If anybody has gone through or participated on any level with a university interview, this scene from Orson Welles’ adaptation of The Trial will look very familiar.
If anybody has gone through or participated on any level with a university interview, this scene from Orson Welles’ adaptation of The Trial will look very familiar.
I shared this video in the sidebar, but I thought it deserved some main-page love as well. It’s long, yes, but well worth your time. Time can & should be made for Malcolm Lowry. This is a good rule of thumb.
(via Dangerous Minds)
Last I checked, it is the final week of 2010, which means it is time for every publication and blog to issue its annual Best Ofs and Round Ups. If time and attention allow it, we at AUFS will be no different. (We may be the most powerful theology blog on the block, but with such power comes great responsibility & expectations. My fart jokes simply will not cut it.) Of this time-honored genre, the internet has a special fondness for ranking music. That the internet has made so much different music so readily available at a moment’s notice makes this understandable and maybe even a little appropriate.
While it is by no means unanimous, one of the clear favorites this year is Kanye West’s “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.” Now, don’t get me wrong: I like this album. I like it a lot, even. Indeed, should I assemble a “10 Favorite Albums of 2010″ list (I would be incapable of ranking these ten – another of my many moral failings), it might very well be one of them. Consequently, I have no qualms with Pitchfork deeming it the best album of the year. A reasonable choice, I say, given their tastes, audience, etc. Where I depart from the corporately cool taste makers, however, is their decision to bestow a perfect-10 score on the album.
In internet-time, this is, of course, old news. I stewed about it a little bit at the time (late-November, right?), but decided to let it go. For some reason, though, I couldn’t help mulling over this matter of perfection. Personally, I have a particular fondness for ambitious imperfection: works whose grasp rival their reach, but slip up in some crucial way. Like a chipped tooth, I savor obsessing over those moments where things don’t quite work for me and/or things go completely off the rails. Or, at the very least, flirt with the breaking-point so decisively that I am forever unsure where or if they actually do so. Now, that’s just me, and I’m certainly not inclined to assert that aesthetic inclination as a kind of universal. My point is that regardless of your own inclination, the very best works are those you have continually to engage, rather than passively enjoy; or, to switch registers slightly, the point is that the best works are those that are just as likely to consume you as you are to consume it.
If this is true, and maybe it’s not, but I think it is, what place (if any) is there for perfection? Don’t get me wrong: I’m not prepared to give up on the idea. It’s just that I think it is something that happens rather by accident, rather than something one achieves (whether by aspiration or not). Moreover, is it just me, or does the assessing of something as ‘perfect’, the fleshing out of the accident, let’s say, take more time than we are these days willing to allow? This isn’t to say that we need necessarily to ‘slow down,’ etc. I’m not making a strong moral argument against the pace of contemporary culture or the speed of internet publishing. Speed has something to do with, but is not fundamental to, the notion that if perfection is applicable at all, it is usually only ever so in retrospect. For is something truly ambitious if one is immediately sure that it not only ‘works’ now, but blazes a new path to future successes and alternative paths unforeseen? One doesn’t need to go along with my affection for the shaggy dogs to agree that if successful ambition takes time to suss out completely, perfection may well take even longer.
Merry Christmas from AUFS!
Below is a little animated transcription of a conversation Adam & I had recently. Perhaps you have a few more holiday parties and get-togethers to muddle through and the conversational talking points we offer will be helpful. Or, you know, not.
I recently subscribed to the @ParisReview twitter feed, and have been marveling on a daily basis at how utterly banal some of the greatest writers of the English language can be. I don’t know that this is the intention of pulling select quotes from interviews and de-contextualizing them in a random tweet, but it is almost always the effect. I could make a list of my top 10 “favorites,” but I think only one will suffice, because it is perhaps the dumbest thing ever said.
As is typically the case when I’m at church, I am thinking about other things. To think about things religious amongst religious people, I find, generates deep antipathy and annoyance on my part. This is a moral failing, perhaps, a vice from which I should repent as readily as I might avarice or arrogance; but it is, I suspect, the one I will release last, at last, even, upon my dying breath, when faced with the possibility that it is time to “get serious,” or at the very least “make peace.” This past weekend, the third Sunday of Advent, I once again found my mind elsewhere, despite having arrived late enough in the service to miss the threats of silent, holy nights rudely, if you ask me, interrupted by herald angels singing about glory and newborn kings. As I strained to wrestle my attention into submission, not unlike Jacob grappling (not without pleasure, I’m sure) for a blessing from a divine stranger, I settled for a compromise — that of applying something I’d rather be doing to what I decided to do instead. I found myself, in short, thinking some more about Elias Canetti’s book Crowds & Power, but this time through the filter of my recent experience as a congregant at a local United Church of Christ, which came quite suddenly (randomly, if you were to ask my wife) after a decade of non-attendance that at the time I had considered an obsessively scribbled period, a terminal punctuation punching its way to a troublesomely deep bruise of black and blue, to nearly two decades of participation in evangelical Christianity. Read the rest of this entry »
The past week or so I’ve been on casually reading Elias Canetti’s amazing book Crowds and Power [Masse und Macht]. I’ve not yet finished it, and hope to have more to say when I have done so (though, you can ask Adam, I always say this), but in the meantime I wanted to paste a long excerpt from a section of the book that I have repeatedly come back to. I’ve sent this around to dozens of people, hung it next to my computer at work, and in general meditated on it for over a week now. I simply cannot get it out of my head, and hope to at least spread the contagion to you. For me anyway, it speaks to and of something, a host of things actually, that seem essential and primal; and lays out in a few pages both the full sweep of history and the gloss of an epic novel.
I don’t want to inundate you with quotes, but my desire will not stop me from doing so. For upon encountering the following two passages from, yes, William Gass’ The Tunnel, I realized his narrator was, in the course of describing a colleague, also describing many a participant in this digitized forum we call the theological blogosphere. Regular readers of our fair blog will get the gist of the jab. I suspect everyone else will not need their hand held either though.
“There may be some truth in what you say, Herschel says, with his customary Cream of Wheat agreement: mildness of a sort which could never cause a bilious blowup, bland as ordinary atmosphere and nearly as impalpable. I call him the hedgehog because he is such a believer in both sides. You have a point, he likes to say, he enjoys saying; there is more than a little merit in that, he declares, as if removing a pipe from his mouth (actually, Herschel never declares, or asserts, or avers–I do that; Governali avows and Planmantee affirms; they do that–Herschel assents, or suggests; he elaborates, or gently opines); yes, well, what you say seems, yes, well, plausible to me, upon my brief entertainment of it anyway, yes, at first glance a nice notion, on the face of it a pleasant guise; but will such an idea survive a long haul over stony ground, you think? the scrutiny of a dental pick? the footsteps of many a traveler across the same ground? and will it survive journalists and cameramen, you know? town meetings? picnics spread out abundantly open?”
“It is impossible—not to say, nettlesome—to carry on a debate with Herschel because he is invariably prepared to grant you your point . . . after he has blunted it. He is quick to applaud your overall attitude (for the most part, of course) (on the whole) (by and large) (in the main). Meanwhile, he has so effectively clouded the countryside that you can never perceive the defining edge of anything, or circumscribe an ordinary outline in order to locate its elbows or touch its tits. Blur, fuzz, smear: that’s what he does—his specialty. It’s not that . . . he hates distinctions, but rather that he makes too many, and lays them down on top of one another repeatedly like an angry scratch-out of lines. On the other hand, you can never come to an accord, either—sing harmony. Not with Good King Qualification, Handsome Prince Perhaps. Not with Mister Maybe. . . . Not with every idea developed as an endless polyhedron. No, you cannot quarrel with Herschel, yet the Hedgehog lets nothing pass. If thoughts wore ties, he’d always feel compelled, in his wifely way, to straighten them. So with Herschel one is habitually in a state of mitigated exasperation.”
Oh that last sentence especially. So delightful. It is tattooed in my brain now.
I’m still plowing my way very slowly, but more quickly in recent days, through William Gass’ troubling masterpiece, The Tunnel. I think I’ve managed to write more notes on some pages than there is text, what with the horrific gems on every tenth or so page. I offer this up for your edification, nude of context, in its birthday suit, as it were:
‘Doom’ has become a comic word as well: “Der Führer went recklessly to his doom.” It’s silly–’doom.’ But I write down ‘doom’–I prefer the word ‘doom’ to others–because of its skull-like eye-holes, sockets into which darkness can be screwed like a dead bulb. Sein Schicksal ereilte ihn. Adolf Hitler could go to his doom because he had one. Only those who have made a pact with the devil have a doom. Hitler, Faust, Don Juan, Leverkühn, have dooms. I’m sure none of my students merits such distinction. The devil does not sign contracts with just anyone. Upon the tens of tons of anonymous millions, no judgment is pronounced. For them there is death, of course, but no doom. The trouble with history is its incorrigible and horrifying honesty. Only the truly damned matter a damn to it. History is the abyss of the doomed. How does that hit you, Henry? Doom. Yes. ‘Doom’ is securely Middle English. ‘Doom’ is not der Schicksal. Der Schicksal cannot hack it. Der Schicksal is a shop where you can buy pork. So I write down ‘doom’–I prefer the word ‘doom’ to its brothers–because it looks like a busker’s malevolent mask; the consonants hook over the ears. And those same ears do not fail to hear the snickers which arise from my class like a rustle of leaves when I complete block-lettering the big pair on the blackboard and turn my unsmiling face to them. Damn you, I think. What do you aspire to? Nothing. Me too. But I want to be made an offer. I want a doom to go to. I aspire to the abyss.” (William Gass, The Tunnel, p. 185).
This week, for the first time in, let’s say, a “long” time, I attended a mid-week bible study. I’m now an official Reader/Lector at the church I’ve been attending, so I thought I might actually reflect on the stuff I’m supposed to read. The study itself was fine enough. We talked about the parable of the tax collector’s prayer, which is, if you recall, compared to that of the Pharisee. Humility vs. pride. The error of hypocrisy. Obligatory liberal note that we shouldn’t conflate the Pharisees with all Jews, and that the Gospel ware written during a particularly ticklish period, so emotions were a little heightened. Etc. My favorite part of the conversation was when the group began comparing the hypocritical Pharisee to conservative talking-heads on tv. I did not find this so much as curious as silly, and ended up confessing that I’d never watched Bill O’Reilly, and continued with the suggestion that perhaps their moral indignation might be better directed if they stopped watching 24/7 news channels.
Now, I have not done any solid research to substantiate the claim that the following is any more true now than anytime before, but it seems to me that Americans are far more eager these days to rush headlong into the living embodiment of a caricature. You have these people on tv–Rachel Maddow as the representative caricature of a do-good liberal, and Bill O’Reilly as the representative caricature of a dog-eat-dog-world conservative–and for all our so-called cultural sophistication w/ respect to media, the political discourse of the masses (such as it is) seems modeled on these personalities/caricatures. This is not a novel observation, I know. But what’s interesting to me is that this kind of behavior is supposed to be the very thing a super media-savvy culture has moved beyond, what with our much-ballyhooed sophistication and post-ironic investment in what happens behind the camera, in the editing room, in the marketing meeting, etc. (I observed a similar thing when my niece visited me last summer: it felt like I was watching the tv-version of what a teenage gor; is supposed to do & say, as though she wasn’t even there. Just a slightly less sexed-up Glee cast-member.) We are today, we’ve been told repeatedly, the smartest consumers of culture ever. On some level, I’ve no doubt this is probably true; and yet, perhaps we’re damned all the more for it being so. I say this because media infiltrates nearly every facet of contemporary culture–including even our reflections about how media infiltrates contemporary culture. Waxing theoretical about irony on this point seems profoundly unhelpful. To my mind, it’s not that everything today (particularly as it relates to our political discourse) is fake: it’s that sincerity itself has been distorted by the untold layers of glass piled all around it. (Note A: No, this doesn’t speak to an inherent problem with “progress” that can be resisted by picking up Milton every now and then.) (Note B: You’ll just have to trust me when I say that I don’t necessarily believe there is a Zero-Ground of “Sincere Human” that has been sullied. This point of perfection, and indeed the entire conversation about it, i.e., whether there is one or not, is a nuisance of ontological proportion. On this point, I diverge mightily from my many of my most philosophical friends, including myself not too long ago.) Read the rest of this entry »
Adam’s shared items Brad’s shared items
Adam Kotsko
Anthony Paul Smith
Brad Johnson
Thomas J. J. Altizer
dominicfox
JD
Nate Kerr
danbarber
thomaslynch
Alex
Thomas J Bridges
clayton crockett
Andy
spinozanetwork
lissamccullough
Ryan Krahn
Christopher Rodkey
jms
Robert Minto
Dan
voyou