Monday, March 31, 2008

A Sonnet

A while ago, as part of preparations for a possible future entry into graduate school, I took it upon myself to make it through the entire Norton Anthology of Poetry. Skipping none. Not even Amelia Layner (don't ask). As of this afternoon, I've made it to Jonne Donne, which means I've waded through a crapload of Love Sonnets, Shakespearean, Spencerian, and otherwise.

So here's my contribution to the genre. I'm calling it #1.

Shall I compare thee to a musty toe?
You'd shame a rotting corpse to diffidence.
Rank reeks do sometimes seep up through a shoe
Wi' a stink like Gorgonzola's recompense,
And some neglected feet will rear a mold
To make visible that which ere was smelled;
And every foot of which was ever told
Was at least once with foul odor befelled.
But thou - thy stench remaineth in the rooms
Long after your brief passing was forgot,
Nor bleach nor fire can purge the rancid blooms
Of pestilential clouds by you begot.

So long as men can smell, and lungs take breath,
This lingers just as long: your creeping death.


We'll talk soon, but please man, take shower.
To my readers - sorry for the long absence of posts, but you'll have to excuse me. I'm in South America, a strange world where the poles of everything you have become used to as a constant become inversed. A place where the middle class is a radical margin to national politics. Where you hear screaming so savage, coming from the neighboring apartment, that you consider dialing 911 and reporting domestic violence, or some heinous new form of torture, until the reverberating shout "gol" makes you realize that its just someone cheering Boca - and they're winning. You understand if I haven't been able to be my usual ebullient self.

I said I was in South America. At the moment I feel like I'm lodged somewhere deep in Buenos Aires' eye. I say this because of it appears Buenos Aires is trying to weep me out with a stream of near boiling water.

A lack of hot water has always been a problem for me, as a person that likes to luxuriate in the steam, sometimes for upwards of a half an hour. So you can imagine my surprise when, after adjusting the silver knobs to the perfect temperature and beginning my "knees-to-shoulders" soap-dance, I was abandoned not by the hot but by the cold. The water starts to warm up slowly, which is not nearly so ominous as the water cooling down, but in a few short seconds is up to flaying strength.

A shower that runs out of cold water? Can someone please explain this to me? More bizarre than toilet water spinning in the other direction.


More posts coming soon.

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Good point, Mr. Windschuttle

Wikipedia on Philip Roth (reading Portnoy´s Complaint) to the Cormac McCarthy article to a website on current literary bickering on 3quarksdaily.com to another article there and finally, clicking on the hyperlinked text why is Said being revisited, landing here, at The New Critereon. Orientalis Revisited by Keith Windschuttle. What a name! I see blue fields and bright skies, a figure extending loom-chords from his fingertips into the black blue of space, a mystic, dew-speckled web humming the ethereal chords of the Spheres, a pair of arms and hands outstretched black against a sunset, diamondflashing shuttles dancing in warbling breezes... Anyway...


´´For a start, he should have realized that Abdel Malek’s analysis of the essentialist failings of Oriental scholarship and Foucault’s thesis that knowledge always generates power are quite incompatible. If, as Malek and Said claim, Orientalism’s picture of the Arabs is false, then it is difficult to see how it could have been the source of the knowledge that led to the European imperial domination of the region. According to Said, Orientalist essentialism is not knowledge, but a series of beliefs that are both distorted and out of date. Surely, though, if these beliefs are wrong, they would have contributed to poor judgment, bad estimates, and mistaken policies. Hence the political power of Western imperialism must have been gained despite them, not because of them. ´´

-http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/17/jan99/said.htm

Back up a bit. It's early afternoon in Buenos Aires. I finished a soy sandwich (don't ask me why) in a cobbled park with puke green poured concrete benches arranged in circles under little copses of trees in the center. Though I conquered a "good night's sleep" the night before I get too bleary-eyed to concentrate. There's not enough time to go home and grab a nap before my next class, not enough time to do anything else. For security reasons, sleeping in public parks in the city center is inadvisable, especially for seven-foot blond Americans. I go to an internet cafe - wikipedia isn't quite sleep, but it's damn close.

The point is that I'm feeling completely void of energy. That makes me feel depressed (this isn't going to turn into therapy, don't worry). I click through a few pages before I land on the above article. Lo and behold. I lean in. An energy begins to crackle. I wake up, feeling a little more alive with every sentence. Why is this criticism of one of the hallowed heroes of multiculturalism surging through me like the first five slurps of mate from the gourd?

Righteous indignation! Take that, left wing establishment, right in your dignified, sorrowful, solar plexus! The article goes on to point out historical inaccuracies in Said's breakthrough obra, and Windshuttle (can't get enough of that name) remains even handed until a short paragraph near the end where he unloads a somewhat vicious indictment of self-victimization on the Columbia emeritus' head. His attack on the hypocrisy of Said's self-declared anti-essentialism is particularly on point.

Point: cultural relativism is incompatible with any kind of morality. This has been bothering since a "post-structuralist feminist" lectured me in college. The article brought to the surface a long-held gripe with the politically infused literary theory I gulped down in a starry-eyed lack of comprehension. And, to my credit, many of the texts were incomprehensible. If our values are purely contingent on our cultural context, than we have no basis on criticizing another culture's beliefs or practices. Even terms like value and morality reek of essence fabrication, that is, if I understand it, an imperialist project of creating universals to the effect that minorities can be relegated into a sub-human margin, and thus exploited. The project of the West with a capital dubya.

So please help me understand this point - if our moral imperatives are culturally relative, on what basis can we condemn female circumcision? Doesn't it boil down to cultural preference? Are we so civilized that we can condemn this practice as barbaric? Are we simply imposing ourselves where we're not wanted, passing racist judgment on peoples we have deemed backwards? If we don't appeal to some form of human universal, do we relinquish the right to condemn any behavior whatsoever?

What are we left with? An academy dominated by a self-evident politic of truism and croneyism. A dominant viewpoint is established and dialogue is occluded by sympathetic sighs, indignation and back-slapping. The reason? The academy needs a moral imperative to justify its existence, even if it has itself rendered the idea of a moral imperative incomprehensible and reprehensible. As Windschuttle points out in his critique, Foucault (another giant of post-modernism) asserted that knowledge is always power. As such, the academy of the past served not only to justify the evil of imperial products, but to enable them. Consequentially, if the search for knowledge is put in the hands of right-minded people, that power can be put to use for the greater good. How could it be otherwise? If we all thought correctly, wouldn't the world be a better place? Thus the trick, the hypocrisy of liberal academia - we teach free thought, but only if you think in politically correct terms. Challenge the establishment, but not in the holy walls of this classroom. The establishment is out there, it's the American monoculture, it's rural, and most of all, it's Republican.

I don't support weeping saints or flaming swords, regardless of whether or not they engender each other. It's the tone, that holier than thou, inflamed finger hanging in my face. Maybe it's why I developed the habit of gesticulating at dinner with a steak knife, so in between bites I could dice up that invisible appendage. Whether it's multiculturalism or the Department of Homeland Security, please get that played-out thing out of my face.

Granted, this is an amateur exercise. By way of admission, I did feel disenfranchised to learn that by my race, my class, and my sex, that my opinion was contaminated before I opened my mouth. That's where my righteous indignation comes from. I will also admit that the righteous indignation of a privileged white male holds water like a sieve. I don't want anyone to buy it. I want to get rid of it - righteous indignation by necessity leads to a sclerosis of the spirit. It leads to a closure of the mind. It feels great. I think it should be avoided in general.



P.S. Been watching alot of Twin Peaks. I'm at the point in the second season where the proliferating sub-plots start flailing about like unoccupied tentacles in a Hentai video. What a fall from grace!