January 2018 – The Art of Compost

David Brooks 1 Lao-Tzu 0

David Brooks, writing on the DC shutdown, got a good one-two on Democrats and Foucault tonight, I laughed out loud.

Democrats focused all their energies on those all-important Michel Foucault swing voters. When Democrats get all excited, they go into a hypnotic trance and think the entire country is the Middlebury College faculty lounge. The American story is a story of systemic oppression. Since the cultural discourse that privileges white hegemony is the world’s single most important problem, of course it’s worth shutting down the entire government to take a stand on DACA.

I mean, I had thought maybe it was, but he has a point? But then he had to go and fuck with a sacred text.

Democrats devised a brilliant Tao Te Ching messaging strategy. The ancient Chinese master informs us, “Being and not being create each other. … Before and after follow each other.” In this way, he teaches the paradoxical infinity of ultimate truth.

The Democrats captured this same paradoxical profundity with their superb messaging over the weekend: We bravely shut down the government to save the Dreamers even though Donald Trump is responsible for shutting down the government.

The ancient Chinese master bows in respect.

Friend, I know you were writing to a deadline and all, but aside from the not really much getting it, that’s just, and these are not words I use lightly, some nasty racist shit, for a cheap laugh.

David Brooks 1, Lao-Tzu 0.

Lao-Tzu wins it.

The column, in which he enjoins us to listen to the non-racist angels of our nature, here.

The image atop, one of the silk manuscripts of the Tao Te Ching, recovered at Mawangdui, more here.

Okay, PS PS, then I go to bed. Close read, à la Foucault, DB’s first para, he uses all twice in one sentence, thrice in two. Who’s it getting overheated, mm?

Major Authors Seminar: Pound and Williams

Description for a spring course I’m way excited to teach again.

We know Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams for a few hit singles

The apparition of these faces in the crowd.

…

so much depends
upon

and maybe a few sayings fit for a bumper sticker. Go in fear of abstractions. No ideas but in things. What these soundbites miss is each poet’s complex and ongoing self-reinvention. Both started as Imagists, rejecting the sentimentality they found in late Victorian verse, instead carving small hard moments of perception. From there, the two diverged, Williams becoming more invested in the local, the scruffily irregular, Pound in archetypal patterns that for him made ancient history current, distant cultures present. Both remained committed, however, to reinventing the epic, and to bringing mythic awareness to the crush of modernity.

Pound read mythology as if it were the morning newspaper.
Williams read the morning newspaper as if it were mythology.
—Donald Revell

Between them they initiated strands in the web of American postmodernism that continue to spread and bear fruit and further ramify to this day. Be ready for close reading of sometimes very difficult texts; the postmodern epic, there’s no mastering it, only entering and being swept through and by it. Assignments will include regular critical responses; a seminar paper to be presented to the class and revised for final submission; an allusion chart mapping a chosen passage from The Cantos; and line-by-line meticulously close reading of a chosen passage from Paterson. Our texts: Pound, selected early poems from Personae, Cathay, selections from the Cantos, selected critical writings; Williams, selected early poems, Spring and All, Descent of Winter, Paterson books I-III, selected prose.

The image atop, a detail from Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers (Sho-Sho Hakkei) by Sesson Shukei (1504–ca. 1590). A time-honoured theme in Chinese and Japanese landscape painting; one such series was inspiration for Pound’s “Seven-Lakes Canto,” Canto XLIX, still point in the book’s burning wheel.

Not, as far as I know, Shukei’s; it’s just for instance. The whole of it

☚ teaching portfolio

“Stunningly statistically beautiful, a monument”

This posted just recently by a treasured friend from grad school (an excerpt)

In moments like these, I’m visited by the ad for Joi, the holographic lover of the replicant blade runner called K. The generic Joi towers above me, stunningly statistically beautiful, a monument to our alienation from the material fact of ourselves. As she comes toward me, her steps make no sound. Even at her scale, she doesn’t displace the air with her movements. She carries no scent. A few feet from me, she stops and crouches to bring her eyes more to the level of mine, but because of her height she still has to look down at me. She says, “You look like a Pepper.”

Read the whole of it, Aethon, which means blazing, also gut-devouring eagle, also also a scary robot corp, do!