Introductions and Departures

I’m headed back home to Chicago tomorrow. Leaving Pennsylvania marks the conclusion of the winter break, and feels like the true end to the prior year. I realize that I’m going to need to write the syllabus for my Introduction to Literature class soon.

Here’s what I’m going to teach:

1.) Germinal – Emile Zola

2.) Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence

3.) Book of the Dead – Muriel Rukeyser

4.) 1919 – John Dos Passos

5.) Underworld – Don DeLillo

So we’ll discuss labor (especially mining), literary naturalism, modernism, and post-modernism. Not a bad intro I hope.

Sounds of Silver

Raccoon writes:

Sound of Silver takes this intersection between irony and melancholy its central emotional ground, and it inhabits it brilliantly, crafting songs that are wry, moving, melancholy, and still (relatively) dance-floor friendly. If there’s ever been a better pop album about adulthood, it’s not coming to mind.

I think that’s a very apt description for what’s so good about the latest from LCD Soundsystem. It feels like 30s malaise/break-up/dance comfort music.

A Quick Note on New Hampshire

My preference for candidates can be easily indexed to where they position themselves on a left-right continuum. So, amongst the democrats, my preferences are something as follows: Kucinich–Obama–Clinton. However, I readily acknowledge that Obama and Clinton are both DLC-style democrats, despite working in  an occasional populist nod on the stump.

While I’d have like to have seen Obama beat Clinton last evening, part of me is pleased that a leading female candidate should take a state. In fact, I hope she takes a few more before it’s all said and done. It’s good for backwards Americans to be supporting a woman for president. So good that I propose a constitutional amendment requiring gender parity. What this means is that when a person becomes a parties’ candidate for president he or she must choose a running-mate (I’m aware of the pun, and embrace it) of the opposite sex. What do you think?

Viggo Mortensen for Kucinich

Kucinich Campaign Update 1/7/08

Why DK supported BO in IA

In an email from DK:

In answer to your questions about why I didn’t support former Senator John Edwards on the second ballot in Iowa: I have serious concerns about his connections to a Wall Street hedge fund, Fortress Investment Group. While attacking others for accepting campaign money from Washington lobbyists, he is up to his ears in money from Wall Street special interests.

He made half a million dollars in a single year for attending a few meetings for Fortress and has invested a substantial part of his own personal wealth in the hedge fund whose portfolios are responsible for sub-prime predatory lending practices, Medicare privatization, and an entire range of corporate sharp dealings that are driving the middle class into poverty.

While I indicated Senator Obama as a preferred second choice in Iowa, Progressives have fundamental disagreements with him and all of the other Presidential candidates on most of their major positions on the issues.

I find this interesting because I’ve long found myself distrusting Edwards’ populism. Now I see there’s reason for my suspicion.

Vote Kucinich!

Snowblind

Here’s a classic example of misreading Jack London’ s dog stories. Critic X opines:

London creates, instead, romantically realistic heroes in his dogs–and naturalism is dispelled. It is his socialistic works that reek of pessimistic determinism. His dogs not only survive but they triumph. Within the realm of actual behavior, the exceptional dog is capable of deeds that humankind finds noble. Because adaptability is more important than sheer savagery, the triumphant animal is more than the most powerful predatory beast. On the other hand, where he does follow the laws of survival that offend the morality expected of the human hero, he may be excused.

X has been arguing in preceding chapters that animals in American literature can be read as literal animals in addition to being read as symbol, allegory, and metaphor. These literal and literary whales, frogs, and asses highlight versions of the free exceptional individual. X begins the London chapter by invoking the hoary debate about who’s in and who’s out of the naturalism club. It’s a bit like the lit-critical equivalent of American Idol. Pessimistic enough? Sufficiently determined to suit Paula Abdul?

London’s dogs are in, the reeking socialist texts are out. X never bothers to mention which texts she has in mind, nor to demonstrate the manner of their determinism. What a relief! I’d really hate to suffer her Iron Heel treatment. If you’ve not read it, The Iron Heel is a graphic anticipatory meditation on American fascism from the perspective of a manuscript edited by the socialists of the future. It is grimly optimistic.

Like Budweiser’s real American heroes commercials, X suggests London’s dogs not only survive, but triumph! They’re probably McCain voters. She intends, I suppose, by “the realm of actual behavior” the kind of stuff that goes on outside of naturalism and reeking socialism, you know–the whole free individual rag. I wish X was free of opaque prose: “capable of deeds that humankind finds noble.” Like what? Namely?

The last lines about possibly being more than the most powerful predatory beast remind me of the typical ideological position of Ron Paul’s brutes. Government impedes their individual merit. If repealing the “welfare state” (that they believe it still exists is largely faith based) hurts the poor, the elderly, the less priviliged, it’s their (the less privileged) own damn fault. We (the sane) can’t blame the baleful outcome of childish economic policies on Ron Paul’s advocates. It’s about personal freedom.

Muse & Drudge

I’ve been reading the poli-punning delight that is Harryette Mullen’s Recyclopedia. Today I’d like to share one of her poems with you:

up from slobbery
hip hyperbole
the soles of black feet
beat down back streets

a Yankee porkchop
for your knife and fork
your fill of freedom
in Philmeyork

never trouble rupture
urban space fluctuates
gentrify the infrastructure
feel up vacant spades

no moors steady whores
studs warn no mares
blurred rubble slew of vowels
stutter war no more

An unsteady (suggesting a drunken slurring?) plural “moors” manages to capture the cold barren space of “moor” with the additive “more” negated. Assonance is Mullen’s means of reducing steady to studs, and moors to mares such that in the final quatrain the “blurred rubble slew of vowels” conjoins and genders the moor mares and steady studs in a question of “whores” and who exactly is stuttering “war no more.” The blurred unsteady stanza offers tentative truce if not piece or peace.

Freedom is consumption of vacant raced bodies and buildings in Philmeyork. The gentrified urban infrastructure presents an untroubled rupture, i.e. a rape, of the felt up vacant spades. The infra is here intra and entrails/entails the violence of your knife and fork in that Yankee porkchop. The north isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, apparently.

The soles of black feet beating down back streets syncopates a blues line, but the blues is the blues and hip hyperbole is no moors steady than a stutter stew of slobbery cutlets. Still, this feels like resistance.

Justice “D.A.N.C.E”

These guys are quite a bit of fun.