December 2010
62 posts
“You dear creature, I want to see you so amazingly.”
– From a fan’s letter to Herman Melville. (via mcnallyjackson)
Flickr
I find it really hard to use Flickr in the age of cameraphones/3G. I can’t make my Flickr stream a ‘destination’ like the way I conceive of Tumblr/Twitter/Facebook.
Techsistential.
3 tags
Reading Tao Lin on train to Glasgow
Feel neutral but maybe excited.
3 tags
Been hectic few days
JH got her flight(s) cancelled. My train got cancelled. We got an overnight bus to Edinburgh. Arrived this morning. Slept. Showed JH around Edinburgh. Going to Glasgow tomorrow. She leaves on Christmas Day. Forever kinda.
home alone
avecpleasure:
2 tags
1 tag
Last night in my shop
Did a shopping ‘party’. It snowed and was wet and miserable most of the night. Not loads of people came. Some people came. Turned into a nice party for volunteers more or less. Made a decent wad. Warm feelings. Oh and T3ETH came and DJed to a small number of people and found themselves a Datacorder.
1 tag
Went to panto tonight in Hackney
The giant was incredible. Animatronic and totally massive. Wish I was a kid to be really scared by it.
1 tag
1 tag
Doing a xmas shopping night on Thursday
bit stressed.
2 tags
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
Last Day of Teaching (This Term) Tomorrow
Second years aren’t getting anything special.
First years are getting a literary quiz. Will post it here afterwards in case any technokids find it beforehand and make a cheat sheet.
Rockabilly Christmas →
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
“Writing 30 years before Nietzsche, in his great novel “Moby Dick,” the canonical...”
– Navigating Past Nihilism - NYTimes.com
2 tags
Me on Jonathan Franzen on Facebook comment threads
Friend: I like Franzen.
Me: HATE.
Friend: Don't be a dick.
Me: I've read lots of his work (several short stories, substantial part of his first novel, several non-fiction articles, and most of the Corrections (my skim-reading comment was just to wind you up, more or less)) and don't like him. I agree he has a talent for situations etc (obviously wouldn't be so successful without some chops) but the reason I dislike him is because of the conception of literature I feel the valorisation of his work inculcates - i.e. to see him as 'The Great American Writer' is regressive and detrimental to (what I see as) more interesting approaches to writing. Though, and this is precisely why I'm so insistent on continuing to talk about him, without his reputation and success getting books onto the front page of Time, would we be in a worse situation?
Friend: But that's not dislike.
Me: Ok, the reason I dislike him is that social realism (and this is a broad and not meant to be strictly definitive classification of his work) just isn't something I want to read. Or maybe it is but I don't allow myself the time for it. I want someone whose language is more playful and whose characters do things that *surprise* me with their realism rather than do things I expect. More Lydia Davis/Lorrie Moore, less Franzen. Purely down to what I feel I want writing to do.
Friend: But you like White Noise.
Me: White Noise -- not one of my faves but kind of like the fetishism of academia and the metatextual stuff (people whose job it is to interpret texts interpreting texts and us having to read the text to interpret their significance). DD plays ...around more with the nature of writing, wants his reader to question the process of interpretation, whereas Franzen writes to talk to the reader about families/people etc (which as I hope I've implied I don't think is *bad* but just not interesting to me). The medium for Franzen is something that shouldn't get in the way of the reader's pleasure, whereas for someone like DeLillo the medium and its inherent difficulties *should be* problematic and pleasureable.
[An aside, sort of: when I went to see Franzen talk he apologised for putting wordgames and complex language into his books. Obviously I thought this was an unnecessary apology because I don't think his books are difficult; rather I think they're easy to read and that they engross the reader so much is testament to his talent. His literary identity is bound up with this weird arrogance/shame thing about the role of the writer. He writes for years in isolation, wears noise-cancelling headphones, really detaches himself from culture. This fact is always brought up in media coverage, as if the writer can't just be someone who writes as a normal person, they have to be shamanic or some shit.]
1 tag
I didn't use that one
(I used a trad King Lear essay.) But makes me want to write more stylistic analyses. Might start doing DFW ones for fun on here.
2 tags
So I started looking at my undergrad essays to...
Stewart Home was born in South London in 1962. When he was 16 he held down a factory job for a few months, an experience that led him to vow he’d never work again. After dabbling in rock journalism and music, the bread-doll fancier switched his attention to the art world in the 1980s and now writes novels as well as cultural commentary. (Home 2003 [2002], blurb; 1997, p.-5; 1999, p.223; 1996...
Dilemma
When do I download the Tim and Eric Chrimbus special?
Bryant’s Jubilee Quartet: I’ll be...