Even Unto Thy Shoes

I have to get through this book quickly, so I’m making use of the translation, and it pains me, friends, it pains me. But I have discovered a further offense: it turns out to have bowdlerized the original as well! Here’s the English:

My mind was in a whirl. I waited to see what he would do. In a flash of revelation I knew about myself: what influenced my state of mind was that I was crazy about Diadorim, and at the same time, underlying this, was a dull rage at it not being possible for me to love him as I wanted to, honorably and completely. And I felt even greater loathing for that Ana Duzuza, who might come between us and break up our friendship. (30-31)

And here’s the original:

Tudo turbulindo. Esperei o que vinha dele. De um aceso, de mim eu sabia: o que compunha minha opinião era que eu, às loucas, gostasse de Diadorim, e também, recesso dum modo, a raiva incerta, por ponto de não ser possível dele gostar como queria, no honrado e no final. Ouvido meu retorcia a voz dele. Que mesmo, no fim de tanta exaltação, meu amor inchou, de empapar todas as folhagens, e eu ambicionando de pegar em Diadorim, carregar Diadorim nos meus braços, beijar, as muitas demais vezes, sempre. E tinha nojo maior daquela Ana Dazuza, que vinha talvez separar a amizade da gente. (30, my emphasis)

That’s pretty hot stuff— way too hot for America in 1963 (as opposed to Brazil in 1955), apparently. (For the curious: the Portuguese idiom “a gente”, which literally means “[the] people”, is used as a colloquial substitute for “we,” so they correctly translate “a amizade da gente” as “our friendship”.) You readers with connections to the lit trade— can you please try to get someone to translate this book for realz? Someone else might have to take an oral exam someday…

Dear hair:

You have looked utterly like shit for the last month or so.  Now, I vainly pride myself on not being vain, but why the revolt, O my hair?  Why draw my attention back from my reading, onto my own scalp, and down your limp and wretchedly frizzy non-coils, as glossy and smooth as a yard of thistles?  Why do you resist the ministrations of the mildly expensive conditioner?  Why do you also misbehave under the sterner yoke of the anti-frizz hair repair nonsense stuff I got for Christmas that one year?  Why do you refuse to fall in any remotely graceful way around my shoulders?  Why do you aspire to the condition of a prairie dog pelt?  Are you under stress?  Because we are all under stress, my hair.  Even those of us who are not a dead mass of protein spindles whose only real charge in life is not to look utterly like shit— we are all under stress and we are all poor, and we are very, very reluctant to go to a local salon and pay someone competent to restore our heads to happy pulchritude.  It’s not that bad, hair.  It is not that bad.  You can do better than this.

From Donoso’s El obsceno pájaro de la noche:

¿Cómo no iba a temer que me tragara esa alfombra reverberante de signos? (151)

What’s that: a reverberating figure in the carpet?  In a book named for a passage from a letter by Henry James, Sr.?  There is clearly some sense of affiliation here, but I would never have called this book Jamesian.  Any ideas, Waggish? Atem?  Others?

I still can’t see myself curling up with a Balzac novel in my spare time, but I have learned things from Lost Illusions, and I have gotten my prejudices against the world of publishing reinforced!  Basically, Balzac does a good job when his characters are doing things; he loses me when he takes a step back to describe people or even institutions.  Arguments among professionals, monetary transactions, Faustian bargains: these all work.  But his description of Mme. de Bargeton is just weak, especially measured against the standard of one of my favorite books of all time.

I’ve been trying to pin down what it is that I find alienating in French literature in general, perhaps even in the works I love by Flaubert and Proust.  I had a moment of insight some time ago when it struck me that there’s not much of a tradition of appreciating or venerating nature in France, Rousseau being the exception that proves the rule (that is, the man didn’t exactly sit out in the woods listening to birdsong and feeling humble, as far as I know).  Nature-veneration is one of my more elementary impulses.  I don’t have a very anthropocentric outlook, and I get impatient with people who do, for good or ill.  But in certain works of French literature— Balzac, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Proust, Sartre, possibly others— I find a mixture of criticism/contempt of society and deep investment in it which drives me mildly nuts.  All those parties with intolerable people!  All the self-flagellating misery undertaken for the sake of esteem!  The inexhaustible desire to narrate it when it just sucks!  So, all right: the intolerable, inescapable social— I’m sure that’s how many people’s lives are and have been throughout history, and it’s only my personal luck that leaves me unsympathetic.  Academia may be too much of a coterie for me to stand in the end; it’s the only case in recent memory of my personal ambition coinciding with participation in a big, competitive prestige network.  (And man… in comp lit, they love the French 19th century.  They love it.)  But my more extended hypothesis involves the experience of the ancien régime and the revolution, in which you are first a) surrounded by cruel assholes and then b) surrounded by different cruel assholes with big ideas.  Thus: cynicism, pessimism, and a sense of world-historical importance follow.

The final term in the series is, naturally, Bourdieu.  Vive Bourdieu!

But I think the U.S., my home country, went in a very different direction in the 19th century, and thereafter in the 20th century, and I appear to have been stamped by that divergence: the successful revolution, the relatively early and ongoing confrontation with/debate over racialized cruelty, the formative role of immigration, the frontier.  I suppose it makes sense that these things seem like Real Problems to me, and the ridiculous and complicated social stratification of France in the above-noted oeuvres seems like a Fake Problem and Also, My God, An Insanely Boring Fake Problem.  Just go somewhere else!… and help people who need it!… But it isn’t that simple to dismiss the social.  Also, my hair is limp and my lips tend to go pale if I don’t apply lip balm; I am aware that a day may come when I must care.  The horror!

AAAAAARRRRGHH, HE. JUST. SUCKS.  HE SUCKS.  Also: never in literary history has a man (or woman) with so little feeling for and understanding of human nature been praised so highly for his feeling for and understanding of human nature.  (Discuss.  Look, he even makes me do ugly stylistic things with prepositions!  It’s his fault.)

I have to demonstrate mastery of these texts in two weeks:

Not pictured: Heliodorus, Aethiopica (etext); two other novels from Lusophonia; the English translation of Illusions perdues I am actually going to read; Sherko Fatah’s Im Grenzland; my bone-rattling panic.  Up close:

It looks a bit scarier than it actually is, I should add, because I’ve read a number of these already and I’m only going to be held responsible for portions of others.  Still… still.  This on top of two other classes and the incompletes.  Extramural reading and blogging are officially on hold.

How best to describe to you the desirability of working on various incomplete projects?  Step into my kitchen:

Seminar paper #1 = frozen block of tempeh.  Dunno.  I love tempeh, but it really might spoil after too long, even in the freezer.  Can’t read expiration date.  “Visible black spots on tempeh are normal.”  ??

Seminar paper #2 = dry bean soup mix that needs to be cooked for hours in a crock pot; possibly also soaking beans overnight.  Mix is now several years old.  The beans are colorful, but the last time I tried to soak beans of indeterminate age, there arose an unspeakable smell that left me quite terrified of all dry legumes.  (Neo-Pythagorean, perhaps?)

Shorter paper = 5-month-old Tupperware container filled with leftovers in back of fridge.  I should at least chuck it in the compost and clean out the container.  The days when this might have been an indifferent, rather than nauseating, prospect, are long, long gone.  The real question is: why did I even save the leftovers when they were so gross the first time around that I couldn’t finish them?  Did I think I would have a change of heart once putrefaction set in?

I could have sworn to you that I’m a better literary scholar than cook— but now I’m honestly starting to wonder.

(All food details have a basis in fact, albeit facts in the distant past.  But that’s how… we… learn!…)

Now, for something less scary: the failure of an academic job search.  This comment at Brian Leiter’s shop states the blindingly obvious concisely:

It seems that, for a variety of reasons (the possible crash in the college age population being only one, the drain of funds away from the humanities and towards the sciences another) the future of philosophy as a profession within the academy is, at this time, in some doubt… if its [sic] true that, in the future, a number of philosophers (that is, people with Ph.D level training in the discipline) will work outside the academy, perhaps one thing that the profession should do is work on removing those barriers that make it nearly impossible for anybody without a university position to participate - through journal publication, conference presentation, etc. - in the discipline.

I can think of a lot of arguments against this point, of course.  There’s the idea that the life of a professor is a critical part of scholarly development which nothing can replace, and which is uniquely equipped to ensure solid scholarship.  Tenure and academic freedom are not just good for scholars; they are the minimum standard for producing credible work.  If it weren’t for the tenure bottleneck, the crazy, monomaniacal, litigious types that the U.S. breeds like mushrooms would submit their wacky, incompetent takedowns of all literary theory to professional conferences and then sue professional organizations for rejecting their papers.  Journals of miserable quality would proliferate, limited only by the ability of disgruntled doctoral students from bottom-ranked programs to register web space.  Without something to keep the number of scholars low, every conference would have masses of headstrong kooks vying for the central seat.  Hierarchies would have to be maintained by spitting, accumulation of gold jewelry, or simple fisticuffs.

Yeah, so, I’m not so sympathetic to that line of reasoning, although (I think) I understand why I should be. I also think that the crisis of the humanities in academia should not, in fact, be everyone’s personal problem; I think the humanities disciplines would benefit from practitioners who are self-supporting, able to pursue gainful and enjoyable employment that suits them better than teaching (and pays better than excessive adjuncting), and who can stay connected to contexts outside higher education, live in cities where they and their families want to live, etc. I do not completely understand why doctoral candidates and Ph.D. holders in the humanities do such a terrible job of advocating for their own professional interests, although I’m sure that many of them, unlike me, are busy reading monographs and going to conferences and editing journals and teaching and so forth.

I do those things too.  But I’m seriously concerned about how dysfunctional this profession is (I am lumping all of the humanities together as one profession, as interpretive disciplines, for argument’s sake), and how long it has been known to be dysfunctional with very few, if any, positive changes. I’m trying both to navigate it and, I hope, to help change it for the better. I talked to a senior faculty member about a lot of this, and he seemed to think I was just freaking out about my own job prospects— but that’s not it.  Even if I do get a job, what happens to my students?  What happens to my friends? What happens to my community?  How can I not care?

That said, of course I don’t know how I should proceed.

Scariest fucking thing I’ve ever heard (San Francisco’s terrifying, infernal earthquake history). Parents, please avert your eyes:

In an instant, the ground in some parts of town liquefied; whole blocks of poorly constructed tenements slumped into piles of rubble, entombing those inside.

I mean… I kinda know how earthquakes work, because I looked it up once, see? And the word “liquefied” is more or less implied

LIQUEFIED

but not actually used, you know, in the sense of the ground

LIQUEFYING

under buildings, as in turning to quicksand, as in

LIQUEFIED.

I am never going to sleep again. I don’t often remember to mention to people who ask me why I don’t move to the city that I prefer to sleep in a small, lightweight, one-story bungalow, because it isn’t a mathematical certainty that I’d die if the roof collapsed on me. That mitigates my problems a bit. It’s everyone else that I worry about. The Bay Area crept down to 75% or 60% oblivion in the wake of Katrina— people started to think about what disaster would look like. We’re back up to the usual 99% now. Me too. I tell you, if I’m going to do any political or civic activism in this town, it should involve disaster preparations, multilingual campaigns, general public shaming, staged demonstrations, etc. Preparedness should be a matter of civic pride, not embarrassed aversion. I suppose the biggest barrier to this is that the things you need to do are hard, inconvenient, expensive, and long-term. But the population turnover in the city is famous— live there for five years and you count as a native— and I sometimes lie awake fantasizing about a brigade of people who would just go around, every month or so, distributing bottled water and flashlights to people. Same time, same place, each month, like some crazy California cult— but, unlike every other crazy California cult, useful.

Still, liquefied. That is one shit-flippin’ word.

Update: it’s so scary I can’t spell it properly.

I’m taking a language pedagogy course at the moment, as preparation for teaching in the fall (I hope).  Since I have taken an alarming number of introductory language courses, I have had plenty of opportunities to reflect on the way languages are learned and taught.  For instance:

a) thematic vocabulary units, like the giant list of types of food you have to memorize during the “food unit.” It is a little like trying to eat all those foods at once.  The superfluity of this one in particular may simply reflect the tendency of young Americans not to cook a lot, or to eat a fairly homogeneous diet, but why should I have an encyclopedic command of comestibles when I cannot

b) use expressions of time to save my life?  Being able to say “four years ago, for a month or two, when I was five, last summer, for the last five months, a month-to-month lease”— I don’t think there is a single language in which I can reliably express all of these things.  They should be drilled constantly, beginning as soon as possible, because the first damn question you will get as soon as you start speaking in language X is “how long have you been studying language X?”  Then you can get around to “How long will these kumquats stay fresh?” or “How long does it take to make this bouillabaise?”

c) Thematic units are a difficult thing in general as well because it’s not that easy to find “themes” of general interest.  “Going to the beach,” for instance, or “going to a party,” etc.: these are fun to do but very boring to talk about.  Your daily schedule: this is important to life, but it’s also pretty boring to talk about.  It seems like language classes always run up against people’s basic reluctance to talk, or even against a diminished social vocabulary.  What do college students do with their time?  What do they say to one another in English?  “I saw that on Facebook!”  Das sah ich auf Facebook!  Vi eso en Facebook!  Vi isso em Facebook!  “Oh my God, I cannot believe…”  Mein Gott, kann ich nicht glauben…  Ay dios mio, no lo puedo creer…

d) Maybe I’ll set up a website, or use the course software, and encourage students each week to submit words or phrases they want to learn to say.  No obscenities, insults, pickup lines, or other things that get people in trouble— there are books for that in every bookstore— but anything not covered in class that comes up.  Accommodating individual variation seems important.