There’s a reality TV show in this somewhere.  As if the trend wasn’t frightening enough.

Textual Detritus is a running series of notes focused on my reading list for exams related to my PhD studies.  These are not reviews so I will refrain from explaining plot lines.  These posts also contain any number of spoilers for the books in question though I’ll try to keep them hidden behind a cut.  Simply, the idea here is to get some of my immediate thoughts down in a coherent manner for later use or discussion.  As such, I make no claim about the level of thought, coherence, or grammar to any of these posts.

Due to a cold I’ve been fighting for the last week, I’m playing a horrible game of catch-up (one that I’m losing I might add) so I’ll be doing a set of quick and shorter than normal Textual Detritus posts today.  First up is Jack London’s Iron Heel.  Written in 1908, Iron Heel is an oddly seductive text.  To be honest, I can’t say that it’s all that well written, but it’s just compelling as hell despite (or perhaps because of) its faults.  This, as a colleague told me, is not the Jack London we read in grade school.  A thoroughly socialist novel, Iron Heel follows the fall of society into a capitalist controlled distopia and the subsequent revolutions to try to overthrow the controlling oligarchy.  The narration is odd in that it’s written from the point of view of the principle revolutionary, Ernest Everhard’s wife.  London adds a further layer through the voice of an editor that interprets the text six centuries after its writing.  The editor provides an intriguing voice that’s my favorite part of the text.  With six hundred years of hindsight, the narrator gets to pass judgment on all of novels events and subsequently hold up the socialist long view of history.  The revolution eventually works out and while we’re only given glimpses on how that utopian society works, the editor’s firm tone suggests that all is well.

The editor’s presence leads back to my claim of the novel’s faults.  The early bits of the novel that highlight Ernest’s proselytizing of socialist dogma essentially read like London was having an imaginary discussion in his mind.  By that I mean the type where you know all the right answers and lead all manner of opponents into logical fallacies and traps.  This might be a reason for Avis Everhard being the novel’s narrator.  Additionally, London seems rather sloppy with his social classes in the story.  Society falls into distinct categories: the oligarchy, revolutionaries, mercenaries, labor, the middle class, farmers, the people of the abyss to name a few.  There’s certainly crossover and ties between the groups, but in each chapter things are nailed down momentarily to move the story forward.  In the next chapter the groups may have shifted a bit, but they are again nailed down by the narration to move things along.  London doesn’t seem to expand or complicate these categories as revolution looms.  Sometimes the mercenaries turn against the oligarchy, but the idea of class-consciousness or class traitors is never really explored.  The proletariat put down by the army, but no real exploration of the folks who make up that army ever happens.  This also raises the question of how revolution comes about. Ernest is in an odd place.  He needs a patron early in the novel and later he raises up of his own accord.  Yet the revolutionary class is depicted specifically as educated.  They are further separated from the working class by London’s depiction of the people of the abyss who are best compared to zombies.  (I’d recommend this book for the chapters dealing with the people of the abyss in the Chicago uprising chapters at the end of the book because they are just compellingly bizarre.)  What exact class or standing the socialist revolutionaries have is never clearly expounded upon in the novel, which seems to undermine the power of the story.

To close up, the arguments of the novel about the metaphysical and facts lead to an interesting question in light of Ernest’s proclivities and his philosophy on life.   Facts are what we trust our life to according to Ernest.  But the novel itself is certainly a metaphysical exploration of reality (particularly if you take into account how young the field of sociology is and that much of the facts of the novel are based solely on rather vague assertions about it.)  So, is the novel a fact?  Would we trust our lives to it?  Perhaps not, but it’s a hell of a read nonetheless.

Textual Detritus is a running series of notes focused on my reading list for exams related to my PhD studies.  These are not reviews so I will refrain from explaining plot lines.  These posts also contain any number of spoilers for the books in question though I’ll try to keep them hidden behind a cut.  Simply, the idea here is to get some of my immediate thoughts down in a coherent manner for later use or discussion.  As such, I make no claim about the level of thought, coherence, or grammar to any of these posts.

Babbitt by Lewis Sinclair, is quite simply a book that goes on too long.  The premise is intriguing.  An upper middle class man who aspires to greatness without really knowing that he aspires to anything at all finds himself in a hopeless funk.  He’s married to a woman he doesn’t necessarily love.  He cares for his children in the abstract.  He does his job well, but he has no true skill with it as a real estate agent who knows everything about property but nothing about the city he’s selling it in.  Babbitt tries, desperately and at times nearly heartbreakingly to break out of the life that has him trapped doing what he’s expected rather than what he wants.

Sinclair makes it painfully clear that part of Babbitt’s problem is that he cannot think for himself.  He finds his opinions grafted onto him by those around him.  Whatever is necessary to fit in for a given moment become his thoughts.  Sinclair’s style in this regard is a little over the top.  We hear Babbitt talking to himself and justifying his every move, yet he manages to provide interiority without actually getting into Babbitt.  The fact is that Babbitt tends to be so transparent in his actions, that is transparent to the reader, that we get a clear understanding of what he’s going through even if Babbitt has no idea himself.  Sinclair’s heavy-handed style also pervades the rest of the novel in detrimental ways.  The most egregious example is Babbitt’s snub by McKelvey and his subsequent snubbing of the Overbrooks.  In short, we get it.  Babbitt is a product of the class system that gave him birth.

What is most redeeming about Babbitt are his attempts to go his own way.  His foray into liberalism for a time is heartening if nothing else than because he attempts to stand against the opinions surrounding him for a moment.  He does not change, however, since he’s merely channeling Seneca Doane’s point of view at least as so far as Babbitt can understand it.  Nevertheless, the episode provides a clear portrayal of the fanaticism that the party line is capable.  Babbitt falls under its sway in the end, but this “tragedy” reinforces the reader’s distaste for it.  Babbbitt is a failure.  We know it.  In fact, we could use about half as many pages to know it.  Still, as Babbitt steps in for his renegade son and declares that he will stand with and for the renegade in his premature marriage we find ourselves cheering for him once again.  The tone of the novel’s end suggests that he’ll stand firm this time.  After witnessing his folly and falls though it’s difficult to say that Babbitt will come to fulfill his own opportunities thanks to the system that he is a willing cog in.  Babbitt’s son has the chance and the will to break out.  The real promise of the end of the novel is that Babbitt actually understands his position in a society that crushes almost all individuality and empathy under the dominating party line.

Interesting chess style game from 1934.

Textual Detritus is a running series of notes focused on my reading list for exams related to my PhD studies.  These are not reviews so I will refrain from explaining plot lines.  These posts also contain any number of spoilers for the books in question though I’ll try to keep them hidden behind a cut.  Simply, the idea here is to get some of my immediate thoughts down in a coherent manner for later use or discussion.  As such, I make no claim about the level of thought, coherence, or grammar to any of these posts.Riders of the Purple Sage is Zane Grey’s breakout 1912 success that I have to admit struck me as odd from the first page.  It likely has to do with me lack of familiarity with the western genre that allowed me to be so surprised by the intense focus on Mormonism in the novel.  Not that all Westerns are anti-Mormon in some way, but rather that I simply wasn’t thinking about the fact that a book taking place in Utah in the 19^th century would, of course, have Mormonism as a central point.  I linger on this point, not due to Grey’s overt criticisms of the religion, but rather due to the way that he utilizes the cowboy figure in light of the failings of the community that he creates.  Grey’s portrayal of the area makes it clear that the rough form of Lassiter is a necessary component to a West that allows such lawlessness to flourish.  The problem is not the gunfighter per say, but rather the community that requires the gunfighter to stand up to a chivalrous code of honor.  The fact that Oldring’s rustlers and Bishop Dyer and Elder Tull are in cahoots just goes to show how “lawless” the West can be on a larger scale than just gun fights.  Rights, such as Jane Withersteen’s are not protected against the vested interests of the community.  There are of course any number of complications due to the inherent bias against Jane since she’s a woman (particularly through the lens of Mormonism in the 19^th century), but to the romanticization of the individual West with which Grey is deeply enamored.

The key for me in this development of the individual cowboy is in Venter’s growth in the novel.  Venters appears as the young man who, in the opposite trajectory of Lassiter, goes to the wilderness to discover his love (Bess) and then paradise (Surprise Valley behind the Balancing Rock).  He becomes wild, but in that wildness is his manhood.  We’re left with the prospect of individuality honed against the wild of the West and in direct conflict with the civilization present in the West.  Venters’ trajectory with Bess back East would seem to suggest that their abilities will not be hampered once they return to the proper American civilization (contrasted with Mormon Utah in this case).  That said, it’s safe to assume that some bags of gold will help with this.

The gold of Surprise Valley operates as an example of the paradise of the land serving the innate interests of the American Hero.  Grey frankly shines in his description of the land, until it becomes overwhelmed by the Edenic quality in Surprise Valley.  The land is indeed beautiful, but the perfect landscape is too much for the reader to take in (or at least this reader).  The Balancing Rock with it’s ability to shut out civilization also serves as a precarious marker for the books shark jumping moment.  As soon as paradise is in reach, complete with its lack of outside intrusion, we’re in a fiction so deep that its hard to set store by it.  I think it’s best shown by Bess’ characterization, or lack thereof, since she resides almost entirely in the Valley.  She becomes the best rider in the sage, yet it’s all ability and no awareness.

This all leads me back to the idea of victimization in these early Western novels.  Like The Virginian, there are any number of fissures where the story does not hold – Lassiter’s sister is kidnapped with little retaliation, there is no federal presence whatsoever in the area nor any gentile resistance to the Mormon attacks.  Moreover, there are no real motivations for any of the “bad” characters, though Oldring becomes something of a “good” character thanks to his care of Bess.  The trials become staged and somewhat ham handed to be honest.  Yet at the same time they highlight the central tenants of the West that we like to hold dear.  Care for the downtrodden, freedom for religion (though in this case it’s from Mormonism) and freedom for upward mobility (Venters).  Justice, through Lassiter’s revenge, and forgiveness, though Lassiter’s postponement of revenge also play a large part in the novel.

In the end the Balancing Rock must fall. The social concerns the novel plays with cannot be supported in the long run nor can even an environment as rich in fantasy as the West sustain the conflict without the intervention of larger powers (federal, Mormon or otherwise) for long.  Lassiter and Jane may be hidden, but they are not alone as they are with their adopted child at the close of the text.  The fallen rock may be scaled, but that is an avenue that Grey cannot easily take us as it leads to new generations, the fall of the frontier and, of course, 1912.

I couldn’t help the Sesame Street Live reference in the post title.  Here is supposedly a clip of Heidegger with English subtitles.  I say supposedly because I am having buckets of trouble with my internet connection today (actually near everyday anymore).  I’m sure I’ll get around to watching it someday when my internet overlords allow me the bandwidth to view a youtube video of all things.

Richard Rayner from the LA Times talks about some reissues of Vonnegut’s early works.  If I may have a soapbox moment, I think he misses an important point about Slaughterhouse-Five.  The opening line of the main narrative “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time” does not lead to an either/or argument about Billy’s sanity.  He doesn’t have to be sane and truly (re)living the events depicted in the novel nor does he have to be necessarily insane.  By being unstuck in time Billy wanders back and forth through events in his life while at the same time he’s actually enacting our day to day entrapment in history.  This is part of the beauty of a book that deals with so hellish a reality as the fire bombing of Dresden.  On a simple level we each have experiences that we cannot let go of, or are not allowed to let go of, and The Children’s Crusade is certainly representative of one of those.  To be unstuck in time is partially to be stuck in time.  The traumatic experiences of the war cannot be escaped and whether or not Billy is sane is of secondary importance to the larger trauma that keeps Billy bouncing around in a book.  Tralfamadore is as real as the book since the experience of time that they propound is the experience of reading:

All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.  The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance.  They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them.  It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads ona string, ant that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.” (27)

What Vonnegut beautifully takes out of the equation for a human experiencing time as the Tralfamadorians do is control.  So Billy and the reader both bop through time continually haunted by events not entirely different from the way trauma leads us to relive things.

The irony that a novel focusing on this aspect would continually serve as the haunting point of return for damn near every review ever written about him would, of course, come as no surprise to Vonnegut.

Textual Detritus is a running series of notes focused on my reading list for exams related to my PhD studies.  These are not reviews so I will refrain from explaining plot lines.  These posts also contain any number of spoilers for the books in question though I’ll try to keep them hidden behind a cut.  Simply, the idea here is to get some of my immediate thoughts down in a coherent manner for later use or discussion.  As such, I make no claim about the level of thought, coherence, or grammar to any of these posts.

Due to running a conference and attending another in the span of two weeks, I’m about a month behind where I should be in this project.  I’ve gotten most of the most pressing matters out of the way now so I should be picking things up a bit more.  First up is perhaps my most glaring oversight given my proclivities: Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice.

Inherent Vice feels as though it thematically picks up where Against the Day, namely with a detective story in LA.  Doc Sportello feels like a spiritual successor to where Lew Basenight ends up at the end of AtD, though without the serious undertones that haunt Lew as he tries to figure out his place in the novel and his past transgression.  Doc just generally glides, in a way mirrors the Traverse boys in AtD or maybe better yet Oedipa in The Crying of Lot 49.  There’s some paranoia, but this is easily the most easygoing of Pynchon’s novels since Lot 49.  This isn’t to say that there aren’t underlying concerns.  The nostalgia for the 60s from works like Vineland is still present and there is a distinct note of regret present in the thought that Manson and his followers essentially fucked everything up for just about everyone.  The hippies are trapped in a stereotype where the middle class fears them and the wind has been taken out of the sails of the counter culture.  The novel’s closing scene, wrapped in fog as it is, harkens to this longing for a different path than the one that seems so clear.  Yet there’s the usual embrace of chance in the fog and the unknown possibilities that it shrouds.

I’ll admit straight away that my first read of IV doesn’t leave me confident to go into detail about the plot, both the novel’s and the one that Doc finds himself unravelling.  The month and a half since I finished the novel doesn’t help either.  What I will say is that Pynchon does seem to track the underlying paths that the counter culture stays strong through Doc’s use of the burgeoning computer industry in his detecting.  Information is at once damning, it’s what traps people in their roles, yet freeing for a detective like Doc.  There’s a hint that computers represent that bit of chaos despite their role in organizing information.  There’s always the chance that information will find its way into the hands of someone like Doc who’ll use it in a way unexpected or unwarranted by the computer programmers.  And thus the hacker takes a slot in Pynchon’s pantheon of resistors.

As with AtD, there are a number of passages about sex and sexuality that are ultimately troubling in this novel.  Frankly, the joke of fetishes isn’t really funny anymore.  That said, they still serve the purpose that Pynchon utilizes them for in his other works.  Even in distaste or merely discomfort, they provoke a reaction not unlike the unexpected erections that “haunt” the male characters.  While they could easily be read as misogynistic, I think that’s too easy.  The fact is that fetishes and sexual appetites run rampant through pretty much all of Pynchon’s characters be they male or female.  They all tend to get off whenever and however they can.  I think that the female characters fall slightly short in Pynchon’s novels, but it’s hard to say whether that’s because of Pynchon’s proclivities or a conscious decision that he’s not the one to write from a female perspective for obvious reasons.  I can’t help but think of the passage in Slow Learner where he admits his mistakes in his early stories.  They abound with stereotypes and he admits to being “a smart-assed jerk who didn’t know any better” (14).  Some of this is likely self-effacement, but some has to be an awareness of his own limitations later in his career.  He has strong female characters, particularly in AtD, (Stray, Yashmeen, and Dally) but we don’t quite get into their characters as much as we do the male characters.  That said, should we?  If he’s a writer to admit his shortcomings in approaching these critical points of view.  This isn’t to say that he doesn’t approach these points of view, more that he isn’t so presumptuous as to actually attempt to speak for them.

And as I’ve read over this I’ve realized that little of this has to do with IV.  Most of my thoughts here are being influenced by a question I was asked during a recent conference where I presented on AtD and none of this should be considered my final word on these subjects.  Like Doc, I’m just muddling my way through hoping for the best and trying to find a connection.

Go read copper.  You’ll thank yourself for it later.

Some interesting bits about Monty Python from the New York Times here.