gold_alarm

Hey, guess who now has a Bachelor's in English from Stanford University?

*preens*

The subject line is all I could say yesterday, the day degrees for Autumn Quarter 2011 were conferred.

Hi everyone! A few things:

(1) http://spilledink.dreamwidth.org
(2) I'm not going to renew thisisangela.net when it expires; I've moved all the content there to the Dreamwidth journal linked above.
(3) I'm going to start friends-locking here, not because I'll be posting sensitive content but because from now on I only want my stuff to be publicly accessible at one place. I've chosen Dreamwidth for that place. What I'm going to be doing is posting friends-locked here, rough drafts, so to speak, and posting the same content at Dreamwidth, and any edits will be made there.
(4) Let me know in comments here if you'd like to be added to my list here. Anyone is welcome, but I think this is only relevant if you (a) want to comment and don't have a Dreamwidth account, and/or (b) want to be able to view comments here.
(5) Also let me know if you'd like a DW code, I have a few.

Hi Professor,

I was retyping my notes for your class and came across the lovely bit of Johnson that you quoted in your lecture on him: "By focusing on the minutiae of life, the metaphysical poets could not represent it in its entirety any more than he who dissects a sunbeam with a prism can exhibit the wide effulgence of a summer noon."

I wanted to say the following in class, but even more now that another connection occurred to me -- there is this wonderful quote of Einstein's: "I want to know how God created the world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details."

I love this, because Newton, the very scientist who dissected the sunbeam with a prism, and Einstein are the two giants of the history of science. Johnson who prized generality, in the various inflections of the word as you detailed in your lecture, is in this quote attacking Newton for his focusing on the small, so to speak, but here we have Einstein in the 20th century saying, I too am interested in the general, the big picture, I too don't care about the minutiae. And this is *so apt* because the very example Einstein uses of what is minute - the spectrum of elements - is *exactly related* to the prism, the spectrum of light and whatnot (it's been too long since high school science for me to remember the details exactly).

So Einstein kind of defends Newton against Johnson's charge, or something.

Isn't that neat? I just had to share!

See you tomorrow in class,
Angela

It wasn't until after I hit the send button that I realized there is a sense in which Einstein is agreeing with Johnson too, but oh well!

I read The Sun Also Rises a few years ago and disliked it. (I managed to read it through without noticing the particular location of Jake's wound.) The word I wanted to use for it was whiny. It's on Professor Johnson's syllabus this quarter, and he said, "I know you've all read this before, some of you more than once, but we're going to be reading it as a trauma narrative, which may not be an approach you've taken before. It's a small masterpiece. Enjoy!"

I just read three chapters and I am not enjoying. Ugh. Bar-hopping and cynicism. I am vaguely recalling the rest of the novel too and definitely recalling that the first time reading it I had a lot of trouble persisting to the end. The whininess and cynicism make sense, if this is Jake's trauma narrative, and it is not my intention at all to belittle someone traumatized by war and a war wound. But Hemingway does not appeal.

It's not blatantly whiny. The New York Times blurb on the back cover calls Hemingway's writing "lean, hard athletic prose...magnificent." It's not sentimental, exactly. But hey, yes, I remember something John Gardner wrote in On Becoming a Novelist about disPollyanna. He contrasts it to Pollyanna. He quotes Harlan Ellison, and then says:

This is not the Pollyanna style favored by hack writers of the twenties and thirties but the hack-writer style that superseded it, disPollyanna. Sunny optimism ... gives way to an ill-founded cynicism ...

I hope Gardner isn't scowling in his grave that I am citing him to support my complaint about Hemingway, maybe Gardner liked Hemingway, I don't know.

...OHEY I just searched in my Kindle ebook of On Becoming a Novelist for "Hemingway" and here you go!: "the tough-guy whining sentimentality in Hemingway" -- ha! Thanks, Gardner. I like you a lot, and not just for this. I hope you're resting in peace.

Anyway, I'd like to hear what you all think of Hemingway. This is the only thing of his I've read, and I'm really not inclined to seek out more.

Something's been coming up a lot for me this term that has to do with trust. It seems to me there are two strategies you can pursue when something in a text perplexes you: puzzle it out with the trust that the author knows what he's doing, or pass over it, attributing it to laxity on the author's part.

I never know which to do, from the heart so to speak, although for the purpose of writing papers for English class it's pretty clear. For a presentation I did in discussion section I started with something that not only perplexed but annoyed me in Nella Larsen's Passing -- all the million (comma-demarcated) parentheses -- and said, okay, I noticed this salient thing in the text, but no, it's not poor writing, it's a deliberate choice. And so I thought, okay, why did Larsen choose to do this? A lot of the parentheses are thought attributions, like (I'm making this up, I don't have the text with me), "It was, Irene thought, very mean of Clare to say that." So what is Larsen trying to achieve with all these parenthetical thought attributions? To convey an Irene who is pathologically self-aware? Or a narrator who is pathologically concerned to attribute everything to Irene?

So in class, studying canonical works, yes, when you come across something perplexing, your algorithm is, "This perplexes me. The author is doing it on purpose. So what is he trying to achieve with it? Let me figure out something he might be trying to do and use that as a point of entry into the text, or a point of departure for my paper." But then what if the text you're reading is Bel Canto, with its famously and hideously awful ending? Is it simply because Patchett is contemporary and not canonical that you are allowed to say, "No, the ending's just bad, she screwed up"? Is it because a bad ending is so blatant and gross, unlike, say, use of parentheses, which is more fine-grained so to speak?

But of course it's not that. Of course learned people recognize or have opinions on where even the canonical greats screwed up. But now we get to the issue of the reader's trust in herself, the reader who might not be learned. (Hi!) Can I trust my instincts?

I guess I come to this, though. Points of perplexity indicate something going on -- something in the text, or in you, or in the interaction between the text and you. Start by assuming the author is doing something deliberate, and try to figure out what that might be. Even if you don't figure something out that strikes you as, okay, the author was trying to achieve aim X, maybe you can come to, hm, I think the author whatever his intention was ended up achieving effect Y. In any case that initial assumption of deliberate choice is often highly productive, if not for true insight into the text then at least for the word count of your paper.

It is far too easy to analyze things in terms of irony, and levels too, far too easy to fall into the trap of using the same theoretical categories and models for every writing assignment. My freshman year at Stanford every paper I wrote had the same thesis, the flesh is the mother of all, I lost God that year and came to see that everything was material and there was no super-physical realm as I had been convinced to my marrow there was when I was hypomanic in high school. That epiphany obsessed me and came out in my academic work. But that that thesis recurred that year was not intellectual laziness as it is this quarter. I was not lazy, I was soul-sick. This quarter I am being lazy, which is fine. My only goal is to graduate, after all. This is my last quarter.

I'm enjoying Bel Canto a lot more than I thought I would. The edition I have, the Harper paperback with the blue spine and Ann Patchett's initials in a gorgeous icon on both covers, is very lovely and beautifully produced and the book is proving to be just as pretty on the inside.

The Tobias Wolff story I read for the midterm I linked to above, I saw its craft but it left me cold. I don't think Bel Canto will persist in my memory either, pretty though it is. Professor Johnson said first lecture that the only formalism in contemporary fiction is realism, and I think that's the problem with it for me. No, not a problem, but it's not what moves me the most, realism.

I wish I could articulate what it was about The Descendants that I disliked. I want to use the word "hipster" in there somewhere, though Hemmings isn't a hipster or at least didn't look like one when I saw her in class.

Okay, however, who titles their own book "Bel Canto"? I just looked it up in the dictionary and it means "fine song," apparently. That's uncomfortably close to naming your book "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius." Ugh, how I disliked that one! I threw it across the room and it hit the wall. It displeases me to walk by 826 Valencia though Dave Eggers is doing good work there, from what I understand. Ugh, that book.

Black Boy was wonderful.

Goodness gracious, but I disliked The Descendants. I like Adam Johnson a lot but I don't appreciate the things he appreciates. I haven't liked anything on his syllabus so far except Oroonoko, and I liked that one because it's delightfully cracktastic, not because of anything to do with craft or beauty.

What I enjoyed the most about Kaui Hemmings's visit to our class yesterday were her remarks on George Clooney. Apparently the dude is pretty awesome. How are some people just so wonderful? It pleases me to think of Ryan Gosling that he is awesome too, though I have no idea. I saw him in Drive and he is seriously (1) gorgeous and (2) talented. Like, both to a shivers-down-the-spine extent. I like to think that he's nice too, smart and funny and kind. That thought makes me happy.

Haha, now I have to talk about James Franco. I haven't seen him in any movie but the first Spiderman, but you guys, I flipped through Palo Alto Stories at Borders before the chain closed and it looked dreadful. But I am made very happy by the idea of him, the gorgeous Hollywood star who has played James Dean who is also a published writer (Vintage!) and a Ph.D. candidate in English at Yale. I absolutely adore that, the whole idea of him.

I've written two papers so far this quarter:

On "The Reading Process" -- on Wolfgang Iser's essay of that title (this one got an A!)

Is Du Bois Relevant Today? -- on the contemporary relevance of The Souls of Black Folk (this one is due in twenty minutes!)

Human being to the mob
What's a mob to a king
What's a king to a god
What's a god to a nonbeliever
Who don't believe in anything?

The melody is beautiful, I love beautiful melody, I love melodicness. I miss playing the piano, sometimes.

I am also so curious about Metallica's upcoming collaboration album with Lou Reed! Their collaboration twelve years ago with the San Francisco Symphony, I loved that, listening to it got me through a lot of my ghastly freshman year. IT WAS THE SOUNDTRACK OF MY PAIN.