Are you an intellectual?

I suppose you could characterize this blog as my personal attempt at becoming an intellectual (with all the concomitant eye-rolls and snickers that ensue when someone else makes use of that term) – detailing the books and articles and conversations that I’ve come across while browsing different websites, newspapers and journals here and there (and thus not doing the things I need to be doing to write my doctoral thesis.)

While I obviously don’t include much here about German literature in general, or culture in fin de siècle Europe more specifically, (or, to get right down to it, the interplay between cosmopolity and solitude in Jewish culture in turn of the century Vienna, Prague and perhaps Istanbul) I do tend to think of one of the main requirements of being a literate person is to keep up with public debate, whether it be literary, political or cultural. To that end, I’ve put together these sparse notes of Choses Vues – Things Seen; in order to have something to talk about with other like-minded friends. Now, if only they would actually read this site regularly..

All this to point out an amusing little article in The Common Review about someone who is interested in much the same things as I’ve tried to point out in this site, all the while acknowledging the general laughableness of the whole enterprise.

Pynchon’s got a big-old book a’comin.

Thomas Pynchon has a whopper coming down the pipes, weighing in at a scant 1,120 pages. The best part is his description of the book that showed up on amazon:

“Spanning the period between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all. With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.”

The above was found at time magazine, on a little article on the difficulty of promoting an author who doesn’t talk to the press. On a slightly unrelated note, I have a first edition of his Mason Dixon on my shelf, right next to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Both have yet to be cracked. My brother, on the other hand, finished both War and Peace and Moby Dick this summer. Guess who’s in grad school studying literature? (Wrong, me.)

Why you should be reading the New York Review of Books (if nothing else)

I feel vindicated, and disheartened. A recent article in The Chronicle for Higher Education shows why reading the New York Review of Books is just so damned important for anyone interested in not only words, ideas and books, but also in their dissemination.

A general, non-scholarly journal of intellectual culture is the foundation upon which any self-respecting intellectual culture stands. Go out and subscribe.

Update: I just found the first issue of the nyrob online, including all of the texts, if I’m not mistaken. It reads as an intellectual who’s who in the Anglophone world from the 60’s. Big names here : Robert Lowell, Mary McCarthy, W. H. Auden, Robert Penn Warren, Susan Sontag, and, of course, the ubiquitous Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, among a lot more others. All in the first issue, folks.

The journal of an intellectual

The Sunday edition of the New York Times has a fascinating article in their magazine on Susan Sontag’s journals. It’s heartening to see how prosaic and sophomoric some of her entries are – I had the impression of reading things that could have come from my own journals.

As someone who keeps a (semi)regular journal on various notepads and pieces of paper throughout the apartment, I was glad to see that the inner workings of an intellectual whom I have always envied/admired. Plus all the name dropping, and, of course, the cities: New York, Paris, Bled (Yougoslavia) etc.

And finally, on reading other people’s journals:

We rarely do know what people think of us (or, rather, think they think of us).. . .Do I feel guilty about reading what was not intended for my eyes? No. One of the main (social) functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people, the people (like parents + lovers) about whom one has been cruelly honest only in the journal.

So dig in..

Online videos of philosophical lectures

A brood comb has put together a list of philosophy lectures found on google video. Primarily philosophy of the mind. Interviews, lectures, talks etc. by people like Searle, Dennett, Putnam et al.

I'm watching Thomas Metzinger's talk on "the self-model of subjectivity", from his book Being No One.

Can Humanists talk to Postmodernists?

I just stumbled across this wonderful little essay on how postmodernists, by eschewing logical categories such as identity and non-contradiction, are ultimately impossible to talk to.

The short answer to the short question posed by my short title (bereft of postcolonial discourse since it has no colon) is no. Humanists cannot talk to postmodernists.

Obviously written by someone who is squarely in the "humanist" camp, it tends to oversimplify some of the most interesting claims that Nietzsche/Heidegger/Derrida et al have made about our access to reality and language. I imagine this type of criticism (call it logical inconsistency) has been levelled before, but I found it worthwhile nonetheless.

Ulysses and Ugly Family Members

The New Yorker has a great little piece on James Joyce's grandson. Another particularly nasty example of a family member with the sole rights to an author's writings who attempts to manipulate scholarship by controlling access to original documents.

Interestingly enough, this cantankerous and opinionated megalomaniac seems, in some strange way, to be all together Joycean. ("Academics", he declares, are like “rats and lice—they should be exterminated!”) I couldn't help but be amused by the old bastard, even after reading that he has been systematically destroying letters in his family estate in order to thwart would-be biographers from unearthing unhappy family secrets.

There is something ever so evil about destroying unpublished letters. Someone look if there is a special circle in hell for such people.

Not all MFA programs are a joke

My brother just sent me a list of pulitzer prize winners who have either attended, or taught at, the Iowa Writers Workshop.There is a reason that we refer to Iowa City as the Athens of the Midwest (to hell with Madison and Ann Arbor).

Higher education in France

Here is an article from the nytimes on why being a student in France is close to unbearable.

People often ask me why I left Paris to come to Nothwestern for my Phd – the simple answer is money. Computers, stipend, access to professors, clean buildings, resources etc. And a degree that counts for something. As much as I loved the people and the city, I needed something a bit more serious..

Jane Jacobs and the Academy

My friend Paul just introduced me to possibly a very wonderful person, Jane Jacobs. I have yet to read anything by her, though "Death and Life of Great American Cities" is now on my To Be Read More Or Less Next list. From the Nytimes obituary:

"In her book "Death and Life of Great American Cities," written in 1961, Ms. Jacobs's enormous achievement was to transcend her own withering critique of 20th-century urban planning and propose radically new principles for rebuilding cities. At a time when both common and inspired wisdom called for bulldozing slums and opening up city space, Ms. Jacobs's prescription was ever more diversity, density and dynamism — in effect, to crowd people and activities together in a jumping, joyous urban jumble."

Anyone proposing to turn city centers into "a jumping, joyous urban jumble" should read and reread. Bicycles, pedestrian areas, people walking around, yelling, buying, talking, smoking, making love and singing songs… think about it.

Anyway, it turns out that an essay by Ms. Jacobs has just been published by the Virginia Quarterly Review, entitled "Credentialing vs. Educating". Well worth the read.