by the contrast between the Fink translation of Lacan and my memory of reading the old Sheridan-Smith translation.

 

Not sure that it's quite right to say that the former is any easier to follow, exactly. But I kept having flashbacks to how enigmatic and knotty certain things in the old translation were, how wierd the locutions seemed. 

 

With the Fink translation, the same passages feel smoother and more coherent. I finish something with the sense of it having taken real concentration, but not strain, to follow. 

 

It's Tuesday, so....time for another column.

 

Meanwhile, there have been some "corrections" to Thursday's column, by Objectivists who can juggle. Language, that is. I'm not going to bother to respond, but wanted to point to something I find amusing.

 

In the column, I mentioned Chris Sciabarra, the one guy whose writing about Rand is always worth reading. A few years ago, he wrote a study of the complex and somewhat unhappy history of the relationship between Objectivism and gay rights. Any number of folks who had personal as well as philosophical reasons to embrace a libertarian perspective were drawn to Rand's work, but had to deal with the fact that the old bird was a pretty typical homophobe. And of course if Ayn Rand said you should eat shredded wheat at every meal, there are Objectivists who insist it was the perfect food.

 

So anyway, Sciabarra published that monograph. And then there appeared a criticism of it by an ortho-Objectivoid named Reginald Firehammer. A few weeks ago, I noticed a reference to it, and sent a message saying, "Admit it, Chris. You just wrote a book under a pseudonym denouncing your own work." 

 

(I don't actually believe that, but come to think of it, he never actually denied it.)

 

Then, in response to my column last week, there appears a comment by Reginald Firehammer.

 

The same evening that column first appeared, the Daily Show unleashed Dino Ironbody on the world. 

 

Coincidence? Or proof of cosmic synchronicity?   

Many thanks to Ralph Luker for this item on Tuesday's column. See also this smart commentary from Caleb McDaniel.

As for CM's idea that there is a "rush to judgment," that certainly crossed my mind. But Holly Jackson actually makes a strong case for EDKH as white, while nobody has any solid evidence that she was black -- and when you read the scholarship, you notice people bending themselves out of shape to find some reason to think that she was. (I could have said more about that in the piece, including one case that verged on outright dishonesty, but that seemed like overdoing it.)

**

The column for Thursday is kind of a smorgasbord.

Until now, I've been using the space to write short essays on whatever on my radar seemed worth, uh, essaying. Will continue to do that. But there is a difference, just as the formal level, between the column (as such) and the essay, and I've been trying to figure out how to take advantage of that difference.

At some point, it would make sense to write up something on that distinction. Arguably I'm way too concerned with such nuances. When somebody refers to my profile of author X as a "review" of X's book, it induces a cringe and a desire to explain the difference between the genres.

That may be a symptom of hypersensitivity and social retardation. My plan, however, is to harvest those nervous tics into a piece of analytic writing, or maybe a lecture or two. 

By then maybe somebody will invite me to teach a class or something. And then I'll have somebody to talk to besides the cats -- who, of course, have really approved of my decision to leave the Chronicle and to live full-time in the no-man's-land of writerly social isolation.

I'm thinking of setting up a regular get-together at a coffee or tea-shop in DuPont Circle, with an open invitation to anyone reading this site who lives in DC.  Watch this spot.... 

Here's my column from Tuesday. Many thanks to Moby Lives and Galley Cat for their attention to it. And to Henry Farrell for this commentary at Crooked Timber -- which also provided an occasion to add some comments of my own on things that didn't quite find room in the piece. (By the way, the Borges connection did cross my mind while writing it.)

It was all Derrida, all the time, this past week. Here's the first column, mainly about the Cardozo conference "Derrida/America." And here's the second, which digresses a bit -- eventually wandering off into a precis of Rogues, which as far as I can tell was the last book he finished before the cancer hit.

 

In truth, I did also write a couple of other things, not about Derrida.

 

 

 

 

 

About 15 years ago, I came across a postcard with a photograph of a leathery little beast with pointed teeth. According to the copyright information, it from a mid-1980s movie called Trolls (a knock-off of Gremlins).

 

The caption said, "Write! or I'll come visit!" -- a way of chiding a friend for not being a good correspondent.

 

But my thought, the minute I saw it, was, "Right, that must be exactly what he looks like." For there was no doubt in my mind that he was the little demon who tortures me when I'm not focused.

 

Anyway, he's had to keep his distance lately.

 

Here's the latest column. And now, in a spirit of reckless of abandon, I am going to spend today away from my desk. He won't get me, though, because I'm taking a legal pad. 

Holy moley, another quantum leap in the number of regular visitors. I'd like to update this site more often -- but I'm writing pretty much all the time now, as it is. Not much crossing my mind now that isn't going into a draft intended for publication someplace or other.

 

 

For anyone wondering about the availability of "Chairman Mao Teaches Us to Study Theory" -- well, I'm not sure what to tell you. Bought it a couple of years ago from somebody online. It isn't in either of the volumes of Cultural Revolution propaganda posters in my collection, and Google only takes you back to this page. 

 

As Cornelius Castoriadis once wrote, satirizing a whole generation of French intellectuals: "Oh China, how distant you are, and how beautiful your signifiers...." (Betcha that made Julia Kristeva cry. I'd like to think so.)     

In the midst of an otherwise sobering -- if not horrifying -- item on a group called Citizens for Literary Standards in Schools, Dan Green quotes a passage from the CLSS manifesto that gave me a rueful moment. It appears in the context of a denunciation of the fact that certain contemporary literary works are taught in schools now. It reads:

"While textual descriptions of heterosexual sex, oral sex, homosexual sex, anal sex, rape, and incest are not generally classified as pornography because they don't contain images, it's undeniable that descriptions of sexually-explicit scenes helps develop an appetite for more of the same."

This is stupid, but in an interesting way.

A piece of writing can't be pornographic? Let's just overlook what the root "graph" means in this context. It is interesting to speculate on the circumstances that might lead anyone to write anything of such patent chowderheadedness.

 

My theory is that CLSS consists of one individual -- a concerned parent. Let us call him Peter Spankwell.

When Mr. Spankwell goes to Google and types in "incest pornography anal cheerleader barnyard," it is in search of photographs, not narrative prose. No doubt that is also true for Peter, Jr. (Or it was, until the parental controls were installed.) Hence, "textual descriptions.... are not generally classified as pornography because they don't contain images." Quod est demonstrandum!

But wait, there's more.

That passage gave me a flashback to adolescence, when I spent a fair amount of time reading Victorian pornography. And not for extra credit either. It was hardly a matter of being precocious. In my podunk town, it was just not feasible to get Playboy, let alone Penthouse. Besides, hiding them took a lot of trouble, whereas stashing a book was a fairly simple matter.

Somehow, I had located (and, chances are, shoplifted) a copy of The Pearl, a British magazine of the 1880s. No copyright, of course, so somebody had reprinted all of it in a cheap paperback edition. It was full of serialized pornographic novels. I seem to recall one of them being set in a harem, another at a country house.

There was also a great deal of explicit poetry. Much of it celebrated the pleasure of being beat with birches by schoolmistresses; and all of it was just terrible.

Checking the index to Steven Marcus's fascinating book The Other Victorians just now, I don't see a reference to The Pearl. But with hindsight, it seems obvious that one or two people wrote the whole thing. It had the feel of a labor of obsession.

No matter what the setting of the fiction -- Turkish harem, lewd boarding house, whatever -- there was always a bit where Cecil and Bertrand would turn their attentions from Daphne to one another. Then maybe Daphne would pull out the birch and punish them. Or something like that. (Remember, it's been twenty five years.)

Such passages did not float my particular boat. It was the kind of fiction in which you could skip a chapter without losing much character development. But perhaps it had a kind of unintentional didactic effect? There is some value, after all, to learning that it takes all kinds to make a world.

Anyway, two things are worth mentioning here.

(1) My appetite wasn't shaped by the reading of "textual descriptions." Rather, vice (as it were) versa.

(2) The experience was a vocabulary builder. My command of 19th century obscenities, while no longer what it was once, is still pretty good. Unfortunately "quim" and "frig" were not on the PSAT. But a certain insight into Victorian capitalism emerges from learning -- through close reading -- that back then the term for orgasm was "spend."

 

It's from the Cultural Revolution period, and it shows Chairman Mao in a library, holding a booklet by Lenin, surrounded by young Red Guards, strong rays of eagerness and earnestness beaming from their faces.

 

The caption -- in Chinese, English, French, and German -- reads: "Chairman Mao Teaches Us to Study Theory."

 

I love that phrasing. He doesn't teach us theory. He teaches us to study theory.

 

There is a whole thing about the pedagogical element of Maoism that Susan Sontag discusses in that Salmagundi interview from the mid-1970s that I would be glad to type up here -- if not for the laziness.

 

It's also in The Susan Sontag Reader. You could look it up.

It's Thursday, hence another Intellectual Affairs column is up....There will be an archive of them at the IHE website, at some point.

 

It's going to be very light blogging for the next little while. Things are busy. I'll just leave it at that and head out for some coffee -- by intravenous drip, if possible...