“Describing a group of tourists: “…all thinking, conversing, joking, or scowling as was their wont at home; and just as intelligently receptive of new impressions as their trunks upstairs. Henceforth they would be labelled as having passed through this and that place, and so would their luggage. They would cherish this distinction of their persons, and preserve the gummed tickets on their portmanteaus as documentary evidence, as the only permanent trace of their improving enterprise.”

— Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

8:25 am  •  22 May 2012

“No man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.”

— Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

8:22 am  •  22 May 2012  •  2 notes

I’ve been out of the country for a few weeks, so I’ve only just come across 22-year-old Obama’s commentary on “The Waste Land.” Most of which we can just pass over in silence, since all its pretension and fluffiness make this almost 22 year old English major cringe in recognition. But let’s look more closely at one part:

Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.)

(Ugh, that preening “milieu.”)

Compare early 80s Obama to Terry Eagleton (from 1975’s Marxism and Literary Criticism):

…the agreed major writers of the twentieth century—Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence—are political conservatives who each had truck with fascism. Marxist criticism, rather than apologizing for that fact, explains it—sees that, in the absence of genuinely revolutionary art, only a radical conservatism, hostile like Marxism to the withered values of liberal bourgeois society, could produce the most significant literature.

Not only are the sentiments the same, but even have them phrased the same way—“liberal bourgeois,” etc. College Obama not only read some Marxist criticism, but sympathized with some of it. Which is not exactly remarkable, given that he was in college (and this was 1983, before the reactionary 80s had really quite set in).

Obviously he’s not a Marxist—he certainly hasn’t governed like one, or even like one of those “bourgeois liberals.” But can you imagine the shitstorm if conservatives were able to make this connection? It would be an unfair shitstorm, of course, but it does play into all the deranged conservative fears about him. We live in a country where a knowledge of Marx disqualifies one from public office—but fortunately, it’s this very ignorance that keeps conservatives from spotting the Marx in this letter (and making it into a talking point). It is, when you think about it, a weird, slightly sad kind of justice.

10:36 pm  •  20 May 2012  •  1 note

“‘Globalization,’ usually the company song of the American corporate strategy, stops at the water’s edge and turns prickly and isolationist when it comes to the rights of others to judge American actions.”

— Christopher Hitchens, No One Left To Lie To

3:06 pm  •  21 April 2012  •  1 note

“…and yet at the same time every frame was infused with and gave off a revolutionary atmosphere, or rather an atmosphere in which you could sense the revolution, not in its totality, but a fragment, a minuscule, microscopic fragment of the revolution, as if you were watching ‘Jurassic Park,’ say, except the dinosaurs never showed, no, I mean as if it was ‘Jurassic Park’ and no one ever enen mentioned the fucking reptiles, but their presence was inescapable and unbearably oppressive.”

— Roberto Bolano, “The Colonel’s Son”

1:07 pm  •  19 April 2012

No, I haven’t read that one. I’ll add it to the list. Thanks! James has so many books that it can be daunting to figure out which ones are worth my time, so it’s useful to hear what other people liked.

12:35 am  •  18 April 2012

My slog through Henry James continues. He’s certainly a writer who takes a lot of work (and a lot of reading) to appreciate, and I feel like it’s only worth my trouble about half the time. But man, the half the time that it works!

I’m less equivocal about the names of his characters. They’re strange: this fact gets obscured because James is usually considered a realist, but his names are as weird as Pynchon or Dickens. Take the story I read today, “The Real Thing,” which features both a Miss Churm and Major Monarch. Other favorites include Dolcino Ambient (from “The Author of Beltraffio”), Paul Overt (from “The Lesson of the Master”), Ulrick Moreen (from “The Pupil”), and Miss Tita (from “The Aspern Papers”; Tita is her first name). These sound almost like real names, but there’s something slightly off and indefinably wrong about them. Which is actually a nice summary of how I feel about a lot of James.

Also, if anyone who reads these is a big James-head, what should I read next? My goal is to work up to the big later novels (Ambassadors, Wings of the Dove, Golden Bowl), but every time I’ve tried them, I’ve been overwhelmed and quit. Anything good to work up to that? I’ve read a fair amount of the major short stories that are included in like every James collection—“Beast in the Jungle,” “Daisy Miller,” “The Middle Years,” “The Figure in the Carpet,” etc.—plus Aspern Papers, Turn of the Screw, Washington Square, and The Europeans.

10:30 pm  •  17 April 2012  •  2 notes

“We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

— Henry James, “The Middle Years”

9:09 pm  •  16 April 2012  •  5 notes

“What people ‘could have done’ is mainly what they’ve in fact done.”

— Henry James, “The Middle Years” 

9:08 pm  •  16 April 2012  •  1 note

“He had followed literature from the first, but he had taken a lifetime to get alongside of her… He had ripened too late and was so clumsily constituted that he had had to teach himself by mistakes.”

— Henry James, “The Middle Years”

9:08 pm  •  16 April 2012  •  3 notes