What is literature?

Grab Bag

2012-01-17T14:27:00.006-06:00

Today Continuum featured my book on their Literary Studies blog, and over on his site Roy Christopher wrote an engaging distillation of "terminal philosophy," which includes a discussion of my book.

Then there's this:

It may not look like anything special, but as is the way of so much airport culture, it is an amalgam of stories, myths, and attitudes—all bundled in a mundane object. It's a custom Ziploc baggy handed out at the Philadelphia airport (circa 2006) during the infamous 3-1-1 time period, after the liquid and gel scare.

Remember the scene? Silver trashcans overflowing with Right Guard, Secret, and Gillette sticks... So much aromatic confidence and plastic material discarded in a single TSA mandate. In 1894 Kate Chopin used the marvelous and seemingly innocuous phrase "grip-sack" toward the end of "The Story of an Hour." The airport Ziploc represents another chapter in this American narrative of travel disasters, botched communication, and the freedom that flees.

I think I am going to start posting here all the bits and scraps that didn't make it into my book The Textual Life of Airports. There's some really good stuff, all rife with subtleties & niceties...

the only space that matters is yours

2012-01-14T15:46:00.011-06:00

She is lying on a First Class sleeper seat. In that luxurious seat/bed she is floating, super-humanly, above snow-capped peaks. She is grounded, but still in the sky. She is—apparently—flying Korean Air.

The seat/bed in this ad is one to be found in a wide-body jetliner. But its luxury is shown to be attached, or just barely floating above, the natural ground. As if, in a way, our passenger never left the Earth.

This advertisement sums up in spectacular form the hyperaesthetic culture of air travel seating. The seating of air travel, whether in the air or on the ground, at the airport, is commonly imagined to be a luxurious experience, where sensations are heightened. Here, in the Korean Air ad, we see that the scale is profoundly out of whack. Thus the tagline—“comfort on a whole new scale”—plays off the Lilliputian landscape that our passenger finds herself resting on/above.

This is the communicated feeling: traveling Korean Air, you are bigger, your footprint quite literally enormous. No matter that, energy-efficiency speaking, this is in fact true for the space-devouring First Class passenger; the point here is how it is imagined and projected as an earthy phantasm. Our passenger’s bottom blends beautifully into the snowy peaks below; the seat/bed appears as a natural extension of the craggy terrain.

What I want especially to highlight here is the fusion of ground and air—stillness and speed—that is condensed in the marketing and imagery of air travel seating.

On the level of the sign, we might say that the signifier here is this out-of-scale depiction of the woman in a state of repose, seemingly indifferent to or utterly agreeable with whatever is around her (and indeed it is a strange scene).

The signified, of course, would be the concentrated notions of comfort, space, ease, and physical dominance—all while radical mobility (being “expelled in jet-form,” to quote Barthes) is taking place.

The full matrix of signification here naturalizes an image of human air travel—and not any routine image of hundreds of human bodies corralled into a dented metal tube. In fact this ad, in a miraculous turn, makes the elite mode of commercial human air travel—the singular First Class chaise lounge—seem to be the most natural form of air travel: it is literally connected to the Earth, a sort of peasant offspring of mountains and trees abutting a tranquil sea.

The ad closes with a double-edged line: “the only space that matters is yours.” Here we are presented with two possible readings: 1) the naturalistic interpretation of isolation in a cold world, where rugged human individuality is the only effective recourse (for philosophy as well as for daily life); and 2) a simple pragmatic message that supports the exorbitant cost for renting a small seat/bed for nine or twelve hours as you are shuttled around the globe: in this time, the space that matters is yours (but it’s only ‘yours’ on a strictly temporary basis). Either way, the ad does its work, positing the wish image of air travel as both a simple existential reflex and a complex political economic stance.

Yet finally we must wonder: is this disembodied seating fixture the remnant of a crash, à la the opening scenes of Lost? We are not meant to pursue this connotation, clearly. With air travel, nothing must disobey the ground rule of Progress.

***

(I'm teaching Roland Barthes's Mythologies in one of my classes this semester, and my students and I are experimenting with the method & form.)

Information

2011-12-31T07:44:00.008-06:00

Diagram genius Ander Monson wrote a really detailed and thoughtful review of Checking In / Checking Out over at Essay Daily.

Speaking of our little book, there are only about 20 copies left. Besides the handful Mark and I sent out to reviewers and friends, we've sold almost all the other 500 copies from the initial print run. (Okay, maybe we also guerrilla dropped a few copies in various airport bookstores around the country...) But the point is that there are only a few left of the original boutique edition. The next edition of the book will likely lose the unique size and get a different cover.

Semi-relatedly, I'm trying to get a hold of Monson's first chapbook, Safety Features, as I understand that it takes place entirely in airports. I've collected so many airport odds and ends since finishing my first book that I'm starting to sense a sequel on the horizon...

Some Recent & Current Things

2011-12-22T07:28:00.007-06:00

Tarmac watching at O'Hare

Carolyn Kellogg wrote a very nice review of Checking In / Checking Out in the LA Times Books section.

And Nicole Sheets gave the book and Airplane Reading a kind mention at Wanderlust and Lipstick.

Meanwhile, I've been experimenting with Twitter as a way to draw people to Airplane Reading, and I'm quite enjoying the formal constraints, as well as the aesthetic and philosophic possibilities nestled within the form's forced compression. I know, it's not like it's a 'new' tool or anything; but it's often intimidating to start into new media forms, and gratifying when they start to feel like you've got the hang of them. I've particularly liked playing with the photo-essay possibilities granted by Twitter, and I've been posting photos at Twitpic.

I'm also starting to rework my long essay on airport/aircraft seating, which I will be sending out to a journal for review in March. I'm starting this essay with a reading of the psychoanalysis of flight in the opening Claude Sylvanshine chapter in The Pale King. I'll be presenting some of this material at ACLA in Providence this coming spring, in a seminar on David Foster Wallace.

Me & Mark at MSY

2011-12-13T15:27:00.006-06:00

Nate Martin of Press Street's Room 220 put together a great interview with me & Mark, about our little two-sided book Checking In / Checking Out.

Time to Reconsider Air Travel

2011-12-12T07:19:00.005-06:00

As long as we're in the mood for making open claims on behalf of sweeping change (if also without specific demands), here's my contribution:

It was a beautiful thing to see, aircraft climbing, wheels up, wings pivoting back, the light, the streaked sky, three of four of us, not a word spoken.

—Don DeLillo, "Hammer and Sickle"

In the above sentence from his new collection of stories, Don DeLillo aptly describes the sublimity of human aviation. But this story is about prisoners, who are on work detail cleaning up the tarmac of an Air Force base. Here, as in so many scenes in DeLillo's novels, DeLillo seems to be urging us to take the time to reconsider air travel.

With the announcement earlier this month that American Airlines will file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, it is time to reconsider air travel. On November 29 a New York Times article about the parent company of American Airlines, AMR, noted “AMR’s financial health has been eroding for years.”

Indeed, if we want to resort to metaphors of health, we are talking about an entire industry that appears to be afflicted with chronic financial problems. Based on the bankruptcy record of nearly all major airlines, it is demonstrably the case that flight is neither a sustainable nor an economically viable mode of mass human transit.

The accomplishments of flight over the twentieth-century were impressive, to say the least. The relative achievements over the first decade of the twenty-first-century have been regressive at best (e.g., multi-hour tarmac waits), and invasive at worst (e.g., full body scans).

Scott McCartney’s recent Wall Street Journal column “The Middle Seat” celebrated Singapore's Changi International Airport as “arguably the world’s most fabulous airport.” McCartney goes on to laud such features as “comfortable areas for sleeping or watching TV, premium bars, work desks and free Internet. A nap room is about $23 for three hours; a shower can be had for $6.” In short, what McCartney finds so alluring and “fabulous” about Changi are precisely the banalities of everyday life on the ground.

Why is it that we find this level of bare life so surprising (and valuable) in airports, as if we have lost touch with our showers and beds at home?

At the extreme end of this line of inquiry, a front-page New York Times headline on Saturday December 3 stated, provocatively, “Hot on the Trail of ‘Just Right’ Far-Off Planet.” Scientists, it seems, may be on the verge of discovering remote planets that lie within the “habitable zone.”

But wait: we live on one of those planets! We have airlines filing for bankruptcy on one of those planets, and airports that simulate ordinary life on one of those planets! Perhaps it is time to really reconsider all of our air travels. It may very well sound like an outlandish question, but what would it take to stop dumping resources and energy into mass air transit, and instead to reinvest in our lives on the ground, on this planet? It is a question worth taking seriously.

Book ~ Alien

2011-12-01T19:44:00.002-06:00

I saw my book for the first time today. What a weird feeling. It resembles an object from outer space. Vaguely recognizable, yet totally alien at the same time. Actually, it's rather like picking up a stranger in the baggage claim: the ambiance is completely familiar, but there's also the thrill of the unknown...

(I should say, too, that Continuum did a beautiful job on the book-as-object; in an age of electronic reading, it's very nice to hold a finely crafted paper book.)

Reading Mark Alan Stamaty

2011-11-18T02:18:00.008-06:00

I thoroughly enjoyed Mark Alan Stamaty's touching autobiographical narrative in the most recent cartoon issue of The New Yorker ("A Cartoon Legacy," October 31). Here are the last three frames:

Stamaty may just call himself a cartoonist, but I find his work to be rife with literary-theoretical significance. I remember as a child being mesmerized by Stamaty's book Small in the Saddle (1975), a story that I now appreciate as a revisionist history of the American West as shrewd as Annie Proulx's Wyoming stories or Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.

Then there is Stamaty's Who Needs Donuts? (1973), which explores ideas of solipsism, addiction, and connection in a consumer culture with as much ambition and layered meaning as David Foster Wallace's sprawling Infinite Jest.

As one more example, Stamaty's illustration of Frank Asch's story Yellow Yellow (1971) illuminates an urban ecology with an attention to detail and texture that now seems to have been anticipating contemporary forays into object-oriented ontology.

I'm drawing on memories from 30 years or so ago, but as I recall, this story is about a boy who finds a yellow construction helmet on the ground, and he puts it on and starts to walk around; the only problem is that it is adult-size, and so it partially covers his eyes—it gives the world a weird yellow hue, strangely magnified. Yet this obfuscation and yellowing of vision ends up turning the world magical and seen to be teeming with all sort of things, and complicating the barriers between living and nonliving, human-scale and frog-scale, built and organic. The conceptual boundary lines all become wonderfully blurry, and indicative of a flattened ontological plane replete with bricks and beetles and boys, nails and nuts and newspaper clippings, frogs and Formica, tangled string and two-headed turtles:

It's not that everything is jumbled and therefore matters less, or that the human character in the story becomes insignificant; rather, it's that everything takes on more meaning under the object-oriented spell of the construction helmet. And I won't give away the ending, but it involves the safety helmet having to be returned to its rightful owner...nevertheless, the boy discovers a way to stay in the vibrant realm of objects, anyway.

All images © Mark Alan Stamaty

The Textual Life of Airports

2011-11-17T02:08:00.000-06:00

My book The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight will be available December 1.

The hardcover edition is $100—which I know might seem rather expensive. Look, it's an academic book; such pricing is fairly standard. More than that, though: it's worth it! It will change the way you experience—and tell stories about—airports. If you don't have a hundred dollars to spare, please request the book from your local or campus library. The much less expensive paperback edition will be out next year.

Book Review: A Meaning for Wife

2011-11-14T14:15:00.002-06:00

My good friend and poet colleague Mark Yakich just published his first novel, A Meaning for Wife. Mark told me about this novel when we first met, at which point it was still forming in notes on the back of Mark's hands (sometimes both of them, well up onto his forearms). The novel begins and ends on airport taxiways, just before the two flights that bookend the story—so I had an obvious point of interest. Then I read a galley of the novel when it was picked up by the savvy independent publisher, Ig.

It seems to me as though this novel is taking up David Foster Wallace's anticipation of a new kind of U.S. fiction. In his 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," Wallace writes:

The next real literary "rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of "anti-rebels," born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that'll be the point, why they'll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can tell, risk things. Risk disapproval.

A Meaning for Wife functions in precisely these ways. What follows is a version of the review I posted on Amazon:

When I first read A Meaning for Wife it reminded me of the stories told in the films Garden State and Grosse Pointe Blank. Like these two movies, Yakich's novel has a similar theme of existential searching within the suburban banalities of late American life. Specifically, "A Meaning for Wife" explores the psycho-geography of Algonquin, Illinois (a suburb of Chicago), under the pretense of a 20th high school reunion, itself cast in the dark shadow of the sudden death of our main character's wife.

I was recently teaching Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises in a 20th-century American fiction course when I realized that A Meaning for Wife is actually participating in a longer lineage of American narratives of disillusionment and irony—irony so deep that "depth" isn't even the right way to describe it. The irony of this kind of fiction is through and through: there is no surface of sincerity that escapes its opposite meaning, and so you can never quite be certain how to take things. The characters who are rendered pathetic are in fact the most stable; the crazy ones utter startling truths from time to time; and home is both safe and claustrophobic for our main characters.

This constant uncertainty of meaning stems from the fact that the main characters of these narratives have lost something significant (Jake Barnes's "accident"; the sudden death of one's lover in A Meaning for Wife), and everything experienced thereafter is distorted and distended, marked by this loss. And neither does the surrounding world stand out as full or fully present: the world too becomes exposed as riddled with lack—even when it is apparently charged with excess. (One might consider Walker Percy's The Moviegoer as another text in this genre, and also Lydia Davis's Varieties of Disturbance.)

The main character of A Meaning for Wife is at turns humble and arrogant, despicable and admirable, hilarious and morose, wise and absurd. His witticisms often morph into lyrical mush over the course of a paragraph, and his mature (and indeed 'experienced', in the Blakean sense) perspective is continually undermined by the sniveling, "squawking" toddler son Owen who accompanies our main character like a parodic Yoda in the backseat of the grandparents' "dull beige sedan."

A Meaning for Wife is peppered with brilliant turns of phrases on every page, like a spontaneous decision to leave the past behind and drive all the way to California, an American Western trope cut short by the realization that Owen will doubtless get hungry and therefore they'll "never make it farther than the Mississippi." Or this observation, as the reunited high school chums drink their way through giddy (if at times awkward) conversation: "Swallowing—isn't it simply another way of marking time?"

The genius of this novel is that it bumbles along on a journey that is always just on the brink of happening, right up to the final sentence—while at the same time, the narrative keeps us wondering if in fact the very concept of 'the journey' is located irrevocably and maddeningly in the past, even as we (must) hurl ourselves into a future to come.

More Faces & Figures, This Time on Autoracks

2011-11-13T10:03:00.007-06:00

This morning I saw more faces and figures on "autoracks" as they passed—a great rat, a snowman, a mystery visage, and some sort of hooded ninja:

As I watched these faces roll by I was reminded of when I lived in Montana and saw similarly striking moving-canvases. My friend Greg Keeler and I would fish these weird parts of the Gallatin River, places where, to get to, you'd have to walk along the tracks—sometimes right between a vertical cliff on one side and the swirling river below on the other, and if a train came you had to sprint to where the cliff leveled off or the riprap became generous enough to climb down onto. It could be quite terrifying when the trains came bearing down suddenly from around a bend. Anyway, sometimes the trains would be carrying green-coated bodies of Boeing 737 airliners, like large alien phalli; other times, there would be long lines of boxcars palimpsestically spray-painted over with a thousand codes, signs, warnings, and other idioms known only to the secret painters. I'm thinking of exploring such scenes in a future course called something like "everyday aesthetics."

Faces of the Ordinary

2011-10-31T09:56:00.005-05:00

Two faces seen on my walk this morning:

"The ordinary is a moving target. Not first something to make sense of, but a set of sensations that incite."

—Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects

"But always the face shows through these forms."

—Emmanuel Levinas, "Ethics as First Philosophy"

Small Houses

2011-10-24T20:24:00.005-05:00

Alec Wilkinson had a great article on "tiny houses" and the psychology of small home dwelling in The New Yorker last summer ("Let's Get Small," July 25). Wilkinson focuses primarily on a movement that builds and resides in homes built on trailer platforms: they can be moved around to different plots of land, and thus the homeowners can live "off the grid," in a sense.

Yet for all of Wilkinson's insights as to the motivations behind tiny house dwellers, he misses an important point: it is not just that tiny houses allow people to live "off the grid"—small homes also are a way to make less of an impact on the grid. In other words, it is not just a matter of living beyond or under the radar: it is also a way to live on the radar, using far fewer resources. While it's true that building codes now do not support such structures, Wilkinson's article illuminates a trend that might (wisely) be taken up more broadly, and thereby affect changes to the very codes that now make such choices seem untenable.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I really like small houses, and believe they offer so much potential for rethinking living space and human relationships to what we call 'property'. I glimpse such places occasionally around New Orleans, where incredibly narrow homes are nestled into alleys and situated on surprisingly tiny lots. Certainly there is a complex history to such dwelling spaces in New Orleans; but I think there might also be lessons for the future, particularly as we learn to modulate our consumption of resources and perhaps even decrease the human 'footprint' on this planet. Here is another small house that I see on my walk to campus each morning:

I don't know the story of this structure—likely it is an unofficial guest house or studio space at the back of a larger lot. But I like to imagine it as an actual home, replete with a scaled-down economy of practices and things...

Morning Walk Photo Essay

2011-10-17T09:24:00.018-05:00

Most mornings these days, I go for a walk to the Mississippi River with my small roommate, Julien. This morning I decided to record my walk by taking some photos that show the things we encountered along the way.

Julien doesn't walk yet, so I push him in this three-wheeled device.

In the humidity of New Orleans, the electricity lines buzz and crackle overhead.

This is one of my favorite houses in the neighborhood, designed and built by Chuck, who also lives in it. I love the juxtapositions of new and old architecture in the city, the traditional Victorian flourishes alongside modern angles and minimalist design.

I also have a thing for small houses, and I keep track of the small houses in the neighborhoods around town. (I generally think of a small house as under 1000 square feet, though I know this definition is debatable. But when dealing with New Orleans typologies, 1000 square feet and under makes for a useful measuring stick.)

Someone threw out a printer—including the paper.

Something about this house feels very Lynchian, to use a term coined by David Foster Wallace.

Perhaps it's that across the street from the Lynchian house there is a nameless, brick-walled compound with a subdued screaming generator somewhere inside, and a sign on a metal door that says WARNING: 13,800 VOLTS.

Here is another small house; note the toilet on the front porch.

I'm thinking about tennis a lot these days because I'm teaching a seminar on David Foster Wallace, for whom the tennis court becomes an intense ecotone, and the human player a migratory species.

Finally we reach the river. We pass an empty Abita box. There's a guy with his fishing rods set up on the old skeleton of a barge below the rip rap. The other day we saw a dead catfish on the river bank; it was the size of a cinder block. The wild roosters aren't around today. Sometimes they are pecking at the remains of crawfish boils from the night before. It's quiet this morning—no boats go by.

Usually we see tankers and tugs pushing barges. This morning as we pass, the water is flat and empty. Upriver, boats are loading.

We cross over the railroad tracks just as a freight train approaches.

Julien points out each car as it passes.

One car carries what appears to be an important message.

Walking back down Magazine St., now. I like how this company is called "Pothole Killers": as if they conceive of potholes as vibrant things that can be killed...or, on the other hand, maintained & cultivated. It is an ordinary, found example of what the philosopher Jane Bennett calls "vital materialism."

Speaking of ecology, the sunlight looks liquid coming through the big oaks festooned with Spanish Moss in Audubon Park.

Julien likes to feel the stringy bromeliads that hang down to where he can reach them.

A mysterious new boutique is about to open on Magazine St.

Interesting headline on the front page of the USA Today.

Almost back home—but first, a quick stop at the best espresso joint in town.

J-House, New Orleans

2011-10-09T13:40:00.012-05:00

The other day I met the architect Ammar Eloueini at his new project site, where he gave me a tour of the J-House:

(These images are from Eloueini's AEDS site; more images of the actual construction process can be seen here.)

The building is designed to minimize the footprint (flood zone thinking) while maximizing the use of the geometry at hand. The house is situated on a traditional narrow New Orleans lot, 30-feet wide by 150-feet deep. The views from the upper floors—the main living area—are striking, with the wide windows ten feet above ground framing the surrounding neighborhoods in effortless, frayed panoramas. There is a stunning sliver of light that cuts gently into the midpoint of the roof. The design makes use of the two overhangs for a carport in the front and a shaded outside area toward the back. To me the covered spaces had the curious feel of a Zen garden that you could hang out in. It reminded me of walking around a Gehry building, but the difference was that the J-House seemed to be inviting me to pull up a chair to the curvy side and open a bottle of wine: to sit down and enjoy the structure while in very close proximity to it. (Gehry's buildings, on the other hand, seem to facilitate movement. This is not a critique at all: they do it really well, for all kinds of movements.)

When I first walked by the J-House a month ago (the house is mid-construction), my partner Lara remarked that it felt like a huge shell you'd find on the beach: startled by its size, perhaps, but familiar with its whorls. Indeed, there is something about the structure that appears accreted, then etched away over time, literally lived in. This is interesting given the fact that the house is not yet finished. But it goes to show how much thought has gone into the space: already lived in while yet uninhabited, as it were.

When I went back to the house a week later and stood outside it for a while, just watching the clouds move by overhead, it occurred to me that it also resembled the eroded smoothness of slot canyons in the desert southwest, those little flash-flood grooves that you can stand in and look out of, watching the clouds and sky fly by. In this way, it was vaguely reminiscent of standing within James Turrell's "Three Gems" at the de Young in San Francisco. The difference here, though, was that unlike one of Turrell's carefully curated skyspaces, the J-House was just there, intermingling with myriad other shotgun and creole cottage style homes. In New Orleans, you get these fractured views of the Gulf Coast sky walking down any street, as the staggered roof-lines intersect and morph into one another, occasionally collapsing in on the structures beneath. New Orleans shows off its erodedness. The J-House is like a re-mark of this common experience: it reminds you to take the time to see it.

Frank Lloyd Wright obviously wanted to evoke the power of erosion with Fallingwater, which suggests the very foundation of the home as ephemeral, moving, almost Heraclitean in its constant relationship to dynamism. Eloueini seems to be balancing this impulse with the always-already submerged feeling of New Orleans: we're under water, and there's no getting around it. Better to build with time and levity both on the mind, aware of radical flux and the reliable comforts of a home-space, at turns and at once.

I had planned to start this post by quoting Wallace Stevens, from his poem "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Now, it appears, I'm going to end with it:

These houses, these difficult objects, dilapidate
Appearances of what appearances,
Words, lines, not meanings, not communications,

Dark things without a double, after all,
Unless a second giant kills the first –
A recent imagining of reality,

Much like a new resemblance of the sun,
Down-pouring, up-springing and inevitable,
A larger poem for a larger audience,

As if the crude collops came together as one,
A mythological form, a festival sphere,
A great bosom, beard and being, alive with age.

Ammar Eloueini is building a house that is truly "a larger poem for a larger audience." His J-House sends my mind rushing with ideas for what Lara and I might do with our tiny house (the lot is 15-feet wide by 90-feet deep!) when we start to renovate it in a year or two...

Lady Gaga and Today's Modernism

2011-10-01T05:34:00.001-05:00

Amid the numerous allusions and references to past musicians, actors, and styles in Gay Talese's recent New Yorker article about Lady Gaga recording with Tony Bennett ("High Notes," September 19), I was struck by a more subtle aesthetic echo: the uncanny, Hemingway-esque dialogue that unfolds between Gaga and Bennett. The exchanges of "I'm having a good time." "Good."—and "We can do it until we're very happy with it." "Everybody's happy...Happy faces!" (with accompanying whiskey, for Gaga)—could be taken right out of The Sun Also Rises. As is well known, such language in Hemingway's narratives usually hints at the presence of malaise—even terror—right under the surface of any given scene. In terms of Gaga and Bennett in the present moment, their dialogue is curious because it suggests a return of modernist anxieties. Given the upcoming elections, the stalled economy, nostalgia for an earlier (fantasy) moment of the nation, and the boisterous lack of confidence in the current administration, it is no wonder that such ambient tremors would find their way (if unconsciously) into the production enclaves of commercial art and culture.

Of course, strains of American Modernism were also trying to make things new. Would that were the case for today's modernists. One dreams of an alternative New Yorker article in which Lady Gaga decides to collaborate with the Obama re-election campaign rather than on a Tony Bennett duets album. In this dream article, instead of drinking whiskey alone, Gaga would have a beer with Obama and then get to work, gearing her talents and mass appeal toward real change—which takes time, patience, and sustained collective effort as well as dynamic individuals.

On Airport Food

2011-09-21T07:03:00.009-05:00

I'm quoted in an article on airport food in The New York Times this week. When Joe Sharkey originally asked me the two questions—1. Do you have a strategy for dining in airports? and 2. From your perspective how has the airport dining experience changed over the decades?—here was my full response:

1. My strategy for dining in airports can't quite be called "eating local," because the word local doesn't exactly fit with airports. But let's call it thinking regionally. So, in San Francisco I always eat at the sushi place in the International Terminal. In Minneapolis, I go for the walleye in the mezzanine restaurant between the C and B concourses. Charles de Gaulle: baguette au fromage. In my own Louis Armstrong airport, a bowl of gumbo and some red beans. As for Detroit? Well, I hear there's a great new wine room in the McNamara Terminal. (Regional? Maybe not. But good wine always wins out.) Wherever you are flying through or to, study the airport maps before your trip: there's usually at least one restaurant of regional value in every airport, and you'll tend to get the freshest ingredients in those establishments.

2. I am interested in how airports appear in a range of cultural expressions, from literature to movies to the visual arts. What I find curious is how the figure of airport dining has been somewhat constant over the recent history of air travel. When I look at Arthur Hailey's 1968 pot-boiler Airport in which the main character has a hurried coffee in the airport restaurant; or at Garry Winogrand's airport photographs from the late 50s through the early 80s with waiting travelers looking haggard and bleary-eyed over lunch tables; or at Don DeLillo's characters killing time with cocktails before their flights (such as in the 1977 novel Players)—in all these examples I see a reoccurring theme of palpable tension, of people not able to relax enough to enjoy their sustenance. Sometimes one hears nostalgia for a time of flight when travelers were less rushed, and airline and airport employees were formal and treated travelers like royalty. But from my research, it seems as though air travel has always involved a certain malaise or a core of anxiety that makes dining a vexed enterprise. This might explain the success of Starbucks in contemporary American airports, those ubiquitous and recognizable facades where travelers can buy a sandwich or a scone, and a coffee or juice, at any time of day just to get it over with and go wait at their gates for their flights, nibbling or munching and sipping their drinks lest there be a delay. Somewhat against its traditional sensuous coffee-shop image, Starbucks manages to peddle airport dining without any illusions of relaxation or enjoyment. Not that one necessarily has to follow this model; one can try to find the regional food nestled in a nook further down the concourse.

Photo by J. Ryan Williams

On Videogames & Memories

2011-09-17T20:07:00.005-05:00

I recently wrote an Amazon review of Ian Bogost's sprightly new book How to Do Things with Videogames. I want to extend that review here in order to think through some related things.

This book's form makes it incredibly accessible and inviting: 20 short essays or occasions through which Bogost invites his readers to think (without any heavy imperative to 'think critically') about how videogames have become a "mature medium."

Bogost describes myriad videogames along the way, and his scene and scenario descriptions are precise and nuanced, yet always concise such that even non-gamers will follow and find solid points of attachment and interest. (I haven't played a videogame seriously since 1992: Metroid II on Game Boy.) In other words, the book is not only an astute and scintillating argument; it is also educational in the most satisfying sense of the word. Speaking of education, I can definitely imagine teaching this book in an undergraduate digital humanities course, as it demonstrates this emergent field at its best: in grounded, lucid, and layered investigations.

In short, How to Do Things with Videogames will be of great interest to all sorts of people: everyday gamers and game makers, certainly, but also to non-gamers as well as to scholars and students of contemporary culture—which is to say the book is media studies for the world.

(That's the end of the Amazon review.)

It really is a wonderful book, and I'm planning to teach it next semester in my "Interpretive Approaches" course at Loyola. Foregoing the standard theory reader, I'm going to organize the course around a handful of short books that reflect how the lessons of critical theory (conceived broadly) are being adapted, expanded, and otherwise put to work in contemporary contexts. (Other books on the syllabus might include Kathleen Stewart's Ordinary Affects, Elaine Scarry's On Beauty, and Graham Harman's Circus Philosophicus.)

But back to How to Do Things with Videogames. As I read this book I found myself thinking more and more about the world of that Game Boy game Metroid II that I spent so many hours immersed in after school days. I even found a longplay recording of the game on YouTube and watched it, totally mesmerized for a while.

For me, the murky world of Metroid II was linked to another murky world: it was the fall of my freshman year of high school and I was in a new school, my dad having taken a new job and moved the family to a new town (near Detroit). I wasn't playing sports (I would start wrestling that winter), and I hadn't made any real friends yet. What I had done was babysit for a neighborhood boy a few times, though, and I used that money to buy a Game Boy. The devices were only a year or so old at that point, and they were still cutting-edge feeling, like handheld portals to other visible worlds. Since my parents didn't allow television in our house (long story), it seemed like a clever alternative way to play videogames—somehow I convinced them that it was nothing like a TV videogame console. Metroid II was one of the first games I bought, and I remember concentrating on it solidly for...some time. In my memory I played the game for weeks or maybe even months before I beat the final level. But this can't be accurate; it probably took no more than a week of obsessive afternoon sessions for me to finish the game. And yet the game is lodged in my mind, affiliated with an assemblage of associations related to that time in my life.

I guess my point is that this is another thing one can do with videogames: find clusters of memories bundled around particular games and acts of play. Later that fall, I sold my Game Boy and all my games and accessories (including that awkward but cool magnifying lens for the screen) to a schoolmate (no memory of who it was), and I used the money to buy fishing gear. I was entering the obsessive fishing phase of my life—but that's another story for another time.

Airplane Reading

2011-09-08T09:23:00.013-05:00

My colleague Mark Yakich and I just launched a site called Airplane Reading. Airplane Reading is an online, ongoing anthology dedicated to people's ordinary and extraordinary stories of air travel. The site features creative nonfiction, anecdotes, and observations about everyday experiences and misadventures of modern flight. New pieces are posted daily, and each week we select one to feature. Submit your own story here.

Our two-sided memoir about flight just came out, too: Checking In / Checking Out is about Mark's lifelong fear of flying, and about my time working for United Express/SkyWest Airlines between the years of 2001 and 2003. An excerpt of my side of the book, about working at the airport when 9/11 happened, is featured today in The Millions.

Shopping with Zizek, at Walmart

2011-08-31T06:49:00.012-05:00

This is a pretty good story, and yesterday as I was telling it to a student I realized I should write it down.

It happened a couple years ago when Slavoj Zizek was in town. Before Zizek's talk at Loyola, I went out to dinner with him and two of my colleagues, John Clark & Josefa Salmón. For some reason John or Josefa asked me if I could drive the group to dinner. I don't really like to drive, or even be in cars. But of course I said yes; maybe that's the only reason I'd been invited, after all—so that I could drive the rest of them. In any case, I picked up Josefa, then John and Slavoj, and we headed to one of our wonderful restaurants on Magazine, Lilette. Travel and Leisure had named Lilette the "sexiest dining room in new orleans"—so where else would we have taken Zizek?

We had a narrow window for dinner, because Zizek's talk was scheduled to begin at 7:30. Our dinner reservation was for 6:00, but we got to the restaurant at 5:30 thinking we'd get a drink first or just eat early, playing it safe to have plenty of time to return to campus for the talk. But when we got to Lilette it wasn't open yet. We started meandering along Magazine to find another venue where we could kill 30 minutes, when all of a sudden Slavoj semi-blurted, "Can we go to a Best Buy?!" I remember looking frantically at John and Josefa in the rear-view mirror, like "Did he just say what I think he said?", and I started racking my brain to conjure the nearest Best Buy store, but couldn't think of where one was, so I asked, "What do you need to get?"

"An ee-pod!"

"What?" (all of us asked simultaneously)

"An EE-POD!!"

"Oh, an iPod!"

Josefa just then remembered that there was a Best Buy out in Harahan, but there was no way we would have gotten back to dinner (much less the talk) in time. So at that point I suggested Walmart. Then John got excited, because the Walmart on Tchoupitoulas was where some of the infamous looting had taken place after Katrina, so he thought it would be the perfect place to take Slavoj pre-dinner. (Apparently, Slavoj was supposed to get an iPod for his son, or a friend of his son, or something—and they were far cheaper stateside.)

So next thing I know I'm driving down Tchoupitoulas, the street that makes a sound in the car like going over an infinity of miniature cattle guards, headed toward Walmart.

As we walked toward the store, perhaps exuding a bit of guilt or shame, Slavoj launched into an expostulation about the sheer visibility of consumerism, and how the warehouse-y, cavernous-feeling Walmart was so much better than high-end places, like for instance Dolce & Gabbana stores that conceal consumerism behind a sheen of glamour and minimalism. We were standing on the threshold of the store, taking in Slavoj's tirade and watching him gesticulate and begin to dominate the space, when I remembered that we were on a tight schedule. So I grabbed Slavoj's arm and I led the way back to the electronics department, because of course as a human raised in the U.S. in the 80s I have a built-in sort of GPS that automatically kicks on when I enter any big box store.

The iPods were behind one of those glass cases that have locks where the doors slide open for employee-only access. So first Slavoj had to peer through the little doors and select which model of iPod he wanted, and then we had to flag down a blue-vested worker to open the case and dutifully hand Slavoj the slim, plastic-wrapped Apple box. We all stood in line behind a couple buying pirate-themed earbuds; and then it was our turn, and Slavoj paid for the iPod with cash. Our conversation had turned from cultural critique to recent Hollywood movies, as we were surrounded by DVDs marked down to $3.99.

As we left Walmart the sun was setting, and the sky was that empurpled milky orange unique to the Gulf Coast. The dinner was good. And so was the talk. But the highlight of the night was shopping with Zizek, at Walmart.

Recollections of a Frank Lloyd Wright home

2011-08-20T10:36:00.022-05:00

My grandparents lived in a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Okemos, Michigan. The house was my grandfather's pride and joy. After my grandparents died the house was sold, and I was worried that the new owners would have it bulldozed, and have the lot subdivided for three or four new homes. But instead, the new owners apparently fell in love with the quirks and character of the house, and they have done a beautiful job restoring and modernizing it (in the funny way that 'modern' can refer to a retro aesthetic). Here is the great room of the house, as it looks now:

I have such vivid memories of being in this house. When my cousins and I would spend nights there we'd often sleep on the floor, but this involved a bit of technical finesse. The house had radiant heating, and so you had to have just the right configuration of davenport cushions and only a light cotton sheet over you, or else you'd wake up drenched in sweat, with that awful taste of microwaved Schwan's chicken sandwiches in your mouth. (If you could sleep through the night, the salty residue got somehow absorbed.) The radiant heating made the house always feel cozy, which was rather paradoxical given the panoramic windows that, in winter, also invited the frigid Midwestern ambiance inside. In the summer months, the house felt almost like a large tent, with the cedars and white oaks at the edge of the yard, just a short sprint away...

Next Project: The Brad Pitt Book

2011-07-27T08:14:00.004-05:00

Reading David Foster Wallace's essay "David Lynch Keeps His Head" over the past few days got me thinking seriously about my next book project, which will be an interdisciplinary study of Brad Pitt. I've been thinking about this idea off and on for the past ten years, and now that I live in New Orleans I regularly pick up on a sort of ambient critical interest in the actor—both as a mythic Hollywood persona and as an actual person who does things that make a difference in the world. I've also had a series of exchanges with scholars and students that have convinced me that this is a project worth pursuing: there are a lot of facets involved, and it's no mere extension of spectation. So I think it's time. I am curious what other people are writing about Brad Pitt, and so I have put out a call for papers to see if I can cull an eclectic group of essays that cohere around the subject.

Of Getting Lost

2011-07-05T09:48:00.006-05:00

Yesterday I got lost in the woods. I mean really really lost: totally disoriented, middle-of-the-day sun overhead and so no bearing on cardinal directions, going probably in meandering circles up ridges and down valleys, tromping through heavy undergrowth, dense expanses of ferns up to my thighs, over a bog whose entire mass jiggled underfoot, through raspberry patches and groves of balsam poplars...trying to find an elusive logging road that finally appeared right in front of me after wandering along a winding ridge-line for a mile or so.

What was supposed to be a relatively short walk in the woods to a somewhat remote glacial 'kettle' lake turned into a four-hour excursion that entailed a lot of displacement and uncanny feelings of total isolation amid the old growth deciduous forests. The tiniest details—the maiden hair fern rachis, a splotch of slime mold on a downed birch tree, drosera carnivorous plants around stunted cedar tree bases, the texture of leatherwood bark—took on incredible thing-ness in the dark and circular woods.

The weird thing is that when I got home and charted where I had been on Google Earth, the area looked so small and easily navigable. Yet while aerial perspective and satellite imaging can certainly zoom in and out impressively and cover a lot of ground, it is very difficult to map or otherwise render the scale of getting lost.

Cultural Productions of 9/11

2011-07-01T06:41:00.009-05:00

The latest issue of Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture is now online, and you can read it here. The issue is called "Cultural Productions of 9/11," and my friend Kara Thompson and I co-edited it and wrote the introduction together. We were fortunate to get fantastic contributions from a range of brilliant scholars. When we first put out the call for papers (a year and a half ago), we had nearly 100 strong proposal submissions; it was difficult to decide on the contents, but it is now very rewarding to see all the thematic overlaps and reoccurring tension points that appear throughout the issue as it turned out.

T-Rex in the baggage claim; flies on your body

2011-06-05T09:38:00.010-05:00

My good friend Greg Keeler just sent me some pictures that he took in the Bozeman airport, around the baggage claim. This one made me pause:

What is that T-Rex doing in the baggage claim? The easy answer: Jack Horner is a local. But on another level, it's kind of hard to take your own baggage too seriously when there's a reminder of geologic time gaping at you with open jaws. Airport art often implicitly critiques the earnestness of human progress.

This photo is apropos of the last chapter of my book on airports. In this chapter, called "Claiming Baggage," I look at how baggage claims are figured in all sorts of literary and cultural texts; I also puzzle over the evolutionary baggage of air travel, or how ideas of flight sometimes spur questions of ecology. A preoccupation with vast timescales is echoed by the strange appearance of the T-Rex in the Bozeman baggage claim, as if it is urging passengers to consider their current travel plans in light of the mind-blowing knowledge of species extinction and climate shifts.

I have been in northern Michigan completing my book and visiting family. I put the finishing touches on my book over the past week, and sent it to the publisher yesterday. So this morning, not thinking of airports or air travel any longer, I turned to my next task, which is to prepare for a seminar on David Foster Wallace that I'm teaching at Loyola in the fall. It's going to be a great class, with a stellar lineup of students.

I went down to the dunes by the beach to read, eager to think about new things. But it only took a few pages into DFW's newly published unfinished novel The Pale King before I was thrust back into the textual life of airports. The novel opens with the character Claude Sylvanshine sitting in the cramped seat of 8-B (exit row) on a regional flight from Midway to Peoria, en route to take his CPA exam. The prose is full of fantastic descriptions of in-flight minutiae such as this one: "Over the window was a stern injunction against opening the emergency hatch accompanied by an iconic triptych explaining how to open just this hatch. As a system, in other words, it was poorly thought through" (8). I wonder how much we might extrapolate from this latter statement when considering the culture of flight at large.

Small flies kept alighting on me as I read; it is that time of year on the Great Lakes shoreline.

A couple people walked by on the beach, waving their arms hysterically and swatting flies. They called over to ask me if the flies were driving me crazy—I said, "No, not really." And I was being honest. It occurred to me that being covered with flies is an apt way to read David Foster Wallace: the bodily sensation somewhat parallels the brain-feel of reading DFW. And I don't mean that it's bad, at all—just that it sort of tickles and constantly distracts; it's not quite agitating, but on the verge of it in thirteen places at once. There's also something about it that makes you feel tinglingly alive, and radically connected to other life forms.

But I think what people don't like about seeing flies crawling all over their bodies (even when they are not biting) is this: you suddenly perceive yourself from an odd distance as an organic, decomposable object. This uncanny realization is understandably unsettling. David Foster Wallace was able to isolate and articulate such feelings in everyday scenarios, such as the totally banal regional flight "yawing" as it makes its routine 50-minute hop from Chicago to Peoria. Maybe these aren't terrible feelings to have, though. Maybe we just need better systems, and better signage. Maybe having a T-Rex in the baggage claim is a start.

Book Cover

2011-05-20T09:32:00.009-05:00

My editor at Continuum just sent me a proof of my book cover, and I'm very pleased with how it turned out:

I love the play of curves and angles, and the solitary traveler waiting to fly. We don't know how long he has been there, or when (or if) he will ever depart. He looks like he is reading, or writing—or maybe nodding off. One of my chapters deals with the uncertain phenomenology of airport waiting, and how this experience appears in dozens of American literary passages; the chapter is called "Ecology in Waiting."

The tug

2011-05-18T16:15:00.024-05:00

While cleaning my office today (an end-of-semester ritual), I stumbled upon this photo that I took in 2001 when I worked at the airport near Bozeman, Montana:

This was my work vehicle. It is the standard diesel "tug" that you see airline workers driving around the tarmac, pulling baggage carts and other miscellaneous trailers around aircraft. I like the way the tug looks against the mountains and the evening sky, almost blocking them out; this sort of captures how I've come to think about airports, as curious spaces that blot out whatever region you are in, even as they insist on regional value (the ability to differentiate place A from place B, and the need to travel between them). Looking at this picture now, on my slim MacBook Air screen, its metaphoric "AirPort" picking up the wireless DSL signal in my house, the scene seems almost quaint: the severe tarmac and a loud, powerful little machine to move heavy cargo around. But of course, at some point my newly manufactured computer was loaded onto a trailer in another country, and hauled into the belly of a plane in order to arrive where it is, aglow in front of me now.

As I finish my own book on airports, I'm also reading the book Aerotropolis by Greg Lindsay and John Kasarda (Kasarda invented the term to basically mean elaborate city infrastructures designed explicitly around air travel). Among the numerous of reviews I have read of this book, I especially like Ian Bogost's take on it. One recurring tension point throughout this book is the simultaneous presence and intricate imbrications of virtual technologies and physical transit. On the one hand, humans have more ability than ever before to be virtually (almost) anywhere, and therefore to eliminate certain 'needs' for physical travel and all the time and resources exhausted to this end. On the other hand, the airborne movement of stuff is only increasing, and this is where the aerotropolis would seem to come in: cities are essentially to be conceived as sites for stuff rather than as places for people. You can sort of see this at work just in the catchy cover of the book, a kind of fantasy in bold colors of a manipulable landscape:

An interesting feature of this image is the lack of people. Certainly, we are to assume there are people in those buildings and within the swarm of airplanes (an air traffic controller's nightmare). But the point is that it is a different scale of seeing people and things, a zoomed out view that suggests a grander scheme than mere humans can grasp. And indeed, this is the feeling I would often get when I worked at the airport: hauling around loads of stuff bound for somewhere else, boarding and deplaning passengers who would file dutifully on and off aircraft, seeing the planes swoop in and out of the valley...there was something much bigger than me—and maybe bigger than all of us—going on here. Maybe I was feeling the tug of the aerotropolis. But to be totally honest, it felt more like the frayed end of something, like an unsustainable trajectory.

Lindsay and Kasarda are probably right when they predict how flight will become even more important and expected in the years to come. And yet, this should not preclude us from wondering about the less-than-ordered nature of this trend. Air travel will no doubt continue to morph and surge in certain parts of the world. But it could also be phased out in certain ways—and I think new media communication modes are an early indicator of this. I'm not saying that people will just suddenly stop flying, but that as 'presence' itself is gradually redefined, we will likely see a re-prioritization of 'being there'.

Lindsay and Kasarda refer to "evolution" and "Darwinian" processes of selection throughout their book, as they make their case for the historical ways that American cities rise, stumble, and fall—and how the centrality of air travel should be seen in this light. But it seems worth remembering that evolution is not simply about "survival of the fittest" (or fastest, in Kasarda's version); evolution is more accurately about adaptation, mutation, and diversity. Evolution also takes place on a timescale that is so much more vast than a century's worth of social and cultural developments can account for. If we really wanted to think about how air travel is part of our species' evolution, we would have to look at it as a value-neutral development among myriad other transformations and shifts in how we get around and impact our ecosystems.

Air travel may seem significant to us, from our perspective—but this doesn't mean that it necessarily has any 'higher value' in evolutionary terms. The odd thing about evolution, as I understand it, is that it is only traceable in retrospect. Furthermore, we really can't make predictions about the future based on evolutionary logic, because the ground is literally alive and moving under us; we're in it and of it—we are our own evolutionary blind-spot, as it were. While Lindsay and Kasarda make bold claims about the the future of flight, I'm wary of such confident teleological argumentation, particularly when it is couched in terms of social-science inflected recourse to "evolution."

Air travel involves so much disorder and diversity; so many awkward transitions and uncomfortably protracted spells of time; labor disputes and wretched working conditions; unexpected events and undesirable circumstances, Business Class Flat Beds and cramped coach seats.... To really think critically about air travel we have to account for these things, as well as economic strategies and zoomed-out views of progress. Strictly speaking, there is never a 'larger view' of flight independent of the tug and million other details clumsily converging and moving around airports.

The subtitle of Aerotropolis is "The way we'll live next." If my book The Textual Life of Airports were a companion piece or response to Lindsay and Kasarda's project, its subtitle could be "The way we* have lived." The asterisk would refer to a qualification concerning the privileged airborne few, and the many many workers who never leave the ground.

Aircraft disaster ecotopias and the making and killing of liberal subjects

2011-05-04T07:56:00.018-05:00

Recently I've been working on an essay about violent airline disasters and environmental aesthetics. It seems to me that there is a persistent drive to describe the surroundings of actual or potential airline disasters in pastoral language, and through images that prepare passengers for pristine landscapes that lie outside the fuselage of crashed planes.

For instance, I continue to read about how part of the Air France plane that went down in the Atlantic two summers ago has been discovered "on a sandy plain" at the bottom of the ocean.

Another example can be seen in this snapshot of an Airbus A340 emergency briefing card that a friend shared with me after a recent flight on Thai Air:

Consider the verdant utopia that exists just past the emergency slide on the far right frame. This is an ecotopia, a wish image for a tabula rasa where the post-crash human can begin again, alive and free to start afresh, to make oneself from the ground up, as it were. This nestled image of an 'outside' to air travel stands in stark contrast to the rest of the safety diagram, with all its instructions and technical details. And it serves as a ideal space where the escaped human can achieve full selfhood: it is a pre-history paradise that strangely exists at the end of history, out the EXIT door of a crashed plane.

Lately this sort of imagery has cropped up in a seemingly disjunctive context. Yesterday The New York Times provided an info-graphic that illuminated the setting and layout of "Bin Laden's Compound":

First let us pause on the shaded area where one of the stealthy U.S. Navy helicopters apparently experienced a "hard landing" and was subsequently blown up as the commando team departed the premises. The aircraft's readiness to be self-destructed suggests an autoimmune function of sorts, as if the military aircraft can always be turned back on itself; this seems obvious enough, perhaps, and yet it is a curious return and reversal of the post-9/11 realization that fully-fueled commercial airliners are missiles by another name. While we do not see the wreckage of the helicopter on the info-graphic, this visual representation of the crash nevertheless suggests, via a grayed-out negative space, the presence of air power and aerial viewing technologies. (My mentor Caren Kaplan has been posting on this topic at her excellent new blog Mind's Eye.) This naturalized perspective is then reinforced by the zoomed-out view that follows:

And here we are back in the ecotopia: dramatic mountains pronounced, riparian zones and watersheds suggested—while human settlements are greatly minimized and de-emphasized, a pale grid at the foot of a wild world. It is in such fantasy topographies that liberal subjects can be made, and killed. An entire political philosophy is thus maintained through simple recourse to a Rousseauian landscape, where everyone included is assumed to be worthy of self-made life—or just death.

Airport Seating, or Sitting in the Post-contemporary

2011-03-30T07:36:00.007-05:00

This week I'm flying to Vancouver to give a paper entitled "The Elimination of Speed: Air Travel and Dead Time." The conference is for the American Comparative Literature Association, and the panel I'm on is called "Defining the Post-contemporary."

Here is the first paragraph of my paper:

In this paper I will suggest that the history of air travel has been caught in a representational bind around the functions and figurations of appropriate seating. This bind has to do with how air travelers experience time and space, and how these sensations are strategically enhanced or elided. Specifically, I wish to analyze literary and philosophical explorations of air travel, and I will also examine some material and visual culture of flight. My paper takes its cue in part from the media theorist Gillian Fuller, who argues that airports have become frames through which we visualize modern life. As Fuller writes, “The airport is, among many other things, a perceptual machine.” It matters not just what we see, but how we see (in) airports. What follows are notes toward a post-contemporary definition of air travel...

...and here's the two-sided handout I'll be referring to:

The Airport Screening Complex

2011-03-25T09:13:00.006-05:00

A short section from my book has been published in essay form in the second issue of the exciting new journal Media Fields. My contribution is called "The Airport Screening Complex."

Book Work

2011-02-18T09:10:00.010-06:00

I have not been posting to my blog as regularly these days, as I'm busy completing my book The Textual Life of Airports.

My book explores how airports appear in literature and culture, with an eye toward the interpretive demands made on passengers, laborers, and other subjects. For instance, consider this architectural sketch for the new Terminal B at the Sacramento airport:

What myriad stories, normative aesthetics, and commonplace expectations shape this idealized baggage claim area?

My book is under contract with Continuum, and is on schedule to be published in November 2011. I look forward to posting on my blog more regularly as soon as the book is done...

On Style: Sofia Coppola's "Somewhere"

2011-01-06T14:40:00.000-06:00

David Denby's review of the film "Somewhere" (in The New Yorker Dec. 20 & 27) astutely points out the director Sofia Coppola's penchant for hotel-bound characters. But while Denby castigates Coppola for being "fixated on a single subject," it is worth considering another reoccurring theme in Coppola's films: the everyday phenomenon of sleep, in all its personal banalities and slow-time oddities. Recall Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson each trying to recalibrate and rest their weary, jet-lagged bodies in "Lost in Translation"; and Kirsten Dunst's attempts at sharing a bed with the wonderfully awkward Jason Schwartzman in "Marie Antoinette." (I need to see "Virgin Suicides" again to make sure, but I'm willing to bet that there are some rich scenes of somnolence therein.) Denby's review of "Somewhere" suggests that Coppola has continued to forward this anthropological study, with Stephen Dorff's character falling asleep constantly throughout the film. The fact is that Coppola brilliantly explores certain themes across very different film subjects.

Yet Denby seems to want Coppola to diversify, to expand her cinematic scope. Is this really a warranted critique? It would be silly to wish that Ernest Hemingway had done something other than continually describe war torn souls; nor would we ask Yiyun Li to stop writing about characters who are estranged and disoriented, either at home in China or transplanted in the U.S. Furthermore, if Mark Rothko created a series of color fields that strike the viewer in compelling ways, or if Tara Donovan makes similarly captivating installations out of range of disposable objects—art criticism is expected to treat with nuance what might at first glance seem to be pure repetition. Denby's review of "Somewhere" misses the mark concerning the style of the filmmaker. Sofia Coppola is an artist, not just an entertainer.

Why Do Dreams Need Guns?

2010-12-16T13:06:00.001-06:00

I just finished watching Christopher Nolan's most recent film, Inception. I found this movie perplexing on many levels, not the least of which was its relentlessly derivative post-Matrix feel. This included all the fights and guns, which never cease to confound me in the context of reality-bending films: if reality can be bent at will (and we see entire cities literally bent in Inception), then of what use are straight punches, combat rolls, and sharp shooters? This makes no sense, and only distracts from the ostensibly philosophical edge of the plot—or perhaps it's that the plot needs these violent charades precisely in order to mask the fact that there is no consistent philosophical project at work in the film.

The subject of dreams should make for fertile imagistic ground in a film; we've seen this in Richard Linklater's Waking Life and Michel Gondry's Science of Sleep. But what these films did well was to harness the minutiae and at times truly nonsensical residues of everyday life as a way to animate and (partially) translate or interpret the dreamworld. Inception, on the other hand, tries far too hard to pull off an aesthetically complex but still basically linear narrative of multi-layered dreams. There are dreams within dreams within dreams—and finally, the film leaves the viewer wondering if the whole movie was itself a dream. (I actually think Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky, a remake of the Spanish film Abre los ojos, pulled off such an indeterminate ending more convincingly.)

The problem with Inception is akin to the problem of Plato's allegory of the cave and the problem of The Matrix, where there is no anchor point for something like actual reality. In each of these cases the supposed real 'reality' (beyond the Matrix, outside the cave, really being awake) always is open to being exposed as a further layer of simulation, sleep, or otherwise mediated deception. There is an infinite regress shot through all levels of the 'real'. Waking Life played with this infinitely looping regress, but in a more truly playful way, accepting as it were the erosive quality of such speculation. Waking Life followed Nietzsche's theory that "a dream, if repeated eternally, would be felt and judged entirely as reality"—and thus everyday life is just a long dream by another name. (And this is similar to Chuang Tzu's "butterfly dream" puzzle: upon waking from a dream in which one was a butterfly, one might not be certain whether one is actually a human who has just dreamt of being a butterfly, or a butterfly who is presently dreaming of being a human.) Even a film like David Fincher's Fight Club did more justice than Inception to the question of what is at stake when the line between the real and the fictitious gets blurred by the threshold of sleep. In that movie, the nameless narrator played by Edward Norton wakes up too late, just as the real world around him is starting to fall apart.

It is clear that Inception is not a radical break from the lineage of recent dream/simulated reality films. But as the latest and most acclaimed of these films, it is worth asking: what might Inception tell us about what all these characters are looking for with such consternation?

I wonder if this collective, outward looking gaze returns us to the topic of violence and guns in Inception. Perhaps the nightmare that all these characters are looking to find their way out of is a dream of military dominance. For what else can all the scenes of paramilitary sniping, blasting, and machine-gunning possibly be about? Somewhat against Freud's formulation of dream-displacement (by which things of high psychic value are de-emphasized in the dream, and low value things get exaggerated and thus serve as psychical red herrings), I think that the guns & violence of Inception (objects and actions that only become more overdetermined as the characters go further 'down' into the subconscious) in fact function as fairly obvious dream symbols in this film.

The twist, however, comes at the level of whose dream we are referring to. In my reading, the film is not about the various characters' dreams or nightmares at all. In fact the dream of Inception is a cultural dream work, a mass condensation of promises and investments concerning precision firepower and discrete time-frames for exiting certain theaters of war. In short, Inception is about a very unfulfilled and dispersed desire for pinpoint military action and tidy resolution in Afghanistan—and by extension, all the other parts of the world for which Afghanistan stands as an untidy metonymy. The symmetry is all too obvious, in this case; it's whose dream this really is that is the question—not to mention how we might wake up from it.

Afghanistan ———————— Inception

Air Travel Conundrums

2010-11-24T14:31:00.001-06:00

I'm currently writing an article on airport screening for an upcoming issue of the journal Media Fields. I'm going to use this post to think about some of the timely aspects of this topic—some spurs that don't exactly fall into the purview of my article, but that I've been nonetheless thinking about along the way.

Airport screening has been in the news lately, with an ad hoc resistance movement emerging out of ordinary passengers frustrated at the TSA's newly deployed full-body scanners, or Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT).

The websites We Won't Fly and Opt Out Day called for passengers to either avoid flying altogether on November 24 (the nation's busiest travel day), or to opt out of the full-body scans, submitting themselves instead to time consuming "enhanced pat downs"—and thereby snarling airport security lines. Either way, the intent was to send the message to our government that airport security has crossed the line.

But as the day unfolded, as one NY Times article reported, "most travelers seemed more interested in getting to their destinations than in making a political statement."

Indeed, the issues around airport screening would seem to be all about politics—but it is a very ambiguous and confused set of political ideals, assumptions, and priorities. Perhaps this is why no unified political statement was available to be made.

First off, there is the questionable use of the full-body scanners. Objections have been raised concerning an invasion of privacy involved in imaging the whole body. Several questions arise from this point: What if I don't want a random person to see the shape of my body? (Ans a subset of the question: What if my body does not conform to normative body images—am I then suspect?) Does this technology really make the sky a safer place? What if the TSA agents are taking sexual pleasure in seeing virtually stripped bodies? (Encouraging this last point, the We Won't Fly website calls the AIT devices "porno-scanners.")

Second, when a passenger opts out of the full-body scan and then must submit to a pat down, this arguably reflects an intrusion of government into private lives: the claim is that passengers literally feel the arm of the government feeling them up if they opt out of the full-body scans. The language gets ramped up to the point that the pat downs have been referred to as "sexual molestation." Again, there are hovering questions of whether these pat downs really make the sky safer, and whether the TSA agents enjoy their work. (The excellent Saturday Night Live skit was perhaps the most astute reflection on this conflation of issues, so far.)

Third, there is the constitutionally defensive and vaguely homophobic rhetoric expressed by the folk hero of the moment John Tyner, who after opting out of a full-body scan in the San Diego airport, then chose to opt out of the pat down, with the insistence that "no one but my wife and my doctor" are allowed to "touch my junk." This sentiment seems to house a dual core of affronted masculinity mixed with a fierce protection of private property (the body serving as the zero level of private property).

This last point brings me to what I think is the real crux of the matter: Is air travel a form of public transportation, or is air travel an extension of private life? Can it function effectively as an equilibrium of both, or are these two things incommensurate (or at least in high tension) on some base level? In other words, how much are private lives translatable into public spaces as ethereal and interpenetrating as the air? Civil aviation, which literally takes airspace as its medium and message, has come to signal a crisis point where private lives can never be adequately defended—neither in theory, nor in practice.

The most nuanced response to these various concerns might very well be reflected by a certain ambivalence: On the one hand, yes, we must admit that the latest safety procedures verge on the absurd, they strip citizens of their rights to privacy, and they arguably do nothing to make flying any safer. On the other hand, though, we should legitimately wonder if these analytic categories—absurdity, privacy, and safety—in fact have ceased to be useful measuring devices when we are dealing with something as tenuous, as globally complex, and as intimately shared as air travel. (Of course, if we were to admit this, we then would have to think seriously about land travel...and the politics of 'land' in general.)

If we were to take air travel seriously as a form of public transportation—if we acknowledged our flying selves as a kind of ungrounded body politic, and not simply as independently mobile cells—I wonder how this might shift the ways we talk about airport screening, and how it would complicate the various points of accountability and responsibility for all parties involved? In other words, what would happen if we were to take the air more seriously as an inescapably shared medium, a public space that we can never escape nor neatly privatize?

Libertarianism and Leaf Blowing: An Aporia

2010-11-08T08:49:00.000-06:00

Tad Friend's recent New Yorker article on the suburban politics of leaf blowing suggests a very troubling state of affairs ("Blowback," October 25). The article pits quiet-loving citizens against "the libertarians" who want to be able to pay gardeners to leaf blow because it is the cheapest (i.e. fastest) way to have an immaculate yard.

And yet what Friend's reporting reveals is that all parties involved exhibit a staunchly libertarian ethos. For the leaf blower advocates, this comes across most obviously as a fierce protection of private property: no one should be able to coerce another individual to spend his or her money in a prescribed way. As for the opponents of leaf blowers, their corralling of ostensibly scientific evidence (including careful measurements of decibel levels and toxic "nanoparticles") represents another, if more subtle, form of libertarianism: this preference-based science is flouted as cultural capital, where the goal is still, finally, to protect private property.

The rights of the individual and the fierce protection of private property are thus effectively gained by dollars, or by scientific sense. This might explain, in part, the surge of the Tea Party candidates in this current election season: across seeming political divides, libertarianism wells up in strong individual feelings. Unfortunately, as Friend's article aptly shows, such an uncompromising philosophy of the individual and private property does not translate very well to living together; libertarianism is far better suited to living apart. (As if that were ever an option.)

Anticipating the Ecological Thought

2010-10-31T06:42:00.000-05:00

This week I am hosting one of my mentors from UC Davis, Timothy Morton, who is giving a talk at Loyola University New Orleans. His talk in entitled Hyperobjects, and it deals with, in Tim's words, how

...science, industry and technology have created and discovered phenomena that are massively distributed across time and space: the BP oil slick, global warming, evolution, nonlocality (in quantum theory), radiation.... These “hyperobjects” pose huge problems for humans, not only in terms of how to deal with plutonium or global warming, for example, but also in terms of how they defy normative understandings about what “objects” are in the first place. In particular, hyperobjects compel us to think beyond the confines of anthropocentric philosophy. I shall explore how to address the challenges hyperobjects pose.

The talk stems from Tim's most recent book, The Ecological Thought, which argues that we need to radically rethink the mesh of interconnectedness that is existence. But I suspect Tim's talk will also push into new territory—namely the ground (or non-ground) of "object-oriented ontology," or what goes by OOO for short. (There's an impressively clear definition of OOO here.)

In my critical theory course this semester, with Tim's work in mind, I have been trying to plot some anticipatory moments in earlier texts.

So, for instance, in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Walter Benjamin posits: "The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology." The 'here' in this statement is the culture where reproducible art is created for masses; Benjamin seems to be saying that in such a culture, it is rare to have an 'immediate' experience of 'reality', because people come to expect a certain type of heightened artifice as reality. (One wonders if iPhone apps and the like function as a contemporary analog? It's somehow more stimulating to watch a machine identify an overheard song, than to remember or figure it out myself.) Yet, the ecological thought pushes through this apparent divide, and finds the orchid and the land of technology to be intimately enmeshed, even growing out of one another. It's not that Benjamin was wrong, but rather that he sensed the limits of the concepts in play: reality, artifice, immediacy, technology...they were breaking down and congealing around him. It's as if Benjamin intuited the ecological thought.

This is a barely conceivable thought. It's like something cooked up by Sigmund Freud, who suggested that "an unconscious conception is one of which we are not aware, but the existence of which we are nevertheless ready to admit on account of other proofs of signs." The ecological thought emerges this way: by associations and metonymic chains that spread out and take on an overwhelming scope.

In a different context, when Frantz Fanon ponders his fraught subjectivity and states, "…in one sense, if I were asked for a definition of myself, I would say that I am one who waits; I investigate my surroundings, I interpret everything in terms of what I discover, I become sensitive."—this too reminds me of a moment akin to the ecological thought. There is a weird sense of hesitation implicit (or really, explicit) in this that seems to belie the urgency of the situation (for Fanon, "the fact of blackness"; for Morton, the ecological catastrophe). In Morton's words, "We shouldn't be afraid to withdraw and reflect" (ET, 9).

Fredric Jameson's "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" likewise contains a moment arguably anticipatory of the ecological thought, when he describes how certain new forms of representation stand "as something like an imperative to grow new organs to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, as yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions."

It is as if Don DeLillo has this in mind, or is unconsciously channeling Jameson, when, in his most recent novel Point Omega, he writes:

…Something’s coming. But isn’t this what we want? Isn’t this the burden of consciousness? We’re all played out. Matter wants to lose its self-consciousness. We’re the mind and the heart that matter has become. Time to close it all down. This is what drives us now. … We want to be the dead matter we used to be. We’re the last billionth of a second in the evolution of matter. … Look at us today. We keep inventing folk tales of the end. … We need to think beyond this. (50-51)

Against what first sounds vaguely apocalyptic, I want to suggest that this is no simplistic imperative, nor is it dismissive of human thought or action. There is something importantly mind blowing happening here, and it touches everything. Does this sound reductively expansive? Yes, but I think it is from within this paradoxical feeling that politics get tempered and beliefs are humbled, and the ecological thought can become praxis. What this praxis will actually look like? Well, we don't know yet. As Morton notes in the introduction of The Ecological Thought, "Like archaeologists of the future, we must piece together what will have been thought" (3). In such a piecing together, we have our work cut out for us.

Express Yourself! Don't Change.

2010-09-22T08:31:00.000-05:00

For anyone who cares about social justice, it should be a sickening fact that an astonishingly small percentage of the people in our country control such a disproportionate amount of the wealth. And even somewhat apolitical figures or what we might call 'progressive' companies take part in this, as SCS suggests in his shrewd post concerning The Fisher Collection of artworks, amassed over the years by the co-founders of The Gap clothing store. While the Fishers 'made their money' by means of ethical wages paid to workers around the globe, the immense value of the collection reflects just how much was systematically (even, again, 'ethically') extracted from these workers, as surplus value, and then used for other means—in this case, to buy art.

Another contemporary company that figures into this problem is the notorious social networking site Facebook. As Jose Antonio Vargas puts it succinctly in his recent New Yorker profile of the founder Mark Zuckerberg, "If and when Facebook decides to go public, Zuckerberg will become one of the richest men on the planet, and one of the youngest billionaires." I have been grappling for several years with the phenomenon of Facebook (almost more of an epiphenomenon), willingly staying 'out of the loop', as it were. I have a hard time justifying my reluctance to 'join'—it is not like it would be any added expense, and as my friends tell me, I could just choose to limit my time on it, and maintain a very bare-bones profile.

And yet there is something about Facebook that still causes me to resist. Perhaps it relates to a point in Marx's Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, when he writes: "Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production." The "consciousness" of Facebook would seem to be all of the things it allows for that are distracting at worst (like constant status updates), and pragmatic at best (e.g. connecting with other people in emergencies). However, the "contradictions of material life" that play out while these things go on are striking: by converting the notion of 'friends' into a commodity, Mark Zuckerbeg becomes worth billions of dollars; the members of Facebook, meanwhile, (re)acquire their friends.

To recast the words of Walter Benjamin, from only a slightly different context: Facebook "sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; [Facebook] seeks to give them an expression while preserving property."

The Contradictions of Modern Libertarianism

2010-09-17T09:44:00.001-05:00

I read with great interest Jane Mayer’s illuminating and incisive profile of the arch-libertarians Charles and David Koch in The New Yorker a couple weeks ago. I'm particularly interested in this subject, because as an undergraduate I attended Hillsdale College in Michigan, a small private school that requires its students to attend free-market seminars, and where the recommended reading list includes works of Friedrich von Hayek, Frédéric Bastiat, etc. Thus I am well familiar with the strong rhetoric and provocative discourse that permeates the libertarian ethos. The college has a fantastic liberal arts core, but the hovering aura of libertarianism at times seemed to compromise the intellectual rigor of my actual classes.

I appreciated very much Mayer’s exposure of the deep contradictions that run through the heart of modern libertarianism. The promise is that everyone and anyone can rise up and exert individual creativity and independence; however, the real material structure of such a belief system requires that there be a privileged few (the likes of the Koch brothers) who disseminate and regulate these ideals from a position of extreme luxury. Meanwhile and always, a confused multitude is charged to struggle endlessly against mystified forces (such as the “socialist” Obama)—forces that are in fact energetically invented and covertly maintained from within. As Mayer indicates, modern libertarianism seems to require its own secret center, a form of government all the more insidious for its innumerable deceptions.

The Most Important Things

2010-08-29T09:16:00.000-05:00

I recently received a Hallmark card in the mail that said "The most important things in life are not things." The card basically was telling me that people are more important than mere 'things'. This sentiment rubs completely against the book I just finished reading, the political theorist Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things.

Bennett suggests that all things are, well, things, and that far from this being a reductive or depressing situation, this in fact should open the way for new ways of being—even new ways of being mindful. Acknowledged and accepted as things, we might then engage more ethically and thoughtfully with other things...even things that escape our human scale, or slip away from consciousness.

The most important thing is to accept that we are things—and so is everything else. All things are things; and it might help us to act accordingly. Don DeLillo reflects on a similar idea in his most recent novel Point Omega: "Think of it. We pass completely out of being. Stones. Unless stones have being. Unless there’s some profoundly mystical shift that places being in a stone" (73).

As a retort to DeLillo, Bennett might propose that it is not a "mystical shift" that places "being in a stone"—rather, a vibrant thingliness infiltrates people as much as stones, and it is from this 'lower' level of shared being that we might rethink things—from stones to other creatures, from living trees to trashy litter. Bennett terms this philosophy "vital materialism," and it is a call "to consult nonhumans more closely…to listen and respond more carefully to their outbreaks, objects, testimonies, and propositions” (108).

Airport Paradoxes

2010-08-05T07:20:00.000-05:00

I took the above picture sometime in the Summer of 2002, when I worked for SkyWest Airlines at the airport near Bozeman, Montana. Sometimes I would take a camera with me when I went to work at the airport, and between flights I'd take pictures like this one, in which there is nothing to see, really—just the drab tarmac against vague mountains and building clouds in the distance, and some empty baggage vehicles awaiting the next arrival.

One thing that has always struck me as odd is how people tend to talk about airports as awful places (especially after a long delay or a lost bag)—but when I suggest that perhaps air travel will cease because of how awful airports are, the same people are appalled, and refuse to entertain this notion. Indeed, people are often all too willing to reassert the eternal presence of airports and air travel (or if not quite eternal, at least perpetual, leading forever into the future of human existence).

Reflecting the common sense perception of airports as horrid sites are airport scenes in literature, in which these built spaces often are denigrated for being worst-case places.

For instance, one of Annie Proulx's satirical tales in her recent collection Fine Just The Way It Is performs this sort of airport reading. The story is called "I've Always Loved This Place," and it narrates a hilarious post-modern (or really, we might say post-western) Devil who rides around Hell on a golf cart and comes up with the idea "to upgrade the current facilities" (36). One of his plans is to renovate "the Welcome to Hell foyer" to include the "combined features of the world's worst air terminals, Hongqiao in Shanghai the ideal, complete with petty officials, sadomasochistic staffers, consecutive security checks of increasing harshness, rapidly fluctuating gate changes and departure times"...all of which ending with, "finally, a twenty-seven-hour trip in an antiquated and overcrowded bucket flying through typhoons while rivets popped against the fuselage" (40). The "finally" here takes us back to the everyday paradox of air travel, which is that the things that passengers (and laborers, for that matter) tolerate for the sake of air travel seem to be forgotten fairly soon after a travel stint (or a work shift) is complete. Or if not forgotten, the absurdities of airports get left in the baggage claim of the mind, where one can retrieve the stories at will, but these stories never quite accumulate into a cumulative critique.

What does Proulx's evil airport figuration have to do with Wyoming? This is a complex dynamic, something I am writing about in my current book on airports: the convergence of airport aesthetics and environmental awareness—here, the way that airport commonplaces become a foil for the rugged, pastoral beauty of the American West that Proulx is so effective at complicating, and exposing for its ideological pitfalls. Airports evoke or spur spatial awareness in all sorts of ways—usually not romantic, often more existential or even post-apocalyptic, and this awareness is all the more sensitive around airports that are supposed to deliver passengers to privileged spaces, like Wyoming.

I noticed another instance of an airport paradox in Joseph O'Neill's novel Netherland. In this book, one particular airport scene follows the logic of what I call "terminal immaterial": how in literary representations airports can be put to use in such ways that the actual sociality and functional operations of airports do not even need to exist—the airport simply makes empty, open space for other observations (and usually grim ones, at that). Here is the passage from Netherland:

We turned south onto the unpopulated, quasi-rural section of Flatbush Avenue, where the road was lined with barren trees. Half a mile or so down, Chuck swung left through a wide gateway and onto a concrete private road. This lead to a no-man's-land of frozen bushes and scrubland. Another turn, leftward, led to an immense white emptiness. The snow had not been plowed from this portion of the road, and like a wagoner, Chuck steered and bumped us along in the hardened ruts of old tracks. A desolate, complex of buildings—warehouses, a tower—was now in view on the left. The sky, aswirl with fleet, darkening clouds, was magnified by the flat null steppe that lay to the east. If a troupe of Mongolian horsemen had appeared in the distance I would not have been shocked.

"Jesus," I said, "where are we?"

Chuck, both hands on the wheel, spurted the Cadillac forward. "Floyd Bennet Field, Brooklyn," he said.

As he spoke, the tower assumed a familiar outline. This was once an airfield, I realized. We were on an old taxiway. (80-81)

In the rambling first paragraph of this passage, the airfield lurks and looms at both the periphery and eventually as the center of the scene—the airport serves as a "barren," open space that actually startles the narrator into uttering "Jesus." For O'Neill, the airfield stands as a long detouring pathway to introducing the character Chuck and his obsession with the sport of cricket. The leveling out of landforms, and the stock masses of the old airport, create empty space and yet firm structure for developing the character of Chuck. The airport is simultaneously a blasted wasteland, and fertile narrative ground. The airport is counter-intuitively cast as an organic zero level: an "immense white emptiness"—almost a blank page. Idyllic, individualistic fantasies and the hard realities of cosmopolitanism are in friction throughout this post-9/11 novel; in this oblique airport scene, Western civilization is at once wiped away and exposed in stark, skeletal form.

One might also note the offhand, Orientalist gesture in both Proulx and O'Neill's airport readings: in each case, a specter of exoticized, 'Eastern' otherness is called into being by the airport space. The American West (or Western State) is vaguely threatened by a phantasmagorical Asia, either in the form of a super chaotic bustling international airport, or by ethnically authentic "horsemen" riding into the open terrain. This undercurrent suggests an anxiety about global space and flows, and thus there is a glimmer of something like ecology: how airports materially express the migrations and populations of our species. Here is another seeming airport paradox: airports comprise incredibly elaborate networks of culture, and yet at airports we can also locate a cipher for nature: how a species 'advances', and possibly, how it might fade away.

___________
Works Cited
Joseph O'Neill, Netherland. New York: Pantheon Advance Reader's Edition, 2008.
Annie Proulx, Fine Just The Way It Is. New York: Scribner 2008.

Boy Detectives

2010-07-18T12:35:00.000-05:00

Over the past month I have been reworking my current book project, a literary-critical study of airports. In particular, I have been drawing on some very helpful feedback from friends and mentors. So, in the midst of heavy duty rewriting and revision, it was very gratifying to receive in the mail a copy of the just published book The Boy Detectives: Essays on the Hardy Boys and Others, edited by Michael Cornelius. I wrote one of the chapters for this volume, and I was thrilled to see it in print.

My chapter is entitled "Terminal Immaterial: The Uncertain Subject of the Hardy Boys Airport Mysteries." In this essay I consider the roles of airports in three Hardy Boys detective stories, one from 1930s and two from the late 1980s and early 1990s. I find that these three garishly boyish representations of airports are in fact entirely consistent with (and no less philosophically complex than) the broader trends that I locate throughout my larger book project, tentatively called The Textual Life of Airports. In one chapter of my book project, I discuss the idea of "airport reading" as light, undemanding entertainment. In this sense, the Hardy Boys stories serve as excellent case studies for how the heaviness of airports infiltrates the lightness of everyday life in 20th-century U.S. culture.

Perspectivism in "The Vagrants"

2010-07-12T08:08:00.000-05:00

Yiyun Li’s novel The Vagrants is a staggering work of narrative perspectivism. By this I mean to describe how the novel moves fluidly between many different characters; over the course of three hundred pages, each character gradually yet steadily takes hold, and becomes an ‘eye’ through which the reader starts to assemble a Chinese town called Muddy River.

In The Genealogy of Morals Friedrich Nietzsche outlines this idea as such:

All seeing is essentially perspective, and so is all knowing. The more emotions we allow to speak in a given matter, the more different eyes we can put on in order to view a given spectacle, the more complete will be our conception of it, the greater our “objectivity.”

Nietzsche’s scare-quoted objectivity is no less than the (of course impossible) sum total of perspectives—an impossibility that balloons when one considers the vast and myriad scales of perspective possible in this world. Indeed, in The Vagrants, even weather patterns attain a valid perspective, one that merges with the political consciousness of the human characters:

“In this period of indecision and uncertainty, old winter-weary snow began to melt. The ground became less solid, the black dirt oozing with moisture in the sunshine.” (179)

The ground that becomes "less solid" is at once the physical earth and epistemological foundations—the mindsets of those who are increasingly aware of the power struggles taking place in Muddy River during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

The Vagrants has at least eight main characters—but that number can slide up to ten, or twelve, easily. In a quite fascinating way, Yiyun Li does not obey the logic of ‘main’ characters: any character is likely to become an eye or a mind through which we see or understand (or not) the world of Muddy River. The novel, in other words, permeates a range of characters—major and minor, there almost is no difference in terms of serious treatment. Anyone—and one is almost tempted to say anything—is potentially a real, noteworthy perspective to inhabit…whether that be for a sentence, a paragraph, a page, or across one of the broader narrative arcs of the novel. At the same time, the novel ranges over the geography of Muddy River, such that the landscape features, seasonal shifts, and animals themselves become narrative material—character vantage points, as it were. The characters—all the possible perspectives of a place—are expanded and carried out beyond limitations of age, class status, or even sentience. At one point in the novel, “Han sank into his parents’ sofa; a new television set, on its beautifully crafted stand, watched him like a dark, unblinking eye” (264). Here the perspective is given a startling rotation in 180 degrees: the character Han goes from seeing to being seen, by a TV—even better, a TV turned off. Later, in a brief passing paragraph, we meet the carpenter and his apprentice who built the TV stand, and see inside their thoughts about the work they were commissioned to do “without more than the minimum compensation” (281). Yiyun Li thus uses perspectivism to swivel around from subjects to objects, exposing the dynamics and mechanics of the social system at hand.

The Vagrants is full of philosophical images and mind-benders, and these often make the reader pause to consider the perspectives available through the lens of narrative. Often, when the novel comments on the work of language and storytelling, these enunciations come across as the most enigmatic and unclear. Take, for instance, the character Teacher Gu, who on his way to deliver a letter to the mailbox, mumbles to someone else: “Don’t ever believe in what’s written down” (275). Yiyun Li asks readers to think simultaneously about an event and its record, about how many ways an event can be seen, and how the act of retelling creates innumerable new points of view. The Vagrants does not advocate perspectivism as any kind of simple formula or positive philosophy, but rather shows perspectivism to be an inescapable condition. This is a condition that, when acknowledged and embraced, can lead to what Nietszsche elsewhere calls "slow reading": a decelerated mode of interpretation that keeps doors of thought open, and does not rush to easy conclusions. Yiyun Li's The Vagrants provides all the pleasures—as well as all the demands—of perspectival slow reading.

Summer Reading: "Quiet As They Come"

2010-06-28T10:27:00.000-05:00

I have just finished reading Angie Chau’s tidally moving book Quiet As They Come, which will be on bookshelves this September. I call it "tidally moving" because, like James Baldwin's novel Giovanni's Room, Chau's book is a meditation on people trying to adjust to an unfamiliar continent, balancing newfound freedoms with bouts of disorientation—and constantly reflecting on ocean expanses and water movements that can both facilitate and bar transit back home.

Chau’s book resonates with echoes of Sandra Cisneros’s classic work The House on Mango Street, and also shows stylistic resemblances to Maxine Hong Kingston’s multi-generational narrative China Men. However, Chau’s book is really the closest in form and content to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. In fact, Quiet As They Come should be appreciated in terms of its critical addition to O’Brien’s Vietnam War stories: Chau contributes another set of vital stories that emerged from that conflict. Through the shifting perspectives of Vietnamese family members who fled to San Francisco in the mid-1970s, Chau narrates the obverse side of the war...the distant ripple effects and far reaching consequences of a war that punctuated the age of modern globalization.

In chapter-stories that strategically accumulate over the course of the book, Chau tracks repercussions subtle and profound, deeply personal as well as complexly cultural in scope. There is so much going on in this book, from the Vietnamese cuisine delectably sprinkled throughout in surprising ways, to the eccentric focus on minute images, such as a mother's "perfume samples that will never know the inside of a wrist, old keys that open forgotten doors" (164), or a high school gym class in which "everyone wore blue short shorts with a serial number on the right leg" (135). Chau does not deploy these images gratuitously; the reader finds that every image is placed tactfully (but quietly, as it were) in the broader composition of the narrative.

For my purposes here, I wish to give attention to one key aspect of Quiet As They Come. What struck me while reading the book and sorting out the characters in my mind was how most of the characters find themselves brushing up against American pop culture—to varying degrees of influence, numbness, and mania. For instance, Chau surrounds her characters with the ever-present, synaesthetic buzz of television, a media form that the characters experience as both enchanting and oppressive, as a sign of status and as a phenomenological sinkhole.

One character, Huong, sits on a couch "with her remote control, vigilantly watching the twenty-four hour news channel, waiting for the next cruel blow to hit" (72). This scene is especially stinging when one considers the Vietnamese American shrimp fishermen on the Louisiana Gulf Coast in the ongoing aftermath of the April 20, 2010 oil rig explosion—at once a heavily mediatized and an intensely immediate event, a "next cruel blow" that resonates poignantly with the tension points that Chau catalogs throughout Quiet As They Come.

Another character, Viet, was a philosophy professor in Vietnam—but is relegated to a monotonous job at the post office in San Francisco, where he stands over a bin, "sorting mail by zip code" (69). His life follows a downward spiral in which TV functions as a visually dominating vortex. This is Viet's daughter, Elle:

I came home and asked my parents, "Why don't we talk more?"

My father said, "We talk plenty." He switched back to the TV.

One day I said, "We watch too much TV."

My Father said, "But we watch TV to improve our English. You said you wanted us to talk more." (102)

Chau thus outlines the viciously circular logic of an advanced consumer society, in which TV constrains possible forms of life by presenting illusions of total knowledge and infinite access.

Still another character, Duc, held captive and tortured in Vietnam, is finally reunited with his family in San Francisco only to find himself still prisoner to post-traumatic stress syndrome, a condition refracted back to him on the TV screen, and routed through his somatic engagement with the media form:

In the living room, Duc changed the channels incessantly. Images flickered by of human bodies loving or abusing each other. He stared ahead with the television set on mute. All the while his thumb beat on the buttons, click, click, clicking." (112)

This scene recalls a similar moment in Louise Erdrich's story "The Red Convertible," when the main character Lyman buys a color TV set and finds it to be the only thing that can tranquilize his Vietnam war veteran brother, Henry:

He sat in front of it, watching it, and that was the only time he was completely still. But it was the kind of stillness that you see in a rabbit when it freezes and before it will bolt. He was not easy. He sat in his chair gripping the armrests with all his might, as if the chair itself was moving at a high speed and if he let go at all he would rocket forward and maybe crash right through the set.

Once I was in the room watching TV with Henry and I heard his teeth click at something. I looked over, and he'd bitten through his lip. Blood was going down his chin.

Like Erdrich, Chau lingers on the "clicking" strain between the television and war scarred soldier: the TV soothes the sufferer of PTSD, but being transfixed does not equal being healed. Indeed, Duc does not easily assimilate back into his family, and this thread of the story becomes one of the intentionally elided chapters of Chau's book.

Chau's TV scenes illuminate what the French theorist Guy Debord refers to as the Society of the Spectacle. In such a society, Debord suggests, "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images." The detailed TV, pop music, and Hollywood allusions in Quiet As They Come forward a sociology—as well as a media ecology—of the characters. We see how the characters are not simply or blandly 'Americanized,' but rather how their interactions and self-expressions are actually produced (and reproduced) by the matrix of sounds and images that swirl out of the television sets blaring around them—Chau's characters adapt to inhabit the increasingly immersive TV environment of the 70s, 80s, and 90s U.S. culture. (This use of TV is in the lineage of Hal Ashby's 1979 film Being There, with its constant, ambient use of television clips that at once hollow out and completely form the main character Chance the Gardener, played by Peter Sellers.) In the last chapter of Quiet As They Come, on her first visit back to Vietnam, Elle observes inside a rustic outhouse: "There is Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, a Vietnamese newspaper, a Japanese comic book, and an Italian porno mag to choose from: a true global village" (181). Also in the final chapter, while on a ferry, Elle observes tourists standing on the deck of the boat, and notes: "We all know the poses. We learned them from watching the Titanic" (185). Consistently and throughout Quiet As They Come, Chau pays attention to the ways that media forms interpenetrate and interpellate her characters, actually forming social relations.

In tracking how her characters drift into mainstream American culture, Angie Chau has written a book that confluences elegantly with the currents of contemporary U.S. fiction. The book is both an endearing account of a becoming-American family's survival, and a nuanced report on the deracination and integration of Vietnamese individuals in a new place, namely the San Francisco bay area—with all the personal connections, emotional fragmentations, pop culture explosions, and social fissures that occur along the way.

(Page numbers cited here are from the advance reading copy.)

Writing in Michigan

2010-06-02T13:46:00.000-05:00

I am going to be in northern Michigan this summer, living in a "writing cabin" of sorts. I am working to finish a draft of my book manuscript, a revised and expanded version of my dissertation, which was entitled "Airport Reading."*

I'm thinking of calling the book The Textual Life of Airports. It is a book about airport stories. It is about the common narratives of airports that circulate in everyday life, and about the secret stories of airports—the strange or hidden narratives that do not always fit into standard ideas of these sites. I locate these airport stories primarily in American literature, and I argue that literary representations reveal what I call “the textual life” of airports. This textual life is an interpretive aspect of airports that often rubs against common sense understandings of what airports symbolize. My book on airports is unique in that it uses literature not merely as one form of cultural representation among many; rather, I turn to literature as a critical material for thinking about how airports function culturally, psychologically, philosophically—and finally, environmentally.

*I'm also thinking of recycling the title "Airport Reading," and using it for a very short non-fiction book about my time working at the airport in Bozeman, Montana. This book would contain the stories of the strange things I saw and did 'behind the scenes', as it were, at the airport. I wrote these stories during the time that the poet Mark Yakich and I were collaborating on a book on flight—a book that could never quite get off the ground...perhaps because it was so interested in plane crashes—a subject that is not exactly "light reading."

Of Wolves and Men

2010-05-09T13:11:00.000-05:00

Barry Lopez’s Of Wolves and Men was a National Book Award finalist when it was first published in 1978, and this book has come to exemplify the author’s truly interdisciplinary style: his works deftly fuse literary acumen with ecological awareness and ethnography. Of Wolves and Men is not just about wolves, but about how little is actually known about wolves—in other words, Lopez is interested in the mythologies that circulate around wolves. And, of course, humans are the creators of mythologies, so the book is just as much about humans. The book is also about how humans visualize wolves: Lopez’s writing is woven around visual culture, from historical photographs, to an Eskimo print of wolves eating a caribou (84), to illustrations of the wolf and the crane attached to the eponymous Aesopian fable (260).

Lopez introduces his book by placing the act of writing in the foreground, and thereby seeking to embed the reader in a detailed (if also entirely mediated) environment:

I am in a small cabin outside Fairbanks, Alaska, as I write these words. The cold sits down like iron here, and the long hours of winder darkness cause us to leave a light on most of the day. Outside, at thirty below, wood for the stove literally pops apart at the touch of the ax. I can see out across the short timber of the taiga when I am out there in the gray daylight. (1)

This is a prime example of what the literary scholar Timothy Morton calls “ecomimesis,” or when environmental writing attempts to “break the spell of language” and “go beyond the aesthetic dimension” (30–31). Lopez is calling on his readers to get into a scene—or as his next sentence puts it, “Go out there” (1). The ‘there’ in this sentence is both the Alaskan terrain and the inside of the book, a landscape of the mind. Lopez acknowledges a distance from his subject (he is writing here, not looking at wolves) precisely in order to achieve “a sense of the surrounding environment, not by being less artful, but more so” (Morton, 31). This is a common tactic throughout Of Wolves and Men, by which Lopez reminds his readers that, finally, the real environment of this text is not the behaviors and habitats of wolves, but rather the (un)knowing human mind in relation to all things wolves. As Lopez writes: “…in the wolf we have not so much an animal that we have always known as one that we have consistently imagined” (204).

Thus Lopez starts the first chapter with a visual directive to the reader: “Imagine a wolf moving though the northern woods…” (9). The following paragraph goes on to flesh out this imaginary scene, and the sentences are rife with figurative language: “The wolf’s body, from neck to hips, appears to float over the long, almost spindly legs and the flicker of wrists, a bicycling drift through the trees, reminiscent of the movement of water or of shadows” (9). The third paragraph, however, strikes a quite different note, scientific and declarative: “The wolf is three years old. A male. He is of the subspecies occidentalis, and the trees he is moving among are spruce and subalpine fir on the eastern slope of the Rockies in northern Canada (10). This type of stylistic shift is characteristic of how the environmental critic Lawrence Buell has described Lopez, as a “roaming” ethnographer, “gleaning insights more from interdisciplinary study and place-based informants…than from staying put” (69). Of Wolves and Men follows an indeterminate yet cumulative pattern of roaming between personal narratives, rumors, pictures, field accounts, and observations. This methodology allows Lopez to draw something of an open perimeter around his subject, which he defines as “a variable creature” (83).

The literary scholar Susan Kollin has shown how “…Lopez dismantles notions of Alaska as a pastoral or wilderness retreat, a place somehow cut off from the rest of the United States or the world” (46). So while certain passages from Of Wolves and Men linger on classic environmental imagery and specific ecosystems, the book continually shifts ground, requiring the reader to recalibrate and come to terms with outlying horizons of knowledge and experience. Indeed, Of Wolves and Men focuses on the lore and legends of wolves in order to expand a general sense of consciousness about how humans, in Lopez’s words, “…struggle to come to grips with the nature of the universe” (204). The scope of this book is at once narrowly focused on wolves, and almost endlessly expansive.

In one section Lopez explains a social phenomenon between wolves and ravens: ravens will often follow wolf tracks in order to discover (and clean up) fresh kills. In the next few paragraphs, Lopez follows this ecological dynamic into the realm of play, and relates stories of how ravens and wolves have been observed to tease one another and engage in games of tag, for fun (67–68). Such a move from scientific documentation to fanciful speculation is a signature feature of Lopez’s writing.

As Peter Wild writes in his book on Lopez, “Of Wolves and Men, founded on the premise that men have created varying concepts of wolves, tells perhaps more about the human psyche than it does about the physical wolf loping along in isolation through the centuries” (26). Of Wolves and Men appears to have a fairly traditional ‘environmental’ subject, yet there are ways in which this book can be understood to have anticipated contemporary intersections between critical theory and environmental studies, such as recent discussions of the human–animal conjunction (e.g. Agamben, Derrida, Haraway, & Wolfe). Near the end of the book, Lopez writes:

I think, as the twentieth century comes to a close, that we are coming to an understanding of animals different from the one that has guided us for the past three hundred years. We have begun to see again, as our primitive ancestors did, that animals are neither imperfect imitations of men nor machines that can be described entirely in terms of endocrine secretions and neural impulses. Like us, they are genetically variable, and both species and the individual are capable of unprecedented behavior. They are like us in the sense that we can figuratively talk of them as beings some of whose forms, movements, activities, and social organizations are analogous, but they are no more literally like us than are trees. (283–284)

This passage shows what the philosophical stakes are for Lopez in taking animality seriously as a subject of investigation; these sentences also demonstrate how, for Lopez, the wolf is both utterly unique and also a metonymy for life at large.

Of Wolves and Men is a hybrid manifesto on behalf of “human inquiry” and against “dogmatic certainty” (285), and its resistance to be strictly defined in terms of any one genre is in part what makes it such a significant environmental literary text. Barry Lopez’s work ranges across diverse subjects and fields of speculation, as one can tell from his more recent short story collections Field Notes and Light Action in the Caribbean. Of Wolves and Men offers an early indicator of how Lopez’s environmental sensibility functions as an elastic point of consciousness: it is both the space between humans and the world, and that which makes the two inseparable.

Bibliography

Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man & Animal. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.
Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.
Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.
Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Kollin, Susan. Nature’s State: Imagining Alaska as the Last Frontier. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
Lopez, Barry. Of Wolves and Men. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978.
Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010.
Wild, Peter. Barry Lopez. Boise: Boise State University, 1984.
Wolfe, Cary. “Flesh and Finitude: Thinking Animals in (Post)Humanist Philosophy.” SubStance Issue 117 (Volume 37, Number 3), 2008.

Environmental Dimensions of Hemingway

2010-05-05T12:57:00.000-05:00

In this post, I wish to discuss the environmental-theoretical significance of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961). I am using this post as an occasion to redress some of the offhand associations that the name "Hemingway" evokes, and to expand appreciation for how Hemingway's writing might be contextualized in terms of environmental theory.

From his birthplace in Oak Park, Illinois, Ernest Hemingway went on to explore and write about environments all around the world. In 1918 Hemingway volunteered as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross; he was assigned to Italy, where he was wounded by a trench mortar near the front lines. Many of Hemingway’s early works reflect on the horrors of WWI, particularly as these experiences and memories get filtered through a return to familiar rural and domestic American settings. Hemingway’s prose is an icon of Modernism, bringing an acute sense of the art of language to bear on the overwhelming realities of the first half of the 20th-century.

Hemingway wrote about fiestas and guerrilla fighters in Spain (The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls), Parisian café life (A Moveable Feast), and Caribbean culture in the Florida Keys and Cuba (To Have and Have Not and the posthumously published Islands in the Stream). The author pays close attention to environmental details, regularly lingering on animals, weather, food, and landforms as focal points for his stories. Hemingway spent portions of his childhood in Northern Michigan, and this ecosystem figures heavily in many of his works. For instance, in numerous short stories Hemingway casts his semiautobiographical character Nick Adams at different ages near the shorelines of Lake Michigan, where Nick experiences both epiphanies and existential dread in this glacially formed landscape. The literary scholar Thomas Strychacz has noted how Hemingway’s Northern Michigan scenes rely on concepts of nature inherited from Native Americans as well as from American Transcendentalism (82). Hemingway’s Northern woods serve as spiritual registers even when the characters themselves seem spiritually devoid.

However, beyond mere recapitulations of older traditions, a distinctly Modernist concept of the environment emerges from Hemingway’s oeuvre, as well. For instance, A Moveable Feast begins:

Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. We would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe. The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal and the Café des Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over from the heat and the smoke inside. (3)

This passage starts out with clear seasonal imagery involving rainstorms, temperature shifts, and plant life—and then ends in a gritty city with public transit and obscured visibility. In a characteristically Modernist fashion, Hemingway presents a nature that is fragmented and eludes objectification: the natural environment surrounds, flows through, and encompasses human culture, such as in this description of Paris.

Hemingway is often cited for his aura of outdoorsy masculinity, but it is key to understand that he was first and foremost a writer. Hemingway was just as taken (if not more so) with the wildness of words as he was with trout, tigers, and rugged terrain. The Hemingway scholar Peter Hays puts it succinctly as such: “his greatest accomplishment was with language” (137). Where one might assume, then, that the obvious scenes of hiking, fishing, boating, or hunting are what make Hemingway’s works environmentally significant, a subtle and pervasive wilderness also exists for Hemingway at the level of the writing. As the literary theorist Fredric Jameson has shown, the form of Hemingway’s writing complicates what can otherwise seem to be simplistic descriptions of the natural world (408–413). Indeed, Hemingway’s writing is almost always as interested in language itself as it is in whatever subject the writing appears to be about. It is useful therefore to think about Hemingway as a writer who encountered language itself environmentally.

Consider the first sentences of For Whom the Bell Tolls, a novel about the Spanish Civil War:

He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass. There was a stream and the falling water of the dam, white in the summer sunlight.

“Is that the mill?” he asked.

“Yes.” (1)

While upon first glance this novel appears to begin with a relatively simple and elegant depiction of an alpine vista, the words are also extremely self-involved. These sentences pose implicit questions about the most basic qualities of sight, space, sound, and communication. The opening dialogue is somewhat redundant, since the first paragraph reports the mill, and then a nameless “he” rhetorically questions this report, only to be reassured “Yes”—it is really the mill. Language is working overtime to set the scene: the word “mill” points at the setting of the novel as well as at the very words used to tell the story. Such meditations on language and perception are a constant preoccupation in Hemingway’s works, and are often evinced through sheer repetition. When Hemingway repeats words or sentences, he is calling attention to the medium of language. This intense sense of one’s artistic material is not only indicative of high Modernist aesthetics (related to how cubists worked to foreground the two-dimensionality of paintings), but it also signals an awareness of how the environment and language are entangled. Actual pine needles have feeling against the skin similar to how the alliterative words ”summer sunlight” appear to the mind’s eye or sound to the ear. Hemingway’s writing fixates on irreducible thresholds between the external world and the human mind, and in this regard the works are key environmental literary texts.

Another compelling environmental aspect of Hemingway’s writings is how his style is often described through recourse to a natural metaphor: the “iceberg” theory. Hemingway considered that as only the ‘tip’ or 1/8 of an iceberg is exposed above the surface of water, likewise writing should not reveal everything, but should only express the bare-minimum of action, dialogue, and plot. Meanwhile, the remaining 7/8, the bulk of thought, feeling, and emotion remains hidden under the surface of the text (c.f. Death In the Afternoon, 192). This schema imagines language itself as a kind of environment: a cold, deep sea in which massive icebergs drift, poking out from the page but hiding a lot, too. Such a framework posits an extra layer of environmental imagery on top of the content of writing. According to the iceberg theory, acts of writing are reflections of an arctic phenomenon, no matter what a story is about.

For example, The Sun Also Rises catalogues a seemingly endless series of drunken parties and inane conversations among American expatriates in Europe. But this is merely the tip of the iceberg; an accumulation under the surface of the words is made up of the exorbitant violence of WWI, a sense of despair at the futility of so-called ‘progress’, and general cynicism concerning the viability of romantic love in the modern world. At one point in the novel, when the main character Jake and his friend Bill are headed on a fishing excursion in the hills near the Basque town of Burguete, Hemingway provides the following account of their walk, a strong example of classic environmental imagery:

It was a beech wood and the trees were very old. Their roots bulked above the ground and the branches were twisted. We walked on the road between the thick trunks of the old beeches and the sunlight came through the leaves in light patches on the grass. The trees were big, and the foliage was thick but it was not gloomy. There was no undergrowth, only the smooth grass, very green and fresh, and the big gray trees well spaced as though it were a park.

“This is country,” Bill said. (122)

Just before this passage the two had been bantering playfully—but when Bill mentioned Jake’s war wound, the conversation was shut down. The novel transitions into a picturesque landscape scene as a way to avoid Jake’s inner-subjective quagmires; this avoidance is reflected in Hemingway’s use of apophasis, or the rhetoical technique of mentioning of things claimed to be not present (no gloominess, no undergrowth), drawing the reader’s attention to these things while also claiming that they are absent. Bill’s understated pronouncement that what surrounds them “is country” marks the dialogic iceberg’s suggestive tip. There is a lot left unsaid: a critical mass concealed and congealed beneath a surface of words that deflects our attention to a spectacular (but incidental) forest. The iceberg theory reveals the operative environment to be not just in the greenery of this passage but also how it functions: the verdant description suggests a vast and looming world of things, only some of which can be glimpsed through words.

Hemingway’s works are highly sophisticated in terms of their environmental aesthetics. Hemingway was obviously enthralled by landscapes and animals, but it is essential to realize that language itself was just as captivating to the writer, and just as wild.

Bibliography

Hays, Peter. Ernest Hemingway. New York: Continuum, 1990.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner, 1964.
---------. Death In the Afternoon. New York: Scribner, 1932.
---------. For Whom the Bell Tolls. New York: Scribner, 1940.
---------. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, 1926.
Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1971.
Strychacz, Thomas. “In Our Time, Out of Season.” The Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway. Ed. Scott Donaldson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.

Nothing Beside Remains

2010-04-15T11:37:00.000-05:00

I presented a version of the following essay at the American Comparative Literature Association conference on April 3 2010, on a panel called "Cosmopolitan SciFi: Reevaluating the Urban through Technology & Culture."

* * *

In Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road, the world is in tatters and ruins. The remains of an advanced civil society are visible in rare Coke cans, wobbly-wheeled grocery carts, occasional jars of food, and a skein of empty roads, bridges, and streets that wend through the blasted terrain. The Road is not a science fiction allegory of a world like ours; rather, this novel is a gloomy prediction of a future to come that is very much grounded in our present. In this essay I consider what remains within the post-apocalyptic landscape of The Road. By focusing on what remains in the bleak and near future-scape, I argue that we can better understand how the present functions as a repository for a certain kind of apocalypticism.

Early in the novel, the man and the boy trudging "south" encounter an abandoned supermarket with “a few old cars in the trashstrewn parking lot” (22). This is a standard landscape setting for the novel, and the pervasive emptiness of the geography causes the remains to appear in stark relief. For example, in the supermarket the man makes a precious discovery:

By the door were two softdrink machines that had been tilted over into the floor and opened with a prybar. Coins everywhere in the ash. He sat and ran his hand around in the works of the gutted machines and in the second one it closed over a cold metal cylinder. He withdrew his hand slowly and sat looking at a Coca Cola.
What is it, Papa?
It’s a treat. For you.
What is it?
Here. Sit down.
He slipped the boy’s knapsack straps loose and set the pack on the floor behind him and he put his thumbnail under the aluminum clip on the top of the can and opened it. He leaned his nose to the slight fizz coming from the can and then handed it to the boy. Go ahead, he said.
The boy took the can. It’s bubbly, he said.
Go ahead.
He looked at his father and then tilted the can and drank. He sat there thinking about it. It’s really good, he said. (23)

The narrative buildup to this scene causes the Coke can to be a glistening feature in the overwhelmingly drab topography of the novel. However, the Coke can is hardly a good omen. With its stark singularity and its “slight fizz,” the soda drink functions as a bittersweet reminder of mass production and consumer culture—indeed, in this scene the man and the boy take pleasure in the very sort of object that has tilted humans toward a catastrophic contemporaneity.

When the man and the boy later approach a deserted city, they see “long concrete sweeps of the interstate exchanges like the ruins of a vast funhouse against the distant murk” (24). The roadways here are depicted in a strange hyperbolic form, as they are in fact “ruins”…but not of any “vast funhouse”—unless this “funhouse” is the very Lady Gaga-esque phantasmagoria of neo-liberalism itself, that hyper-serious state that promises privatization, inalienable individuality, and endless accessories. It is precisely this sense of the centered, knowing self that is challenged by what remains in The Road—or in many cases, what no longer remains. At once point, the man is pondering the de-linking taking place between his memory and the world:

The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever. (89)

Here, the existence of things is directly tied to their names; when the signifiers go, that means that the ‘reality’ has gone, too. The prediction is not hopeful for a world of things whose idiom has lost its value. Shortly thereafter in the novel, an instance of this occurs such that we can see the process taking place:

He looked at the boy. I’ve got to go for more wood, he said. I’ll be in the neighborhood. Okay?
Where’s the neighborhood.
It just means I wont be far.
Okay. (95)

The word “neighborhood” has lost its meaning for the boy, for whom “neighborhood” means nothing in a landscape of dead wood and charred roads. The idea of the neighborhood remains intact for the man, but the boy contradicts this idea, and shows it to be a mere remnant of thought, no longer remaining as material reality.

In The Road we often see these threshold remains that splinter the distinctions between the mental and physical, thought and things. For instance:

They passed through towns with messages scrawled on the billboards. The billboards had been whited out with thin coats of paint in order to write on them and through the paint could be seen a pale palimpsest of advertisements for goods which no longer existed. (127-128)

The billboards and their layered meanings indicate what the narrative calls “the richness of a vanished world” (139)—this is a fraught richness, a textual surface that is both dense with meaning and but also evacuated, and losing significance everyday. The narrative meanders through this world in a documentary fashion, noting “odd things scattered by the side of the road. Electrical appliances, furniture. Tools” (199). Toward the end of the novel, the scenes continue to degrade, time turning into “days sloughed past uncounted and uncalendared. Along the interstate in the distance long lines of charred and rusting cars. The raw rims of the wheels sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber, in blackened rings of wire” (273).

At one point along the way, the man and the boy discuss the fate of “the states” and the geophysical tenacity of “the road.” While the state-level governmental systems of the U.S. have collapsed, the road remains with nothing to “uproot” it, at least not “for quite a while,” as the man remarks. This conversation is sparked by a physical arrangement of the roadmap that the man and the boy use to travel south:

The tattered oilcompany roadmap had once been taped together but now it was just sorted into leaves and numbered with crayon in the corners for their assembly. He sorted through the limp pages and spread out those that answered to their location.
We cross a bridge here. It looks to be about eight miles or so. This is the river. Going east. We follow the road here along the eastern slope of the mountains. These are our roads, the black lines on the map. The state roads.
Why are they the state roads?
Because they belong to the states. What used to be called the states.
But there’s not any more states?
No.
What happened to them?
I dont know exactly. That’s a good question.
But the roads are still there.
Yes. For a while.
How long a while?
I dont know. Maybe quite a while. There’s nothing to uproot them so they should be okay for a while.
But there wont be any cars or trucks on them.
No.
Okay. (42-43)

The Road demonstrates how civil society—even in its decline—cannot be disentangled from the ecological baseline of the world. The lack of living roots are as much of an absent force on "the state roads" as the absence of operable "cars or trucks." Likewise, for the man and the boy the icy rains and gray skies are as hostile and looming as the scattered hoards of other people who threaten to rob, kill, and/or eat them. There is a productive ambiguity about the novel in the way that the cause of the apocalyptic shift is kept obscure, thus allowing for the human presence to be the flashpoint for apocalyptic imagery, and also a sort of mere medium through which we understand apocalyptic effects (climate change, food scarcity, unchecked violence, contaminated water, etc.). In other words, the apocalypse has both already occurred in the novel, and is ongoing. The narrative through-line of “the road” accommodates this temporal stutter, serving as a space that remains functional, and yet also registers as an ambience of social breakdown with its noticeable lack of vehicles punctuated by vehicles in various states of decay, such as a wrecked semi-truck on the bridge with its trailer full of dead bodies, or the burnt and hollow cars that mark the edge of a ruined city.

What is utterly unsettling about The Road is that it takes place entirely in a landscape of remains, and posits remaining as a state of being. The novel renders completely obsolescent notions of progress, whether in the geographical sense or in a moral, personal, or governmental sense. Whereas one reading of the novel’s ending highlights a note of hope and possibility for survival, I would like to suggest that the novel undercuts its own teleological promise by being, consistently and throughout, a narrative based on remains: things remain, whether they be human or not, whether humans are able to adapt to remaining conditions, or not.

The question of what remains can be used to map post-apocalyptic science fiction on an axis of things and thoughts that remain—or how such remains usher in different thoughts, different things. We can think about how texts in this genre retain or repurpose things and ideas from the present—or, conversely, how texts empty landscapes of familiar features, and reconfigure the minds of characters. In The Road, not much remains, and what does remain takes on a weathered, dated aura—the novel does not reify the Coke bottle or the burnt out vehicles along the road. Rather, these objects reflect the reality of finitude, and as remains, they facilitate the awareness on behalf of the man and the boy that the Earth will never be as it was. We can take this novel as a precautionary tale, or as a dire prediction. But what I want to linger on is how The Road unravels a landscape very present and real to us. Nothing in the novel is alien or otherworldly, and yet everything is shown to be in a state of ruin. The remains come from us, now. What is different is that their functions, values, and styles have been reduced to nearly a zero-level.

I would like to end by discussing very briefly James Cameron’s recent blockbuster movie Avatar. This film, too, takes place in a terrain of remains, even as it ostensibly envisions a futuristic, distant moon where people are blue and mountains float in the sky. While a wasted Earth is alluded to at one point in the film, what we see on the moon Pandora is a wealth of earthly remains: normal military bases, buzzing command centers, edgy science labs, computer stations, recognizable video recording technologies and familiar machine guns, even nicely pressed men’s clothes on the corporate boss played by Giovanni Ribisi.

The plot of Avatar is supposed to take place 145 years from the present, and yet everything appears eerily the same: in short, everything of the present remains. As if to entirely and ridiculously over-determine this point of present remains, when the smart ecosystem of Pandora decides to revolt against the humans, we even get a rendition of a ubiquitous aviation problematic from our contemporary moment: bird strikes. In the movie, large flying reptiles hurl themselves like martyrs into the warplanes and helicopters of the human army, causing explosions, crashes, and general pandemonium. But we have seen this before, in the images of Captain Sully’s Airbus floating in the Hudson River, and in numerous other stories disseminated since, documenting how birds and planes do not mix. My point here is that even in the most fantastical moment of Avatar—the spiritualized ecosystem of Pandora turning against the machines—it is nevertheless an insistence that what is now, will remain.

The Road, on the other hand, takes place maybe a few years in the future. What remains in The Road are worn out objects and manufactured items kept in meager circulation by a diminishing thread of human agency. The natural world remains, largely in hibernation or in a state of scalded holding. Human agency remains, but The Road suggests that this is on its way out. The Road is far scarier than Avatar, as it does not allegorize or push our fate into a future beyond our present generation. Science fiction texts grapple with the question of remains, but what they do with these remains makes a world of a difference—for reception as well as for ‘meaning’—if meaning still remains at all, which is another pressing question for our contemporary moment.

-----------

Cited: Cormac McCarthy, The Road. New York: Vintage, 2006.

On Myths of the English Degree & Myths in General

2010-04-05T11:19:00.001-05:00

Recently I was asked to give a talk to English majors at Loyola about what they can "do" with an English degree. The poster for the event suggested that I would help to "debunk" English degree myths. I used this as a jumping off point for my talk, which is here:

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I was surprised to see on the poster for this event that it would debunk the “myths of the English degree”—but this got me thinking about my presentation tonight, in which I will suggest a kind of inverted relationship to this standard notion about earning an English degree, and that there are ‘myths’ peculiar to it as a field of study. In short, this is my thesis: it is not the “myths of the English degree” that we should worry about; rather, what we need to think about carefully and critically is the strange way that being an English major seems to produce a unique sort of ontological anxiety: What does it mean to ‘be’ an English major? What will I ‘do’ with the English degree? How useful—or, what I really fear, useless—is this degree? How will I know if I am using my English degree to have a meaningful life?

These types of questions haunt the English major in a distinct way—well, along with the philosophy major, perhaps. Think of Sofia Coppola’s joke about this in her film Lost In Translation, when the bored and aimless Scarlett Johansson explains to Bill Murray that she was a philosophy major, and he says, sarcastically, “I hear there’s a real racket in that.” Or, as another example, in my very first college English class, the professor stood in the front of the class and said “People will always ask you what you can do with an English degree. Here’s what to say: Tell them you can do anything with an English degree.” I don’t remember if that inspired me, or if I thought it was bullshit—but now, at some remove, I wonder why my professor started a Great Books course on this weirdly anxious occupational note? Did this really assist us in our readings of ancient Greek epics and tragedies? Why do we feel the need to carry around these fears of “what we are going to do” after college? And can we dispel such fears at an event such as this one?

Here is part of the problem: it is so ingrained in our culture to think that earning an English or a philosophy degree is a deficiency, a kind of booby prize in the collegiate competition that should result in a buttoned-down practicality called ‘real life’. Or, such degrees are only for misanthropes and agitators—these worries are so culturally ingrained that one finds it difficult to speak concretely about how this problem arises in the first place, not to mention what to do about it.

My hunch is that the “myths of the English degree” are in fact not the myths we need to fixate on. These very myths might even serve a hyper-real function in the first place. Allow me to explain what I mean by this statement, that the “myths of the English degree” function as a hyper-reality.

In his book Simulacra and Simulation, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard has a brilliant argument about Disneyland, in which he suggests that while we think we know that Disneyland is a fake place, and thereby we can appreciate the reality of society outside the theme park, it is actually something like the reverse that is true. Baudrillard points out that all the processes and experiences of Disneyland are really very familiar to daily life: in the theme park, you purchase tickets to participate in certain events, you stand in line to wait for rides, you interact with people in absurd costumes, and you abide by basic geographic sensibilities that assure you that the rules of Disneyland rely on certain physical boundaries and topographical features (think of Space Mountain, or a plastic “wild river” rapid). While these experiences may be exaggerated in the setting of the theme park, they in fact mimic parts of everyday life: we drive around in cars called the Honda Odyssey, the Ford Focus, or the Toyota Matrix; we wait in line at Starbucks to use a clever credit card to buy a personalized, frothy drink; the person behind the counter at Starbucks wears a little outfit that assures us that we are in a special place, experiencing something real, Italian; we abide by the rules of grassy lawns and sidewalks, overpasses and “scenic views.” Baudrillard argues that whereas we commonly think of Disneyland as fake, and as opposed to the rest of the real world, it would more accurate to say that Disneyland functions as a “hyper-real” site: it is just like the ‘real world’, and even more so, by consolidating everything we know from daily life, and presenting it to us in embellished form. In other words, we require the allegedly fake ridiculousness of Disneyland so that we do not question the ridiculousness of the things and processes in so-called ‘real life’. The myths of Disneyland reproduce and reflect the myths of real life, such that it is incorrect to think that Disneyland is fake: rather, Disneyland is the realm of the hyper-real—it is all the more real because it shows us the reality we’ve constructed around us.

I want to make an analogous claim about the “myths of the English degree.” When people talk in nervous or vapid ways about the English degree, and what you can or cannot ‘do’ with it, they are really articulating a far more widespread anxiety about the possibilities and limits of life in general. The myths of the English degree are the myths of life: that you have to ‘do’ something that you have planned out beforehand; that you have to have certain credentials to act certain ways; that if you don’t know what to do, you will become lost or be a deadbeat, like Jeff Bridges’ “Dude” in The Big Lebowski; that if you ask questions of life, or want to be “different,” you will end up like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, having a sordid affair and pissing off your parents. These are some myths in circulation, and they all seem to converge mythically around earning an English degree, and knowing what you are supposed to do with one.

So let’s get to practical matters: at the end of my theorizing, what can you really do with an English degree? Well, this is precisely where theory meets practice: as an English major, you can learn to read well, and think clearly, even when you are confused by the stuff of life. (And in my experience, the more I read and the more I think, the more confusing it all seems.) Luckily, the training you get on the way to an English degree includes reading and thinking about myths. When you seem to encounter mythical territory concerning your major, see what psychological terrain it is reflecting around other degrees, or other ways of life. You really don’t have to worry about what “dream job” you will have, or what your “true calling” in life is: for those are major myths, and ones worth jettisoning or putting in brackets as soon as possible. You might have many jobs in your life, or you may find something that sustains your lifestyle and is tolerable—that can be enough. You may also land a job that is very fulfilling, but this will not keep the myths of life at bay: remember, there are next year’s models of cars to worry about, what you should or should not smell like, where to go on vacation, and what to do when you get there—ironically, the more settled in a job you become, the more myths will present themselves to you in the form of consumer demands. But again, here’s where your English degree can help: read the myths trafficking around you, think about just how mythical they are, and feel unsettled by this vast fiction that we are a part of. I am not advocating nihilism here, but rather suggesting the creative potential that we have as human beings—and urging you to participate in the creativity, as readers, and as writers who write the world. Again: it is not the “myths of the English degree” that you need to worry about—it is the myths of life, all the demands and stresses and pressures that you feel, the unanswered questions that you think you have to answer now...that vague sense that brought you here, tonight. Studying language and literature, we can learn to think about life’s myths, and we can talk & write about these myths clearly, analytically, & poetically—that’s what we can do, and frankly, I find it to be a real relief.

class blog posts and academic writing: a theory

2010-03-24T15:03:00.000-05:00

A colleague and I were talking recently about how much extra writing (translation: time) blogs take to use seriously as a teaching tool. Often, one ends up writing a comment to a student's post that is as long as (or longer than) the post in question; sometimes, a follow-up student comment then provokes another comment...and suddenly the post and comments start to resemble a lengthy collaborative essay, nearly self-contained.

How does all this writing figure in to one's more formal, research-based academic writing? Perhaps not at all—or maybe just not directly.

Upon first glance, it might appear that this sort of writing would distract from or deplete one's energies from the serious, scholarly writing that one has to do to earn tenure.

Yet my colleague and I have found that our own productivity—especially the ability to simply sit and write, to work on a project—increases dramatically during periods when we are using blogs in class as writing components. Through having to write regularly, thoughtfully, and consciously for an audience of one's students, the writing mechanisms are maintained, and kept flexible; it becomes easier to turn to one's own work and write a new paragraph here, revise an old essay there.

While this conversion is not always clear or distinct in the moment, we do find that writing articulate and detailed comments, each aimed at once toward an individual author and an entire class, our own scholarly writing tends to happen with fewer blocks and less inhibitions.

UP IN THE AIR

2010-01-18T10:58:00.001-06:00

Jason Reitman's film adaptation of Walter Kirn's novel UP IN THE AIR treats the subject of flight in two not entirely compatible ways, and these ways can be seen in this promotional still, with the singular George Clooney’s contemplative face in the center foreground, and the Eames Tandem chairs receding endlessly into a terminal background:

1. The movie treats the subject of modern flight as kitsch, such as we see in the close-up shots of Clooney swiveling his rollerbag, sliding his card through the check-in kiosk, going through security with a straight face, etc. The vulgar aesthetics of air travel draw chuckles from a knowing crowd. It is curious that Clooney's character, the exit strategist Ryan Bingham, is held up as someone who reflects the autonomous fantasy of taste (we see him shopping for ties at an airport clothiers, and we note that he has those flexible Nike shoes packed in his bag), and is shown to have his taste entirely defined for him by the whims of airline protocols, airport consumer culture, and corporate rewards programs. The monotonous airport scenes function as an analog to the predictability of the total system at hand—the human becomes passive and numb, an agent of nothing—but still moving at impressive speed. For kitsch to work, we all have to know things are ugly, and then buy them anyway. Imagine the feeling of gratification that passengers will have when they are able to enjoy their kitsch surroundings while also seeing this movie as in-flight entertainment: a circle will be complete, but nothing remarkable will have happened.

2. Flight is also depicted as earnest Romantic material, thus the impossible aerial views (views such as no window seat ever actually affords); the wish image of infinite destinations that appears when Clooney looks up at sprawling departures screens and his eyes flick back and forth; and in the metaphor of "connection" that is at turns lampooned and honored throughout the film. Air travel still maintains the slightest residues of the Romantic, and UP IN THE AIR provides ample examples of how just residual these impulses really are: We know that flying in a commercial airliner does not deliver the god's eye view, and yet we accept the cinematic conceit. We know that flight schedules are anything but unlimited matrices of potential new geographies, and yet the informational screens of arrivals and departures still manage to convey some remnant of discovery. Finally, without kisses at the departure gate, or hugs the moment one steps out of the jet-bridge, and with the airport police keeping you from leaving your car at curbside, we know that airports are no longer the place for sustained emotional 'connections'...and yet, we say sure, we'll watch a movie that tries to keep alive the myths and promises of making a 'connection' in flight.

On this last note, what is it about airports that lend themselves to excessive metaphor? Let us be clear, the idea of "connection" is strictly metaphorical here; come to think of it, I do not recall a single scene in the film in which Clooney actually makes a 'connection'— all his flights appear to be direct flights. The 'connection' in this movie is derived from the energy and aura of airports, but it really takes root in an over-fertilized soil of Hollywood romance mixed with Midwestern sentimentality. But in a general sense, this metaphorical excess is an airport problem. Consider one poster for the film:

Look at the layers of metaphor in this image. The "connection," as I've insisted, is not about the airport. This image is a riff on the scene in which Clooney and his understudy are departing Detroit; they are at the beginning on their trip, not in a 'connecting' airport. "Arriving this December" is a further metaphor, taking airport verbiage ('arrivals') and repurposing it as a marketing campaign for the film. The movie's title is itself a metaphor: the characters are quite obviously on the ground, and 90% of the film occurs there, too. The air facilitates the drama, certainly, but strictly speaking, being up in the air is a metaphor. The singular Boeing 747 in the mid-ground is more of a metonymy for all the American Airlines MD-80s that arc across the screen. Finally, the little bird in the upper right-hand corner of the frame is a cute but utterly unnecessary metaphor. We're in an airport, staring at a jumbo jet; do we really need a little bird to remind us that we are in the atmosphere of flight?

The overdetermined metaphoricity of airports creates a squishy subject, an absorbent material base for narratives—and this is perhaps why the kitsch surfaces and the Romantic residues of airports can be sustained together. In airports, displacement is the rule, everything stands for something else, and conflicting feelings are subsumed in the ether of progress.

Taxiway Views

2009-12-28T03:22:00.000-06:00

A little story of mine was in The New York Times last week: "A Night Spent on the Tarmac, With No Complaints." It made an especially nice coincidental pairing with another topic of the moment:

As if on cue, the past few days have offered a series of drab taxiway views that reflect a lingering preoccupation with the bleak drama of air travel, something people seem to crave and yet find revolting at the same time:

Dec. 25, 2009

Dec. 27, 2009

The philosopher Martin Heidegger once described the concept of "standing reserve" by evoking the image of an airliner waiting on the taxiway for takeoff. I wonder if airliners still hold such promise in terms of being able to illustrate philosophical ideas.

The recent headlines in the news and their accompanying taxiway views have led me to imagine a class I would like to teach on the discourse and imagery of the postmodern airliner. Don DeLillo's White Noise would offer an apt point of entry: in one section of the novel, DeLillo writes about a group of passengers who have just barely survived a plane crash. The survivors mill around the airport, unable to quite leave, opting instead to hear their story of near death recounted aloud by one of the haggard passengers. DeLillo writes, “They were not yet ready to disperse, to reinhabit their earthbound bodies, but wanted to linger with their terror, keep it separate and intact for just a while longer...” (91). For DeLillo, the near fatal plane crash throws bare life into stark relief, and yet it is also an experience doomed to be subsumed in a precession of simulacra.

Likewise, the current frenzy around near air disasters seems to reflect an attempt to grasp—only to lose touch with—what admittedly is a difficult subject: namely singular mortality, and all the physical risks and contingencies involved therein. In the monotonous taxiway views and in headlines such as "A ‘Nonserious’ Incident on Same Flight to Detroit," there is a tone of desperation, as if we are trying so hard to locate meaning in a subject that is rapidly losing distinction, its horizons gone gray.

Strange Plane Events

2009-12-11T02:37:00.000-06:00

My colleague Mark Yakich and I have posted several excerpts from our current book project on flight. The book is a collaborative travel memoir of sorts that moves between two narratives: Mark's fear of flying, and my experiences working at an airport and becoming obsessed with the oddities of air travel. Our aim is to have this published as a true airport book: compact and easy to read while on the taxiway before takeoff, while in a holding pattern waiting for clearance to land, or while sitting at the gate during an indefinite delay. The idea is that the book can be read in little segments, a story here and a story there, at random—or taken together as a narrative whole, and read more like a novel. The rationale for the material object of the book is for all the times of travel (at an airport, waiting; or on an airplane when lower-tech forms of reading are demanded) when it is preferable to have some 'light reading' ready at hand. So, of course, we envision the book available at airport bookstores.

There was a New Yorker cover a few years ago that offered a utopian vision of airport reading; in a sense, Mark and I are trying to write the kind of book that the fictive passengers in this image might be holding:

In his illustration, Adrian Tomine presents the wish-image of "airport reading." It is a multicultural fantasyland where everyone is at peace, a cosmopolitan dream where instead of shopping, every subject is being enchanted by a book. (For an absurdly dark take on a similar setting, see Roy Kesey's short story "Wait" in the collection All Over.) The silhouetted aircraft in the background of this image hint at the unspectacular banality that jet travel has achieved in our contemporary moment: no one in this imaginary departure lounge seems the least bit in awe of (or afraid of) flying. The blustering snow out the window suggests the environmental limits of flight, similar to a recent USA Today headline that read "Bird risk to jets called a 'flashing beacon'" (so we often find ourselves reading about how flight ends). As the departures monitor displays a uniform stream of DELAYED signs, the passengers all go with the flow, calmly reading their unmarked (and hard-bound!) books. These are Platonic forms of the Book: objects that universally enlighten and make time irrelevant. The airport is a mythic space where time can stand still, but often not in a pleasant way. One might wish that the experience of an airport delay were more like how time flies when one is engrossed in a good book; but usually this is anything but the case.

And so Mark and I are attempting to write a book designed for airport reading, with a bit of double-edged irony, given our inclinations toward writing alternately about the quotidian details of flight and about the horror of airplane crashes. When you really think about it, flying is all the more strange for how plain it has become.

What We Can Learn From Zizek

2009-11-20T10:03:00.002-06:00

This past week the philosopher Slavoj Zizek visted Loyola University New Orleans, and I had the chance to spend some time with him over dinner, as well as attend his public talk, "Uses and Misuses of Violence." I want to use this post to reflect on what we can learn from Zizek. This is a practical guide. I am not concerned here with delineating the 'big philosophy' of Zizek's thinking; rather, I am interested in touching on a few ways that I found Zizek's visit useful in relation to my own pedagogical practices.

First, it is necessary to point out the obvious but sometimes ignored reality that Zizek is a public intellectual. This is a difficult role with at times contradictory demands. One the one hand, the public intellectual has to be understood as profoundly intellectual—and accordingly held to certain (shifting) standards. On the other hand, the public intellectual must be clearly public—and therefore utterly accessible and entertaining. This is an extremely difficult (if not outright impossible) balancing act, and we should not too easily dismiss Zizek with regard to one side or the other of this dual role. (Common complaints tend to be "He's too narcissistic and theatrical" or "He's too tangential or sweeping in his references to follow.") The role of the public intellectual is tricky, and yet increasingly important—we should be supportive of such figures, and not get caught in the oppositional role of vulgar critics who can discount personalities (and performances) wholesale. What Zizek teaches us—on a really basic level—is that there is still a lot of hard thinking to do concerning society and culture.

At one point near the end of his talk, Zizek said something very useful about violence: he encouraged his audience to look for violence precisely where it is not perceived. This sounds counter-intuitive—and it is. That is what makes it philosophical and challenging. To look for violence in unexpected places is not a call to mass paranoia, but is rather a matter of "asking the right questions" about situations that seem 'normal'. It is a continual process, not a final judgment. How do we orient ourselves in such a continual process that also demands constant perception and assessment? In one of my current classes, my students and I are discussing this question as appears throughout the apocalyptic novel Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler.

Zizek called for a reclaiming of 'civility' and 'decency', which I think surprised many people, as he is hardly ashamed of using perverse anecdotes, obscenities, and graphic illustrations to make his theoretical points. Zizek posed 'civility' against 'habits'—suggesting that sometimes the most 'decent' and 'civil' we can be is to jar ourselves out of habitual modes of thinking (and thus acting). Zizek also advocated to the audience that we need to "change our dreams." This was a very interesting modification of the Marxian premise that the base (actions in the material world) must change the superstructure (thoughts, dreams, consciousness). Perhaps the 'dreams' here are to be understood as somehow more material—as activated settings and scenes, as it were. I found this formulation puzzling but totally intriguing, and I will continue to think about how humans might be able to change their dreams with instantaneous material effects (not simply as a matter of thought).

This point also came up in Zizek's provocation that we "stop saying things that keep everything the same." If there is one simple thing we can learn from Zizek, it is an attention to detail in terms of how we describe things, how we name situations, and what sorts of terms become standard, expected. This may sound all too simple, but it becomes complex, fast—taken seriously, this sort of radical refusal to say things that keep everything the same allows for the unforeseen, indeed possibly the unforeseeable. Taken seriously, too, such a positive refusal can greatly impact the ways we learn, teach, and live. Things cannot and do not stay the same—and when we STOP acting as if things CAN stay the same, this opens up worlds of possibilities. (Zizek is interested in thinking about history as not only what happened in the past, but also in terms of all the things that didn't happen, and for what reasons.) I am completely aware of how naively optimistic this idea of 'stopping-for-the-sake-of-change' may sound. But it is also a real lesson that we cannot help but keep learning. In my other class this semester, my students are grappling with this very issue in Philip K. Dick's novel Time Out of Joint, considering how the characters accept or refuse to accept as-if static material conditions.

So there is my brief synopsis of what we can learn from Zizek. I have written this as an attempt to take the public intellectual seriously, as seriously as he takes himself, certainly—but also (and just as much) as seriously as he takes the world at large. And isn't this intellectual seriousness (or what Donna Haraway calls "serious play") what we try to teach our students, if nothing else?

iPhones in the classroom

2009-11-10T11:48:00.001-06:00

This is not a post about how annoying it is when phones go off in class, nor about how amazed I am when a student decides to take only one little white earbud out during class, and leave the other one in, softly playing something that only the self can hear. Rather, in this post I want to discuss a few ways in which I have found iPhones to be quite useful in what is mostly an old-school, book-oriented introduction to literary theory classroom.

The other day, we were discussing Simulacra and Science Fiction by Jean Baudrillard, and we were grappling with the concept "pantographic." I said, "Does anyone have a dictionary handy?" No. "How about an iPhone with a dictionary 'app'?" Of course. A tech-savvy student looked up the word, and then we talked about how the epoch of 'hyper-reality' (according to Baudrillard, our age) dispenses with the "pantographic excess" (massive scale shifts) of traditional science fiction (such as we see in imaginary parallel worlds that look eerily similar even when detail are exaggerated or shrunk) in exchange for pervasive models of simulation that have the feel of the 'real'—and iPhone apps turn out to be an apt example of what Baudrillard is referring to. We talked about all the 'real' things that one can now do on an iPhone—such as look up a word in a dictionary, play music, consult a map, identify birds—and considered why none of this seems magical, but rather appears as a simple, natural extension of daily life. The iPhone served as a pedagogical help-aid, and as a quotidian object to be unconcealed in the classroom—we could actually treat it as a living text, through its own access to language.

A week or so later, we were discussing a short story and a student conjectured that the word "torrid" might come from the same word root as the astrological sign of Taurus the bull (we were tracking metaphors of animality in a fictive landscape). This time, I simply said "Who has an iPhone etymology app ready?" And promptly a student was tapping away and informing the class that torrid comes from the Latin torrid-us (to dry with heat).

There are, then, real uses for iPhones in the English classroom. Still, as we move closer to the possibility of full immersion, paperless 'new media' classrooms, there are pressing questions to pose. In the name of online education, one recent blog post that has now disappeared recommended "75 Apps to Turn Your iPhone into the Ultimate Personal Library." The post claimed:

There’s something to be said about the weight of a book in your hand and the feel of the pages, but iPhone apps now give you an option.

I wonder, though, what is this mysterious "something to be said about the weight of a book"? That it is heavy? That it feels nice? And what is the singular "option" that an iPhone phone offers here? It seems caught up in a swarm of exchanges having to do with weight, feel, ease of consumption, access, energy—in other words, a whole world of experiential preferences are assumed when we exchange a book for an iPhone. Perhaps these experiential preferences need to be discussed more directly as such.

So what are the remaining arguments on behalf of (traditional) books? One gripe that I often hear is about annotation: you can't take notes and highlight in an e-reader like you can in a book. Well, not yet you can't (or at least not yet very well). Another one has to do with smell: books take on smells that are unique to each book, whereas the e-reader is seen to be a sterile object. Actually, though, electronics have their own abject qualities, as anyone in tune with their senses who has had a phone or a computer keyboard for a long time gradually becomes aware of. Plastic can come to stink and accrete bodily stuff, too. Maybe soon e-readers will be able to smell like books (and a different book each time you download a new one), and keyboards will be able to emit a new plastic aroma (like that "new car smell" spray that one can buy), rather than excrete an old-plastic-coated-with-food-and-earwax-and-boogers smell. But is this merely a question, then, of how good the simulation gets? Once an e-reader can really simulate a book to exactness, will we no longer miss the book? And if we still will miss the book, why? What are the experiential strongholds—and what are the fantasy objects—of 'old media' nostalgias?

Fields without Origins

2009-10-30T05:47:00.000-05:00

Two colleagues of mine and I are working to develop a syllabus for a new English course that will utilize e-readers instead of paper books: every student in the class will be given an e-reader, and our goal will be to immerse ourselves in 'new' practices of reading. The class will be focused on the "digital human," and in particular it will concern questions of new media reading and writing technologies. How is reading different (and how is it the same) on a screen? Should we call this (what I'm doing now) 'writing', or are the practices of composition, citation, 'browsing', and 'linking' on a screen deserving of a new name?

One thinks of Roland Barthes's concept of the 'scriptor' who is "is born simultaneously with the text" and who "traces a field without origin"—this is sort of what it feels like to compose a blog post (even if it is a fantasy). And so, perhaps we'll read "The Death of the Author" and From Work to Text in the class—which makes me wonder: will reading Barthes be different on an e-reader than on this screen in front of me now? I suppose, thinking about it, that my head won't be hanging from my neck at this awkward angle, because I'll be lying back, instead of sitting up.

Nicholson Baker has proven to be an excellent phenomenologist of e-reading. I appreciate how Baker accounts for what it feels like to read electronically; we do not have nearly enough critical reflection on this subject. In his New Yorker piece on the Kindle, he describes one serious advantage of reading Kindle books on an iPod Touch: night reading. As Baker explains:

...when you wake up at 3 A.M. and you need big, sad, well-placed words to tumble slowly into the basin of your mind, and you don’t want to wake up the person who’s in bed with you, you can reach under the pillow and find Apple’s smooth machine and click it on. It’s completely silent. Hold it a few inches from your face, with the words enlarged and the screen’s brightness slider bar slid to its lowest setting, and read for ten or fifteen minutes. Each time you need to turn the page, just move your thumb over it, as if you were getting ready to deal a card; when you do, the page will slide out of the way, and a new one will appear. After a while, your thoughts will drift off to the unused siding where the old tall weeds are, and the string of curving words will toot a mournful toot and pull ahead. You will roll to a stop. A moment later, you’ll wake and discover that you’re still holding the machine but it has turned itself off. Slide it back under the pillow. Sleep.

Indeed, there is something utopian about the promises of e-reading. Look at how Sony figured it in an early ad, circa 2005:

I wrote about this magazine advertisement in my dissertation, because it was such a peculiar wish image: an utterly empty airport; a Boeing 747-400 devoid of any livery; carpet that looks almost grass-like, this ambience accentuated by the construction-site T-bar post in the ground, atop of which is the invitation to read. The ad then (reflexively) reads: "Pick a nice spot for your library." Ah, what a nice way to think of the airport: as a library. I have been in a few quiet airports, and it is a quite nice experience. Most of the time, however, airports are loud and anything but library-like. Often in airports it seems as though I am thinking in CNN—then, I realize it is just the inescapable TVs blaring above my head. Tip: Minneapolis has a tranquil, TV-free observation room accessible at the joint of—I think—the D and F concourses.

But back to the Sony ad. In this picture, the airport serves as a place where one will necessarily have the time to read, but the airport has also been somewhat deemphasized by the act of reading: the airport is emptied out by the superimposition of a library onto the departure lounge. This context shift justifies the ghostly emptiness of the airport, and might even explain the lack of a signifying airline icon on the aircraft in the background (the only mark, which is more of a phatic ‘re-mark’, is an obscured tail number)—the airplane is a blank page, of sorts. Reading has evacuated presence from the airport, even as the presence of the airport has allowed reading to happen—airport reading is thus rendered chiasmatic, as a thing to do while waiting to fly, and as a thing to do instead of flying, to defer flight...in principle, a deferment that can be drawn out as one can "read more" on the Sony Reader. Just keep reading—you won't notice your flight, much less see the fields below, or even remember where you came from.

This is the circular dream of e-reading: it promises to be seamlessly available to nearly every moment of everyday life. But at what point does an everyday life of e-reading cease to be desirable? When everyday pilots are so caught up in their screens (Off-Course Pilots Cite Computer Distraction) that their plane flies undeterred for 150 miles beyond its destination, might we rightly ask, like children, are we there yet?

Air Travel Absurdity, Part 2

2009-10-11T12:11:00.000-05:00

The latest article in the NY Times on air travel is awkwardly titled "What Not to Say in an Exit-Row Seat". Passenger Jim Dwyer tells how he was pulled off a flight by security personnel for making a joke in the exit row; but he claims he made no such quip. It turns out that it was an identity mix-up due to a seat swap, and the security personnel were really after a man on the other side of the aisle. Dwyer concludes:

...it is one thing to be belligerent on the street, and quite another on a commercial flight. And in truth, I did not care much about justice for the man who got thrown off, as long as I was let back on.

These two sentences expose the conceptual crisis of commercial flight in U.S. culture. On the one hand, airports and airliners are deemed to be elevated states of exception, isolated mobilities imbued with a higher level of consciousness and awareness, reliant on a tacit understanding of a certain civil and social conduct. Dwyer implies that commercial flight involves a way of being that is markedly different from life "on the street."

Yet on the other hand, in airports and in airliners civil society is seen to be on the verge of total collapse. Dwyer's utter lack of interest in "justice" for the exit-row joker suggests that the ambience of flight is, after all, not unlike the 'street life' derided above: the conditions of commercial flight inspire a cutthroat attitude, self-interested to the core, and a feeling of being outside the law. Outside the law, we find ourselves "on the street" inside a floating, flexible regime of protocols and paranoia, all in an effort to secure the liberal traveler, a category that anyone can be speedily exempted from, at almost any time. This is the experience of contemporary flight in U.S. culture: we have achieved brute existence, with complimentary beverages and exit-rows.

I am looking forward to Slavoj Zizek's new book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, which appears to have (at the very least) a surface correspondence with these matters:

The Nonsense of Air Travel

2009-09-23T12:07:00.000-05:00

A NY Times article reported this week on how airlines are having to "rethink" First Class and Business Class, because they are too expensive to maintain as is. United, we are told, is considering a new class of service just below Business: it will be called "Premium Economy." Are we supposed to forget that this has existed in effect in the guise of "Economy Plus" for several years now? Rhetorically speaking, how does the flip of Economy and the shift from Plus to Premium constitute a serious 'rethinking'?

The article goes on to illuminate the state of air travel as such:

“In building up their premium classes, airlines have been building themselves a castle in the air that’s ultimately unsupportable,” said Peter Morris, the chief economist in London for Ascend Worldwide, an aviation consulting company. “Unless the business world carries on expanding its needs for these services, the castle, to some extent, will come crashing down.”

Wait: when is a "castle in the air" ever 'supportable'? (When it is an Airbus A380?) Furthermore, can one even imagine the sight of a castle in the air crashing down only "to some extent"? I cannot picture this, as hard as I try. It seems as though the popular discourse of air travel is approaching a surrealist aesthetic. Is there a threshold to such nonsensical language in the realm of something alleged to require a certain technological precision (e.g., flight)?

Another article (can we call these email-in interview pieces "articles"?) discusses the subject of manners on planes. Larry Winget expounds,

I don’t know what people are thinking when they travel nowadays. It’s like they leave their brains in the airport parking lot, and forget about common sense and courtesy.

Initially, one might be inclined to agree with Larry Winget's sentiment. The article goes on to narrate three episodes of bad manners on a plane; in two of the cases, Larry Winget intervenes, once with comic wit and once with a firm hand. Larry Winget's anecdotes are solid evidence for the tattered state of air travel: on planes people are rude, generally self-absorbed, and when they do communicate with one another their tempers are short, to say the least. Larry Winget emerges as a civilian arbiter of such situations. But Larry Winget looks like a pretty big guy, and kind of imposing; there is a colorful picture of him next to the article to prove it. This article seems to imply that what we need is a citizen task force, a sort of ad hoc brigade of unofficial (but serious) 'air marshals':

I am really trying not to let people’s behavior get to me. Most of the time, I keep my sense of humor, take lots of deep breaths, read a good book and don’t let the idiots get me down.

But sometimes, you just have to take a stand.

What are the limits of this injunction to "take a stand"? What brute force do we condone when it comes to flight? At what point is the rational, self-controlled liberal subject allowed to dominate, to flex within the aluminum-thin structure all around?

Perhaps literature can instruct. Larry Winget posits a civilized coping mechanism for this context: "read a good book" in order to avoid being annoyed by others on the plane. But what does one do when 'good' fiction reflects the absurdities of air travel? We would seem then to be caught in a möbius strip, or on an infinitely rerouted trip. Last week's short fiction piece in the New Yorker, "Land of the Living" by Sam Shepard, stumbles into this problematic terrain. Shepard begins this sardonic vacation story in the drab interior of a sweltering airport in Mexico. At one point the narrator observes:

We’re being herded, shoulder to shoulder with all the other Minnesota “snowbirds” frantically fanning themselves with their customs forms.

The familiar use of an airport setting to begin or end a story relies on what I elsewhere call "the poetics of no-man's land." Here, this involves a figurative disjunction between the "'snowbirds'" and the 'herding' taking place: animality is plainly overdetermined in the locus of the airport, and the setting resembles Larry Winget's worst nightmare: humans stripped of humanity, bumbling along, trying to get somewhere. What is the end of this spectrum? Sheer animality, or death? Later in "Land of the Living," during the characters' return trip, an unexpected landing at the St. Louis airport suggests that the end of flight is mortal death—which is to say, figurative evacuation, literally. Perhaps, then, the nonsense of air travel anticipates a more general, final vacation.

Some Comments on the Curiosity of Blogs

2009-09-17T08:31:00.000-05:00

Stanley Fish's latest NY Times blog post "Does Curiosity Kill More Than the Cat?" has provoked 399 comments as of this morning (17 Sep).

Fish basically presents 'curiosity' as a vice that when given a "positive twist" morphs into "the scientific project"—leading all the way up to present efforts on behalf of the National Endowment of the Humanities to digitalize "just about everything." Fish seems to be unimpressed with the promise of digital archives.

In short, Fish concludes that 'curiosity' seems to be the God that humans want to worship. I keep placing 'curiosity' in scare-quotes because it seems like such an unwieldy concept, and an odd one to take on in a brief expository form such as a blog post. The 399 comments generated in the three days since the post appeared tend to either ridicule Fish for sounding like a religious fanatic, or applaud Fish's critique of hubris.

For one commentator, a welcome apocalypse is on the near horizon:

Do not despair, however, because soon there will be a collective, intellectual revolt, at which point the compasses will be righted once again and everything will be given its proper place.

—Craig

There is something so, what, curious about this kind of certainty. It makes me almost suspect that Fish's post was a provocation, a calculated ruse intended to expose just these sorts of impulses. Clearly, to maintain a blog (or comment on one) involves more than a little faith in human curiosity, and such faith would be more than a little resistant to the "revolt" anticipated.

I wonder then if, really, Fish's post is a (perhaps unconscious) reflection on the curiosity of blogs in general. Let me explain.

Stanley Fish could have written a blog post with the title "Does Chocolate Kill More Than the Cat?" Then, using some clever passages and strategic citations, he could move swiftly toward an argument about a general idolatry concerning chocolate. One can imagine concluding sentences that would read something like this:

The question, posed by thinkers from Roald Dahl to Frederick Shilling to Timothy Morton, is whether this is the God—the God, ultimately, of indulgence—we want to worship. Given the evidence, including the philosophy of Green & Black's, the answer would seem to be yes.

Within three days, Fish would have around 399 comments that would account for a dispersed field of praise, agreement, disagreement, counter-argument, and sarcasm—over the subject of chocolate. And here we are: in a world of blogs, communicating about communication, right at home in the world. The argument was never about 'chocolate' or 'curiosity' all along—it was about ways of reading and habits of writing, and how these acts become ingrained over (digital) time.

To "Over-Interpret"

2009-08-30T07:50:00.000-05:00

What does it mean when people warn others not to "over-interpret" a situation? This usually means that too much thinking can paralyze action, and then things don't get done. This makes sense from a practical standpoint: the more time I spend analyzing a menu at a restaurant, the longer I defer my actual meal. And after too long, I might just be asked to leave.

We sometimes use this language to advise friends about relationships, for instance when we say things like: "Don't over-interpret the fact that she did not call you last night; just go see her and talk to her!" By this sort of phrasing we mean that direct communication and articulated questions are healthier for a relationship than are solipsistic hypotheses and speculative flights of the imagination.

However, when it comes to literary criticism, I do not think that it is possible to "over-interpret." In fact, I would go as far to say that every act of interpretation is inescapably an over-interpretation. When interpreting, one does not simply read a novel and then put it back on the bookshelf (or file it in the e-reading device's archive). Instead, what one does is linger over particular passages, research a peculiar historical material reference, or develop a theory that explains certain aspects of the narrative. In short, any act of interpretation over-does the literary work, and this is precisely the point. (Tangentially, I am very curious about this habit of attaching "over" as a prefix to words that already imply extra action: over-dramatize, over-analyze, even, strangely, over-think. Does this possibly come from a cultural sense of food, from how we say that something cooked too much is overdone? Or is this just another case in point?)

Interpretation is supposed to be enriching, and to add appreciation to art. On the other hand, interpretation can be seen as derivative, and completely external to the work of art. I am aware as I write this that it may seem as though I am relying on and even reinforcing a set of binaries here: life/thought, art/interpretation. These sets of categories are of course fluid and not mutually exclusive. Yet if we can never "over-interpret" art, it seems to make sense that we should also hesitate before telling people not to "over-interpret" situations in everyday life. Rather, to over-interpret might be nothing more and nothing less than to interpret, and given space and time, interpretation might be understood not as a derivative form of life, but as a way of life in which choices must be made, but must equally always be left open to ponder, and in some cases, to redress.

The impetus for this post was that I am in the middle of revising an article on F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel The Last Tycoon, and it was recently suggested to me that I "over-interpret" passages from the text. This is probably true on a certain level: I like to spend a lot of time on a little bit of text. However, I also want to defend "over-interpretation" as interpretation. I suppose the trick is to make thoughtful interpretation look more like art, and feel more like life.

Nature and Artifice

2009-08-04T08:48:00.000-05:00

“The machine which at first blush seems a means of isolating man from the great problems of nature, actually plunges him more deeply into them.”

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des Hommes

Last week I saw two films at the Traverse City Film Festival: "Herb and Dorothy," an excellent documentary about two lovely, understated collectors of minimalist and conceptualist art; and “Examined Life,” a collage of site-specific interviews with contemporary thinkers who discuss subjects ranging from cosmopolitanism to ecology, and from disability studies to revolution. These two films, it seems to me, connect at the intersection of nature and artifice.

After the screening of “Herb and Dorothy,” the director Megumi Sasaki took questions from the audience, and spoke about the importance of one specific scene in the movie that took place in a pet store, in which the main characters look at animals in between their visits to art studios. Sasaki articulated a key point of the film: the convergence of animals, nature, and art.

Animals, nature, and art: what else is there? Species inhabit a planet; and they make things. This triangulation seems at once utterly simple and totally profound. What else is there outside of this amalgam? One might say thought, but thought is part of our species being. Thought is something interesting that we do as humans. Technology, too, is simply saying our technology, the things we make, ideas that often start out as (or in) art, and turn into machines or screens. Finally and inevitably, animals and art both collapse into nature. ‘Nature’ is an all-encompassing term the harder you think about it, which begs the question: why do we need the idea of nature at all?

When Slavoj Zizek insists in “Examined Life” that humans need to become more artificial, more alienated, in order to responsibly reckon with the realities of landfills and recycling dumps, I think what he means is that we have to let go entirely of the idea of nature as if we could grasp it either as a transcendent Other or as some ideal version of ourselves in balance with everything else. We have to accept ourselves as animals of artifice, and artifice as our nature. All this really means is taking what we make and do seriously. In turn, we might be able to actually do something different with waste, with all the remnants of artifice that humans produce. One of my mentors at UC Davis, Timothy Morton, has written at length on this subject in Ecology Without Nature.

These two films align with the urgency of ecological theory—which is to say, the crisis of realization that comes from the awareness that humans can never ever get outside the purview of ‘nature'. This 'nature' is a weird term: it can mean everything, and yet is eerily similar to nothing. Where does this leave us? We are always, only, thoroughly and inescapably, here, in our bodies, in our minds, making and doing things, on this planet, or somewhere nearby. Forgetting about nature, this is the place to start thinking.

The more artificial we become, the more natural we are. This is a difficult thought to think.

Thinking Space in "Childcare"

2009-07-13T04:17:00.000-05:00

Next year in a first-year seminar called "Thinking Space," I will likely assign the fiction piece that appeared in last week's New Yorker, Lorrie Moore's "Childcare."

"Childcare" takes place in a more or less contemporary moment, and is told from the first-person perspective of a college student looking for work—based on preliminary content alone, it already presents itself as an apt story for university students. The narrative is structured around restaurants, so that what seems at first to be straight storytelling gets curved by gastronomic curiosities; the story takes place in a small town, but it also a little looping network of food, always ready to go global. Near the beginning, the narrator mentions a meal called "Buddha’s Delight" available at "the Peking Café"; by the end of the story, we are at a Perkins with a "Bottomless Pot of Coffee." One character owns a French restaurant that is a present absence throughout the story: it is mentioned repeatedly but never really there. The story is not ostensibly about 'food' per se, (the narrator is not looking for work in a restaurant), and yet food keeps popping up, interrupting—or arguably forming—the narrative. This suggests a useful debate to have in class: what is the role of food in this story? This debate might also lead into a favorite assignment of mine, which is to have students write mini-reviews of local restaurants; this time around, I could have my students try to discover narratives that are lying dormant in their restaurants of choice, rather like the obverse of Moore's story, which finds restaurants within a broader fictive landscape.

It would be interesting to pair this story with an excerpt from Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, in part because of the shared preoccupations with eating out. Then, there is something to learn about environmental language in these two texts. A Moveable Feast begins: "Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over." Moore's story starts out similarly: "The cold came late that fall, and the songbirds were caught off guard." I would ask my students how seasonal logic functions in each of these narratives. Is it just about setting, or does seasonal language do something specific to the setting? Perhaps it has something to do with what Heidegger called "worlding," in terms of how geophysical space is disclosed, both consciously opened up and necessarily delimited. I think of such environmental language as "spacing"—because in the midst of such description, the narrator becomes spaced out, and we (the readers) are not exactly in the realm of thought, yet not totally external to it, either. (This tangent could become a useful way to introduce Derrida's notion of "différance" as the spatialization of time and the temporization of space.)

Moore also plays with words in clever ways. For example, the narrator makes this observation concerning her college life: "In the corridors, students argued over Bach, Beck, Balkanization, bacterial warfare." This would be an excellent moment to talk not only about the spatial effects of alliteration, but also about intertextuality, perhaps bringing back Hemingway on Stein or Pound in A Moveable Feast. And then, we might compare literary and cultural allusions in prose with hypertextuality online: How is Moore's story aided by new media ways of thinking and reading? What happens when we use a Google search to help us map routes, make translations, and follow obscure references in a story? What is the threshold of searching in literature? (Ending on that note, in another post and in another class, I'd like to discuss the fiction piece in The New Yorker from a few weeks ago by Stephen O'Connor, "Ziggurat." This story involves an imaginative search through language and space, blending old mythologies with new media mysteries.)

Currency : Critical :: PowerPoint : Political

2009-06-28T04:24:00.000-05:00

I was recently forwarded an email with a PowerPoint presentation designed to lambaste big government spending by showing how much space a trillion dollars would take up. The presentation ends with a satirical trillion dollar bill on which President Obama's visage appears, and it reads "The United Socialist States of America."

But can such a presentation actually function as political commentary? I don't think so—at least not precisely. First off, this jab at Obama reminded me all too well of the 9-11 bill that ridiculed President Bush and pronounced ONE DECEPTION in place of ONE DOLLAR.

A quick Google image search yields dozens of such sardonic monetary notes from a range of historical moments and national registers. It would appear, then, that this is something of a trope: the use of currency to call into question the acts of certain political figures. But what does this trope suggest about the (perhaps misplaced) belief in the truth value of currency? Do we really believe everything we see on a 'real' dollar bill? Is this 'everything' even knowable, or must it remain partially cryptic—or at least infinitesimally semiotic—in order to preserve the metaphysical qualities of exchange? We know that the value of money is hardly stable, and that the 'truth' of money is a social product, made and remade everyday. So why call on the figure of money as an oracle?

To use currency as a template for divining any final truth exposes a misconception: money always lies in the sense that it abstracts value—the reason that it works is because we agree not to dwell on the abstractions in question. What does the dollar value on my paycheck really, finally, reflect about my actual work? Nothing very specific or unique to me. It is curious how something as fundamentally bland as money can become so tied up with the alleged sanctity of the 'individual' in certain political camps. What are people standing for when they invoke the rights of individuals to control their own money? Individuals, or money itself? What do we expect from money? In a way these are simple questions, I know—but these questions also hinge on complex psycho-social relations. (I guess this is properly called economics.)

Tom McCarthy's recent novel Remainder hinges on money, too. In the opening pages, the narrator is awarded a large settlement after an undisclosed accident; he envisions the amount as such: "...I thought about the sum: eight and a half million. I pictured it in my mind, its shape" (8). The figure of money permeates the novel, and ends up somewhat spoiling the mise-en-abyme conceit of the narrative. In short, money ruins this novel by becoming an increasingly plentiful and correspondingly uninteresting plot motivator. It would seem that McCarthy's contemporary novel and the Obama trillion dollar bill have this in common: a staggering amount of currency inspires only to snuff out the possibility of making any clear critical point.

Tangentially related, and perhaps even more intriguing to me than the money, however, was the medium contained in the email forward. (Email forwarding is itself a peculiar media form to consider where individuality would seem to be at stake, but that's another matter.) The presentation arrived as a PowerPoint, a program that, like most others, presupposes faith in a social system that is working. Thus, against the glib apocalypticism in the trillion dollar bill presentation, the medium is supposed to stand strong and true. PowerPoint is a new media form that must be 'fleshed out', as we say—and I mean this quite literally. What do people actually do with (or get from) PowerPoint? How do audiences respond bodily to these presentations? How do people take in slides that transmogrify before their eyes? How do words work (or fail to work) in this space? David Byrne raises such questions implicitly in his Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information, art pieces that utilize PowerPoint to show how medium and message are inescapably intertwined:

As Byrne's artwork suggests, have a lot of hard thinking to do before we can assume that ubiquitous software can be politically explicit.

On Driving

2009-06-14T23:53:00.001-05:00

Driving the long haul across southern Texas today I was reminded of the Coen brothers' excellent adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's equally excellent novel No Country For Old Men. In a way, this film is as much about driving around Texas as it is about drug money or an unstoppable killer. The Coen brothers captured these driving scenes with a "perceptual acuity" (ala Elaine Scarry) that makes the film both ominous and ordinary. As I drove along today I kept finding myself thinking about these less dramatic yet integral moments of the film, and I snapped some images of these vistas with the handy camera phone:

One might read McCarthy's novel as an updated version of his earlier work Blood Meridian, in which a less than Romantic Western frontier network of trails and towns is simply replaced with a more contemporary geography of meandering highways offering views that make one wince while driving, endlessly driving into horizons that seem eerily the same mile after mile: progress in the making.

interests converge

2009-06-05T11:15:00.000-05:00

Many of my current interests converge on the cover of this week's New Yorker:

Air travel, ecology, post-apocalyptic imagery, book reading versus the new media technologies...this illustration serves as a cipher for a host of anxieties and consolations around the contemporary moment. There is a wish for aliens; but also a wish for them to be like us. There is a desire to see ecological recovery at the expense of human civilization—and a desire to see this from a removed, as if neutral perspective. Nostalgia for the old, tattered book depends on a pile of rubble in the form of the new media technologies (screens, keyboards, cell phones, e-book readers).

The New Yorker cover presents a modern take on Shelley's "Ozymandias": a story of ruin rendered in bright colors, positing annihilation in order to preserve an old form of reading (this is, after all, the summer fiction issue). Instead of the mise-en-abyme of first-person speakers who we meet in Shelley's sonnet, in this illustration we get to see the lonely reader at work—and he looks happy, his spaceship hovering nearby. To rephrase Wallace Stevens: the reader became the book, and the post-apocalyptic day was like the conscious being of the book.

Technologies R Us

2009-06-04T11:05:00.000-05:00

The USA Today reports on The Dumbest Generation and presents a sort of counterargument. The basic concern is whether social networking sites like Facebook are making Generation Y students 'dumb', or whether such practices are simply (and complexly) retooling the ways of being 'smart'.

In many ways I find myself in a third position in relation to the two writers who are quoted in the article. This is a lively debate across the humanities, and it is almost too easy to take either side of this seeming divide: to be nostalgic for skills and habits that are allegedly locatable in some past moment in time, or to argue for different kinds of smartness across different times. Not only is it too easy to take one of these sides, but in fact these sides are incommensurable, and so they end up not really forming a debate at all, but more accurately exposing two different ways of understanding 'the world'—not to mention 'history'. The largest problem in this article, however, is the seemingly clear and distinct idea of 'technology'—which boils down to meaning either A) stuff that humans make that takes them away from some mythical pure origin, or B) something irreducibly bound up with humans and the world from the start, and therefore hardly a useful term at all.

For isn't a spider's web a 'technology' of sorts? The looping, grabbing tendrils on a vining plant are technologies too. And the ceramic bowl is a technology that likely changed eating patterns at some point in human history no less dramatically than text messaging is changing communication patterns now. The point is that the word 'technology' might not be helping this discussion: we would need to be much more precise about how specific things in the world affect specific acts of behavior (and not exclusively in relation to humans). Then we could at least agree on what we are talking about.

As it is, the idea of 'technology' functions as an inscrutable force, either to be wary of and resist, or to submit to and be absorbed by—either way, this word completely misses the point that there is no location from which humans could ever get a clear view of technology, for even the brain and the eyes are themselves always already little technologies for seeing and knowing, and here we are, enmeshed in the whole matrix from the start. We would need to talk about very specific things that bother us or interest us. How contemporary college students use personal devices that seem in friction with a book-based literature classroom—now that might be interesting. Or how contemporary students are engaged in ongoing, expanding communication networks that challenge linear narrative structures—that might be interesting, too. But these need not be antagonistic lines of inquiry, as the USA Today article seems to posit them.

In the American Studies course I am currently teaching called "The Ecology of Beauty," my students did a photography project in which they were required to grapple with how they understand themselves in relation to 'nature'. I think that one particular student's photo gets at some of the complexities of the technology question at hand:

Down on Up

2009-05-31T20:06:00.000-05:00

The problems with Pixar’s latest film Up are primarily formal ones. These include the onslaught of events, and a virtual saturation of characters.

The events in Up are sequenced irregularly and create strange senses of importance: for instance, the breaking of chocolate bars takes up more time in the film than a trans-hemispheric journey. A rare bird turns out to be rainbow colored, in case one has missed the colorfulness of the house or the vast cluster of helium balloons that provide it with lift. The events that are the best in the film achieve a majestic quality of slow time that could have been maintained throughout—such as the excruciatingly drawn out, diagonal ride of an electric stair-chair descender. This film really only needed about four events; as it is, there are dozens of events that fill out the plot, and too many of these events flit by so quickly that they cannot be substantive, and therefore are throwaway. More of the story's time could have been given to the defiance of urban sprawl, the isolation and domesticity of unregulated air space, and the spectacular vistas that we see so well in a few scenes early in the film.

When too many characters flood the plot, narrative sensitivity and attention to detail can tend to be dampened. In this case, the gradual introduction of more and more characters climaxes with a canine infinitude that is more ridiculous than funny. In a film like Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, hoards of running, red-eyed humans gone mad works; in a film that should remain skyward, such as Up, hundreds of talking cyborg dogs on the ground do not work so well. This character splurge rather ruins the conceit of an animation film, wherein anything is possible—which is precisely why some things should not be done. Restraint would seem to be the key to digital storytelling.

Finally, a missed opportunity: an airline or aircraft manufacturer could have benefited from a case of ingenious 'product placement' with the ballooned house seen from an airliner cruising by, people gawking while sipping small cups of soda. Here are some rough ideas:

Up made me nostalgic for the quiet, richly intertextual and darkly comical Wall-E of last summer. Or maybe it just exposed just my penchant for the post-apocalyptic genre, which I plan to teach a class on this coming fall.

Airport Reading

2009-05-30T12:12:00.000-05:00

I recently completed my dissertation at UC Davis on the textual aspects of airports in U.S. culture. After filing my dissertation I took a short trip to visit some friends in Portland, Oregon. On the way there, I snapped a picture in the Sacramento airport without too much attention to what I might capture. In fact, I held the camera to my side and took the picture without looking into the viewfinder at all. Now, I'll take the take the time to 'read' this image in order to explain a little about my dissertation.

My dissertation is interested in how airports read. In this picture, I can see people reading various things: magazines, computer screens, books, text messages, and newspapers. Airports are the place to read, as evinced by the way that bookstores are increasingly migrating out of cities and towns and into terminals and concourses.

Beyond the people reading in the airport, there are also a lot of things to read about the space itself. In this departure lounge I see signs for gates 25 and 27, directional markers meant to be read and followed. I see a sign for "free Wi-Fi"—a hanging text that prompts me to discover further reading material on my laptop, if I have one. Several people in the picture have taken the "free Wi-Fi" cue and stare into their screens. If I cannot get 'connected', I will have to resort to lower-tech forms of reading, or just space out. People watching is another kind of reading suitable for airports.

I see multiple trash receptacles, which tell me that this is a space where consumption and waste is expected. I also see a tree which appears to be rather discordantly 'greening' this built space of transit. Or perhaps the little tree is inviting Nature in—in which case the color complementary small red alarm boxes on the columns may be imagined as berries beneath the canopy of off-white ceiling tiles. Aside from the verdant motif, however, the dominant color scheme reads monochromatic and is laid out in mostly geometric patterns of alternating lights and darks.

A majority of the dark shapes in this scene are the ubiquitous rows of airport chairs that the psychologist Robert Sommer calls "hard architecture": such seating is quite clear and uncompromising about how passengers are to comport themselves and communicate (or not) in this space. Anyone who has spent significant time in such chairs should be familiar with the feeling of craning your neck to talk to someone next to you, or leaning awkwardly uphill to talk to someone across from you. Through this seating arrangement, the airport forwards a sociological understanding of how people should be organized and spaced out (how people should feel) in this space.

And above, the square fluorescent lamps offer light for easy reading. In the airport everyone has their identity checked: passports read, employee ID cards verified, and boarding passes scanned—the airport reads its human inhabitants. All these practices combined make up airport reading: this is a legible context wherein nature and culture collude, inside becomes outside, bodies blend into technologies, and everything proceeds as in an endless delay.

"here" & "apps"

2009-05-20T12:22:00.000-05:00

Today I am a guest contributor to the blog Changing Lives, Changing Minds, a literature blog out of UMass-Dartmouth. You can view my post here.

Two new media observations:

1. On that curious word here: A friend recently pointed out that the linked word "here" has attained a funny way of functioning as a floating transit point with no necessary stable spatial anchor. Online, the linked word "here" can lead one anywhere (here), or nowhere (here). I also see that there is a place called here.com which is thoroughly cryptic but existentially reassuring. I wonder if the linked word "here" is a sort of virtual "non-place"—an updated version of how the anthropologist Marc Augé has used this term to describe spaces that are designed for passage and transition, never to serve as distinct places in and of themselves (e.g., airports, highway rest stops, & ATMs).

2. Lately I've been seeing a lot of advertisements that evince the plethora of "apps" available for the iPhone. I was discussing some of these applications with my students recently in class (the iHandy Carpenter with its digital level, The Moron Test, etc.), and one student rolled his eyes and said "They've got an app for everything." Yet when people are surprised (or annoyed) that there is an iPhone application for "everything," it seems to me that this is not entirely different from being surprised (or annoyed) that there is everything there is in the world. Perhaps this is the secret trick of the iPhone: it refreshes the already existing world with a surprising quality of recognizability. (Because surely we couldn't have apps that were unintelligible or ineffable.) Thus the iPhone apps depend on our continual experience of a rather underwhelming revelation, something to the the effect of: "I can't believe that there are so many things in the world!"

Rey Chow on New Media

2009-05-14T11:00:00.000-05:00

Recently I heard Rey Chow give a provocative talk called "Postcolonial Visibilities: Foucault, Deleuze, and the New Media Technologies." Among other things, Chow discussed the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon by which images of the lowest resolution end up achieving the highest visibility. Consider, for instance, the way that camera phone snapshots can be captured nearly spontaneously and then disseminated at an exponential rate, causing the 'first images' that we often see of an event to be distinctly unframed, out of focus, pixelated—yet also the ones that tend to stick in our minds (and in Google image archives, as well).

As students seem increasingly to have ready-to-hand access to portable imaging technologies such as camera phones, I wonder how such 'writing tools' (if I can dare to call them that) could be put in the service of analysis and composition in the humanities classroom. In an American Studies course I am currently teaching, called "The Ecology of Beauty," I plan to experiment with this by having students capture two images, one of 'nature' and one not of 'nature' (how else to categorize it?). The goal will be to complicate not only the categories of nature and non-nature, but also to think about how tiny-screen image capturing is an ecology in its own right: our devices are a part of how we see, frame, and interact with the 'the world' as a viewable landscape, a space always just waiting to be imaged. What will students take pictures of? How will they describe their taking of these pictures? Are we able to be phenomenological about the visibilities that we can hold in our hands as 'objects'?

In her talk Chow posed challenging questions about a pictorial fluidity and mobility, i.e. about the immanent recyclability of new media images. Chow suggested that we need to develop a new flexibility for thinking about how humans are constituted as subjects through these technologies that from one perspective look like no more than little surveillance machines that we carry around on our bodies as we traipse through a heavily-monitored, hyper-individuated world.

Air Force One, hijacked, over NYC?

2009-04-28T12:28:00.000-05:00

(Photograph by Dan Kohn, from the NY Times)

Yesterday people saw what looked like an utterly unique hijacking situation: Air Force One swooping low over New York City with military F-16 fighter jet escorts. Not only was 9/11 evoked, but its very singularity was challenged: the Event could be re-imagined, seen (and recorded) again, in 'real time'.

"Oh my god...that's not normal...that's a hijacking, I know it..."—so one Youtube movie-maker utters as she captures the banking jumbo jet as it disappears behind buildings. Yet apparently it is 'normal' in what the director Paul Greengrass explicitly calls the "post-9/11 world" (his film United 93 is part of this cultural matrix). The youtube movie maker was able to identify this event as a hijacking in the style of 9/11. Of course, the hijacking of the Presidential jet was itself already cinematized in Wolfgang Petersen's 1997 film Air Force One. How are such heavily and deeply mediated events able to spring up onto the bouncy surface of the really real? (A theory: hand-held cameras seem to help.) Is the 'normal' truly at stake when we know precisely how to categorize the abnormal—how to film it, photograph it, and talk about it?

Air Force One, hijacked, over NYC, in 2009: how much more overdetermined can symbolism get? It turns out that it was just a photo-op conducted by the Air Force: they needed new, flashy pictures of the Presidential jet over NYC. They just forgot to notify the public that there would be a jumbo jet flying at skyscraper level in NYC, again.

My musings here are not meant to discount people's real feelings of fear yesterday at the sight of the jets overhead. But we need to think seriously about what the literary critic David Simpson describes in his book on 9/11 as "the metaphysics of transit in all its varieties...." We do not yet know how to talk about airliners and fighter jets, especially when they invade the psycho-social space of the so-called 'normal'.

Attention, Focus

2009-04-23T12:01:00.000-05:00

I am starting to glimpse a constellation.

A recent Wall Street Journal article on Kindle e-book reading argues:

...an infinite bookstore at your fingertips is great news for book sales, and may be great news for the dissemination of knowledge, but not necessarily so great for that most finite of 21st-century resources: attention.

Can 'attention' really be measured in terms of finitude or infinitude? It seems to me rather that the more attention one gives, the more one has. At least this is what appears to happen when slow reading a poem in a classroom: the more attention one pays, the more one gets 'out of' (or into?) the text, and the more attention one will have for future literary encounters.

This week the New Yorker reports on the use of neuroenhancers, specifically in college and work settings. The article quotes one psychologist, Martha Farah, as saying: "...I’m a little concerned that we could be raising a generation of very focussed accountants.”

An excerpt from David Foster Wallace's last novel-in-progress "The Pale King" accounts for the inner-subjective labyrinths and deep focus of I.R.S. agent Lane Dean, Jr.:

He did another return; again the math squared and there were no itemizations on 32 and the printout’s numbers for W-2 and 1099 and Forms 2440 and 2441 appeared to square, and he filled out his codes for the middle tray’s 402 and signed his name and I.D. number that some part of him still refused to quite get memorized so he had to unclip his badge and check it each time and then stapled the 402 to the return and put the file in the top tier’s rightmost tray for 402s Out and refused to let himself count the number in the trays yet, and then unbidden came the thought that “boring” also meant something that drilled in and made a hole.

DFW's Lane Dean, Jr., amid countless numbered forms and tangential thoughts, challenges any easy oppositions between accountant and philosopher, attention and distraction.

Concerning attention, is the point to increase deep focus, or to accept certain distractions as precisely the material to focus on? Are the holes of consciousness there to be filled, or left empty? Perhaps it is the concept of emptiness itself that is the most scarce and 'finite' resource of the 21st-century. In that case, though, could one argue that the Kindle creates more empty space to contemplate by reducing the need for stacks of books? What is the relationship between new media reading technologies and empty space? And to call up Keats, in a roundabout way, what are the (im)material thresholds of "slow time"? This post is unspooling, which my spell-check function wants me to replace with "supercooling." Believe it or not, there is a future contemporary literature class forming out of this nebula.

To Be or Not To Be Kindled

2009-04-13T08:51:00.000-05:00

The email I received from Amazon.com this morning really tried to make me feel like I was missing out on something. As someone who "enjoys purchasing books from Amazon," they just thought I'd like to know that "there are now over 260,000 books, magazines, newspapers, and blogs"...this implied that said texts are available for the Amazon Kindle, which is always connected through 3G wireless so that one can download "anytime, anywhere." With objects like these, who needs imagination?

I am curious but hesitant about the Kindle. I have thought seriously about the potential advantages of these devices in the literature classroom. There would be almost no excuse for students not having their texts with them. Maybe reading would be fun for all. And look how easy it is to hold a Kindle:

Yet if you did not know what to look for, this image would be a cipher: is she gazing at a mystic tablet...or at her hands...or at a mirror (i.e. herself)? It is almost as if 'it' isn't there at all. Such minimalism certainly could uplift the spirits of college students who are used to schlepping around five-pound Norton anthologies. What would such a class feel like, in which everyone had the same slick little machine for reading? (Furthermore, could we get some of those couches and throw pillows for the classroom? Those unergonomic chairs are not helping the situation.)

The picture in my email was slightly more instructive, if also eerily vacant:

What bothers me about this image, though, is the white border around the device, not to mention the disembodied white hand; these make the Kindle look hermetically sealed in a world of its own, as if one can so easily achieve the uninterrupted time and empty space for reading that the cover page alone would evoke a sort of rapture. Amazon notes that the battery can last so long that one can "read for days without recharging." Could Kindles really guarantee a new era of learning, a promised land of literature students seduced into slow reading via fast connections? Practically speaking, does the energy required to build and power Kindles offset the energy required to produce (and transport) paper books? Is white the new (same old) green?

Marley & Me: What is it?

2009-04-02T09:41:00.000-05:00

When I went to Blockbuster yesterday afternoon, I had no intentions to write a post about Marley & Me. But this movie is such a curious oddity, in ways one might not expect from a film touted as "The Perfect Family Comedy!" (Mark Allen, CBS, DVD cover).

First of all, the movie is about writing and narrative form. Here are Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson in one scene, proofreading a piece of writing together:

I can (almost) imagine screening this moment in a classroom in order to model collaboration. Aniston and Wilson play married newspaper columnists. The film, intermittently narrated by Wilson in plucky voice-overs, follows their careers and the escapades of their dog Marley, who Wilson's character writes about in his columns. But as the movie unfolded, I was constantly uncertain whether I was watching a story about Wilson's character the writer, or whether I was watching what Wilson's character was watching in order to write stories. In other words, the film is so layered with embedded subplots and hovering meta-narratives that it begins to take shape as an intricate chiasmus. The movie jerks back and forth between narrative points-of-view, but it turns out that all these layers exist on the same plane, even as they appear to loop around continually, adding texture and turns. The movie, frankly, stretches and twists the brain by employing quite sophisticated plotting mechanisms. Toward the end, it turns out that we're back at the beginning; the movie has mostly been an elaborate analepsis, or flashback of sorts.

The movie also participates, albeit awkwardly, in the genre of the epic: Wilson and Aniston's characters are on a familiar journey toward that mythic place called The American Dream, yellow lab and Honda Odyssey minivan included. However, this is an epic landscape without gods or fate. In fact, Marley & Me forwards a radically secular sense of contemporary culture. Mentions of God and Christian theology are brief, sardonic, and during a vacation in Ireland (thus also exoticized). Near the end of the film, a young child speaks of Heaven, making this idea seem infantile. On the other hand, the film makes its audience intensely aware of the passing of time, and the passing of life—i.e., mortality. Marley & Me is about impermanence, enjoying things while they last, and writing about it all. And then making a movie about all these things. If this sounds like a tall order for an allegedly simple feel-good movie, it is. Furthermore, the movie is definitively not a comedy. It is a tragedy. But perhaps what makes the movie 'postmodern'—to use a potentially vapid term—is precisely its ability to conflate, confuse, and compact an incredible amount of narrative material in 115 minutes of something called entertainment.

Questions Concerning Technology

2009-03-17T20:31:00.000-05:00

What is the point of teaching students how to read books in the epoch of the Internet?

I am currently trying to make a case for a ‘new’ collection of theoretical readings—a book that will teach well and provide undergraduate students with a sense of confident mastery (albeit preliminary) over the slippery subject of Critical Theory. But what is the use of such a sheaf when most readings—or in some cases, summaries of such readings—are available on the screen, at the click of a mouse button, handily archived, and hyper-linked throughout? What can a book do, differently?

One can resort to the materiality of the paper-feel, or to the smell of a book. But textually speaking, what subtleties exist when reading a page? Does a page of Marx or Freud read differently in a book and on the screen of an Amazon Kindle? Will the Webpage soon displace the earlier notion of ‘page’ as piece of paper? Was Alexander Pope’s formulation of the critic an early premonition of the movement from literature to criticism to…the Internet?

How does one discuss this (hyper)textual matrix without sounding apocalyptic, nostalgic, or utopian? What is the work of literary theory in an age of technological reproducibility? Take the contemporary Japanese phenomenon of the ‘cell phone novel’—now is literature dying, or thriving? It is hard to say, but interesting to think about.

Art and Commerce: A Lesson in Faking

2009-03-13T10:50:00.000-05:00

A friend passed along a story about the artist JSG Boggs and his one-sided, hand-drawn dollars that he passes off as real money in stores…only to then sell the receipt, change, and whatever goods he bought as the ‘art’. This would seem to function as an interesting extrapolation of a claim by the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas: “The phenomenology of images insists on their transparency” (“Reality and its Shadow”). For Boggs, the assumed transparency of a dollar bill’s appearance allows (fake) currency to move simultaneously into dual phenomenological realms of commerce and art: both realms become bracketed and open to question. After the performative transaction, a true aesthete can buy the ‘work’ of art: commodity, change, and a receipt. Meanwhile, the objet d’art circulates effectively as a dollar—until, one supposes, it actually gets counted by a machine at the bank. (In which case, is a Boggs Bill thrown away? Destroyed? Sold on eBay?) Of course, this double move also threatens to implode an economic system on which it depends. Or does it? Perhaps, instead, Boggs has indicated a clever way out of our current recession.

This case suggests how one could use plagiarism productively in the literature classroom. I recently discussed a rogue assignment with one of my colleagues at UC Davis that would proceed as such: students, working in collaborative groups, would acquire ‘finished’ papers online—and then remix sections, rephrase sentences, and bolster (or strip) arguments until what one ends up with is a single essay that could pass through an online ‘paper finder’ detective. In other words, through technologies of online plagiarism and by recourse to pastiche and collaboration, a polyvalent lesson emerges: we challenge the regime of singular authorship, we practice critical engagement with online media forms, and we encounter the Internet as a textual feedback loop rather than as a copout, a (false) compositional authority, or an outlet shopping mall. Again, Levinas: “Art then lets go of the prey for the shadow.”

On Crashing: An Inquiry of Fragments

2009-02-17T10:48:00.000-06:00

We chose this plane because we didn’t know that
It would become the subject

Of a poem. To us poetry is ludicrous,
As if telling a hawk he has talons.

—Mark Yakich, “Last Flight out of a State of Mind”

A recent article from the Times reports that the crash of Continental Flight 3407 near Buffalo, New York was possibly caused (in part) by "specifically, large cool droplets of water that freeze on contact with an airplane." I am no scientist, but I wonder about the specificity of the terms "large" and "cool" in relation to matters that would seem to require precision (i.e., aeronautics). Now the debate seems be turning from matters of ice to matters of the autopilot: if it isn't nature, it's the robots that kill us. (But what happens when climate and machines collude?)

A similar problem can be considered in further reporting on the circumstances around US Airways Flight 1549's emergency landing in the Hudson River. It turns out that the plane went through a flock of Canada Geese:

But researchers are still trying to determine if they were migratory geese from Canada, or resident birds from the New York area. Those that migrate typically weigh from 6 pounds to nearly 11 pounds, the safety board said, but nonmigrating geese are fatter and “can exceed published records.” Either kind is too much for the engines to handle, however.

It also turns out that the engines of the Airbus A320 are required only to be able to "choke down" (is that a technical phrase?) birds of up to four pounds. Yet at stake in this investigation is not why this plane's engines seem built drastically below levels of reality (the Airbus A320 has not been grounded; there are several hundred taking off and landing as I write this), but whether the birds in question were locals or tourists, corpulent or svelte. Yet still, the masses in question are so disproportionately greater than the certification standards of 1996. Have Canada Geese really gotten that much larger in recent years? Should we blame the chubby geese on urban sprawl, or on migration patterns being affected by global warming? Or is this a postmodern Icarus myth, a cautionary tale about underestimating a flying machine's "choke down" levels? I find myself utterly flummoxed concerning the competing values of technical science and everyday mythology in such reporting.

There is an aesthetic history to trace here. Of course these thematics go at least as far back as Icarus, but for our purposes here, let us consider two 20th-century examples from U.S. literature: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon (the original, non-authorized edition of 1941), and Michael Crichton's Airframe (1996).

Fitzgerald's unfinished novel begins with a late night, transcontinental flight that is grounded by thunderstorms in Tennessee; Fitzgerald had sketched out an ending that would have involved a midnight plane crash into snowy mountains, a month after which a group of children on a hike in the vicinity find the wreckage and pillage the plane's contents, thus learning about the main characters in a grizzly sort of ramshackle anthropology of the present. The narrative is framed by the tremulous status of human flight.

Crichton's novel opens with a scene eerily similar to the descriptions we are being given about Flight 3407's last moments of flight: "...the plane seemed to shudder, the nose of the plane turning down. Suddenly everything titled at a crazy angle. ... The plane went into another steep dive" (4-5). Compare a passage from the Times article today: "Then the airplane nose pitched up, then down, as the airplane rolled to one side. It was far too close to the ground already for the crew to regain control."

Incidentally, Crichton's novel refers to planes again and again as "birds." This is not at all an uncommon trope, but it is worth reflecting on given our current preoccupation with "bird strikes." The bird, in other words, is both a figurative model for human flight, and the animal that can endanger human flight. In my dissertation I call this aesthetic trend "bird citing," for the ways in which birds and planes are symbolically juxtaposed and occasionally literally collide into one another around the space of airports. Birds are sometimes cited as inspirations, and other times cited as threats.

A complexly layered instance of bird citing can be seen in a public art sculpture at Chicago's Midway Airport. Ralph Helmick's installation "Rara Avis" is a diaphanous bird comprised of 2500 tiny metal airplanes. Here is the City of Chicago's Public Art Program description of the piece:

Suspended sculpture visible from center of ticketing hall and mezzanine level...an epic suspended sculpture poetically linking natural and manmade aviation. Comprised of thousands of precisely suspended pewter elements, the artwork employs three-dimensional Pointillism wherein numerous small sculptures compose a larger, composite form. From a distance, the sculpture is perceived as a monumental image of a cardinal, Illinois’ state bird. Upon closer examination, a perceptual shift occurs and the large avian form reveals itself to be composed of over 2500 small renderings of aircraft. Over 50 different aircraft are represented, ranging from Leonardo da Vinci-inspired designs and 19th century balloons to classic passenger airliners and 21st century spacecraft.

In a flip of scales, this bird is apparently able to "choke down" thousands of flying vessels, from across historical moments, and remain a contemplative, airborne register for human flight.

The links between "nature" and "manmade aviation" are made in the air, and undone on crashing. Or perhaps this formulation gets it all wrong: what if there were never any links to be made or undone in the first place? What if 'man' could never be closer to, or farther from, 'nature'? How might we think of flight differently, then? Might we be able to build a better vocabulary for talking about things like air flow, ice, and birds—not to mention, ourselves?

"A New Epoch of Piracy"

2009-02-12T12:21:00.000-06:00

The recent "Pirates of the Caribbean" films provided much fodder for discussing the subject of 'piracy' in the classroom. What does it mean to 'copy', 'cut', and 'paste'? (Are these mere aesthetic metaphors, or real acts of violence/creativity?) How does one come up with 'original' ideas out of a common language? Can an iPod distinguish between legally and illegally downloaded tunes? (Can the ear?) Personal computers and similar technologies allow networked citizens to hold a double status as everyday pirates. A modern mise en abyme: someone burning pirated DVDs of "Pirates of the Caribbean."

Today we read in the Times:

More than 100 ships have been attacked in Somalia’s pirate-infested seas in the past year, but no hijacking has attracted as much attention as this one, in large part because the freighter was loaded with arms, including tanks. It stirred fears of a new epoch of piracy and precipitated an unprecedented naval response. Warships from China, India, Italy, Russia, France, the United States, Denmark, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Greece, Turkey, Britain and Germany have all since joined the antipiracy campaign.

Meanwhile, a history class at George Mason University created a brilliant collaborative hoax called "The Last American Pirate." Part of their assignment was to compose a fictitious Wikipedia entry that would make it past the surveillance of the notoriously scrupulous (if also occasionally arbitrary) Wikipedia editors. (It passed, for a while—but now is prefaced by a meta-critical disclaimer of sorts.)

I would like to design a course in which we would confront the myriad specters of piracy that haunt the discipline of English—such as plagiarism, pastiche, and dissemination, to name a few. Are writers always pirates? Or, is writing automatically on the side of "the antipiracy campaign"? Either way, English classrooms would seem to be, unavoidably, "pirate-infested seas" indeed.

Airport Art

2009-02-07T15:33:00.000-06:00

This post reflects on a Wall Street Journal article about the controversial public art installation (“Mustang,” by Louis Jiménez) located at the gateway of the Denver International Airport. I wish to elaborate briefly on a few specific passages from the article:

"It looks like it's possessed," says Denver resident Samantha Horoschak. "I have a huge fear of flying anyway, and to be greeted at the airport by a demon horse—it's not a soothing experience."

Who said that flying should be a “soothing experience”? Human beings in flight are hardly stable subjects. Perhaps the horse conjures all too uncannily the contemporary, possessive attitude toward airborne mobility—what the Greeks might have simply called hubris.

Now a local developer, Rachel Hultin, has launched a campaign to get the wild horse moved so it isn't the first thing visitors to Denver see. In the past month, Ms. Hultin has signed up about 7,600 supporters on her Facebook page, Bye Bye Blue Mustang. This week she dropped off 200 protest haiku at the mayor's office. (Sample verse: Because of this thing / People think they are in hell / Instead of Denver.)

First, what should be the first thing that visitors to Denver “see”? How are airports supposed to function as infinitely inviting gateways, when we know that their everyday operations are far more mundane—not to mention rife with intimations of mortality? Second, what do haiku have to do with A) protest, and B) Western American art? (Come to think of it, I've seen the movie, and it stars Tom Cruise.) How is it that this particular instance of airport art has provoked a completely unrelated literary genre as a form of response?

"When they unwrapped it, I was just horrified," says Dena McClung, who watched from the airport tower, where she worked as an air-traffic controller until her recent retirement. "It makes me feel like I'm looking at something out of a science-fiction movie."

Wait, let me get this straight: An air traffic controller sees a horse and thinks of “science-fiction.” Meanwhile, sleek metal tubes thunder into the sky all around...but nothing ‘science fiction’ to notice there. The animal as art-object becomes a fictive semaphore of horror; at the same time, the scientific machinations of human beings slide out of focus, and turn into natural arcs on the horizon of consciousness. On the approach to the terminal, an equine sculpture evokes cinema—airport screening is a given.

"It's disturbing," says Nancy Harris, a Denver painter. "As an artist myself, I totally respect the artist's vision. But I don't think it's representative of the Denver community."

This is a sneaky assertion, with grave implications: Art (here represented by a painter, a metonymy for the art form par excellence) is first and foremost about representation. The more true to life the “representative” force of the artwork, the less we have to pay attention to the actual re-presentation of humans (and all the politics involved therein) from place to place, consolidated in and facilitated by airports. An odd proposition: Soothing art as a supplement to airport banality.

Finally, a curious turn:

Resigned to looking at it for at least the next few years, Ms. Hultin, the leader of the anti-Mustang campaign, now plans to launch a public-education effort to demystify the sculpture. … Her goal: Instead of being scared, "when people see it, they'll be like, 'Oh, that's interesting,'" she says.

Is ‘demystification’ a product, or a process? Demystification is never something to be achieved once and for all; rather, it is an ongoing, critical comportment of sorts. To suppose that it is ‘art’ that requires demystification is to get the arrangement entirely wrong: art exists precisely on the seam between reality and mystery. Sadly, it seems that for Ms. Hultin, being “scared” could never be “interesting.” At the intersection of the Denver airport and public art, one may glimpse the threshold of the Sublime.

Emergency/Poetics

2009-02-05T10:58:00.000-06:00

There is an interesting way in which emergency recordings can tune people in to ambient poetics. Consider, for instance, one comment in the Times article concerning the air traffic control tapes from US Airways Flight 1549's water landing in the Hudson River last month:

For a recording with so many long dead spaces, the suspense is oddly gripping. Just reading the transcript doesn’t capture the tension surrounding “we’re gonna be in the Hudson” and “radar contact is lost”.

That was one cool pilot.

This description of the recording evokes synaesthesia: the "long dead space" is in fact no more and no less than silence; the "suspense" that 'grips' the listener is felt in a bodily way; the visuality of "reading" is both called attention to by the quotation marks and yet put under erasure by the "just"; finally, the comment is temperature-controlled by the "cool pilot." Many senses are fused together in this heavily mediated recording of a feeling of a recording...a recording that, finally, is meant at some level to communicate an actually felt experience in a 'real time' of the past.

Writing lesson: While "just reading" may be insufficient for feeling the liveliness of language, perhaps writing—which necessarily rereads—is a way to "capture the tension" that always surrounds communication.

Web Elements, Imagery, Reservations

2009-02-01T12:00:00.000-06:00

Last week I guest-taught an introductory literature class at Loyola University in New Orleans. The students were extremely adept at seizing on and describing imagery in Louise Erdrich's story "The Red Convertible," and I found myself thinking about ways that one might discuss the formal aspects of imagery in terms of Web elements. In other words, how might we understand the work of narrative imagery through familiar online media forms?

We might speculate, for instance, that narratives with stuttered temporal distributions of imagery function the manner of hyper-links, spinning the reader off into a multiplex of tangential story lines while still ostensibly comprising a single narrative. I could imagine bringing up a completely arbitrary NY Times article on the big screen in a classroom, and then attempting as a group to both read the self-contained story and follow links outward in order to discover the thresholds of narrative coherence in a new media landscape. Then we could turn to a paragraph from "The Red Convertible" and follow geographic and cultural 'links' in a similar fashion, perhaps even recreating the annotated road-trip on Google Maps. Arriving at the prolonged description of the photograph of Lyman and Henry in the story, we might try to understand literary ekphrasis as operating similarly to Subaru's slow, painterly detail shots of their Forester. How green is the online Subaru Forester, and how red (or well read) is the Olds convertible of the story? What reservations might we detect around the imagery of automobiles?

Why read literary imagery alongside Web elements? Four tentative reasons: 1) to read literature through familiar new media forms, 2) to question the very "newness" of new media, 3) to foreground the mediation of narrative devices, and 4) to discuss how Internet 'pages' can be effectively analyzed as 'texts'. This final point is crucial for any class that engages the visual culture of websites. I'm thankful for the excellent students at Loyola for prompting me to think down these paths.

Apparently, Other Spaces Still Exist

2009-01-09T16:26:00.000-06:00

I would like to write a longer post on this subject, but as I am currently on fellowship and working to finish my dissertation in the next couple months, I think that two brief quotations will have to suffice for now:

"Mr. Mody of the maritime bureau in London said there were currently 15 vessels being held by pirates off the coast of Somalia, involving 290 crew members." —NY Times, Pirates Free Tanker After Ransom

"The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates." —Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces

A Tall Order: Poetry Lesson for New Media Critique in a Composition Class

2009-01-08T17:34:00.000-06:00

My concern in this post is to think about digital media as a way to mediate (if counter-intuitively) between the separate realms of literature and composition, a disciplinary divide that seems to me both rarefied as well as conceptually unhelpful. Online media forms offer both a new genre for creative (and, of course, consumer) expression, as well as an imperative for ever-more streamlined (if also endlessly citational) expository prose. Thus, something like literary analysis lends itself to the parsing of this media form, in both prose content matters and in spatio-aesthetic design. In other words, by adopting the methods and decelerated temporality of literary analysis, we might effectively gauge the formal dimensions of the relatively ‘new’ ways of writing extant online. To respond to the call that we need to teach students to critically read websites and other interactive objects of visual/mass culture, I want to suggest that our pedagogical material is nearer to hand than we might think. In short, and to put it rather provocatively, there is nothing like a poem to help one learn how to critically read websites. Poetry cannot help but deploy multimedia forms (think of how synaesthesia works) and rely on non-linear textual space (conjure a simple line or stanza break).

I would like to propose that self-aware formalist poetry reading might be geared toward consciously decelerated new media critique. Consider Langston Hughes’s “Theme for English B,” a literary text that is often strategically slid into the pages of composition anthologies. What is the function of a poem in a course on expository prose? How might this poem in fact offer ways to critically engage online media? How might a poetry lesson cause us to reflect on reading in the age of the Internet? Through a few preliminary remarks on the opening lines of this well-known poem, I hope to offer a few tentative—if also bold—answers to these questions.

Reading this poem with the Internet in mind, we might say that Hughes interrupts himself almost immediately with a ‘pop-up’ box of sorts:

The instructor said,

Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you—
Then, it will be true.

I wonder if it’s that simple?

In these lines, Hughes enacts the very sort of textual polysemy that Roland Barthes theorizes in his essay “From Work to Text.” Writing is always many writings, here reflected in a self-reflexive joke of sorts. In an understatedly postmodern turn, Hughes turns a writing prompt into the object of composition. One can see why this poem teaches particularly well in beginning composition courses, where the primary hurdle of writing seems to be the abysmal gap between life and reflection, or subject and object. How does one “just write” when there is an aporia between the subject position of the beginning writer and this reified object out there called Writing (or Barthes’s “Work”)? Hughes leaps over this hurdle conversationally, with a nod toward his instructor. And Hughes’s uses of enjambment and empty space to these ends seems to me to be useful in terms of questioning how we navigate the banally open Google Search page:

Here I would want to stress how “to Google” has become a verb both inviting and daunting, and how “to write” harbors a similarly vexed imperative in terms of the assumed epistemological position of the subject. For the Googler as well as for the writer, the horizon of knowledge must appear at once empty and potentially full beyond comprehension. One only has to “Start,” in the parlance of Microsoft.

Google by numbers

2008-12-13T11:09:00.000-06:00

I've noticed an interesting trend lately, whereby a writer makes an expository point by way of an offhand reference to the sheer numeric quantities of a Google search.

For instance: Patricia Marx, in a recent article on sale shopping in the poor economy, notes: "If you type 'discount' and 'New York' into Google, you will be presented with 57,944 local business results."

Second case: In the Modern Language Association's 2008 issue of Profession, Geoffrey Galt Harpham, in a provocative article about teaching Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to American soldiers, observes: "Modernity generates hearts of darkness with an efficiency, and on a scale, that could only be called modern. Google 'Heart of Darkness' and 'Joseph Conrad' and you get fewer than 400,000 entries; leave off Conrad so that you are looking not for a text but a concept, and you get nearly 2,000,000" (75).

I, too, have resorted to a Google search in my writing. In a piece I am currently working on concerning Wallace Stevens's widely anthologized poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," I have been interested in the digital image saturation of blackbird citing in Google Images (1,120,000 hits) compared with Stevens's enigmatic yet economically sparse allusions to this form of avian imagery.

The truth, however, is that practically every Google search yields impressive results in terms of pure 'hits'. What do we learn from Google by numbers? Through Google do we glimpse the sublime aura of the Information Age? Or, seen differently, might Google always be reasserting the inescapability of finitude, even if it lies at the end of a million web pages?

Two TV Shows, Two Notes

2008-12-01T16:25:00.000-06:00

A recent New Yorker review of two television shows ("Science Projects") raises two points worth lingering on. This post is perhaps a little strange because I have nothing to say about the actual shows in question, "Fringe" and "The Mentalist." Yet I would like to insist that the blog post is an effective venue for spurs, for the tangential literary critical points that can shoot off a main subject—points that therefore often go undiscussed.

Concerning "Fringe," Kalefa Sanneh describes the "mad scientist" of the show as such: "He is a godless mystic, convinced that every freak phenomenon has a materialist explanation, that there are no coincidences." This sentence is perplexing on several accounts. A "godless mystic" is fairly coherent; we might understand this character as a secular believer in the powers of palpable 'spirit' or traceable energy fields. In a word, this person might be a Hegel of the present moment. But "every freak phenomenon has a materialist explanation"—does Sanneh mean material explanation? Materialism would not exactly leave much room for mysticism; to see the world in terms of material processes would be to suspend the leap to mystical perception—rather, any materialist wonder would be grounded in the realm of the physical (finite but unbounded, as we understand the surface of a sphere). Furthermore, materialism certainly allows for coincidences. The world is wide; two things can coincide without necessarily being causally connected. Thus, I don't see how the godless mystic's materialism refuses coincidental phenomena. The freak in this sentence is the referential vacuity by which the "mad scientist" is (un)known.

Second note: In Sanneh's discussion of "The Mentalist," one of the main characters is defined in terms of her brusque castigations: "At the Palm Springs airport, she learns that a colleague needs to stop by the baggage carrousel, and she is not amused: “You checked luggage? What are you, on vacation?”" This scene description intrigues me for its reliance on what I elsewhere call "the poetics of no-man's land," or the ambiance of the airport baggage claim that becomes a spatial cipher for distinct personae, allowing travelers a reading of their fates in piles of bags. The baggage claim consolidates a number of social tropes, all situated in the indefinite time of waiting for one's belongings, which, as we know, may not arrive in the present moment. (The dialectic of the traveler and baggage handler is far more elliptical than that of Hegel's Master and Slave.) Here, the iconic and aloof vacationer is dropped out-of-context into what Sanneh calls a "quasi-scientific investigative drama." How does the airport come to function as a fortune teller? Recall the opening credit scenes of Mike Nichols's The Graduate: the entire film is anticipated in LAX by a mystical cut from Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin Braddock to the baggage carousel. Some coincidences are understood to be plainly material and proleptically visionary, at once.

Mitt Romney and Automobility

2008-11-20T07:40:00.000-06:00

In a recent op-ed in the New York Times Mitt Romney argues that the only way for the U.S. automotive industry to succeed is to “let Detroit go Bankrupt.” At one point, Romney quips, “I love cars, American cars.” This facile claim strikes me as both sympathetically banal as well as a blunt expression of exactly what Karl Marx would have described as the “fetishism” of commodities: as if cars have their own social life, as if cars care whether or not Mitt Romney “loves” them. It is noteworthy that Romney does not say that he loves the people who design or build cars; he loves the cars themselves. (This is mindful of John McCain’s remark in the final Presidential debate to the effect of “Americans are the best workers in the world!” The people known as “Americans” are, in this schema, recognizable by their labor before their humanity or other characteristics—work takes on a special quality, somehow constitutive in its own right.)

Romney’s declaration of auto-mobile-love also completely ignores a much more critical reality: cars are simply not a sustainable means (neither sociologically nor ecologically) for humans to transport themselves around this planet. Certainly, I understand that humans are very attached to cars in current practices of everyday life—and I also accept that many people do have the capacity to love the cars in which they spend countless hours commuting, running errands, or joy riding. However, we have to become aware of the reality that “automobility”—a term that means both self-directed mobility as well as dependence on external technologies for motion—is a phenomenon that is dated, and likely nearing its end. Cars cut up the world in ways that delimit perspective and cultivate solipsism, even while they seem to promise precisely the opposite. (Nabokov captures this brilliantly in his masterpiece Lolita.) Automobility, or “the entire gamut of practices that foster car culture,” relies on a host of twentieth-century conditions that are now exhausted and outdated. We need to get over the fetishism of cars and work to rigorously imagine new possibilities for how humans might inhabit and move around the planet. I am not sure what these new possibilities for mobility might be—indeed, they reside in the Derridean realm of a “future-to-come.” Yet this need not be a utopia; it might simply be a more consciously—and conscientiously—integrated network of transportation routes and rituals. The opening to this future exists. But humans have to be open to this possible future. Loving cars is not an open sentiment, as much as it may be deployed as such.

Annie Proulx's "The Hellhole": A New Media Approach

2008-11-09T19:32:00.001-06:00

In thinking about how to teach fiction through an integrated new media approach, I wish to explore a theory for "digital mapping." I am using the term "digital mapping" in a geographic sense as well as in a more metaphoric, networked sense.

Annie Proulx's story "The Hellhole" (from her collection Bad Dirt, 2004) considers rugged landscape as both a fictive and a geologic terrain. In the spirit of Hawthorne, Proulx concocts a magically dark tale about the metaphysical niceties of public space and the everyday ethics of hunting. The main character is Creel Zmundzinski, a Fish and Game warden in Elk Tooth, Wyoming. Creel discovers a certain thermal feature near a turnout that will swallow poachers whole, if he catches them in the act of brutal animal slaughter and then leads them to the sinkhole. But when this morally charged topography becomes overused, its secret is unknowingly paved over by the Forest Service.

Where is this mythical space, and how might it align with a real place? Google Maps to the rescue. There appears to be no actual town called "Elk Tooth"— however, the corresponding Google search culls hits for several websites where one can purchase "elk ivory jewelry." As one site informs its readers/consumers: "The Jensen Family's strong belief in western values led us to exclusively offer our Elk Ivory Jewelry. Elk teeth may appear to be teeth, but are actually the remains of prehistoric tusk, which is ivory." Two Google clicks from the fictitious Elk Tooth, and one finds oneself in an ambiguous (yet real) thicket of rhetoric concerning "western values," prehistory, and the commodification of animal parts in a global (and virtual) marketplace. It is worth noting that in Proulx's story, Creel's drinking buddy and Forest Service pal is named "Plato Bucklew." How did we get from Plato's cave to Elk Tooth, Wyoming? Western values, indeed.

This is one mere path across the digitally mappable contours of Proulx's story "The Hellhole." One can imagine an entire class structured around small group work in which students map the narrative using online materials and then present their findings in multimedia essays at the end of class. For instance, one group of students might explore the ecology of Wyoming's thermal features and provide images to supplement the textual descriptions of a steaming, burbling earth. This online activity, though, should not be thought of as an end in and of itself, but always as a way to analyze how associative links are made in prose and on the internet, and where these two medial networks intersect, overlap, clash, or diverge entirely. What makes a story a text? What can a text make of the internet?

Metalepsis and the cultural logic of spies

2008-09-30T09:01:00.000-05:00

"Faith in spies is mystical, fuelled by fantasy and halfway to religion. They're a protected species in our national psychology." —John Le Carré, "The Madness of Spies"

In this post I discuss the rhetorical term 'metalepsis' as it appears in William Gibson's recent novel Spook Country. Early in the narrative when one of the characters finishes a call on a cell phone, "She...clamshelled her phone" (4). Richard Lanham defines metalepsis as a "Present effect attributed to a remote cause," and also paraphrases Quintilian by describing metalepsis "the transition from one trope to another...a kind of compressed chain of metaphorical reasoning" (Handbook of Rhetorical Terms, 99). This word "clamshelled" functions as a metalepsis: the metonymic action of closing a flip-phone (an action standing in for the object) is described by way of not only a clam (which would be an outright metaphor), but specifically by way of the hinging of a clam's shell as it opens or closes. So an active part of the creature is used to describe the shape of the phone; it is a metonymy within a metonymy, the image of an organic action lodged within a technological object's hinge function.

An interesting pairing in an introductory literature course would be to read Gibson's novel juxtaposed with a screening of the Coen brothers' latest film, Burn After Reading. Like Gibson's novel, in this film the intrigue of spying pales in comparison to the everyday personal adventures offered up by Home Depot, "Hard Bodies" workout centers, and iPods. The literature class might trace how metalepsis functions as a logic of informational coding in the spy narrative: where metalepsis occurs, the form becomes the content and the reader becomes the spook. But as Gibson and the Coen brothers both wonder, what happens when the code does not conceal a national secret? What would it mean to make a metalepsis of nothing?

From Bourdin and Nietzsche to the genre of aphorisms

2008-09-09T09:16:00.000-05:00

My latest letter to The New Yorker was published and can be seen here. It is in reference to an article on Frédéric Bourdin, the French con-man who pretends to be various children. In this letter I juxtapose Bourdin's evocation of Nietzsche's well-known aphorism about fighting monsters with another of Nietzsche's aphorisms on what maturity consists of: becoming seriously childlike, again. The fine point of this query sharpens depending on the amount of irony that one detects in Nietzsche. The most effective aphorisms involve ironic slippage; in this case, it is not clear whether maturity is something to be 'achieved' in an proactive sense, or whether it is no more (and no less) than a misperceived ascent that is, in fact, more of an inescapable return.

As I mentioned a few months ago, I would like to design a literature course on the aphorism: how this old form becomes all the more poignant—or elusive, I'm not sure—in the concentrated text-spaces of online reading. I can imagine a syllabus based around Heraclitus, William Blake, Nietzsche, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, and Lydia Davis—just to name a few of the writers who experiment in this form. We might trace a line from pre-Socratic philosophy to Modernist poetry, if only to find ourselves in postmodern currents of fiction that flow like a Heraclitean river, only different. It occurs to me, too, that successful 'letters to the editor' occasionally read like aphorisms; this could be a strategy, then, for teaching a certain kind of "professional writing," as well.

(I was going to change the title of this post to "...the genre of the aphorism"—but then I wondered: is there something about aphorisms that spurs multiplicities? This could be part of the critical import of aphorisms: that they demand contexts of multiple readings and pluralities of meaning. Out of condensed space, aphorisms generate more thinking and writing. This reminds me of Barthes's theory of the Text as compared to the Work. This could be a line of analysis in a course on aphorisms.)

Virtual problems

2008-08-13T11:12:00.000-05:00

Sue Halpern’s article on “Virtual Iraq” (May 19, 2008) provided a curious look at how new media forms are being employed for P.T.S.D. therapy. One wonders, though, about the political implications of technologies that translate the real violence of warfare into an abstracted “game” of sorts. It is obviously important to help veterans with P.T.S.D. recover from their experiences and to be able to cope with everyday life; yet what happens, in the long term, when the wounds of war can be so effectively and efficiently treated by immersion in a virtual realm? It sounds eerily like a rationale for the continuation of an unwinnable war. Rather than address the root causes of today’s combat-inflicted P.T.S.D.—namely, chaotic battle conditions in which “civilians” and “insurgents” are easily mistaken, and there is no clear sense of what a “mission accomplished” would ever look like—Virtual Iraq threatens to normalize (and even trivialize) the consequences of a terribly chosen war. In short, Virtual Reality therapy does not simply make reality easier to bear; it also makes certain realities—such as preemptive war and excessive oil consumption—merely virtual problems.

The limits of the spectacle

2008-08-13T11:09:00.000-05:00

Anthony Lane, in his June 25, 2007 review of “A Mighty Heart,” writes “Only once does Mariane [Pearl] crack. Informed of her husband’s death and of its savage circumstances, she goes to her room, crouches over, and keens.” This is a significant misreading of that moment in the film. In fact, Angelina Jolie’s Mariane screams over her husband’s death before she learns the specifics of his execution. Afterward, when Mariane is told about the video of the beheading, she simply insists that she never wants to see it. This sequencing is key to the film, which, in its own vexed way, critiques spectacular uses of violence in a global-technological age: the fact that killings, missile strikes, and torture can be recorded and screened does not make their realities any easier to navigate. The paradox emerges at the point where we are supposed to feel, through Jolie’s cinematic performance of Mariane, that the felt consequences of violence are always beyond the limits of the spectacle.

Stay sharp, Obama!

2008-08-13T11:04:00.000-05:00

In Larissa MacFarquhar’s profile on Barack Obama (“The Conciliator” May 7, 2007), the presidential candidate is reported as saying: “There are universal values I will fight for. I think there may have been a time and a place in which genital mutilation was culturally appropriate, but those times are over. I’m not somebody who believes that our foreign policy has to be driven by moral relativism. What I do believe is that we have to apply judgment and a sense of proportion to how change happens in any society—to promote our ideals and our values with some sense of humility.” These sentences undermine one another in troubling ways. First, “universal values” would necessarily travel across time and space; that’s what would make them universal. To accept genital mutilation as a historical and cultural phenomenon, then, would be to critique the very logic of “universal values.” “Moral relativism” has become a cliché often deployed by the right to lambast precisely the “humility” which Obama later advocates. The problem here is that even though moral relativism is a fraught term itself (morality and relativity are two utterly distinct ways of understanding the world), Obama essentially accepts this contradictory stance in the previous two sentences: he claims to support universal values, but also concedes that time and place make such values culturally acceptable—or not. While I deeply respect and agree with Obama’s pleas for “humility,” “proportion,” and an understanding of societal “change,” I am nervous that his invocations of “universal values,” “ideals,” “judgment,” and the scarecrow of “moral relativism” threaten to compromise his status of a fresh political persona; this language sounds eerily similar to the confused, lofty, and inapplicable rhetoric that we have become all too familiar with over the past eight years.

On language and the philosophy of mind

2008-08-13T10:58:00.000-05:00

I was struck by the way that Larissa MacFarquhar finesses a delicate strategy in her piece on Pat and Paul Churchland (“Two Heads” Feb. 12, 2007). Her article thoroughly explains how these two philosophers of mind are working to complicate (and ultimately do away with) the linkages between language and thought; in other words, MacFarquhar effectively uses language to describe how we might begin to imagine a world without language. The Churchlands’ wish to get beyond language is rather puzzling, especially given their own adoption of more sophisticated and nuanced language in their day-to-day lives. Collaborative writing practices also seem to reflect the sort of brain-sharing that interests the Churchlands: one often reads accounts of collaboration in which co-authors finish each other’s sentences or anticipate one another’s thoughts. For that matter, aren’t all serious engagements with what we call ‘literature’ instances of ‘brain joining’, however mediated or incomplete? In fact, isn’t this precisely the reason why The New Yorker devotes impressive (and, frankly, expensive) amounts of empty space to the margins of its poetry selections? These spaces make room for readers to enact a brush against another brain, to inhabit the perceptual processes of another human. One can accept language as a “minor phenomenon,” and yet still spend a lifetime expanding one’s mind with words.

Green Values

2008-08-12T19:26:00.000-05:00

Elizabeth Kolbert’s article on Amory Lovins (“Mr. Green” Jan. 22, 2007) exposes a vexing problem at the core of contemporary environmentalism. Lovins offers example after example of ecologically savvy solutions, by shrewdly linking energy conservation with the charms of free-market economics. Then, towards the end of the article, Lovins unconvincingly invokes the phrases ‘moral’, ‘spiritual’, and ‘higher purpose’ in order to explain why people will not simply consume more resources once energy can be produced and consumed more efficiently: “Every faith tradition that I know decries materialism.” Lovins then quotes the first two lines of Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard”: “After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends.” Importantly, though, Stevens is playing off of Nietzsche’s insistence that the ‘no’s of the world are precisely spiritual and theological in nature: so-called ‘higher purpose’ is often an excuse for not taking lower, earthly matters more seriously. Thus, to be truly environmental, humans must say ‘yes’ to the material world—in all its complexity—before enduring positive changes can be enacted. Kolbert’s article shows that as long as environmentalists defer to metaphysical justifications for human behavior, true ecological awareness will be endlessly deferred.

Post-secularism in the flesh

2008-08-12T19:21:00.000-05:00

Rebecca Mead’s astute review “Proud Flesh” (Nov. 13, 2006) raises complex philosophical questions related to this contemporary medical niche. Cosmetic surgery indeed serves quasi-religious functions, but it seems not so concerned with “the notion of human perfectibility” as much as with the idea of infinite deferral: there will always be another possible surgery, a next procedure to undergo. In this way, the cult of cosmetic surgery is a decisively post-secular phenomenon. The cultural trend appears to rely on faith, and yet there is no transcendent object of worship; even the physical body, as Mead aptly notes, is emptied of any final value. What one desires is an experience of endless permutation—never any calculable progress. If we translate this attitude over to the political realm, we can begin to comprehend the comportment of individuals who call for revolutionary change, but, to echo St. Augustine, “not just yet!”

Self-help without the self

2008-08-12T19:11:00.000-05:00

Nick Paumgarten’s fascinating article on Robert Greene (“Fresh Prince” Nov. 11, 2006) seems to forward an implicit critique of the self-help craze. What one gains in power, money, success, and fame is often at the expense of one’s actual ‘self’. Thus Greene’s persona slips in and out of focus throughout the article, never fully materializing as a human being to whom readers might in fact relate. Who is Robert Greene? For some, he is a mystic scribe; for others, a savvy business consultant; for others still, he is nothing less than a god. This brings to mind Marx’s observation in Capital: “A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (Capital, Vol. One, Sect. 4). Robert Greene is first and foremost a commodity: he is consumed in an already intact web of social relations and abstracted value. There are no ‘selves’ to help here; the consistent face of capital does not require personality.

String Theory: Postmodern, or Romantic?

2008-08-12T19:06:00.000-05:00

Jim Holt’s compelling article on string theory (Oct. 2, 2006) turns on a complicated question: “Is physics, then, going postmodern?” Holt follows up this query by invoking John Keats’s 1819 poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” which ends with the tautological puzzle, “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Importantly, though, Keats was not a “postmodern” poet; he was a Romantic. Strictly speaking, postmodernism has very little serious interest in considerations of objective beauty or unification. One wonders if Holt is in fact trying to suggest that physics, via string theory, is going Romantic in its expansively enumerated attempts to articulate a final, unifying theory. If so, Holt might have illuminated the current state of string theory with the words of another Romantic poet, Byron: “What is the end of fame? ‘t is but to fill / A certain portion of uncertain paper” (Don Juan: Canto the First, lines 1736-1737).